Why people buy iPhones
[Via Scripting News]
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/FL7yD-0pqZg&hl=en_US]
BTW, I lined up to buy an iPhone 4 on the first day.
“I don’t care.”
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While NSFW, my son and I laughed as hard as is possible. It starts as one of the best ‘rake’ jokes and then just gets better.
Explaining Complex Concepts with Sophisticated Infographic Animations
[Via information aesthetics]
This week, at least 2 instructive movies appeared that use various forms of infographic animation to explain some complex phenomena, ranging from the intrinsics of baseball pitching over the various technicalities of drilling oil spill relief wells.Watch below how BP tries to inform the public about the technical details of its relief well drilling efforts, which also includes the exact video explanation BP uses internally for their own personnel currently present on their rigs. Except of the amount of jargon and the various abbreviations, the movie does make clear why this operation seems to take so long. For those interested, the static infographic can be downloaded at BP’s website.
Or watch the The New York Times infographic animation How Mariano Rivera Dominates Hitters [nytimes.com] and learn about the differences between a ‘fastball’, a ‘cutter’ and a ‘slider’. This movie also includes an impressive frame-freeze that highlights the potential ball trajectories at the exact moment the batter must makes the swing decisions. (via @blprnt)
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The baseball infographic is outstanding. The NYT is outstanding here, especially with its sports graphics (the World Cup realtime reports are fun to watch while watching the game.
Here, we take something baseball does really well – collect a lot of information – and put it into a visual form that many can instantly get. The demonstration of the different spins from different pitches is wonderful.
I’d love to see another one dealing with someone like Jamie Moyer, who has succeeded by having great control, ball placement and change of speed.
Huntington’s cases underestimated
[Via Health News from NHS Choices]
“There are far more people with Huntington’s disease in the UK than has been assumed,” said The Guardian. However, stigma and fear of insurance companies leads many to keep their condition a secret, it added.
The news is based on two articles about Huntington’s disease, a progressive, inherited disorder that affects the nervous system, for which there is presently no cure. The disease typically appears in middle age, affecting muscle co-ordination and leading to cognitive decline. One article discusses the negative medical and scientific attitudes towards Huntington’s, which, in the past, had supported the sterilisation of families who carry the gene. The other is a commentary that argues that the estimated prevalence of Huntington’s may be double the standard estimates of about six to seven in 100,000, but that stigmatisation and financial penalties in insurance policies may lead people to conceal the condition.
The articles are timed to coincide with the launch of an all-party parliamentary group to promote greater understanding and awareness of Huntington’s. While both are based to some extent on personal opinion, they highlight a serious issue for sufferers of the disease and their families and will perhaps lead to advances in both treatment and perceptions of this devastating illness.
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The way society deals with Huntington’s disease – a genetic disease for which there is as yet no cure – will give us a hint of what we might expect when each of us has our complete genomes sequenced.
We will have the technology quite soon to determine the genomes for individuals at a very low cost. each of us will then know all about all sorts of genetic problems we each have. Not all will be a devastating as Huntington’s but it is quite likely that many of us carry genes that can be called ‘harmful.’
The stigma still attached to a well-characterized disease may be repeated a multitude of times for almost all of us. I wonder how society will deal with that?
Analyzing iPhone 4 reception vs. signal attenuation
[Via Edible Apple]
Brian Klug & Anand Lal Shimpi of Anandtech have posted a thorough analysis of the the iPhone 4 antenna and how the device’s signal is affected when held in various positions. Setting up the testing environment, however, was a bit tricky since Apple removed the Field Test from the applications directory in the iPhone 4 filesystem.
Still, Klug and Shimi were able, after a bit of iPhone tomfoolery, to get a “numeric readout of signal strength on a non-jailbroken iPhone 4.” Here’s what they found.
