Oh, is THAT why we haven't yet coalesced into a tiny ball of infinitely dense matter awaiting the next bang! Did you hear they're planning the next faster-than-light experiment for December 21, 2012?
I got to chat with Luis von Ahn, co-creator of the Captcha and reCaptcha, and it turns out he's a surprisingly idealistic guy. Taking inspiration from people in gyms pedaling and going nowhere, he hoped to actually *do* something with the brainpower needed to solve a reCaptcha (he said something along the lines of, "actually your brain is doing a pretty amazing thing -- translating an image to text.") Maybe digitizing the archives of the New York Times and ancient manuscripts isn't world hunger or world peace, but it's pretty damn cool. And as you probably know, that's what you're helping to do every time you translate a word in a reCaptcha box.
Sorry all, I meant to leave this comment on the 140 byte Tetris post. Please disregard. Atrocities to Iran programmers have very little to do with sporks.
It looks as if this study shows HIT can take someone with a current grade D and bring them up to a C or C+. I wonder if the same benefits will hold for people already at a B- hoping to make it to B+? Specifically, I wonder if 20 minutes of HIT is best turned into 25 minutes of HIT, or if at a certain base fitness level the paradigm flips back to needing longer, more endurance-based exercise? Hmm...
This seminal study in 1977 showed that kids who immerse themselves in the storylines of fantasy play outperform kids who play "real" games (like house or firefighters), kids who read and discuss fantasy, and kids who read and discuss "real" stories. I just talked to one of the co-authors, David Dixon, who now teaches at Missouri State, and he guessed that his study's results had something to do with helping kids both stretch their narrative imaginations and to disentangle the concepts "thought" from "action" (In young kids, thinking IS doing). So what I wonder is this: do video games WITHOUT storylines encourage kids to formulate their own? Or do games without storylines lose this narrative aspect altogether?
I got to interview the Salk Institute's Ronald Evans about exercise, training, and fitness -- he's a cell biologist and looks at how drugs might mimic the *signals* of exercise without a person actually exercising. In fact, there's a good candidate: the drug AICAR does just this, making cells believe they've exercised without all the, you know, sweating and such. The body ramps up its burn rate and you lose weight and gain muscle. Unfortunately, Evans says not to look for AICAR anytime soon -- it's generic and injectible. Any company that puts $100m into development would face immediate market competition. And the market doesn't want to inject. It's a great drug -- but we'll never see it.
Similarly, sites web-based brain-training services like Lumosity are capturing and keeping data that describes your cognitive function. First, this is very cool: it may provide the data points researchers need to discover once and for all whether training IQ is, in fact, possible (and if so, how to do it). And second, this is very scary: Woe be unto the users if the databse is hacked, opened, or otherwise sprung. You think carrying a height/weight ratio with you from a dating site is disturbing? What about carrying your IQ or ability to learn? Simply: yikes.
This is spectacular. And it reminds me of researchers Cindy Meston and David Buss' 237 reasons for sex. They similarly tried to semantically define why people have sex and along those lines interviewed thousands of undergrads. The results? The stereotype that men have sex for pleasure while women have sex for love is unfounded. Also, some great answers like one woman saying, "I'd rather spend five minutes having sex with him than spend five days listening to him whine about how horny he is." Good stuff.
A country recently named a 2012 Top Cock-Blocker of Middle Eastern Democracy, is seeking a Public Relations Specialist to communicate to its internal, external, and exiled audiences. The position will be responsible for connecting with our 141,750,000+ domestic "employees", introducing new employees and interns to our country's unique culture, expanding its social networking reach, maintaining the corporate website, event planning, cultivating community relationships, responding to media inquiries, writing and disseminating press releases, coaching our subsidiaries on their individual PR needs, crushing dissent, and mentoring an intern.
