Computer Science / Engineering posts
- December 1, 2010
- 04:42 PM
- 429 views
How To Fool A Lie Detector Brain Scan
by Neuroskeptic in Neuroskeptic
Can fMRI scans be used to detect deception?It would be nice, although a little scary, if they could. And there have been several reports of succesful trials under laboratory conditions. However, a new paper in Neuroimage reveals an easy way of tricking the technology: Lying In The Scanner.The authors used a variant of the "guilty knowledge test" which was originally developed for use with EEG. Essentially, you show the subject a series of pictures or other stimui, one of which is somehow special; maybe it's a picture of the murder weapon or something else which a guilty person would recognise, but the innocent would not.You then try to work out whether the subject's brain responds differently to the special target stimulus as opposed to all the other irrelevant ones. In this study, the stimuli were dates, and for the "guilty" volunteers, the "murder weapon" was their own birthday, a date which obviously has a lot of significance for them. For the "innocent" people, all the dates were random.What happened? The scans were extremely good at telling the "guilty" from the "innocent" people - it managed a 100% accuracy with no false positive or false negatives. The image above shows the activation associated with the target stimulus (birthdays) over and above the control stimuli. In two seperate groups of volunteers, the blobs were extremely similar. So the technique does work in principle, which is nice.But the countermeasures fooled it entirely, reducing accuracy to well below random chance. And the countermeasures were very simple: before the scan, subjects were taught to associate an action, a tiny movement of one of their fingers or toes, with some of the "irrelevant" dates. This, of course, made these dates personally relevant, just like the really relevant stimuli, so there was no difference between them, making the "guilty" appear "innocent".Maybe it'll be possible in the future to tell the difference between brain responses to really significant stimuli as opposed to artifical ones, or at least, to work out whether or not someone is using this trick. Presumably, if there's a neural signiture for guilty knowledge, there's also one for trying to game the system. But as it stands, this is yet more evidence that lie detection using fMRI is by no means ready for use in the real world just yet...Ganis G, Rosenfeld JP, Meixner J, Kievit RA, & Schendan HE (2010). Lying in the scanner: Covert countermeasures disrupt deception detection by functional magnetic resonance imaging. NeuroImage PMID: 21111834... Read more »
Ganis G, Rosenfeld JP, Meixner J, Kievit RA, & Schendan HE. (2010) Lying in the scanner: Covert countermeasures disrupt deception detection by functional magnetic resonance imaging. NeuroImage. PMID: 21111834
- November 30, 2010
- 09:27 AM
- 1,429 views
50 years of metallic glasses
by Joerg Heber in All That Matters
This week I am attending the 2010 Materials Research Society Fall Meeting in Boston — one of the key meetings in materials science. One of the sessions is on bulk metallic glasses and their applications, which this year is a little special. It is organised in honour of the 50 year anniversary of the first demonstration [...]... Read more »
KLEMENT, W., WILLENS, R., & DUWEZ, P. (1960) Non-crystalline Structure in Solidified Gold–Silicon Alloys. Nature, 187(4740), 869-870. DOI: 10.1038/187869b0
- November 29, 2010
- 01:48 AM
- 1,565 views
Social Media Use by Medical Students
by Dr Shock in Dr Shock MD PhD
Social software or the use of Internet (Web 2.0) for generating your own content, to connect with one another and to share and manage content with each other is used by young people. How do first year medical students use this social software? This could be important because these networks could become networks of learners [...]
Related posts:Social Media in Health and Medicine: Medlibs Round 2.7
The Risks of Online Social Networking for Students
Disclosure of substance use on social media websites
... Read more »
Sandars, J., Homer, M., Pell, G., & Crocker, T. (2010) Web 2.0 and social software: the medical student way of e-learning. Medical Teacher, 2147483647-5. DOI: 10.3109/01421590701798729
- November 27, 2010
- 06:27 AM
- 833 views
Uppsala Status Report
by egonw in Chem-bla-ics
As you know, my post-doc in Uppsala ended. It was a good time, and it was great collaborating on Bioclipse with Ola, Jonathan, Arvid, and Carl. I would have loved tighter integration with the work of Maris and Martin, but that was limited to one joined paper (in press). I thank Professors Jarl Wikberg and Eva Brittebo for allowing me to continue my research at their department, and hope this is not the end of the collaboration yet.