To give you perspective, for a UMTS “3G” plant, -51 dBm is the best reported signal you can get – it’s quite literally standing next to, or under a block away from a tower. At the other extreme, -113 dBm is the worst possible signal you can have before disconnecting entirely. With a few exceptions, signal power as low as -107 dBm is actually perfectly fine for calls and data, and below that is where trouble usually starts. However, you can see just how little dynamic range iOS 4 has for reporting signal; over 40% of the range of possible signal levels (from -99 dBm to -51 dBm) is reported as 5 bars.
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One of the things they found was that, yes, there is greater attenuation of the signal holding the iPhone but the iPhone had higher sensitivity to begin with, so you could still make calls.
The writers at Anandtech had this to say:
From my day of testing, I’ve determined that the iPhone 4 performs much better than the 3GS in situations where signal is very low, at -113 dBm (1 bar). Previously, dropping this low all but guaranteed that calls would drop, fail to be placed, and data would no longer be transacted at all. I can honestly say that I’ve never held onto so many calls and data simultaneously on 1 bar at -113 dBm as I have with the iPhone 4, so it’s readily apparent that the new baseband hardware is much more sensitive compared to what was in the 3GS. The difference is that reception is massively better on the iPhone 4 in actual use.
Putting the antenna outside the phone provides greater reception of signal but also allows greater attenuation with the hand. So you gain a lot in signal strength and reception, some of which may be lost by the hand. On balance, people are reporting being able to receive and make calls in areas they were unable to before.
It seems that the main reason this was noticed had to do more with the way Apple decided to create its meter. It is actually not very informative since most of the signal strength will always be reported as 5 bars, even when you have had attenuation that corresponds to 4 orders of magnitude – dB is a log scale.
To go from 5 bars to 4, there is a loss of 10,000 in signal strength. But to go from 4 bars to 1 is a loss of only 5! In a weak area, you could go from 5 bars to 1 with only a loss 17 dB or about about a 50-fold reduction in signal strength.
In other words, at 5 bars, there can be a change in signal strength of up to 10,000 – about 40 dB – without seeing the bar change at all. But to go from 5 bars to 1, it could take a change in strength of 50 – about 17 dB.
Apple has set the meters such that people think they are in much better reception areas than they are used to. That is, the reception of signal can vary over a range of 10,000 without seeming to change the meter. But a simple loss of signal by 50-fold could take the meter from 5 bars to 1.
So, a lot of people in strong areas are reporting seeing no change in the meter, because a 20 dB attenuation by holding the phone will not appear to change the meter much when it takes up to 40 dB to change it from 5 bars to 4.
Simply adjusting the meter, so that the signal strengths for each bar are set up differently would make the perception quite different.
Any phone manufacturer could make the meter read as many bars as they want. Here, it appears that Apple may have decided that instead of giving each bar equal weight of about 15 dB, it overweighted the meter to make 5 bars cover 40 dB.
If it had weighted things evenly, then people would see a 3 bar dropping to 2 or 1 bars, not 5 bars dropping to 1. Not as much of a surprise.
Someone said the the meter readings are bogus on any phone because the manufacturer can make them read anything.
What is key, though, is that a phone can still make great calls even when highly attenuated if it starts with a higher signal reception.
‘How a Broker Spent $520 Million in a Drunken Stupor and Moved the Global Oil Price’
[Via Daring Fireball]
Rowena Mason, reporting for The Telegraph:
By 10am it emerged that Mr Perkins had single-handedly moved the global price of oil to an eight-month high during a “drunken blackout”. Prices leapt by more than $1.50 a barrel in under half an hour at around 2am – the kind of sharp swing caused by events of geo-political significance. Ten times the usual volume of futures contracts changed hands in just one hour.
Now that’s a bender. (Via Chris Espinosa.)
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These are the guys who are in charge of our financial system? Sure makes me think about putting some gold into a mattress.
Tom Wujec: 3 Ways the Brain Creates Meaning
[Via Creativity Central]
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This is a wonderful talk about how we process information to create meaning. The three key phrases for doing this right are: Visualize, Interactive and Persistent.
He explains why cartoonish graphics can be so powerful for re-enforcing and developing meaning. As I mentioned the other day, learning and remembering utilize a very complex set of pathways to help produce meaning or knowledge.
