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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!

A new stage play that turns all your ideas about humanity on their head Do we achieve a better sense of self and others by interfacing with our machines? Or are we just losing the true essence of humanity?

A few months back, we talked about the challenges faced by libraries in the era of ebooks, digital information and shrinking budgets. An emerging idea, now being pioneered at one New York state library, is to offer 3D printing facilities to enable constituents to develop and innovate new ideas and products. The Fayetteville Free Library of Fayetteville, NY recently has assumed a new mission in efforts to serve its constituencies with 3D printing facilities. The "FFL Fab Lab" is a space set aside with 3D printing technology, which seeks to encourage innovation and learning of the concept. At the foundation of the FFL's Fab Lab will be a MakerBot Thing-o-Matic 3D printer, donated to the library. The Fab Lab's 3D printer uses plastic as its raw material.

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.  

While the brightest minds of Silicon Valley are "disrupting" whatever industry is too crippled to fend off their advances, something odd is happening to our language. Old, trusted words no longer mean what they used to mean; often, they don't mean anything at all. Our language, much like everything these days, has been hacked. Fuzzy, contentious, and complex ideas have been stripped of their subversive connotations and replaced by cleaner, shinier, and emptier alternatives; long-running debates about politics, rights, and freedoms have been recast in the seemingly natural language of economics, innovation, and efficiency. Complexity, as it turns out, is not particularly viral.

"Businesses invest billions of dollars annually in market research studies developing and testing new ideas by asking consumers questions they simply can't answer. Asking consumers what they want, or why they do what they do, is like asking the political affiliation of a tuna fish sandwich. That's because neuroscience is now telling us that consumers, i.e., humans, make the vast majority of their decisions unconsciously. Steve Jobs didn't believe in market research. When a reporter once asked him how much research he conducted to develop the iPad, he quipped, "None. It isn't the consumers' job to know what they want." And according to some measures, the iPad became the most successful consumer product launch ever and Apple went on to become the most valuable company of all-time."

"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."

Note: this would make a good blog post Minimalist posters explain complex philosophical concepts with basic shapes When it comes to explaining philosophy, sometimes less is more - and we think this arresting collection of minimalist posters encompasses that idea perfectly. The illustrations you see featured below are from a a series entitled "Philographics," and were created by London-based graphic designer Genís Carreras. Using basic colors, simple geometric design, and concise definitions, Carreras manages to cram impressive amounts of information - on philosophical doctrines as diverse as hedonism, determinism, and existentialism - into a surprisingly simple and accessible package. We've included a sample of the collection below, but you'll find the series in its entirety, along with plenty more examples of Carreras' work, over on his website. The posters are also available for purchase via society6.

Justin Nichol sez, "Black Flag Games is currently running a Kickstarter to produce a radical boardgame project called 'A Las Barricadas'. It is a boardgame about conflict between state police and anti-authoritarian demonstrators. It is a two-player game with each player representing one of these social forces. The theatre of the conflict is street demonstration. It has been designed to inspire tactical consideration and conversation and is being developed and designed by the Black Flag Games Collective, committed to the idea that games and interactive media can have an impact in the struggle for a free and cooperative world. We are also committed to the ideals of free culture and aim to deliver professional play experiences that enrich a participatory entertainment culture."

A report in the New Journal of Physics shows how the quest for an invisibility cloak is leading to cleverer ways to use and manipulate light. The trick could aid the analysis of complex samples or even communications.

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.

So, after my post on ground-truth documents, one of my commenters argued eloquently that I ought to clean it up and submit it to a journal read by people who manage programming projects. He suggested Software Practice and Experience. This seemed like a pretty good idea, until I read SP&E's submission procedures and was reminded that (like most journals) they want me to assign the copyright of my submission to the publisher. My instant reaction was this: Fuck. That. Noise. I'm certainly willing to cede publication rights when I want to be published, but copyright assignment ain't going to happen. Ever. Nobody gets to own my work but me. (Yes, I insist on this with my book publishers too.) I have a message to all you technical journal publishers out there…

What if you could replicate President Obama's famous cool, Lady Gaga's style and Michael Phelps's athleticism? An experimental philosopher is attempting to do just that. Sort of.  Jonathan Keats, a "poet of ideas" whose exploits include opening a photosynthetic restaurant for plants and a celestial observatory for cyanobacteria, is now introducing "the first trouble-free human cloning technique." 

Last week, physicist Brian Cox showed us why everything that could happen does happen in a riveting tour of the quantum universe. In this fascinating short excerpt from BBC's A Night With The Stars, Cox turns to the Pauli exclusion principle - a quantum mechanics theorem holding that no two identical particles may occupy the same quantum state simultaneously - to explain why everything is connected to everything else, an idea at once utterly mind-bending and utterly intuitive, found everywhere from the most ancient Buddhist scripts to the most cutting-edge research in biology and social science.

UNU Media Centre head Brendan Barrett shares insights derived from a UNU Institute for Water, Environment and Health conference that focused on K* (K-Star) - a spectrum of ideas that covers research communication, science push, knowledge translation, adaptation, transfer and exchange, knowledge brokering and mobilization, and policy pull. * * * To sum up the underlying need for the recent K* Conference 2012, I borrow the words of a co-participant who explained that "as we are seeing with the climate debate and other 'wicked problems', it is not sufficient to assume that scientific consensus about the facts will be influential in policy or the wider community".

In the past few years, digital technologies have revolutionized everything from the way we work to the way we educate, inform and entertain ourselves. In fact, millions of engaged citizens are using the Web to connect and collaborate around shared concerns and opportunities in their communities and in international forums and institutions. Now, as Canada readies itself to host the World Congress on Information Technology (WCIT2012) in Montreal this October, we have a unique opportunity to mobilize large numbers of connected citizens to participate in a global, online conversation designed to elicit new ideas and innovations that could help address some of the world's most urgent challenges.

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?

see you should be perfect in the morning to solve many Nightmare green problems

Here's some bad news for those of you who like to think you can think rationally about risk. You can't. You know all those thoughtfully considered views you have about nuclear power or genetically modified food or climate change? They are really no more than a jumble of facts, and how you feel about those facts. That's right. They're just your opinions. Which is bad news, because no matter how right you feel, you might be wrong. And being wrong about risk is risky, to you AND to others.