Free Thought
sporte | January 6, 2011About mid-morning, my 16yr old daughter called me from school and asked me to help her get an interview transcript that was on her computer.
Four years ago, when my older daughter was in high school, I would have printed that document and driven to the school to deliver it.
Not today.
Today, I found the document on YD's computer, opened a browser, logged in to Google Docs, uploaded her file to my Google Docs account, and set the sharing settings so that YD could log in from school and get the document, which she did.
No one had to drive to the high school. No child had to stand outside in…
drorzel | January 5, 2011
To Beat Back Poverty, Pay the Poor - NYTimes.com
"Today, however, Brazil's level of economic inequality is dropping at a faster rate than that of almost any other country. Between 2003 and 2009, the income of poor Brazilians has grown seven times as much as the income of rich Brazilians. Poverty has fallen during that time from 22 percent of the population to 7 percent.
Contrast this with the United States, where from 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the increase in Americans' income went to the top 1 percent of earners. (see this great series in Slate by Timothy Noah on American…
jtoney | December 31, 2010My previous postings on the fruit fly brain generated quite a bit of interest, and I wanted to share with you some more detail that I received from Terry C.-W. Yeh, researcher at the Applied Scientific Computing Division of the National Center for High-Performance Computing in Taiwan. Thank you, Terry, for being so gracious!
I hope you enjoy this decoded tour as much as I have.
Detail of 150 neurons.
Ever wonder about the distribution of neurotransmitters throughout the brain? {Recall my recent posting about dopamine receptors and liberalism - OK, there's no such thing as a "liberal" fly!}…
mikethemadbiologist | December 23, 2010It's safe to say that Thomas Watson Sr., the first chairman of IBM (International Business Machines), truly revolutionized computing. While I'm sure Sam Palmisano, the current chairman of IBM, is a smart guy and has done some good things, I haven't heard anyone claim he's a technological revolutionary. So I found this post about Watson's and Palmisano's compensation and taxes very interesting (italics mine):
The newly released 1943 data make for absolutely stunning reading. We have simply never had clearer evidence of just how much America used to expect out of individual wealthy Americans…
drorzel | December 21, 2010
Tron | Film | Better Late Than Never? | The A.V. Club
"What's odd about all this is that the more I see these movies, the more I become convinced they could have been used in happy little object lessons about how God wants only to save us. That includes Tron, a mostly mediocre-to-awful film with some fascinating ideas about the nature of divinity and the relationship between God and humanity rattling around in its empty little skull. At the time, I wasn't allowed to see it, because it placed computers at the same level as humans. Now that I've actually seen the film, it's hard to see how it…
jtoney | December 20, 2010
Inspired by my earlier posting on the fruit fly brain:
I received a nice "holiday gift" from a researcher at the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) in Taiwan, Terry C.-W. Yeh. NCHC and the Brain Research Center at the National Tsing Hua University created the FlyCircuit database.
This 32 second video gives you a 3D tour of the various components of the fruit fly brain integrating data collected using more than 16,000 individual neurons - a startling example, to me, of the wonderment of science as a product of bridging computer science, molecular biology and neuroscience…
kbonham | December 19, 2010Know anything about quantum computing (other than it sounds awesome)? Well, I didn't, until I read the latest edition of the Harvard Science in the News Flash.
Thus far, utilizing charged electrons to make computers has been endlessly fruitful, allowing us to build smaller and faster computer chips. Unfortunately, we cannot continue improving technology simply by scaling down to smaller sizes because we will eventually reach atomic sizes where our devices will no longer function. As we look ahead into the not-too-distant future, we will need to explore new, innovative technologies that go…
jdupuis | December 18, 2010(Some) Principles of Computational Science
The State of Open Source
US Trade Wholesale Electronic Book Sales
Strata Gems: Five data blogs you should read
Science Bloggers: Diversifying the news
The Four Sons of digital curation
Lots of Markets, Lots of Business Models
Copyright and Open Access for Academic Works
Do You Want Fries with That Degree?
The Future Is Not a Zero-Sum Game
Does a PhD Student Need a Publication Strategy?
A Curricular Innovation, Examined and A Curricular Innovation, Examined (Part 2) and A Curricular Innovation, Examined (Part 3) (commercial online course)
"It's Not…
drorzel | December 17, 2010
Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » QCut
"Let me end this post with a request: I want all of my readers to visit the YouCut page, and propose that quantum computing and theoretical computer science research be completely eliminated. Here's my own CAREER Award; go ahead and cite it by number as a particularly egregious example of government waste.
See, I'm hungry for the honor (not to mention the free publicity) of seeing my own favorite research topics attacked on the floor of the House. As we all know, it's child's play to make fun of theoretical computer science: its abstruseness, its…
pharyngula | December 9, 2010I'm really liking these CreatureCast videos Casey Dunn's students put together — and there are two new ones, on moray eels and stomatopods. That's communicating science!
