To translate visual patterns to neural activity, what is needed is a coordinate map, a rule which links each point in the visual field to a point on the flat model of V1. In the 1970s scientists including Cowan came up with just such a map, based on anatomical knowledge of how neurons in the retina communicate with neurons in V1.
The full text of Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger's Hugh Cudlipp lecture
So anyway my name is Bruce Sterling and I'm a science fiction writer from Austin Texas, and I'm here to deliver my speech now, which I like to call "The Wonderful Power of Storytelling." [This is the second giant talk by Bruce Sterling I have saved with Del.icio.us.]
This is a transcription of a talk made by Bruce Sterling at Reboot, Copenhagen on 26 June 2009
David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.
By R. Buckminster Fuller
How did a publication with just a four-year run help shape a community so prolific that it went on to inspire Google, Craigslist, and the blogosphere; save six American rivers; and shape sustainable business practices as we know them today?
AMERICAN BLACK METAL BANDS SPECIALIZE IN A UNIQUELY BRUTAL, HOMEGROWN SOUND, BUT THEY DON’T ACTUALLY KILL PEOPLE. SO WHY SHOULD THEY BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY? DISCUSSED: Multiple Stab Wounds, Inner-Scene Power Struggles, The Suicide of a Man Named Dead, Untitled Salt Sculptures, Japanese Literature, Pretzels, Hash, Necklaces Made of Teeth and Bones, The Common Conflation of Two Different Metals, Corpse Paint, Dude-ish Tracksuits, Illinois, The Sound of the Ghost of a Strangulated Raven, How Dreaming About Killing People Is More Radical Than Killing People
"The digital age is destroying us by ruining our ability to concentrate" [Reader-grabbing hyperbole is destroying us by ruining our ability to read realistic, serious journalism (since journalism no longer exists)]
Fernando Gómez-Pinilla [Prof. UCLA] believes that appropriate changes to a person’s diet can enhance his cognitive abilities, protect his brain from damage and counteract the effects of ageing.
To suggest that the average householder is to blame for our colossal national wastage is to ignore the way that the food industry has been allowed to develop in this country.
Though each state has its own rules on "municipal incorporation," in general you'll need to get 51 percent of the eligible voters in the area to go along with you.
THROW AWAY! DONATE GARAGE SALE KEEP CONSIGNMENT GIVE TO FRIEND KEEP EBAY
Most of us would agree that there exists a world outside our minds.
Oh, well. It would have started "Once upon a time" and ended "A sad story, don't you think?"
Carl is taking part in a long-standing American tradition of giving up on the endless drive to earn more money and abandoning a society based on consumption of goods. (Carl Steadman?)
Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance.
A few years back, one prominent oil producer switched to trading in euros per barrel. That country was Iraq
Eventually we'll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That's the source of my optimism.
And the better future we left behind
While no Fifth Amendment right protects the data on your laptop or phone, one federal court has held that even a judge cannot force you to divulge your password when the act of revealing the password shows that you are the person with access to or control
I’ve been on unemployment three times in the past six years. Each time was better than the last, and each time I stayed on until the last cent was exhausted
In spite of his Gordon Gecko haircut and his fine conceit of himself as a masterful businessman, he says he wants his employees to think of him "as a friend first, a boss second — probably an entertainer third."
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a
What's so unnatural about working for a big company?
Both men, independently, used the same word to describe and define the condition: autist, or autism, from the Greek autos, meaning self.
Travel was pointless. It removed you from the place in which you had a meaning, and to which you gave meaning in return by dedicating your life to it, and spirited you away into fairylands where you were, and looked, frankly absurd.
You are less inclined to watch television when you realise how much it can cost you to mess around. Put a reminder that “work NOT done = no money”.
What's In-Q-Tel? Well, believe it or not (and check out their website), this is the venture-capital wing of the CIA. [...] A friend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night at home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk.
via Jacob — In America men often work long hours even when they are well off; such men, naturally, are indignant at the idea of leisure for wage-earners, except as the grim punishment of unemployment
Wage-wise, the retail workers were at the bottom of the totem pole, the real sweatshop workers of the organization. But they seemed like they were the most excited to be there. For which I always credited coke.
Teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on effort rather than on intelligence or talent, produces high achievers in school and in life.
Mr. Iwata, president of Nintendo came to our office. We had a nice talk over supper.
if you want to reduce the stress in your life you need to simplify your lifestyle
For example, in 2000, Gore and Bush mentioned the following issues zero times: Child poverty, the drug war, homelessness, working-class families, NAFTA, prisons, corporate crime and corporate welfare.
Mr. Shikwati, the G8 summit at Gleneagles is about to beef up the development aid for Africa... Shikwati: ... for God's sake, please just stop.
The web has changed the game for a lot of organizations, but for the local business, it's more of a threat and a quandary than an asset.
