A Link to Chile quake may have tipped Earth's axis
Each day should be 1.26 microseconds shorter, according to preliminary calculations
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A Link to The Very Ancient Mariners
Early humans, possibly even prehuman ancestors, appear to have been going to sea much longer than anyone had ever suspected.
That is the startling implication of discoveries made the last two summers on the Greek island of Crete. Stone tools found there, archaeologists say, are at least 130,000 years old, which is considered strong evidence for the earliest known seafaring in the Mediterranean and cause for rethinking the maritime capabilities of prehuman cultures.
(via nytimes)A Post Entitled Value in obscurity
Once a group reaches a certain size, each participant starts to feel anonymous again, and the person they’re following — who once seemed proximal, like a friend — now seems larger than life and remote.
[…]
Maybe we should be designing tools that reward obscurity — that encourage us to remain in the shadows. Or what if they warned us when our social circles became unsustainably large? Sure, we’d be connected with fewer people, but we’d be communicating with them, and not just talking at them.
I think my lunchtime reading is going to be on the theme of why are so many people obsessed with celebrity? The model of having small but meaningful social groups is far more appealing to me, but it seems that there is something in human nature that makes us all care greatly about the Ashton Kutcher’s and Oprah’s of the world.
A Post Entitled Awesome column about which NY Times stories are the most shared
More emotional stories were more likely to be e-mailed, the researchers found, and positive articles were shared more than negative ones. Longer articles generally did better than shorter articles, although Dr. Berger said that might just be because the longer articles were about more engaging topics.
[…]
Building on prior research, the Penn researchers defined the quality as an “emotion of self-transcendence, a feeling of admiration and elevation in the face of something greater than the self.”
They used two criteria for an awe-inspiring story: Its scale is large, and it requires “mental accommodation” by forcing the reader to view the world in a different way.
“It involves the opening and broadening of the mind,” write Dr. Berger and Dr. Milkman, who is a behavioral economist at Wharton.
via nytimes.com
It sounds like a really interesting study. I’ve had a notion for some years now to start a blog on ‘futurology’ or something similar. Now I’m wondering if that could be a hit…
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A Post Entitled The Guardian’s Zeitgeist
The Guardian has just launched Zeitgeist, a prototype index that displays visually what stories on the site are currently getting the most buzz. The blog post announcing it has some interesting explanations of the mechanics behind it:
To start with we wanted to look at how people use the site. A very blunt way to do this is page views, which has its place but isn’t that helpful in this context.
Instead we’re analysing and combining all sorts of things; where people come from, where they go to next, how long they stay on a particular page, if the page is getting passed round twitter and other social websites, number (and rate) of comments and so on.
They’ve done a smart think by keeping archive versions of these pages, not only because they could be interesting to browse in the future, but from an SEO perspective too.I think something similar to this would make for a far more compelling front page, instead of the mile long link-lists news sites seem to favour.
A Post Entitled BBC Interactive map: A decade of road deaths
From the BBC’s Crash feature:In 2008, 2,538 people died on Britain’s roads, on average nearly seven every day. Using official data released by the Department of Transport, this map plots the location of every fatal road crash in Great Britain between 1999 and 2008, a total of 32,298 deaths.
It is also fascinating to explore the infographics:
New drivers aged between 17 and 25 stand out. Passing a driving test does not provide the necessary experience and judgments needed for today’s busy roads. The hourly distribution has high numbers between 10pm and 2am, implying partying, drinking and lower levels of seat belt use.
A Post Entitled Emotion Markup Language
The W3C just completed the first draft of the Emotion Markup Language (EmotionML 1.0). Um, why?If you’re still not getting the why, they have a list of 39 possible use cases. I’m wondering if it could be used for interactive fiction somehow? I love crap like this!Use cases for EmotionML can be grouped into three broad types:
- Manual annotation of material involving emotionality, such as annotation of videos, of speech recordings, of faces, of texts, etc;
- Automatic recognition of emotions from sensors, including physiological sensors, speech recordings, facial expressions, etc., as well as from multi-modal combinations of sensors;
- Generation of emotion-related system responses, which may involve reasoning about the emotional implications of events, emotional prosody in synthetic speech, facial expressions and gestures of embodied agents or robots, the choice of music and colors of lighting in a room, etc.
A Post Entitled Mapumental
I watched a fascinating presentation on mapping technologies and their use in the BBC yesterday. The highlight for me was an amazing video showing all the Open Street Map edits made in 2008. The Channel 4 / MySociety / Stamen project, Mapumental was also demonstrated (well, just the Mapumental YouTube video actually). It’s a really useful tool. Here I’m showing a few Cardiff examples.
A Post Entitled Local crime mapping
This new local crime mapping service is public service on the web done right. You can easily locate your area, compare it to others, download the data as a CSV file and subscribe to updates via RSS.
It is under heavy load right now though.
