April 30, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM WARD PLUNET

Ward Plunet originally shared this post: Mapping the Flow of Musical Tastes Interesting mining of data from a social music site (last.fm). By tapping into the last.fm API, these Irish researchers modeled the geographic flow of musical influence. They were able to identify where certain tastes frequently originated, and draw a hierarchy of influential cities (like the chart shown above for North America). note – top ranked North American cities: Atlanta, Montreal, Toronto, Chicago. from original article (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1204.2677v1.pdf): _For us, the most surprising features of ?g. 3 are (1) the middle ranking positions of some of the largest cities, such as NYC and LA in ?g. 3a and NYC and Chicago in ?g. 3b and (2) the prominent position of Canadian cities, especially in ?g. 3b._ Using Data to Map Geographic Flow of… Using last.fm Data to Map Geographic Flow of Music By tapping into the last.fm API, these Irish researchers modeled the geographic flow of musical influence. They were able to identify where certain…..
April 29, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM BRAD MORRIS

Disappearing inhibitors Earlier research found that approximately one fifth of the synapses in the brain inhibit rather than excite other nerve-cell activity. Neuroscientists have now shown that many of these inhibitory synapses disappear if the adult brain is forced to learn new skills. They reached this conclusion by labelling inhibitory synapses in mouse brains with fluorescent proteins and then tracking them for several weeks using a specialised microscope. They then closed one of the mice’s eyes temporarily to accustom them to seeing through just one eye. After a few days, the area of the brain that processes information from both eyes began to respond more actively to the open eye. At the same time, many of the inhibitory synapses disappeared and were later replaced by new synapses. Regulating the information network Inhibitory synapses are vital for the way networks function in the brain. “Think of the excitatory synapses as a road network, with traffic being guided from A to B, and the inhibitory synapses as the matrix signs that regulate the traffic,” explains research leader Christiaan Levelt. “The inhibitory synapses ensure an efficient flow of traffic in the brain. If they don’t, the system becomes overloaded, for example as in epilepsy; if they constantly indicate a speed of 20 kilometres an hour, then everything will grind to a halt, for example when an anaesthetic is administered. If you can move the signs to different locations, you can bring about major changes in traffic flows without having to entirely reroute the road network.” Brad Morris originally shared this post: Learning mechanism of the adult brain revealed They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Fortunately, this is not always true. Researchers have now discovered how the adult brain can adapt to new situations. Their study may be significant in…
April 28, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM AMANDA PATTERSON

This is the Digital Age. Get used to it, we’ll be here a while =D h/t +Peter Smalley Amanda Patterson originally shared this post: The Internet’s population has doubled in five years. Africa has gone from 34 million to 140 million, a 317% increase. Asia has gone from 418 million to over 1 billion, a 143% increase. Europe has gone from 322 million to 501 million, a 56% increase. The Middle East has gone from 20 to 77 million, a 294% increase. North America has gone from 233 to 273 million, a 17% increase. Latin America (South & Central America) has gone from 110 to 236 million, a 114% increase. Oceania (including Australia) has gone from 19 to 24 million, a 27% increase. The Internet’s Population Doubled Over the Last… The Internet’s Population Doubled Over the Last Five Years Royal Pingdom susses out some interesting trends about the world’s 2.27 billion Internet users: • Africa has gone from 34 million to 140…
April 27, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM ARS TECHNICA

“There is currently little research exploring neuroscience’s public image. The mass media are the main vectors in the transmission of scientific research. To date, systematic analysis of neuroscience in the media has only addressed the area of media coverage of specific neurotechnologies such as fMRI, PET, and TMS (Racine et al., 2005,Racine et al., 2006,Racine et al., 2010). This research identified three emerging trends in media interpretations of neuroimaging. Neurorealism describes the use of neuroimages to make phenomena seem objective, offering visual proof that a subjective experience (e.g., love, pain, addiction) is a “real thing.” Neuroessentialism denotes depictions of the brain as the essence of a person, with the brain a synonym for concepts like person, self, or soul. Finally, neuropolicy captures the recruitment of neuroscience to support political or policy agendas.” “These studies provide intriguing data, but the exclusive focus on neurotechnologies restricts their scope. To be included in the analysis, media articles had to contain quite technical terms like fMRI or PET: the research therefore overlooked articles that discussed brain research without naming specific technologies or that used lay terms for them (e.g., “brain scans”). Here, we consider how brain science, defined more generally, manifests in the mainstream media.” Matteo Cerri originally shared this post: Neuron – Neuroscience in the Public Sphere Neuroscientists and philosophers nowadays claim that the problem of phenomenal consciousness is a scientific problem. Increasing knowledge of the neural correlates of consciousness is expected to yiel…
April 27, 2012

