Items of some interest…

These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

  • Free Ride: Dig­i­tal Par­a­sites and the Fight for the Busi­ness of Cul­ture | Brain Pickings

    “For my part, I started Brain Pick­ings more than six years ago as what’s com­monly referred to as a “pas­sion project” (though I don’t like the fleet­ing non­com­mit­tal rela­tion­ship this phras­ing sug­gests) and didn’t have a busi­ness model — but I did have a crystal-​​clear edi­to­r­ial model, which remains the same today: get peo­ple inter­ested in mean­ing­ful cross-​​disciplinary things they didn’t yet know they were inter­ested in, and in the process empower their net­worked knowl­edge and com­bi­na­to­r­ial cre­ativ­ity; break out of the fil­ter bub­ble, if you will, though con­ceived long before we had the very vocab­u­lary to artic­u­late it. So when an aggre­ga­tor like the Huff­in­g­ton Post, a business-​​model wolf wear­ing an editorial-​​authenticity sheep’s skin, takes my (ad-​​free) con­tent and regur­gi­tates it on its (ad-​​plastered) site, it lives up to the term “par­a­site” at the heart of Levine’s argu­ment, derived from the Greek par­a­sitos and used to describe “some­one who ate at some­one else’s table with­out pro­vid­ing any­thing in return.””

    pub­lish­ing dis­in­ter­me­di­a­tion rein­ter­me­di­a­tion intellectual-​​property cre­ativ­ity col­lab­o­ra­tion network-​​culture

Items of some interest…

These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

Items of some interest…

These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

  • Blog­ging Moby-​​Dick

    “The ship Pequod, too, was a ves­tige of an ear­lier phase of the whal­ing indus­try: “She was a ship of the old school, rather small if any­thing; with an old-​​fashioned claw-​​footed look about her.” She was a ship tro­phied by past hunts, and named after “a cel­e­brated tribe of Mass­a­chu­setts Indi­ans, now extinct as the ancient Medes.” Matt Kish’s por­trait of the Pequod evokes its inim­itabil­ity and intri­cacy, but Melville’s own image is at least as fantastic.”

    book-​​art Moby-​​Dick illus­tra­tion book-​​blogging
  • Mini­van of the Rev­o­lu­tion » Blog Archive » And So It Begins

    “And yet, here I am. Fifty years old, irre­deemably a book­seller, and more happy than if I’d…if I’d what? Well, than if I’d just about any­thing, I sup­pose. I’ll put it this way – if I were to win the lot­tery tomor­row, the only thing that would change would be the qual­ity of my inven­tory. I just can’t imag­ine doing any­thing else. Even in those moments of blank­est regret, when all the bills come due at once and my stock looks like it could have been cho­sen at ran­dom by a blind, crack-​​addicted three-​​year-​​old; when the office hasn’t been cleaned in a month and the cof­fee jit­ters set in because I for­got to eat my break­fast which is still sit­ting cold on the kitchen counter six hours later; when the phone rings and it’s some flea-​​market guy ask­ing to “pick my brain” about a “real old book” he found buried in cow­shit in his granddaddy’s barn; even when I get home after a house buy and real­ize that every book I just over­paid for smells irre­triev­ably of cat piss…even then, I can only imag­ine one way for­ward: more books. And then, more books after that and, for dessert, more books. More books. More books. More books.”

    bib­lio­ma­nia book­seller intro­spec­tion gen­er­al­ism

Items of some interest…

These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

  • Hebrew Typog­ra­phy

    beau­ti­ful lettering

    typog­ra­phy hebrew graphic-​​design cal­lig­ra­phy let­ter­ing
  • [1110.5376] A Quan­ti­ta­tive Test of Pop­u­la­tion Genet­ics Using Spatio-​​Genetic Pat­terns in Bac­te­r­ial Colonies

    “It is widely accepted that pop­u­la­tion genet­ics the­ory is the cor­ner­stone of evo­lu­tion­ary analy­ses. Empir­i­cal tests of the the­ory, how­ever, are chal­leng­ing because of the com­plex rela­tion­ships between space, dis­per­sal, and evo­lu­tion. Crit­i­cally, we lack quan­ti­ta­tive val­i­da­tion of the spa­tial mod­els of pop­u­la­tion genet­ics. Here we com­bine ana­lyt­ics, on and off-​​lattice sim­u­la­tions, and exper­i­ments with bac­te­ria to per­form quan­ti­ta­tive tests of the the­ory. We study two bac­te­r­ial species, the gut microbe Escherichia coli and the oppor­tunis­tic pathogen Pseudomonas aerug­i­nosa, and show that spatio-​​genetic pat­terns in colony biofilms of both species are accu­rately described by an exten­sion of the one-​​dimensional stepping-​​stone model. We use one empir­i­cal mea­sure, genetic diver­sity at the colony periph­ery, to para­me­ter­ize our mod­els and show that we can then accu­rately pre­dict another key vari­able: the degree of short-​​range cell migra­tion along an edge. More­over, the model allows us to esti­mate other key para­me­ters includ­ing effec­tive pop­u­la­tion size (den­sity) at the expan­sion fron­tier. While our exper­i­men­tal sys­tem is a sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of nat­ural micro­bial com­mu­nity, we argue it is a proof of prin­ci­ple that the spa­tial mod­els of pop­u­la­tion genet­ics can quan­ti­ta­tively cap­ture organ­is­mal evolution.”

