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So who are you? You might be a current scientist, a recovering scientist, a revolutionary, or just really into checking out neat innovations. Well, Marblar's a right-brained buffet - and we're about to open the kitchen.  Who says finding homes for inventions can´t be fun? Who says the process has to be closed to just a select few? Marblar.com is a democratic playground for creativity. You´ve got great ideas and we´ve got great inventions. As a Marblar you´ll be part of an artistic community and earn marbles for flexing your imagination in the service of science.  So there you have it. You´re a creative beast. The left brains sure aren´t starting the Fourth Industrial Revolution.  You are.  Join today.

The Being Human Conference, which took place at San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts this weekend, was designed to explore the science of human experience. The speakers ranged from neuroscientists, philosophers and psychologists, to monks, poets and filmmakers - and together their collective ideas and insights shined a light on the complexities of what it means to be human in 2012.  

VANCOUVER, British Columbia - Our digital age is all about bits, those precise ones and zeros that are the stuff of modern computer code. But a powerful new type of computer that is about to be commercially deployed by a major American military contractor is taking computing into the strange, subatomic realm of quantum mechanics. In that infinitesimal neighborhood, common sense logic no longer seems to apply. A one can be a one, or it can be a one and a zero and everything in between - all at the same time.

"It's got to be one of the coolest names ever for a group: The Kansas Anti Zombie Militia. But the group is real and its members are pretty serious about it. Once the Zombie Apocalypse hits, they'll be ready for it and they want you to be too. "Can a natural person change into this monster that many fear?" Alfredo Carbajal, the militia's main spokesman, said in an interview. "The possibilities are yes, it can happen. We have seen incidents that are very close to it, and we are thinking it is more possible than people think.""

Heated political rhetoric is everywhere. It sets us apart from one another and erodes what's left of civil discourse. It grinds the worthy concept of "logic" into dust. Not any more. Not when we fight back with an open source game I'm calling Logic Shrink. I'm not selling a thing. You don't need an app, a console, even a board. It's entirely your game. Play a solitary version. Play it during a get-together with your extended family. Play it with kids, especially teens. Bring it to the classroom, community center, or secret Super PAC meeting. It will entertain. Afterwards, when the lively score-keeping has ended there will be something new in the room. It may be unfamiliar at first. It's a state of being that requires no name calling, no slippery slope. It's logical thinking.

London, UK, June 16 and 17: Open IoT Assembly: "In 2011 Pachube published this attempt at a Bill of Rights for the Internet of Things. Data ownership will continue to be one of the defining issues of this decade. As the Internet of Things matures, clear lines will be drawn as companies bring products and services to market. Business models will be built on one of two philosophies:       *    Controlling a customer's access to their data and limiting its use to a single service. Profiting through vendor lock-in and switching costs/hassle.     *    Maximizing the value that is built on top of data and constantly innovating. Building a product that customers choose based on its own merits.

Hey Great Lakes THATCampers! We're just under a month away from what promises to be a very exciting unconference. We've got a full day of workshops on Friday (be sure to email us at glthatcamp2012 [at] gmail [dot] com with your workshop choices if you haven't done so already!), topped off with a meet-and-greet hosted at London's own UnLab on the Friday evening. Saturday will be a day of sessions, and it is truly a day that is up to you, the CAMPERS, to make your own. In order to get you started, we've put together a list of a few of the session ideas you have suggested in your applications. Now that you are all registered as contributors, you are able to post about what you'd like to see happen on the 21st and 22nd. The more talk there is about the sessions prior to Great Lakes THATCamp, the faster we can get going on the Saturday morning, so please join in and help us out!

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.

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.

It has taken more than a decade, but PayPal - the coaster of the Internet that has had a downhill ride with the wind at its back pretty much since acquisition - is finally under serious threat. It may not be showing up in PayPal's numbers yet. Indeed, by the time you start to see these things on the balance sheet, the damage is irreversible. The question is whether it can still be reversed now. I'm arguing no for three big reasons. The first is the decreasing relevance of eBay. PayPal was never founded to be merely the payment arm of eBay, but eBay was so dominant in ecommerce at the time and the need for digital payments on the platform was so great that that became the bulk of the business.

