WHEN YOU READ something confusing, or work a crossword puzzle, or try to remember where you put your keys, what do you do with your body? Do you sit? Do you stand? Do you pace? Do you do anything with your hands? Do you move your eyes in a particular pattern?

How you answer questions like these, it turns out, may determine how long it will take for you to decipher what you're reading, solve your puzzle, or get your keys back.

Don't just stand there, think

Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace have made the world seem like a small place after all. But even on the Internet, persistent language barriers and cultural differences mean that the planet may not be quite as interconnected as you think.

The List: The World’s Top Social Networking Sites

MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating large datasets that is amenable to a broad variety of real-world tasks. Users specify the computation in terms of a map and a reduce function, and the underlying runtime system automatically parallelizes the computation across large-scale clusters of machines, handles machine failures, and schedules inter-machine communication to make efficient use of the network and disks. Programmers find the system easy to use: more than ten thousand distinct MapReduce programs have been implemented internally at Google over the past four years, and an average of one hundred thousand MapReduce jobs are executed on Google's clusters every day, processing a total of more than twenty petabytes of data per day.

MapReduce: simplified data processing on large clusters

Watch the Reaction between the Burning Magnesium and Added Carbon Dioxide Ice.

Magnesium and Carbon Dioxide

ONE of life's little mysteries is why particular people fancy each other—or, rather, why they do not when on paper they ought to. One answer is that human consciousness, and thus human thought, is dominated by vision. Beauty is said to be in the eye of the beholder, regardless of the other senses. However, as the multi-billion-dollar perfume industry attests, beauty is in the nose of the beholder, too.

ScientificMatch.com, a Boston-based internet-dating site launched in December, was created to turn this insight into money. Its founder, an engineer (and self-confessed serial dater) called Eric Holzle is drawing on an observation made over a decade ago by Claus Wedekind, a researcher at the University of Bern, in Switzerland.

The scent of a woman (and a man)

Now days in the era of science research being measured by SCI, Impact Factors, funding committees etc., most researchers would not risk themselves to focus on some true problems which demand some deep insights and long commitments. This is a simple fact in our current funding system. No wonder, in a report to the US president by President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, named as “Computational Science: Ensuring America’s Competitiveness”, a group of leading scientists expressed their concerns:

“Based on its analysis of Federal R&D agency activities, PITAC concluded that Federal support for computational science research has been overly focused on short-term, low-risk activities. In the long term, this is actually a high-risk strategy that is less likely to yield the high-payoff, strategic innovations needed for the future.”

Now we are in the age of competition: everything is required to be done faster; everybody is required to produce more with less time. Nobody knows what the end of this road is; Nobody knows whether it is the right way. It is more or less to make people to feel nostalgia about the golden days of science in the past time, before NSF or any other funding committees are established. For example, in Cambridge University, after becoming a member of the faculty, you have the freedom to do whatever you like to do within the university’s resources. You don’t need apply any special funding for it. Nobody will evaluate your research every 2~3 years. However, those golden time is gone. Now we can not undo what we had already done. More importantly, we can not back to the age of doing science without complicated devices and giant machines, which are essential for the progress of bio-science and nano-technologies etc.

What could we do?

The story behind the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

Andre Elisseeff leads a research team at IBM’s Zurich Research Lab that in September demonstrated a prototype system that will allow doctors to view their patients’ electronic health record (eHR) using three-dimensional images of the human body. Called the Anatomic and Symbolic Mapper Engine, the system maps the information in a patient’s eHR to a 3-D image of the human body. A doctor first clicks the computer mouse on a particular part of the image, which triggers a search of the patient’s eHR to retrieve the relevant information. The patient’s information corresponding to that part of the image is then displayed, including text entries, lab results, and medical images, such as magnetic resource imaging. The doctor can zoom in on the image to retrieve selective information or narrow the search parameters by time or other factors.

“The 3-D coordinates in the model are mapped to anatomical concepts, which serve as an index onto the electronic health record. This means that you can retrieve the information by just clicking on the relevant anatomical part. It’s both 3-D navigation and a 3-D indexed map,” explains Elisseeff.

Elisseeff makes clear that the mapper engine is not just a 3-D imaging system. In addition to connecting to a patient’s eHR, the images displayed are linked to the 300 000 medical terms defined by the SNOMED (Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine) international standard, a copy of which the mapper engine accesses from a local database. “It is impossible for doctors to remember all these terms, and they will need some assistance in the near future. Medical standards are at least as complicated to doctors as normal medical terms are to patients,” Elisseeff notes.

Furthermore, Elisseeff says, “The SNOMED terminology is also a knowledge repository. It is how we include the medical knowledge into the mapper engine, how we tell the computer that a finger is a part of the hand or that flu and fever can be related. The glue between graphical objects and the electronic health record is fundamentally based on this computerized medical knowledge. This is the core of our work. The visible part of the application is the 3-D model. But the most challenging part is building the links such that they are clinically relevant.”

“You can think of it as being like Google Earth for the body,” is how Elisseeff frames the mapper engine. “We see this as a way to manage the increasing complexity that will come in using computers in medicine.”

