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NASA Spacecraft Data Suggest Water Flowing on Mars - 0 views

www.nasa.gov/...mro20110804.html layscience mars
shared by anonymous on 04 Aug 11 - Cached
  • Dark, finger-like features appear and extend down some Martian slopes during late spring through summer, fade in winter, and return during the next spring. Repeated observations have tracked the seasonal changes in these recurring features on several steep slopes in the middle latitudes of Mars' southern hemisphere.
  • "The best explanation for these observations so far is the flow of briny water," said Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona, Tucson.
  • When researchers checked flow-marked slopes with the orbiter's Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM), no sign of water appeared. The features may quickly dry on the surface or could be shallow subsurface flows.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • "The flows are not dark because of being wet," McEwen said. "They are dark for some other reason."
  • anonymous on 04 Aug 11
     
    "Observations from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have revealed possible flowing water during the warmest months on Mars."
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Conversational Narcissism: How to Avoid It - 3 views

artofmanliness.com/...void-conversational-narcissism communication
shared by anonymous on 18 Aug 11 - Cached
  • In The Pursuit of Attention, sociologist Charles Derber shares the fascinating results of a study done on face-to-face interactions, in which researchers watched 1,500 conversations unfold and recorded how people traded and vied for attention.
  • Dr. Derber discovered that despite good intentions, and often without being aware of it, most people struggle with what he has termed “conversational narcissism.”
  • Conversational narcissists always seek to turn the attention of others to themselves.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • it takes much more subtle forms, and we’re all guilty of it from time to time.
  • the enjoyment of a good conversation is becoming more of a rarity these days. In our time of cell phones, text messaging, and emails, we’re having less face-to-face interactions, and thus when we do meet up with people in the flesh, our social skills can be a bit rusty.
  • A good conversation is an interesting thing; it can’t be a solely individual endeavor—it has to be a group effort.
  • Each individual has to sacrifice a little for the benefit of the group as a whole and ultimately, to increase the pleasure each individual receives.
  • During a conversation, each person makes initiatives. These initiatives can either be attention-giving or attention-getting. Conversational narcissists concentrate more on the latter because they are focused on gratifying their own needs. Attention-getting initiatives can take two forms: active and passive.
  • The response a person gives to what someone says can take two forms: the shift-response and the support-response.
  • The shift-response if often very subtle. People put in a nice transition to disguise it by prefacing their response with something like, “That’s interesting,” “Really? “I can see that,” right before they make a comment about themselves.
  • Most conversational narcissists–careful not to appear rude– will mix their support and shift responses together, using just a few more shift-responses, until the topic finally shifts entirely to them. 
  • it’s fine to share things about yourself, as long as you loop the conversation back to the person who initiated the topic.
  • Conversational narcissism can take an even subtler form. Instead of interjecting about themselves and trying to initiate a new topic, conversational narcissists can simply withhold their support-responses until the other person’s topic withers away and they can take the floor.
  • three forms support-responses can take
  • Background acknowledgments
  • Supportive assertions
  • Supportive questions
  • A conversational narcissist can kill someone’s story dead in its tracks by withholding these support-responses, especially by not asking any questions.
  • Conversationalist narcissists will also show their disinterest in the speaker by delaying their background acknowledgments
  • Good conversationalists place their background acknowledgments in just the rights spots, in the small natural pauses in the conversation.
  • The narcissist tries to adhere to social expectations by giving the speaker some cursory acknowledgments, but they’re not really listening, and so they throw them in there just a few seconds off.
  • one more form of conversational narcissism to avoid is the “Well, enough about me, I want to hear more about you!” tactic.
  • Once someone introduces a topic, your job is to draw out the narrative from them by giving them encouragement in the form of background acknowledgments and supportive assertions, and moving their narrative along by asking supportive questions.
  • anonymous on 18 Aug 11
     
