Lu Cong

Lu Cong: "

Lu Cong

"

Spellingscorrector leert zichzelf gewone taal

Spellingscorrector leert zichzelf gewone taal: "TILBURG - Onderzoekers van de Universiteit van Tilburg hebben een nieuwe spellingscorrector voor internet ontwikkeld, die zij dinsdag presenteren op een taalsymposium."

maar zei zij dat het goed was, blijft fout

#1887: Het mooiste filmpje van een spin die een mot vangt

#1887: Het mooiste filmpje van een spin die een mot vangt: "
Ook al is ‘ie niet echt. De video Loom is namelijk volledig geanimeerd door het Duitse Polynoid. Spannend en een beetje griezelig, maar vooral fabelachtig gemaakt. Bekijk de video bij nrcnext.nl. Lees verder
"


Loom from Polynoid on Vimeo.

Hunger Crisis Worsens, Food System Broken: Oxfam

Hunger Crisis Worsens, Food System Broken: Oxfam: "

By David Brough

LONDON (Reuters) - Food prices could double in the next 20 years and demand will soar as the world struggles to raise output via a failing system, international charity Oxfam said Tuesday, warning of worsening global hunger.

[More]









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Photo

Photo: "

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Einde van mega-ijstijd blijft een raadsel

Einde van mega-ijstijd blijft een raadsel: "UTRECHT - Direct na het ontdooien van 'Snowball Earth' veroverden planten en dieren de wereld. Maar geologen blijken zich 1,6 miljoen jaar te hebben vergist en weten nu niet langer wát deze cruciale stap in de aardse evolutie veroorzaakte."

jimmy rosenberg

In your rss reader the grooveshark-widget in this post should be invisible (hell, I dont know why), turn to the site and listen to a great gitarist

Fun with Google Correlate | Gene Expression

Fun with Google Correlate | Gene Expression: "

A few people have pointed me to Google Correlate. Google says that this tool is like “Google Trends in reverse.” You know I love Google Trends, so of course I’m going to poke around Google Correlate. The tool shows you the strongest correlations by query over time, as well as concentrations and correlations of the query by state. So here’s the distribution for “Jesus”:

If you know something about the United States, I assume you aren’t surprised. But how about something like “Krishna?”

Does this make sense to you? What’s up with New Jersey? As a proportion it has by far the greatest number of Indian Americans. (the #1 correlate is “Radha,” which makes sense)

How about something more obscure? OK, “Ludwig von Mises”:

The Ludwig von Mises Institute is based out of Auburn, Alabama. They’re a radical libertarian outfit whose aim is to promote the thought of the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises (whose more moderate student, F. A. Hayek, is much more famous today). It doesn’t seem like ...

"

The Apocalypse Equation

The Apocalypse Equation: "The Apocalypse Equation, (technically called a 'stochastic equation,' because it describes the relationship of probability to time) shows what nuclear weapons ultimately mean for 'civilization.'"

Human Brain Limits Twitter Friends To 150

Human Brain Limits Twitter Friends To 150: "

The number of people we can truly be friends with is constant, regardless of social networking services like Twitter, according to a new study of the network

Back in early 90s, the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar began studying the social groups of various kinds of primates. Before long, he noticed something odd.

Primates tend to maintain social contact with a limited number of individuals within their group. But here's the thing: primates with bigger brains tended to have a bigger circle of friends. Dunbar reasoned that this was because the number of individuals a primate could track was limited by brain volume.

Then he did something interesting. He plotted brain size against number of contacts and extrapolated to see how many friends a human ought to be able to handle. The number turned out to be about 150.

Since then, various studies have actually measured the number of people an individual can maintain regular contact with. These all show that Dunbar was just about spot on (although there is a fair spread in the results).

What's more, this number appears to have been constant throughout human history--from the size of neolithic villages to military units to 20th century contact books.

But in the last decade or so, social networking technology has had a profound influence on the way people connect. Twitter, for example, vastly increases the ease with which we can communicate with and follow others. It's not uncommon for tweeters to follow and be followed by thousands of others.

So it's easy to imagine that social networking technology finally allows humans to surpass the Dunbar number.

