{"id":672,"date":"2009-09-18T06:53:07","date_gmt":"2009-09-18T10:53:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/biweekly-links-for-09182009\/"},"modified":"2009-09-18T06:53:07","modified_gmt":"2009-09-18T10:53:07","slug":"biweekly-links-for-09182009","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/biweekly-links-for-09182009\/","title":{"rendered":"Biweekly links for 09\/18\/2009"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/thelede.blogs.nytimes.com\/2009\/09\/14\/bin-ladens-reading-list-for-americans\/?hp\">Bin Laden\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Reading List for Americans &#8211; The Lede Blog &#8211; NYTimes.com<\/a>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;While Oprah\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s seal of approval on a book cover is sought after in America, Osama Bin Laden\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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. &#8220;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/gilesbowkett.blogspot.com\/2009\/09\/theres-no-such-thing-as-good-client.html\">Giles Bowkett: There&#8217;s No Such Thing As A Good Client<\/a>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;You don&#8217;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.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/agtb.wordpress.com\/2009\/09\/17\/new-paper-on-goal-oriented-communication\/\">New paper on \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Goal Oriented Communication\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00c2\u00ab Algorithmic Game Theory<\/a>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;An intriguing paper titled \u00e2\u20ac\u0153A Theory of Goal-Oriented Communication\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153sense\u00e2\u20ac\u009d whether some progress is made toward their goals,  prior agreement about a language is not necessary and a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153universal\u00e2\u20ac\u009d  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.)&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.paulgraham.com\/publishing.html\">Post-Medium Publishing<\/a>\n<ul>\n<li>Excellent essay on the future of publishing, by Paul Graham.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/gowers.wordpress.com\/2009\/09\/16\/possible-future-polymath-projects\/#comment-3969\">Possible future Polymath projects \u00c2\u00ab Gowers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Weblog<\/a>\n<ul>\n<li><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.douglasadams.com\/dna\/19990901-00-a.html\">Douglas Adams: How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet<\/a>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;people complain that there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a lot of rubbish online&#8230;or that you can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t \u00e2\u20ac\u02dctrust\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 what people tell you on the web anymore than you can \u00e2\u20ac\u02dctrust\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants&#8230; 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t easily answer back \u00e2\u20ac\u201c like newspapers, television or granite. Hence \u00e2\u20ac\u02dccarved in stone.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 What should concern us is not that we can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t take what we read on the internet on trust \u00e2\u20ac\u201c of course you can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just people talking \u00e2\u20ac\u201c but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV&#8230; One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcthem\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 out there. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just an awful lot of \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcus\u00e2\u20ac\u2122.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/0909.2925\">[0909.2925] Galaxy Zoo: Exploring the Motivations of Citizen Science Volunteers<\/a>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;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. &#8220;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2009\/09\/13\/magazine\/13contagion-t.html?_r=2&#038;th=&#038;emc=th&#038;pagewanted=all\">Are Your Friends Making You Fat? &#8211; NYTimes.com<\/a>\n<ul>\n<li>Fascinating discussion of correlations in social networks.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Dean_Karnazes\">Dean Karnazes &#8211; Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia<\/a>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;After [running 50 marathons in 50 days], Karnazes decided to run home to San Francisco from New York City.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.informationisbeautiful.net\/visualizations\/the-billion-dollar-gram\/\">The Billion Dollar Gram | Information Is Beautiful<\/a>\n<ul>\n<li>Nice visualization of the amounts of money required to do different things.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/rjlipton.wordpress.com\/2009\/09\/15\/theory-has-bet-on-pnp\/\">Theory Has Bet On P=NP \u00c2\u00ab G\u00c3\u00b6del\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Lost Letter and P=NP<\/a>\n<ul>\n<li>Thoughtful post questioning the conventional wisdom that P is not equal to NP, and the wisdom of completely ignoring the possibility that P = NP.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.galaxyzooblog.org\/2009\/09\/15\/shes-an-astronomer-kate-land\/\">Galaxy Zoo Blog \u00c2\u00bb She\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an Astronomer: Kate Land<\/a>\n<ul>\n<li>Lovely quote from one of the Zoo-builders, Kate Land: &#8220;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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s work can be remote, abstract, and cut off from the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcreal-world\u00e2\u20ac\u2122. And it was just brilliant to work on something that touched so many people.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.plosbiology.org\/article\/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1000197\">PLoS Biology: Real Lives and White Lies in the Funding of Scientific Research<\/a>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;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&#8230; They have mastered a glass bead game that rewards not only quality and honesty, but also salesmanship and networking.&#8221;   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.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/radar.oreilly.com\/2009\/09\/rss-never-blocks-you-or-goes-d.html\">RSS never blocks you or goes down: why social networks need to be decentralized &#8211; O&#8217;Reilly Radar<\/a>\n<ul>\n<li>Broad survey of peer-to-peer services.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.fotopedia.com\/\">Fotopedia: Images for Humanity<\/a>\n<ul>\n<li>Collaborative photographic encylopedia, with generous licensing.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Click <a href=\"http:\/\/delicious.com\/nielsen\/\">here<\/a> for all of my del.icio.us bookmarks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bin Laden\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Reading List for Americans &#8211; The Lede Blog &#8211; NYTimes.com &#8220;While Oprah\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s seal of approval on a book cover is sought after in America, Osama Bin Laden\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/biweekly-links-for-09182009\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Biweekly links for 09\/18\/2009<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}