Sciber

noreply@blogger.com (CyberL) — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 19:54:00 +0000

Melanie Mitchell's blog withe perspectives on the sciences of complexity: Exploring Complexity

The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information

noreply@blogger.com (CyberL) — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 20:43:00 +0000

"We estimated the world’s technological capacity to store, communicate, and compute information, tracking 60 analog and digital technologies during the period from 1986 to 2007." Full article @ Science

Innovations R Us

noreply@blogger.com (CyberL) — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 21:09:00 +0000

Networks move scientific discovery forward at the speed of light. Full article @ Innovations R Us - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences

A Generalization of Hamilton's Rule for the Evolution of Microbial Cooperation

noreply@blogger.com (CyberL) — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 17:25:00 +0000

"Hamilton’s rule states that cooperation will evolve if the fitness cost to actors is less than the benefit to recipients multiplied by their genetic relatedness. This rule makes many simplifying assumptions, however, and does not accurately describe social evolution in organisms such as microbes where selection is both strong and nonadditive. We derived a generalization of Hamilton’s rule and measured its parameters in Myxococcus xanthus bacteria. Nonadditivity made cooperative sporulation remarkably resistant to exploitation by cheater strains. Selection was driven by higher-order moments of population structure, not relatedness. These results provide an empirically testable cooperation principle applicable to both microbes and multicellular organisms and show how nonlinear interactions among cells insulate bacteria against cheaters." Full article @ Science

Measuring the costs and benefits of cooperation in microbes. Blue, cooperator fitness; red, noncooperator fitness. (A) In Hamilton's rule, b is the slope of fitness against the frequency of cooperators among social neighbors; c is the fitness difference between cooperators and noncooperators for a given social environment. Fitness effects are nonadditive when benefits are (B) nonlinear or (C) depend on recipient genotype.

Special Demi-Issues on Network Data Analysis

noreply@blogger.com (CyberL) — Wed, 19 May 2010 21:56:00 +0000

Awesome recommendation from Cosma Shalizi: Special Demi-Issues on Network Data Analysis in <cite>Annals of Applied Statistics</cite>

Community Structure in Time-Dependent, Multiscale, and Multiplex Networks

noreply@blogger.com (CyberL) — Tue, 18 May 2010 14:56:00 +0000

"Network science is an interdisciplinary endeavor, with methods and applications drawn from across the natural, social, and information sciences. A prominent problem in network science is the algorithmic detection of tightly connected groups of nodes known as communities. We developed a generalized framework of network quality functions that allowed us to study the community structure of arbitrary multislice networks, which are combinations of individual networks coupled through links that connect each node in one network slice to itself in other slices. This framework allows studies of community structure in a general setting encompassing networks that evolve over time, have multiple types of links (multiplexity), and have multiple scales. Full article @ Science

A Turing Machine Overview

noreply@blogger.com (CyberL) — Mon, 10 May 2010 09:48:00 +0000

"My goal in building this project was to create a machine that embodied the classic look and feel of the machine presented in Turing’s paper. I wanted to build a machine that would be immediately recognizable as a Turing machine to someone familiar with Turing's work.
"A Turing Machine Overview

The Bootstrap

noreply@blogger.com (CyberL) — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 15:40:00 +0000

"Statisticians can reuse their data to quantify the uncertainty of complex models." Full article by Cosma Shalizi @ The American Scientist

Complex networks: The fragility of interdependency

noreply@blogger.com (CyberL) — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 14:50:00 +0000

"A study of failures in interconnected networks highlights the vulnerability of tightly coupled infrastructures and shows the need to consider mutually dependent network properties in designing resilient systems". Full article @ Nature

Secret of Annoying Crowds Revealed

noreply@blogger.com (CyberL) — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 14:23:00 +0000

"Push, shout, or politely excuse yourself all you want, but those slowpokes in your way just won't budge. A new study shows a long-neglected reason why: Up to 70% of people in crowds socially glue themselves into groups of two or more, slowing down traffic. What's worse, as crowds gets denser, groups bend into anti-aerodynamic shapes that exacerbate the problem." Full news report @ ScienceNOW.

Full Article:

Moussaïd M, Perozo N, Garnier S, Helbing D, Theraulaz G [2010]. "The Walking Behaviour of Pedestrian Social Groups and Its Impact on Crowd Dynamics". PLoS ONE 5(4): e10047.

Mining our Reality

noreply@blogger.com (CyberL) — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 11:29:00 +0000

"Something important is changing in how we as a society use computers to mine data. In the past decade, machine-learning algorithms have helped to analyze historical data, often revealing trends and patterns too subtle for humans to detect. Examples include mining credit card data to discover activity patterns that suggest fraud, and mining scientific data to discover new empirical laws (1, 2). Researchers are beginning to apply these algorithms to real-time data that record personal activities, conversations, and movements (3–8) in an attempt to improve human health, guide traffic, and advance the scientific understanding of human behavior." Full perspective @ Science Magazine.