Like with new year, the end of a contract is a good time to reflect on ones accomplishments. It's been a bit delayed, but as you know, I already in my next project in Cambridge, and will start in January with yet a longer term position in predictive toxicology (more on that soon). This makes this a really crowded period, on top of birthdays, Sinterklaas, x-mas, and sorts.
My Research
As you might know, my research interest lies in understanding molecular properties and their applications in larger molecular systems. This can be how small molecules pack in crystals, finding patterns in properties (QSAR-like work), etc. Because the underlying methods are useful in many domains, you see applications in various too, including drug discovery, metabolomics, etc. These methods involve statistics and cheminformatics, primarily, which is clear from my publications on method development in chemometrics and cheminformatics. You will also have seen that visualization is a very important tool here, as our numerical validation can easily mislead even a trained scientist.
How Uppsala fits in
About 30 months ago, I got an offer to join the Bioclipse team to work on the cheminformatics features of the workbench. It was already using the CDK, so the project was a tight match with what I did in the past. Additionally, there were plans to integrate R, and while the latter is partially implemented, that part was unfortunately not completed by the group yet. I believe this is a crucial aspect, and without it the large-scale impact of Bioclipse will be severely reduced.
Bioclipse is positioned as a workbench to use third-party libraries, web services, databases, etc, and has done so very successfully (doi:10.1186/1471-2105-8-59). It speaks many Open Standards, and already incorporates various important Open Source libraries for life sciences research, including the aforementioned CDK (doi:10.2174/138161206777585274, doi:10.1021/ci025584y), but also Jmol, JChemPaint, BioJava (doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btn397), and others. Using these libraries it has rich visualization means for life sciences data, including molecules and protein sequences. The latter, of course, is directly related to the proteochemometrics research done in Wikberg's group. Recently, Bioclipse adopted scripting functionality, making it a perfect tool to share life sciences computation, just like Taverna (doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/bth361) and KNIME.
Where I hoped to do some research in proteochemometrics, events lead me into different areas, which I explained in Why you have not heard me much about chemometrics recently....
But, Bioclipse provides me with the tools I need to take molecular chemometrics (doi:10.1080/10408340600969601) forward.
Results
So, what has this resulted in, besides a number of unsuccessful grant applications? We're still counting, but two book chapters, a book on pharmaceutical bioinformatics, one proceedings paper, five research papers, seven oral presentations at international meetings, and a ACS conference on RDF in chemistry. Oh, and tons of Open Source code, of course. (I'm at the edge of collapsing; I did that as student, lost a year, but learned a lot about myself ... these results I have worked very hard for; I am not a miracle worker. And I have to disappoint people occasionally, as things do not work out how I expected them to be. My apologies for that.)
I will not describe all in detail now, but focus on a few things around what I made my research in Uppsala: semantic cheminformatics, which I believe to be a key concept of where cheminformatics must be going. The first paper resulted from a collaboration with Johannes, a medical researcher at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Germany (full reference at the end of the post). This work provides an alternative to SOAP, which has a better solution to asynchronous computing that the polling approaches now commonly used. A XMPP-based service just reports back when it is done, so that you do not have to ask all the time. Makes sense to me. We made the platform available to Bioclipse and Taverna, and demonstrated the technology with applications in life sciences, including (QSAR) descriptor calculation, and susceptibility for seven known HIV protease inhibitors.
This work stresses that if we really want to, we can significantly improve scientific computing. It's very much like what Peter concluded this week: "None of this is rocket science - it’s purely a question of will". This is what I have being trying to show in the past few years. The disuse of accurate scientific computing is a deliberate choice. Making your cheminformatics research irreproducible is a choice, and a bad one too. There can be acceptable reasons, but the choice would be bad nevertheless (I hope that distinction is clear: you can have valid reasons to do something intrinsically wrong. You will be forgiven, and be encouraged to change your behavior.) Many people on the Blue Obelisk community are laying out the foundations and show cases, hoping to make it easier for others to change behavior. I think we have been quite successful there.