    "In a time where a lot of the old social supports people relied upon have disappeared, people have become starved for attention. They bring this hunger to their conversations, which they see as competitions in which the winner is able to keep the attention on themselves as much as possible. And this is turning the skill of conversation-making into a lost art."
  • Erik Hanson on 19 Aug 11
     
    I think this sort of competitive behavior in conversations has existed far longer than modern communications devices. I have mys suspicions about this claim: "In our time of cell phones, text messaging, and emails, we're having less face-to-face interactions, and thus when we do meet up with people in the flesh, our social skills can be a bit rusty." There are plenty of cultures, even fairly large subcultures within the US, that take this "narcissism" as a given. As a Midwesterner (where talking in general can almost seem rude), I experience this a lot. But there are also things like Spanish classes that teach students to swap "um" and "er" for "eh," and to make that sound loung and loud to avoid "giving away" the attention in a conversation.
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USENIX 2011 Keynote: Network Security in the Medium Term, 2061-2561 AD - 1 views

www.antipope.org/...x-2011-keynote-network-se.html whimsy technology longnow
shared by anonymous on 16 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • if we should meet up in 2061, much less in the 26th century, you’re welcome to rib me about this talk. Because I’ll be happy to still be alive to rib.
  • The question I’m going to spin entertaining lies around is this: what is network security going to be about once we get past the current sigmoid curve of accelerating progress and into a steady state, when Moore’s first law is long since burned out, and networked computing appliances have been around for as long as steam engines?
  • a few basic assumptions about the future
  • ...82 more annotations...
  • it’s not immediately obvious that I can say anything useful about a civilization run by beings vastly more intelligent than us. I’d be like an australopithecine trying to visualize daytime cable TV.
  • The idea of an AI singularity
  • the whole idea of artificial general intelligence strikes me as being as questionable as 19th century fantasies about steam-powered tin men.
  • if you start trying to visualize a coherent future that includes aliens, telepathy, faster than light travel, or time machines, your futurology is going to rapidly run off the road and go crashing around in the blank bits of the map that say HERE BE DRAGONS.
  • at least one barkingly implausible innovation will come along between now and 2061 and turn everything we do upside down
  • My crystal ball is currently predicting that base load electricity will come from a mix of advanced nuclear fission reactor designs and predictable renewables such as tidal and hydroelectric power.
  • We are, I think, going to have molecular nanotechnology and atomic scale integrated circuitry.
  • engineered solutions that work a bit like biological systems
  • Mature nanotechnology is going to resemble organic life forms the way a Boeing 737 resembles thirty tons of seagull biomass.
  • without a technological civilization questions of network security take second place to where to get a new flint arrowhead.
  • if we’re still alive in the 26th century you’re welcome to remind me of what I got wrong in this talk.
  • we’re living through the early days of a revolution in genomics and biology
  • We haven’t yet managed to raise the upper limit on human life expectancy (it’s currently around 120 years), but an increasing number of us are going to get close to it.
  • it’s quite likely that within another century the mechanisms underlying cellular senescence will be understood and treatable like other inborn errors of metabolism
  • another prediction: something outwardly resembling democracy everywhere.
  • Since 1911, democractic government by a republic has gone from being an eccentric minority practice to the default system of government world-wide
  • Democracy is a lousy form of government in some respects – it is particularly bad at long-term planning, for no event that lies beyond the electoral event horizon can compel a politician to pay attention to it
  • but it has two gigantic benefits: it handles transfers of power peacefully, and provides a pressure relief valve for internal social dissent.
  • there are problems
  • . In general, democratically elected politicians are forced to focus on short-term solutions to long-term problems because their performance is evaluated by elections held on a time scale of single-digit years
  • Democratic systems are prone to capture by special interest groups that exploit the information asymmetry that’s endemic in complex societies
