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United States Patent: 7533369
11/078,461
Excerpt - 'The Industrial Revolutionaries,' by Gavin Weightman - First Chapter - NYTimes.com
hapter One: SPIES
There were spies everywhere in eighteenth-century Britain. Though they disguised themselves in a variety of ways, they all had one ambition - to unearth the secrets of Britain's industrial success. They came from many different European countries, from Russia, Denmark, Sweden and Prussia, but the most eager of the spies were from Britain's greatest rival, France. Many were very erudite men who posed as disinterested tourists, compiling reports which they presented as purely academic treaties. Others posed as workmen in the hope of getting close to some fiendishly clever piece of machinery. And wherever the spies failed to gain entry, they were often reduced to lurking around local inns, hoping to engage knowledgeable workmen in conversation and induce them to cross the Channel for some splendid reward.
It was already evident to the French and other Europeans that Britain was gaining an industrial lead in the first half of the eighteenth century. There was, for example, the newly acquired technique of smelting iron with purified coal or 'coke' instead of charcoal, a fuel which was becoming prohibitively expensive. There were processes for the preparation of raw wool which were trade secrets and much sought after, as were some of the arcane skills of watchmakers. In the absence of any really reliable textbooks or journals which might disseminate information on how things were done, the most effective way to steal an innovation was simply to bribe a skilled workman to leave his employer. Indeed, in 1719 the British government had passed a law forbidding craftsmen to emigrate to France or any other rival country and put a penalty on attempted enticement. At that time the chief concern was the loss of iron founders and watchmakers. But after the mid-century it was the astonishing developments in textiles which were the chief target of foreign spies and the subject of protectionist legislation outlawing the export of tools and machinery as well as skilled men. It was in this trade that the English t
Revolutions: Graphing real-time foreclosure data: Data Mashups in R
Graphing real-time foreclosure data: Data Mashups in R
The latest in the O'Reilly "Short Cuts" series, and the first devoted to R, is Data Mashups in R. Written by Jeremy Leipzig and Xiao-Yi Li, this 30-page article is an excellent and very practical example of integrating messy data from varied sources, using R or REvolution R.
It's not designed as a manual-style introduction to R. But while working through the fully-detailed example it presents, even programmers unfamiliar to R will get a good sense of the practical capabilities of R when working with real-life data sources. "Learning by doing" is a great way to bootstrap your knowledge of any language, and a concrete, practical example like this really helps with that process.
The example used is a particularly timely one: how to automate the process of downloading foreclosure data from a public website, and presenting it in graphical form, like this:
Brazil: Social advertising’s next frontier | VentureBeat
he idea of a company that develops social apps is a relatively new concept. How would you define the mission of your company and what you guys do?
Gilberto Junior: We address the problem of the lack of relevance in display advertising. We believe advertising can be more engaging and it can be where people already are, instead of trying to take them out of there and lead them to some kind of advertising website. Advertising should be viral and spread out spontaneously. Amanaiê, in just 10 months, is already the leader at the social ads market in Brazil. Digital advertising is changing. Digital display ads are working less and [becoming] less relevant over time. The new digital media is that one that engages the costumer. The advertising that is so relevant that the user wants to install it on their public personal profile on a social network.
VB: You told me in an earlier conversation that you have an American partner. How did that come about and what advantages do you see as a result?
GJ: Michael came here for a conference and did some research and met me looking for Brazilian startups. He found my blog, we had a coffe and started to talk about investing in Brazil and the opportunities that would come as Orkut launches the Opensocial platform for social apps. [Afterwards] , we started up Socialsmart and Amanaie.
VB: So what are the advantages of having a partnership that is based in New York and Brazil?
GJ: We look for business opportunities. Mostly, to problems here that were successfully solved in the U.S. and nobody is doing anything here and vice-versa. We can leverage the innovation from the two places and do better deals. We have experience on planning the strategy, design and development of applications for advertising and branding on social networks. That’s what we do best. And the same way brands need it here, they need it there too. As Brazilians have a taste and culture similar to U.S. and Europe, we already know what works and what doesn’t, and that is portable to those places too.
