Category Archives: news

“Why Email Is Broken—and What Will Replace It” by PETER DIAMANDIS

featured at Singularity Hub:

“If you need to communicate something important to a friend, do you call? Visit? Email? Text? Skype? WhatsApp? Snap? Tweet? Message on Facebook or LinkedIn? (…)

As more and more tools become available, we seem to have accepted the notion that communication is “contextual”: LinkedIn is for work. Facebook is for friends. Snapchat is for close friends. Texting is for something immediate, if not urgent. Slack is for your team.Twitter is for public broadcast. Skype is for long distance. Phone calls are for intimacy or something really important.

And a lot of people make the mistake of thinking that email is, well, good enough.(…)

If the email is more than a few lines long, I don’t read it.
If I don’t get the point in the first couple of lines, I stop reading.Continue reading→

Hacking Mona Lisa’s smile

After centuries being studied, some researchers to link the elusive smile to unbalanced skills of different areas of our visual field.

As the recently discovered La Bella Principessa not only attributed to Leonardo da Vinci shows similar effect, more evidence is brought to light that this was tested and intentional at the work, as Alessandro Soranzo and Michelle Newberry’s “The uncatchable smile in Leonardo da Vinci’s La Bella Principessa portrait” argues.

How long until you have a sfumato illusion filter in your phone’s camera?

“The Neuron’s Secret Partner: Glial cells…” by FERRIS JABR

Article by Ferris Jabr, illustrated by Jackie Ferrentino, featured  in Nautilus

“When we speak of brain cells we usually mean neurons: (…)  The rest, known as neuroglia or simply glia, have long lived in the neuron’s shadow.

(…) By the early 1900s, that notion had begun to erode. (…) From the 1960s onward (…) neuroscientists confirmed that glia are the brain’s architects, doctors, police, janitors, and gardeners. In the last five years, researchers have finally brought glia into the limelight as the highly dynamic, incomparably versatile, and indispensable partners of the neuron. Here are five recently discovered roles glia play in the brain:

Wiring – (…)  radial glial cells form a widespread lattice of cables along which neurons crawl like inchworms (…)  A series of studies in the last three years have also confirmed that some glial cells excrete molecules that promote the formation of new connections between neurons, while others engulf and digest weak and underused synapses, changing the brain’s micro-circuitry throughout life.
Clearing Clutter – (…) Microglia roam about scavenging harmful tangles of proteins, the remains of dead cells, and bits of unneeded DNA. But a study published just last year indicated that microglia are essential for eliminating clumps of amyloid beta and other protein clusters associated with Alzheimer’s and related neurodegenerative disorders. (…)

Helping Neurons Talk – (…)  oligodendrocyte precursor cell (OPC) is one of the most unique and active types of glia. (…) OPCs form synapses with neurons and change their own behavior (…)

Helping You Breathe – (…) When glia known as astrocytes detected a drop in blood pH, which would correspond to elevated levels of carbon dioxide, they increased (…) the breathing rate in live rats, eventually bringing more oxygen to the brain. Raising the pH, which would correlate with oxygenated blood, had the opposite effect. (…)

Making You Smart – By absorbing and releasing neurotransmitters, and thereby modifying the availability of these molecules, astrocytes change how frequently and forcefully neurons fire” read full story

How Does NASA Study Hurricanes?

posted by NASA by Max Gleber, from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

“(…) NASA uses an arsenal of instruments to learn more about how these storms progress as they form. These devices orbit Earth on a fleet of spacecraft, including Aqua, Terra, the Global Precipitation Measurement core observatory, NASA-NOAA’s Suomi NPP satellite,Calipso, Jason-2 and CloudSat.

“There are typically multiple instruments on every spacecraft with various purposes that often complement each other,” said Eric Moyer, the Earth science operations manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “We can see the progression of a storm from one day to the next using the Terra and Aqua satellites—a morning and afternoon view of every storm system, every day.”

(…) NASA’s RapidScat instrument that flies aboard the International Space Station measures surface winds over the ocean and is used to gather data on tropical cyclones. (…)

Passive microwave imagers aboard NASA’s Global Precipitation Measurement and NASA-NOAA’s Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership missions can peer through cloud canopies, allowing scientists to observe where the water is churning in the clouds.

(…) Computer modeling is another powerful NASA research tool.