    bacterial-​​genetics evo­lu­tion micro­bi­ol­ogy exper­i­ment cute
  • NDFD Data­base Contents

    “You can access NDFD ele­ments via file trans­fer pro­to­col (ftp), http, eXten­si­ble Markup Lan­guage (XML), or web browser. Links to the data, sup­port­ing infor­ma­tion and soft­ware are listed below:…”

    weather data raw-​​data-​​now government2.0 nudge-​​targets ref­er­ence fore­casts
  • The Per­for­ma­tiv­ity of Net­works — Kieran Healy

    “The “per­for­ma­tiv­ity the­sis” is the claim that parts of con­tem­po­rary eco­nom­ics and finance, when car­ried out into the world by pro­fes­sion­als and pop­u­lar­iz­ers, refor­mat and reor­ga­nize the phe­nom­ena they pur­port to describe, in ways that bring the world into line with the­ory. Prac­ti­cal tech­nolo­gies, cal­cu­la­tive devices and portable algo­rithms give actors tools to imple­ment par­tic­u­lar mod­els of action. I argue that social net­work analy­sis is per­for­ma­tive in the same sense as the cases stud­ied in this lit­er­a­ture. Social net­work analy­sis and finance the­ory are sim­i­lar in key aspects of their devel­op­ment and effects. For the case of eco­nom­ics, evi­dence for weaker ver­sions of the per­for­ma­tiv­ity the­sis in quite good, and the strong for­mu­la­tion is cir­cum­stan­tially sup­ported. Net­work the­ory eas­ily meets the evi­den­tial thresh­old for the weaker ver­sions; I offer empir­i­cal exam­ples that sup­port the strong (or “Bar­ne­sian”) for­mu­la­tion. Whether these par­al­lels are a mark in favor of the the­sis or a strike against it is an open ques­tion. I argue that the social net­work tech­nolo­gies and mod­els now being “per­formed” build out sys­tems of gen­er­al­ized reci­procity, con­nec­tiv­ity, and commons-​​based pro­duc­tion. This is in con­trast both to an ear­lier net­work imagery that empha­sized self-​​interest and entre­pre­neur­ial exploita­tion of struc­tural oppor­tu­ni­ties, and to the model of action typ­i­cally con­sid­ered to be per­formed by eco­nomic technologies.”

    network-​​theory network-​​culture eco­nom­ics cultural-​​dynamics theory-​​and-​​practice-​​sitting-​​in-​​a-​​tree

Items of some interest…

These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

  • Clas­si­fy­ing Heart Sounds Challenge

    “Accord­ing to the World Health Organ­i­sa­tion, car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­eases (CVDs) are the num­ber one cause of death glob­ally: more peo­ple die annu­ally from CVDs than from any other cause. An esti­mated 17.1 mil­lion peo­ple died from CVDs in 2004, rep­re­sent­ing 29% of all global deaths. Of these deaths, an esti­mated 7.2 mil­lion were due to coro­nary heart dis­ease. Any method which can help to detect signs of heart dis­ease could there­fore have a sig­nif­i­cant impact on world health. This chal­lenge is to pro­duce meth­ods to do exactly that. Specif­i­cally, we are inter­ested in cre­at­ing the first level of screen­ing of car­diac patholo­gies both in a Hos­pi­tal envi­ron­ment by a doc­tor (using a dig­i­tal stetho­scope) and at home by the patient (using a mobile device). The prob­lem is of par­tic­u­lar inter­est to machine learn­ing researchers as it involves clas­si­fi­ca­tion of audio sam­ple data, where dis­tin­guish­ing between classes of inter­est is non-​​trivial. Data is gath­ered in real-​​world sit­u­a­tions and fre­quently con­tains back­ground noise of every con­ceiv­able type. The dif­fer­ences between heart sounds cor­re­spond­ing to dif­fer­ent heart symp­toms can also be extremely sub­tle and chal­leng­ing to sep­a­rate. Suc­cess in clas­si­fy­ing this form of data requires extremely robust clas­si­fiers. Despite its med­ical sig­nif­i­cance, to date this is a rel­a­tively unex­plored appli­ca­tion for machine learning.”

    machine-​​learning com­pe­ti­tion nudge-​​targets clas­si­fi­ca­tion seg­men­ta­tion data-​​analysis supervised-​​learning