Brynn Evans - Bookmarks

14Expand

Energy Efficiency: Potential Fuel Savings Generated by a National Speed Limit Would Be Influenced by Many Other Factors

Review of literature and experts by a government agency. Produces a report on the myriad factors that would influence actual gas savings on a national speed limit.

Tags: gas, oil, barrels, energy, cars, speed, limit, consumption, savings, us, policy on 2008-11-20 -All Annotations (16) -About

more fromwww.gao.gov

In response to the request, we reviewed existing literature and consulted knowledgeable stakeholders on the following: (1) What is the relationship between speed and the fuel economy of vehicles? (2) How might reducing the speed limit affect fuel use?
peed that optimizes fuel economy for all vehicles. Optimal speed for fuel economy for individual vehicles ranges widely, but is generally between 30 and 60 mph, depending on a vehicle's characteristics. However, a vehicle's fuel economy also depends on other factors besides air resistance. Factors that enhance
there is no single speed that optimizes fuel economy for all vehicles
electronic and computer controls,
engine efficiency enhancement
transmissions, and hybrid technology
offset by increases in vehicle weight, performance, and accessory loads.
Lowering speed limits can potentially reduce total fuel consumption
175,000 to 275,000 barrels of oil per day
consistent with estimates of the impact of the past national speed
rivers' compliance with a reduced speed limit
Moreover, a national speed limit would not affect many of the miles driven in the United States, such as those in urban areas, where most vehicles are already traveling at lower speeds due to lower speed limits or congestion
weather conditions
road conditions

6Expand

The social web: All about the small stuff

From the Google blog: they argue that the benefit of the social web and social technologies is that people are able to stay close to friends because they are aware of the small events going on daily in their lives.

Tags: social, web, technology, lifestream on 2008-09-23 and saved by 2 people -All Annotations (6) -About

more fromgoogleblog.blogspot.com

17Expand

Official Google Blog: The future of search

Marisa Mayer talks about using location, natural language (and voice), mobile media, and social networks to personalize search in the next 10 years.

Tags: search, google, social on 2008-09-11 and saved by 21 people -All Annotations (35) -About

more fromgoogleblog.blogspot.com

s impact on people's lives around the world in the 10 years since Google's founding. It has changed politics, entertainment, culture, business, health care, the environment and just about every other topic you can think of. Which got us to thinking, what's going to happen in the next 10 years? How will this phenomenal technology evolve, how will we adapt, and (more importantly) how will it adapt to us? We asked 10 of our top experts this very question, and over the next three weeks we will pre
Alan Kay has famously observed, the best way to predict the future is to invent it
why couldn’t I do these searches right then, when I needed to
needs to be more mobile
voice and natural language search.
picture
We’re not sure yet, but we do know that the one thing that the search experience can’t be - especially in the face of the online media explosion we’re currently experiencing - is stagnant
how will it be better
understand more about you
location is one potentially useful facet of personalized information
Another element of personalization is social context. Who am I friends with, and how do I relate to them? How can I harness their knowledge more efficiently
Algorithmic analysis of the user’s social graph to further refine a query or disambiguate it could prove very useful in the future
searches where actually asking a friend helps
A quick email to a doctor friend, and I was back on the right track - equipped with the right spelling and his explanation of the difference
friend-augmented" search
investing in machine translation
familiar with 80-20 problems

10Expand

The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes

This is a good write up on a number of things I've been thinking about related to Dunbar's number and online social network size.

Tags: no_tag on 2008-09-08 and saved by 41 people -All Annotations (19) -About

more fromwww.lifewithalacrity.com

... there is a cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships, that this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size ... the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.
147.8 is the "mean group size" for humans
community size of 150 will not be a mean for a community unless it is highly incentivized to remain together
Dunbar's theory is that this 42% number would be true for humans if humans had not invented language, a "cheap" form of social grooming
Dunbar's Number acting as a limit rather than a mean.
WikiPedia
that the optimal size for active group members for creative and technical groups -- as opposed to exclusively survival-oriented groups, such as villages -- hovers somewhere between 25-80, but is
This all leads me to hypothesize that the optimal size for active group members for creative and technical groups -- as opposed to exclusively survival-oriented groups, such as villages -- hovers somewhere between 25-80, but is best around 45-50.
Dunbar] found that the MAXIMUM number of people that a person could keep up with socially at any given time, gossip maintenance, was 150
but that they only keep tabs on 150 people max at any given point