The ideal candidate is self-directed and self-motivated, resourceful, tactful, and enjoys kicking puppies. You must be a persuasive writer and speaker. Your success will be measured by your creativity and your ability to ruin the lives of dissenters and their extended families with little to no supervision. A college degree plus five years or more experience in a corporate PR or Spanish Inquisitional environment is required.
Please submit a brief writing sample with your resume and your soul to PR@Putin.com. Salary commensurate with experience.
With Swiss-watch timing, I just got an email from the Boulder, CO school district informing me that we didn't lottery into any of our three open-enrollment choices. Certainly there has to be a better way? That said, I really can't think of one. Other than homogenizing school quality -- meaning no school would be any "better" or "worse" than another, is there a fair way to allocate kids among schools? I guess one way would be to further "theme" elementary schools -- one would prioritize art, another math, another sports, etc. so that parents would choose schools according to their very personal definitions of "good" and "bad", thus perhaps getting more kids placed in schools their parents see as good? There have got to be better ideas than that half-brained brainstorm, right?
Now, all I can say is...yikes!
You're probably right that S/T ratio matters on a classroom-to-classroom comparison basis -- look, for example, at the ability to pull a kid aside for extra help while others are working independently. But are SCHOOLS with overall low S/T ratios necessarily better? I wonder if there aren't possible negative reasons for low S/T ratios (for example, an especially high percentage of kids requiring resource room work), that could in some cases make low S/T ratio a predictor of a less-good school?
This is something I wonder about almost every day: are kids REALLY better off when parents help with homework? It's certainly my bent, but then I wonder if my kids wouldn't be better off figuring their work out on their own. I don't know the answer -- anyone? I do the same thing with Legos -- we just built the Millennium Falcon and I know Leif wouldn't have been able to do it on his own. But would he have been better off in the long run doing a less complex kid, independently, and then building toward the Falcon?
I would agree completely if it weren't for this: despite the fact that I write about the science of education and my wife is a former spectacular teacher, our kids learn better from teachers other than us. For example, we started skiing this year -- my wife and I had our 5yo in a ski harness. Two lessons later with the "Eldorables" program and he's snowplowing independently like a bowling ball on stilts. The same is true of writing -- my wife and I would set up spectacularly fun writing and drawing projects that wouldn't go anywhere -- then in kindergarten, Leif loves the basic assignments they give. Of course we love reading and playing card games with the kids, but in terms of education, I think the culture of school promotes learning in a way we can't mimic at home.
Okay, so if I'm being honest, school quality is only one factor among many in our school choice conundrum. In addition, we're weighing the desire to seat our kids in the community of our neighborhood school along with the kids we see in our 'burb everyday. And then there's the commute. And potential tuition at privates. And much, much more. With, like 1000 true variables in addition to education quality, how oh how can parent's make a rational choice? Er....
Kudos to your wife. My wife spent a year as a grant-funded middle school literacy specialist in Novato, CA and got massacred -- she felt like she couldn't meet her students' needs in the classroom and now just finished her PhD in clinical psychology, thinking this might be a better in-road into the problem. Cheers.
I got to interview a couple of the authors on this study -- Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick -- for my book, Brain Trust. In fact, online dating is only a piece of their exploration into romantic interactions. They've got an awesome paper out titled Smooth Operating: A Structural Analysis of Social Behavior in which they pick apart the words, actions and mindsets that create "smooth" initial romantic encounters. (One finding: you shouldn't be too passive or too aggressive in the way you steer conversation topics.) They also looked at speed dating , finding among other things that people who rate everyone highly are themselves rated low (liking everyone comes off as desperate), and that the sex that sits is more liked than the sex that rotates. Ack! If only I'd known this in middle school!
In addition to crowdsourcing accessibility, what about taking suggestions for election mechanics themselves? Our winner-take-all elections effectively squish third party candidates -- a vote for anything but Dem/Rep is wasted, so why do it except in symbolic protest? Not so in ranked elections:
http://www.economist.com/node/21533435. Or what about allowing voters to split, like, 10 "preference points" across candidates as they see fit?