Now, I have wondered why working with the iPad is such a different process than with a desktop computer. It seems that it may have something to do with the meanings and metaphors we have in our brain.
The original Mac GUI first gave use a way to visualize, a way to interact and a persistent way to see the computer. It was a desktop visual, with papers and folders just as we were used to interacting with. We interacted with a keyboard and mouse, which, while a little different than normal, provided tremendous interaction. And we could come back to this world with little difficulty to examine all aspects.
The iPad GUI also has all three themes but its metaphor and meaning seems quite different. Instead of a desktop metaphor, it is something that completely changes depending on what we want to do. It is a book, it is a newspaper, it is sketchpad. We interact act with it directly, manipulating objects just as we have for millions of years. And persistence is not only still present but, when iOS 4 is available, will allow persistence between different apps to be greatly magnified.
The iPad is a totally different way of gaining meaning from the data we examine in this Information Age. We are just beginning to get an idea of just what it will allow us to do but I think a GUI that permits direct, manipulative interaction of visualized, persistent data will become the main way we interact with not only mobile devices but with a wide range of other information appliances.
Google remotely deletes 2 misleading Twilight Android apps – here’s why
[Via Edible Apple]
Remember the ridiculous outrage that ensued after Steve Jobs confirmed that there was a “kill switch” built into the iPhone which allows Apple to remotely delete malicious apps that somehow manage to sneak into the app store?
Well, Android has a similar feature and Google unfortunately had to employ it recently when they removed two misleading applications that were “built by a security research for research purposes.”
Google’s Android Blog explains:
These applications intentionally misrepresented their purpose in order to encourage user downloads, but they were not designed to be used maliciously, and did not have permission to access private data — or system resources beyond permission.INTERNET. As the applications were practically useless, most users uninstalled the applications shortly after downloading them.
After the researcher voluntarily removed these applications from Android Market, we decided, per the Android Market Terms of Service, to exercise our remote application removal feature on the remaining installed copies to complete the cleanup.
Sounds innocuous enough, and we can’t knock Google for remotely removing apps, but if the apps in question weren’t malicious, then why bother?
Well, Google’s description of events is pretty vague, so here are some details to fill in the holes courtesy of hackinthebox.
Security research Jon Oberheide uploaded an app promising never before seen pictures from the next Twilight movie. But hidden in the app was code that “phones hometo check for any new code that Oberheide [wanted] to add to the program, including any hidden control program or “rootkit” that he wished to install.”
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Both Apple and Google have kill switches built in to get rid of malicious software. However, in this case, it has been demonstrated that a ‘nice’ app could have some really nasty stuff hidden in it. Without any vetting of the apps, who is to know what is hidden in even the nicest apps.
The iTunes App store may provide much greater examination of programs, making it much harder to hid malicious code. The caveat is that since we really do not know for sure what vetting Apple does we can not be 100% certain either.
At least Apple has a greater vested interest in making sure it catches things before the kill switch is needed. And I would expect that after seeing this exploit on Android that people will be trying something similar on the iPhone.
by whatleydude
[Via Daring Fireball]
Nokia makes hay of iPhone 4 reception issue. (Via Matt Drance.)
Update: Instructions for how to hold the Nokia 2320. And, even better, here’s video showing a Nokia E71 with the exact same problem.
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Watch the video of the Nokia E71. It was posted May 26, long before the iPhone Hand of Death problems. The Nokia does exactly the same thing as the iPhone has been accused of.
So why so much negative hype against Apple rather than also against Nokia? It simply makes a better story with the iPhone because no one really cared about the Nokia back in May; the video has 622 views as of today. Raining on someone’s parade is a raison d’être for many.
Much better to tell a misleading story that feeds an incorrect narrative than actually report. That is how most media outlets do it.
[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]
by jordigraells
Microsoft and the Innovator’s Paradox
[Via HarvardBusiness.org]
“The Odds Are Increasing That Microsoft’s Business Will Collapse”
That’s a pretty good title if you (like Henry Blodget from Silicon Alley Insider, the writer of the article) are trying to grab eyeballs. It also provides a useful introduction to what I call the “Innovator’s Paradox.”
