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Climate change and warfare: Cool heads or heated conflicts? | The Economist - 0 views

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    Too warm to fight? History shows that conflicts were happening in colder periods
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Super Physics Smackdown: Relativity v Quantum Mechanics...In Space - Technology Review - 2 views

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    The only way to study the conflict between relativity and quantum mechanics is to test them over enormous distances in space. And physicists are already making plans
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Common ecology quantifies human insurgency : Article : Nature - 0 views

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    nice paper: like especially: To our knowledge, our model provides the first unified explanation of high-frequency, intra-conflict data across human insurgencies. Other explanations of human insurgency are possible, though any competing theory would also need to replicate the results of Figs 1, 2, 3. Our model's specific mechanisms challenge traditional ideas of insurgency based on rigid hierarchies and networks, whereas its striking similarity to multi-agent financial market models24, 25, 26 hints at a possible link between collective human dynamics in violent and non-violent settings1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19. Top of page
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    There was also this paper ... Power Law Explains Insurgent Violence (http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/1216/1?rss=1)
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Sean Gourley on the mathematics of war | Video on TED.com - 0 views

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    By pulling raw data from the news and plotting it onto a graph, Sean Gourley and his team have come up with a stunning conclusion about the nature of modern war -- and perhaps a model for resolving conflicts. - really interesting
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Kilogram conflict resolved at last - 3 views

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    Apparently it's time for retirement of the Le Grand K, if all goes well until the middle of next year...
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    "One method (...) involves counting the atoms in two silicon-28 spheres that each weigh the same as the reference kilogram." Sounds like a lengthy task, but someone must keep those physics PhD students busy, I guess...
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Error Undoes Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Results - 3 views

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    :-)
  • ...1 more comment...
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    And this guy is 200 bucks ahead http://xkcd.com/955/
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    Well, it's not yet confirmed... That error would be worse than the magnetic moment of the muon about 10 years ago. There, it was "at least" a conflict of conventions used in the computer codes!
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    In a statement based on an earlier press release from the OPERA collaboration, CERN said two possible "effects" may have influenced the anomalous measurements. One of them, due to a possible faulty connection between the fiber-optic cable bringing the GPS signals to OPERA and the detector's master clock, would have caused the experiment to underestimate the neutrinos' flight time, as described in the original story. The other effect concerns an oscillator, part of OPERA's particle detector that gives its readings time stamps synchronized to GPS signals. Researchers think correcting for an error in this device would actually increase the anomaly in neutrino velocity, making the particles even speedier than the earlier measurements seemed to show. CERN's statement says OPERA scientists are studying the "potential extent of these two effects" but doesn't indicate which source of error (if either) is likely to outweigh the other. However, Lucia Votano, director of the Gran Sasso laboratory, says the "main suspicion" focuses on the optical-fiber connection. She adds that OPERA researchers deserve credit for "having tenaciously followed this particular evidence via checks completed in the last few days." The two effects will get a new round of tests in May, when the two labs are scheduled to make velocity measurements with short-pulsed beams designed to give readings much more precise than scientists have achieved so far.
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Stephen Hawking: 'There are no black holes' : Nature News & Comment - 1 views

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    Event Horizon - a modern myth?
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    GR is valid on large scales and is, therefore, a simplification of the unknown GUT. As such, the mathematical solutions obtained in GR are strictly speaking valid only within GR. Certainly, the solution called black hole is an extremely heavy object and at the same time extremely small - a point without geometrical extension. The latter is heavily in conflict with the validity range of the underlying theory and, hence, makes lots of people (including experts unlike me) question the concept of black holes despite the fact that something has been "observed" which fits into this concept. Regarding the movie: Event Horizon might be a myth but it emphasizes what Sante said in on of his presentations: Don't use a black hole for travelling, take the worm hole instead. The constructor of Event Horizon created a black hole not considering that the damn thing has no exit...where did he think the Event Horizon would end?
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Power Law Explains Insurgent Violence - 1 views

  • To try to explain the mechanism behind these patterns, the team borrowed a simple computer model from economics. The model treated all insurgencies like a marketplace--groups of people constantly deciding whether to act. Rather than coordinating, the groups simply watch the news. The size of the carnage reported at any given time determines the probability that a group of a given size will strike next. Like clockwork, the attacks over the course of the conflict--from the smallest to the most deadly--have the same distribution.
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Being human: Conflict: Altruism's midwife : Article : Nature - 0 views

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    Might be an interesting source of inspiration for research on evolution, cooperation etc.
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[1107.0392] Emergence of good conduct, scaling and Zipf laws in human behavioral sequen... - 3 views

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    ... proof that humanity is good?
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    "The dataset contains practically all actions of all players of the MMOG Pardus since the game went online in 2004 [18]. Pardus is an open-ended online game with a world- wide player base of currently more than 370,000 people. Play- ers live in a virtual, futuristic universe in which they interact with others in a multitude of ways to achieve their self-posed goals [22]. Most players engage in various economic activities typically with the (self-posed) goal to accumulate wealth and status. Social and economical decisions of players are often strongly influenced and driven by social factors such as friend- ship, cooperation, and conflict." quite impressive ...
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A Radically Conservative Solution for Cosmology's Biggest Mystery - 2 views

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    Two ways of measuring the universe's expansion rate yield two conflicting answers. Many point to the possibility of new physics at work, but a new analysis argues that unseen errors could be to blame. See also this work based on GAIA data that, on the other hand, reinforces the discrepancy: Milky Way Cepheid Standards for Measuring Cosmic Distances and Application to Gaia DR2: Implications for the Hubble Constant https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.10655
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The Whorfian Time Warp: Representing Duration Through the Language Hourglass. - 0 views

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    How do humans construct their mental representations of the passage of time? The universalist account claims that abstract concepts like time are universal across humans. In contrast, the linguistic relativity hypothesis holds that speakers of different languages represent duration differently. The precise impact of language on duration representation is, however, unknown. Here, we show that language can have a powerful role in transforming humans' psychophysical experience of time. Contrary to the universalist account, we found language-specific interference in a duration reproduction task, where stimulus duration conflicted with its physical growth. When reproducing duration, Swedish speakers were misled by stimulus length, and Spanish speakers were misled by stimulus size/quantity. These patterns conform to preferred expressions of duration magnitude in these languages (Swedish: long/short time; Spanish: much/small time). Critically, Spanish-Swedish bilinguals performing the task in both languages showed different interference depending on language context. Such shifting behavior within the same individual reveals hitherto undocumented levels of flexibility in time representation. Finally, contrary to the linguistic relativity hypothesis, language interference was confined to difficult discriminations (i.e., when stimuli varied only subtly in duration and growth), and was eliminated when linguistic cues were removed from the task. These results reveal the malleable nature of human time representation as part of a highly adaptive information processing system.
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