We are going to crack this thing really soon. Hold on tight. Psychology World originally shared this post: The human brain’s connections turn out to be a an orderly 3D grid structure with no diagonals. 2D sheets of parallel fibers cross at right angles — ” like the warp and weft of a fabric.” The first pictures from the most powerful brain scanner of its kind reveal an “astonishingly simple architecture.” This diffusion spectrum image of a whole human brain came from the new Connectom scanner, part of the NIH’s Human Connectome Project.This video has NO audio.

Bruno Gonçalves originally shared this post: Competition among memes in a world with limited attention : Scientific Reports : Nature Publishing Group Competition among memes in a world with limited attention : Scientific Reports : Nature Publishing Group The wide adoption of social media has increased the competition among ideas for our finite attention. We employ a parsimonious agent-based model to study whether such a competition may affect the popu…

KQED SCIENCE originally shared this post: Man and Machine “The International Space Station’s humanoid robot helper, Robonaut 2, reaches out to touch a gloved astronaut hand in a photo that pays tribute to Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling painting.” Read more here: http://www.livescience.com/19335-robonaut-photo-michelangelo-sistine-chapel.html

Apparently I spent all morning arguing with the GM of a $1+ billion international company about how capitalism is obsolete. Lol internet. I think I did a good enough job, when you take into account that I’m trying to be on my best behavior in G+. Either way, it is an interesting discussion that I’d like to save for future reference, so I’m linking it here. Any contributions you have, here or there, would be appreciated immensely. https://plus.google.com/u/0/115633934578783827271/posts/fzQHDwgtLSE Gregory Esau – Google+ – Say goodbye to Microsoft Sharepoint, GoTo Meeting & WebEx… Say goodbye to Microsoft Sharepoint, GoTo Meeting & WebEx — Google+ Hangout Apps Come Out Of Hiding — http://ow.ly/9XbtZ It’s interesting because…

John Kellden originally shared this post: Frameworks, part 13: Social Proxy Babble “Babble (1997-2001) was a pioneering persistent chat system that used a visualization to show the presence and involvement of participants in a conversation; it was designed, implemented, deployed and studied over about four years.” The dynamics of sensemaking http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue4/gasson.html “While many studies focus on cooperation in computer-mediated work groups, these studies often focus on the role of technology in supporting some unexplored construct of collaboration. This article attempts to flesh out that construct, by providing rich insights into how members of a group that spans various professional communities of practice collaborate in jointly constructing a socio-technical artifact—a knowledge management system—within its context of application.” Social Computing Group – Babble People and projects at IBM Research

David Bikard originally shared this post: http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/05/ideas-bank/scientists-should-be-publishing-on-wikipedia Alex Bateman: Why scientists should be publishing on Wikipedia (Wired UK) If someone had told me ten years ago that there would be a single website that the public would visit for information about science and technology, I would have laughed at them

Jeff Sayre originally shared this post: What Small Eyes You Have! An team of researchers are working on building an in vivo mirco-robot that would scour the human body, searching out diseases and monitoring the health of its host. From the article: Cyberplasm will be designed to mimic key functions of the sea lamprey, a creature found mainly in the Atlantic Ocean. It is believed this approach will enable the micro-robot to be extremely sensitive and responsive to the environment it is put into. Future uses could include the ability to swim unobtrusively through the human body to detect a whole range of diseases. #SyntheticBiology #robotics #Cyberplasm #cybernetics #SynapticWeb ‘Living’ micro-robot could detect diseases in humans A tiny prototype robot that functions like a living creature is being developed which one day could be safely used to pinpoint diseases within the human body. Called ‘Cyberplasm’, it will combine adva…