Blodget’s article was provocative. He argued that Microsoft is in a no-win situation. It isn’t sitting on any idea that is on the cusp of turning into a multi-billion dollar business. The personal computer is losing its dominance to mobile devices and tablets. The company’s core profit drivers (Windows and Office) are under disruptive assault from Google’s freely available applications and operating system. At best, Microsoft will respond with its own free products and erode its profit margin.
The most telling thing in Blodget’s post was a chart that showed the sources of Microsoft’s profits over the past few years. Microsoft’s core business has continued —despite continued proclamations of the company’s coming demise —to throw off cash and to grow. But new growth businesses that were specks in 2006 (entertainment and devices and online services) remain tiny, and Microsoft hasn’t created any material new businesses over the past few years.
So the real problem isn’t what Microsoft is doing today. It’s what Microsoft did, or didn’t do, five, or even 10 years ago. At the time, its base business was a bastion of strength. Today’s threats were in their infancies. It would have been the perfect time to plant seeds that today would be blooming profit generators.
Why didn’t it? It’s The Innovator’s Paradox: When you don’t need the growth, you act in ways that lead to you not getting the growth you will need. And when you do need the growth, you can’t act in ways that deliver it.
Got that?
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The problem here, as stated so well in the Innovator’s Dilemma is that even companies that recognize they need to change, that they need to come up with the next big product, are too often totally unable to do so. There are lots of reasons for this but one of the major ones stems from the difference between the truths of exploitation (marketing) and formulation (research).
As was explained to me many years ago, research costs money directly from the bottom line. But marketing makes money, that for every dollar spent on marketing the company makes $4. So it is simply idiotic to spend money on research.
That is the difficulty during the exploitation stage – it is too easy for those who are doing the exploiting to really support the work of those doing the formulation. It takes tremendous personal effort by engaged management to keep the company on the course of innovation.
How do you know where the puck is going? One way that I have personally seen work quite well involves continuous vetting of the ideas from all points of view. The project is examined and critiqued, always in a way to make it better.
And this requires a very special sort of corporate culture – one that abides failure and one that does not abide zero-sum solutions. Let me expand the latter.
What often happens in many mature companies that have low resources for new growth is that the only way I can get my project funded to to make sure that your project is not funded. The only way for me to succeed is for you to fail. Once this happens, innovation is really strangled.
Any innovation that arises will either be destroyed by those with more power or co-opted, removing it from the very people who were innovative. This is one reason why many mature companies only innovate by buying another company’s innovation.
Breaking the Paradox requires not permitting this rot to take root. But simply putting resources into innovation is not enough.
There are two companies today that continue to demonstrate an ability to overcome the Innovator’s Dilemma/Paradox – Apple and Google.. A key point is that management there follows Wayne Gretzky’s maxim: I skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.But each take very different routes to the puck.
Google allows its workers to spend up to 20% of their time working on innovative ideas. This is a really effective way to allow innovative people to create wonderful things.
Google does its vetting in public. Google often thrust these innovations out into the wild as a public beta, giving us lots of possibilities but asking the public to do the vetting required to determine whether the innovations were really useful. This we have had lots of Google novelties – Wave, Knol,Chrome, Android, etc – that are somewhat hit or miss. It is almost as if Google skates everywhere, waiting for the odds to allow success. Even when one succeeds in being where the puck is, it is often not strong enough to be ready to score. Some more tinkering will be necessary. But at least now they know where to focus some effort. With some further help, the innovation can become a success.
It can do this because it really has to spend little time making sure each item is great. It follows the DIKW model, working through rapid iterations to reach the correct choice. This allows it to throw out a lot of innovations but even the best ones are often just good enough. It can take many more iterations to move towards perfection where more focussed vetting may be necessary while, especially as the products move into the exploitation phase, there is less incentive to.