NASA’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office, or GMAO works to improve the understanding of hurricanes and assess models and procedures for quality. (…)

NASA also conducts field missions to study hurricanes. (…)  The most recent NASA field mission to study hurricanes was the Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel or HS3. For three consecutive years, the HS3 mission investigated the processes that underlie hurricane formation and intensity change in the Atlantic Ocean basin. The mission used the Global Hawk, a high-altitude long-endurance aircraft capable of flights of 26 hours at altitudes above 55,000 ft. (…)

In 2016, NASA is launching the Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System, a constellation of eight small satellites.CYGNSS will probe the inner core of hurricanes in such detail to better understand their rapid intensification. One advantage of CYGNSS is that it can get frequent measurements within storms. (…)

For more on NASA’s hurricane observations and research, visit:

www.nasa.gov/hurricane”

See full original post

 

“3D Computer Interfaces Will Amaze—Like Going From DOS to Windows” by JODY MEDICH

Article featured in Singularity Hub:

“Today (…) computer interfaces (…) force us to work in 2D rectangles instead of our native 3D spaces. (…)

All this, however, is about to change in a big way. (…) We are constantly creating a spatial map of our surroundings. This innate process is called spatial cognition; the acquisition of which helps us to recall memories, reveal relationships, and to think. (…)  It allows us to offload a number of cognitively heavy tasks from our working memory in the following ways:

Spatial Semantics: We spatially arrange objects to make sense of information and its meaning. (…)

External Memory: (…) space compensates for our limited working memory.

Dimension: Dimension helps us to immediately understand information about an object. (…)

Embodied Cognition: Physically interacting with space through proprioception (…)

(…)The Problem With Modern Operating Systems (…)  is 2D computing is flat. (…)

Limits our ability to visually sort, remember and access
Provides a very narrow field of view on content and data relationships
Does not allow for data dimensionality
This means the user has to carry a lot of information in her working memory. (…)

The good news is that spatial memory is free, even in virtual spaces. (…) ” read full article

“Algorithms and Bias: Q. and A. With Cynthia Dwork” by Clair Cain Miller

Interview featured in the NY Times:

“Q: Some people have argued that algorithms eliminate discrimination because they make decisions based on data, free of human bias. Others say algorithms reflect and perpetuate human biases. What do you think?

A: Algorithms do not automatically eliminate bias. Suppose a university, with admission and rejection records dating back for decades and faced with growing numbers of applicants, decides to use a machine learning algorithm that, using the historical records, identifies candidates who are more likely to be admitted. Historical biases in the training data will be learned by the algorithm, and past discrimination will lead to future discrimination.

 

(…) Q: You have studied both privacy and algorithm design, and co-wrote a paper, “Fairness Through Awareness,” that came to some surprising conclusions about discriminatory algorithms and people’s privacy. Could you summarize those?

A: “Fairness Through Awareness” makes the observation that sometimes, in order to be fair, it is important to make use of sensitive information while carrying out the classification task. This may be a little counterintuitive: The instinct might be to hide information that could be the basis of discrimination.Continue reading→

“Did technology kill the book or give it new life?” By Padraig Belton and Matthew Wall

story from bbc.com

“The book is dead, long live the book.

(…) While there can be no denying that printed book sales have taken a massive hit with the rise of digital, there is some evidence that the rate of decline is slowing and that the excitement over e-readers is subsiding.

(…)  But a lot depends on the sector you’re looking at.

Adult fiction (…) has migrated strongly to the e-book, whereas cookery and religious books still do well in print, as do books with illustrations. (…)

There are plenty of services out there trying to bridge the gap between the physical and the digital, extending the definition of what a book is. (…)

The Little Girl Who Lost Her Name – a printed book that could be digitally individualised to include the name of the child reading it – went on to be the top-selling children’s picture book in Britain and Australia.

(…)“Digital technology and the rise in the digital reading culture has allowed authors and publishers many more new creative opportunities to develop ‘the book’ further and delight readers,” she says.

“It also allows authors to publish directly, to connect intimately with their readers and, crucially, to create new ways of telling their stories.”

(…) So the book isn’t dead; technology is simply helping it evolve beyond its physical confines.

Long live the book.” Read full story

Interspecies organ transplant

It is now long awaited that some day humans will be able to raise human spare parts in other species.  Pigs are among the favored donors – perhaps due to the similar diet habits.

As this story by Antonio Regalado reports, researchers are presenting impressive progress in swapping hearts and kidneys among pigs and baboons (that would be us).  Get me a new liver and a double dry martini to celebrate, please.

And then we know as well that (other) scientific experiments made mice smarter by inserting human brain cells in them.

Now we just have to be careful how to mix (shake, don’t stir) these practices.  Make the pig too smart and I bet it won’t give away a heart so easily.

