Free Thought
drorzel | August 22, 2010
News: A Graphic Text - Inside Higher Ed
A bunch of professors in MBA programs have written a textbook in graphic novel form. I'd make a joke here about what this says about our future captains of industry, but, really, do I need to?
(tags: education comics business academia books)
slacktivist: A bank run in reverse
"The United States is flush with low-interest cash from the Giant Pool of Money. Yes, that cash will one day have to be repaid, but right now what it means is the government has the opportunity to invest it in ways that will help to generate future revenue, which is to say in…
mspringer | August 18, 2010A few days ago there was an interesting math problem posed on the right-leaning lawprof blog The Volokh Conspiracy. It's a cute problem in itself, and it makes a nice discussion example about the role of computers in modern physics. The problem is this:
Find a ten-digit number with the following two properties (in base 10, of course): A. The number contains each digit (from 0 to 9) exactly once. B. For every N from 1 to 10, the first N digits of the number are divisible by N.
Thus, for instance, 1234567890 doesn't work; while 1 is divisible by 1, 12 is divisible by 2, and 123 is divisible by…
drorzel | August 17, 2010
For Lean Budgets, a Plug-and-Play Solar System - Green Blog - NYTimes.com
You know you're a physical scientist when "Plug-and-Play Solar System" suggests something like "... then you put Jupiter here, and you're all set. See, they're orbiting already! And it's open-source, so it's free." Sadly, this is actually about some home photovoltaic thing.
(tags: science astronomy planets environment energy nytimes blogs)
News: Parenthood Gaps and Premiums - Inside Higher Ed
"Linda Grant of the University of Georgia [and] Kimberly Kelly of Mississippi State University noted that many experts would…
drorzel | August 16, 2010
Sex between adolescents in romantic relationships is often harmless to their academics
"The context in which adolescent sexual activity occurs can substantially moderate the negative relationship between sexual intercourse and education, according to research to be presented at the 105th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association.
"Compared to abstinence, sexual intercourse in committed romantic relationships is often academically harmless, whereas in other types of relationships it is more detrimental," said Bill McCarthy and Eric Grodsky, sociologists at the University of…
drorzel | August 14, 2010
Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » Eight Signs A Claimed Pâ NP Proof Is Wrong
"So, in the future, how can you decide whether a claimed Pâ NP proof is worth reading? I'll now let you in on my magic secrets (which turn out not to be magic or secret at all).
The thing not to do is to worry about the author's credentials or background. I say that not only for ethical reasons, but because there are too many cases in the history of mathematics where doing so led to catastrophic mistakes. Fortunately, there's something else you can do that's almost as lazy: scan the manuscript, keeping a…
drorzel | August 12, 2010
If Physical Books Are Dead in Five Years, How Do the Poor Find Books? Whither (or Wither?) the Library? : Mike the Mad Biologist
"The great promise of our libraries is that, if you can physically get there (and for some services, even that isn't required), you have access to the materials, rich or poor. And in the 21st century, that also means the internet, for those who can't afford to access it. Personally, I use the library all the time, and it seems a pretty bustling place to me--if anything, it would appear library use is soaring, at least in Boston.
Books need to be accessible to all…
drorzel | August 11, 2010
Crowd Sourcing Loses Steam - Newsweek
"There's no shortage of theories on why Wikipedia has stalled. One holds that the site is virtually complete. Another suggests that aggressive editors and a tangle of anti-vandalism rules have scared off casual users. But such explanations overlook a far deeper and enduring truth about human nature: most people simply don't want to work for free. They like the idea of the Web as a place where no one goes unheard and the contributions of millions of amateurs can change the world. But when they come home from a hard day at work and turn on their computer…
drorzel | August 10, 2010
Why Public Employees Are The New Welfare Queens | The New Republic
"To what extent is the problem that the retirement benefits for unionized public sector workers have become too generous? And to what extent is the problem that retirement benefits for everybody else have become too stingy?
I would suggest it's more the latter than the former. The promise of stable retirement--one not overly dependent on the ups and downs of the stock market--used to be part of the social contract. If you got an education and worked a steady job, then you got to live out the rest of your life comfortably.…
sporte | August 4, 2010This summer, Seattle's weather has been cloudy and cold. Luckily, "cloud" has another meaning.
For those of you wondering, what "cloudy" means, Eric Nilsson, from Insilicos, has a great article in Xconomy on Seattle and cloud computing.
A quick description of cloud computing would is to think of computer hardware, that is, the servers and data centers, as "utilities." Where other utilities like the Rocky Reach Dam produce and sell electricity, cloud utilities sell computing power. How they sell it is the distinguishing piece.
I think this quote from the article describes it best:…
drorzel | July 31, 2010
slacktivist: If you can make it there
"Newcomers are often insecure, and a debt of gratitude can make anyone feel a bit awkward, so I try my best to be patient with some of the sillier things often said by those from the American "heartland" about supposed "East Coast elites" in general and New York in particular.
But that patience has its limits and I may have reached those limits listening to various non-New Yorkers bloviating about where and how New Yorkers ought to be allowed to worship. (I'm from the heartland of New Jersey, myself, where I was taught that real Americans don't imagine…
developingintelligence | July 27, 2010"What we're seeking is not just one algorithm or one cool new trick - we're seeking a platform technology. In other words, we're not seeking the entirety of a collection of point solutions, what we're seeking is a platform technology on which we can build a wide variety of solutions."