Anyways... on to the second paper. As said, Bioclipse is the platform that can bring these new cheminformatics methods to the desktop. The new and improved Bioclipse 2 (see citation below) adds one important new feature: scripting. My work in this paper focuses on doing making sure the cheminformatics library was properly integrated, continued development of JChemPaint (yet unpublished, and in collaboration with the EBI, but see for example this blog post), and helping Ola and other to properly use the CDK in their applications (MetaPrint2D (doi:10.1186/1471-2105-11-362), etc.). The impact of this work goes far beyond the papers on which I am author, though not every reviewer will understand that, unfortunately. This work is really the plumbing, it's the development of the measuring machines to do the job, the development of a STM device to actually get going.
The third paper, also listed at the end, is about defining a standard for detailed exchange of QSAR data. It defines what information is needed to reproduce a set of QSAR descriptors, including the input, and using a descriptor ontology which we published about before (doi:10.1021/ci050400b). This project can be the seed of a public repository of QSAR data, where it will be clear what is meant, and how the data can be used. If you are interested in setting up such a public repository, please contact me or Ola.
That leaves me to the work that I have initiated in the group: the use of RDF technologies (I do hope all VR reviewers are listening). RDF provide a lingua franca for data exchange in life sciences, and the meaning of words is provided by sharing dictionaries (ontologies). Bioclipse has been extended to speak RDF, and we developed various applications based on it. A proceedings previews the effort, while the paper is in print in the new Open Access Journal of Biomedical Semantics. Of course, you can also read much about this topic in this blog.
RDF is going to change bio- and cheminformatics in ways the XML has been unable to do. Various papers are currently in preparation to provide detailed uses case and related research. I am very excited about this technology which further improved interoperability and reproducibility in cheminformatics. Should you care about that? Yes, because by using these good practices, research will be easier to interpret, conclusions judges, and as such, we can fo... Read more »
Wagener, J., Spjuth, O., Willighagen, E., & Wikberg, J. (2009) XMPP for cloud computing in bioinformatics supporting discovery and invocation of asynchronous web services. BMC Bioinformatics, 10(1), 279. DOI: 10.1186/1471-2105-10-279
Spjuth, O., Alvarsson, J., Berg, A., Eklund, M., Kuhn, S., Mäsak, C., Torrance, G., Wagener, J., Willighagen, E., Steinbeck, C.... (2009) Bioclipse 2: A scriptable integration platform for the life sciences. BMC Bioinformatics, 10(1), 397. DOI: 10.1186/1471-2105-10-397
Spjuth, O., Willighagen, E., Guha, R., Eklund, M., & Wikberg, J. (2010) Towards interoperable and reproducible QSAR analyses: Exchange of datasets. Journal of Cheminformatics, 2(1), 5. DOI: 10.1186/1758-2946-2-5
- November 23, 2010
- 04:52 AM
- 683 views
Visual Complexity Rankings and Accessibility Metrics – #accessibility #a11y
by Simon Harper in Thinking Out Loud
Eleni Michailidou passed here PhD defence with flying colours and now her work 'Visual Complexity Rankings and Accessibility Metrics' is published.... Read more »
Eleni Michailidou. (2010) Visual Complexity Rankings and Accessibility Metrics. Thesis. info:/
- November 23, 2010
- 03:42 AM
- 493 views
Discussions beyond the dichotomy of ‘downloading is theft’
by Tomas Rawlings in A Great Becoming
Andersson, J (2010). Peer-to-peer-based file-sharing beyond the dichotomy of ‘downloading is theft’ vs. ‘information wants to be free’: How Swedish file-sharers motivate their action Unpublished as yet Discussion of paper: <em>Peer-to-peer-based file-sharing beyond the dichotomy of ‘downloading is theft’ vs. ‘information wants to be free’: How Swedish file-sharers motivate their action</em> by Jonas Andersson of [...]... Read more »
Andersson, J. (2010) Peer-to-peer-based file-sharing beyond the dichotomy of ‘downloading is theft’ vs. ‘information wants to be free’: How Swedish file-sharers motivate their action. Unpublished as yet. info:/
- November 19, 2010
- 01:52 AM
- 647 views
Molecular recess
by Anna Goldstein in Berkeley Science Review Blog
It would be an understatement to say that molecular machines have been under a tremendous amount of pressure lately. Proponents of nanotechnology have left them variously responsible for curing the world’s diseases, providing mankind with limitless food, water, energy and information, and even self-assembling so we don’t have to make them ourselves. And that’s only a partial list. Under the weight of such towering expectations, can we really blame them if they give up and turn the planet into grey goo?
