“The High Through­put Human­i­ties satel­lite event at ECCS’10 estab­lishes a forum for high through­put approaches in the human­i­ties and social sci­ences, within the frame­work of com­plex sys­tems sci­ence. The sym­po­sium aims to go beyond mas­sive data aqui­si­tion and to present results beyond what can be man­u­ally achieved by a sin­gle per­son or a small group. Bring­ing together sci­en­tists, researchers, and prac­ti­tion­ers from rel­e­vant fields, the event will stim­u­late and facil­i­tate dis­cus­sion, spark col­lab­o­ra­tion, as well as con­nect approaches, meth­ods, and ideas.

The main goal of the event is to present novel results based on analy­ses of Big Data (see NATURE spe­cial issue 2009), focus­ing on emer­gent com­plex prop­er­ties and dynam­ics, which allow for new insights, appli­ca­tions, and services.”

“Instead, this effort is about com­pe­ti­tion. It is to build new social and eco­nomic sys­tems that can com­pete with the cur­rent polit­i­cal and eco­nomic monop­o­lies and if suc­cess­ful, force them to com­pete in order to stay rel­e­vant. It’s about build­ing some­thing new from the ground up, a start-​​up cul­ture of inde­pen­dence and san­ity, that attracts bet­ter par­tic­i­pants and deliv­ers more results than any other alternative.

The start-​​ups these entre­pre­neurs are build­ing work within the cur­rent sys­tem and against it, grow­ing in power with each cycle of inno­va­tion. They com­pete against each other to pro­vide the best pos­si­ble results, yet con­nect on a level that allows them to accel­er­ate faster than if they were alone. ”

“We are pleased to announce the estab­lish­ment of the new Com­pu­ta­tional Social Sci­ence Soci­ety (called CSSS, or “C-​​triple-​​S”), offi­cially reg­is­tered in Wash­ing­ton DC on 16 Decem­ber, 2009, as a 501 ©(3) sci­en­tific non-​​profit pro­fes­sional orga­ni­za­tion to serve mem­bers in our field of com­pu­ta­tional social sci­ence. This new orga­ni­za­tion orig­i­nated at the last meet­ing of NAACSOS, when the gath­ered mem­bers unan­i­mously moved to estab­lish the new CSSS and elect offi­cers to pro­vide for con­ti­nu­ity of lead­er­ship and build on NAACSOS’ best past accomplishments.”

“Back in early Feb­ru­ary, while aboard a red-​​eye to New York, Dave McClure wrote a long, humor­ous, ram­bling, profanity-​​laden rant of a blog post that focused on startup busi­ness mod­els. While it makes for an enter­tain­ing read, McClure’s post is also very insight­ful and makes a solid case for why star­tups should shift from adver­tis­ing mod­els and instead build their new busi­nesses on sub­scrip­tions and micro­pay­ments. Ear­lier this month I had the chance to visit the head­quar­ters of ZooLoo, a startup that wit­nessed this very shift first-​​hand with their own busi­ness model.”

“…Big-​​budget the­atri­cal and film pro­duc­tion in our world share their inher­ent risk and unpre­dictabil­ity with a colo­nial the­ater that began with a few adven­tur­ous artists cross­ing the Atlantic. Per­haps most impor­tantly, whether for an eighteenth-​​century or a twenty-​​first cen­tury play­goer, the inter­sec­tion of audi­ence and per­former con­structs a sense of com­mu­nal belong­ing, even if it is only belong­ing to a com­mu­nity of two peo­ple con­sist­ing of the star and the starstruck.”

“It seems proper to con­clude with some very brief spec­u­la­tions about the kinds of ques­tions that Martin’s anti-​​narrative nar­ra­tive can help us to ask—both about his his­tor­i­cal moment and about our own. To do so, we should return to an appar­ently throw­away moment in the first lines of Martin’s memoir—one that’s not about being hun­gry, but that does tell us more about the poten­tially dis­tort­ing nature of story-​​telling. “The heroes of all His­to­ries, Nar­ra­tives, Adven­tures, Nov­els and Romances, have, or are sup­posed to have ances­tors, or some root from which they sprang. I con­clude, then, that it is not alto­gether incon­sis­tent to sup­pose that I had par­ents too.” Savvy enough to know that the mem­oirist is a lit­er­ary char­ac­ter like other lit­er­ary char­ac­ters, and that the tale he would tell is sub­ject to the rules estab­lished by other sto­ries, Mar­tin cul­ti­vates an ironic dis­tance from his sub­ject and under­scores the arti­fice of his work.…”

“The 1946–49 period isn’t sur­pris­ing since there was a flood of work­ers from the mil­i­tary (keep­ing income down), but peo­ple had sig­nif­i­cant sav­ings from WWII when income far out­paced con­sump­tion. Of course, in the recent period, con­sump­tion was higher than income pri­mar­ily because of mort­gage equity extrac­tion (The Home ATM).

The pre­vi­ous busi­ness cycle was “bad by any measure”.”

