"Time travellers may be using Twitter and Facebook, claim scientists, despite finding no evidence of it"
the same can be said for most moders science "big claims with no evidence" :)
If you're looking for interesting articles or sites devoted to Kobe Bryant, you search Google. If you're looking for interesting comments from your extended social network about the three-pointer Kobe just made 30 seconds ago, you go to Twitter.
We are living in the future when live broadcasts are being censored by AI programs in real-time.
I'm sure dictators everywhere are looking forward for these technologies to mature. Having a firewall over reality is so convenient.
What this tells is that we should not take AI seriously until smart Luis's (or his son) managed to make something decent out of it ...
"This was, of course, absurd. First of all, the clips had been provided by the studios to be shown during the award ceremony. The Hugo Awards had explicit permission to broadcast them. But even if they hadn't, it is absolutely fair use to broadcast clips of copyrighted material during an award ceremony. Unfortunately, the digital restriction management (DRM) robots on Ustream had not been programmed with these basic contours of copyright law.
And then, it got worse. Amid more cries of dismay on Twitter, Reddit, and elsewhere, the official Worldcon Twitter announced:
Chicon 7@chicon_7
We are sorry to report that #Ustream will not resume the video feed. #chicon7 #hugos #worldcon
3 Sep 12 ReplyRetweetFavorite
And with that, the broadcast was officially cut off. Dumb robots, programmed to kill any broadcast containing copyrighted material, had destroyed the only live broadcast of the Hugo Awards. Sure, we could read what was happening on Twitter, or get the official winner announcement on the Hugo website, but that is hardly the same. We wanted to see our heroes and friends on that stage, and share the event with them. In the world of science fiction writing, the Hugo Awards are kind of like the Academy Awards. Careers are made; people get dressed up and give speeches; and celebrities rub shoulders with (admittedly geeky) paparazzi. You want to see and hear it if you can.
But Ustream's incorrectly programmed copyright enforcement squad had destroyed our only access. It was like a Cory Doctorow story crossed with RoboCop 2, with DRM robots going crazy and shooting indiscriminately into a crowd of perfectly innocent broadcasts."
That is about € 14e9 - enough to pay more than a million YGTs for half a year. Could we use maybe just half a million YGTs for half a year to build a similar platform and keep the remaining € 7e9 for ourselves? Keep in mind that WhatsApp only has 45 employees (according to AllThingsD: http://goo.gl/NtJcSj ). So we would have an advantage > 10000:1. On the other hand does this mean that every employee at WhatsApp gets enough money now to survive comfortably for ~5000 years or will the inevitable social inequality strike and most people get next to nothing while a few get money to live comfortably for ~1000000 years?
Also: Does Facebook think about these numbers before they pay them? Or is it just a case of "That looks tasty - lets have it"?
Also (2): As far as I can see all these internet companies (Google, Facebook, Yahoo, WhatsApp, Twitter...) seem to make most of their income from advertising. For all these companies together that must be a lot of advertising money (turns out that in 2013 the world spent about $ 500 billion on advertising: http://goo.gl/vYog15 ). For that money you could of course have 20 million YGTs roaming the Earth and advertising stuff door-to-door... ... ...
Jo, thats just brilliant...
500billion USD total on advertising, that sounds absolutely ridiculous.. I always wondered whether this giant advertisement scheme is just one big 'ponzi'-like scheme waiting to crash down on us one day when they realize, cat-picture twittering fb-ing whatsapping consumers just aint worth it..
Facebook is not really so much buying into a potential good business deal as much as it's buying out risky competition. Popular trends need to be killed fast before they take off the ground too much. Also the amount of personal data that WhatsApp is amassing is staggering. I have never seen an app requesting so many phone rights in my life.
Pattern is a web mining module for the Python programming language.
It bundles tools for data retrieval (Google + Twitter + Wikipedia API, web spider, HTML DOM parser), text analysis (rule-based shallow parser, WordNet interface, syntactical + semantical n-gram search algorithm, tf-idf + cosine similarity + LSA metrics) and data visualization (graph networks).
Intuitive, well documented, and very powerful. A library to keep an eye on.
Check the example Belgian elections, June 13, 2010 - Twitter opinion mining
That raises another interesting question: how quickly could life-bearing ejecta from Earth (or anywhere else) seed the entire galaxy?
Hara and co calculate that it would take some 10^12 years for ejecta to spread through a volume of space the size of the Milky Way. But since our galaxy is only 10^10 years old, a single ejection event could not have done the trick.
