Group items tagged

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.

Back in August I wrote a post covering a rash of reports on the worrying rise of bad science in TED talks. A couple of months later TED pulled the following TEDx talk after the neuroscientist Bradley Voytek posted a question about it to Quora: "Is Randy Powell saying anything in his 2010 TEDxCharlotte talk or is it just total nonsense?". The top voted response was from Stanford theoretical physicist Jay Wacker and began:

"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."

"We thought ten people would care; instead a million people read our Storage Pod 1.0 blog post where we open sourced the Backblaze Storage Pod design and introduced the world's most cost-efficient way to store big data. The interest grew when we published our Petabytes on a Budget: Revealing More Secrets blog post that announced Storage Pod 2.0, which doubled the amount of storage and reduced the price. Since then several companies have built businesses selling Storage Pods inspired by Backblaze to hundreds of organizations around the world who are storing hundreds of petabytes of data on their own Storage Pods. Today we introduce Backblaze Storage Pod 3.0 which stores more data, costs less, is more reliable, and is easier to service."

If you miss those great 1990s movies in which cyberspace runs amok, you'll get a kick out of this video of a real-life system for monitoring cyber-attacks. The new DAEDALUS (Direct Alert Environment for Darknet And Livenet Unified Security) cyber-alert system has been in the making for several years, but now the developer has posted a cute video, to show you what it looks like.If you miss those great 1990s movies in which cyberspace runs amok, you'll get a kick out of this video of a real-life system for monitoring cyber-attacks. The new DAEDALUS (Direct Alert Environment for Darknet And Livenet Unified Security) cyber-alert system has been in the making for several years, but now the developer has posted a cute video, to show you what it looks like.

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.

"Security researchers warn that cybercriminals have started using Java exploits signed with digital certificates to trick users into allowing the malicious code to run inside browsers. A signed Java exploit was discovered Monday on a website belonging to the Chemnitz University of Technology in Germany that was infected with a Web exploit toolkit called g01pack, security researcher Eric Romang said Tuesday in a blog post. "

"The boundless wisdom and humor of Terry Pratchett get immortalized in a series of motivational posters that you only wish were hanging in your office right now. They don't seem to be the kind of thing Buzzfeed normally posts, but that's where I found them. No source or attribution, natch :|"

This is a guest post by David Hales, a fellow associate of the new complexity think-tank, Synthesis. David specialises in computational social science and here he provides a thought-provoking response to the rise in big data, and some of the more outlandish claims made about it. For a good example of the latter, see Chris Anderson's piece 'The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete'. He makes some really relevant points for development big data initiatives.

"THE cassette tape is about to make a comeback, in a big way. From the updates posted by Facebook's 1 billion users to the medical images shared by healthcare organisations worldwide and the rise of high-definition video streaming, the need for something to store huge tranches of data is greater than ever. And while hard drives have traditionally been the workhorse of large storage operations, a new wave of ultra-dense tape drives that pack in information at much higher densities, while using less energy, is set to replace them."

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 Economist is hosting a debate between Bruce Schneier and former TSA honcho Kip Hawley, on the proposition "This house believes that changes made to airport security since 9/11 have done more harm than good." I'm admittedly biased for Bruce's position (he's for the proposition), but it seems to me that no matter what your bias, Schneier totally crushed Hawley in the opening volley. The first commenter on the debate called Hawley's argument "post hoc reasoning at its most egregious," which sums it all up neatly.

The American Journalism Review has just published a searing condemnation by Washington Post contributor Paul Farhi of the state of education journalism, much of which, it contends, reinforces a narrative that the U.S. school system is failing -- a narrative supported by "self-styled education reformers," but refuted by the experiences of many parents asked to rate their local schools. I've railed against this before in the context of tech blogs' treatment of education, and while the AJR piece doesn't address technology specifically, I would argue that the narratives of failing schools certainly fuel much of the growing business of ed-tech.

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…

Technology is a lovely thing, but sometimes it scares the bejeezus out of us. This working 3D-printed gun is one such case. Gun enthusiast "HaveBlue" has documented in a blog post (via the AR15 forums) the process of what appears to be the first test firing of a firearm made with a 3D printer.

Becoming a university professor requires a lot of work for very little financial reward, compared to most other professions. In STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) fields, the minimum requirement is four years of undergraduate education, plus anywhere between four and a half and eight years of graduate studies, followed by an (ever increasing) number of years of post-doctoral work. That may get you an assistant professorship where, at a state university, the starting salary is in the $60k-70k range. 

Several years ago, I read Brian Aldiss's Billion Year Spree -- his "true history of science fiction" from Mary Shelley to the early 1970s. I found Aldiss's account of the genre's development entertaining and informative... but something bothered me, long after I'd finished reading it. So much so that I've since spent hundreds of dollars on forgotten, out-of-print books; I've written dozens of long, scholarly posts about the thing that bothered me so much, for io9 and my own blog, HiLobrow; and this year I've even launched a money-losing publishing imprint in a quixotic effort to set the record straight.

This is a guest post by Clark Dever, social media manager of Vuzix and a photographer. You can follow him on Twitter @clarkdever

You want to start your own blog but you don't want to look tacky by using an existing design. Creating your own theme can be daunting, but with some assistance you can have a unique design for your blog in no time. This post will help you put it all together using WordPress, the most popular (and free) blogging software available.

Google's swooshy new concept video for augmented reality goggles (or "spex", if you will) has certainly put the virtual cat among the digital pigeons. An attempt, perhaps, to leapfrog the iPad - if Google can persuade us that what we really want is headwear that will let us see things that aren't really there.