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Benno Hansen

Heat, Drought Linked to Violence Worldwide - weather.com - 1 views

  • Worldwide, shifts in climate are strongly linked to human violence, researchers concluded after examining quantitative studies from the past 25 on climate and various forms of violence.
  • A global temperature rise of 2-degrees Celsius could increase the rate of intergroup conflicts, such as civil wars, by more than 50 percent in many parts of the world, the study's statistical analysis found.
  • studies that find that heat waves lead to more violent crime in U.S. cities, for example, indicate that humans are poorly equipped to deal with exposure to hotter temperatures
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  • In agricultural areas, where climate affects the economy, violence may increase because of weather-caused poor economic conditions.
Benno Hansen

The Economist explains: How might your choice of browser affect your job prospects? | T... - 0 views

  • applicants who have bothered to install new web browsers on their computers (such as Mozilla's Firefox or Google's Chrome) perform better and stay in their posts for 15% longer, on average, than those who use the default pre-installed browser that came with their machine (ie, Internet Explorer on a Windows PC and Safari on an Apple Mac)
  • applicants who belonged to one or two online social networks tended to stay in their jobs for longer than those who belonged to four or more social networks
Benno Hansen

Why Cities Keep Growing, Corporations And People Always Die, And Life Gets Faster | Con... - 0 views

  • you have to innovate faster and faster in order to avoid the collapse
  • The system will collapse, because eventually you would have to be making a major innovation, like you know, IT every six months. Well, that's completely crazy.
  • There's a theorem you can prove that says that if you demand continuous open growth, you have to have continuous cycles of innovation. Well, that's what people believe, and it's the way people have suggested that’s how you get out of the Malthusian paradox. This all agrees within itself but there is a huge catch.
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  • We have open-ended growth, increase in pace of life, and the threat of collapse because of the singularity. But there's a big catch about this innovation. Theory says, sure, you can get out of collapse by innovating, but you have to innovate faster and faster.
  • It's great on the one hand that you have this open ended growth. But if you kept going, of course, it doesn't make any sense. Eventually, you run out of resources anyway, but you would collapse
  • One of the bad things about open-ended growth, growing faster than exponentially, is that open-ended growth eventually leads to collapse. It leads to collapse mathematically because of something called finite times singularity.
Benno Hansen

The mathematics of being nice - life - 21 March 2011 - New Scientist - 1 views

  • direct reciprocity. This is when individuals have repeated interactions, so if I help you now, you may help me later
  • indirect reciprocity, which takes place in groups. If I help you, somebody else might see our interaction and conclude that I'm a helpful person, and help me later
  • cooperators survive in clusters. This is called spatial selection, and it plays an important role, not only for people but for bacteria, animals and plants
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  • group selection: it may be that our group of cooperators is better off than another group of defectors
  • kin selection, which can occur when you help a close relative
  • I think that most uses of punishment are very much for selfish interests, such as defending your position in the group. Punishment leads to retaliation and vendettas. It's very rare that punishment is used nobly.
Benno Hansen

Automated News Comes To Sports Coverage Via StatSheet - 0 views

  • We may no longer need the humans, at least for data-driven stories.
  • Every story on each site was written by a robot, or to put it more precisely, by StatSheet’s content algorithms. “The posts are completely auto-generated,” says founder Robbie Allen. “The only human involvement is with creating the algorithms that generate the posts.”
  • It has about 20 different types of articles that it generates, from season previews to game recaps. StatSheet might analyze 10,000 data points and 4,000 possible phrases to generate a single story.
Benno Hansen

Media Companies Must Become Trusted Data Hubs » Article » OWNI.eu, Digital Jo... - 0 views