24Expand

Magazine Preview - I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You - Clive Thompson - NYTimes.com

Tags: no_tag on 2008-09-05 -All Annotations (25) -About

more fromwww.nytimes.com

n’t think they wanted constant, up-to-the-minute updates on what other people are doing. Yet when they experienced this sort of omnipresent knowledge, they found it intrig
Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.”
physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye
They’re far shorter, far more frequent and less carefully considered
The growth of ambient intimacy can seem like modern narcissism taken to a new, supermetabolic extreme — the ultimate expression of a generation of celebrity-addled youths who believe their every utterance is fascinating and ought to be shared with the world
This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives
but the idea of using communication tools as a form of “co-presence” has been around for a while.
Mizuko Ito
But they also discovered that the little Ping-Ponging messages felt even more intimate than a phone call.
Add Sticky Note
- Ito's work looking at "microblogging" of sorts between couples on cell phones.
  posted by bmevans on 2008-09-05
But it’s easy to tweet all the time, to post pictures of what I’m doing, to keep social relations up.
Add Sticky Note
- Benefit of twitter: "can keep social relations up" and maintain a "much bigger social circle"
  posted by bmevans on 2008-09-05
Things like Twitter have actually given me a much bigger social circle.
n 1998, the anthropologist Robin Dunbar argued that each human has a hard-wired upper limit on the number of people he or she can personally know at one time
about 150
Are people who use Facebook and Twitter increasing their Dunbar number, because they can so easily keep track of so many more people?
Add Sticky Note
- Good question!
  posted by bmevans on 2008-09-05
Many maintained that their circle of true intimates, their very close friends and family, had not become bigger
But where their sociality had truly exploded was in their “weak ties” — loose acquaintances, people they knew less well.
My overall Dunbar number is thus 301: Facebook (254) + Twitter (47), double what it would be without technology.
Sociologists have long found that “weak ties” greatly expand your ability to solve problems.
one account for their weak ties, one for their deeper relationships
awareness tools like News Feed might be creating a whole new class of relationships that are nearly parasocial
a culture of people who know much more about themselves

10Expand

Classics in the History of Psychology -- Harlow (1958)

This is the famous Harlow monkey love study. Infants seek contact comfort with cloth mothers over wire mothers. Without motherly support and comfort, infants display psychosomatic problems, suggesting that getting "love" (not just food) is important for child development.

Tags: harlow, monkey, mother, love, wire, cloth, infant on 2008-09-03 -All Annotations (0) -About

more frompsychclassics.yorku.ca

we know little about the fundamental variables underlying the
formation of affectional responses and little about the mechanisms through
which the love of the infant for the mother develops into the multifaceted
response patterns characterizing love or affection in the adult.
John Bowlby, who attributes importance not only to food and thirst
satisfaction, but also to "primary object-clinging," a need for
intimate physical contact, which is initially associated with the mother.
During the course of these
studies we noticed that the laboratory raised babies showed strong attachment
to the cloth pads (folded gauze diapers) which were used to cover the
hardware-cloth floors of their cages.
baby monkey raised on a bare wire-mesh cage floor
survives with difficulty, if at all, during the first five days of life
contact comfort
might be a very important variable in the development of the infant's affection
for the mother.
we built a surrogate mother
These data make it obvious that contact comfort is a variable of overwhelming
importance in the development of affectional response, whereas lactation is a
variable of negligible importance.
One function of the real
mother, human or subhuman, and presumably of a mother surrogate, is to provide
a haven of safety for the infant in times of fear and danger.
It is apparent that the cloth mother is highly preferred over the wire one,
and this differential selectivity is enhanced by age and experience.
the mother or
mother surrogate provides its young with a source of security, and this role or
function is seen with special clarity when mother and child are in a strange
situation

1Expand

Know the Net (to get information you need)

"When you know the net you can quickly get to the information or resources you need in your local community.

So, the statements below about John McCain's vetting process for his VP candidate are puzzling. Did they not know how to scroll through the network via key access nodes [a.k.a. network weavers] or did they just not do it?"

Tags: valdiskrebs, information, knowledge, internet, social, networking on 2008-09-03 -All Annotations (0) -About