biologist and computer scientist discover the 'anternet' | School of Engineering A collaboration between a Stanford ant biologist and a computer scientist has revealed that the behavior of harvester ants as they forage for food mirrors the protocols that control traffic on the Internet. On the surface, ants and the Internet don't seem to have much in common. But two Stanford researchers have discovered that a species of harvester ants determine how many foragers to send out of the nest in much the same way that Internet protocols discover how much bandwidth is available for the transfer of data. The researchers are calling it the "anternet." Deborah Gordon, a biology professor at Stanford, has been studying ants for more than 20 years. "The next day it occurred to me, 'Oh wait, this is almost the same as how [Internet] protocols discover how much bandwidth is available for transferring a file!'" Harvester ants. It turns out that harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex barbatus) behave nearly the same way when searching for food.
The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids What do we make of a boy like Thomas? Thomas (his middle name) is a fifth-grader at the highly competitive P.S. 334, the Anderson School on West 84th. Slim as they get, Thomas recently had his long sandy-blond hair cut short to look like the new James Bond (he took a photo of Daniel Craig to the barber). Unlike Bond, he prefers a uniform of cargo pants and a T-shirt emblazoned with a photo of one of his heroes: Frank Zappa. Thomas hangs out with five friends from the Anderson School. Since Thomas could walk, he has heard constantly that he’s smart. But as Thomas has progressed through school, this self-awareness that he’s smart hasn’t always translated into fearless confidence when attacking his schoolwork. For instance, in the early grades, Thomas wasn’t very good at spelling, so he simply demurred from spelling out loud. Why does this child, who is measurably at the very top of the charts, lack confidence about his ability to tackle routine school challenges? Thomas is not alone.
Tweets vs. Likes: What gets shared on Twitter vs. Facebook? It always strikes me as curious that some posts get a lot of love on Twitter, while others get many more shares on Facebook: What accounts for this difference? Some of it is surely site-dependent: maybe one blogger has a Facebook page but not a Twitter account, while another has these roles reversed. So what kinds of articles tend to be more popular on Twitter, and which spread more easily on Facebook? tl;dr Twitter is still for the techies: articles where the number of tweets greatly outnumber FB likes tend to revolve around software companies and programming. The first site I looked at was Nathan Yau’s awesome FlowingData website on data visualization. Here are the 10 posts with the lowest tweets-to-likes ratio (i.e., the posts that were especially popular with Facebook users): And here are the 10 posts with the highest tweets-to-like ratio (i.e., the posts especially popular with Twitter users): Notice any differences between the two? What do we find? Here’s a graph of the result:
Space Euphoria: Do Our Brains Change When We Travel in Outer Space? In February, 1971, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell experienced the little understood phenomenon sometimes called the “Overview Effect”. He describes being completely engulfed by a profound sense of universal connectedness. Without warning, he says, a feeing of bliss, timelessness, and connectedness began to overwhelm him. He describes becoming instantly and profoundly aware that each of his constituent atoms were connected to the fragile planet he saw in the window and to every other atom in the Universe. He described experiencing an intense awareness that Earth, with its humans, other animal species, and systems were all one synergistic whole. He says the feeling that rushed over him was a sense of interconnected euphoria. Rusty Schweikart experienced it on March 6th 1969 during a spacewalk outside his Apollo 9 vehicle: “When you go around the Earth in an hour and a half, you begin to recognize that your identity is with that whole thing. This is done with Faraday cages.