Visualizing Electronic Health Records With "Google-Earth for the Body"

We have identified our six top Internet themes/events for 1H’08 that could create trading opportunities in the group.

Intensifying 3rd party seller competition (negative)
As the industry giant ($57bn in TTM GMV) eBay’s anticipated listing fee changes could impact the 3rd party market. We think Amazon ($5bn in TTM GMV) might incorporate some of this uncertainty (and consumer uncertainty), into its ‘08 outlook, potentially creating a buying opportunity as we expect little actual impact.

A bump Online media spending (positive)
We see two events that could build enthusiasm on the Internet advertising market into the summer: elections and the TV writers strike. Direct dollars won’t be that material ($150mn possible direct benefit to Online adverting in ‘08), but extensive political spend could crowd non-political spending to Online display markets, which could be a catalyst for Yahoo or Google (YouTube).

Increasing focus on mobile market initiatives (both)
CES and the spectrum auction will provide greater clarity on Google’s and Yahoo’s mobile strategies, we expect each company to be aggressive in 2008. Difficult to handicap the risk of Google winning the spectrum auction, but losing could be a stock catalyst. Also, we expect Yahoo’s to renegotiate its AT&T contract with a mobile partnership component, potentially clearing an overhang.

Improving display ad targeting technology (positive)
A Google/DCLK merger may highlight possibility for improved targeting technology to drive up the value of Online ad inventory. We think Online CPMsat around $2.50, which trail newspapers by 5-10x has room to grow, and targeting will make social networking sites more competitive, but also benefit Yahoo! in ‘08.

Asset value unlock speculation (positive)
The InterActive split into five entities expected in mid-2008 will be the catalyst and, in addition to potentially creating value for Interactive, the split could be an industry catalyst highlighting the underlying asset value for Yahoo ($10-11/share) and potentially even eBay (we value PayPal ~$10bn) or Expedia (TripAdvisor).

Social networking revenue model emergence (negative)
Audiences are moving to social networking sites and the “interest targeting” ad sales initiative by MySpace is just a first step in competitive audience monetization. We expect more display/sponsorship/ad network initiatives, followed by peer-to-peer eCommerce and possibly personalized search in a few years. All large cap. Internet stocks (eBay, Google, Yahoo) have some degree of risk, although AOL, MSN and Yahoo! could have most in ‘08.

Merril Lynch's Top Internet themes for 1H’08

Calling for a “new beginning” to reform the nation’s transportation programs, the bipartisan National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission today unveiled a comprehensive plan to increase investment, expand services, repair infrastructure, demand accountability, and refocus Federal transportation programs, while maintaining a strong Federal role in surface transportation. Policy changes, though necessary, will not be enough on their own to produce the transportation system the Nation needs in the 21st century. Significant new funding also will be needed.

Congress created the twelve-member, bipartisan Commission in 2005 and it not only was charged with examining the condition and operation of the surface transportation system, but also with developing a conceptual plan and specific recommendations to ensure that the surface transportation system serves the needs of the nation now and in the future.

Transportation for Tomorrow: Report of the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission

This report provides an overview of the role foreign investment plays in the U.S. economy and an assessment of possible actions a foreign investor or a group of foreign investors might choose to take to liquidate their investments in the United States. Concerns over the potential impact of disinvestment have grown as national governments have become more active investors and as uncertainty over the risks associated with securities backed by sub-prime mortgages has increased volatility in financial markets. Actions taken by foreign investors to liquidate their holdings could affect the U.S. economy in a number of ways due to the role foreign investment plays in the United States and due to the current mix of economic policies the United States has chosen. The impact of any such action on the economy would also depend on the overall condition and performance of the economy and the financial markets.

If the economy were experiencing a strong rate of economic growth, the impact of a foreign withdrawal likely would be minimal, especially given the dynamic nature of credit markets. If a withdrawal occurred when the economy were not experiencing robust rate of growth or if credit financial markets were under duress, the withdrawal could have a stronger effect on the economy.

The particular course of action foreign investors might choose to take and the overall strength and performance of the economy at the time of their actions could affect the economy in different ways. Congress likely would become involved as a result of its direct role in making economic policy and its oversight role over the Federal Reserve. In addition, the actions of foreign investors could complicate domestic economic policymaking. Foreign investors who decide to liquidate their holdings of one particular type of investment would normally need to look for other types of assets to acquire. While there are a multitude of possible strategies foreign investors could pursue, this analysis assesses the impact of four of the most likely strategies a single large foreign investor or a group of foreign investors could choose to employ to reduce or withdraw entirely their holdings of U.S. financial assets:

* A rapid liquidation of U.S. Treasury securities.
* A shift in the make-up of foreign investors’ portfolios among various dollar-denominated assets.
* A rapid shift from dollar-denominated assets to assets denominated in other currencies.
* A slow shift in the make-up of future accumulations of assets away from dollar-denominated assets to assets denominated in currencies other than the dollar.

This report will be updated as events warrant.

Foreign Ownership of U.S. Financial Assets: Implications of a Withdrawal