  • Advertising and journalism do not complement each other the way they used to.
  • successful media companies of the future have to build an infrastructure that turns them into reliable data hubs, able to analyze even very large and complex datasets internally and to build stories on their insights
  • machine can assemble large portions of articles through structured data
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  • computers are getting ever closer to mastering the subtleties of human communication
  • Any event can be described by fundamental data: latitude, longitude, time and date and importance.
  • the fundamental role of journalism will remain the same: searching for truth, and demanding accountability of those in power
  • the majority of online journalists are stuck working with outdated or unimaginative tools
  • Trust, not information, is the scarce resource in today’s world. Trust is something that is hard to earn and easy to lose. And it is a core element of journalism
  • The trust market is still up for grabs. Most media players are still competing in the “attention market.”
  • fact collection will be organized rather than done by journalists
  • In the future, many journalists will resemble project managers, aggregating resources around platforms like Ushahidi rather than dashing adventurers
  • In an era where more and more users have a camera phone and a way to put that content online, the journalist becomes the one who’s best able to curate and validate material from the data deluge, not just adding to it. Crowdsourcing should allow media organizations to devote more resources to vetting information produced by others, and thereby gaining trust.
  • Many investigations will be led behind a computer as journalists organize a community of users and a team of developers to get stories out.
Benno Hansen

Observations: Physics of free kicks: The hidden advantage of long-distance soccer shots - 0 views

  • spinning balls suddenly change trajectory, from a smooth arc to a sharp inward curl
  • spinning balls follow a kind of circular arc as they slow from drag forces and are pushed from a linear path by the so-called Magnus effect
  • For a well-struck soccer ball, the researchers estimate, one might expect a gentle arc followed by a sharp hook at about 50 meters
Benno Hansen

Clive Thompson on Why We Should Learn the Language of Data | Magazine - 0 views

  • We live in a world where the thorniest policy issues increasingly boil down to arguments over what the data mean. If you don’t understand statistics, you don’t know what’s going on — and you can’t tell when you’re being lied to.
  • Activists propagate horror stories
  • correlation is not causation. And individual stories don’t prove anythin
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  • our inability to grasp statistics — and the mother of it all, probability — makes us believe stupid things
  • Statistics is the new grammar
Benno Hansen

Exclusive: How Google's Algorithm Rules the Web | Magazine - 1 views

  • Facebook launched an early attack with its implication that some people would rather get information from their friends than from an anonymous formula. Twitter’s ability to parse its constant stream of updates introduced the concept of real-time search, a way of tapping into the latest chatter and conversation as it unfolds. Yelp helps people find restaurants, dry cleaners, and babysitters by crowdsourcing the ratings.
  • Microsoft purchased Farecast — a Web site that tracks airline fares over time and uses the data to predict when ticket prices will rise or fall — and incorporated its findings into Bing’s results. Microsoft made similar acquisitions in the health, reference, and shopping sectors
  • Google uses signals to ensure that only the most relevant tweets find their way into the real-time stream. “We look at what’s retweeted, how many people follow the person, and whether the tweet is organic or a bot,”
Benno Hansen

The Canadian Press: Researchers suggest tall soccer players are more likely to be calle... - 0 views

  • "We found that on average the player who committed the foul is taller than the one who was the victim,"
  • Humans throughout evolution needed to be more afraid of bigger animals because bigger animals usually have more potential to harm us,"
Benno Hansen

Maths used to predict outcome of football match - 2 views

  • Sports commentators will often argue the importance of scoring the first goal and often suggest that a team improves its chances of winning considerably by scoring it.
  • calculating the probability of the first-goal team winning at discrete points in the match after the first goal is scored based on the number of minutes remaining in the game
  • Team X is playing team Y. Team X scores first and there are T minutes left in regulation time.
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  • goal scoring follows the law of statistics known as a Poisson distribution
  • From the first whistle, team X has a 50:50 chance of winning.
Benno Hansen

World Poultry - News: Chicken sounds indicate stress - 0 views

  • vocalisation patterns have been found to be different for stress due to handling and stress due to overcrowding. The analysis was carried out by digitally recording laying chickens' vocalisations under different types of stressful conditions, and then, after removing background noise, analysing the recordings using a modified version of the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) with voice recognition algorithms.
  • HMM has achieved an overall condition classification accuracy of 74%.
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