You think 3D printing in titanium is crazy -- check out the work of researchers Atala and Forgacs, who are using what's effectively a dot-matrix printer to spew "bio-ink" onto "bio-paper". The bio ink is a mixture of a patient's stem cells and the paper is a collagen lattice that degrades over time, allowing the ink to grow through it. By printing 2D images on a stack of paper, these 2D images combine to form a 3D shape. They're talking about printing organs -- like bioprinting a heart. Sweet.
I heard on NPR the other day a story about Roger Angel, U. Arizona mirror guru, who's making 27-footers for installation in Chile by, I think it was, 2020. The amazing part is casting to that accuracy -- without exact uniformity. These 27-foot mirrors have to focus slightly off-center. Here's the transcript:
http://m.npr.org/news/Science/145837380
Yes! In many cancers a whole "panel" of biomarkers are affected -- researchers are dialing in the algorithms that recognize these biomarker signatures of disease. For example, maybe one biomarker isn't predictive, but in combination with 5, 15, or 100 others, the panel as a whole becomes predictive. An example is Dan Thoedorescu's COXEN panel, which looks for a host of biomarkers to predict bladder cancer: http://www.ucdenver.edu/academics/colleges/medicalschool/departments/Pathology/academicprograms/cancerbiology/Pages/theodorescu_canbio.aspx
Researchers are even using gold nanoparticles to detect biomarkers in exhaled breath, to predict lung cancer. The tech's not quite there yet, but soon you might be able to breathe into a bag at the grocery store and it would screen your breath for the signatures of lung cancer.
Slashdot Mirror
Hopefully sketchers will be more accurate than hummers or whistlers -- a la Midomi.com. But I doubt it -- can't wait to see if this survives beta.
Oh, is THAT why we haven't yet coalesced into a tiny ball of infinitely dense matter awaiting the next bang! Did you hear they're planning the next faster-than-light experiment for December 21, 2012?
I got to chat with Luis von Ahn, co-creator of the Captcha and reCaptcha, and it turns out he's a surprisingly idealistic guy. Taking inspiration from people in gyms pedaling and going nowhere, he hoped to actually *do* something with the brainpower needed to solve a reCaptcha (he said something along the lines of, "actually your brain is doing a pretty amazing thing -- translating an image to text.") Maybe digitizing the archives of the New York Times and ancient manuscripts isn't world hunger or world peace, but it's pretty damn cool. And as you probably know, that's what you're helping to do every time you translate a word in a reCaptcha box.
Wow, that's actually kind of beautiful -- with the same beauty as a good mathematical proof or Man's most efficient invention: the spork.
Sorry all, I meant to leave this comment on the 140 byte Tetris post. Please disregard. Atrocities to Iran programmers have very little to do with sporks.
Wow, that's actually kind of beautiful -- with the same beauty as a good mathematical proof or Man's most efficient invention: the spork.
Has everyone seen MacArthur winner and MIT prof Erik Demaine's origami? Really, a collection of some of the most brilliant things I've ever seen.
It looks as if this study shows HIT can take someone with a current grade D and bring them up to a C or C+. I wonder if the same benefits will hold for people already at a B- hoping to make it to B+? Specifically, I wonder if 20 minutes of HIT is best turned into 25 minutes of HIT, or if at a certain base fitness level the paradigm flips back to needing longer, more endurance-based exercise? Hmm...
This seminal study in 1977 showed that kids who immerse themselves in the storylines of fantasy play outperform kids who play "real" games (like house or firefighters), kids who read and discuss fantasy, and kids who read and discuss "real" stories. I just talked to one of the co-authors, David Dixon, who now teaches at Missouri State, and he guessed that his study's results had something to do with helping kids both stretch their narrative imaginations and to disentangle the concepts "thought" from "action" (In young kids, thinking IS doing). So what I wonder is this: do video games WITHOUT storylines encourage kids to formulate their own? Or do games without storylines lose this narrative aspect altogether?