Perhaps in an effort to save us from such an apocalyptic scenario, some nanoscientists have set more leisurely intermediate goals for molecular machines, like getting them to play games. A group of researchers from Columbia University recently developed a two-player strategy game between a human player and DNA-based molecular computer called “tit-for-tat”. Continue reading →... Read more »
Pei R, Matamoros E, Liu M, Stefanovic D, & Stojanovic MN. (2010) Training a molecular automaton to play a game. Nature nanotechnology, 5(11), 773-7. PMID: 20972436
Lund K, Manzo AJ, Dabby N, Michelotti N, Johnson-Buck A, Nangreave J, Taylor S, Pei R, Stojanovic MN, Walter NG.... (2010) Molecular robots guided by prescriptive landscapes. Nature, 465(7295), 206-10. PMID: 20463735
- November 17, 2010
- 07:00 AM
- 1,262 views
Social networking extends battery life
by David Bradley in Sciencetext
A new approach to social networking for mobile devices, such as tablet PCs and smart phones could improve the user experience as well as making connecting with contacts more efficient. The approach could also boost battery life by up to 70% by making use of shared data between users that are in the same location. [...]Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech TalkSocial networking extends battery life
... Read more »
Rebeka Belavic, Marko Basuga, Vedran Podobnik, Ana Petric, & Ignac Lovrek. (2010) Agent-based social networking for mobile user. Int. J. Intelligent Information and Database Systems, 4(6), 599-628. info:/
- November 15, 2010
- 10:57 AM
- 621 views
ASSETS 2010 Picks – #assets10
by Simon Harper in Thinking Out Loud
We did present at ASSETS 2010 as I previously said and I must say that I think this years conference was solid.... Read more »
Shari Trewin, Bonnie E. John, John Richards, Cal Swart, Jonathan Brezin and John Thomas. (2010) Towards a Tool for Keystroke Level Modeling of Skilled Screen Reading. Proceedings of the 12th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, 1(1). info:/
- November 14, 2010
- 02:16 PM
- 479 views
Seek and ye shall find (friends online)
by Hadas Shema in Information Culture
Who makes new friends on social networks online? If we are going by the "rich get richer" assumption, we would expect to find that people who are already socially active will find even more friends on SNS. On the other hand, it's possible that those who have troubles forming offline relationships will socialize more on the Web (the "social compensation" model). The third possibility is the "seek and ye shall find" model: people who believe it's possible to create online friendships would be more likely to create them. The sample in this study (Tufekci, 2010) was 617 students, 19 years old on average who use SNS. They were asked about the number of friends they kept in touch weekly offline (15 on average) and if they've met new friends online. In the qualitative section (175 respondents) they were asked whether they believed it was possible to meet new friends online or not, and why.After analysis, Tufekci found that those who believed online friendships (N = 300) were possible were 52% more likely to have met new friends online than those who didn't (N=317). The only difference between the two groups was time spent online: those who were positive about online relationship spent about 23 more minutes a day online. Surprisingly, African-Americans had about 67% higher odds of meeting new friends online, compared with whites. Gender and age didn't make any significant difference, and neither did the number of offline friends. Why people don't believe in online friendshipsTrust. Some respondents felt online identities aren't reliable.Need for a face-to-face communication.Difficulties in conveying emotions and creating intimacy online.Why people do believe in online friendshipsSome respondents felt online friendships are less judgmental, more open and less embarrassing. Some respondents felt the important part in a relationship is the conversation, whether online or offline.Experience. About 10% of the respondents who were positive about online relationships met friends/spouses online or have known someone who did. Of course, the results of this study are relevant to the college population studied, so one can't generalize the findings to the rest of the population, but it is interesting that many of the "N-generation" still feel the need for a face-to-face interaction in order to form a friendship. Tufekci, Z. (2010). Who Acquires Friends Through Social Media and Why?"Rich Get Richer" versus "Seek and Ye Shall Find" Proceedings of the 4th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM, 2010).... Read more »