It may be difficult to imagine a world where human beings are even more connected than we are now. Yet the reality is that when it comes to connectivity, we're barely scratching the surface in terms of where we'll be in the future. Read more: http://techland.time.com/2012/02/21/the-connected-human-how-the-world-is-about-to-get-even-smaller/#ixzz1nATDjr5q

"Someone points me to this report from Tilburg University on disgraced psychology researcher Diederik Stapel. The reports includes bits like this: When the fraud was first discovered, limiting the harm it caused for the victims was a matter of urgency. This was particularly the case for Mr Stapel's former PhD students and postdoctoral researchers . . . However, the Committees were of the opinion that the main bulk of the work had not yet even started. . . . Journal publications can often leave traces that reach far into and even beyond scientific disciplines. The self-cleansing character of science calls for fraudulent publications to be withdrawn and no longer to proliferate within the literature. In addition, based on their initial impressions, the Committees believed that there were other serious issues within Mr Stapel's publications . . . This brought into the spotlight a research culture in which this sloppy science, alongside out-and-out fraud, was able to remain undetected for so long. . . . The scientific literature must be cleansed of everything that is fraudulent, especially if it involves the work of a leading academic. Sounds familiar? I think it also applies to recipients of the Founders Award from the American Statistical Association. There's more: The most important reason for seeking completeness in cleansing the scientific record is that science itself has a particular claim to the finding of truth. This is a cumulative process, characterized in empirical science, and especially in psychology, as an empirical cycle, a continuous process of alternating between the development of theories and empirical testing. . . . My first reaction was that all seems like overkill given how obvious the fraud is, but given what happened with comparable cases in the U.S., I suppose this "Powell doctrine" approach (overwhelming force) is probably the best way to go."

Under a new deal signed by the University of Western Ontario and the University of Toronto, the act of emailing a link will be classed as equivalent to photocopying, and each student and faculty member will cost the universities $27.50/year for this right that the law gives them for free, along with a collection of other blanket licenses of varying legitimacy. In order to enforce these licenses, all faculty email will be subject to surveillance.

"In the Harry Potter world, Ravenclaws are known for being the smart ones. That's their thing. In fact, that was really all they were known for. In the books, each house could be boiled down to one or two words: Gryffindors are brave, Ravenclaws are smart, Slytherins are evil and/or racist, and Hufflepuffs are pathetic loyal. (Giving rise to this hilarious Second City mockery.)"

"It is a wonder that we have yet to officially write about probability theory on this blog. Probability theory underlies a huge portion of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and statistics, and a number of our future posts will rely on the ideas and terminology we lay out in this post. Our first formal theory of machine learning will be deeply ingrained in probability theory, we will derive and analyze probabilistic learning algorithms, and our entire treatment of mathematical finance will be framed in terms of random variables."

Imagine going to work every day and at the start of your day, with your first cup of coffee, you sit down to glance at beheadings, children in the process of being raped, human bodies in various stages of decomposition, the living and dead results of domestic violence, hanging bodies of 10 year old boys accused of being gay, real-life snuff films and bloody dog fighting rings and their subsequent results. Can you think up a human horror? I've probably seen it or a picture or video of something very similar.

"If you're running a WordPress site, now would be a good time to ensure you are using very strong passwords and to make sure your username is not "admin." According to reports from HostGator and CloudFlare, there is currently a significant attack being launched at WordPress blogs across the Internet. For the most part, this is a brute-force dictionary-based attack that aim to find the password for the 'admin' account that every WordPress site sets up by default."

It's impossible to grasp the consequences or outcomes of new technology, especially when that technology is developed by a twenty-something hacker. That much was already clear in January 2010, when Mark Zuckerberg told TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington that Facebook isn't just a place to connect with your friends. It was a place to be more public than ever before. "People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time," he said. "But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner's mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it."

Alpha One Labs co-founder Sean Auriti and a group of like-minded hackers have launched a campaign to build Hackert0wn, a Brooklyn hackerspace the likes of which the world has never seen. As planned, Hackert0wn will be an  entire hacker ecosystem complete with retail shops stocked with spare parts, sleeping pods, a gym that feeds power back into the building, a co-working space, private offices, a cafe with a coffee dispensing robot, a dumpling shop, an aquaponic farm that raises fish and produce for nearby residents and restaurants, and a state-of-the art CNC machine shop. Oh, and all the buildings will be built out of recycled shipping containers.

SANTA BARBARA-"Maybe we're just too dumb," Nobel laureate physicist David Gross mused in a lecture at Caltech two weeks ago. When someone of his level wonders whether the unification of physics will always be beyond mortal minds, it gets you worried. Since his lecture, I've been learning about a theory that seems to confirm Gross's worry. It is so ridiculously hard that it could be the subject of an Onion parody. But at the same time, I've been watching how physicists are trying to power through their intimidation, because the theory promises a new way of understanding what space and time really are, at a deep level.