ideonexus - Slashdot User

+ - 2012 Warmest Year on Record, 2nd Most Extreme-> 0

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ideonexus

on Tuesday January 08, 2013 @04:34PM

ideonexus writes "Apparently 2012 is the warmest year on record according to the NOAA, and 12 of the 13 warmest years on record have all occurred since the year 2000, and decades of temperature measurements go from warmest to coldest by 2000s, 90s, 80s, 70s, 60s, 50s, 40s, 30s, 20s, 10s, 1900s, etc, etc. It's almost as if there's some sort of pattern here. If only there were some theory backed up by nearly 14,000 peer-reviewed research papers, 18 consensus statements by scientific organizations, and two centuries of reproducible laboratory results that could explain this strange "warming" phenomenon."
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+ - The Implications of Google Blocking Access to Anti-Islam Film-> 1

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ideonexus

on Saturday September 15, 2012 @08:49PM

ideonexus writes "While the decision has been a footnote in most news stories, the Washington Post is raising the question of what it means that Google can shutdown access to the anti-Islam film in countries where that film has sparked riots, something the American government cannot do thanks to our First Amendment. A popular meme in the Information Age is that the Internet spreads democracy by enabling citizens to organize and speak out, but we forget that much of that speech is now hosted by third-parties who are under no obligation to protect it."
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+ - Pussy Riot Faces Sentencing Friday-> 0

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ideonexus

on Thursday August 16, 2012 @07:28AM

ideonexus writes "Three members of the punk-rock band Pussy Riot will be sentenced Friday. The trio have spent five months in pretrial detention and face three to seven years in prison for 30 seconds of singing a "Punk Rock Prayer" in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour protesting Vladimir Putin's reelection. They chose to use their closing statements not to defend their actions, but to further register their protests against the state, its President, and the Russian Orthodox Church, which has called for divine retribution against the women. The trial has gained international attention and sparked a Free Pussy Riot movement."
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+ - The Art of Elections Forecasting-> 0

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ideonexus

on Thursday June 07, 2012 @04:31PM

ideonexus writes "Years ago Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, a blog seeking to educate the public about elections forecasting, established his model as one of the most accurate in existence, rising from a fairly unknown statistician working in baseball to one of the most respected names in election forecasting. In this article he describes all the factors that go into his predictions. A fascinating overview of the process of modeling a chaotic system."
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+ - NC Republicans Consider Outlawing Sealevel Rise Predictions-> 2

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ideonexus

on Wednesday May 30, 2012 @10:44PM

ideonexus writes "Republicans in North Carolina are floating a bill that would force planners to only consider past historical data in predicting the sea-level rise (SLR) for the state as opposed to considering projections that take Global Warming into account. NC-20, the pro-development lobbying group representing twenty counties along the NC coast, is behind the effort and asserts that the one-meter prediction would prohibit development on too much land as opposed to SLR predictions of 3.9 to 15.6 inches."
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+ - Astronomer Who Inspired Carl Sagan's "Contact" Retiring-> 0

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ideonexus

on Tuesday May 22, 2012 @02:55PM

ideonexus writes "Jill Tarter, the woman who inspired the fictional character Ellie Arroway in Carl Sagan's "Contact," is retiring as a SETI Astronomer after 35 years in order to focus entirely on raising funds to keep the SETI project operational, which employs 150 people and costs $2 million a year to operate, but had to shut down for several months in 2011 due to budget problems."
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+ - The Rise of "Brogrammers"-> 0

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ideonexus

on Wednesday May 09, 2012 @01:04PM

ideonexus writes "Several news stories in recent weeks are covering a culture-shift in computer programming from being a nerd-culture thing to becoming more of a frat-house thing with the rise of "Brogrammers." Businessweek describes it as a "new, more testosterone-fueled breed of coder", while Mother Jones editor Tasneem Raja laments that the culture-shift is alienating women. Users on Quora posted satirical answers to the question "How does a programmer become a brogrammer?" with answers about sunglasses, energy drinks, protein, and time at the gym."
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+ - Growing Evidence of Football Causing Brain Damage-> 0

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ideonexus

on Thursday May 03, 2012 @02:27PM

ideonexus writes "NFL Linebacker Junior Seau's suicide this week bares a striking similarity to NFL Safety Dave Duerson's suicide last year, who shot himself in the chest so that doctors could study his brain, where they found the same chronic traumatic encephalopathy that has been found in the brains of 20 other dead football players. Malcom Gladwell stirred up controversy in 2009 by comparing professional football to dog fighting for the trauma the game inflicts on players' brains, but with mounting evidence that the repeated concussions football players recieve during their careers causing a lifetime of brain problems, it raises serious concerns about America's most popular sport and ethical questions for its fanbase."
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+ - Brown University Prof: Economists are Social Scientists-> 0