I got to interview the Salk Institute's Ronald Evans about exercise, training, and fitness -- he's a cell biologist and looks at how drugs might mimic the *signals* of exercise without a person actually exercising. In fact, there's a good candidate: the drug AICAR does just this, making cells believe they've exercised without all the, you know, sweating and such. The body ramps up its burn rate and you lose weight and gain muscle. Unfortunately, Evans says not to look for AICAR anytime soon -- it's generic and injectible. Any company that puts $100m into development would face immediate market competition. And the market doesn't want to inject. It's a great drug -- but we'll never see it.
Similarly, sites web-based brain-training services like Lumosity are capturing and keeping data that describes your cognitive function. First, this is very cool: it may provide the data points researchers need to discover once and for all whether training IQ is, in fact, possible (and if so, how to do it). And second, this is very scary: Woe be unto the users if the databse is hacked, opened, or otherwise sprung. You think carrying a height/weight ratio with you from a dating site is disturbing? What about carrying your IQ or ability to learn? Simply: yikes.
This is spectacular. And it reminds me of researchers Cindy Meston and David Buss' 237 reasons for sex. They similarly tried to semantically define why people have sex and along those lines interviewed thousands of undergrads. The results? The stereotype that men have sex for pleasure while women have sex for love is unfounded. Also, some great answers like one woman saying, "I'd rather spend five minutes having sex with him than spend five days listening to him whine about how horny he is." Good stuff.
True that. Military coup installed puppet governments...in the name of democracy!
A country recently named a 2012 Top Cock-Blocker of Middle Eastern Democracy, is seeking a Public Relations Specialist to communicate to its internal, external, and exiled audiences. The position will be responsible for connecting with our 141,750,000+ domestic "employees", introducing new employees and interns to our country's unique culture, expanding its social networking reach, maintaining the corporate website, event planning, cultivating community relationships, responding to media inquiries, writing and disseminating press releases, coaching our subsidiaries on their individual PR needs, crushing dissent, and mentoring an intern. The ideal candidate is self-directed and self-motivated, resourceful, tactful, and enjoys kicking puppies. You must be a persuasive writer and speaker. Your success will be measured by your creativity and your ability to ruin the lives of dissenters and their extended families with little to no supervision. A college degree plus five years or more experience in a corporate PR or Spanish Inquisitional environment is required. Please submit a brief writing sample with your resume and your soul to PR@Putin.com. Salary commensurate with experience.
With Swiss-watch timing, I just got an email from the Boulder, CO school district informing me that we didn't lottery into any of our three open-enrollment choices. Certainly there has to be a better way? That said, I really can't think of one. Other than homogenizing school quality -- meaning no school would be any "better" or "worse" than another, is there a fair way to allocate kids among schools?
I guess one way would be to further "theme" elementary schools -- one would prioritize art, another math, another sports, etc. so that parents would choose schools according to their very personal definitions of "good" and "bad", thus perhaps getting more kids placed in schools their parents see as good? There have got to be better ideas than that half-brained brainstorm, right?
Now, all I can say is...yikes!
You're probably right that S/T ratio matters on a classroom-to-classroom comparison basis -- look, for example, at the ability to pull a kid aside for extra help while others are working independently. But are SCHOOLS with overall low S/T ratios necessarily better? I wonder if there aren't possible negative reasons for low S/T ratios (for example, an especially high percentage of kids requiring resource room work), that could in some cases make low S/T ratio a predictor of a less-good school?
This is something I wonder about almost every day: are kids REALLY better off when parents help with homework? It's certainly my bent, but then I wonder if my kids wouldn't be better off figuring their work out on their own. I don't know the answer -- anyone? I do the same thing with Legos -- we just built the Millennium Falcon and I know Leif wouldn't have been able to do it on his own. But would he have been better off in the long run doing a less complex kid, independently, and then building toward the Falcon?
