AcaWiki

AcaWiki:PressRelease-2009-10-07 - AcaWiki: "AcaWiki’s mission is to make academic research more accessible and interactive by creating a 'Wikipedia for academic research.' 'Cutting-edge research is often locked behind firewalls and therefore lacks impact,' founder Neeru Paharia explains, 'AcaWiki turns research hidden in academic journals into something that is more dynamic and accessible to have a greater influence in scholarship, and society.' AcaWiki enables users to easily post and discuss human-readable summaries of academic papers and literature reviews online. AcaWiki also helps users to share and organize summaries through the use of tags and RSS feeds. Vijay Kumar, senior associate dean and director of the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology at MIT, says, 'AcaWiki can provide an important 'sense-making' function for enabling easier sharing of knowledge that can help to build bridges across disciplines—and even between academia and those outside.'"

AcaWiki

AcaWiki - Mike Linksvayer: "AcaWiki† officiously launches tomorrow. The goal is to make academic knowledge more accessible through wiki community curated article “summaries” — something like long abstracts aimed at a general audience rather than specialists.

This could be seen as an end-run around access and copyright restrictions (the Open Access movement has made tremendous progress though there is still much to be done), but AcaWiki is a very partial solution to that problem — sometimes an article summary (assuming AcaWiki has one) would be enough, though often a researcher would still need access to the full paper (and the full dataset, but that’s another battle)."

What Happened to Argentina?

What Happened to Argentina? - Economix Blog - NYTimes.com: "A century ago, there were only seven countries in the world that were more prosperous than Argentina (Belgium, Switzerland, Britain and four former English colonies including the United States), according to Angus Maddison’s historic incomes database. In 1909, per capita income in Argentina was 50 percent higher than in Italy, 180 percent higher than Japan, and almost five times higher than in neighboring Brazil. Over the course of the 20th century, Argentina’s relative standing in world incomes fell sharply. By 2000, Argentina’s income was less than half that of Italy or Japan.

The chart below shows the relationship between income in 1909 and income in 2000 in 1990 dollars, and Argentina is the extreme outlier. The gap between 2000 income and predicted economic success, based on 1909 income, is larger for Argentina than for any other country."

Chart of the Day

Chart of the Day | Mother Jones: "The results were pretty dismal: only about half the respondents even noticed the calorie counts and only 15% said they influenced their choice. But the receipts told an even more dismal story: overall, people actually purchased more calories after the law went into effect. The results aren't statistically significant, though, so basically all the researchers can really say is that the law (so far) hasn't had any effect. The only glimmer of good news is that among people under 35, respondents who noticed the labeling did seem to cut back a bit. No other subgroup showed any effect. So who knows? Young people probably respond to this kind of thing more quickly than older people, so maybe it's just going to take some more time before all this stuff sinks in."

What is the Vatican, exactly?

What is the Vatican, exactly? | Salon: "he seemed totally oblivious to the fact that the reason he was called on the U.N. carpet had far more to do with the Vatican's failure to protect children from such abuse. As recently as 2004 Pope John Paul II granted a special audience to Father Marcial Maciel, the Mexican priest who founded the right wing group the Legion of Christ and had been repeatedly and credibly accused of child sexual abuse since the 1970s. It was Benedict who finally had enough of Maciel and ordered him in 2006 to retire quietly to a life of prayer and initiated an investigation of the charges of sexually abusing young seminarians as well as fathering three or four children and supporting them with the order’s money. Not a single bishop has faced serious repercussions for his role in covering up sexual abuse. Boston’s Cardinal Law was forced to resign as archbishop of Boston but given a sweet job in Rome as the titular cardinal of Santa Susanna, the American Catholic church in Rome."