Suspicion smells

Reading newspaper used to wrap fish may be useful to read news with less bias.  Your own bias.

“Something smells fishy: Olfactory suspicion cues improve performance on the Moses illusion and Wason rule discovery task” indicates that exposure to fish smells may bring people to have less memory illusion and reduced confirmation bias.

One of the researchers, Eunjung Kim, of above paper has also studied this topic in his previous “Fishy Smells Improve Critical Thinking: Explorations of the Embodiment of Suspicion” work.

 

And the whole earth was of one language… (Genesis 11:1)

Reserachers Richard Futrell, Kyle Mahowald, and Edward Gibson from the department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences of MIT published a “Large-scale evidence of dependency length minimization in 37 languages“.

Words grammatically related tend to be closer to each other in sentences.  Across all languages, in what can be a case of a linguistic universal.  Linguistic universals are predicted by theories such as Universal Grammar by Noam Chomsky and applied in many natural and formal languages.

Key novelty here is ‘Large-scale evidence’.  Since Noam Chomsky (among other linguists) language models and hierarchy studies apply theoretic universal properties.  More data and application of language parser made it possible to gather evidence of dependency length minimization.

Alphabet – Google’s holding co., birth certificate

Larry Page announced Google’s new operating structure, under a company called Alphabet:

“As Sergey and I wrote in the original founders letter 11 years ago, “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.” As part of that, we also said that you could expect us to make “smaller bets in areas that might seem very speculative or even strange when compared to our current businesses.” From the start, we’ve always strived to do more, and to do important and meaningful things with the resources we have.

 

(…) Our company is operating well today, but we think we can make it cleaner and more accountable. So we are creating a new company, called Alphabet. I am really excited to be running Alphabet as CEO with help from my capable partner, Sergey, as President… read full release“

Gendered Language in Teacher Reviews – interactive search

This interactive chart lets you explore the words used to describe male and female teachers in about 14 million reviews from RateMyProfessor.com.

You can enter any other word (or two-word phrase) into the box below to see how it is split across gender and discipline: the x-axis gives how many times your term is used per million words of text (normalized against gender and field). You can also limit to just negative or positive reviews (based on the numeric ratings on the site). For some more background, see here.

some interesteing results from ‘respected’, ‘intelligent’, ‘threatening’, ‘creative’, ‘passion’…

Superelastic Electronics

From Science Magazine Science 24 July 2015: Vol. 349 no. 6246 pp. 400-404

“Composite stretchable conducting wires

Think how useful a stretchable electronic “skin” could be. For example you could place it over an aircraft fuselage or a body to create a network of sensors, processors, energy stores, or artificial muscles. But it is difficult to make electronic interconnects and strain sensors that can stretch over such surfaces. Liu et al.created superelastic conducting fibers by depositing carbon nanotube sheets onto a prestretched rubber core (see the Perspective by Ghosh). The nanotubes buckled on relaxation of the core, but continued to coat it fully and could stretch enormously, with relatively little change in resistance.” read more

Sexist men are underperformers. Again. Again, scientifically proven.

Researchers Michael M. Kasumovic and Jeffrey H. Kuznekoff published “Insights into Sexism: Male Status and Performance Moderates Female-Directed Hostile and Amicable Behaviour“.

” Although social constructionist theory argues that sexism is a response towards women entering a male dominated arena, this perspective doesn’t explain why only a subset of males behave in this way. (…)

We hypothesised that female-initiated disruption of a male hierarchy incites hostile behaviour from poor performing males who stand to lose the most status. To test this hypothesis, we used an online first-person shooter video game that removes signals of dominance but provides information on gender, individual performance, and skill.

We show that lower-skilled players were more hostile towards a female-voiced teammate, especially when performing poorly. In contrast, lower-skilled players behaved submissively towards a male-voiced player in the identical scenario. This difference in gender-directed behaviour became more extreme with poorer focal-player performance.

We suggest that low-status males increase female-directed hostility to minimize the loss of status as a consequence of hierarchical reconfiguration resulting from the entrance of a woman into the competitive arena.

Higher-skilled players, in contrast, were more positive towards a female relative to a male teammate. As higher-skilled players have less to fear from hierarchical reorganization, we argue that these males behave more positively in an attempt to support and garner a female player’s attention.

Our results provide the clearest picture of inter-sexual competition to date, highlighting the importance of considering an evolutionary perspective when exploring the factors that affect male hostility towards women.”  check the full paper