SIMPLE G+ STREAM MANAGEMENT THERE ARE LOTS…

Simple G+ Stream Management There are lots of good resources for managing circles. This is how I manage my stream. You can have as many circles as you’d like and you don’t need to change the way you manage them. Instead, you want to build 3 meta-circles to manage the stream. These circles are: Internet: Add everyone to this circle. Seriously, everyone. Every time someone adds you, add them to this circle. All of them. Don’t discriminate at this step, there will be time for that later. Main Stream: Add people to this circle if I don’t want to miss any of their posts. This circle is made from people who I have in other circles related to our shared interests, but they are also in this circle because I want to make sure they appear in my stream. Junk: Add people to this circle that you never want to see on your home stream. I arranged my circles so that the Main Stream is first and the Internet circle is second, so they’ll appear in my circle tabs on the home screen. Then, I set the main stream to full blast, the internet cicle to a drip, and the junk circle to zero, as indicated in the picture below. I have lots of other circles for my special interests, but with only a few exceptions those circles are also set to zero. In other words, my home stream is controlled entirely by the Main Stream and Internet circles. That’s it! I’ve circled over 3,000 people this way, and I’m able to manage my stream without much effort. I can’t keep up with everything, of course, but with this method I have better control over what I’m expected to keep up with. Try it out, let me know what you […]
April 27, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM CIRO VILLA

Facebook, Google+, and Internet Environmentalism I know FB/G+ comparisons are tired and lame, but I wrote up this comment in +Ciro Villa’s thread, and it seems to lay out a position that I’m not sure has been explicitly stated before. Comments or suggestions in either thread would be appreciated! _ The typical complaint about G+ relative to FB is that “there’s no one here”. This is a curious sort of argument that pervades many aspects of the contemporary popular discussion. It is a kind of argumentum ad populum: an appeal to the people. Consider the following arguments that share a similar form: I’m not going to put solar panels on my roof because no one else on my block is doing it, and I don’t want to be different. I’m not going to conserve energy and reduce consumption, because no one else is doing it and I want to keep up with their lifestyles. I’m not going to reduce my meat consumption, because everyone else’s meat consumption is going up and I don’t want to be left behind. Etc. You get the point. These are obviously bad arguments, but they share the same formal structure of the justifications used to rationalize the use of Facebook. Regardless of the context used, an appeal to the people is a logical fallacy. G+ is a better social network, not just in the “easier to use and I like it more” sense, but in the much more important sense of “open, inclusive, and user-controlled”. I think we have an ethical obligation to prefer open networks over closed networks not just for our own networking experiences, but for the sake of the networks themselves. Moving to G+ for me is closer to a kind of “internet environmentalism” whereby I’m trying to make choices that I […]
April 26, 2012

THERE’S SOME DISCUSSION GOING AROUND ABOUT…

There’s some discussion going around about the number line and innate intuition. This is a good time to talk about Meno’s Paradox! The paradox is raised by the sophist Meno as Socrates attempts to engage him in some philosophical inquiry. Meno wonders how we could possibly inquire into anything without already knowing the subject we are inquiring in to. Here’s the official statement of the paradox from Plato’s dialogue: Meno: And how will you enquire, Socrates, into that which you do not know? What will you put forth as the subject of enquiry? And if you find what you want, how will you ever know that this is the thing which you did not know? Socrates: I know, Meno, what you mean; but just see what a tiresome dispute you are introducing. You argue that man cannot enquire either about that which he knows, or about that which he does not know; for if he knows, he has no need to enquire; and if not, he cannot; for he does not know the, very subject about which he is to enquire. Socrates rejects the paradox immediately. Instead, he cites “priests and priestesses” who discuss something like reincarnation of the soul. Socrates says that if the soul is reincarnated, then we never really learn anything new. Instead, we simply recall things we’ve already experienced before. He says: “The soul, then, as being immortal, and having been born again many times, rand having seen all things that exist, whether in this world or in the world below, has knowledge of them all; and it is no wonder that she should be able to call to remembrance all that she ever knew about virtue, and about everything; for as all nature is akin, and the soul has learned all things; there is no […]
April 26, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM ROB MALDA