Tufekci, Z. (2010) Who Acquires Friends Through Social Media and Why? "Rich Get Richer" versus "Seek and Ye Shall Find". Proceedings of the 4th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM, 2010). info:/
- November 9, 2010
- 07:00 AM
- 1,193 views
Location, location, location
by David Bradley in Sciencetext
Smart phones and other portable devices are increasingly hooking us into location-based systems so that we can find local services, check in at events, connect with friends and businesses and much more. But, there is a downside to allowing a third party to know your GPS co-ordinates or access your cell phone location – privacy [...]Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech TalkLocation, location, location
... Read more »
Ali Khoshgozaran, & Cyrus Shahabi. (2010) A taxonomy of approaches to preserve location privacy in location-based services. Int. J. Comput. Sci. Eng., 5(2), 86-96. info:/
- November 9, 2010
- 04:30 AM
- 492 views
Bombers wearing suicide vests can be detected from a safe distance
by SAGE Insight in SAGE Insight
Sensing and identifying the improvised explosive device suicide bombers: people carrying wires on their body From The Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation: Applications, Methodology, Technology Terrorist threats from small devices continue to be a very real global concern. A reminder of the persistent danger from such weapons was flagged just last week as Federal [...]... Read more »
Fox, W., Vesecky, J., & Laws, K. (2010) Sensing and identifying the improvised explosive device suicide bombers: people carrying wires on their body. The Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation: Applications, Methodology, Technology. DOI: 10.1177/1548512910384604
- November 5, 2010
- 09:00 AM
- 673 views
Princess Leia and the Next Dimension
by Rheanna Sand in Science in Seconds
With my lightsaber and Jedi robes, this Halloween I defended the Rebel Alliance against the evil Galactic Empire with the help of Princess Leia, who faithfully acted out her hologram scene throughout the night: "Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope."
Well, if Leia were here now, she could actually send that holographic message. That is, if she were friends with Nasser Peyghambarian at the University of Arizona. He and his colleagues have developed a new technique for three-dimensional telepresence, or transmitting moving holograms from one location to another in near real-time.
As they explain in their paper, published in the November 4th issue of Nature, this technology is quite different from that used in the 3D movies and TVs - which use polarized light to trick your brain - and is not the cheesy digital image fusion used by CNN in their election night coverage. Holograms are much more awesome in that they reproduce the light intensity and wave front, which makes objects appear like they would if real light were bouncing off them.
Holograms can be computer generated, and have been since the 1960's, but the vast amount of visual information has limited the size and resolution of displays. A technique called stereographic holography eases the data load, and unlike other forms of stereoscopy, does not require the observer to wear silly glasses to see the 3D effect. This group decided to go this route.
The other advance made was in the display material, a photorefractive polymer that is capable of being updated to create a moving image. The previous material, inorganic crystal, was not suitable for large screens and couldn't be easily updated. Plus, it would look really tacky next to your iPad.
Though some object to the term "telepresence" with something a few inches wide with a 2-second delay, there is no doubt that this technology is frickin' cool. Of course they say the best uses will be in medicine and the military, but we saw how well that went with the internet. Just imagine, or don't, what Tiger Woods or Brett Favre could do with this kind of messaging. C'mon, you know that's where it'll end up!