Also, Dunn has a new book, Practical Computing for Biologists, also available on Amazon right now. I'm going to have to get a copy; it might be a good idea to introduce more students to the basics, too.
jdupuis | December 8, 2010Getting Rid of Books: A Heresy
Arsenic-associated bacteria (NASA's claims)
The Gatekeeper is Dead! Long live the Gatekeeper
The Library: Three Jeremiads
The Future of Advertising
Web Developers Get Real (Time): The massive amount of real-time information available is leading to new programming approaches
Discover more than 3 million Google eBooks from your choice of booksellers and devices
Education and the social Web: Connective learning and the commercial imperative
7 game-changing mobile trends for 2011
Wikileaks and the Long Haul
What Publishers, Authors & Journalists Can Learn from…
jdupuis | December 5, 2010I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one covers three books and is from March 1, 2007:
The Best American Science Writing 2006 by Gawande, Atul, editor & Jesse Cohen, series editor
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2006 by Greene, Brian, editor…
illconsidered | December 3, 2010Okay, the "Globally and Seasonally averaged" thread has grown to over 500 comments and thus reached its point of diminishing return in terms of the time it would take to read it and the utility of doing so. And while on the one hand I don't like to feed what is drifting towards to troll-like behaviour, the conversation continues and I don't want to stifle it. It began with a comment of mine at Judith Curry's blog about who is a denier and who is a sceptic. See the update in the original article for why Richard clearly falls out of the sceptic category.
So I am going to close that thread…
drorzel | December 1, 2010
Slate's 80 Over 80: The most influential octogenarians in America (2010). - - Slate Magazine
"For the second year in a row, Mormon President Thomas S. Monson stands atop the list. As the divine prophet, seer, and revelator for 5.5 million Americans and more than 12 million people around the world, he's the most powerful 83-year-old we could find. Look for Monson to stay on top for years to come--at least until Boyd K. Packer, octogenarian president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, succeeds him as the alpha Mormon."
(tags: politics religion slate society culture lists silly)
A Mailing…
pharyngula | November 30, 2010You all remember Criswell, right, the amazing prognosticator of Plan 9 From Outer Space? Ray Kurzweil fits the mold: vague predictions, slippery, fuzzy statements, backtracking and excuse-making. The only differences are that Kurzweil is cold-reading technology rather than people's personalities, and like most mediums, he tends to make happy optimistic predictions that sell better than some of the wackier stuff Criswell talked about (there has been no cannibal apocalypse, and Criswell was one of the early kooks to leap on the end-of-the-world in 2012 bandwagon; Kurzweil just prattles about…
mikethemadbiologist | November 22, 2010Brad DeLong, Scott Lemieux, and Felix Salmon all take Stanley Fish's absurd discussion of Why Does College Cost So Much by Robert Archibald and David Feldman to task--and are right in doing so. It's a shame because Archibald and Feldman actually do have some key insights into where the money goes. The arguments they make aren't Fish's arguments either. How one can claim that college costs haven't risen faster than inflation boggles my mind: it simply involves division (college costs have risen much faster than the median household income). Of course, this is Stanley Fish, so numerical…
jdupuis | November 19, 2010Another list for your reading and collection development pleasure. This one concentrates on more business-y books so I've only chosen the ones that relate more to social media/technology. It's 10 Business Books In 2010 from Cloud Computing.
Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky
Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead by Charlene Li
The New Polymath: Profiles in Compound-Technology Innovations by Vinnie Mirchandani
The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World by David Kirkpatrick…
cevans | November 17, 2010
A few months ago, I attended Cyborg Camp in my hometown of Portland, Oregon. Cyborg Camp is an "unconference," basically a room full of cyberpunks, mega-nerds, and aspirational coders that gather in an office building to talk about the "future of the relationship between humans and technology." This event deserves a separate entry, but for now I'd like to recall a particularly evocative thing: that the most heartbreaking thing I saw at Cyborg Camp was an adult man hopelessly tangled in a web of cables.
It was his own off-the-shelf wearable computing system, a gordian thing connecting his…
esiegel | November 16, 2010"What makes the universe so hard to comprehend is that there's nothing to compare it with." -Anonymous
If I were brand new to theoretical cosmology, I might be skeptical of a whole bunch of "dark" things that I'd heard of. "Dark matter?" "Dark energy?" Come on; you've got to be kidding me! You're telling me that 95% of the Universe is not made of protons, neutrons, and electrons, like all the matter we know?
After all, I look out at the Universe, and this is what I see.
Stars, galaxies, gas and dust... normal matter, all of it. Yet all I need to do is start with two very well-supported…
jdupuis | November 10, 2010It has begun. The annual year's best science books posting orgy!
Every year for the past 4 or 5 years I've been linking to and posting about all the "year's best books" lists that appear in various media outlets and highlighting the science books that are mentioned. From the beginning it's been a pretty popular service so I'm happy to continue it.
For my purposes, I define science books pretty broadly to include science, engineering, computing, history & philosophy of science & technology, environment, social aspects of science and even business books about technology trends or…