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12 Aug 09
Does closing roads cut delays? | csmonitor.com
Interesting. Because of the "price of anarchy" when it comes to individual drivers trying to minimize their personal travel time, closing roads along a route can actually make everything more efficient during rush hour.
See...expanding roads isn't necessarily the solution!
03 Aug 09
The truth about grit - The Boston Globe
"Interestingly, it also appears that praising children for their intelligence can make them less likely to persist in the face of challenges, a crucial element of grit."
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Interestingly, it also appears that praising children for their intelligence can
make them less likely to persist in the face of challenges, a crucial element of
grit.
Shouts & Murmurs: A Guide To Summer Sun Protection : The New Yorker
The perfect thing to read on a Monday morning while nursing my crispy neck and serious racoon-face after a long weekend of burning -- I mean beach camping.
-
SPF 100—This is to SPF 99 and below as excellent heroin is to Capri Sun juice
boxes. -
SPF 175—Ever wanted to have unprotected sex with a prostitute in Haiti? Don’t
answer. Doesn’t matter. The point is with SPF 175 that’s now an option.
30 Jul 09
Marathons and Memory : The Frontal Cortex
At The Frontal Cortex Jonah Lehrer has a post on marathon running and memory. Stress, like the stress from running for 4 hours, is known to disrupt memory -- but all memory isn't disrupted equally. The study found that after a marathon, runners had reduced "explicit" memory (ability to remember specific words, facts, numbers, etc.) but improved "implicit" memory (the ability to remember actions, motions, processes, etc.).
Fascinating! As someone who has run -- oh, is it 5? -- marathons I definitely felt a deterioration in my cognitive abilities as the races progressed. My ability to do simple math (like calculating mile splits) withered away. But it wasn't because I couldn't add anymore -- I could do that just fine. It was always because I couldn't remember what my watch said one mile earlier. That's a distinctly "explicit" memory function.
29 Jul 09
Re-Engineering the Earth - The Atlantic (July/August 2009)
-
Dyson’s early geo-engineering vision addressed a central, and still daunting,
problem: neither sulfur-aerosol injection nor an armada of cloud whiteners nor
an array of space-shades would do much to reduce carbon-dioxide levels. As long
as carbon emissions remain constant, the atmosphere will fill with more and more
greenhouse gases. Blocking the sun does nothing to stop the buildup. It is not
even like fighting obesity with liposuction: it’s like fighting obesity with a
corset, and a diet of lard and doughnuts. Should the corset ever come off, the
flab would burst out as if the corset had never been there at all. For this
reason, nearly every climate scientist who spoke with me unhesitatingly
advocated cutting carbon emissions over geo-engineering. -
Ken Caldeira, of the Carnegie Institution for Science, thinks we ought to test
the technology gradually. He suggests that we imagine the suite of
geo-engineering projects like a knob that we can turn. “You can turn it gently
or violently. The more gently it gets turned, the less disruptive the changes
will be. Environmentally, the least risky thing to do is to slowly scale up
small field experiments,” he says. “But politically that’s the riskiest thing to
do.”
24 Jul 09
Cell Beta Prototypes
Cell Press is working on rethinking the science journal "article of the future" for the digital/information age. Even scientists think reading journal articles is boring, so my guess is this cna only be a good thing. I like their idea of a tiered/hierarchical approach to information (so you can dive in if you want all the dirty technical details) versus the trational linear publised approach.
Maybe journalists should start applying this kind of thinking to creating the "feature article of the future"? Well, some already hvae...
(Found this through SEED's week in review: http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/full_moon_half_measures/)
Secure Cities: security zoning and shrinking public space
Interesting...the Secure Cities project maps open spaces in NYC, San Francisco and LA that have been cordoned off because of post-9/11 security measures. The project is funded out of CU-Denver. Sounds like a great story idea...