  • The adversarial two-party model is a very bad tool for generating consensus on how to tackle difficult problems with no precedents
  • Finally, representative democracy scales up badly
  • Nor are governments as important as they used to be.
  • the US government, the largest superpower on the block right now, is tightly constrained by the international trade system it promoted in the wake of the second world war.
  • we have democratic forms of government, without the transparency and accountability.
  • At least, until we invent something better – which I expect will become an urgent priority before the end of the century.
  • The good news is, we’re a lot richer than our ancestors. Relative decline is not tragic in a positive-sum world.
  • Assuming that they survive the obstacles on the road to development, this process is going to end fairly predictably: both India and China will eventually converge with a developed world standard of living, while undergoing the demographic transition to stable or slowly declining populations that appears to be an inevitable correlate of development.
  • a quiet economic revolution is sweeping Africa
  • In 2006, for the first time, more than half of the planet’s human population lived in cities. And by 2061 I expect more than half of the planet’s human population will live in conditions that correspond to the middle class citizens of developed nations.
  • by 2061 we or our children are going to be living on an urban middle-class planet, with a globalized economic and financial infrastructure recognizably descended from today’s system, and governments that at least try to pay lip service to democratic norms.
  • And let me say, before I do, that the picture I just painted – of the world circa 2061, which is to say of the starting point from which the world of 2561 will evolve – is bunk.
  • It’s a normative projection
  • I’m pretty certain that something utterly unexpected will come along and up-end all these projections – something as weird as the world wide web would have looked in 1961.
  • And while the outer forms of that comfortable, middle-class urban developed-world planetary experience might look familiar to us, the internal architecture will be unbelievably different.
  • Let’s imagine that, circa 1961 – just fifty years ago – a budding Nikolai Tesla or Bill Packard somewhere in big-city USA is tinkering in his garage and succeeds in building a time machine. Being adventurous – but not too adventurous – he sets the controls for fifty years in the future, and arrives in downtown San Francisco. What will he see, and how will he interpret it?
  • a lot of the buildings are going to be familiar
  • Automobiles are automobiles, even if the ones he sees look kind of melted
  • Fashion? Hats are out, clothing has mutated in strange directions
  • He may be thrown by the number of pedestrians walking around with wires in their ears, or holding these cigarette-pack-sized boxes with glowing screens.
  • But there seem to be an awful lot of mad people walking around with bits of plastic clipped to their ears, talking to themselves
  • The outward shape of the future contains the present and the past, embedded within it like flies in amber.
  • Our visitor from 1961 is familiar with cars and clothes and buildings
  • But he hasn’t heard of packet switched networks
  • Our time traveller from 1961 has a steep learning curve if he wants to understand the technology the folks with the cordless headsets are using.
  • The social consequences of a new technology are almost always impossible to guess in advance.
  • Let me take mobile phones as an example. They let people talk to one another – that much is obvious. What is less obvious is that for the first time the telephone network connects people, not places
  • For example, we’re currently raising the first generation of kids who won’t know what it means to be lost – everywhere they go, they have GPS service and a moving map that will helpfully show them how to get wherever they want to go.
  • to our time traveller from 1961, it’s magic: you have a little glowing box, and if you tell it “I want to visit my cousin Bill, wherever he is,” a taxi will pull up and take you to Bill’s house
  • The whole question of whether a mature technosphere needs three or four billion full-time employees is an open one, as is the question of what we’re all going to do if it turns out that the future can’t deliver jobs.
  • We’re still in the first decade of mass mobile internet uptake, and we still haven’t seen what it really means when the internet becomes a pervasive part of our social environment, rather than something we have to specifically sit down and plug ourselves in to, usually at a desk.
  • So let me start by trying to predict the mobile internet of 2061.
  • the shape of the future depends on whether whoever provides the basic service of communication
  • funds their service by charging for bandwidth or charging for a fixed infrastructure cost.