These Foolish Things

Incharacter.org: "This is living? Wisdom plays it safe, avoids occasions of sin, sits home on Saturday night with an improving book. Elvis used to croon that “Wise men say, ‘Only fools rush in.’” But like the king he was, he knew that a brokenhearted clown understood more about the heart than any cautious Polonius. What would love be without impetuousness? Who can love and then be wise? “The heart has reasons that the reason doesn’t know.” No proverb says that love should be the end product of careful calculation, that it’s the smart move. This is why computerized dating seems repulsive to so many people; you just know the machine would be happier working on a spreadsheet. Besides, who would trust his emotional life to a program written by some Caltech brainiac who’s spent his entire geeky existence playing Halo and Warcraft? To quote Mr. T, “I pity the fool.”"

Canada’s biggest problem? America

Canada’s biggest problem? America - World - Macleans.ca: "But it was just one more high-profile imbroglio between the two countries that may have left many Canadians asking the question: is America Canada’s biggest problem?

Jason Myers, the president of the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters, calls growing American protectionism “the hottest issue for us.” He is not only concerned about new rules that affect us directly, but also those aimed at other countries that lead to problems for Canada. For example, when Obama announced in September that the U.S. would impose tariffs on tires from China, Myers worried that any Chinese retaliation against the U.S. auto industry would hurt Canadian businesses, too, because that sector is so integrated in North America. “We just see a whole lot of areas where the U.S. is becoming more closed, protectionist and isolated in terms of trade,” Myers says. “It’s not just that it’s our biggest market, but we make things together. We are part of an integrated supply chain. It has far-reaching impacts throughout industries.”"

vonnegutSTYLE

vonnegutSTYLE: "The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. Don't you yourself like or dislike writers mainly for what they choose to show you or make you think about? Did you ever admire an emptyheaded writer for his or her mastery of the language? No.

So your own winning style must begin with ideas in your head."

Europe's Lactose Intolerance

Europe's Lactose Intolerance | Foreign Policy: "Demonstrations against low milk prices and demands for aid have been going on for over a month in Europe, culminating yesterday when protesters invaded Brussels. Above, Belgian dairy farmers, many of whom brought their cows, protest low milk prices outside European Commission headquarters on Sept. 7."

A Colossal Lack of Judgement

Celestial Junk: A Colossal Lack of Judgement: "President Obama has come under attack for his “method” when trying to get the Olympic games for Chicago. Among points being made, is that Barack delivered a speech laced with hubris, and that the Chicago committee itself, recently taken over by Obama mentor, Valerie Jarrett, approached the process with ham-fisted arrogance . Be what it may, it’s not the Obama approach to the IOC that disturbs me.

I’m very concerned, nay stunned, at the colossal lack of judgement shown by not only Barack Obama, but by his advisory team, in sending the president to Copenhagen in the first place."

Philip Glass on Sesame Street

Philip Glass on Sesame Street

Ignatieff's committing political euthanasia

Ignatieff's committing political euthanasia | The Hill Times - Canada's Politics and Government Newsweekly: "If a party has to commit political suicide to defend its credibility, it means there's not much of it left in the party."

Masdar City to test GE 'smart' appliances

Masdar City to test GE 'smart' appliances | Green Tech - CNET News: "Abu Dhabi's planned green community, Masdar City, will be testing General Electric's smart appliances in a handful of residences and coordinating them with its power grid, GE said Monday.

GE's Consumer & Industrial division announced in October 2008 that it was developing home appliances that could ease the strain on electrical grids by coordinating with a grid's off-peak hours to perform flexible functions.

A refrigerator equipped with a 'smart' meter, for example, communicates with the local power utility. That refrigerator then waits to run its automatic defrost cycle until it has received a signal from the electrical grid that it's an off-peak period."

