• Remix of Out of Control
  • Wonderful: someone has taken Kevin Kelly’s book “Out of Control” and done a substantive remix. I think the original book is an extraordinary work of prophecy, but also agree with the person doing the remix: the original is long-winded and lacks focus. This remix looks to solve those problems.
• The Oldest Living Things in the World
  • Rachel Sussman’s excellent blog describing her travels around the world to find the oldest living things in the world.
• What Do Mathematicians Need to Know About Blogging? II | The n-Category Café
  • Nice short piece by John Baez on mathematics and blogging.
• The best Halloween trick ever
  • “I grew up in a college town, and one Halloween our doorbell rang and we opened the door expecting to see trickortreaters– but what was in front of our open door–was another door! Like, a full-on wooden door, that had a sign that said “Please knock.” So we did, and the door swung open to reveal a bunch of college dudes dressed as really old grandmothers, curlers in their hair, etc, who proceeded to coo over our “costumes” and tell us we were “such cute trick or treaters!” One even pinched my cheek. Then THEY gave US candy, closed their door, picked it up and walked to the next house.”
• Twitter Data Analysis: An Investor’s Perspective
  • “# Twitter’s user growth is no longer accelerating. The rate of new user acquisition has plateaued at around 8 million per month.
    # Over 14% of users don’t have a single follower, and over 75% of users have 10 or fewer followers.
    # 38% of users have never sent a single tweet, and over 75% of users have sent fewer than 10 tweets.
    # 1 in 4 registered users tweets in any given month.
    # Once a user has tweeted once, there is a 65% chance that they will tweet again. After that second tweet, however, the chance of a third tweet goes up to 81%.
    # If someone is still tweeting in their second week as a user, it is extremely likely that they will remain on Twitter as a long-term user.
    # Users who joined in more recent months are less likely to stop using the service and more likely to tweet more often than users from the past.”
• Homicidal somnambulism: a case report
  • Fascinating: “A case of a homicide and an attempted homicide during presumed sleepwalking is reported in which somnambulism was the legal defense and led to an acquittal. Other possible explanations including complex partial seizures, dissociative state, rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder and volitional waking behavior are discussed. The evidence supporting the probability that this act occurred during an episode of somnambulism and sleep-related confusional arousal is reviewed and weighed.”
• Social engineering-Knowledge Database
  • “apt-get for hardware… SKDB is a method for sharing hardware over the internet. By “hardware” we mean not just designs for circuit boards, but also biological constructs, scientific instruments, machine tools, nuts and bolts, raw materials, and how to make them. “

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• Michael Wolff on Rupert Murdoch | vanityfair.com
  • Utterly fascinating. Show’s how a very smart, very driven person – in this case, Rupert Murdoch – can act in very stupid ways, by being out of the loop. What I find fascinating is the fact that this can happen: it means Murdoch’s entire network of friends and colleagues must be similarly out of the loop, effectively isolating him from a very important part of culture.
• ‘Citizen scientists’ watch for signs of climate change
• Emerging Capitalist Economy at Burning Man | Savage Minds
• Rescuing The Reporters « Clay Shirky
  • Clay Shirky figures out how much news is really reported in his hometown newspaper. The answer is “not much”.

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• Surprises in Mathematics and Theory « Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP

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• Miniature Pearl
  • Cosma Shalizi on Judea Pearl on causality. Pearl is one of the leading figures in understanding causal inference. When I hear the old line that “correlation doesn’t imply causation” a little voice inside always ask “so what _exactly_ does imply causation?” Pearl seems to understand the answer to that question as well as anyone.

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• The Ultimate Productivity Blog
  • Surprisingly good.
• Message To The Australian Government From Anonymous
• Clay Shirky: Let a thousand flowers bloom to replace newspapers; don’t build a paywall around a public good » Nieman Journalism Lab
• That Which Does Not Kill Me Makes Me Stranger – New York Times
  • Wonderful article about the limits of the human mind and body: “‘‘I feel like if I go on, I will die,’’ he says, struggling for words. ‘‘It is everything at the same moment, piled up over and over. Head, muscles, bones. Nobody can understand. You cannot imagine it until you feel it.’’

