IBM uses atoms to create world's smallest movie. © IBM Research.
All rights reserved. In a secret laboratory, a team of scientists races against the clock. They hover over a 2-ton machine so menacing and powerful, it can freeze single atoms in place. With the precision of angels and the patience of gods, the scientists use a super-sharp needle to coax these specks of matter into complex patterns—patterns they hope will communicate to the children of Earth a message so urgent, the fate of the human race depends on it. At least, that’s what the voiceover might say if this were a feature film. For the last few weeks, a team at IBM has nudged atoms—building blocks of the freaking universe—into slides depicting a short story about a boy and his pet.
Obviously, this sort of stop motion is a little more complex than your latest Vine. The scientists have experimented with iron, manganese, cobalt, and other various atoms to learn how they react at atomic levels, but they chose a carbon monoxide molecule for the film. Consciousness. U.S. intelligence tests crowd-sourcing against its experts. WASHINGTON — Nine years ago, Congress blocked a Pentagon agency from setting up a website that would have allowed anyone with a credit card to bet on the likelihood of foreign assassinations, coups and terrorist attacks.
The idea was to take advantage of the "wisdom of crowds," a social science maxim that contends the average of a group of forecasters, under certain circumstances, tends to be more accurate than even the most knowledgeable single forecaster. For The Record Los Angeles Times Thursday, August 23, 2012 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 4 News Desk 2 inches; 60 words Type of Material: Correction CIA crowd-sourcing: An article in the Aug. 21 Section A about a federal study into the "wisdom of crowds" said that participants were asked to assess the likelihood of future terrorist strikes, among other topics. But lawmakers worried the proposed predictions market could allow terrorists to profit from their own misdeeds.
Now terrorism futures are back. The Emerging Revolution in Game Theory. The world of game theory is currently on fire.
In May, Freeman Dyson at Princeton University and William Press at the University of Texas announced that they had discovered a previously unknown strategy for the game of prisoner’s dilemma which guarantees one player a better outcome than the other. That’s a monumental surprise. Theorists have studied Prisoner’s Dilemma for decades, using it as a model for the emergence of co-operation in nature. This work has had a profound impact on disciplines such as economics, evolutionary biology and, of course, game theory itself. The new result will have impact in all these areas and more. The game is this: imagine Alice and Bob have committed a crime and are arrested. What should Alice and Bob do? If they co-operate, they both spend only one month in jail. However, the game gets more interesting when played in repeated rounds because players who have been betrayed in one round have the chance to get their own back in the next iteration.
Why Bronze Medalists Are Happier Than Silver Winners. So we have the paradox of a man shamed to death because he is only the second pugilist or the second oarsman in the world.
That he is able to beat the whole population of the globe minus one is nothing; he has “pitted” himself to beat that one; and as long as he doesn’t do that nothing else counts. In 1892, psychologist William James wrote these words in this foundational book, The Principles of Psychology. James’s observation echoes a sentiment that is well known in psychology: a person’s achievements matter less than how that person subjectively perceives those achievements. For example, you might be thrilled over a 5% raise at work until you learn that your colleague down the hall earned a 10% raise. But is there ever a case when the individual with the 5% raise is happier with his or her outcome than the person with the 10% raise?
In the video above are the gold, silver, and bronze medalists at the medal ceremony for women’s moguls at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. Future - Science & Environment - Social status: Why all men are not created equal. Research suggests social hierarchies could be a law of nature and bring big benefits to communities. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”, declared the signatories of the American Declaration of Independence, but the slave-owning Thomas Jefferson did not seem to think they need stay that way. Indeed, if there’s one characteristic shared by almost every human society, it is inequality: the existence of a social hierarchy. Humans aren’t alone in that. But in an ant society, at least you know where you stand: you’re either a queen, a worker, or a male, fit for nothing but reproducing. Humans, in contrast, have complex, many-tiered and overlapping hierarchical structures: only we seem to have developed the exquisitely nuanced caste of the local government officer.