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"Click through to see some examples of exactly what $787 billion could buy, and then vote at the end on what you would spend the money on."
links for 2009-02-10
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"Welcome to the UFO Series Home Page, devoted to the 1970 British science fiction television series UFO, created by Gerry & Sylvia Anderson and starring Ed Bishop as Commander Straker "
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"I.Q. matters, but Heckman points to equally important traits that start and then build from those early years: motivation levels, emotional stability, self-control and sociability. He uses common sense to intuit what these traits are, but on this subject economists have a lot to learn from developmental psychologists. "
Talk about real-time search
There’s been some buzz around the next phase of search being “real-time”. Read Write Web wrote two articles on instances where Google Search failed to connected to the sought-after info, such as “Gmail down” or the river landing in NYC. While I have been telling folks that 2009 is the year we have a serious Google competitor in search, Jonathan Borthwick lays out the reasoning and fingers real-time search as the challenge for Google.
Gerry Cambell has a nice chart that puts it more prosaically. I like his axes of expressed vs considered and delayed vs instantaneous content. That lays out a spread of types of content out there that one may look for or follow. He sees real-time search of expressed and instantaneous content more in line with how we live our lives and navigate a sea of information.
Yes, I think this is one aspect of where search needs to go, but I am not sure it’s the only piece. Trending and sentiment analysis, for sure, are much better when using expressed and instantaneous info, indeed, I am constantly looking for a tool that can help me with that.
But I feel there are other aspects that need to be fed in. For example, I think there will be a touch of semantic mining to add value to this real-time search. And I think, at some level, the search needs to know who is searching and fold in relevance that way.
Current search seems to miss the semantics and context and personal aspects of the query, aspects that will increase the value of the results.
Furthermore, I do think that while the linear nature of search, and I expect, real-time search, is not ideal, it will still dominate, since it’s easier to build upon an expected mode of interaction and data scanning than to build some fancy (and theoretically more useful) interface to the query results (or at least, that’s one area that I am cautious of pushing for innovation).
As a parting thought, this push for real-time search, I feel, has come from the regular use of live streams of info, live streams that are now overwhelming us and for which we need, you guessed it, new filters. So, I do think, at some level, we’ll have better real-time search tools, if only to allow us to get a good sense of what’s happening in our many incoming lifestreams.
Image from Gerry Cambell
links for 2009-02-08
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Very good story re: simplification of disease genetics.
"The reason for this disappointing outcome, in his view, is that natural selection has been far more efficient than many researchers expected at screening out disease-causing variants. The common disease/common variant idea is largely wrong. What has happened is that a multitude of rare variants lie at the root of most common diseases, being rigorously pruned away as soon as any starts to become widespread. "
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"I told a friend who lives in St. Petersburg that I was going to Helsinki. He wrote, “Enjoy your herring … and your reindeer.” Even through the e-mail message, I could hear his sneer. Finland’s cuisine has been historically maligned. In 2001, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy argued that Finland did not deserve to house the European Union’s food-safety agency because “Finns don’t even know what prosciutto is.”"
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Nice article on fusing urban and agricultural.
As part of a wee counter-Industrial Age brainwave I've been surfing lately, one theme is what "old" technology we had, say, agriculture, that was more widespread and that might have to come back for us to move forward.
I think as (I hope) biology becomes more important as an advanced technology, old biological tech, like farming, will become important again (just think of the affect on farming due to biofuels, mentioned at the start of the article). Likewise, we're swinging back to previous times of more diverse (and seasonal and local) food crops. Might nature be staging a comeback?
"Creating open space where others wouldn’t think to look for it is a trademark of architect David Baker, who, for Curran House, an affordable housing project in San Francisco’s gritty Tenderloin neighborhood, designed roof gardens with small individual container garden plots allowing residents to cultivate their own crops."
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"But now medical technology has caught up with exercise lore. Researchers in Germany, using advances in neuroscience, report in the current issue of the journal Cerebral Cortex that the folk belief is true: Running does elicit a flood of endorphins in the brain. The endorphins are associated with mood changes, and the more endorphins a runner’s body pumps out, the greater the effect."
All the more reason to get my butt out the door.
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"Delivr, currently in private beta (we’ve got invites – see below), literally mobilizes your web content. Whether it’s a web address, Flickr photo, YouTube video, or street address, Delivr will enhance the content for mobile viewing and generate a unique URL that you can then send to friends via social sites or SMS message."
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"The Navy offloaded fuel, water and personnel from a grounded, $1 billion guided missile cruiser so tugboats and a salvage ship can try again early Sunday morning to free it from a rock and sand shoal."
I wonder how much trust in GPS has to do with this.
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"In what has now become a harbinger of spring, the Red Sox equipment truck arrived on Yawkey Way at 7:35 a.m. on a Saturday morning in February 2008 in preparation for departure to Fort Myers later in the morning."
links for 2009-02-07
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"A Framingham biotech company yesterday became the first to win federal approval to manufacture a drug by using genetically modified animals, an approach that could eventually be used to produce many drugs using farm animals."
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"Today's dogs are descendants of ancient wolves. Now, it turns out, at least some of today's wolves inherited traits from ancient dogs.
"Gray wolves have that name because of their color, but in North America many of them have dark or black coats instead of the standard gray."
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links for 2009-02-06
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"Shepard Fairey, the controversial street artist riding a roller coaster of publicity with his red, white, and blue posters of President Barack Obama, was arrested last night on his way to DJ an event kicking off his exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art."
links for 2009-02-04
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Gah.
"Starting this summer, some of the world's leading thinkers in exponentially growing technologies will be gathering annually at NASA Ames Research Center, in the heart of Silicon Valley, for 10 weeks of discussions on how to change the future. And you could join them.
"The gatherings will be part of what is known as Singularity University, a brand-new academic institution co-founded by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, X Prize chairman and CEO Peter Diamandis, and former Yahoo Brickhouse head Salim Ismail, and anyone can apply. "
Almost feels like a counter-Long Now gathering of boffins (and some of the same, what).
[via TomRaftery] -
Really simple and fun visualization of Tweets during the Superbowl 09. [via @noodlepie]
links for 2009-01-30
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Gah. As a wordsmith, my word design skills extend to line breaks, headings, and maybe bold text (I'm not a fan of italics). But fancy font design, and font sizing? Nope. Hopeless there, and this long list really won't help me. But a nice read for all you fonties out there who do get it. [via @rivalee]
links for 2009-01-29
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At the very same DLD Michael mentions, Julia Allison wondered if the Web was going to make us all more dull. She noted that as politicians became more widely known, the more dull they became, partly to be more palatable to a wider audience. On the flip side, she commented that Web personalities, as they became more famous, become targets for the random nut (usually mediated by the relative anonymity and distance the Web affords, too). She told us of a few nasty issues, as did others on her panel. And I heard of others (Kathy Sierra comes to mind) who, like Michael, have had horrible moments, just from being a public figure online. Julie referenced Clay Shirky regarding early tech and how folks need to learn new etiquette. We're just going through that (rough) learning period, I suppose. (security aside, I won't go into adverse health effects Michael has been mentioning for a while – he needs a break)