However, they say that if life evolved at 25 different sites in the galaxy 10^10 years ago, then the combined ejecta from these places would now fill the Milky Way.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1204.1719: Transfer of Life-Bearing Meteorites from Earth to Other Planets
Nigel Leck, a software developer by day, was tired of arguing with anti-science crackpots on Twitter. So, like any good programmer, he wrote a script to do it for him.
not overly impressive:
"The Google data could not predict the weekly fluctuations in stock prices. However, the team found a strong correlation between Internet searches for a company's name and its trade volume, the total number of times the stock changed hands over a given week."
the problem is that usually the google search queries and the twitter updates happen after a crisis for example. I dont really think that people all over the world suddenly realised that Lehman would collapse and started googling it like crazy before it collapsed. More likely they did it afterwards.
"This means that tweets about Lady Gaga's lingerie can help someone debugging Perl code. (Or a tweet about Perl code may help Lady Gaga's underwear stylist.) "
once again one of these initiatives that came up from a situation and that would never have been possible with a top-down approach .... fantastic!
and as Dario said: we are apparently where NASA still has to go with this :-)
indeed ... you are right .... interesting project btw - they started in 1999, were in 2005 the first NASA project on Sourceforge and won several awards ....
then this entry why they did not participate last year:
"05/01/09: Skipping this years Google Summer-of-Code - many of you have asked why we are not participating in this years Summer of Code. The answer is that both John and Peter were too busy with other assignments to set this up in time. We will be back in 2010. At least we were able to compensate with a limited number of NASA internships to continue some of last years projects."
.... but I could not find them in this years selected list - any clue?
They participate under the name "The Java Pathfinder Team" (http://babelfish.arc.nasa.gov/trac/jpf/wiki/events/soc2010). It is actually a very useful project for both education and industry (Airbus created a consortium on model checking soft, and there is a lot of research on it)
As far as I know, TAS had some plans of using Java onboard spacecrafts, 2 years ago. Not sure the industry is really sensible about Jobs' opinions ;) particularly if there is no better alternative!
To my knowledge (readers correct me if I'm wrong) no where else within NASA do people get paid to just think very long range ideas. My question: does such a group belong in NASA and should it or something like it be revived? And if you think so, what should its highest priority be? Propulsion? Artificial gravity systems? Space Elevator?
Perhaps some of ACTers will find this conference interesting... One of the talks:
"Would Einstein be on Twitter? Exploring the potential and limits of Web 2.0 in science & science communication"
[Edit] Oh, I see someone has already posted this link... a year ago. Anyway, if anyone of you plans to go, let me know - I'll be around ;-)
Just came back from ESOF 2010... I was on look for ACT agents undercover, but either they were not there or the cover was good enough... Anyway here's a few remarks from me (I could write a nice report... if you paid):
1) In general, to say that ESA was underrepresented on the conference as a whole is not enough (I guess ESA just failed to notice the event taking place). For instance, on the GMES presentation, ESA as such was not mentioned at all... at some point I started to wonder if ESA is actually involved in the project, but now I checked the website and apparently it is. On the other hand, GMES presentation was crap anyway, as after 1:15 of talking, I didn't gain any knowledge of what GMES is and what its contributions to the EU community will be.
2) There was a lot of talk about LHC and particle research (well, at least among those that I attended). Some of them were very good, some of them rather crap...
3) "Would Einstein be on Twitter? Exploring the potential and limits of Web 2.0 in science & science communication" talk - quite interesting, but focusing mainly on Science-to-Wide Public and Science-to-Journalists communication. Not really on Science-to-Science (as in Ariadnet). There was quite an extensive discussion with the public. You may be interested that Nature is trying to stimulate Web 2.0 communication, running blog service, but also I think a kind of social network - perhaps you'd like to have a look. In general the conclusion was that Web 2.0 is not so useful for scientific communication because practising it requires TIME (blogs, etc.) and often some professional skills (podcasts/videocasts, etc.), and scientists have neither of these. This can be run on corporation level (like ESA does actually), but then it looses the "intimate" character.
4) "How much can robots learn?" talk... very nicely presented: understandable by the wide public, but conveying the message... which is something like "we can already make the robots do stuff absolutely imp
Well, my comment was cut in half, and I don't feel like typing it again... the most important highlight from the rest is that the only presenter from ESA (ESTEC) did not show up on his talk because his department was undergoing some sort of audit on the same day :)