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Luís F. Simões

Why Randomly-Selected Politicians Would Improve Democracy - Technology Review - 4 views

  • If Pluchino sounds familiar, it's because we've talked about him and his pals before in relation to the Peter Principle that incompetence always spreads through big organisations. Back in 2009, he and his buddies created a model that showed how promoting people at random always improves the efficiency of the organisation. These guys went on to win a well-deserved IgNobel prize for this work.
  • Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1103.1224: Accidental Politicians: How Randomly Selected Legislators Can Improve Parliament Efficiency
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    I think I start to understand why Italian politics does so horribly bad...
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    ... because they don't follow this rule!
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    According to the authors we have four types of people in the parlement: 1) intelligent people whose actions produce a gain for both themselves and for other people. 2) helpless/naive people in the top left quadrant whose actions produce a loss for themselves but a gain for others; 3) bandits whose actions produce a gain for themselves but a loss for other people. 4) stupid people in the bottom left quadrant produce a loss for themselves and also for other people. According to the above definition it is clear that their model does not apply to the italian parlament where we only have stupid people and bandits.
Joris _

Tracking Whale Sharks With Astronomical Algorithms | Wired Science | Wired.com - 3 views

  • equations were developed for astronomers using the Hubble telescope, Holmberg’s crew adapted them for biologists studying Earth’s biggest fishes
  • Holmberg also hopes that other programmers will follow his lead and lend their coding skills to worthy projects. “Pick the species or concern you’re most passionate about, pick the researchers who are working on it, and identify their technical needs,” he said. “I’m not even a great programmer. I’m underqualified but highly productive
LeopoldS

China used prisoners in lucrative internet gaming work | World news | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

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    forced to play WOW ...
Luís F. Simões

The 'Facebook Class' Built Apps, and Fortunes - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • Working in teams of three, the 75 students created apps that collectively had 16 million users in just 10 weeks. Many of those apps were sort of silly: Mr. De Lombaert’s, for example, allowed users to send “hotness” points to Facebook friends. Yet during the term, the apps, free for users, generated roughly $1 million in advertising revenue.
Joris _

DARPA Solicits Ideas For Its Hundred-Year Starship Project | Popular Science - 4 views

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    I just can't see how their way of finding non-state funding for a 100 year project could work but would be happy to be surprised positively ...
Christos Ampatzis

FP7 Space Call 5 launched! - 6 views

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    link broken ...
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    thanks - works now
jmlloren

DRACO: a technique to cure a broad range of viruses - 2 views

shared by jmlloren on 05 Aug 11 - No Cached
LeopoldS liked it
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    DRACO selectively induces apoptosis, or cell suicide, in cells containing any viral dsRNA, rapidly killing infected cells without harming uninfected cells. As a result, DRACO should be effective against virtually all viruses,
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    Holy grail of medicine... if this indeed works and is safe (which I actually doubt), someone's going to make a nice fortune. BTW the toupee of the guy on the photo says it all :)
Luís F. Simões

USSR Wins Space Race As U.S. Shuts Down Shuttle Program | The Onion - America's Finest ... - 4 views

  • The termination of NASA's space shuttle program marks the end of a nearly 54-year rivalry between the USSR and the United States to achieve superiority in space exploration.
  • Sources confirmed that in commemoration of the capitalist defeat, extra bread and corn rations had been approved in all major cities, and factory workers were given time off their nine-hour work shifts to join in the festivities.
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    we can't access it from within the firewall I fear ...
Christos Ampatzis

Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist - 4 views

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    Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the western world? Whose monopolistic practices make Walmart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch a socialist? You won't guess the answer in a month of Sundays. While there are plenty of candidates, my vote goes not to the banks, the oil companies or the health insurers, but - wait for it - to academic publishers.
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    fully agree ... "But an analysis by Deutsche Bank reaches different conclusions. "We believe the publisher adds relatively little value to the publishing process … if the process really were as complex, costly and value-added as the publishers protest that it is, 40% margins wouldn't be available." Far from assisting the dissemination of research, the big publishers impede it, as their long turnaround times can delay the release of findings by a year or more." very nice also: "Government bodies, with a few exceptions, have failed to confront them. The National Institutes of Health in the US oblige anyone taking their grants to put their papers in an open-access archive. But Research Councils UK, whose statement on public access is a masterpiece of meaningless waffle, relies on "the assumption that publishers will maintain the spirit of their current policies". You bet they will. In the short term, governments should refer the academic publishers to their competition watchdogs, and insist that all papers arising from publicly funded research are placed in a free public database. In the longer term, they should work with researchers to cut out the middleman altogether, creating - along the lines proposed by Björn Brembs of Berlin's Freie Universität - a single global archive of academic literature and data. Peer-review would be overseen by an independent body. It could be funded by the library budgets which are currently being diverted into the hands of privateers. The knowledge monopoly is as unwarranted and anachronistic as the corn laws. Let's throw off these parasitic overlords and liberate the research that belongs to us."
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    It is a really great article and the first time I read something in this direction. FULLY AGREE as well. Problem is I have not much encouraging to report from the Brussels region...
Juxi Leitner