Dharmendra Modha, manager of cognitive computing at IBM Research Almaden, discusses the Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics ("SyNAPSE") project. Mad scientist eyes are also on display:
Video after the jump:
Hat tip to Dave Jilk for pointing this out. See also his eCortex work.
drorzel | July 24, 2010
Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 040504 (2010): Room-Temperature Implementation of the Deutsch-Jozsa Algorithm with a Single Electronic Spin in Diamond
"The nitrogen-vacancy defect center (N-V center) is a promising candidate for quantum information processing due to the possibility of coherent manipulation of individual spins in the absence of the cryogenic requirement. We report a room-temperature implementation of the Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm by encoding both a qubit and an auxiliary state in the electron spin of a single N-V center. By thus exploiting the specific S=1 character of the spin system,…
drorzel | July 23, 2010
slacktivist: Credit scoring and unemployment
"Say you're unemployed and you decide to work your tail off to land a new job, so you send out 40 résumés a week. Half of the companies might decide to do a credit-check before getting back to you. This sets off alarm-bells at the credit-rating agencies. Twenty credit-checks in one week? There goes your credit score. And there goes your hope of landing a new job.
This is what the use of credit scoring in employment decisions means: Looking for a job disqualifies you from being hired."
(tags: politics economics class-war blogs slacktivist US…
drorzel | July 17, 2010
News: Technologically Illiterate Students - Inside Higher Ed
"The assumption that today's student are computer-literate because they are "digital natives" is a pernicious one, Zvacek said. "Our students are task-specific tech savvy: they know how to do many things," she said. "What we need is for them to be tech-skeptical."
Zvacek was careful to make clear that by tech-skeptical, she did not mean tech-negative. The skepticism she advocates is not a knee-jerk aversion to new technology tools, but rather the critical capacity to glean the implications, and limitations, of technologies as they…
drorzel | July 16, 2010
Mightygodking.com » Post Topic » Grading every country's national anthem, part one
"Burundi. Sounds more like a movie soundtrack than a national anthem - a really awesome movie, though, about African cowboys looking out over the savannah as the sun sets over the elephants, and then maybe they fight evil white people from some European country bent on exploitation, and of course there would be a good white person, possibly played by a Baldwin. But, yeah, this anthem is not very anthemic. Nice, though. 67"
(tags: world music silly blogs)
The Analogizer « Tom Scott
"Journalists! Do you…
drorzel | July 15, 2010
Mightygodking.com » Post Topic » What if Bertie Wooster, rather than being a mere layabout, was also Batman?
""Good morning, sir. I have prepared a breakfast of scrambled egg, kippers and bacon, as per your request."
"Fantastic, Jeeves! I tell you truly, I've worked up a massive appetite and that's no mistake."
"Am I to assume that tonight's excursion went well, sir?"
"Well, it started off a bit sticky. My cape got all tangled when I went to punch this one hooligan in the face."
"Ah, yes. The cape."
"Jeeves, we've had this discussion twice now. The cape is part of the ensemble."
"We have…
jwilbanks | July 11, 2010Dorothea has written a typically good post challenging the role of RDF in the linked data web, and in particular, its necessity as a common data format.
I was struck by how many of her analyses were spot on, though my conclusions are different from hers. But she nails it when she says:
First, HTML was hardly the only part of the web stack necessary to its explosion. TCP/IP, anyone?
I'm on about this all the time. The idea that we are in web-1995-land for data astounds me. I'd be happy if I were to be proven wrong - trust me, thrilled - but I don't see the core base of infrastructure for a…
drorzel | July 11, 2010
LaserFest | Videos of Lasers in Art & Entertainment
A collection of videos showing the use of lasers in art, movies, and television.
(tags: lasers science physics video television movies outreach art)
Home - emergentuniverse.org
A small but well-designed site dedicated to giving the public an interdisciplinary look at the science of emergent phenomena, including medicine, physics, neuroscience, and computing.
(tags: science education physics biology condensed-matter computing technology internet outreach)
Small changes steer kids toward smarter school lunch choices
"In the school…
catdynamics | July 7, 2010I just had an ice cold Pepsi this afternoon.
It was 35+C (ok, in the mid-nineties), I had just come back from a long hot walk through the kidfest day at the Artfest and I just had to have it.
It was so refreshing, and cool, and invigorating. Why it was exhilarating.
Don't know about the "Aids Digestion" bit - 'course it was Diet... not the same, eh?
It will, probably, be the only pepsi I have this month.
So, us physical science bloggers can be like total sluts, what with Pepsico having bought a blog on scienceblogs.com and many of the other bloggers quitting or suspending operations.
Not.…
ddobbs | July 7, 2010Hoo boy. I never thought I'd have to resign a blogging position in protest. But so I find.
I'm dismayed at ScienceBlogs' decision to run material written by PepsiCo as what amounts to editorial content â equivalent, that is, to the dozens of blogs written by scientists, bloggers, and writers who come with a different, more straightforward sort of agenda. This is like having Pfizer run CME; it presents problems I can't overlook. My Sblings should and will do as they see and feel best, and can and will do so without censure or judgment from me. But I cannot help but feel complicit in this if I…