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n 1961, IBM commissioned Charles and Ray Eames to create an exhibition for the California Museum of Science and Industry.  The resulting exhibition, called Mathematica: a World of Numbers, is a founding document of interactive STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math) exhibitions.

FOR the past decade or so, generals commanding the world's most advanced armies have been able to rely on accurate forecasts of the outcomes of conventional battles. Given data on weather and terrain, and the combatants' numbers, weaponry, positions, training and level of morale, computer programs such as the Tactical Numerical Deterministic Model, designed by the Dupuy Institute in Washington, DC, can predict who will win, how quickly and with how many casualties.

Today, Dr. Kaku addresses this question: MIT researchers have created a new imaging system that can acquire visual data at a rate of one trillion exposures per second. What can this super camera enable us to see?

Millions of people log on to Lumosity daily to flex their brain muscles--and hopefully improve memory, attention and general cognitive performance in the process.  But this brain training site has recently garnered attention for a large-scale survey which found that better brain performance was linked to 7 hours of sleep per night,  aerobic activity 2-3 times per week and a daily cocktail.  While the overall efficacy of brain training remains hotly debated, Michael Scanlon, co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Lumos Labs (creator of Lumosity), discusses the findings from the study, what surprised him most and what we can take away from correlational data. 

"Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has spoken out against the Draft Communications Bill, the UK government plans to monitor and store all digital communications, dubbed the "Snooper's Charter". In case Draft Communications Data Bill becomes the law, the US entrepreneur has promised to encrypt all connections between Wikipedia servers and the UK, effectively reducing the government's ability to snoop on use of Wikipedia. Wales was speaking to a  joint committee tasked with scrutinising the proposed Communications Bill before it is debated in the House of Commons."

A flyer designed by the FBI and the Department of Justice to promote suspicious activity reporting in internet cafes lists basic tools used for online privacy as potential signs of terrorist activity.  The document, part of a program called "Communities Against Terrorism", lists the use of "anonymizers, portals, or other means to shield IP address" as a sign that a person could be engaged in or supporting terrorist activity.  The use of encryption is also listed as a suspicious activity along with steganography, the practice of using "software to hide encrypted data in digital photos" or other media.  In fact, the flyer recommends that anyone "overly concerned about privacy" or attempting to "shield the screen from view of others" should be considered suspicious and potentially engaged in terrorist activities.

After reading your recent post, I thought you might find this interesting - especially the scanned interview that is included at the bottom of the posting. It's an old OMNI interview with Walter Stewart that was the first thing I read (at a young and impressionable age ;) about the prevalence of errors, fraud and cheating in science, the institutional barriers to tackling it, the often high personal costs to whistleblowers, the difficulty of accessing scientific data to repeat published analyses, and the surprisingly negative attitude towards criticism within scientific communities. Highly recommended entertaining reading - with some good examples of scientific investigations into implausible effects. The post itself contains the info I once dug up about what happened to him later - he seems like an interesting and very determined guy: when the NIH tried to stop him from investigating scientific errors and fraud he went on a hunger strike.

Louisville's hackerspace LVL1 is working on a home automation setup for the space, and they call it MOTHER. Using open-source home automation software called HOLOS, the capabilities include: * Monitoring of LVL1 Space Occupancy & Zone Occupancy * Measuring of "Hacktivity Levels" of each Zone * Monitoring of individual member occupancy * INSTANT WOMP MODE! (dubstep everywhere at the press of a button) * Notifications of "Abnormal" hacktivity levels * Monitoring of various websites and notifications of LVL1 mentions * Various "Nagging" (Take out the trash, It's cold please shut the door, I haven't seen you in 3 days, please come visit your mother, etc…) * "Member Scenes" - Auto setting of audio, lights, etc.. based on specific members present * Logging and Graphing of ALL data * Voice recognition and communication * Control of Lighting and appliances * Security System monitoring and notification of alerts * Phone calls and emails based notifications * Google Talk communication with AIML chat integration

Facebook and Google are two of technology's great data projects. Love them or hate them, they spend all day mining their users' activity. They harvest a few dozen bits of usable personal information per user per day. All in the interest of serving you ads.