I’ve written a lot about innovation at Apple. Apple supports innovation but takes a different route to a released product. Apple keeps its vetting much more private. They put a lot of focus on releasing products that are already successful, rather than simply iterating itself there. When the public learns of a new innovation, it is almost totally fully realized. Apple has continually driven innovative approaches through several different products – iMac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc. – any one of which most companies would be happy to maintain.
Apple most likely has a range of possible innovations in the stream – we hear rumors of all sorts of things. But, whereas Google places its innovation in the public eye for us to vet, Apple does this in private. It harshly examines them, rapidly arriving at only one place to meet the puck, but what is there is incredibly strong and is able to drive to success almost by itself.
Apple has a focus on its innovations that permits it to attain success repeatedly. Google may have less focus on specific innovations, but its iterative cycle can be so rapid that it can reach success also.
Each approach has real benefits. By focussing so strongly on where it believes the puck is going, Apple has actually been able to create products that were actually inconceivable for the public before release. But by putting many eggs in one basket as it were (yes I know too many metaphors) it runs the risk of mistaking where the puck will be.
Google does not really need to be sure of where the puck will go. It can simply put so many innovations out there, that one of them is bound to hit. However, its lack of focus can often mean that really disruptive innovations may not get the push they need – they get lost in the crowd.
Both Apple and Google are exemplars of their particular niche when it comes to sustaining innovations. The ways they figure out where the puck will be are different but the basic recognition that anticipating the puck is paramount for their company is the same.
So, companies that want to break the innovator’s paradox need to figure out if they should follow the Apple model or the Google one.
[As an aside, it is obvious that Pixar follows a similar model as Apple and has, not too surprisingly, become the most successful studio in Hollywood.]
[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]
The Long of Coming Up Short
[Via HarvardBusiness.org]
I didn’t take Calculus in high school, and I almost didn’t take Advanced Placement (AP) American History for fear that I wouldn’t get an A. In retrospect, given that I’ve pursued a career in finance, achieving a B in Calculus rather than knowing little to nothing on the topic would have been a decent trade. Yet I was so concerned about getting anything less than an A, which for me was tantamount to an F, that I wouldn’t take the risk.
Fear of failure can be a debilitating trait personally and professionally. According to Dr. Megan Gunnar of the University of Minnesota, an expert on stress and coping in children (as quoted in Mind in the Making, by Ellen Galinsky), we must learn to fail so that we can learn to succeed. She explains, “if you never allow your children to exceed what they can do, how are they going to learn to manage adult life — where a lot of it is managing more than you thought you could manage?” The same is true in the workplace: If we never have the opportunity to exceed what we can do, or think we can do, how will we manage?
When we are doing the work we really want to do, and hoping to triumph professionally, we will likely experience failures, and experience them repeatedly. And we’ll be in good company. According to Columbia University professor Amar V. Bhide, for 90% of all successful new businesses, the strategy the founders initially pursued didn’t lead to the business’s success. Meanwhile, Dr. Fritz Grupe, founder of MyMajors.com, has found that 80% of college-bound students have yet to choose a major, and “50% of those who do declare a major, change majors — with many doing so two and three times during their college years.” That’s a lot of intermediate failures, or at the very least detours, before arriving at success.
One way we practice learning to fail is by institutionalizing opportunities to take on challenges. Singapore has, in part, become one of the world’s leaders in math education because a lesson isn’t complete if the students haven’t been given something they don’t know how to do. In the words of George Polya, a Hungarian mathematician and educator, we need to build processes into our work to find “a way out of difficulty, a way around an obstacle, attaining an aim which is not immediately attainable.”
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An important aspect of a resilient organization is the ability to deal with failure. In a complex world with a multitude of difficult problems, success is not always immediately possible. It can take several iterative steps through failure to find the right solution, to gain wisdom.
I’ve written about the DIKW model of Innovation. Data is manipulated by humans to become different forms of information. The interconversion of information produces knowledge, which results in the ability to make a decision. Often this decision may be to recognize that previous attempts were wrong – a failure – and need to be modified, resulting in another iteration of the DIK cycle.
