BCNetWORKSHOP, trends and perspectives in complex networks
Topic: Science
7:33 am EDT, Oct 1, 2008
Ten years have elapsed since the publication of the celebrated paper by Watts and Strogatz on small-world networks. During this decade, the development of foundational aspects and methodologies set the grounds of complex network science, an interdisciplinary research area connecting Statistical Physics, Biology, Information Technology, Sociology, Economy, and others. Time has come to ask what have been the major contributions of this emerging field to prospect its future in perspective. We believe network science is now mature enough to start developing problem-solving ability and engineering and predictive power.
The spirit of this workshop is to stimulate researchers in complex networks and related areas to find new perspectives, trends, and applications that guarantee this headway. To this end, internationally recognized specialists will be invited to explain their current investigations and to discuss the expected progress of their research within the context of the field. The workshop will present as well selected contributions compliant with its purpose. An open colloquium session will also be organized where keynote speakers, participants, and committee members will have the opportunity to debate all together on the present situation of complex networks science and its outlook.
This exhibition features more than 20 health posters from the 1920s to the 1990s. Covering infectious diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, AIDS, gonorrhea, and syphilis, the posters come from North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa.
These posters provide insight into the interplay between the public's understanding of disease and society's values. They reflect the fears and concerns of the time and also the medical knowledge that was available. Considered an art form, many are beautiful and entertaining, but during their heyday, they sought to educate people on matters of life and death.
Public health took a visual turn about 100 years ago. In an era of devastating epidemic and endemic infectious disease, health professionals began to organize coordinated campaigns that sought to mobilize public and government action through eye-catching posters, pamphlets, and motion pictures. Impressed by the images of mass media that increasingly saturated the world around them, health campaigners were inspired to present new figures of contagion, and recycle old ones, using modernist aesthetics, graphic manipulations, humor, dramatic lighting, painterly abstraction, distortions of perspective, and other visual strategies. They devised a new iconography of contagion that emphasized visual legibility and the pleasure of the view.
The Invention of Air is a book of world-changing ideas wrapped around a compelling narrative, a story of genius and violence and friendship in the midst of sweeping historical change that provokes us to recast our understanding of the Founding Fathers.
It is the story of Joseph Priestley—scientist and theologian, protégé of Benjamin Franklin, friend of Thomas Jefferson—an eighteenth-century radical thinker who played pivotal roles in the invention of ecosystem science, the discovery of oxygen, the founding of the Unitarian Church, and the intellectual development of the United States. And it is a story that only Steven Johnson, acclaimed juggler of disciplines and provocative ideas, can do justice to.
In the 178 0s, Priestley had established himself in his native England as a brilliant scientist, a prominent minister, and an outspoken advocate of the American Revolution, who had sustained long correspondences with Franklin, Jefferson, and John Adams. Ultimately, his radicalism made his life politically uncomfortable, and he fled to the nascent United States. Here, he was able to build conceptual bridges linking the scientific, political, and religious impulses that governed his life. And through his close relationships with the Founding Fathers—Jefferson credited Priestley as the man who prevented him from abandoning Christianity—he exerted profound if little-known influence on the shape and course of our history.
As in his last bestselling work, The Ghost Map, Steven Johnson here uses a dramatic historical story to explore themes that have long engaged him: innovation and the way new ideas emerge and spread, and the environments that foster these breakthroughs. And as he did in Everything Bad Is Good for You, Johnson upsets some fundamental assumptions about the world we live in—namely, what it means when we invoke the Founding Fathers—and replaces them with a clear-eyed, eloquent assessment of where we stand today.
Scirate.com is a new experimental website for trying to deal with the information torrent hoisted upon the typical scientist who attempts to keep up with the latest and greatest in his or her research field. The basic idea is for the site to work as a sort of filter for the daily listings of new papers appearing on the internet. In particular, the site is currently set up to work most closely with the arxiv.org a preprint depository which has daily postings of new papers. By adopting the model of such websites as digg.com users can vote for a paper. These votes then influence which papers are displayed in a given listing. As a larger and larger userbase grows, it is hoped that the effect of this voting will allow users to confidently be directed to the most important papers published in each listing. Of course there must always be a group of people who are considering each paper, so the real hope is that the amortized work involved will improve under such a voting system.
One question which is usually brought up is why one should vote for a paper? Do you need to read the paper before you vote for it? Most probably the website will function much like other such social websites: people will vote for papers that they find interesting without having read the paper, but probably after having read the abstract.
This course examines the role of the engineer as patent expert and as technical witness in court and patent interference and related proceedings. It discusses the rights and obligations of engineers in connection with educational institutions, government, and large and small businesses. It compares various manners of transplanting inventions into business operations, including development of New England and other U.S. electronics and biotechnology industries and their different types of institutions. The course also considers American systems of incentive to creativity apart from the patent laws in the atomic energy and space fields.
NASA Images is a service of Internet Archive, a non-profit library, to offer public access to NASA's images, videos and audio collections. NASA Images is constantly growing with the addition of current media from NASA as well as newly digitized media from the archives of the NASA Centers.
The goal of NASA Images is to increase our understanding of the earth, our solar system and the universe beyond in order to benefit humanity.
It's Not the Answers That Are Biased, It's the Questions
Topic: Science
7:20 am EDT, Jul 29, 2008
When a scientist is hired by a firm with a financial interest in the outcome, the likelihood that the result of that study will be favorable to that firm is dramatically increased. This close correlation between the results desired by a study's funders and those reported by the researchers is known in the scientific literature as the "funding effect."
Scientific malpractice does happen, but close examination of the manufacturers' studies showed that their quality was usually at least as good as, and often better than, studies that were not funded by drug companies.
It has become clear to medical editors that the problem is in the funding itself. As long as sponsors of a study have a stake in the conclusions, these conclusions are inevitably suspect, no matter how distinguished the scientist.
The answer is de-linking sponsorship and research.
The evidence suggests that from an executive perspective, the most desirable employees may no longer necessarily be those with proven ability and judgment, but those who can be counted on to follow orders and be good "team players."
In this paper, we study certain geometric and topological properties of online social networks using the concept of density and geometric vector spaces. "Moi Krug" ("My Circle"), a Russian social network that promotes the principle of the "six degrees of separation" and is positioning itself as a vehicle for professionals and recruiters seeking each others' services, is used as a test vehicle.
Quantum mechanics is the girl you meet at the poetry reading. Everyone thinks she's really interesting and people you don't know are obsessed about her. You go out. It turns out that she's pretty complicated and has some issues. Later, after you've broken up, you wonder if her aura of mystery is actually just confusion.
