Pulse of the Tweeters
If you really want to know the most influential people tweeting on the hot topics of the day, go to pulseofthetweeters.com. The website went online in May and has been tracking the top trending topics from Twitter in real time ever since. AThe website was created in the laboratory of Alok Choudhary, John G. Searle Professor and chair of electrical engineering and computer science at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science. It grew out of the thesis project of Ph.D. candidate Ramanathan Narayanan. A"The question we're really asking is: whose opinions are most interesting and influential on any given topic?" Narayanan said.
Posted: October 1st, 2010
at 3:27pm by Koookiecrumbles
Categories: education,#twitterisfothebirds
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The Price of Unity
As the German people celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall, the governments in Bonn and Paris were secretly haggling over European monetary union. According to internal government documents, the negotiations almost collapsed. Was West Germany’s beloved currency, the deutsche mark, sacrificed at the altar of reunification to win France’s support?
Posted: October 1st, 2010
at 3:15pm by Koookiecrumbles
Categories: business,politricks,development
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Quote of the Day
The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else. AaEliezer Yudkowsky, Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk via
Posted: October 1st, 2010
at 3:12pm by Koookiecrumbles
Categories: quote of the day
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Eskimo Nebula
The breathtakingly beautiful Eskimo Nebula is an intricate structure of shells and streamers of gas around a dying Sun-like star 5000 light-years away. The disc of material is embellished with a ring of comet-shaped objects, their tails streaming away from the central, dying star. The planetary nebula began to form about 10 000 years ago, when the dying star started to expel an intense ‘wind’ of high-speed material out into space. A Credits: NASA, ESA, Andrew Fruchter (STScI), and the ERO team (STScI + ST-ECF)
China Launches Moon mission
A Long March 3C rocket with the Chang’e-2 probe took off from Xichang launch centre at about 1100 GMT. AThe rocket will shoot the craft into the trans-lunar orbit, after which the satellite is expected to reach the Moon in about five days. AChang’e-2 will be used to test key technologies and collect data for future landings. A The latest launch, to test key technologies and gather data, is China’s second lunar mission China says it will send a rover on its next mission, and it also has ambitions to put humans on the surface of the lunar body at some future date. AThe Xinhua News Agency said Chang’e-2 would circle just 15km (nine miles) above the rocky terrain in order to take photographs of possible landing locations. AIt is China’s second lunar probe - the first was launched in 2007. The craft stayed in space for 16 months before being intentionally crashed on to the Moon’s surface.
The Four Types of Scientists
1. TheAData-Driven Nerd:
These are guys and gals who seem to spend every waking hour in the lab. They're precise and thorough. They like new technologies that get them better a and more, always more a data. They hate writing up their papers because there's never enoughAgood data to say something definitive. They generally see no need for (and have no patience for) journalists, unless lapsing into an effusive geek-out moment over some surprising new data.AArchetype: Rosalind Franklin, the meticulous X-ray crystallographer whose work formed the backbone of Watson and Crick's DNA discovery. According toAPBS: "Rosalind Franklin always liked facts. She was logical and precise, and impatient with things that were otherwise."
2. TheATheory-Driven Nerd:
These are big-thinking intellectuals who build systems and make wide-sweeping hypotheses. They love giving long keynote lectures at scientific conferences.AThey listen to classical music in their rich mahogany offices while writing up their papers, in which they're likely to quote philosophers or drop in bad poetry.AArchetype: Albert Einstein. According to his Nobel Prize write-up, "Einstein's gifts inevitably resulted in his dwelling much in intellectual solitude."
3. TheAData-Driven Adventurer:
These are the doers. The field scientists a archaeologists, geologists, deep-ocean divers a who want to be the first to discover something, no matter what the risk. The forensic scientist who scrapes underneath dead fingernails. The microbiologist who works with Ebola. Other appropriate cliches: They're not afraid to get their hands dirty, plunge right in. They're straight-shooting, fast-talking. They live in the here and now.AArchetype: Neil Armstrong. He blasted through the atmosphere, lived on dehydrated food, put on that silly helmet, and collected the Moon rocks. But I bet it was a bunch of ISTJs who studied their geological composition.
4. TheATheory-Driven Adventurer:
Lastly, there's my favorite kind of scientist (if only because they make the best protagonists): the Theory-Driven Adventurer. They're problem-solvers, multi-taskers, broad thinkers. They love showing off their skills and playing with big, impressive toys. Journalists like labeling them as 'rebels' and, especially, 'mavericks'.AArchetype: Craig Venter, who spent months and months sailing his personal yacht around the world toAcollect microbial samples for gene sequencing. His most clever nickname is 'Darth Venter'; the least clever, 'asshole'.
Posted: October 1st, 2010
at 8:32am by Koookiecrumbles
Categories: science,development
Comments: No comments
"The education landscape has changed pretty profoundly, and the unions have to adapt," says Tim Daly, president of the New Teacher Project, a Teach for America (TFA) offshoot often seen as a counterweight to the power of unions and teachers colleges. "It’s no longer just school districts they’re dealing with but charter schools, accountability measures that flow from Washington and new governance structures such as mayoral control and state takeovers.
Hawking & Mlodinow: No ‘theory of everything’
"In our view, there is no picture or theory-independent concept of reality. Instead we adopt a view that we call model - dependent realism: the idea that a physical theory or world is a model (generally of a mathematical nature) and a set of rules that connect theelements of the model to observations. According to model - dependent realism, it is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only whether it agrees with observation. If two models agree with observation, neither model can be considered more real than the other. A person can use whichever model is more convenient in the situation under consideration."
.:physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com->
Posted: October 1st, 2010
at 8:24am by Koookiecrumbles
Categories: life,science,blogs
Comments: No comments