    A few moments later, he says: ‘‘The pain doesn’t exist for me. I know it is there because I feel it, but I don’t pay attention to it. I sometimes see myself from the other view, looking down at me riding the bike. It is strange, but it happens like that.’’ Robic veers like this when he discusses pain. He talks of incomprehensible suffering one moment and of dreamlike anesthesia the next. If pain is in fact both signal and emotion, perhaps that makes sense. Perhaps the closer we get to its dual nature, the more elusive any single truth becomes, and the better we understand what Emily Dickinson meant when she wrote that ‘‘pain has an element of blank.’’”

• Joho the Blog » [berkman] Clay Shirky on the future of news
  • David Weinberger on Clay Shirky on journalism
• …My heart’s in Accra » Clay Shirky and accountability journalism
  • Ethan Zuckerman on Clay Shirky on Journalism
• Writing Math on the Web » American Scientist
  • Illuminating article about why writing math on the web remains so difficult.
• Academic studies about Wikipedia – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  • Many fascinating facts:the influence of admins is decreasing over time (from 2003 to 2006); readers are 50/50 male/female, but editors are 60/40 split (would be interesting to know stats for most frequent editors, too); WP has 44 official policies and 248 guidelines, as at September 2007; the “Ignore all rules” rule has become quite complicated (irony!); people have even classified the different types of power plays used by editors; editors come to own particular pages, and this sometimes causes problems; it’s getting harder to become an admin, only 42% of candidates pass the process (sounds like academic peer review…).
• Synthetic biology and evolution : The New Yorker
• The Gömböc shop
  • Get your Gomboc’s here.
• The story of the Gömböc
  • Very cool: the Gomboc is a 3-d object with just a single stable point of equilibrium. That means that if you put it down, it’ll always self-right. Apparently, some tortoises actually have Gomboc-like shells to help them self-right…
• ETH Zurich’s head of research resigns
  • “At ETH Zurich, there are suspicions that scientific data may have been falsified in two publications and a doctoral thesis in 1999 and 2000. At the request of the then group leader Peter Chen, now Vice President Research and Corporate Relations, the Executive Board appointed a panel of experts. It concluded that data had indeed been falsified. However, it is not known for absolute certain who was responsible for the falsifications. Nevertheless, out of respect for ETH Zurich and the function as head of research, Peter Chen has acknowledged his responsibility and decided to step down as Vice President at the end of September 2009.”
• Dan Bricklin: New Modes of Interaction: Some Implications of Microsoft Natal and Google Wave
• Jeff’s Search Engine Caffè: The Winning $1M Netflix Prize Methods Published
  • Links to papers describing the top solutions to the Netflix Prize.
• The Open PhD – What a Concept
  • “I am going to create my own Ph.D. program via open education using open courseware. My degree will be in Educational Technology with an emphasis in (what else?) Open Education as the Great Equalizer. As the tagline to my blog states: it will be all the learning, with none of the “doc”-uments. (Or none of the “cred”-entials). But I will have the knowledge; and, in the end, isn’t that the most important thing? (Oh, and I will still have my $45,000).”
• Nascent: Joi Ito visits Nature
  • Timo Hannay’s notes on Joi Ito’s talk: “CC licensing increases demand but cannibalises sales. So there’s a trade-off depending on the demand and sales of any given piece of work at any given time. The questions about CC licensing are therefore practical ones about what, who and when – not a religious decision. (Though for scientific and certain other types of content, CC believes in free access.)”
• The Story of Google Maps and Google Wave (pdf)

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• Marginal Revolution: How should economists integrate their personal and professional lives?
  • “In many ways the core of blogging is a willingness to apply what you know to every problem you encounter, and see how good a job you can do of it in a more or less integrated fashion.”
• Who Will Determine Who Pays for Equality in Health Care?
  • “Imagine that someone invented a pill… the Dorian Gray pill, after the Oscar Wilde character. Every day that you take the Dorian Gray, you will not die, get sick, or even age…The catch? A year’s supply costs $150,000.

    Anyone who is able to afford this new treatment can live forever. Certainly, Bill Gates can afford it. Most likely, thousands of upper-income Americans…shell out $150,000 a year for immortality.

    Most Americans, however, would not be so lucky. Because the price of these new pills well exceeds average income, it would be impossible to provide them for everyone, even if all the economy’s resources were devoted to producing Dorian Gray tablets.

