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POPSFor the first time, everyone can see the whole world "Google Earth has introduced 21 layers of data from various organizations that provide information about specific ocean sites." I find this collaborative work inspiring, in relation to how humanity can unite in creating a win win situation for all.
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POPS Iraq's Unspeakable Crime: Mothers Pimping Daughters While sexual violence has accompanied warfare for millennia and insecurity always provides opportunities for criminal elements to profit, what is happening in Iraq today reveals how far a once progressive country (relative to its neighbors) has regressed on the issue of women's rights and how ferociously the seams of a traditional Arab society that values female virginity have been ripped apart.
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POPSMusic Reduced to Beautiful Math "You can use these geometrical spaces to provide ways of visualizing musical pieces," Tymoczko told LiveScience. "These spaces give us a much better and comprehensive picture of the space of all possible chords."
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POPSMapping Kerouac: The Grammatical Artwork of Stefanie Posavec Posavec dissects every word, phrase, sentence, and subject of Kerouac's On the Road to invent new ways of looking at the familiar masterpiece. The diagrams make for beautiful art in their own right. (See source for high-res pictures.) In her structure analysis, each chapter explodes in a color-coded starburst of topical breakdowns. At a glance, you can see Kerouac's focus wander from the sketches of local life in the beginning, to depictions of work and travel in the middle, with women and the subject of love dominating the latter chapters. The comparative sentence diagrams are what really drew me in. It's fascinating to behold an entire literary work all at once on one page. What's more, Kerouac's casual prose style can be differentiated immediately from the stately, grandiose writing of Faulkner, not to mention the terse, claustrophobic style of Orwell's fiction. Literary reductionism at its most fun and beautiful.
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POPSDNA sample may be enough to build an image of your face These are being computerised with the gene mix indicating what the ratio will be between these various facial features. It allows the computer to build up an image of a face based only on the gene mix found in the DNA. He indicated that “maybe 500 facial markers and 500 ancestry markers” would be enough to build an accurate and complete face.
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POPSMinority Report is being materialized "The inventors of the technology claim the system can distinguish between people’s memories of events they witnessed and between deeds they committed" “As we enter more fully into the era of mapping and understanding the brain, society will face an increasing number of important ethical, legal and social issues raised by these new technologies,” Mr. Greely, the Stanford bioethicist, and his colleague Judy Illes wrote last year in the American Journal of Law & Medicine." Interesting article. Raises many questions; a) the easiest one is is it valid? why easiest because it can be one day answered, at least i assume so. b) if it is valid, should we use it? where is the line of privacy? should there be a line as such? i find it fundamentally challenging the human conceptual descriptions of what is self, identity, society and its relation. Fascinating. what do you think?
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POPSWere Ancient Viruses a Key to Human Evolution? These viral fragments are fossils that reside within each of us, carrying a record that goes back millions of years. Because they no longer seem to serve a purpose or cause harm, these remnants have often been referred to as “junk DNA.” Although many of these evolutionary relics still manage to generate proteins, scientists have never found one that functions properly in humans or that could make us sick. That is until Thierry Heidmann who runs the laboratory at the Institut Gustave Roussy, on the southern edge of Paris, brought one to life. Heidmann long suspected that if a retrovirus happens to infect a human sperm cell or egg, which is rare, and if that embryo survives—which is rarer still—the retrovirus could have the evolutionary power to influence humans as a species becoming part of the genetic blueprint, passed from mother to child, and from one generation to the next, much like a gene for eye color or asthma.
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POPS"Drained" oceans reveal epic landscapes ...Big Island of Hawaii is practically little when seen with its underwater flanks exposed. Measured from the seabed, the island's active volcano Mauna Loa is the world's tallest mountain--some 4,000 feet (1,200 meters) taller than Mount Everest. The Big Island was gradually thrust upward out of the Pacific, likely by a plume of lava deep beneath the seafloor. Those same slow forces look to be at work beneath a new volcano off the southeastern end of the Big Island, Loihi. Ten thousand or a hundred thousand years into the future, Loihi should emerge as the latest and hottest new Hawaiian island.
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POPS“How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci” " Like Edison, who built new innovations on top of previous inventions, innovative leaders never declare an invention “done,” Mr. Axelrod says. “Everything ultimately became the source of something new later,” he says. “It’s like the difference between a rich person and a wealthy person. A rich person has a lot of money and buys things. A wealthy person invests in things that make more money. It’s creating ongoing wealth out of your intellectual capital.”
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POPSWaht is Mind Mapping? bear with me: once you break the ingrained habit of linear note taking, you won’t look back. Benefits and Uses I think I already gave away the benefits of mind mapping and why mind maps work. Basically, mind mapping avoids dull, linear thinking, jogging your creativity and making note taking fun again. But what can we use mind maps for? * Note taking * Brainstorming (individually or in groups) * Problem solving * Studying and memorization * Planning * Researching and consolidating information from multiple sources * Presenting information * Gaining insight on complex subjects * Jogging your creativity It is hard to make justice to the number of uses mind maps can have – the truth is that they can help clarify your thinking in pretty much anything, in many different contexts: personal, family, educational or business. Planning you day or planning your life, summarizing a book, launching a project, planning and creating presentatio
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POPSA Robot that Navigates Like a Person The machine is controlled by algorithms designed to mimic different parts of the human visual system. Rather than capturing and mapping its surroundings over and over in order to plan its route--the way most robots do--the European machine uses a simulated neural network to update its position relative to the environment, continually adjusting to each new input. This mimics human visual processing and movement planning.
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POPSNew Scifi Story About How Google Achieves Consciousness rom the story: When Ed examined the traffic, he realized that Google was doing more than mapping the digital universe. Google doesn't merely link or point to data. It moves data around. Data that are associated frequently by search requests are locally replicated—establishing physical proximity, in the real universe, that is manifested computationally as proximity in time. Google was more than a map. Google was becoming something else.
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POPSWhat Do Your Genes Say About You? The Future of Personal Genomics The company 23andMe announced its DNA testing service last month in San Diego. You might think such a comprehensive analysis would costs thousands, but the process is actually relatively affordable. For less than $1,000 customers are able to learn virtually everything science currently knows about their biological code. For those wary of needles, you’ll be comforted to know that the DNA is retrieved conveniently and painlessly from a home mail-in saliva test kit.
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POPSObsessive Compulsive Disorder: brain research Potentially a contribution to understanding brain disorders. I very much like the scientists' scientific caveats, their 'mays' and 'appears to be"s. Correlation studies need to be contextualised in conceptual mapping.
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POPSHow the Brain Maps Symbols to Numbers "Humans learn to use symbols as mental tools during childhood; prior to the utilization of signs as symbols, long-term associations between initially meaningless shapes and semantic categories must inevitably be established,"
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