  • These two models for pricing imply very different network topologies.
  • This leaves aside a third model, that of peer to peer mesh networks with no actual cellcos as such – just lots of folks with cheap routers. I’m going to provisionally assume that this one is hopelessly utopian
  • the security problems of a home-brew mesh network are enormous and gnarly; when any enterprising gang of scammers can set up a public router, who can you trust?
  • Let’s hypothesize a very high density, non-volatile serial storage medium that might be manufactured using molecular nanotechnology: I call it memory diamond.
  • wireless bandwidth appears to be constrained fundamentally by the transparency of air to electromagnetic radiation. I’ve seen some estimates that we may be able to punch as much as 2 tb/sec through air; then we run into problems.
  • What can you do with 2 terabits per second per human being on the planet?
  • One thing you can do trivially with that kind of capacity is full lifelogging for everyone. Lifelogging today is in its infancy, but it’s going to be a major disruptive technology within two decades.
  • the resulting search technology essentially gives you a prosthetic memory.
  • Lifelogging offers the promise of indexing and retrieving the unwritten and undocmented. And this is both a huge promise and an enormous threat.
  • Lifelogging raises huge privacy concerns, of course.
  • The security implications are monstrous: if you rely on lifelogging for your memory or your ability to do your job, then the importance of security is pushed down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
  • if done right, widespread lifelogging to cloud based storage would have immense advantages for combating crime and preventing identity theft.
  • whether lifelogging becomes a big social issue depends partly on the nature of our pricing model for bandwidth, and how we hammer out the security issues surrounding the idea of our sensory inputs being logged for posterity.
  • at least until the self-driving automobile matches and then exceeds human driver safety.
  • We’re currently living through a period in genomics research that is roughly equivalent to the early 1960s in computing.
  • In particular, there’s a huge boom in new technologies for high speed gene sequencing.
  • full genome sequencing for individuals now available for around US $30,000, and expected to drop to around $1000–3000 within a couple of years.
  • Each of us is carrying around a cargo of 1–3 kilograms of bacteria and other unicellular organisms, which collectively outnumber the cells of our own bodies by a thousand to one.
  • These are for the most part commensal organisms – they live in our guts and predigest our food, or on our skin – and they play a significant role in the functioning of our immune system.
  • Only the rapid development of DNA assays for SARS – it was sequenced within 48 hours of its identification as a new pathogenic virus – made it possible to build and enforce the strict quarantine regime that saved us from somewhere between two hundred million and a billion deaths.
  • A second crisis we face is that of cancer
  • we can expect eventually to see home genome monitoring – both looking for indicators of precancerous conditions or immune disorders within our bodies, and performing metagenomic analysis on our environment.
  • If our metagenomic environment is routinely included in lifelogs, we have the holy grail of epidemiology within reach; the ability to exhaustively track the spread of pathogens and identify how they adapt to their host environment, right down to the level of individual victims.
  • In each of these three examples of situations where personal privacy may be invaded, there exists a strong argument for doing so in the name of the common good – for prevention of epidemics, for prevention of crime, and for prevention of traffic accidents. They differ fundamentally from the currently familiar arguments for invasion of our data privacy by law enforcement – for example, to read our email or to look for evidence of copyright violation. Reading our email involves our public and private speech, and looking for warez involves our public and private assertion of intellectual property rights …. but eavesdropping on our metagenomic environment and our sensory environment impinges directly on the very core of our identities.
  • With lifelogging and other forms of ubiquitous computing mediated by wireless broadband, securing our personal data will become as important to individuals as securing our physical bodies.
  • the shifting sands of software obsolescence have for the most part buried our ancient learning mistakes.
  • So, to summarize: we’re moving towards an age where we may have enough bandwidth to capture pretty much the totality of a human lifespan, everything except for what’s going on inside our skulls.
  • anonymous on 16 Aug 11
     