    So here is the hard question: How should we, as a society, decide who gets the benefits…? Are we going to be health care egalitarians and try to prohibit Bill Gates from using his wealth to outlive Joe Sixpack? Or are we going to learn to live (and die) with vast differences in health outcomes? Is there a middle way?”

• Amir Ban on Deep Junior « Combinatorics and more
  • Nice short history of computer chess.
• Is the Internet melting our brains? | Salon Books
  • Apparently not. Who knew?
• Astronomy Picture of the Day Aug 4 2009: Discussion
  • “In my opinion, your image also highlighted a relatively new variation of human collective intelligence. APOD is not only a picture web site — its readership define perhaps the most collectively intelligent group of sky enthusiasts in history in terms of identifying sky phenomena. The debate that took place over your image — and several other images as well — was amazing. In my opinion, this power intelligence engine zeroed in on the right answer. And your image has helped measure and calibrate this intelligence. In the future, I hope to write a paper about the powerful collective intelligence that APOD has become, and I hope to use your image — given your permission — as one example.”
• Greg Kroah Hartman on the Linux Kernel
  • Amazing talk by Greg Kroah Hartman on the development process for the Linux Kernel. The rate of change is unbelievable – thousands of lines of code per day, many commits per hour. Loads of details about the technical and social process. All sorts of fault-tolerance in the social process: if someone disappears, the process still grinds on, and produces a reliable product. Well worth watching.
• Style Guides for Google-originated Open-source Projects
• A League ladder of PSI openness? | Government 2.0 Taskforce
  • “Why doesn’t Google report on governments’ preparedness to release data. It could produce a methodology and apply it consistently.” Could also be done by a not-for-profit, in a similar way to the reports issued by, e.g., Human Rights Watch, on human rights around the world.
• Tetris effect – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  • “People who play Tetris for a prolonged amount of time may then find themselves thinking about ways different shapes in the real world can fit together, such as the boxes on a supermarket shelf or the buildings on a street.[1] In this sense, the Tetris effect is a form of habit. They might also see images of falling Tetris shapes at the edges of their visual fields or when they close their eyes.[1] In this sense, the Tetris effect is a form of hallucination. They might also dream about falling Tetris shapes when drifting off to sleep.[2] In this sense, the Tetris effect is a form of hypnagogic imagery.”
• World’s best Tetris player
  • This guy is to Tetris what Tiger Woods is to golf. Skip to 4:40 and watch the pieces go invisible.
• Science fiction: The stories of now – 16 September 2009 – New Scientist
  • A letter from Virginia Woolf to Olad Stapledon about “Star Maker”: “Dear Mr. Stapledon,

    I would have thanked you for your book before, but I have been very busy and have only just had time to read it. I don’t suppose that I have understood more than a small part – all the same I have understood enough to be greatly interested, and elated too, since sometimes it seems to me that you are grasping ideas that I have tried to express, much more fumblingly, in fiction. But you have gone much further and I can’t help envying you – as one does those who reach what one has aimed at.

    Many thanks for giving me a copy,

    yours sincerely,

    Virginia Woolf”

• Terry Tao: A speech for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
  • Terry Tao on how the internet is changing science, especially mathematics.