VB: Beyond th
Docs Are Old-School, We Need PageRank for People (Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic)
Google's big innovation was in realizing that a link to content is the same as a vote. By tracking all the links pointing to a page of content Google assesses how influential that page is - its reputation. Google calls this 'PageRank' and it's old tech.
PageRank assigns a reputation score to the URL where content is published. This makes it a great fit for content that stays put in one location. However, evolving content distribution via blogs, RSS, guest columns, and syndication are a challenge for PageRank. Tweets, retweets, micropublishing, ratings, and comments - even bigger problems.
The solution lies in associating reputation with the identity of the author - a PageRank for People.
Reputation is Personal
At issue is how Google attributes reputation.
If marketing guru Seth Godin publishes an article on NYT.com, marketing wonks want to read it. If he publishes it instead at PodunkMarketingBlog.net, they still want to read it, because hey - it's Seth Godin. Google would rank the article at NYT highly, but Seth's work would be next to invisible when published at Podunk.
We assign reputation to people; experts, advisors, consultants, coaches, gurus, friends, etc. Search engines to date have relied on some proxy for this real-world reputation.
Content Lives Everywhere
In the physical world, your reputation follows you. If you're the world's foremost expert on AJAX, your opinion on the topic will be respected wherever you go. Imagine if the same held true online. Publish an article on an obscure web dev blog, it ranks highly, because hey - you're an expert. Pen a guest column on "AJAX and You" for Women's Day magazine and it ranks great, because you're the best in your field. Post a comment on the blog of an up-and-coming developer and that post gets a boost, because one of the luminaries in the industry judged it worth weighing in on. These are just a few of the possibilities, I'm sure there are plenty more.
Mapping reputation to people instead of URLs makes PageRank portable. It's PageRank for people.
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The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Soiled currency notes recycled into eco-friendly products
ntil 2001, the soiled and torn currency notes that were taken back were incinerated.
The briquettes are sold for industrial use through tenders. A kg of such briquettes are sold for a minimum of Rs.6. On an average, nearly 8.28 lakh kg briquettes are manufactured every year.
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Nearly Rs.550 crore worth soiled notes are taken out of circulation in the Tamil Nadu region every month. Such currency notes are replaced with fresh ones as part of the RBI’s clean note policy. The recent introduction of a system to provide incentives to banks for collection of mutilated currency has also contributed to the substantial increase in the number of notes received by the RBI.
LRB · Donald MacKenzie: All Those Arrows
Few people’s reputations have been improved by the credit crisis. One is the BBC’s Robert Peston; another is Vince Cable. A third is Gillian Tett, capital markets editor of the Financial Times. Prior to the crisis, she and her team were the only mainstream journalists who covered in any detail the arcane world of ‘credit derivatives’. Tett saw – however imperfectly – the huge risks that were accumulating unnoticed within that world, and spoke out about them.
Fool’s Gold begins in a conference room in Nice in spring 2005. Tett admits that at that point she was baffled by the technical language – ‘Gaussian copula’, ‘attachment point’, ‘delta hedging’ – used by the participants. However, before joining the FT she had conducted fieldwork in Soviet Tajikistan for a PhD in social anthropology, and the ethnographer in her was now reawakened. The conference reminded her of a Tajik wedding. Those attending it were forging social links and celebrating a tacit world-view – in this case, one in which ‘it was perfectly valid to discuss money in abstract, mathematical, ultra-complex terms, without any reference to tangible human beings.’
She whispered to the man sitting beside her, asking who the key actors in the ceremony were – those up on the conference hall’s stage. ‘They used to all work at J.P. Morgan,’ he answered. ‘It’s like this Morgan mafia thing. They sort of created the credit derivatives market.’ The answer surprised her. J.P. Morgan was not Goldman Sachs; it wasn’t an exciting bank. It bore the name of America’s most celebrated financier, but it was ‘dull’: safe, boring, perhaps a little snobbish. (When its current chief executive, the now well-respected Jamie Dimon, joined the bank from Bank One, whose headquarters were in Chicago, Tett reports that one Morgan banker muttered: ‘Not another retail banker from Hicksville, USA!’)