I would agree completely if it weren't for this: despite the fact that I write about the science of education and my wife is a former spectacular teacher, our kids learn better from teachers other than us. For example, we started skiing this year -- my wife and I had our 5yo in a ski harness. Two lessons later with the "Eldorables" program and he's snowplowing independently like a bowling ball on stilts. The same is true of writing -- my wife and I would set up spectacularly fun writing and drawing projects that wouldn't go anywhere -- then in kindergarten, Leif loves the basic assignments they give. Of course we love reading and playing card games with the kids, but in terms of education, I think the culture of school promotes learning in a way we can't mimic at home.
Okay, so if I'm being honest, school quality is only one factor among many in our school choice conundrum. In addition, we're weighing the desire to seat our kids in the community of our neighborhood school along with the kids we see in our 'burb everyday. And then there's the commute. And potential tuition at privates. And much, much more. With, like 1000 true variables in addition to education quality, how oh how can parent's make a rational choice? Er....
Kudos to your wife. My wife spent a year as a grant-funded middle school literacy specialist in Novato, CA and got massacred -- she felt like she couldn't meet her students' needs in the classroom and now just finished her PhD in clinical psychology, thinking this might be a better in-road into the problem. Cheers.
I got to interview a couple of the authors on this study -- Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick -- for my book, Brain Trust. In fact, online dating is only a piece of their exploration into romantic interactions. They've got an awesome paper out titled Smooth Operating: A Structural Analysis of Social Behavior in which they pick apart the words, actions and mindsets that create "smooth" initial romantic encounters. (One finding: you shouldn't be too passive or too aggressive in the way you steer conversation topics.) They also looked at speed dating , finding among other things that people who rate everyone highly are themselves rated low (liking everyone comes off as desperate), and that the sex that sits is more liked than the sex that rotates. Ack! If only I'd known this in middle school!
In addition to crowdsourcing accessibility, what about taking suggestions for election mechanics themselves? Our winner-take-all elections effectively squish third party candidates -- a vote for anything but Dem/Rep is wasted, so why do it except in symbolic protest? Not so in ranked elections: http://www.economist.com/node/21533435. Or what about allowing voters to split, like, 10 "preference points" across candidates as they see fit?
You think 3D printing in titanium is crazy -- check out the work of researchers Atala and Forgacs, who are using what's effectively a dot-matrix printer to spew "bio-ink" onto "bio-paper". The bio ink is a mixture of a patient's stem cells and the paper is a collagen lattice that degrades over time, allowing the ink to grow through it. By printing 2D images on a stack of paper, these 2D images combine to form a 3D shape. They're talking about printing organs -- like bioprinting a heart. Sweet.
I heard on NPR the other day a story about Roger Angel, U. Arizona mirror guru, who's making 27-footers for installation in Chile by, I think it was, 2020. The amazing part is casting to that accuracy -- without exact uniformity. These 27-foot mirrors have to focus slightly off-center. Here's the transcript: http://m.npr.org/news/Science/145837380
Yes! In many cancers a whole "panel" of biomarkers are affected -- researchers are dialing in the algorithms that recognize these biomarker signatures of disease. For example, maybe one biomarker isn't predictive, but in combination with 5, 15, or 100 others, the panel as a whole becomes predictive. An example is Dan Thoedorescu's COXEN panel, which looks for a host of biomarkers to predict bladder cancer: http://www.ucdenver.edu/academics/colleges/medicalschool/departments/Pathology/academicprograms/cancerbiology/Pages/theodorescu_canbio.aspx Researchers are even using gold nanoparticles to detect biomarkers in exhaled breath, to predict lung cancer. The tech's not quite there yet, but soon you might be able to breathe into a bag at the grocery store and it would screen your breath for the signatures of lung cancer.