The Creepiest Thing Ever: L’Inconnue de la Seine

mental_floss Blog � The Creepiest Thing Ever: L’Inconnue de la Seine: "Here’s something that happened. In the early twentieth century, a popular piece of art for the fashionable French home was L’Inconnue de la Seine (translation: “the unknown woman of the Seine”), a completely creepy death-mask (pictured at left) of a young woman whose body had been pulled from the Seine River in Paris, sometime in the 1870s or 1880s. As the (somewhat questionable) story goes, a pathologist at the morgue found the unknown woman’s face enchanting, so he made a death mask, a plaster casting of her face. The resulting cast was widely reproduced and became both a popular objet d’art, as well as extremely influential to writers, artists, and indeed young girls who attempted to replicate her (dead) looks. And you thought your friends were goth in high school…."

Flawed climate data

Flawed climate data: "The 18th and 19th century portion of the sample, for instance, contains at least 30 trees per year. But that portion doesn't show a warming spike. The only segment that does is the late 20th century, where the sample size collapses. Once again a dramatic hockey stick shape turns out to depend on the least reliable portion of a dataset.

But an even more disquieting discovery soon came to light. Steve searched a paleoclimate data archive to see if there were other tree ring cores from at or near the Yamal site that could have been used to increase the sample size. He quickly found a large set of 34 up-to-date core samples, taken from living trees in Yamal by none other than Schweingruber himself!Had these been added to Briffa's small group the 20th century would simply be flat. It would appear completely unexceptional compared to the rest of the millennium."

Leading UK Climate Scientists Must Explain or Resign

Jennifer Marohasy � Leading UK Climate Scientists Must Explain or Resign: "This sorry saga also raises issues associated with how data is archived at the UK Met. Office with incomplete data sets that spuriously support the case for global warming being promoted while complete data sets are kept hidden from the public – including from scientific sceptics like Steve McIntyre.

It is indeed time leading scientists at the Climate Research Centre associated with the UK Met. Office explain how Mr McIntyre is in error or resign."

Bodies pile up in Detroit morgue; poor can't afford burial

Bodies pile up in Detroit morgue; poor can't afford burial - Oct. 1, 2009: "Inside the Wayne County morgue in midtown Detroit, 67 bodies are piled up, unclaimed, in the freezing temperatures. Neither the families nor the county can afford to bury the corpses. So they stack up inside the freezer."

Sarkozy Snubs Obama on Nuclear Threat Stance

Charles Krauthammer - Sarkozy Snubs Obama on Nuclear Threat Stance - washingtonpost.com: "Don't take it from me. Take it from Sarkozy, who could not conceal his astonishment at Obama's naivete. On Sept. 24, Obama ostentatiously presided over the Security Council. With 14 heads of state (or government) at the table, with an American president at the chair for the first time ever, with every news camera in the world trained on the meeting, it would garner unprecedented worldwide attention.

Unknown to the world, Obama had in his pocket explosive revelations about an illegal uranium enrichment facility that the Iranians had been hiding near Qom. The French and the British were urging him to use this most dramatic of settings to stun the world with the revelation and to call for immediate action."

Why the recession is here to stay

Why the recession is here to stay - Business - Macleans.ca: "When U.S. marshals put Bernie Madoff’s Long Island mansion on the block last month, few expected much action. Sales of luxury homes have been as dead as the lowly subprime market—and surely the oceanfront playground of a disgraced Ponzi fraudster would be hard to move. Then something astonishing happened. A furious bidding war erupted, and the house sold in mid-September for US$8.75 million in cash, well over the asking price. Madoff’s US$65-billion scam may have embodied all the lying, cheating and greed that got us into the Great Recession, but the frenzy for Bernie’s old digs shows that the froth is back, alive and well."

Michael Lewis on A.I.G.

Michael Lewis on A.I.G. | vanityfair.com:
"liddy: I don’t know them, sir.

grayson: Not a single one. You’re talking about a group, a small group of people who caused your company to lose $100 billion, as you sit here today, you can’t give me one single name.

liddy: The single name I would give you is Joseph Cassano, who ran …

grayson: That’s a good start. You already gave that name. Give me another name.

liddy: I just don’t know them. I do not know those names. I don’t have them all at my command.

grayson: Well, how can you propose to solve the problems of the company that you’re now running if you don’t know the names of the people who caused that problem? … I would expect you’d at least know more than one name. How about two names? Give us one more name."

