This is a bit of mystery for me but fortunately there is some information out there, mainly the article “How browsers work” by Tali Garsiel.
I was a bit annoyed by the current Twentyfourteen WordPress Template that renders first some lines before getting towards the final layout. I am experimenting therefore with keyframe encapsulating as I did not find any better method. Continue reading How browsers render elements
Category Archives: Software
Crowdfunding academic research
Firstmonday has an interesting article about crowdfunding academic research. While I think this is a valuable option for some add-on studies, it is certainly nothing to fund a large academic center. Continue reading Crowdfunding academic research
Filtered net, self-censored opinion, what can we belief?
This piece is about filtering
and this about censoring
Rupert Sheldrake is a fascinating member of the scientific world. His TED talk named “The Science Delusion” was controversially censored by the TED community after being aired. Rupert shares that humanity has become stuck in turning science into another belief or dogma vs. allowing the method to be what it is. Rupert Sheldrake outlines 10 dogmas he has found to exist within mainstream science today. He states that when you look at each of these scientifically, you see that they are not actually true.
Some views are strange of course, while others are not (replace for example “morphogenetic fields” with “DNA methylation”). Even with a few interacting factors, a causal proof is nearly impossible. More at SFGATE or The Guardian.
Bad news are good news
e! Science News reports a new study in EPJ Data Science by Marcel Salathé showing that anti-vaccination sentiments spread more easily than pro-vaccination sentiments.
We find that the effects of neighborhood size and exposure intensity are qualitatively very different depending on the type of sentiment. Generally, we find that larger numbers of opinionated neighbors inhibit the expression of sentiments. We also find that exposure to negative sentiment is contagious
Read the full paper for the tricky design – at least the results fully underpin daily life experience. It’s certainly much easier to do Twitter than Facebook studies on the other hand these rather short messages are certainly not the main channel of many great “opinionated” people.
What a data scientist does except drinking coffee
Add geolocation barcodes to travel guides, conference leaflets, etc please
There are so cute little files while I am constantly looking up addresses in travel guides, madly identifying them at google earth before transferring location bookmarks to my mobile devices.
Why can’t publishers produce just some small geo.kml or geo.rdf files, deposit them somewhere on their web server and link them with barcodes that are printed each time a geolocation is referred too (example link Groebenzell)?
The iPhone needs a slightly different form (without kml) as well as an app like i-nigma that is pointed by this barcode
to maps://?geocode=&q=gr%C3%B6benzell&ie=UTF8&client=safari&oe=UTF-8&hnear=Gr%C3%B6benzell,+Oberbayern,+Bayern&gl=de&t=m&z=14”>Groebenzell.
A broken contract
Erika Check Hayden ( who asked me by email before she wrote that piece ) has a new article about “A broken contract – as researchers find more uses for data, informed consent has become a source of confusion. Something has to change“. While I largely agree with her analysis of the current situation, her points for change are somewhat weakly described ( BTW that paper already generated a heated discussion at The Mermaid’s Tale: “Informed consent — who’s it supposed to protect, anyway?” ). Continue reading A broken contract
A Word file that crashes the Macbook hard disk
Believe it or not, I was editing this week a document that I received by email. After 3 minutes Word Mac 2011, Version 14 crashed, leaving only a temporary file back on my OSX 10.7.4 desktop.
As restarting Word did not work, I used disk utility, that recommended to be started from another disk.
When doing so, it recommended to reformat my hard disk (which I did). Continue reading A Word file that crashes the Macbook hard disk
Making the invisible motion visible
Here is a new MIT video software, that constructs first a backbone of an object showing minor movements while then amplifying these movements to a ridiculous extent. Not clear what I try to explain? See a video at SPON. Although the idea behind Continue reading Making the invisible motion visible
Wearing headphones at work
When visiting other institutes, I frequently see scientists wearing headphones ( I only use my Bose headphones to make noise – only yesterday I couldn’t resist t download the free Goldberg variations from Kickstarter ). entertainment.slashdot.org now details what I already feared Continue reading Wearing headphones at work
Sync Lion desktop via iCloud
While all that sync’ing works quite well, I still have different desktops on my MacBooks.
Here is a solution that is based on some undocumented feature of the iCloud that I have found at macstories.net. It basically needs to activate the iCloud settings also for files which will give you in Lion access to a magic 5 GB ~/Library/Mobile Document folder very much alike to Dropbox.
I am rsyncing here now my Desktop folder by an automator action as described at banana.com. Can be done in less than 5 minutes…
Infinite stupidity?
This is a new Edge conversation with Mark D Pagel.
A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we’ve seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What’s happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we’re being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We’re being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. Continue reading Infinite stupidity?
Sync macs over iCloud
I have tried out the new sync function on my mac books and it works (nearly) perfect. There is not so much information out there, how this is working, that’s why I am describing here briefly my strategy.
The master machine is sync’ed first Continue reading Sync macs over iCloud
Computers are like bicycles for our mind (Steve Jobs)
or in his won words
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
Less than one mistake in every 6 million deliveries
I have seen recently a TV documentation about the Dabbawalas in Mumbai who deliver freshly cooked food to the workplaces and return the empty boxes back to the customer’s home. According to Wikiedia.
In 2002, Forbes Magazine found its reliability to be that of a six sigma standard. More than 175,000 or 200,000 lunch boxes get moved every day by an estimated 4,500 to 5,000 dabbawalas, all with an extremely small nominal fee and with utmost punctuality Continue reading Less than one mistake in every 6 million deliveries