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• Bin Laden’s Reading List for Americans – The Lede Blog – NYTimes.com
  • “While Oprah’s seal of approval on a book cover is sought after in America, Osama Bin Laden’s is, to put it mildly, not. On Monday, the authors of three books apparently recommended to American readers by the leader of Al Qaeda in his latest communique might be wondering how one goes about returning an unsolicited endorsement to a shadowy militant who has been in hiding for eight years. “
• Giles Bowkett: There’s No Such Thing As A Good Client
  • “You don’t want to be in the position of having an idiot boss, quitting your job, working for yourself, and discovering that your new boss is an even bigger idiot.”
• New paper on “Goal Oriented Communication” « Algorithmic Game Theory
  • “An intriguing paper titled “A Theory of Goal-Oriented Communication” by Oded Goldreich, Brendan Juba, and Madhu Sudan has recently been uploaded to the ECCC, expanding a line of work started by the last two authors here and here. The basic issue studied is how is it possible to effectively communicate without agreeing on a language in advance. The basic result obtained is that, as long as the parties can “sense” whether some progress is made toward their goals, prior agreement about a language is not necessary and a “universal” protocol exists. My nerdier side cannot help but thinking about the application to communicating with an alien species (which I bet the authors did not mention on purpose.)”
• Post-Medium Publishing
  • Excellent essay on the future of publishing, by Paul Graham.
• Possible future Polymath projects « Gowers’s Weblog
• Douglas Adams: How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet
  • “people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online…or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine [applying] any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants… For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV… One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.”
• [0909.2925] Galaxy Zoo: Exploring the Motivations of Citizen Science Volunteers
  • “The Galaxy Zoo citizen science website invites anyone with an Internet connection to participate in research by classifying galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. As of April 2009, more than 200,000 volunteers had made more than 100 million galaxy classifications. In this paper, we present results of a pilot study into the motivations and demographics of Galaxy Zoo volunteers, and define a technique to determine motivations from free responses that can be used in larger multiple-choice surveys with similar populations. Our categories form the basis for a future survey, with the goal of determining the prevalence of each motivation. “
• Are Your Friends Making You Fat? – NYTimes.com
  • Fascinating discussion of correlations in social networks.
• Dean Karnazes – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  • “After [running 50 marathons in 50 days], Karnazes decided to run home to San Francisco from New York City.”
• The Billion Dollar Gram | Information Is Beautiful
  • Nice visualization of the amounts of money required to do different things.
• Theory Has Bet On P=NP « Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP
  • Thoughtful post questioning the conventional wisdom that P is not equal to NP, and the wisdom of completely ignoring the possibility that P = NP.
• Galaxy Zoo Blog » She’s an Astronomer: Kate Land
  • Lovely quote from one of the Zoo-builders, Kate Land: “The popularity of the site was absolutely heart-warming. I used to get quite emotional reading emails and posts on the forum from zooites who loved the project and were wild about astronomy. So much of an academic’s work can be remote, abstract, and cut off from the ‘real-world’. And it was just brilliant to work on something that touched so many people.”
• PLoS Biology: Real Lives and White Lies in the Funding of Scientific Research
  • “The peculiar demands of our granting system have favoured an upper class of skilled scientists who know how to raise money for a big group… They have mastered a glass bead game that rewards not only quality and honesty, but also salesmanship and networking.” I agree with much in this article. Some years back I constructed a list of papers I especially admired, and was surprised to discover that with only a few exceptions they were produced from unfunded research. This was sobering, since it suggest that receiving research grants was (at least according to my judgement of scientific quality) anticorrelated with doing work of the highest quality. Grants seem to be good at sustaining an established area, but not very good at all at producing the conceptual innovations that start new subfields.
• RSS never blocks you or goes down: why social networks need to be decentralized – O’Reilly Radar
  • Broad survey of peer-to-peer services.
• Fotopedia: Images for Humanity
  • Collaborative photographic encylopedia, with generous licensing.

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• Paul Buchheit: Evaluating risk and opportunity (as a human)
  • Excellent post from Paul Bucheit, essentially pointing out that (a) it’s often too damn difficult to figure out expected returns from a course of action; (b) we often can get some picture of the tails of the distribution (what’s the best that can happen, what’s the worst); and (c) in iterated situations, we often care a lot more about the tails, anyway. This is an especially valuable heuristic in situations with limited downside. An example that comes to mind is hiring: there is very limited downside in approaching (potential) superstars, and you’re in an iterated situation, so you may as well swing for the fences. Yet most people think about expected value – “he/she would never want to work here”, and so confine themselves to the middle of the Bell curve.
• I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script
• The Bio-Economist
  • Survey of the cost of gene sequencing, synthesis etc.
• Would You Bet Your Life? « Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP
  • Richard Lipton on how sure people really are that P is not equal to NP. As in, willing to bet money at high odds.
• Galaxy Zoo Blog » The Hyper-Velocity Stars Project: Serendipity at its Best
  • Hyper-Velocity Stars are stars moving at very high speeds – typically a percent or more the velocity of light – relative to other local stars. This is the story of how the Galaxy Zoo Hyper-Velocity star project started small, and then snowballed, with more and more people getting involved.
• The Canon of Medicine – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  • Remarkable 1025 text by Ibn Sina, apparently describing randomized controlled trials, risk factor analysis, and an awe-inspiring range of treatments, diseases, symptoms, methods of surgery and so on.
• The New Atlantis: Francis Bacon (1627)
  • Fascinating throughout: “We have three that try new experiments, such as themselves think good. These we call Pioneers or Miners.