Ardipithecus: We Meet At Last

Ardipithecus: We Meet At Last | The Loom | Discover Magazine: "Combined with other A. afarensis fossils, paleonthropologists got a pretty decent picture of what hominids looked like. Lucy was a chimpanzee-sized ape with a brain that was only a little bigger than a chimp’s. She still had long arms and curving hands and other traits hinting that she could still climb in trees. But she also had feet with stiff, forward-facing toes, an adaptation for walking on the ground.

So things stood for about 20 years. But then, with the discovery of Ardipithecus and a few other hominid fossils, the record of our ancestry got pushed back millions of years. The oldest fossil that’s been identified as a hominid, Sahelanthropus tschadensis, dates back between 6 and 7 million years old. But scientists have only found pieces of the Sahelanthropus skull. Another species, Orrorin tugenensis, is 6 million years old; it’s represented by little more than a leg bone."

Thinking literally

Thinking literally - The Boston Globe: "Now, however, a new group of people has started to take an intense interest in metaphors: psychologists. Drawing on philosophy and linguistics, cognitive scientists have begun to see the basic metaphors that we use all the time not just as turns of phrase, but as keys to the structure of thought. By taking these everyday metaphors as literally as possible, psychologists are upending traditional ideas of how we learn, reason, and make sense of the world around us. The result has been a torrent of research testing the links between metaphors and their physical roots, with many of the papers reading as if they were commissioned by Amelia Bedelia, the implacably literal-minded children’s book hero. Researchers have sought to determine whether the temperature of an object in someone’s hands determines how “warm” or “cold” he considers a person he meets, whether the heft of a held object affects how “weighty” people consider topics they are presented with, or whether people think of the powerful as physically more elevated than the less powerful."

The Importance of Being Unimportant

The Importance of Being Unimportant - The Brooklyn Rail: "From a commercial perspective, for the most part, there are two groups of people in the world: those who buy art for investment and those who buy art because they like it. I’ve met many collectors who bastardize this statement, claiming they “like to invest in good art.” Speculating on art is fine—it’s a free country—but treating art exclusively as a commodity hurts the market in innumerable ways, which I won’t go into except to say that it has been instrumental in raising prices to a point at which 2000 people in the world support the careers of 200 artists. Most critics believe that it isn’t their duty to follow the money in the system, only to maintain critical vigilance and to separate the good art from the bad art. The only problem is, over the course of the last 20 years we’ve watched “bad” work somehow turn into “sensational” work, “sensational” turn to “provocative,” “provocative” into “important,” and “important” back into “good.” It’s a collecting world’s semantic shell game."

Regulating greenhouse gases: Enter the EPA

Regulating greenhouse gases: Enter the EPA | The Economist: "OVER the past few days, America has moved towards a federal system for regulating its carbon emissions in three ways. First, several big companies have broken with trade associations that oppose the cap-and-trade bill now in the Senate. Second, the bill has moved a stage further towards becoming law. Third, and most important, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced that if Congress won’t legislate to cut greenhouse gases, it will regulate anyway."

$72 Million for Energy Efficiency and Conservation Projects in 7 States and Territories

Department of Energy - Obama Administration Delivers Nearly $72 Million for Energy Efficiency and Conservation Projects in 7 States and Territories: "“This funding will allow states across the country to make major investments in energy solutions that will strengthen America's economy and create jobs at the local level,” said Secretary Chu. “It will also promote some of the cheapest, cleanest and most reliable energy technologies we have - energy efficiency and conservation - which can be deployed immediately. Local communities can now make strategic investments to help meet the nation's long term clean energy and climate goals.”

States and territories receiving funding today include: Idaho, Nevada, New Jersey, Oregon, Puerto Rico, South Dakota and the U.S. Virgin Islands."