“Hammond assures me I have nothing to worry about. This robonews tsunami, he insists, will not wash away the remaining human reporters who still collect paychecks. Instead the universe of newswriting will expand dramatically, as computers mine vast troves of data to produce ultracheap, totally readable accounts of events, trends, and developments that no journalist is currently covering.” “That’s not to say that computer-generated stories will remain in the margins, limited to producing more and more Little League write-ups and formulaic earnings previews. Hammond was recently asked for his reaction to a prediction that a computer would win a Pulitzer Prize within 20 years. He disagreed. It would happen, he said, in five.” h/t +Michael Fagan Rob Malda originally shared this post: Algorithms that write the news http://m.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/04/can-an-algorithm-write-a-better-news-story-than-a-human-reporter/all/1 Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter? | Gadget Lab | Wired.com Had Narrative Science — a company that trains computers to write news stories—created this piece, it probably would not mention that the company’s Chicago headquarters lie only a long baseball tos…
April 26, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM BRUNO GONÇALVES

“The social brain hypothesis has suggested that social network size (and structure) is constrained by a combination of cognitive processes and the time required to service social relationships. We test this hypothesis in humans using a unique 18-month mobile phone dataset by examining changes in the structure of social networks across a major change in subjects’ social and geographical circumstances. Our analysis reveals that the time allocation patterns of call frequency by participants to network members have a distinctive overall shape, where a small number of top-ranked network members received a disproportionately large fraction of calls, with some individual variation. However, importantly, whilst there was a large turnover of individual network members, these changes have little effect on the time allocation patterns of each individual: individuals thus displayed a distinctive “social signature” that was both persistent over time and independent of the identities of the network members. *This provides the first direct evidence that social networks are constrained by a combination of cognitive constraints and the time individuals have available for social interaction, confirming one of the key assumptions of the social brain hypothesis.*” Bruno Gonçalves originally shared this post: The persistence of social signatures in human communication. (arXiv:1204.5602v1 [physics.soc-ph]) The social brain hypothesis has suggested that social network size (and structure) is constrained by a combination of cognitive processes and the time required to service social relationships. We test this hypothesis in humans using a unique 18-month mobile phone dataset by examining changes in the structure of social networks across a major change in subjects’ social and geographical circumstances. Our analysis reveals that the time allocation patterns of call frequency by participants to ne…
April 26, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM CHARLIE HOOVER

Charlie Hoover originally shared this post: One thing is for sure, we humans certainly know how to get around! Mesmerizing Visualization Maps Every Transportation Route on Earth [VIDEO] “Welcome to the Anthropocene” maps every land and water transportation route on earth in a celestial three-minute clip.
April 26, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM A.J. CANN

“So far, the Portable Legal Consent is valid only in America, although Sage Bionetworks is looking at ways of adapting it to fit the legal frameworks of China and the European Union. How quickly the idea will catch on remains to be seen. But if it does, other sorts of researchers who rely on gathering personal data—for example in sociology or in tracking energy use in homes—may find it attractive. And that would enable research of a sort that is now impossible, by opening up the field of quantifiable social science.” ____ Awesome! I’ve been writing about consent and consensus as part of my #attentioneconomy series, and I’m happy to see the reworking of consent as part of the dialogue. The discussion here seems to be dramatically limited in scope; the issue is part of the move for Portable Legal Consent in genomics research. You can read more about it here: http://weconsent.us/ The website includes a link to an endorsement written in Nature Genetics: http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v44/n4/full/ng.2244.html This is very interesting stuff! A.J. Cann originally shared this post: The Only Way Is Ethics In an age where people promiscuously post personal data on the web and regularly click “I agree” to reams of legalese they have never read, news of yet another electronic consent form might seem like a big yawn. But for the future of genomics-related research the Portable Legal Consent, to be announced shortly by Sage Bionetworks, a non-profit research organisation based in Seattle, is anything but mundane. Consent 2.0 Sign here IN AN age where people promiscuously post personal data on the web and regularly click “I agree” to reams of legalese they have never read, news of yet another electronic…
April 25, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM JENNIFER OUELLETTE