Brian Eno, Peter Schmidt, and Cybernetics

noreply@blogger.com (CyberL) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:46:00 +0000

"Cybernetics is one of the most widely misunderstood concepts. The word itself seems sinister and futuristic, but the term has ancient roots – the Greek word kybernetes, meaning steersman. Cybernetics was famously defined in more recent times by Norbert Wiener in 1948, as the science of “control and communication, in the animal and the machine.” Words like "control” may seem to have creepy overtones, but at its heart, cybernetics is simply the study of systems. "Cybernetics is the discipline of whole systems thinking...a whole system is a living system is a learning system," as Stewart Brand put it in 1980. Cybernetic systems have been used to model all kinds of phenomena, with varying degrees of success – factories, societies, machines, ecosystems, brains -- and many noted artists and musicians derived inspiration from this powerful conceptual toolkit. Cybernetics may be one of the most interdisciplinary frameworks ever devised; its theories link engineering, math, physics, biology, psychology, and an array of other fields, and ideas from cybernetics inevitably infiltrated the arts. The musician and producer Brian Eno, for example, was a big fan of connecting ideas from cybernetics to the studio environment, and to music composition, in his work in the 1970s."

Full article @ Rhizone.

P.S. Thanks Artemy for sending this!

R, the Software, Finds Fans in Data Analysts

noreply@blogger.com (CyberL) — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 16:35:00 +0000

"R is also the name of a popular programming language used by a growing number of data analysts inside corporations and academia. It is becoming their lingua franca partly because data mining has entered a golden age, whether being used to set ad prices, find new drugs more quickly or fine-tune financial models." Full Story @ NYTimes.com

Slides for Lecture 9 online

noreply@blogger.com (CyberL) — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 04:16:00 +0000

Lecture 9

The Year Online

noreply@blogger.com (CyberL) — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 03:58:00 +0000

The Year Online:The business of social networking, cloud computing, and a flaw in the fabric of the Internet top the most notable stories of 2008. Full story @ Technology Review: The Year Online

The Year Online

noreply@blogger.com (CyberL) — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 03:58:00 +0000

The Year Online:The business of social networking, cloud computing, and a flaw in the fabric of the Internet top the most notable stories of 2008. Full story @ Technology Review: The Year Online

Slides for Lecture 8 online

noreply@blogger.com (CyberL) — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 03:00:00 +0000

Lecture 8 - The Cyborg Species

Imagine Cup Student Competition 2009

noreply@blogger.com (CyberL) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:22:00 +0000

The World’s Premier Student Technology Competition: Imagine Cup Student Competition 2009. Looks especially at the Information Technology Competition.

"I wish there had been an Imagine Cup when I was growing up. It gets people involved in seeing that software is changing the world."
--Bill Gates
Chairman, Microsoft Corp.

Everything that the world may become "someday" lies in the hands of young people today. As they look at the road ahead, their close relationship with technology enables them to dream in ways we never have before. Put the two together, and you have young minds holding the tools that can make their vision a reality.

This is the recipe that inspired Microsoft to create the Imagine Cup. What begins with a burst of inspiration and a lot of hard work can become a future software breakthrough, a future career, or a flourishing new industry. The Imagine Cup encourages young people to apply their imagination, their passion and their creativity to technology innovations that can make a difference in the world – today. Now in its sixth year, the Imagine Cup has grown to be a truly global competition focused on finding solutions to real world issues.

Open to students around the world, the Imagine Cup is a serious challenge that draws serious talent, and the competition is intense. The contest spans a year, beginning with local, regional and online contests whose winners go on to attend the global finals held in a different location every year. The intensity of the work brings students together, and motivates the competitors to give it their all. The bonds formed here often last well beyond the competition itself.

CDI grant awards 2008

noreply@blogger.com (CyberL) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 19:36:00 +0000

List of CDI Awards

The body is obsolete

noreply@blogger.com (CyberL) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 19:35:00 +0000

Is this the future of Human-Computer Interaction?

Links for Lecture 8

noreply@blogger.com (CyberL) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 18:16:00 +0000

Animals using tools:

Crow and Wire
Capuchin Monkeys (Windows Media).
More about Tool Use in Animals.

Opaque Technology

List of bad designs.
Design Guru Donald Norman and his publications.

Towards portable knowledge technology

Google SMS, here is the Manual. And what about Google in your Brain? It is coming soon.

Cyborgs in Movies

Blade Runner

Ubiquitous computing

Smart Shopping
Mark Weiser
Tokyo RFID Map. More details at InfoWorld.
social dynamics and coordinated human activity

interactive fabrics

noreply@blogger.com (CyberL) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 18:03:00 +0000

"A company called Luminex has hit on the idea of weaving fibre-optics into fabric, so the wearer can really light up a room when they enter it." Full article at BBC News.

Surfing the Web with nothing but brainwaves.

noreply@blogger.com (CyberL) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 18:02:00 +0000

"Kiss your keyboard goodbye: Soon we'll jack our brains directly into the Net - and that's just the beginning". Full Story at CNNMoney.com: Future Boy: This is your brain on Google

Video from CyberKinetics

Networking from the craddle

noreply@blogger.com (CyberL) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 16:02:00 +0000

A host of new sites, including Totspot, Odadeo, Lil’Grams and Kidmondo, offer parents a chance to invite friends and family to join and contribute to a network geared to connecting them to the baby in their lives. Full story @ NYTimes.com

Give a laptop. Change the World

noreply@blogger.com (CyberL) — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 00:46:00 +0000