A privacyscore estimates the privacy risk of using a website based on how they handle your personal and tracking data.

You can dock just about any of those old drives into this simple device. Stick a USB transfer cable into one end along with the power-cable, and in one of the other ends, you can connect a 3.5" IDE hard drive, or a laptop 2.5" IDE drive, or even a miniscule 1.8" IDE hard drive! But, why stop there? You can connect a SATA drive, too! How about an optical disk drive? We've got it covered. Blu-Ray, DVD, CD, writeable, rewriteable... it doesn't matter! We're drive agnostic with our USB to SATA/IDE Combo Kit. Now your old drives have a brand new life. Or, if you're the handy type, you can keep this one device handy to recover data from a drive in a dead computer. You won't have to haul several different devices - just this one! Features Connect USB 2.0 ports to any IDE or SATA drive: 3.5" IDE 2.5" laptop IDE 1.8" micro IDE 3.5" SATA 2.5" SATA Optical drive that supports standard IDE or SATA connectors* AC Input: 100-240v/50-60hz DC output: 5v/12v Supports Windows (98se and up) or Mac OS (8.6 and up) Includes power supply, molex y-splitter, USB cable and drive dock * Some "slim-line" optical drives use a modified SATA connector that won't fit. Your mileage may vary.

Our personal data is among today's most valuable information currency. It's often hard to determine what part companies own, what part the government owns, and what part, if any, is entirely our own - provided a third party hasn't already sold it to someone else.

While smartphones are awesome little computers, one of the things that really makes them useful is their built-in sensors - many apps are made possible via a phone's accelerometer, gyroscope, GPS, microphone, camera, or some combination of the bunch. The thing is, though, all of those sensors are stuck in the smartphone. What if you want to use your phone to monitor another device? Well, that's where NODE comes in. The proposed gadget could be placed on or near a device, and would wirelessly relay data from multiple onboard sensors, via Bluetooth.

The Cryoscope shows the user exactly what to expect outside by haptically exhibiting exactly how cold or warm it is to be outside. The user simply touches an aluminum cube that has been heated or cooled to the appropriate temperature. The unit fetches weather data from the internet, and translates it to the cube physically, pumping heat in or out of the cube.

Do you know what is the most common question that I get every day on social media, forums or email? "How to get insights about my Google Analytics data?" People approach me saying that they have a Google Analytics account for years, but they look only at page views or the number of visitors they get.

The company's social scientists are hunting for insights about human behavior. What they find could give Facebook new ways to cash in on our data-and remake our view of society.

Synthesis is a think-tank devoted to using the emerging paradigm of complex networks in the social sciences to tackle social and public policy concerns. Over the past 20 years or so, social scientists have increasingly made use of advances in the natural sciences to make better sense of social systems. Fields such as network theory, non-linear mathematics and systems theory, which we refer to as the study of complex networks, give us much greater insights that help us make sense of social systems. Armed with a greater understanding, this collection of paradigm-changing toolboxes can help us to make better policy decisions, in the public, private, and "third" sectors.

We are living a unique moment in history. The development of communication technologies has produced a change in the modes of interaction of society, creating new forms of relating which are fundamentally different from those before. These new ways of relating and technologies have contributed to the emergence of new social and political movements. These movements, as exemplified by the Arab Spring, the democratisation movement in Iceland, and the 15M / TakeTheSquare / Occupy movement, are the most strinking examples of the potential of this new phase (together with other phenomena such as Wikileaks and Anonymous).

The brain appears to be wired in a rectangular 3D grid structure, suggests a new brain imaging study funded by the National Institutes of Health. "Far from being just a tangle of wires, the brain's connections turn out to be more like ribbon cables - folding 2D sheets of parallel neuronal fibers that cross paths at right angles, like the warp and weft of a fabric," explained Van Wedeen, M.D., of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), A.A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging and the Harvard Medical School.