Jennifer Ouellette originally shared this post: There’s a hint of the “duh” quality to this research, but interiguing nonetheless. “It turns out, they say, that various online behaviors are a good indicator of personality type. For example, conscientious people are more likely to post asking for help such as a location or e-mail address; a sign of extroversion is an increased use of emoticons; the frequency of status updates correlates with openness; and a measure of neuroticism is the rate at which blog posts attract angry comments.” Psychologists Use Social Networking Behavior to Predict Personality Type – Technology Review The ability to automatically determine personality type could change the way social networks target services to users
December 15, 2006

MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY

From Henry Jenkin’s Convergence Culture (2006). A bigger excerpt and (hopefully) full discussion can be found here. Almost a decade ago, science fiction writer Bruce Sterling established what he calls the Dead Media Project. As his website explains, “The centralized, dinosaurian one-to-many media that roared and trampled through the twentieth century are poorly adapted to the postmodern technological environment.” Anticipating that some of these ‘dinosaurs’ were heading to the tar pits, he constructed a shrine to “the media that have died on the barbed wire of technological change.” His collection is astounding, including relics like “the phenakistoscope, the telharmonium, the Edison wax cylinder, the stereopticon… various species of magic lantern.” Yet, history teaches us that old media never die- and they don’t even necessarily fade away. What dies are simply the tools we use to access media content- the 8-track, the Beta tape. These are what media scholars call delivery technologies. Most of what Sterling’s project lists falls under this category Delivery technologies become obsolete and get replaced; media, on the other hand, evolve. Recorded sound is the medium. CDs, MP3 files, and 8-track cassettes are delivery technologies. To define media, let’s turn to historian Lisa Gitelman, who offers a model of media that works on two levels: on the first, a medium is a technology that enables communication; on the second, a medium is a set of associated “protocols” or social and cultural practices that have grown up around that technology. Delivery systems are simply and only technologies; media are also cultural systems. Delivery technologies come and go all the time, but media persist as layers within an even more complicated information and entertainment stratum. A medium’s content may shift (as occurred when television displaced radio as a storytelling medium, freeing radio to become the primary showcase for rock […]
January 11, 2007

OF THE EPIDEMICS

Hippocrates, 400 BCE 13. The greatest and most dangerous disease, and the one that proved fatal to the greatest number, was consumption. With many persons it commenced during the winter, and of these some were confined to bed, and others bore up on foot; the most of those died early in spring who were confined to bed; of the others, the cough left not a single person, but it became milder through the summer; during the autumn, all these were confined to bed, and many of them died, but in the greater number of cases the disease was long protracted. Most of these were suddenly attacked with these diseases, having frequent rigors, often continual and acute fevers; unseasonable, copious, and cold sweats throughout; great coldness, from which they had great difficulty in being restored to heat; the bowels variously constipated, and again immediately in a loose state, but towards the termination in all cases with violent looseness of the bowels; a determination downwards of all matters collected about the lungs; urine excessive, and not good; troublesome melting. The coughs throughout were frequent, and copious, digested, and liquid, but not brought up with much pain; and even when they had some slight pain, in all cases the purging of the matters about the lungs went on mildly. The fauces were not very irritable, nor were they troubled with any saltish humors; but there were viscid, white, liquid, frothy, and copious defluxions from the head. But by far the greatest mischief attending these and the other complaints, was the aversion to food, as has been described. For neither been described. For neither had they any relish for drink along with their food, but continued without thirst. There was heaviness of the body, disposition to coma, in most cases swelling, which ended in […]
January 16, 2007

CHANNEL FREDERATOR IS STILL PRETTY COOL

January 25, 2007

INSTAPOLL

I’ve been slacking off on this blog, but I have been seriously lacking inspiration recently. And that hasn’t changed. But people still visit the site, so I might as well put that to good use. My cat Gus is partially an outdoor cat, but I am afraid to just let him run wild lest someone thinks he is a stray and take him away. So I’d like to brand him in some way. The traditional method for branding a domesticated house pet is a collar, but he’s already gone through two collars, and Gus simply will not take to them. He’ll wear it for a day or two, and then sneak away and take it off and bury it or something, and I’ll never see it again. So I am wondering if it would be just entirely inhumane to make him wear a harness. For a demonstration of a cat harness, click here. Cat harnesses are designed to walk a cat, but I am neither foolish nor sadistic enough to actually try to walk Gus. Rather, I am starting to think that making Gus wear a harness is the only way I can ensure that a collar will stay on. Does this make me a horrible, evil person?
January 29, 2007