There's a generation of web writers who produce "pleasure reading" on the web. Some are funny. Some are touching. Some are enraging. Most dwell in Sturgeon's 90th percentile and below. They're not writing novels. If they were, they wouldn't be web writers
"This is just confirmation that Starbucks and its cousins are all really in the commercial real estate business," he said. "They're giving very cheap real estate for a very pricey cup of coffee."
Or, everything we’ve learned so far: Research, articles, stories, and practical know-how about the music industry written from an independent band’s perspective.
Conversely, his IT employees have only three options: approve a request, research it or pass it up to him.
Explore the wide variety of inventions and ideas of science fiction writers - over 1,200 are available on Technovelgy. Use the Timeline of Science Fiction Invention or the alphabetic Glossary of Science Fiction Technology to see them all.
Hello, everyone. My name is Satoru Iwata, President of Nintendo Co., Ltd. Starting from today, I'd like to deliver a unique (perhaps unprecedented) series of interviews explaining the vision behind Wii, our revolutionary new console.
In 1609, a doctor named Wecker found a corpse in Bologna with two penises. Since then, there have been eighty documented cases of men similarly endowed.
Too much standing in the way, so something isn't really happening... yet.
“Why not? What’s the worst that’s going to happen? Twenty years down the road, someone’s gonna find your picture? Just make sure it’s a great picture.”
How disciplined are you about your early-morning routine?
I'll be living on just over $1,000 a month this year.
Mostly, I tell them I’m an accountant.
Or, How to Avoid Paying Rent and Getting a Job
Last Thursday, Eno gave a talk which was titled Before and after Darwin. Here's a recap:
Your future self is probably a stranger to you
See: Gruen Transfer. They are armchair media theorists, who take pleasure in deconstructing and defusing the messages of their enemies.
Over the next fifty years, by most indicators dear to economists, the country remained the richest in the world. But by another set of numbers—longevity and income inequality—it began to lag behind Northern Europe and Japan.
More than half (55%) of all online American youths ages 12-17 use online social networking sites. ... The survey also finds that older teens, particularly girls, are more likely to use these sites. For girls, social networking sites are primarily places t
* This article was first presented as a paper at the 2001 Computer Games & Digital Textualities conference in Copenhagen.
Case Study Luc Courchesne January 2002
The sexual primal scene of cinematic man was the simple tripod shot of a man kissing a woman. It was not so much the sexual explicitness or lack of it, but rather the fact that the audience were instantly made a collective of voyeurs.
Because 2007 is 23 years too late.
If believers cannot have that conversation because it compromises their God definition, then that is a tip-off that the God they serve is in fact an idol and atheism is always a proper response to idolatry.
Cannabinoids promote embryonic and adult hippocampus neurogenesis and produce anxiolytic- and antidepressant-like effects
A devoted mother is looking proudly on at a military parade as her son's platoon marches past: "There's my boy, he's the only one in step!"
For the month of November, I’m only spending $30 on food. The only exception will be things that are freely available to the average person
Berlin's friends would “watch him as if he were a trapeze artist, soaring through every imaginable subject, spinning, flipping, hanging by his heels and without a touch of showmanship”.
The GAO had found so many significant material deficiencies in the government’s accounting systems that the GAO was “unable to express an opinion” on the financial statements.
From the Bush administration’s post-Katrina power grab to a growing arms race in Latin America to the new hackable passports
Will there be a television in the bedroom?
(In no particular order.)
I'm sick and tired of this patriotic, nationalistic and fascist crap.
Who am I? I am the creator of a certain video game console. I don't want to toot my own horn, but let's just say that profits from this machine were four billion dollars higher than the Microsoft XBox.
So what does create genius or extreme talent? Musicians have an old joke about this: How do you get to Carnegie Hall from here? Practise
I first met Jimbo Wales, the face of Wikipedia, when he came to speak at Stanford.
Thankfully, true crises are rare. Most people go through only one in a lifetime, or maybe none at all.
“Let me tell you how this works,” said Gustavo Crisaldo, a thoughtful machinist with prematurely gray hair, now a member of Cristal Avellaneda’s directorial commission. “It’s this simple: if we hadn’t had our backs against the wall, we wouldn
A profession is more than a job -- it is a community and a culture.
When we realize that these zealots aren’t merely crazy but determined and ingenious
The comments are more useful than the posting
If you can just quickly whip something out and it's done, maybe it's time, once in a while, to think and think and think, "can I make it better than it is, a little superior?" What it does is not necessarily make the product better in the end, but it brin
Ten weeks is not much time. The average startup probably doesn't have much to show for itself after ten weeks. But the average startup fails.
When the Lord made me, he made a ramblin' man.
I caught a couple of duplicates. Probably more like 86 Theses. Still, awkward to wake up with this nailed to your door...
As Patricia Churchland has put it, “human beings are not controlled by a spooky-stuff soul.”
# The RIAA has sued over 20,000 music fans for file sharing, who have on average paid a $3,750 settlement. That's over $75,000,000.