In a resilient company, each iteration drives the organization towards wisdom – the ability to make the correct decision.
Often, a good strategy is to find out the things that do not work – that are successful failures. An example I use in game play is called Bulls and Creots. Trying to guess a four digit number, with correct numbers in the right place called Bulls and correct numbers in the wrong place called Creots.
There are about 4500 possible numbers assuming no repeats and no zero in the first position. It helps to have a system to work through the possibilities in the best possible fashion. However, the most informative answer is to be completely wrong.
Guessing 4 numbers that are not in the answer removes 40% of the possibilities. One failure greatly limits the future possibilities, making it much easier to narrow down on the correct solutions.
I worked at a biotechnology company called Immunex for 16 years. It was a very well-run, innovative company that did a pretty good job accepting failure if well done. It was one of those 90% of businesses that found success at something different from the initial idea.
Too many companies believe that if they only promote those who are always successful, then they will always win. They fail to recognize that sometimes success can be debilitating and that sometimes failure is liberating.
In a complex world, sometimes the path to wisdom requires failure.
James “Jesus Glasses” Corbett: Update 25 Jun ‘10
[Via The Sensuous Curmudgeon]
THIS is about Dr. James Corbett, a teacher at Capistrano Valley High School in Mission Viejo, California, whose classroom remarks that creationism is “superstitious nonsense” were ruled to have violated the Constitution’s establishment clause. He was sued by Chad Farnan, one of his students — presumably a creationist.
We don’t follow too many other blogs, but we seem to be the only one that’s paying much attention to this case. We don’t know why, because the wrong outcome will have a deleterious effect on science education and the freedom of teachers everywhere. Bear with us, you’ll understand.
Chad had also sued the school board — which was found not liable by the trial court. Both Corbett and Chad are appealing to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. Corbett wants to be found not liable, and Chad wants the court to impose even more liability.
Our last post on this topic was six months ago: James “Jesus Glasses” Corbett: Update 15 Dec ‘09. Appeals can take a long time, so there’s been nothing to report since then. Today, however, we do have some news:
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This is what makes America so special – I don’t think there is another place on Earth where a student could successfully sue a teacher for calling creationism “religious, superstitious nonsense.”
Where is this false? It is religious. It is superstitious – a notion maintained despite evidence to the contrary. And it is nonsense – words or language having no meaning or conveying no intelligible ideas.
A student can sue, and win, because his feelings were hurt by a teacher’s expression of the truth. Ain’t America great!
I would add that I find it ridiculous. [You can read an earlier post by the Curmudgeon that demonstrates some of the ridiculousness of creationism]
Is a biology teacher supposed to allow a Young Earth Creationist to ignore the facts? If your religion is disparaged by facts, perhaps you should find another religion.
by jurvetson
Feelings of Knowing
[Via The Frontal Cortex]
Clive Thompson has a wonderful article in the NY Times Magazine on Watson, the supercomputer programmed to excel at Jeopardy. Thompson delves into the clever heuristics used to generate singular answers to ambiguous questions. (Watson relies on massive amounts of parallel processing, so that “he” is running thousands of Google searches simultaneously.) While Watson’s performance is certainly impressive, I thought the most interesting part of the story involved the failings of the machine. It’s easy to rhapsodize about the ever escalating speed of microchips, but it turns out that Watson is often too slow at ringing the buzzer:
In more than 20 games I witnessed between Watson and former “Jeopardy!” players, humans frequently beat Watson to the buzzer. Their advantage lay in the way the game is set up. On “Jeopardy!” when a new clue is given, it pops up on screen visible to all. (Watson gets the text electronically at the same moment.) But contestants are not allowed to hit the buzzer until the host is finished reading the question aloud; on average, it takes the host about six or seven seconds to read the clue.
Players use this precious interval to figure out whether or not they have enough confidence in their answers to hazard hitting the buzzer. After all, buzzing carries a risk: someone who wins the buzz on a $1,000 question but answers it incorrectly loses $1,000.