NASA Starts Work on Real Life Star Trek Warp Drive Guess who’s winning the brains race, with 100% of first graders learning to code? It’s Estonia! We’re reading today that Estonia is implementing a new education program that will have 100 percent of publicly educated students learning to write code. Called ProgeTiiger, the new initiative aims to turn children from avid consumers of technology (which they naturally are; try giving a 5-year-old an iPad sometime) into developers of technology (which they are not; see downward-spiraling computer science university degree program enrollment stats). ProgreTiiger education will start with students in the first grade, which starts around the age of 7 or 8 for Estonians. The compsci education will continue through a student’s final years of public school, around age 16. Teachers are being trained on the new skills, and private sector IT companies are also getting involved, which makes sense, given that these entities will likely end up being the long-term beneficiaries of a technologically literate populace. Top image courtesy of Kiselev Andrey Valerevich, Shutterstock
El Patrón de los Números Primos: Prime Number Patterns by Jason Davies. For each natural number n, we draw a periodic curve starting from the origin, intersecting the x-axis at n and its multiples. The prime numbers are those that have been intersected by only two curves: the prime number itself and one. Below the currently highlighted number, we also show its sum of divisors σ(n), and its aliquot sum s(n) = σ(n) - n, which indicate whether the number is prime, deficient, perfect or abundant. Based on Sobre el patrón de los números primos by Omar E.
Science & Environment | 'Oldest English words' identified Some of the oldest words in English have been identified, scientists say. Reading University researchers claim "I", "we", "two" and "three" are among the most ancient, dating back tens of thousands of years. Their computer model analyses the rate of change of words in English and the languages that share a common heritage. The team says it can predict which words are likely to become extinct - citing "squeeze", "guts", "stick" and "bad" as probable first casualties. "We use a computer to fit a range of models that tell us how rapidly these words evolve," said Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading. "We fit a wide range, so there's a lot of computation involved; and that range then brackets what the true answer is and we can estimate the rates at which these things are replaced through time." Sound and concept New spoken words for a concept can arise in a given language, utilising different sounds, in turn giving a clue to a word's relative age in the language.
Computer program ‘evolves’ music from noise Evolutionary processes in DarwinTunes. Songs are represented as tree-like structures of code. Each generation starts with 100 songs; however, for clarity, it only follows one-fifth of them. Twenty songs are randomly presented to listeners for rating, and the remaining 80 survive until the next generation; thus, at any time, the population contains songs of varying age. Of the 20 rated songs, the 10 best reproduce and the 10 worst die. Bioinformaticist Robert MacCallum of Imperial College London and colleagues have adapted DarwinTunes — a program that produces 8-second sequences of randomly generated sounds, or loops, from a database of digital “genes” — to be accessed online. Almost 7000 participants rated each sound loop, played in a random order, on a 5-point scale from “can’t stand it” to “love it.” In a musical take on survival of the fittest, the highest-scored loops went on to pair up with others and replicate. Readers can cast their votes at the DarwinTunes Web site.
Brain Workshop - a Dual N-Back game Introduction - Download - Tutorial - Details & Options - Donate Dual N-Back exercise featured in Brain Workshop was the subject of an April 2008 peer-reviewed scientific study which shows that practicing the Dual N-Back task for 20 minutes 4-5 days per week will improve your working memory (short term memory) and fluid intelligence. This Wired article has a good summary of its benefits. If you've never tried Dual N-Back before, here's a quick tutorial to get you started. Dual 1-Back It's best to begin with Dual 1-Back, the simplest mode. Launch Brain Workshop.Press Space to enter the Workshop.Press M to switch to Manual mode.Press F1 to decrease the N-back level to 1.Press Space to begin a Dual 1-Back session. You will see a blue square appear every 3 seconds accompanied by the sound of a letter. It's easy to perform this task when focusing only on a single cue (either the square's position or the letter). Dual 2-Back Brain Workshop starts in Dual 2-Back mode by default.
Amazing optical illusion or "glitch in the Matrix"? - The Feed Blog (CBS News) Watching this video is a bit like seeing a "glitch in the Matrix". Is it impressive? Without a doubt. Is it science? The video was posted by YouTube user brusspup, who has been featured here on The Feed a few times for amazing optical illusions and art, and who writes about it: This is really simple but has such an awesome effect. Another amazing video that has earned a big triple-rainbow salute from all of us here at The Feed! © 2012 CBS Interactive Inc.