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t was quietly innovative. One of the team’s driving forces was a young Englishwoman, Blythe Masters; another, Terri Duhon, makes no secret of her upbringing in a trailer in Louisiana; central to its technical work was an Indian mathematician, Krishna Varikooty. Boisterousness that would have horrified John Pierpont Morgan was tolerated. At one gathering in Florida, one of the team’s managers broke his nose when drunken colleagues were pushing him into a hotel swimming-poo
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The team’s pivotal innovation, introduced in December 1997, was a deal they called ‘Bistro’ (Broad Index Secured Trust Offering). For a decade, banks had been experimenting with credit derivatives, which are ways of separating out the ‘credit risk’ involved in lending (the risk that borrowers will default on their obligations, failing to make the required interest payments or not repaying their loans) and turning that risk into a product that can be bought and sold. Bistro helped make this tentative activity big business: it transferred to outside parties the credit risk of loans totalling $9.7 billion that J.P. Morgan had made to 307 companies. The scheme was an influential version of a CDO (collateralised debt obligation), and like other CDOs, Bistro was divided into ‘tranches’, of which originally there were two. Investors in the lower or ‘junior’ tranche received a healthy rate of return, 375 basis points over Libor (London Interbank Offered Rate), which is the average rate at which a panel of leading banks report they can borrow from other banks.[*] (A basis point is a hundredth of a percentage point.) This compensated the junior investors for the fact that their investments would bear the initial losses, beyond a small reserve built up during the deal’s first five years, should any of the 307 borrowers default.
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What the Little Bird Told Me About You: Three Twitter Apps for Psych Analysis
omorrow morning, social media and marketing researcher Dan Zarrella is debuting a new way to see into the minds of Twitter users by analyzing their most recent 1,000 tweets.
TweetPsych uses two linguistic analysis methods to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their tweets. It compares the content of a user's tweets to a baseline reading Zarella built by analyzing over 1.5 million random tweets and shows the areas where that user stands out. It also reminded us of two other fascinating apps that show how long a user has been on Twitter and with whom they hold most of their @reply conversations. Being socially minded journalists, we've made bookmarklets for all three services.
Zarrella wrote in an email tonight that he used RID (Regressive Imagery Dictionary) and LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) to parse the data. RID is a text analysis tool composed of more than 3,000 words from 43 categories of cognition and emotion. LIWC is a text analysis software program that calculates the degree to which people use different categories of words in emails, speeches, poems, or transcribed daily speech. The program considers positive and negative emotion words, self-references, and words that refer to sex, eating, or religion.
Profiles with updates that are protected cannot be analyzed by TweetPsych.
Let's take a look inside the mind of a few Twitter users. Most of the social media elite tend to have fairly impersonal tweets; hence, their TweetPsych profiles are relatively homogeneous catalogs of upward mobility, obsession with professional affairs, and moral imperativism. Here's a profile of a photographer/mother/homemaker/blogger in Georgia:
hyperexperience
I visited the Louvre DNP Museum Lab again this year to see their interactive installations developed around ‘The Slippers’ by the 17th Century Dutch painter Samuel van Hoogstraten. As in past exhibits, the show – which takes roughly one hour to see – focuses entirely on one piece of art on loan from the Louvre. Instead of spending the hour rushing through packed galleries, visitors to the Museum Lab have the luxury of concentrating on only one painting. The experience is far more memorable. In the sloppy video I montaged above, you can see several of the interactive installations that they have developed to reveal the rich symbology of the image. Touch screen interfaces are used to demonstrate the perspective of the interior scene and to call up the significance behind particular objects in the scene. Augmented reality tags on exhibit placards pull up an animated curator on the ubiquitous portable museum guide. Simple touch interfaces serve to research related texts and images. The Museum Lab makes a convincing argument for a new type of exhibition where more space is devoted to the study of artwork than to the art itself.
A Wandering Mind Heads Toward Insight - WSJ.com
n our fables of science and discovery, the crucial role of insight is a cherished theme. To these epiphanies, we owe the concept of alternating electrical current, the discovery of penicillin, and on a less lofty note, the invention of Post-its, ice-cream cones, and Velcro. The burst of mental clarity can be so powerful that, as legend would have it, Archimedes jumped out of his tub and ran naked through the streets, shouting to his startled neighbors: "Eureka! I've got it."