    “We have three that draw the experiments of the former four into titles and tables, to give the better light for the drawing of observations and axioms out of them. These we call Compilers.

    “We have three that bend themselves, looking into the experiments of their fellows, and cast about how to draw out of them things of use and practise for man’s life, and knowledge… These we call Dowry-men or Benefactors.

    “Then… we have three that take care… to direct new experiments, of a higher light, more penetrating into nature than the former. These we call Lamps.

    “We have three others that do execute the experiments so directed, and report them. These we call Inoculators.

    “Lastly, we have three that raise the former discoveries by experiments into greater observations, axioms, and aphorisms. These we call Interpreters of Nature.”

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• …My heart’s in Accra » Steven Downes, Anders Sandberg on Cloud Intelligence
• Anders’ Mad Scientist Page
  • Awesome set of links (many gone, but the titles still amuse): “This page is dedicated to all Seekers of Truth, regardless of how warped the truth may be.”
• AIP UniPHY
  • Social networking site, aimed at physical scientists.
• Cathemeral Thinking: What is a magazine?
  • Discussion of what a magazine is from David Harris, the founder of Symmetry magazine. I think the post makes a mistake in conceiving of “the magazine” as some sort of platonic ideal – it’s just a tiny little corner of the enormous space of possible ways of connecting readers and writers. But thought-provoking nonetheless.
• How all Nigerians Became Scammers. | OoTheNigerian
  • A thoughtful post on modern stereotypes and the damage they can cause. The tune may change but the song remains the same.
• Open Learning Initiative
• Semantic Web-related Research using Wikipedia
  • Very little of this actually uses the semantic web in any serious way, but it’s still an interesting list of papers. Lots of articles on automated extraction of information, clustering, topic extraction, recommendation systems, and so on.
• Eric Schadt – Enlisting Computers to Unravel the True Complexity of Disease – Biography – NYTimes.com
  • New York Times profile of Eric Schadt, and open approaches to innovation in biology. Interesting, although it would have been a lot better with more concrete detail about open innovation.
• Paul Krugman: How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?
  • Krugman’s version of economic history. I found it informative and stimulating, even if oversimplified in places. Lurking in the background is the question of what it means to understand a phenomenon. The most obvious candidate is the ability to make predictions, but this seems to me to be neither necessary nor sufficient. It’s bothersome that sometimes knowing more actually leads one to make worse predictions.
• The Open Dinosaur Project
  • An open invitation for people to help construct a database of skeletal measurements for ornithischian dinosaurs. Anyone can help out – they’re trying to do a comprehensive literature survey.
• Market Design: Federal Judges Law Clerk Hiring
  • Fascinating summary of work on “cheating” (i.e., not obeying prevailing norms) in a market, in this case the hiring of clerks for Federal Judges in the US, as well as many interesting links to other work on the functioning of that market.
• Nascent: Andrew Savikas visits Nature
  • Timo Hannay’s (head of Nature.com) notes on Andrew Savikas’ (O’Reilly media) talk at Nature. Many fascinating facts: O’Reilly ebooks outsell print by 2:1; ebook sales doubling every 18 months for last 5 years; “free” is much more complicated than you might think; price discrimination as a useful strategy (technically, this is illegal in the US, for reasons I don’t quite get, although there are easy ways around it); nice analogy to the first TV programs being just like radio.
• The Trouble with Nonprofits (Aaron Swartz’s Raw Thought)
  • I thought this was interesting, and probably contained a kernel of truth: “What distinguishes people who are great at what they do from those who are just mediocre? The answer, it seems, is feedback.” Swartz gives as examples playing chess (rapid incontrovertible feedback) versus making political predictions (slow, vague feedback, easy to discount or ignore). I suspect that what’s going on in the political pundit case is a different kind of feedback, one not based on how correct the pundit is, but rather based on more superficial traits which make a person seem impressive. I wonder to what extent it’s possible to manufacture (and stick to) feedback methods for one’s work?

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