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ideonexus

on Thursday April 26, 2012 @09:50AM

ideonexus writes "Controversial or insightful? Glenn Loury, an economist at Brown University, laments that economists arrogantly pretend to have empirical mathematical certainty on their side but are actually merely glorified social scientists."
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+ - The Addictive Potential of Brain Hacking with tDCS-> 4

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ideonexus

on Thursday March 08, 2012 @09:35AM

ideonexus writes "New Scientist author Sally Adee has a fascinating blogpost up about her personal experiences with using Transcranial Direct-Current Stimulation (tDCS), the act of conducting an electric current through the brain, to learn marksmanship with an assault rifle for an article she wrote, and talks about how much she longed to put the electrodes back on a few days later after the effects had worn off. With tDCS devices now available for sale with a prescription and DIYers posting instructions for building your own (see also here), are geeks on the precipice of a revolutionary and potentially addictive new brain hack?"
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+ - 101 Reasons Why Evolution is True-> 0

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ideonexus

on Sunday February 12, 2012 @10:44AM

ideonexus writes "Today is Darwin Day. With states continuing to introduce bills to teach creationism alongside the established science, like Indiana did at the beginning of this month, it's important to remember the overwhelming evidence supporting the Theory of Macroevolution through Natural Selection. Here are 101 Facts supporting Darwin's theory, in a creative commons licensed post with 101 accompanying photos."
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+ - The Zynga Skinner Box-> 0

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ideonexus

on Thursday January 26, 2012 @10:18AM

ideonexus writes "Benjamin Jackson has published a summary in the Atlantic of an article to soon be published in the Kickstarter-funded journal Distance concerning the psychological strategy employed by social game makers like Zynga. Games like Angry Birds and Farmville use Pavlovian conditioning to turn human beings into rats in a Skinner box, pushing the button over and over again to get that little dopamine fix from our brains as we earn fake rewards. We have a finite amount of time in this life. If we want to spend it on games, then those games should be creative, challenging, and force us to grow, like Portal, Civilization, Magic the Gathering, Robo Rally, or Memrise."
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+ - Scientists Compete on Qatar Reality Show-> 0

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ideonexus

on Monday January 23, 2012 @10:18AM

ideonexus writes "Qatar has just wrapped up the third season of the reality show "Stars of Science, where innovators in the Middle East compete to have their inventions funded along the same lines as the American shows "Survivor" and "Project Runway." Wired has a write-up about the show and the drama the Arab Spring has brought on the contestants as well as how some of the more conservative contestants balanced socializing with a female contestant in the latest season. It's easy to forget that while Western Civilization was mired in the millennium-long dark ages, the Middle East was inventing Algebra, optics, and the Scientific Method before the region fell into its own dark ages of religious fundamentalism. Could this be the spark of a European-style Era of Enlightenment for the region?"
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+ - The Convoluted Life Cycle of a News Story-> 0

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ideonexus

on Sunday November 20, 2011 @03:57PM

ideonexus writes "Once upon a time, newspapers were considered the "first draft of history." Today, rather than the daily episodic updates of major news stories developing a narrative over time, we have a perpetual stream of factoids from which a story emerges. Lauren Rabaino of mediabistro details this new lifecycle of a newspaper story, from tweets to blog posts to an eventual print edition, and asks What are the best standards of practice? Should news sources provide a single web address with a stream of updates, post new blog entries that link to older ones, or should they adopt a Wiki approach to the news--revising a single story with a history of revisions available behind the scenes?"
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+ - Social Networks Increase Brain Matter-> 0

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ideonexus

on Thursday November 17, 2011 @12:49PM

ideonexus writes "Previous studies have shown a correlation between people who have more friends on Facebook and increased grey matter in their brains, but there remained a question of whether social networking promoted the growth or if people with expanded regions were better at social networking. A new study in Science using 23 macaques assigned to social groups of varying numbers found "monkeys in the larger groups had more gray matterin brain areas linked to processing social information. " Sciam Blogger Eric Michael Johnson has an insightful write-up on this research in the context of historical primate studies and asks whether "online technology has allowed some individuals to express (and expand) a form of social behavior that emerged for other adaptive reasons but which has been underutilized until now?""
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