WHAT I HAVE BEEN DOING

Disinfect the core I can beat the computer about 75% of the time. I cannot imagine that completing my prelim would be any more satisfying.
January 29, 2007

NOT THAT THERE HASN’T BEEN THINGS TO TALK ABOUT

Of course. The world goes on even when you aren’t paying attention. Courts Turn to Wikipedia, but Selectively (NYT) When a court-appointed special master last year rejected the claim of an Alabama couple that their daughter had suffered seizures after a vaccination, she explained her decision in part by referring to material from articles in Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia. The reaction from the court above her, the United States Court of Federal Claims, was direct: the materials “culled from the Internet do not — at least on their face — meet” standards of reliability. The court reversed her decision. Oddly, to cite the “pervasive, and for our purposes, disturbing series of disclaimers” concerning the site’s accuracy, the same Court of Federal Claims relied on an article called “Researching With Wikipedia” found — where else? — on Wikipedia. … More than 100 judicial rulings have relied on Wikipedia, beginning in 2004, including 13 from circuit courts of appeal, one step below the Supreme Court. (The Supreme Court thus far has never cited Wikipedia.) In doing some background research on this article, I stumbled on this metawiki page, which is worth a look.
January 29, 2007

THE CARESS OF A ROBOT ARM

Eh, one more combo post for the night. Click both links for video. Robotic arm rides, 5 cents (Engadget) Also via Engadget: A Tiny Robotic Hand (Technology Review) “It is the world’s smallest robotic hand, and [it] could be used to perform microsurgery,” says Chang-Jin Kim, the lead researcher at UCLA, who says the device is safe for biological applications. Since it runs on gas pressure instead of electricity, it can be used in both dry and wet environments. The “microhand” measures one millimeter across when closed into a fist. It consists of four “fingers,” each of which is made from six silicon wafers, with polymer balloons doing the work of “muscles” at the wafers’ joints.
February 1, 2007

INFERNAL MACHINE

You may have heard of the ‘bomb scare‘ in Boston last night over the imminent threat of a Mooninite attack. While the situation is both hilarious and depressing, the law that the Mooninites violated is also pretty funny: (b) For the purposes of this section, the term “hoax device” shall mean any device that would cause a person reasonably to believe that such device is an infernal machine. For the purposes of this section, the term “infernal machine” shall mean any device for endangering life or doing unusual damage to property, or both, by fire or explosion, whether or not contrived to ignite or explode automatically. For the purposes of this section, the words “hoax substance” shall mean any substance that would cause a person reasonably to believe that such substance is a harmful chemical or biological agent, a poison, a harmful radioactive substance or any other substance for causing serious bodily injury, endangering life or doing unusual damage to property, or both. So yes, a lite brite is now an ‘infernal machine’. 9/11 changed everything. Also: 70’s haircuts.
February 1, 2007

A SUPERIOR LIFE FORM

New thread in D&D about a recent Forbes article on Network Neutrality. During the discussion, various analogies were thrown around: highways, telephone networks, classified ads, etc. Forum Superstar LaFarga issued the following challenge: All analogies for computer technology suck and people need to stop using them. If you can’t explain the situation without an analogy then you don’t fucking understand it properly in the first place… When everybody in this thread can agree what the best analogy for the internet is, let me know. My response is worth archiving here: Here’s the best analogy: John Carpenter’s The Thing. No, wait, hear me out. The Internet was built by ARPA for a very clear reason: they needed a communications network that was plastic and dynamic and could still operate under sustained heavy damage. Even if you knock out one or two central servers, network traffic could still flow end-to-end. As long as the network is still coherent (that is, as long as there is some connection between the end points), then your communications network was still operational. In other words, the internet is built the way it is in order to be almost impossible to kill. The solution to this problem is IP, the internet protocol. The key to IP is that it is dumb as rocks. A packet only knows its desitnation, but it doesn’t give a damn how it gets there. It is up to the network to determine the path between endpoints, and with a sufficiently connected network, there are always tons of paths to take. The upshot is that there are no preferred paths between end users, so if you kill some paths, there are always alternates available. This is absolutely essential to the way the internet works. And its just like The Thing. The Thing contains […]
February 8, 2007

DON’T ASK

Booty Booty
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