Technology Review: Startup That Builds Biological Parts - 0 views

  • "Think of it as rapid prototyping in biology--we make the part, test it, and then expand on it," says Reshma Shetty, one of the company's cofounders. "You can spend more time thinking about the design, rather than doing the grunt work of making DNA." A very simple project, such as assembling two pieces of DNA, might cost $100, with prices increasing from there.
nikolas smyrlakis

Google Flu Trends | How does this work? - 1 views

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    Learn about how Google Flu Trends uses aggregated search query data to accurately estimate current flu activity in several countries. - Lead to a Nature paper as well
Nina Nadine Ridder

Essay - The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate - NYTimes.com - 4 views

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    cannot access to this one...
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    Sorry, works for me though... Dunno what s wrong!
Juxi Leitner

Cockroach-Inspired Robot Survives 8-Story Fall, Will Outlive Us All - Dash - Gizmodo - 3 views

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    wow ... nice project ... and very simple indeed!
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    sweet! That's a convincing biomimetic study :) Especially when it falls and survives...
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    nice and good work, as usual from this lab. however, biomimetic is only the name, as usual from this lab.
Joris _

DailyTech - NASA Releases iPhone App - 2 views

  • The U.S. space agency has worked more diligently the past few years to better interact with the public.
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    what about ESA?
  • ...3 more comments...
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    have already sent it as a suggestion to our com department ... btw: installed the app and its really well done!!
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    God no, why give more taxpayers' money to the shittiest, greediest and most closed company out there??
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    why "more" ... do they get any taxpayers money? answer to your question: because its the most efficient (and coolest) platform to convey your message to a larger audience with relatively little effort ... btw: just ordered a time capsule for home :-)
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    I said "more" because we already gave them money in the form of Sophia and Atlas :) If we want to be consistent in promoting "open" efforts (open innovation, open source, open governance, etc.) we should avoid Apple like the plague. They are far far worse than Microsoft in terms of closedness, secrecy, shady market practices and vendor lock-in. Just google a bit and you will find lots of example of their behaviour.
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    cant' really argue about the Apple practices, although I ve read some things. I think the NASA app is more like a news feed and nothing more. But that online crowdsourcing game we had in mind, now that would be cool in a mobile version - new mobiles also have accelerometers nowadays
pacome delva

Galaxy Zoo 2 : The Story So Far - 3 views

  • The original Galaxy Zoo was launched in July 2007, with a data set made up of a million galaxies imaged with the robotic telescope of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. With so many galaxies, the team thought that it might take at least two years for visitors to the site to work through them all. Within 24 hours of launch, the site was receiving 70,000 classifications an hour, and more than 50 million classifications were received by the project during its first year, from almost 150,000 people.
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    this is what I call a nice example of crowdsourcing or citizen scientists .... (remember my idea in the ideastorm ?? :-)
Friederike Sontag

Aerosols make methane more potent - 1 views

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    "climate policy-makers need to pay much more attention to restricting short-lived pollutants, such as methane, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and aerosols. This could create significant changes in the local and global climate quite quickly, whereas the effects of efforts to reduce emissions of long-lived carbon dioxide will not be seen for many years."
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    interesting indeed ... but coming at the right time before copenhagn?
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    These conclusions come too late to have a real impact on decisions that will be taken in Copenhagen, I assume. But I think it is a hot topic as climate change 'solutions' that work QUICKLY are more and more needed!!
Francesco Biscani

DIRECT - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • DIRECT is a proposed alternative Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicle architecture supporting NASA's Vision for Space Exploration, which would replace the space agency's planned Ares I and Ares V rockets with a family of launch vehicles named "Jupiter."
  • DIRECT is advocated by a group of space enthusiasts that asserts it represents a broader team of dozens of NASA and space industry engineers who actively work on the proposal on an anonymous, volunteer basis in their spare time.
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    Just read about this, it looks like an interesting example of bottom-up innovation and self-organization.
Joris _

Global warming: Our best guess is likely wrong - 0 views

  • theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record
  • There appears to be something fundamentally wrong
  • something other than carbon dioxide caused much of the heating during the PETM
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    I find the title of the article misleading at best, but probably plainly wrong since they seem to talk about conditions way back and I am not sure how well our current models have been designed to work in these very different conditions? - but should probably be rather another good reason to put more effort into improving the models!
LeopoldS

News - General: Winston the pigeon wings it - 0 views

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    I always new it - the future of telecom is with pigeons ... (what happened to our idea of the pigeon inspired navigator??)
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    Well, it's been newn... I mean known since computer networks were invented that it'll take them a long time to match with a throughput of a train carrying recorded media. The point is that throughput is not the only important parameter: the other is response time... (BTW let's see how this commenting feature works, not many folks seem to use it...)
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    I do use it quite regularily .... a train full of DVDs and flash drives, yes ok - but a pigeon!!!!
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