Saturday, April 08, 2006

Iran's nuclear propaganda machine in the New Scientist. I've written a commentary in the New Scientist on how the Iranian propaganda machine, maybe for the first time, has successfully sold its people its own vision and narrative on its nuclear program. Unfortunately, the online version of the article is not available for free. But I'm going to post it on my blog next week. Hope they wouldn't mind.... [Editor: Myself (English)] 8:38:30 PM    comment []

Ah, the Glamour of Academia.... It's kind of a dismal grey day today, so I find myself planning to spend a good chunk of the day working in the lab (which I haven't been able to do during the week, because of my teaching responsibilities). I have a student who's going to present a poster at DAMOP this year, and I need to do a few this weekend to make sure that he's got a reasonable chance of getting results. As you might imagine, this has me thinking all sorts of sunny thoughts about the academic life, so here are a couple of links in that vein: 1) The Dean Dad has some thoughts on generational divides in the academy. As with most sweeping generalizations about generations, I'm pretty skeptical, but there's some interesting stuff there. 2) Timothy Burke offers an excellent suggestions for administrative reform. (Here is the permalink to the Invincible Super-Blog entry he's referring to.) [Uncertain Principles] 8:38:28 PM    comment []

(a few of Dave Pollard's) Links for the Week - Apr.8/06. The Most Inspiring Novels: Men vs. Women: The UK Guardian has just compiled the results of a survey of men's choices of most inspiring novels (last year they surveyed women's choices). The lists are utterly different. Perhaps not surprisingly, I'm not much impressed with either list (my list would have to include Ishmael or Story of B, The White Bone, Natural Selection, and Riddley Walker), though I like the women's list better. Thanks to Fouro for the link. Doc Searls on the Morality of Business: Some interesting thoughts from Doc over at Tim O'Reilly's blog on how generosity in business is natural and essential. It's not about reciprocity or altruism -- it's about being authentically human, something that is terribly difficult in most large, traditional organizations. Listen to Your Blog by Synthesized Podcast: A new free service called Talkr creates voice synthesis podcasts of your blog, and allows users to 'subscribe' to up to three blogs using this mechanism. Setup is a bit cumbersome, but my blog is now up. The voice 'reading' it is female, pleasant and natural-sounding, but 'she' has trouble with contractions. It's not clear to me if or how these podcasts can be listed in podcast directories. A novelty for now, but I think this has legs. Thanks to Tom Munneke for the link. [How to Save the World] 8:38:22 PM    comment []

Forensic analysis redux. I take it, from many of the comments on my last post, that virtually no one bought my idea for loosing the forensic economists on sports records. So let's try again. Hopefully round two will be a bit more convincing.... [gladwell.com] 6:29:18 PM    comment []

Bleak argument that eBay's jumped the shark (ZdBlo .... Bleak argument that eBay's jumped the shark (ZdBlog via mCass) [robot wisdom weblog] 6:29:14 PM    comment []

Taxpayer Data and the IRS. Good information on the security of tax data in the IRS. [Schneier on Security] 8:21:11 AM    comment []

'The Poem That Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later': Classic Beat. Half a century after the publication of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," a collection of essays pays tribute. By Review by GREIL MARCUS. [NYT > Books] 8:20:58 AM    comment []

Origin Story. Katherine Sharpe asked about the best science books ever, as a proxy for "what got you into science?" I wasn't able to give a really good answer to that question, but I will share a science-related anecdote from when I was a kid. There's a good chance that this will come off as either painfully dorky or just plain cloying, so I'll put it below the fold, lest it damage my street cred. (Shut up.) Read the rest of this post... [Uncertain Principles] Really nice tale, and fine meta-take on the telling of the tale. 8:06:55 AM    comment []

People choose groups where punishment of free-riders enables the group to profit. (Thanks, Sam!) Study Links Punishment to an Ability to Profit is the New York Times headline about recent research results, published today in Science: Sociologists have long known that communes and other cooperative groups usually collapse into bickering and disband if they do not have clear methods of punishing members who become selfish or exploitative. Now an experiment by a team of German economists has found one reason punishment is so important: Groups that allow it can be more profitable than those that do not. Given a choice, most people playing an investment game created by the researchers initially decided to join a group that did not penalize its members. But almost all of them quickly switched to a punitive community when they saw that the change could profit them personally. The study, appearing today in the journal Science, suggests that groups with few rules attract many exploitative people who quickly undermine cooperation. By contrast, communities that allow punishment, and in which power is distributed equally, are more likely to draw people who, even at their own cost, are willing to stand up to miscreants. An expert not involved in the study, Elinor Ostrom, co-director of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University, said it helped clarify the conditions under which people will penalize others to promote cooperation. "I am very pleased to see this experiment being done and published so prominently," Dr. Ostrom said, "because we still have many puzzles to solve when it comes to the effect of punishment on behavior." Dr. Ostrom has done fieldwork with cooperatives around the world and said she often asked other researchers and students whether they knew of any long-lasting communal group that did not employ a system of punishment. "No one can give me an example," she said. [unmediated] 8:06:10 AM    comment []

Wikipedia list of blogging term. Build your blog vocabulary one buzzword at a time. (Apologies to whoever I'm not crediting for leading me to this page, but I've lost the track.) Technorati Tags: blogging [rexblog: Rex Hammock's Weblog] 8:05:40 AM    comment []

Ants are really old. Ants are considerably older than previously believed, having originated 140 to 168 million years ago, according to new research on the cover of this week's issue of the journal Science. But these resilient insects, now found in terrestrial ecosystems the world over, apparently began to diversify only about 100 million years ago in concert with the flowering plants, the scientists say. [Pajamas Media] 8:05:28 AM    comment []