In today's innovation economy, engineers, economists and policy makers are eager to foster creative thinking among knowledge workers. Until recently, these sorts of revelations were too elusive for serious scientific study. Scholars suspect the story of Archimedes isn't even entirely true. Lately, though, researchers have been able to document the brain's behavior during Eureka moments by recording brain-wave patterns and imaging the neural circuits that become active as volunteers struggle to solve anagrams, riddles and other brain teasers.
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"An 'aha' moment is any sudden comprehension that allows you to see something in a different light," says psychologist John Kounios at Drexel University in Philadelphia. "It could be the solution to a problem; it could be getting a joke; or suddenly recognizing a face. It could be realizing that a friend of yours is not really a friend."
These sudden insights, they found, are the culmination of an intense and complex series of brain states that require more neural resources than methodical reasoning. People who solve problems through insight generate different patterns of brain waves than those who solve problems analytically. "Your brain is really working quite hard before this moment of insight," says psychologist Mark Wheeler at the University of Pittsburgh. "There is a lot going on behind the scenes."
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At the University of London's Goldsmith College, psychologist Joydeep Bhattacharya also has been probing for insight moments by peppering people with verbal puzzles.
By monitoring their brain waves, he saw a pattern of high frequency neural activity in the right frontal cortex that identified in advance who would solve a puzzle through insight and who would not. It appeared up to eight seconds before the answer to a problem dawned on the test subject, Dr. Bhattacharya reported in the current edition of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
"It's unsettling," says Dr. Bhattacharya. "The brain knows but we don't."
So far, no one knows why problems sometimes trigger an insight or what makes us more inclined to the Eureka experience at some moments but not at others. Insight does favor a prepared mind, researchers determined.
Even before we are presented with a problem, our state of mind can affect whether or not we will likely resort to insightful thinking. People in a positive mood were more likely to experience an insight, researchers at Drexel and Northwestern found. "How you are thinking beforehand is going to affect what you do with the problems you get," Dr. Jung-Beeman says.
By probing the anatomy of 'aha,' researchers hope for clues to how brain tissue can manufacture a new idea. "Insight is crucial to intellect," Dr. Bhattacharya says.
Taken together, these findings highlight a paradox of mental life. They remind us that much of our creative thought is the product of neurons and nerve chemistry outside our awareness and beyond our direct control.
"We often assume that if we don't notice our thoughts they don't exist," says Dr. Christoff in Vancouver, "When we don't notice them is when we may be thinking most creatively."
The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age - The MIT Press
n this report, Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg focus on the potential for shared and interactive learning made possible by the Internet. They argue that the single most important characteristic of the Internet is its capacity for world-wide community and the limitless exchange of ideas. The Internet brings about a way of learning that is not new or revolutionary but is now the norm for today’s graduating high school and college classes. It is for this reason that Davidson and Goldberg call on us to examine potential new models of digital learning and rethink our virtually enabled and enhanced learning institutions.
This report is available in a free digital edition on the MIT Press website at http://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262513593.
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning
About the Authors
Cathy N. Davidson is the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Ruth F. Devarney Professor of English at Duke University.
David Theo Goldberg is the Director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute, the University of California system-wide research facility for the human sciences and theoretical research in the arts. He also holds faculty appointments as Professor of Comparative Literature and Criminology, Law and Society at UC Irvine, and is a Fellow of the UCI Critical Theory Institute.
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The Pocket Doctor: An Open Source Opportunity?
In a post back in March, I made the point that mobile phones and other mobile devices will increasingly function as medical monitoring devices, which could be a big opportunity for open source application development. The concept of the phone as doctor may still be questionable for some people, since there aren't many applications to point to (yet), but open source developers are often uniquely good at creating something where there is nothing. Here are some thoughts on how meaningful this kind of application development could really be, and who is working on the idea.
At the demonstration of the iPhone 3.0 operating system earlier this year, Apple demonstrated two new applications for the iPhone that monitor the glucose levels of the owners and monitor blood pressure. The idea is that iPhone owners who have diabetes or high blood pressure could have data on their physical status collected, and even automatically sent at regular intervals to a doctor. Think of the idea as a sort of onboard doctor.