(I was pointed here from Kaid Benfield's blog on NRDC's Switchboard http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/kbenfield/city_living_in_an_age_of_hyper.html)
MIT SENSEable City Lab
This is the lab that is conducting the Trash Track program. They have lots of other interesting projects, like the "real time city" which compiles data from urban sensors.
Tracking trash - MIT News Office
Oooh ... tagging trash with wireless location devices. Cool! Now, if I had gotten involved with something like THIS when I was at MIT, maybe I'd still want to be an engineer.
23 Jul 09
Unlocking the Mysteries of The Artistic Mind | Psychology Today
Jonah Lehrer on how art heightens natural stiumlus-response. He uses this Picasso quote: "Art is the lie that reveals the truth." -- or, as neuroscience shows, art isn't a complete lie, but a deliberate exageration.
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Through careful distortion, he found a way to intensify reality. As Picasso put
it, "Art is the lie that reveals the truth." -
What's surprising is that such distortions often make it easier for us to
decipher what we're looking at, particularly when they're executed by a master.
Studies show we're able to recognize visual parodies of people—like a cartoon
portrait of Richard Nixon—faster than an actual photograph. The fusiform gyrus,
an area of the brain involved in
facial recognition, responds more eagerly to caricatures than to real faces,
since the cartoons emphasize the very features that we use to distinguish one
face from another. In other words, the abstractions are like a peak-shift
effect, turning the work of art or the political cartoon into a
"super-stimulus." - 1 more annotations...
22 Jul 09
Mind Hacks: Vision shift glasses alter time perception
Whoa! Wearing prism glasses that shift vision to the left "shrinks" time, while wearing prism glasses that shift vision to the right "expands" time. I'm intrigued by the linguistic implications of this, since so many of our time/space/numeric perceptions are based on our language.
Scoring/Criteria | Smarter Cities
(Ed. note: Gah! I wrote this already, then Diigo deleted it! Or I did by accident...)
My pre-stated theme for the summer was "data visualization" -- although it kind of got pushed aside by the completely unrelated theme "fictiontion writing" -- so instead of commenting on the methodology behind NRDC's new "smarter cities" ranking, I'm going to comment on how they presented their data.
Things I loved: the division of cities by size and the ease of moving between those groups; the division of the data by category/scoring criteria; the control the user has over the list (i.e., clicking on a category like "green spaces" and re-ranking the table); the use of size-graded circles to indicate scoring; the mouse-over titles combined with simple icons to display each category; the orange and teal color scheme (of course!)
Things that I think could be improved: instead of just naming a category when you mouse over it, it would have been nice to have an easy link or pop up description of what that category means (instead of a hidden link at the bottom of the table); the sizes of the circles are discrete (small, medium or large) not actually reflective of the numberical score, and that's not indicated very clearly; the "city profiles" should list the scores in each category; although city profiles have maps, there is no map on the front page -- this would have been nice for looking at metro areas (i.e., Portland is in the large city category, Beaverton is in the small city category -- you have no way of knowing that those two cities are both ranked high and geographically adjacent unless you do some clicking)
Also, this has nothing to do with data visualization, but isn't the preference for the term "smarter cities" over "smart cities" reminiscent of the recent shift in sex-ed-speak from "safe sex" to "safer sex"? Just saying ...
21 Jul 09
SEEDMAGAZINE.COM § MATHEMATICIANS: An Outer View of the Inner World
Audio slide show of mathematicians describing their craft -- which, as many of them note, has as much in common with creative arts than with hard sciences.
Joel Makower: Two Steps Forward: GreenXchange: Sustainable Innovation Meets the Creative Commons
Although Joel Makower's writing could, as always, use some serious editing, there's some good info here about GreenXchange. It's a meeting of two of my favorite ideas: open source and sustainable design!
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A small group of companies spearheaded by Nike have partnered with the nonprofit
Creative Commons to try to change that. Their novel initiative, called GreenXchange, aims to allow companies to share intellectual
property for green product design, packaging, manufacturing, and other uses. If
it succeeds, this budding coalition could accelerate innovation across companies
and sectors. At minimum, it stands to rewrite the rules about how companies
share.