P.-A. Blanche, A. Bablumian, R. Voorakaranam, C. Christenson, W. Lin, T. Gu, D. Flores, P. Wang, W.-Y. Hsieh, M. Kathaperumal, B. Rachwal, O. Siddiqui, J. Thomas, R. A. Norwood, M. Yamamoto, & & N. Peyghambarian (2010). Holographic three-dimensional telepresence using large-area photorefractive polymer Nature, 468, 80-83 : 10.1038/nature09521
... Read more »
P.-A. Blanche, A. Bablumian, R. Voorakaranam, C. Christenson, W. Lin, T. Gu, D. Flores, P. Wang, W.-Y. Hsieh, M. Kathaperumal.... (2010) Holographic three-dimensional telepresence using large-area photorefractive polymer. Nature, 80-83. info:/10.1038/nature09521
- November 3, 2010
- 02:03 PM
- 828 views
Real-time holographic video displays could be near
by Joerg Heber in All That Matters
Holograms may seem like an original invention from some science fiction films. A famous scene often mentioned in this context is that from Star Wars where Princess Leia records an important holographic message, ending with the words “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi“. Such visions of holograms aren’t fiction. In a paper published in Nature, Nasser Peyghambarian, [...]... Read more »
Blanche, P., Bablumian, A., Voorakaranam, R., Christenson, C., Lin, W., Gu, T., Flores, D., Wang, P., Hsieh, W., Kathaperumal, M.... (2010) Holographic three-dimensional telepresence using large-area photorefractive polymer. Nature, 468(7320), 80-83. DOI: 10.1038/nature09521
- November 2, 2010
- 10:21 PM
- 830 views
A graceful collapse
by The Curious Wavefunction in The Curious Wavefunction
Vijay Pande's group at Stanford has become well-known for using the collective force of millions of CPUs around the world for simulating protein folding in the project known as Folding@home. One of the enduring challenges in simulating folding has been to sample the long timescales that are common in real-life folding events, and recent breakthroughs have made accessing such time domains realistic. We should expect long protein folding simulations to be within the reach of many non-specialists in the next few years. In the latest issue of JACS, Pande's group provides an example of such advances by simulating the folding of a 39 residue protein called NTL9. The actual folding time is 1.5 ms so this is a substantially long MD simulation. To achieve this, Pande's group uses Graphic Processor Units (GPUs) of the kind that are found in video game modules. Over the last few years these units have made interesting biological phenomena accessible to chemists. C & EN has a nice article on the increasing use of GPUs for biomolecular simulation.Pande's group also uses a set of statistical tools called Markov State Models (MSMs) to identify metastable folding states and the transition trajectories between them. MSMs provide a nifty strategy to bridge the results from several short trajectories (rather than running one long one).What is endearing about the simulation is that that the correct structure doesn't form until much later and then quickly falls in place, like a lost kid suddenly remembering his place in the marching band. As can be seen in the video below, the missing piece of the puzzle is a short C-terminal part of a beta-sheet which seems to linger as part of an alpha helix while the rest of the sheet structure forms. After comfortably waltzing around as a little helical piece for a long time, it seems to suddenly remember its correct identity and snaps and collapses into place as part of the beta sheet. Very nice!Admittedly, a 39 residue protein is minuscule compared to most typical proteins. But the results provide a neat proof of concept. Importantly, they also show that current force fields with implicit solvent models can be accurate enough for this kind of simulation. Further validation will test these force fields more stringently.Voelz VA, Bowman GR, Beauchamp K, & Pande VS (2010). Molecular simulation of ab initio protein folding for a millisecond folder NTL9(1-39). Journal of the American Chemical Society, 132 (5), 1526-8 PMID: 20070076... Read more »
Voelz VA, Bowman GR, Beauchamp K, & Pande VS. (2010) Molecular simulation of ab initio protein folding for a millisecond folder NTL9(1-39). Journal of the American Chemical Society, 132(5), 1526-8. PMID: 20070076
- November 1, 2010
- 02:44 AM
- 1,334 views
Final Verdict: Internet Enhances our Social Lives
by Dr Shock in Dr Shock MD PhD
From a sample from 13 countries, the Internet doesn’t make us more lonely, the Internet improves our social lives. The critics of Internet suggesting that the Internet has a negative impact on us can be put at ease, the Internet doesn’t ruin our social lives.
Recent research took into account the different kinds of usage [...]
Related posts:The Social Capital Divide in MySpace
Digital Divide in Internet Addiction?
Elderly and Internet and Computer Skills, An Update
... Read more »
Amichai-Hamburger, Y., & Hayat, Z. (2010) The impact of the Internet on the social lives of users: A representative sample from 13 countries. Computers in Human Behavior. DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2010.10.009
- October 26, 2010
- 02:23 AM
- 1,669 views
Adolescents’ Narcissism on Facebook
by Dr Shock in Dr Shock MD PhD
We already discussed Narcissism on Facebook for adults, this research is a bout a more vulnerable group of facebook users: adolescents. This study examined the personality traits extraversion and narcissism as manifested in certain features of adolescents’ Facebook profiles. These features were profile picture rating (rating of their physical appearance in profile picture), facebook status [...]