Often those six or seven seconds weren’t enough time for Watson. The humans reacted more quickly. For example, in one game an $800 clue was “In Poland, pick up some kalafjor if you crave this broccoli relative.” A human contestant jumped on the buzzer as soon as he could. Watson, meanwhile, was still processing. Its top five answers hadn’t appeared on the screen yet. When these finally came up, I could see why it took so long. Something about the question had confused the computer, and its answers came with mere slivers of confidence. The top two were “vegetable” and “cabbage”; the correct answer — “cauliflower” — was the third guess.
To avoid losing money — Watson doesn’t care about the money, obviously; winnings are simply a way for I.B.M. to see how fast and accurately its system is performing — Ferrucci’s team has programmed Watson generally not to buzz until it arrives at an answer with a high confidence level. In this regard, Watson is actually at a disadvantage, because the best “Jeopardy!” players regularly hit the buzzer as soon as it’s possible to do so, even if it’s before they’ve figured out the clue. “Jeopardy!” rules give them five seconds to answer after winning the buzz. So long as they have a good feeling in their gut, they’ll pounce on the buzzer, trusting that in those few extra seconds the answer will pop into their heads. Ferrucci told me that the best human contestants he had brought in to play against Watson were amazingly fast. “They can buzz in 10 milliseconds,” he said, sounding astonished. “Zero milliseconds!”
This anecdote highlights one of the most impressive talents of the human mind. We don’t just know things – we know we know them, which leads to feelings of knowing. I’ve written about this before, but one of my favorite examples of such feelings is when a word is on the tip of the tongue. Perhaps it occurs when you run into an old acquaintance whose name you can’t remember, although you know that it begins with the letter “J.” Or perhaps you struggle to recall the title of a recent movie, even though you can describe the plot in perfect detail.
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As this exercise shows, our memory is more than simply a database of facts. We also catalogue that we have the information somewhere. In some sort of ‘meta’ fashion, our brain remembers that we learned a fact, even if it can not remember the fact itself.
This kind of makes sense since in the wild, you do not necessarily have the seconds needed to retrieve complete memories and facts. Simply having a gut feeling that there is a useful climbing tree nearby may be enough to start running and may provide valuable milliseconds to keep one alive.
But it is fascinating to think that for many memories that not only is the data stored somewhere but also there is also another location that remembers that we have that memory. I imagine that is why mnemonics that can be so helpful. They help us actualize the meta-memory, allowing us to recover it faster. Perhaps some of them are useful, not because they produce the memory as much as make it easier to access the meta-memory trail.
This may take IBM quite some time to deal with because it essentially requires a lot of pre-work done on every memory, something that may be difficult for computers.
So, while the computer may be able to be the average person, it has a hard time with real Jeopardy champions, most likely because they have very well-developed meta-memory.
by DVIDSHUB
[Via Climate Progress]
“In the end, we have a project that is incredibly expensive. There has been little scientific review. It is questionable if the proposed berm will prevent oil from entering the wetlands it is designed to protect. The structure will be very short-lived. And there are many potential negative impacts of this structure on the coastal environment that have not been evaluated. Coastal dredging and filling can cause significant damage to marine organisms and local ecosystems as massive amounts of sand are dug up in one location and then deposited on the sea floor in another spot. In addition, building a 45-mile sand berm could alter tidal currents and lead to the erosion of natural barrier islands that protect the Louisiana coast from hurricanes.”
The magnitude of the BP oil disaster guarantees devastation to the Louisiana shore no matter how effective the response — see 20-year veteran of the Coast Guard: “With a spill of this magnitude and complexity, there is no such thing as an effective response.” And that means cynical politicians are in a perfect position to demagogue dubious solutions, since if they are ignored, they can merely point to the environmental devastation and say, “if only you had listened to those of us who know this area best.”
So we have Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and the berms — low-lying barrier islands that are made of dredged sand (click on figure above to enlarge). A great many articles have been written explaining why this approach is somewhere between an unproductive use of scarce resources and a counterproductive effort that will do more harm than good. I’ll excerpt some at length, including an excellent Yale e360 piece [quoted above] by a top coastal geologist.
