Science and technology links
About the dangers of choosing an email address when you are young and then keeping them.
Nice short presentation of how the “loudness wars” and compression is taking the punch out of modern musical recordings.
Worldmap of remoteness.
Nice chart of gravity wells in the solar system.
Prof. Gross on the state of physics and other matters.
Y2K 10 years after. Via claidheamhmor. Y2K fear as evidencing the taste for the apocalyptic.
A website allows creators of malware to correct their work.
About cultural and economic differences in cell phone usage: which appears to be converging due to the characteristics of the technology.
A good year for natural disasters:
Munich Re said natural catastrophes took many fewer lives and caused much less damage on average in 2009 than in the previous decade.
The notion of a heroin drug overdose may be misleading. Study finds that changes in heroin price affect patterns of drug use.
Mexico has undergone the demographic transition to low fertility.
About the halo effect around helicopters at night.
MIT uses incentives and the internet to win a $40,000 prize in discovering 10 red balloons released around the US:
The winning researchers, who specialize in studying human interactions that emerge from computer networks, set up a Web site asking people to join their team. They relied on visitors to the Web site to invite their friends. They also sent e-mail messages inviting people to participate and sent a small number of advertisements to mobile phones.
They said that they would dole out the prize money both to chains of individuals who referred people who had correct information on the balloons’ locations and to charities. They described their method as a “recursive incentive structure.”
Having fun with the things scientists have said in the pages of the NYT over the decades. More fun. Part three. Part four. Part five. Part six.
2007 report on computer game usage in Oz.
Studying how science actually works:
The problem with science, then, isn’t that most experiments fail - it’s that most failures are ignored. …
Not surprisingly, undergraduates without a physics background disagreed with Galileo. (Intuitively, we’re all Aristotelians.) …
However, when it comes to noticing anomalies, an efficient prefrontal cortex can actually be a serious liability. …
But this research raises an obvious question: If humans - scientists included - are apt to cling to their beliefs, why is science so successful? How do our theories ever change? How do we learn to reinterpret a failure so we can see the answer? …
Interestingly, the most important element of the lab meeting wasn’t the presentation - it was the debate that followed. Dunbar observed that the skeptical (and sometimes heated) questions asked during a group session frequently triggered breakthroughs, as the scientists were forced to reconsider data they’d previously ignored. The new theory was a product of spontaneous conversation, not solitude; a single bracing query was enough to turn scientists into temporary outsiders, able to look anew at their own work.
Nice short presentation of how the “loudness wars” and compression is taking the punch out of modern musical recordings.
Worldmap of remoteness.
Nice chart of gravity wells in the solar system.
Prof. Gross on the state of physics and other matters.
Y2K 10 years after. Via claidheamhmor. Y2K fear as evidencing the taste for the apocalyptic.
A website allows creators of malware to correct their work.
About cultural and economic differences in cell phone usage: which appears to be converging due to the characteristics of the technology.
A good year for natural disasters:
Munich Re said natural catastrophes took many fewer lives and caused much less damage on average in 2009 than in the previous decade.
The notion of a heroin drug overdose may be misleading. Study finds that changes in heroin price affect patterns of drug use.
Mexico has undergone the demographic transition to low fertility.
About the halo effect around helicopters at night.
MIT uses incentives and the internet to win a $40,000 prize in discovering 10 red balloons released around the US:
The winning researchers, who specialize in studying human interactions that emerge from computer networks, set up a Web site asking people to join their team. They relied on visitors to the Web site to invite their friends. They also sent e-mail messages inviting people to participate and sent a small number of advertisements to mobile phones.
They said that they would dole out the prize money both to chains of individuals who referred people who had correct information on the balloons’ locations and to charities. They described their method as a “recursive incentive structure.”
Having fun with the things scientists have said in the pages of the NYT over the decades. More fun. Part three. Part four. Part five. Part six.
2007 report on computer game usage in Oz.
Studying how science actually works:
The problem with science, then, isn’t that most experiments fail - it’s that most failures are ignored. …
Not surprisingly, undergraduates without a physics background disagreed with Galileo. (Intuitively, we’re all Aristotelians.) …
However, when it comes to noticing anomalies, an efficient prefrontal cortex can actually be a serious liability. …
But this research raises an obvious question: If humans - scientists included - are apt to cling to their beliefs, why is science so successful? How do our theories ever change? How do we learn to reinterpret a failure so we can see the answer? …
Interestingly, the most important element of the lab meeting wasn’t the presentation - it was the debate that followed. Dunbar observed that the skeptical (and sometimes heated) questions asked during a group session frequently triggered breakthroughs, as the scientists were forced to reconsider data they’d previously ignored. The new theory was a product of spontaneous conversation, not solitude; a single bracing query was enough to turn scientists into temporary outsiders, able to look anew at their own work.