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The march of science is stumbling and easily sidetracked, fraught with bias, fads and dead ends. A new research initiative based at the University of Chicago and the Computation Institute will use the latest computational tools to scrutinize this imperfect path and better understand how knowledge was and is created. Such understanding could transform the process of research, calling out past missteps while revealing unanticipated new directions for the future.

The goal of the workshop is to explore ways to become better providers and connectors of knowledge in a world where the sources of knowledge are increasingly diverse and dispersed. At the World Bank, for example, we are seeking ways to connect with new centers of research, emerging communities of practice, and tap the practical experience of development organizations and the policy makers in rapidly developing economies. Our goal is to find better ways to connect those that have the development knowledge with those that need it, when they need it.

Could computers become cleverer than humans and take over the world? Or is that just the stuff of science fiction? Philosophers and scientists at Britain's Cambridge University think the question deserves serious study. A proposed Center for the Study of Existential Risk will bring together experts to consider the ways in which super intelligent technology, including artificial intelligence, could "threaten our own existence," the institution said Sunday. "In the case of artificial intelligence, it seems a reasonable prediction that some time in this or the next century intelligence will escape from the constraints of biology," Cambridge philosophy professor Huw Price said.

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.

There's no doubting the cloud invasion. But the research firm Gartner believes the personal cloud will replace the PC as the center of our digital lives sooner than you might think: 2014. "Major trends in client computing have shifted the market away from a focus on personal computers to a broader device perspective that includes smartphones, tablets and other consumer devices," Steve Kleynhans, research vice president at Gartner, said in a statement on Monday. "Emerging cloud services will become the glue that connects the web of devices that users choose to access during the different aspects of their daily life."

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.

(Brian- I was as part of the WBI alumni network informed of and asked to submit to the call for papers for this conference. Please review -I think your work would fit in here - let me know what you think- kdv)    Annually organized by Wuhan University of Technology (China), Yamaguchi University (Japan), the Pontifical Catholic University of Sao Paulo ( Brazil ) and the Brabant Center of Entrepreneurship (BCE),  the International Conference on Innovation and Management has proven to be a high-profile event for leading international scholars in the area of management and innovation. 

"A Swiss study appears to have uncovered what anti-capitalist activists have been claiming for years -- that the global economy is controlled by a small group of deeply interconnected entities. But don't grab a pitchfork and head to the nearest Occupy protest just yet. Systems researchers say this isn't the result of an Illuminati-type global conspiracy, but rather a natural force to be expected. "Such structures are common in nature," complex systems expert George Sudihara told NewScientist."

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."