    "Good afternoon, and thank you for inviting me to speak at USENIX Security." A fun read by Charlie Stoss."
  • Erik Hanson on 17 Aug 11
     
    I feel like cancer may be a bit played up. I freak out more about dementia.
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The Mind-Reading Salmon: The True Meaning of Statistical Significance - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm criticalthinking layscience
shared by anonymous on 15 Aug 11 - Cached
  • The p-value is an all-purpose measure that scientists often use to determine whether or not an experimental result is “statistically significant.”
  • The p-value puts a number on the effects of randomness. It is the probability of seeing a positive experimental outcome even if your hypothesis is wrong.
  • Many scientific papers make 20 or 40 or even hundreds of comparisons. In such cases, researchers who do not adjust the standard p-value threshold of 0.05 are virtually guaranteed to find statistical significance in results that are meaningless statistical flukes.
  • anonymous on 15 Aug 11
     
    "If you want to convince the world that a fish can sense your emotions, only one statistical measure will suffice: the p-value."
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The Economic Manhattan Project - 1 views

www.edge.org/...perimeter09_index.html
shared by anonymous on 13 Jul 11 - Cached
  • According to the organizers, "Concerns over the current financial situation are giving rise to a need to evaluate the very mathematics that underpins economics as a predictive and descriptive science. A growing desire to examine economics through the lens of diverse scientific methodologies — including physics and complex systems — is making way to a meeting of leading economists and theorists of finance together with physicists, mathematicians, biologists and computer scientists in an effort to evaluate current theories of markets and identify key issues that can motivate new directions for research."
  • anonymous on 13 Jul 11
     
    "After all, we are witnessing the Waterloo of Wall Street. So, ironically, it was in the Canadian province of Ontario, in the small town of Waterloo, that a meeting was convened to shed new light on the world's financial debacle. In a densely packed conference schedule, the general approach was to take measure of the crisis not only in a new way, but with instruments never used before. Even the venue for event, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, was itself programmatic, though invitations to participate were sent far beyond the boundaries of economics and physics to mathematicians, lawyers, behavioral economists, risk managers, evolutionary biologists, complexity theorists and computer scientists.- Jordan Mejias, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung"
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More Than 3,000 Vintage Book Graphics Find a Home Online - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...241871 research visualization graphics old free vintage atlantic
shared by anonymous on 13 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 13 Jul 11
     
    Thanks to the tireless curators behind brilliant sites such as 50 Watts, BibliOdyssey, Paleofuture, and How to Be a Retronaut, to name just a few of the Internet's treasure troves, we now have collections of archival material that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago.
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Mass Extinction Easier to Trigger Than Thought - 0 views

www.wired.com/...mass-extinction-methane longnow layscience
shared by anonymous on 21 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • The cataclysmic extinctions that scoured Earth 200 million years ago might have been easier to trigger than expected, with potentially troubling contemporary implications.
  • Rather than 600,000 years of volcanic activity choking Earth’s atmosphere with carbon dioxide, just a few thousand years apparently sufficed to raise ocean temperatures so potent greenhouse gases trapped in seafloor mud came bubbling up.
  • “It could happen again. It’s only the boundary conditions that we don’t know.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • In what scientists call the end-Triassic mass extinction, at least half of all living species simply disappear from the fossil record. The die-off didn’t merely cause ecological disruption. It was so sudden and profound that planetary chemical cycles went haywire for the next several million years.
  • The leading explanation for the extinction invokes extended, climate-altering volcanic activity caused by splitting continental plates, but earlier research by Ruhl suggested a more nuanced and jarring narrative.
  • “A small release of CO2 from volcanoes triggered a small change in the global climate, raising land and ocean temperatures. That led to the release of methane from the seafloor,” said Ruhl.
  • Scientists have raised the possibility that rising global temperatures could release trapped methane into the atmosphere, further raising temperatures and releasing more methane in a feedback loop of warming and planetary disruption. That’s apparently what happened during the end-Triassic extinction.
  • Exactly how much warming would be needed to start the loop anew, and how much methane would flow forth, are open questions. “We could potentially trigger a small increase in ocean temperatures, which triggers methane release,” said Ruhl. “But it’s difficult to quantify how much methane is in the ocean these days. Maybe we have less methane in seafloors now. Maybe we have more.”
  • anonymous on 21 Jul 11
     