Nice office supplies, dude.
The financial services industry certainly produces a lot of paper! Here’s what you need to keep and when you can trash it.
There's lots more information about the involvement of evangelical Christians in American politics at With God On Our Side.
Henry Jenkins is the Director of Comparative Media Studies Program and Full Professor of Literature at MIT. He has authored and edited 11 books, and has been studying videogames as media text since the early 90s from various perspectives
Neither Blossom nor Ettus can predict how their next projects will be used. But that's the point.
The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, 1986
In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. For many years inventions hav
3. The US Is Not (Yet) a Police State.
In this article, we will explore general issues related to e-mail and voicemail and offer practical tips on how to better use the technologies.
Browsing a government Web site, he pulled up a local divorce document listing the parties' names, addresses and bank account numbers, along with scans of their signatures. With a common software program and some check stationery, the document provided all
An inability to protect its citizens. The belief that it is above the law. A lack of democracy. Three defining characteristics of the 'failed state'.
Introduction: Complexity Leads to Futility
The goal of this paper is to review the history of why psychologists moved from a word shape model of word recognition to a letter recognition model, and to help others to come to the same conclusion. This paper will cover many topics in relatively few pa
Web Geeks Unite! was the original slogan when The Morning News launched in 1999, and though our mission has changed, the spirit is undiminished.
Last week was a terrible week at SourceGear. Most weeks I really enjoy my job. By the end of last week, I was reminding myself every hour that I get paid to do this.
Perhaps you are happy with the growth of the US government. Perhaps you feel it is not large and powerful enough, that it needs to be larger and more powerful.
Textbook for the MIT course "Software Engineering for Internet Applications". We assume that they know how to write a computer program and debug it. We do not assume knowledge of any particular programming languages, standards, or protocols. The most conc
You heard about how Google self-censors in China (e.g. human rights sites top-ranked by Google in other countries are missing in Google.cn). But did you know that Google showed censored search results in other countries for years, sometimes even without s
It was reported that the revolutionary new console was the most popular at the Electronic Entertainment Expo ‘06 - and many videos taken from the show floor showed a stampede of people heading for the Nintendo area as the doors opened in the morning!
If something is important to you, you spend money to make it reliable. If you cannot make it reliable, then you make it redundant. It's a life lesson more than a computer lesson.
It's not a conspiracy when the "conspirators" spent years writing Op-Eds in the Washington Post.
Drop cap H ow do we succeed in putting our ideas into words, so that another person can understand them? This complex undertaking involves translating an idea into a one-dimensional sequence, a string of words to be read or spoken one after the other.
Developed by the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT), the Terrorism Knowledge Base offers in-depth information on terrorist incidents, groups, and trials. [With WIZARDS!]
The federal law makes it unlawful to record telephone conversations except in one party consent cases which permit one party consent recording by state law. (a person can record their own telephone conversations without the knowledge or consent of the oth
Thanks Jacob! I'm not following you.
As many readers of this page will know, I have an on-going interest in Japan, its people and language. I have assembled this set of pages: (a) to provide information about a number of my projects in the area of Japanese computing and dictionaries, (b) to
U.S. regulators have approved a test that reportedly can predict who are at high risk for a return of cancer after surgical removal of the prostate gland.
They still can't read your thoughts just by looking at you, but researchers can now see what your brain is doing just by shining beams of light into your head.
Initial trials show just two applications of the PEP005 Topical gel on two consecutive days cleared up 71 per cent of basal cell carcinomas, or BCCs, the most common type of skin cancer.
To a rather large extent, abstraction is replaced by perception, but we do not know much about how this works, nor where the borderline lies. As an effect of this replacement, a so-called 'given' problem situation is not really given since it is seen diff
How and when people see pieces from the computer game in their sleep tells of the role dreaming plays in learning
Our own doubts and fears are the only things that prevent us from attracting greater wealth or achieving any expansive goal. The vast majority of the work it takes to succeed is internal — dealing with our doubts and fears.
Then, he altered the cages in only one particular: he divided them into two chambers with a clear wall broken only by one opening, too small for the males to get through but just right for the females. Architecturally it was a minor change, but what it di
proposal for the government to finance the production of textbooks on the condition that they would be placed into the public domain....
But risk homeostasis proposes another half to that continuum – according to Dr. Wilde, if a given person’s level of risk drops too far below their comfort level, they will again modify their behavior. This time though, they will increase their level o
credit cards will be provided by media companies, cellphone providers and banks will merge
Working mothers, out-of-wedlock births, divorce and other factors have transformed the social landscape. No one feels this more than African American women.
i love it when a plan comes together
The word itself, which is of medieval Scholastic origin, was rehabilitated by Franz Brentano towards the end of the nineteenth century. ‘Intentionality’ is a philosopher's word. It derives from the Latin word intentio, which in turn derives from the v