There are already applications of this type arriving for the iPhone, but the early ones have mostly limited functionality, and don't do the actual monitoring of physical systems. There is, however, an interesting effort going on at UCLA to enable mobile phones to run medical tests. UCLA announced its advances in this area late last year.
UCLA researchers have developed a lens-free technique called LUCAS, or Lensless Ultra-wide-field Cell monitoring Array, for doing medical imaging with a cell phone. Phones with LUCAS technology use a short wavelength blue light to capture medical images. Then, the captured image is compared to a library of images to make a diagnosis. Initially, UCLA researchers see this as leading to new practices for wireless, remote medical diagnostics for diseases such as HIV and malaria in the third world.
We've written about open source applications aimed at humanitarian and global medical aid before. Recently, the Lemelson-M.I.T. program awarded $100,000 to Dr. Joel Selanikio for his developme
Looking to Buy Gold? Grab Quarters for the Vending Machine - NYTimes.com
After creating an online platform for trading precious metals this year, his small company has hit on a frontier beyond the Internet: the seemingly endless line of devices at airports and train stations that spit out cigarettes, condoms, toothpaste and candy bars in exchange for a little cash. But his machines will allow customers to buy small chunks of gold.
Mr. Geissler’s argument centers on gold’s role as the investor’s last bulwark against inflation. As the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the Bank of England print vast amounts of money to combat the worst economic downturn in a generation, prices are likely to rise.
“No one knows how these experiments of the central banks will work out,” Mr. Geissler said. “When you close your eyes, you can’t possibly imagine that this will go well.”
Within three months, Mr. Geissler’s company, TG-Gold-Super-Markt, plans to have “a substantial number” of machines up and running in Germany, Austria and Switzerland with hopes for 500 around the world. He is aiming for a franchise model in which clients buy the machines, which cost 20,000 euros, or about $28,000, and then pay to have them serviced by TG-Gold.
The company, based in Reutlingen, near Stuttgart, is showing off a prototype in Frankfurt, but it has more to do before 500 machines can grace the world’s tougher neighborhoods. The machines will be tested with explosives to make sure they are resistant to theft, Mr. Geissler said.
“They’ll be outfitted like an armored vehicle,” he said. “We’re going to put them in places like Russia, and the boys are not exactly demure over there.”
Customers will be able to buy 1-, 5- and 10-gram pieces of gold, and Canadian Maple Leafs and South African Krugerrands, each a tenth of an ounce. A one-gram piece, the size of a child’s fingernail, now costs about 30 euros, or $42.
The concept of gold dispensers came to Mr. Geissler as he pondered how to advertise the online marketplace for precious metals that Infos, his Internet fund trading platform, introduced in May.
Green Inc. Column - Making Case for Climate as Driver of Migration - NYTimes.com
“The impacts of climate change are already causing migration and displacement,” the document began, adding that by midcentury, “the prospects for the scope and scale could vastly exceed anything that has occurred before.”
The study, titled “In Search of Shelter” and written by a large cast from several nongovernmental organizations, including the United Nations, CARE International and Columbia University, combined climatological and demographic data with field interviews of migrants already on the move. The aim was to provide an overview, with rich maps and an oft-lacking dose of empiricism, of where the changing environment is driving decision-making on the ground and which areas are likely to be hit hardest if things get worse.
Large populations in Asia, for example, rely on shrinking Himalayan glaciers — “the Water Tower of Asia” — to feed rivers and provide water. Should the shrinking continue, millions of downriver residents might be forced to move
View through a window may influence recovery from surgery -- Ulrich 224 (4647): 420 -- Science
View through a window may influence recovery from surgery
RS Ulrich
Records on recovery after cholecystectomy of patients in a suburban Pennsylvania hospital between 1972 and 1981 were examined to determine whether assignment to a room with a window view of a natural setting might have restorative influences. Twenty-three surgical patients assigned to rooms with windows looking out on a natural scene had shorter postoperative hospital stays, received fewer negative evaluative comments in nurses' notes, and took fewer potent analgesics than 23 matched patients in similar rooms with windows facing a brick building wall.
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