“It’s not an iPhone and it’s not a lap­top: the iPad is a ground­break­ing new device. You need to cre­ate true iPad apps to take advan­tage of all that is pos­si­ble with the iPad. If you’re an expe­ri­enced iPhone devel­oper, iPad Pro­gram­ming will show you how to write these out­stand­ing new apps while com­pletely fit­ting your users’ expec­ta­tion for this device.

Avail­able in Beta April, 2010″

“I strongly implore you on behalf of myself, inde­pen­dent inven­tors like me, and for the good of our coun­try to sup­port the patent reform leg­is­la­tion before you. And if upon reflec­tion you rec­og­nize how truly vital the Patent Office is to the future of our coun­try then I would ask you to do more and to con­sider the issue of “rev­enue diversion”.

The U.S.P.T.O. is unique in Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment in that it costs the tax­payer noth­ing while pro­vid­ing the best dol­lar for dol­lar value in the intel­lec­tual prop­erty indus­try. The U.S.P.T.O. should have the author­ity to set its fees so that they are appro­pri­ate to the ser­vices pro­vided and “in the aggre­gate” suf­fi­cient to fully opti­mize the func­tion­ing of that office, and to rea­son­ably bud­get for the cap­i­tal expen­di­tures that will be required in the future for it to con­tinue to do so.”

“I agree that Kerr’s point about uti­liz­ing the judi­ciary sys­tem to deter­mine who, pre­cisely, con­sti­tutes an enemy com­bat­ant and who does not is a vital point. But an equally vital point, at least to my mind, is summed by another por­tion of Kerr’s retal­i­a­tion wherein he revis­its the John Adams anal­ogy that has been float­ing about (empha­sis mine),

When Adams agreed to rep­re­sent the Eng­lish sol­diers, he was not ful­fill­ing some sort of oblig­a­tion: No one had to rep­re­sent the Eng­lish­men. Adams acted — and was crit­i­cized then, but cel­e­brated now, for it — because he agreed to rep­re­sent the sol­diers out of a per­sonal con­vic­tion that no per­son should face a trial with­out counsel.”

“NAr­ray is an Numer­i­cal N-​​dimensional Array class. Sup­ported ele­ment types are 1/​2/​4-​​byte Inte­ger, single/​double-​​precision Real/​Complex, and Ruby Object. This exten­sion library incor­po­rates fast cal­cu­la­tion and easy manip­u­la­tion of large numer­i­cal arrays into the Ruby lan­guage. NAr­ray has fea­tures sim­i­lar to NumPy, but NAr­ray has vec­tor and matrix subclasses.”

“So I offer this as a sup­ple­men­tary con­sid­er­a­tion: take an inter­est in what your users are good at. Take an inter­est in how they are good at being social with and through your ser­vice or appli­ca­tion. Learn how to observe what users are doing and how their social habits vary. Think out­side your­self and from the per­spec­tives of other people.

Their behav­iors may not give them away entirely, but if you develop a palette of per­sonal and social skills that you can use to relate to peo­ple dif­fer­ent from you, your design insights will be that much smarter.”

“Math­e­mat­ics illu­mi­nates the pat­terns and struc­tures all around us. Our dynamic exhibits and pro­grams will stim­u­late inquiry, spark curios­ity, and reveal the won­ders of mathematics.”

“Imag­ine the scene. You are eleven years old, and in the five min­utes before the end of the les­son, your Maths teacher decides he should make his class more “fun” by intro­duc­ing a “game”. He explains that he is going to point at each pupil in turn and ask them to say the next num­ber in sequence, start­ing from one. The “fun” part is that if the num­ber is divis­i­ble by three, you instead say “Fizz” and if it is divis­i­ble by five you say “Buzz”. So now your maths teacher is point­ing at all of your class­mates in turn, and they hap­pily shout “one!”, “two!”, “Fizz!”, “four!”, “Buzz!”… until he very delib­er­ately points at you, fix­ing you with a steely gaze… time stands still, your mouth dries up, your palms become sweatier and sweatier until you finally man­age to croak “Fizz!”. Doom is avoided, and the point­ing fin­ger moves on. Until the next time.”

“Data Mar­ket­place makes it easy for peo­ple to find, buy and sell data online.

Most data must be aggre­gated, cleaned, and ana­lyzed to extract use­ful infor­ma­tion. It doesn’t make sense that the same per­son should do all of these things. Data Mar­ket­place con­nects peo­ple who need data with peo­ple who are good at col­lect­ing, clean­ing, and ana­lyz­ing it.

Peo­ple request data that they need. Providers upload data to Data Mar­ket­place, pro­vide descrip­tive meta­data, and set a price. Stored meta­data is used to help con­sumers find rel­e­vant data through tra­di­tional search engines and when brows­ing the marketplace.”

“The pri­mary exploratory tar­get of this research project is to find a strat­egy hope­fully bet­ter than any other known for evolv­ing, through genetic algo­rithms, cel­lu­lar automata rules for global syn­chro­niza­tion tasks. By bet­ter we mean that syn­chro­niza­tion rules need to emerge more con­sis­tently, faster and with higher prob­a­bil­ity com­pared to pre­vi­ous stud­ies under the same ini­tial conditions.”