research

CMU, Claytronic's homepage for programmable matter. Real life transformer research.

And, oh yeah, try meditation

Quoted: When something bright or novel flashes, it tends to automatically win the competition for the brain’s attention, but that involuntary bottom-up impulse can be voluntarily overridden through a top-down process that Dr. Desimone calls “biased competition.” He and colleagues have found that neurons in the prefrontal cortex — the brain’s planning center — start oscillating in unison and send signals directing the visual cortex to heed something else.

Quoted: She recommends starting your work day concentrating on your most important task for 90 minutes. until that first break, don’t get distracted by anything else, because it can take the brain 20 minutes to do the equivalent of rebooting after an interruption. “Multitasking is a myth,” Ms. Gallagher said. “You cannot do two things at once. The mechanism of attention is selection: it’s either this or it’s that.”

Truly amazing.

Quoted: Brian Greig creates electrified geared orreries for sale, exhibits for science museums, planetariums and observatories. View these exquisite works of art

I never really gave these much thought until I had to design for the Research Dept.

Further advancements in flexible electronics.

An intriguing investigation trying to get to the bottom of a tangled network of small dating sites. Strange business practice but apparently very effective.

World Urbanization Prospects:
The 2007 Revision Population Database

A lot of useful information on urban forestry!

i dotted this classic interview with Virilio because he has been concerned with the phenomenon of "Newshounds" for some time, and in specific with the decisive importance of the circulation of images for modern warfare, domestic and foreign.

I bring this up because it reminds me of Nealist's recent dot about how New York has decided to implement this system of "newshounding" on a mass level, and under the explicit pretenses of a civilian-led effort to amplify urban policing.

anyway, here's a snippet of the interview discussing this (and many other things, as always) -

"But let us link all this to something that is not discussed very often. I am referring here to the impact of the launch of the television news service CNN in 1984 or thereabouts. However, what I want to draw your attention to is CNN's so-called 'Newshounds'. Newshounds are people with mini-video cameras, people who are continually taking pictures in the street and sending the tapes in to CNN. These Newshounds are a sort of pack of wolves, continually looking for quarry, but quarry in the form of images. For example, it was this pack of wolves that sparked off the Rodney King affair a few years ago in Los Angeles. Let us consider the situation: a person videos Rodney King being beaten up by the cops. That person then sends in the footage to the TV station. Within hours riots flare up in the city! There is, then, a link between the logistics of perception, the wars in Lebanon and the Gulf as well as with CNN and the Pentagon. But what interests me here is that what starts out as a story of a black man being beaten up in the street, a story that, unfortunately, happens all the time, everywhere, escalates into something that is little short of a war in Los Angeles!"