Related posts:Narcissism on Facebook
Are Facebook Users Different?
The Dangers of Facebook or Let’s Be Careful Out There
... Read more »
Ong, E., Ang, R., Ho, J., Lim, J., Goh, D., Lee, C., & Chua, A. (2010) Narcissism, extraversion and adolescents’ self-presentation on Facebook. Personality and Individual Differences. DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2010.09.022
- October 26, 2010
- 12:32 AM
- 491 views
The medium is the joke
by Hadas Shema in Information Culture
In their paper "The medium is the joke: Online humor about and by networked computers" by Shifman and Blondheim (2010, pay-walled) the authors sampled 170 texts from "humor hubs" (that is, well-known humor sites), plus 80 videos from YouTube, ending up with 250 humorous items in their sample.Manufactors, monopoly and the Microsoft menace In the absence of real alternative to Microsoft (though a friend once threatened me with installation of Linux) users make jokes which the authors interpret according to superiority theories (users are helpless to do anything but mock the ruler). Instead of throwing the Vista-installed laptop against the wall, the victims users show their frustration by making jokes. But it's not all Microsoft's fault: the authors suggest that because of the strong synonymity between Microsoft and the PC, people could be taking out their anger on Microsoft for "the failure of man and computer to interact harmoniously".The usersMisusers: blondes, rednecks and usually other 'stupid' groups. Misusers are the people who can't work their computer properly.Over-users: geeks; They are so familiar with computers they become emotionally attached to the ("You seriously consider devoting a web page to your computer. Not the brand, mind you, but the actual computer itself"). Over-users in jokes compromise their humanity and 'real' relationships in favor of their computers and cyberculture.Abusers: The abusers "can be interpreted as the mirror image of the over-user". They use their computer to satisfy "the most earthly human drives" (pornography, frauds). Unlike computers, abusers have human-related faults.Tech support(source: the inevitable XKCD)The tech support jokes address the gap between human expectations and how computers actually work. Tech supporters are considered a class of their own, "the closest parallel may, in fact, be the Oracle's Pythia or the priest in confession, mediating between man and the sublime divinity". The user has sinned and the computer stopped working. In order to communicate with the divine entity, the users turn to its priests, the tech support people. I think the authors might have missed a sub-genre here, which I'll refer to as "tech-support are idiots" and is represented in the above XKCD comics. It's true there are many jokes about idiot customers, but tech-support personnel is also often mocked. Anthropomorphism When computer become human. The sneezing computer, the icons attempting to kill one another on your desktop...These jokes are funny because of the sudden similarity between the very separated categories of 'human' and 'machine'. Compumorphism The mocking of human groups by comparing traits associated with them to those of computers (computers are males because "they have a lot of data but are still useless"; computers are females because "no one but their creator understands their internal logic"). The traits allegedly shared by the computer and the group make them less than 'true humans'.... Read more »
Shifman, L., & Blondheim, M. (2010) The medium is the joke: Online humor about and by networked computers. New media . info:/10.1177/1461444810365311
- October 25, 2010
- 07:38 PM
- 617 views
Finding Parameters for Cancer Progression and other Complex Biological Models
by Michael Long in Phased
Diego Fernandez Slezak (Buenos Aires University, Argentina), Gustavo Stolovitzky (IBM), and coworkers show that a mathematical "best fit" to a complex biological model may be biologically implausible.... Read more »
Fernández Slezak, D., Suárez, C., Cecchi, G. A., Marshall, G., & Stolovitzky, G. (2010) When the Optimal Is Not the Best: Parameter Estimation in Complex Biological Models. PLoS ONE, 5(10). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0013283
- October 22, 2010
- 05:54 PM
- 740 views
Yes, diversity matters
by David Basanta in Cancerevo: Cancer evolution
Diversity matters and I am not talking about the workplace. It does in cancer (I am writing this from an NCI organised meeting in the context of the ICBP, where one one the main themes is the role of...... Read more »
Palmer TM, Doak DF, Stanton ML, Bronstein JL, Kiers ET, Young TP, Goheen JR, & Pringle RM. (2010) Synergy of multiple partners, including freeloaders, increases host fitness in a multispecies mutualism. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 107(40), 17234-9. PMID: 20855614
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