idevelop.mini

Catastrophic cascade of failures in interdependent networks

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 01:05:22 +0300

Catastrophic cascade of failures in interdependent networks:

A fundamental property of interdependent networks is that failure of nodes in one network may lead to failure of dependent nodes in other networks. This may happen recursively and can lead to a cascade of failures.

Online games, superempowerment, and a better world

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 14:00:04 +0200

Online games, superempowerment, and a better world:

For active online gamers real life is broken. It doesn’t make any sense. Effort isn’t connected to reward. The path forward is confused, convoluted, and contradictory. Worse, there’s a growing sense that the entire game is being corrupted to ensure failure. So, why play it?

We live in public

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 16:52:21 +0200

We live in public

The Mismeasure of Man

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 03:05:38 +0200

The Mismeasure of Man:

The Mismeasure of Man is a 1981 book written by the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002). The book is a history and critique of the methods and motivations underlying biological determinism, the belief that “the social and economic differences between human groups — primarily races, classes, and sexes — arise from inherited, inborn distinctions and that society, in this sense, is an accurate reflection of biology.”

Triumph of the Golden Rule

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 20:46:01 +0200

Triumph of the Golden Rule:

We live in a world with other people. Almost every decision we make involves someone else in one way or another, and we face a constant choice regarding just how much we’re going to trust the person on the other side of this decision. Should we take advantage of them, go for the quick score and hope we never see them again – or should we settle for a more reasonable reward, co-operating in the hope that this peaceful relationship will continue long into the future?

David Cope’s software creates beautiful, original music.

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 23:13:03 +0200

David Cope’s software creates beautiful, original music. :

Emmy was once the world’s most advanced artificially intelligent composer. She produced thousands of scores in the style of classical heavyweights, scores so impressive that classical music scholars failed to identify them as computer-created. Cope attracted praise from musicians and computer scientists, but his creation raised troubling questions: If a machine could write a Mozart sonata every bit as good as the originals, then what was so special about Mozart? And was there really any soul behind the great works, or were Beethoven and his ilk just clever mathematical manipulators of notes?

How to cut off Google Buzz completely

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 02:14:52 +0200

Turning Buzz off

If you don’t want to use Buzz, you can disable it. To completely remove all of your participation in Buzz, follow all of these steps in order:

Delete your Google profile. Here’s how.
Block all of the people following you. Here’s how.
Turn off Buzz at the bottom of Gmail. Here’s how.

New Russian botnet tries to kill rival

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 01:13:49 +0200

New Russian botnet tries to kill rival:

The feature, called “Kill Zeus,” apparently removes the Zeus software from the victim’s PC, giving Spy Eye exclusive access to usernames and passwords.

How FarmVille Scales to Harvest 75 Million Players a Month

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:05:25 +0200

How FarmVille Scales to Harvest 75 Million Players a Month:

How did FarmVille scale a web application to handle 75 million players a month? Fortunately FarmVille’s Luke Rajlich has agreed to let us in on a few their challenges and secrets. Here’s what Luke has to say…

A model of the history of human misery

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 18:16:26 +0200

A model of the history of human misery:

For most of the human history we’ve been hunter-gatherers. But over the past 10,000 years there was a switch in lifestyle, farming has emerged independently in several locations, and filled in all the territory in between. One truism of modern cultural anthropology is that this was a big mistake, that hunter-gatherer lifestyles were superior to those of peasant farmers, less miserable with much more free time. I think this is somewhat unsubtle, which is ironic since cultural anthropologists really love to deconstruct the errors of others which they themselves are guilty of (i.e., in this case, the normative aspect immediately jumps out in the scholarship. There’s little doubt as to who they’re “rooting” for).

The Universe as a Hologram

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 16:22:30 +0200

The Universe as a Hologram:

Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn’t matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart. Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing.

Game theory shows evolution follows most successful member

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:50:15 +0200

Game theory shows evolution follows most successful member:

Scientists set up a model where human players engage with each other and compete for resources, and can change their strategies for doing so in various ways. They found that as more rounds of the game were played, the human players developed a tendency to imitate the best player, causing the players as a group to tend to play the game the same way.

"Socialism has nothing to do with government or command economy. That’s just the American straw-man..."

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:04:20 +0200

“

Socialism has nothing to do with government or command economy. That’s just the American straw-man definition of Socialism. Socialism is entirely to do with who owns and ultimately controls the means of production: It advocates the people who use the means of production (labour) should rather than someone else (capitalists). The argument goes that if labour doesn’t own the means by which they can produce things then they will be subjugated by those that do in order to produce and create wealth and effectively become wage slaves to their bosses.

Communism is just one of the proposed ways of achieving a labour ownership of the means of production by making them public. Even communism is not about government or central control; it claims to only use the state as a means to an end in getting the social structure right for communism and then eventually dissolve the state and leave only true communism.

”

- http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/ah3wc/his_single_known_mathematical_failure_was_not/

BBC - The Secret Life of Chaos (2010)

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:37:19 +0200

BBC - The Secret Life of Chaos (2010):

Chaos theory has a bad name, conjuring up images of unpredictable weather, economic crashes and science gone wrong. But there is a fascinating and hidden side to Chaos, one that scientists are only now beginning to understand. It turns out that chaos theory answers a question that mankind has asked for millennia - how did we get here? In this documentary, Professor Jim Al-Khalili sets out to uncover one of the great mysteries of science - how does a universe that starts off as dust end up with intelligent life? How does order emerge from disorder?

Monkey controlling robotic arm with brain

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:34:14 +0200

Monkey controlling robotic arm with brain:

In a ground-breaking 5 year experiment, scientists hook up a robotic arm controlled by a computer game to a monkey’s brain. In training the monkey to move the arm by ‘playing’ the game with a joystick. Researchers wanted to learn more about the output of the brain and the individual brain-cell signals. However the monkey was about to do something that would make history and change the lives of those involved.

Green sea slug makes chlorophyll like a plant

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:32:41 +0200

Green sea slug makes chlorophyll like a plant:

Scientists from the University of South Florida in Tampa have found a green sea slug is able to synthesize chlorophyll like a plant, which makes it the first animal known to be capable of the feat.

NGiNX_HTTP_Push_Module

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 16:07:07 +0200

NGiNX_HTTP_Push_Module:

This module turns Nginx into an adept HTTP Push and Comet server. It takes care of all the connection juggling, and exposes a simple interface to broadcast messages to clients via plain old HTTP requests. This lets you write live-updating asynchronous web applications as easily as their oldschool classic counterparts, since your code does not need to manage requests with delayed responses.

Anomie

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 15:36:09 +0200

Anomie:

Anomie, in contemporary English language, is a sociological term which may most simply be described as a personal condition resulting from a lack of norms. For Émile Durkheim, a lack of social ethic produces moral deregulation and an absence of legitimate aspirations.

Has Amazon EC2 become over subscribed?

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 15:31:56 +0200

Has Amazon EC2 become over subscribed?:

Amazon has been telling conferences and anyone that cares to listen that they can handle anything we throw at them. They have always been cagey to say the least, about revealing any sort of scaling numbers and when asked just how many instances they can spin up, they never really give a straight answer.

After 3 years of production usage what we can tell you is this .. Amazon do have a breaking point.

MQL, Prolog, and the future of Semantic Web databases

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 13:24:44 +0200

MQL, Prolog, and the future of Semantic Web databases:

Metaweb has this Semantic Web database, Freebase, employing an incredibly cool query language called MQL (Metaweb Query Language). The core idea of the database is that you represent knowledge as a massive object graph — objects represent things that you want to store information on.