Jindal himself would be more credible as a supporter of a science-based approach to protecting Louisiana, if he hadn’t launched an effort to block climate change regulations that are aimed at averting catastrophic climate change, which will submerge and destroy the very part of his state he is supposedly trying to save now. And Jindal has mocked federal efforts to do science-based monitoring of other disasters (see “Eruptions of know-nothingism from conservative savior Bobby Jindal“).
I have scientists emailing me what a bad idea this is. I welcome any expert comments or links from people who actually think this is a good idea.
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While the science indicates berms would be useless and knowing that even one small storm would render them ineffective and knowing that they could have as devastating effects on wildlife as not doing anything and knowing that they might affect the barrier marshes and knowing that the berms would take 9 months to build and knowing that even the berms that have been built violated the very rules that were agreed upon and knowing that the cost is upwards of $500 million, should we really still listen to anyone who is using this to bash political opponents?
Dr. Robert Young, a professor of coastal geology, stated it best:
In the end, we have a project that is incredibly expensive. There has been little scientific review. It is questionable if the proposed berm will prevent oil from entering the wetlands it is designed to protect. The structure will be very short-lived. And there are many potential negative impacts of this structure on the coastal environment that have not been evaluated. Coastal dredging and filling can cause significant damage to marine organisms and local ecosystems as massive amounts of sand are dug up in one location and then deposited on the sea floor in another spot. In addition, building a 45-mile sand berm could alter tidal currents and lead to the erosion of natural barrier islands that protect the Louisiana coast from hurricanes.
Are there better ways to spend $500 million than on a make-work program that will create something that most likely disappears quite rapidly? How about training oil workers who might be displaced by the coming problems of peak oil? Or finding ways to provide better economic realities for the people of LA?
I would certainly hope so.
Visualizing All Teams that Played the World Cup Football Finals
[Via information aesthetics]
In how many ways can humankind visualize a World Cup? Visualizing the World Cup [robertivan.com] presents an interactive view of the teams that played in the World Cup finals since FIFA began the soccer tournament in 1930. Based only on CSS and Javascript code, this visualization forms an almost identical, repurposed copy of the Visualizing the Stanley Cup, which does the exact same but then for illustrating the Stanley Cup.More technical information about how these graphs have been made can be found here.
[More]
Looks great in Safari. It is a very nice example of what can be done without using Flash and it is pretty useful to see the teams lined up.
How about one for the World Series or the Super Bowl?
Touch the research you need – new PLoS iPad App
[Via everyONE]
In just over 2 months since the iPad launch, PLoS has released a dedicated iPad app, that covers all the PLoS Journals, available free from the App Store.
We are one of the first academic journal publishers to do this with thanks to the talented developer Tom Brow, who has made mobile browsing of our journals easier than ever (watch this 1.5 minute video demo which was filmed by Bruce Wismer and edited by Matt Agnello, the Hungry Filmaker).
The PLoS Journals iPad application lets you:
- Browse and share from anywhere over 3G or Wifi
- Keep an archive of articles for offline reading
- Turn pages with a satisfying flick and scroll between them
- Magnify pages should you wish
PLoS is committed to continue pushing the boundaries of scientific communication. We’re delighted that both this and our first iPhone app (from PLoS Medicine) were created for us pro bono by the developers – something that would not be possible without our Open Access Licence from Creative Commons, which provides a rich source of content for experimentation and creative reuse.
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This is a very nice first attempt particularly for an app that was done pro bono. The pages actually turn and, because everything is open, you can read any articles without having to go through a pay wall.
I wish more science publishers had apps this useful, at least for reading. Nature has an app but not optimized for the iPad. I find it very painful to read. I really wish Highwire Press would go this route. They are the largest publisher of Open Access articles. Having an easy to use app like the one from PLoS would be awesome.
SpreadingScience
Sustainable Path Foundation Idea Club