The Standing Ovation Problem “The basic SOP can be stated as: A brilliant economics lecture ends and the audience begins to applaud. The applause builds and tentatively, a few audience members may or may not decide to stand. Does a standing ovation ensue or does the enthusiasm fizzle? Inspired by the seminal work of Schelling (1978), the SOP possesses sucient structure to generate nontrivial dynamics without imposing too many a priori modeling constraints. Like Schelling’s work, it focuses on the macro-behavior that emerges from micro-motives, and relies on models that emphasize agents driven by simple behavioral algorithms placed in interesting spatial contexts. Though ostensibly simple, the social dynamics responsible for a standing ovation are complex. As the performance ends, each audience member must decide whether or not to stand. Of course, if the decision to stand is simply a personal choice based on the individual’s own assessment of the worth of the performance, the problem becomes trivial. However, people do not stand solely based upon their own impressions of the performance. A seated audience member surrounded by people standing might be enticed to stand, even if he hated the performance. This behavioral mimicry could be strategic (the agents wants to send the right signal to the lecturer), informational (maybe the lecture was better than he thought), or conformal (he stands so as to not feel awkward). Regardless of the source of these peer effects, they set the stage (so to speak) for interesting dynamic behavior.” Miller, John, and Scott E. Page (2004) Complexity, Vol. 9, No. 5, May/June http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/StandingOvation.MillerPage.pdf http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/StandingOvation.MillerPage.pdf

I wrote this in the comment of the original thread below. I have no idea if I’m right, but I thought I’m going to save it for posterity (vanity) anyway. For what it’s worth, nothing like this is mentioned in the linked article in Nature. __ If the biological analog of quantum theory is the theory of evolution, then the biological analog of the Higgs boson is the neural correlate of the meme. The theory of evolution is highly explanatory, and predicts a wide range of observed phenomena. It doesn’t give you a set of linear equations, but it does describe a set of complex dynamics that allows for a detailed study of the very mechanisms of life. Like the standard model, some of these mechanisms are well studied and understood. The biological equivalent of the electrons are the genes: the most familiar and well understood mechanisms predicted by the theory. At the moment, we understand electrons far better than we understand genes– that is, we can do more with them. But the last few decades have seen incredible advances in genetic engineering, and we are only becoming more confident in our grasp. The theory of evolution also has natural and obvious applications in the areas of psychology and sociology, but applying the theory in these areas is like walking through a minefield, and there are few places where we can do so with any confidence. The lack of confidence about the specifics, however, betrays a much deeper confidence in the generalities: the same biological models that explain the organization of other biological systems should likewise explain the organization of both brains and networks of brains. Both phenomena are pervasive biological phenomena, but we lack the mechanism, the “fundamental particle”, to unify their treatment with the genetic models we’ve been […]

“He scalpels out little segments freehand, remarking: ‘That’s your fear and aggression centre …'” Psychology World originally shared this post: A human brain dissection – in pictures By Zoe Williams, +The Guardian Photo Credit: Graeme Robertson Observe the process, step by step, as professor Steve Gentleman dissects a brain at the Brain Bank. It may be difficult to look at, but the research done here helps scientists to learn more about little-understood and devastating conditions from Parkinson’s disease to Alzheimer’s and multiple sclerosis Source: http://goo.gl/QVijz

Ciro Villa originally shared this post: …”The recently-launched Runmycode has thrown another bridge across these divides, a bridge that allows scientists and academics in the fields of economics and business to test the logic of an argument by testing the code that expresses it. A user can employ Runmycode for free to automatically create a website built around a given professional paper in between 15 and 45 minutes. The central feature of the resultant site is a cloud-based data simulator, developed in J2EE, that allows a user to test the paper’s assertions. This simulator allows readers, especially other scientists and those for whom the paper may prove the most useful, to test the arguments in the paper with their own data set.”… Runmycode lets scientists crowdsource code testing A new service removes a little more of the barrier between academics and the public by automatically producing a companion website for each paper researchers author. Creators hope it will invite criti…

John Baez originally shared this post: +Mike Stay pointed out Ron Eglash’s webpage on fractal themes in African architecture: http://homepages.rpi.edu/~eglash/eglash.dir/afractal/afarch.htm The most convincing example is an aerial photo of a Ba-ila village. Here’s a sketch based on that photo.