The Neuroscience of McGriddles : The Frontal Cortex
This blog post from Jonah Lehrer is an ode -- or anti-ode, as in this case they amount to the same thing -- to the McGriddle and the greasy, fatty, energy-filled satisfaction it brings mankind. He quotes Elizabeth Kolbert's recent round-up in the New Yorker of obesity books and research (http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/07/20/090720crbo_books_kolbert?currentPage=all which I read yesterday...) and adds in a Duke study.
The money quote:
"Let's imagine, for instance, that some genius invented a reduced calorie bacon product that tasted exactly like bacon, except it had 50 percent fewer calories. It would obviously be a great day for civilization. But this research suggests that such a pseudo-bacon product, even though it tasted identical to real bacon, would actually give us much less pleasure. Why? Because it made us less fat. Because energy is inherently delicious. Because we are programmed to enjoy calories."
Meatloaf : The New Yorker
Poem by Donald Hall ...
"In August Lauren climbs Mt. Kearsarge,
where I last clambered in middle age,
while I sit in my idle body
in the car, in the cool parking lot,
revising these lines for Kurt Schwitters,
counting nine syllables on fingers
discolored by old age and felt pens,
my stanzas like ballplayers sent down
to Triple A, too slow for the bigs."
-
In August Lauren climbs Mt. Kearsarge,
where I last clambered in middle age,
while I sit in my idle body
in the car, in the cool parking lot,
revising these lines for Kurt Schwitters,
counting nine syllables on fingers
discolored by old age and felt pens,
my stanzas like ballplayers sent down
to Triple A, too slow for the bigs.
-
In August Lauren climbs Mt. Kearsarge,
where I last clambered in middle age,
while I sit in my idle body
in the car, in the cool parking lot,
revising these lines for Kurt Schwitters,
counting nine syllables on fingers
discolored by old age and felt pens,
my stanzas like ballplayers sent down
to Triple A, too slow for the bigs.
- 1 more annotations...
20 Jul 09
Why are Americans fat? : The New Yorker
-
Undeniably, the fat—the authors of “The Reader” are adamant advocates for the
“f” word—are subject to prejudice and even cruelty. A 2008 report by the Rudd
Center for Food Policy and Obesity, at Yale, noted that teachers consistently
hold lower expectations of overweight children -
To claim that some people are just meant to be fat is not quite the same as
arguing that some people are just meant to be poor, but it comes uncomfortably
close. - 3 more annotations...
Why are Americans fat? : The New Yorker
-
The movement known variously as “size acceptance,” “fat acceptance,” “fat
liberation,” and “fat power” has been around for more than four decades; in
1967, at a “fat-in” staged in Central Park, participants vilified Twiggy, burned
diet books, and handed out candy. More recently, fat studies has emerged as a
field of scholarly inquiry; four years ago, the Popular Culture
Association/American Cultural Association added a fat-studies component to its
national conferences, and in 2006 Smith College hosted a three-day seminar
titled “Fat and the Academy.”
XXXL : The New Yorker
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Today, soft drinks account for about seven per cent of all the calories ingested
in the United States, making them “the number one food consumed in the American
diet.” -
Kessler spends a lot of time meeting with (often anonymous) consultants who
describe how they are trying to fashion products that offer what’s become known
in the food industry as “eatertainment.” Fat, sugar, and salt turn out to be the
crucial elements in this quest: different “eatertaining” items mix these
ingredients in different but invariably highly caloric combinations. A food
scientist for Frito-Lay relates how the company is seeking to create “a lot of
fun in your mouth” with products like Nacho Cheese Doritos, which meld “three
different cheese notes” with lots of salt and oil. Another product-development
expert talks about how she is trying to “unlock the code of craveability,” and a
third about the effort to “cram as much hedonics as you can in one dish.”
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