Not so say Bruno Goncalves and buddies at Indiana University. They studied the network of links created by 3 million Twitter users over 4 years. These tweeters sent each a whopping 380 million tweets.

But how to define friendship on Twitter. Goncalves and co say it's not enough simply to follow or be followed by somebody for there to be a strong link.

Instead, there has to be a conversation, an exchange of tweets. And these conversation have to be regular to be a sign of a significant social bond, so occasional contacts don't count.

Goncalves and pals used these rules to reconstruct the social network of all 3 million tweeters and studied how these networks evolve.

It turns out that when people start tweeting, their number of friends increases until they become overwhelmed. Beyond that saturation point, the conversations with less important contacts start to become less frequent and the tweeters begin to concentrate on the people they have the strongest links with.

So what is the saturation point? Or, in other words, how many people can tweeters maintain contact with before they get overwhelmed? The answer is between 100 and 200, just as Dunbar predicts.

'This fifinding suggests that even though modern social networks help us to log all the people with whom we meet and interact, they are unable to overcome the biological and physical constraints that limit stable social relations,' say Goncalves and co.

The bottom line is this: social networking allows us to vastly increase the number of individual we can connect with. But it does nothing to change our capability to socialise. However hard we try, we cannot maintain close links with more than about 150 buddies.

And if Dunbar is correct, that's the way it'll stay until somebody finds a way to increase human brain size.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1105.5170: Validation of Dunbar's Number In Twitter Conversations

"

Meer welvaart door meer vertrouwen

Meer welvaart door meer vertrouwen: "
In high-trust maatschappijen worden mensen veel sneller rijk dan in een land waar iedereen elkaar wantrouwt. De dominee helpt dus de koopman. Hoe komt dat?

Onderling vertrouwen is essentieel voor welvaart.

Meer vertrouwen neemt economische weerstanden weg

Uit wetenschappelijke onderzoeken blijkt keer op keer dat in een land waar de mensen elkaar vertrouwen, de welvaart veel sneller toeneemt. Dat komt omdat de essentie van economie, uitwisseling is. Als je elkaar vertrouwt, zal je veel sneller goederen en diensten uitwisselen dan als je denkt dat je handelspartner je gaat bedonderen. In het tweede geval ga je veel moeite steken in allerlei juridische beschermingsconstructies en duurt het veel langer voor je iets koopt of verkoopt.Dat is ook de reden dat in derde-wereldlanden met veel corruptie, zakendoen heel veel tijd kost. Je moet als zakenman je zakenpartner eerst zeer goed leren kennen voor je hem voldoende vertrouwt. Je hebt daardoor maar weinig uitwisselingen en de handel stagneert.

Leuk voor incassobureaus en advocaten, maar economisch gezien zijn dit allemaal verliesposten. Ze zorgen er namelijk voor dat de transactiekosten stijgen, terwijl je er niets van terug ziet. Tenzij je een advocaat bent uiteraard. Daardoor wordt er minder (of zelfs helemaal niet) gehandeld en komt de virtueuze cirkel (zichzelf versterkende positieve feedbackloop) stil te liggen.

Dit is ook de reden dat de economie het in high-trust samenlevingen als Zweden erg goed doet, hoewel de belastingen hier tot de hoogste ter wereld behoren. Klaarblijkelijk weegt de hoge mate van wederzijds vertrouwen op tegen de hoge belastingdruk, waardoor een uitgebreid stelsel van sociale voorzieningen wordt bekostigd.

Ideeën om het onderlinge vertrouwen te vergroten

Wil de overheid de economie stimuleren, dan is het dus veel slimmer om in plaats van miljarden in allerlei projecten te pompen, er voor te zorgen dat het vertrouwen van mensen in elkaar groter wordt. Een goed begin is bijvoorbeeld er voor zorgen dat de wetten worden gehandhaafd en dat oneerlijkheid hard wordt aangepakt. Dit geldt ook voor corruptie. Op dit moment kunnen oplichters vaak jarenlang hun gang gaan voor ze tegen de lamp lopen omdat de politie dit geen prioriteit geeft. Dom en een bewijs van incompetentie. Dit is namelijk uiterst schadelijk voor de economie. De slachtoffers van oplichters zullen zich de volgende keer wel twee keer bedenken voor ze weer met iemand zaken doen en ook anderen over hun ervaringen vertellen. Willen de dienders oplichters niet harder aanpakken, dan moet de politiek maar ingrijpen en wat koppen laten rollen. Wat extra politiecapaciteit of een task force om oplichters aan te pakken, kost maar weinig geld. Ook moeten daders niet anoniem blijven.