    What a lovely headline! Anyway, humans could have an easier time doing stuff that could obliterate us. Viva evolution!
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Stress in the city - 0 views

www.labspaces.net/...Stress_in_the_city layscience urban
shared by anonymous on 22 Jun 11 - Cached
  • A new international study, which involved Douglas Mental Health University Institute researcher Jens Pruessner, is the first to show that two distinct brain regions that regulate emotion and stress are affected by city living.
  • "These findings suggest that different brain regions are sensitive to the experience of city living during different times across the lifespan," says Pruessner. "Future studies need to clarify the link between psychopathology and these affects in individuals with mental disorders.These findings contribute to our understanding of urban environmental risk for mental disorders and health in general. They further point to a new approach to interface social sciences, neurosciences and public policy to respond to the major health challenge of urbanization."
  • anonymous on 22 Jun 11
     
    "Being born and raised in a major urban area is associated with greater lifetime risk for anxiety and mood disorders."
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Misattribution of Arousal - 3 views

youarenotsosmart.com/...misattribution-of-arousal criticalthinking yanss emotions
shared by anonymous on 11 Jul 11 - Cached
  • In 1974, psychologists Art Aron and Donald Dutton hired a woman to stand in the middle of this suspension bridge. As men passed her on their way across, she asked them if they would be willing to fill out a questionnaire. At the end of the questions, she asked them to examine an illustration of a lady covering her face and then make up a back story to explain it.
  • The scientists knew the fear in the men’s bellies would be impossible to ignore, and they wanted to know how a brain soaking in anxiety juices would make sense of what just happened.
  • they had their assistant go through the same routine on a wide, sturdy, wooden bridge standing fixed just a few feet off of the ground.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • After running the experiment at both locations, they compared the results and found 50 percent of the men who got them digits on the dangerous suspension bridge picked up a phone and called looking for the lady of the canyon. Of the men questioned on the secure bridge, the percentage who came calling dropped to 12.5. That wasn’t the only significant difference. When they compared the stories the subjects made up about the illustration, they found the men on the scary bridge were almost twice as likely to come up with sexually suggestive narratives.
  • Arousal comes from deep inside the brain, in those primal regions of the autonomic nervous system where ingoing and outgoing signals are monitored and the glass over the big fight-or-flight button waits to be smashed.
  • Misattribution of arousal falls under the self-perception theory.
  • Arousal can fill up the spaces in your brain when you least expect it. It could be a rousing movie trailer or a plea for mercy from a distant person reaching out over YouTube. Like a coterie of prairie dogs standing alert as if living periscopes, your ancestors were built to pay attention when it mattered, but with cognition comes pattern recognition and all the silly ways you misinterpret your inputs.
  • The source of your emotional states is often difficult or impossible to detect. The time to pay attention can pass, or the details become lodged in a place underneath consciousness. In those instances you feel, but you know not why. When you find yourself in this situation you tend to lock onto a target, especially if there is another person who fits with the narrative you are about to spin. It feels good to assume you’ve discovered what is causing you to feel happy, to feel rejected, to feel angry or lovesick. It helps you move forward. Why question it?
  • The research into arousal says you are bad at explaining yourself to yourself, but it sheds light on why so many successful dates include roller-coasters, horror films and conversations over coffee.
  • There is a reason playful wrestling can lead to passionate kissing, why a great friend can turn a heaving cry into a belly laugh. There is a reason why great struggle brings you closer to friends, family and lovers. There is a reason why Rice Krispies commercials show moms teaching children how to make treats in crisp black-and-white while Israel Kamakawiwo’ole sings Somewhere Over the Rainbow. When you want to know why you feel the way you do but are denied the correct answer, you don’t stop searching. You settle on something – the person beside you, the product in front of you, the drug in your brain. You don’t always know the right answer, but when you are flirting over a latte don’t point it out.
  • anonymous on 11 Jul 11
     
    "The Misconception: You always know why you feel the way you feel. The Truth: You can experience emotional states without knowing why, even if you believe you can pinpoint the source."
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