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:


  • phi­los­o­phy ontol­ogy pragmatism-it-ain’t which-​​is-​​weird
  • The Valve — A Lit­er­ary Organ | Talk to the Wood: Ani­mism is Natural

    “…Yet we should be wary of get­ting wrapped up in the prac­ti­cal­ity of it all. For that hardly explains the mythol­ogy, the fact that this or that fea­ture of the land­scape is a sacred place, that the Song­lines were traced by cul­ture heroes of ani­mal nature. None of that is nec­es­sary for the merely prac­ti­cal end of accu­rate time-​​keeping, though it might be use­ful to have a story to give some con­tent to the nar­ra­tive stream. To mea­sure a long stretch of time, and thus a long dis­tance, one could sim­ply count to some suf­fi­ciently high num­ber while walk­ing and singing at a steady pace. Count­ing to an arbi­trarly high value, how­ever, is a rel­a­tively recent human accom­plish­ment, one not present in pre­lit­er­ate cul­tures. One could also use very long strings of non­sense syl­la­bles, but they are very dif­fi­cult to mem­o­rize accu­rately, as thou­sands of under­grad­u­ates in decades of psy­cho­log­i­cal exper­i­ments know all too well; such things sim­ply don’t have much pur­chase in the human brain. So one sings the song of a cul­ture hero’s jour­ney, while trac­ing that jour­ney one­self, and in the process, one becomes that hero. We are in the world Val Geist hypoth­e­sized, in which our ances­tors imi­tated the calls of ani­mals in order to manip­u­late ani­mal behav­ior. In the process of imag­in­ing the wilder­ness though the per­sona of an ani­mal one assim­i­lates that wilder­ness to the cat­e­gories and needs of human culture.”

    social-​​dynamics ani­mism big-​​T-​​theory Bruno-​​Latour anthro­pol­ogy cultural-​​dynamics
  • Open states: Trans­parency for state gov­ern­ments using open data | open​source​.com

    What is the biggest impact Open States has had to date? I sup­pose it depends on what kind of impact we’re talk­ing about. Gov­ern­ments are slowly com­ing to terms with this and we’ve seen states like Min­nesota and Kansas start to move towards machine-​​readable access of their data—and I think we can take some of the credit for that. A big part of it is that they just have smart peo­ple work­ing there that get the impor­tance of mak­ing this data avail­able in as many ways as pos­si­ble. I’m par­tic­u­larly par­tial to the impact that the project has had on indi­vid­u­als. Sun­light open sources every­thing we do, and as a result, we have over 130 projects on GitHub. Most of these projects aren’t things that the aver­age devel­oper uses, so they don’t see a ton of atten­tion from out­side devel­op­ers. Open States has been a real suc­cess in a unique way—it has got­ten devel­op­ers that were oth­er­wise unaware of open gov­ern­ment involved. We’ve had con­tri­bu­tions from approx­i­mately 50 devel­op­ers, rang­ing from minor tweaks to a parser to fix an error that a user noticed to entire states con­tributed. I think it has made a real impact in pro­vid­ing a gen­tle intro­duc­tion for devel­op­ers look­ing for a way to contribute.

    open-​​access open­ness government2.0 trans­parency com­mons

Items of some interest…

These are my Pin​board​.in links for May 16th from 06:43 to 06:47:

  • Why train depar­ture infor­ma­tion is not cur­rently open data « Placr News — Going back in his­tory, until Feb­ru­ary 2009 ATOC licensed train depar­ture infor­ma­tion under com­mer­cial terms to a very small num­ber of organ­i­sa­tions, mostly within the rail indus­try. Kizoom pub­lished the only smart­phone app at that time, the free MyRail­Lite for iPhone. Then a dis­pute arose between ATOC and Kizoom, and ATOC with­drew Kizoom’s licence to use the train depar­ture infor­ma­tion. Kizoom com­plained to the ORR, who con­ducted an inves­ti­ga­tion (PDF) into whether ATOC had abused a dom­i­nant posi­tion under com­pe­ti­tion law. ORR decided that ATOC did have a dom­i­nant posi­tion in the sup­ply of train depar­ture infor­ma­tion, but they “found no evi­dence that ATOC’s con­duct in grant­ing access to Dar­win had pre­vented a new prod­uct from com­ing to mar­ket or ham­pered the emer­gence of new tech­nol­ogy” in Novem­ber 2009. When the free MyRail­Lite from Kizoom was taken off the mar­ket, it was imme­di­ately replaced by a £5 iPhone app from Agant which was mar­keted under the National Rail Enquiries brand.

  • enclo­sures open-​​access raw-​​data-​​now infra­struc­ture government2.0
  • G8 vs INTERNET — After 15 years of fight­ing the shar­ing of cul­ture in the name of an obso­lete copy­right regime, gov­ern­ments of the World are unit­ing to con­trol and cen­sor the Inter­net. The black-​​out of the Egypt­ian Net, the US government’s reac­tion to Wik­ileaks, the adop­tion of web­site block­ing mech­a­nisms in Europe, or the plans for “Inter­net kill switches”[1] are all major threats on our free­dom of expres­sion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion. These threats come from cor­po­ra­tions and politi­cians, unset­tled by the advent of the Internet.

  • intellectual-​​property copy­right inter­net cen­sor­ship leg­is­la­tion cor­po­ratism peti­tion