De boel bij elkaar houden werkt economisch gezien ook goed. De economie groeide het hardst tijdens de paarse kabinetten, toen politieke tegenstanders samenwerkten in een kabinet en het CDA, wat tot dan toe altijd geprofiteerd had van de politieke verdeeldheid, buitenspel kwam te staan. Aan deze periode kwam een einde door de integratieproblemen met islamieten. Een aantal van hen heeft het hoge vertrouwensniveau in de Nederlandse samenleving op ernstige wijze misbruikt. Datzelfde geldt voor de bestuurlijke elite, die zichzelf op schaamteloze wijze verrijkt. Hierdoor verminderde het onderlinge vertrouwen in de bevolking, waardoor Nederland een moeilijke tijd tegemoet ging. Ook laaide hierdoor de verdeeldheid tussen links en rechts weer op. Dit is jammer. Hopelijk worden deze twee problemen nu eindelijk doortastend aangepakt.

Interessant

What destroys societal trust? – Tziporah Heller

The downside of difference – The Australian
"

en in high-trust samenleving lijken er ook meer zwartwerkers te zijn!

New Medical Tools to Explore Your Symptoms

New Medical Tools to Explore Your Symptoms: "

Ah, spring! The time of year when winter coats are exchanged for short sleeved shirts, space heaters for open windows, and winter colds for stuffy noses, rashes, and itchy or watery eyes. When suffering from any set of symptoms, misery often seeks company, and what better way to find out how many other people share in your seasonal symptomatology than through Wolfram|Alpha? By aggregating survey data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), our medical content team has put together a unique set of symptom-searching tools that will enable you to investigate all of the symptoms you may experience throughout the year. For example, by entering “sneeze”, you can immediately find that an estimated 960,000 patients complain of sneezing when they visit the doctor each year, and that marginally more male patients complain of sneezing than female patients.

By scrolling down through the output, we also find that sneezing is highly correlated with the primary diagnosis of allergic rhinitis (otherwise known as hay fever). Just below the diagnosis probabilities data table, we can find information about the drugs associated with diagnoses that are correlated with sneezing. Not surprisingly, allergic rhinitis is strongly associated with the drug Zyrtec. What is interesting is that, between the sexes, males are more often prescribed Nasonex to control their symptoms than females.

Further along down the page, it’s no surprise to find that the symptoms that most commonly co-occur with sneezing are coughing and nasal congestion. By clicking the “Show specific symptoms” button, we can access which group of specific symptoms make up more general symptom categories. For example, cough and nasal congestion have no specific subset of symptoms, but eye discharge is a more general description of symptoms that include the more specific symptom “watery eyes”, and “throat symptoms” includes “soreness of throat”, “swollen throat”, and “throat irritation”.

Below the symptom table, distributions of patient characteristics detail the variability of patients’ attributes. By default, these attributes include age, weight, height, and BMI. By clicking the “More” button in the top right corner of the pod, you can also access systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure, and body temperature distributions. For easy reference, all attribute distributions are laid over a light gray distribution curve that represents the entire US general population.

Within the rest of the output, Wolfram|Alpha also supplies the conditional probabilities for which select sub-populations are affected by a queried symptom, as well as the percentage of patients with the symptom who utilized specific healthcare payment methods. Besides single symptoms, multiple symptoms can also be searched through Wolfram|Alpha. For example, after entering “anxiety and depression”, the data that is returned reflect those patients who reported or were diagnosed with depression and anxiety during a healthcare provider visit in a given year. Data can also be queried by attributes that include age, gender, and weight. For example, users can add an age to the previous example (e.g. “anxiety and depression age 37”) and get a tailored output specific to patients between 30 and 40 years old.

Various new features and additions to our symptom dataset are currently underway, including the addition of more years of survey data, which will add even more searchable symptom combinations. The medical research field is vast and encompasses a large number of professionals ranging from physicians to physicists. At Wolfram|Alpha, we aim to make our medical content available and relevant to all who are interested, and we hope to become your first choice when researching medical information online.

"

The Known Universe

The Known Universe: "Van dit soort pogingen om de onmetelijkheid van ons universum te visualiseren kan ik geen genoeg krijgen.. Twee prachtige pogingen gebaseerd op de reistijd van licht.... Mindblowing!

"

Dag des Oordeels ging niet door - jammer

Dag des Oordeels ging niet door - jammer: "De Amerikaanse godsdienstfanaat Harold Camping had voorspeld dat gisteren de Dag des Oordeels zou plaatvinden. Hij had dat 17 jaar geleden ook voorspeld, maar toch kreeg hij veel volgelingen en veel publiciteit - en verdiende hij veel geld met zijn boek. In dit filmpje wordt geschetst hoe de wereld eruit had kunnen zien als God alle christenen tot zich had genomen.

"

Dus u dacht dat óns verkeer hopeloos was

Dus u dacht dat óns verkeer hopeloos was: "Onthutsende documentaire over een reis per truck over een weg in Congo die er eigenlijk allang niet meer is. De eigenaar van de truck riskeert zijn hele bezit. Voor de passagiers is het een lijdensweg. Het zet ons 'fileleed' in een ander perspectief. Sluit weddenschappen af hoe lang ze doen over 650 km (de chauffeur zet in op vier dagen). Meesterwerkje van, ja hoor, Al-Jazeera.

"

best rapture pics

see more at gizmodo

the great cucumber massacre

Garden party held today
Invites call the debs to play
Social climbers polish ladders
Wayward sons again have fathers
Hello, Dad, hello, dad
Edgy eggs and queuing cumbers
Rudely wakened from their slumbers
Time has come again for slaughter
O on the lawns by still Cam waters
A slaughter, it's a slaughter

Champagne corks are firing at the sun again
Swooping swallows chased by violins again
Strafed by Strauss they sulk in crumbling eaves again
Oh God not again

Aperitifs consumed en masse
Display their owners on the grass
Couples loiter in the cloisters
social leeches quoting Chaucer

Doctor's son a parson's daughter
W where why not and should they oughta
Please don't lie upon the grass
Unless accompanied by a fellow
May I be so bold as to perhaps suggest Othello

Punting on the Cam is jolly fun they say
Beagling on the downs, oh please do come they say
Rugger is the tops, a game for men they say

I'm punting, I'm beagling, I'm wining, reclining, I'm rucking, I'm fucking
So welcome, it's a party

Angie chalks another blue
Mother smiles she did it too
Chitters chat and gossips lash
Posers pose, pressmen flash

Smiles polluted with false charm, locking on to Royal arms
Society columns now ensured, returns to mingle with the crowds
Oh what a crowd

Punting on the Cam, oh please do come they say
Beagling on the downs, oh please so come they say
Garden party held today they say
Oh please do come, oh please do come, they say.

The housing bubble vs. the financial crisis | Gene Expression

The housing bubble vs. the financial crisis | Gene Expression: "

In the mid-2000s many regular folks knew that something was weird in housing. Of course everyone was aware that there was a short term windfall to be made if you could flip. But there were normal discussions about the bubble, and when it would burst, or if the weird arguments by some economists and the real estate industry that there wasn’t a bubble were true. In contrast regular people weren’t aware of the possibility of a financial crisis. I recall saying stupid things about the “Great Moderation,” parroting what I’d heard smarter people who I assumed knew better say, in the summer of 2008. Or take a look at some of the comments when I mooted the possibility of a recession in mid-2007: “They’re practically glorified hiccups nowadays. I don’t get what the big deal is.”

With that in mind I looked at Google Trends for two queries, “housing bubble” and “financial crisis.” The top panel is search query, and the bottom panel is news query. The financial crisis query is what you’d expect:

The housing bubble query is more interesting:

People ...

"

Practice makes perfect…via

Practice makes perfect…

via: "

Practice makes perfect…

via

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Blog - Why the Web Became Illegal in Europe Yesterday

Blog - Why the Web Became Illegal in Europe Yesterday: "

Can the Web as we know it survive without installing tracking files on your computer?

At midnight on Wednesday most websites based inside the European Union became illegal.

"