linkstream2 microblog

#Russia & the Curse of Geography
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/10/russia-geography-ukraine-syria/413248/ Issues always faced: “the ports still freeze & the European Plain is still flat”

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“Russia has not finished with Ukraine yet, nor Syria. From the Grand Principality of Moscow, through Peter the Great, Stalin, and now Putin, each Russian leader has been confronted by the same problems. It doesn’t matter if the ideology of those in control is czarist, communist, or crony capitalist—the ports still freeze, and the European Plain is still flat.”
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11. Descriptive Title of Applicant’s Project

Enter a brief descriptive title of the project. This field is required.

A “new” application must have a different title from any other PHS project with the same PD/PI. A “resubmission” or “renewal” application should normally have the same title as the previous grant or application. If the specific aims of the project have significantly changed, choose a new title.

A “revision” application must have the same title as the currently funded grant.

NIH and other PHS agencies limit title character length to 81 characters, including the spaces between words and punctuation. Titles in excess of 81 characters will be truncated. Be sure to only use standard characters in the descriptive title: A through Z, a through z, 0 through 9, space ( ), and underscore (_).

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Font

Prepare the application using Arial, Helvetica, Palatino Linotype, or Georgia typeface in black font color. After text attachments are converted to PDF, font size in each final PDF document must be at least 11 points (or larger). (A Symbol font may be used to insert Greek letters or special characters; the font size requirement still applies.) Since some PDF converters may reduce font sizes, it is important to confirm that type density in each final PDF document, including both characters and spaces, is no more than 15
characters+spaces per linear inch and no more than six lines per vertical inch.
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Note: 72 points/inch so 6 lines/inch at 11pt type translates into a line spacing of 11 pts + 1pt per line.

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Paper Size and Page Margins

Final PDF documents should be formatted to be no larger than standard paper size (8 ½” x 11). The final PDF document should have at least one-half inch margins (top, bottom, left, and right) for all pages. No information should appear in the margins, including the PI’s name and page numbers.

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Figures, Graphs, Diagrams, Charts, Tables, Figure Legends, and Footnotes You may use a smaller type size but it must be in a black font color, readily legible, and follow the font typeface requirement. Color can be used in figures; however, all text must be in a black font color, clear and legible.
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http://grants.nih.gov/grants/funding/424

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Cuomo’s method relies on this synchronized chaos, a somewhat mysterious discovery summarized in a 1990 paper [2] by Louis Pecora and Thomas Carroll at The Naval Research Laboratory. The phenomenon occurs in some situations when part of the outputof one chaotic system is used as an input for a twin chaotic system. If the two systems are properly synchronized, then the second system will mimic the behavior of the first with uncanny fidelity.

Just like Pecora, Carroll, Cuomo, and Oppenheim have done, we’ll look at synchronization in the chaotic Lorenz system (look at my post Edward Lorenz’s Strange Attraction for a Deeper Dive into the Lorenz system). The system comes from Edward Lorenz’s simplification of an atmospheric convection model, and its intriguing chaotic behavior has been studied for decades. It is defined by the following system of nonlinear differential equations:
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http://logicaltightrope.com/2013/09/01/sending-your-secrets-safely-with-chaos/

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But are we sure of our observational facts? Scientific men are rather fond of saying pontifically that one ought to be quite sure of one’s observational facts before embarking on theory. Fortunately those who give this advice do not practice what they preach. Observation and theory get on best when they are mixed together, both helping one another in the pursuit of truth. It is a good rule not to put overmuch confidence in a theory until it has been confirmed by observation. I hope I shall not shock the experimental physicists too much if I add that it is also a good rule not to put overmuch confidence in the observational results that are put forward until they have been confirmed by theory.Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882-1944) English astronomer and physicist.
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http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/sciquote.htm

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The bridge’s movements were caused by a ‘positive feedback’
phenomenon, known as synchronous lateral excitation. The natural sway motion of people walking caused small sideways oscillations in the bridge, which in turn caused people on the bridge to sway in step, increasing the amplitude of the bridge oscillations and continually reinforcing the effect.[6] On the day of opening, the bridge was crossed by 90,000 people, with up to 2,000 on the bridge at any one time.

Resonant vibrational modes due to vertical loads (such as trains, traffic, pedestrians) and wind loads are well understood in bridge design. In the case of the Millennium Bridge, because the lateral motion caused the pedestrians loading the bridge to directly participate with the bridge, the vibrational modes had not been anticipated by the designers. The crucial point is that when the bridge lurches to one side, the pedestrians must adjust to keep from falling over, and they all do this at exactly the same time. Hence, the situation is similar to soldiers marching in lockstep, but horizontal instead of vertical.

The lateral vibration problems of the Millennium Bridge are very unusual, but not entirely unique.[7] Any bridge with lateral frequency modes of less than 1.3 Hz, and sufficiently low mass, could witness the same phenomenon with sufficient pedestrian loading. The greater the number of people, the greater the amplitude of the vibrations. For example, Albert Bridge in London has a sign dating from 1873 warning marching ranks of soldiers to break step while crossing.[8] Other bridges which have seen similar problems are:
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Bridge,_London

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In 1665, Christiaan Huygens [Huygens, 1673] noted “When we suspended two clocks so constructed from two hooks imbedded in the same wooden beam, the motions of each pendulum on opposite swings were so much in agreement that they never receded the least bit from each other and the sound of each was always heard simultaneously. Further, if this agreement was disturbed by some interference, it reestablished itself in a short time. For a long time I was amazed at this unexpected result, but after a careful examination finally found that the cause of this is due to the motion of the beam, even though this is hardly perceptible. The cause is that the oscillations of the pendula, in proportion to their weight, communicate some motion to the clocks. This motion, impressed onto the beam, necessarily has the effect of making the pendula come to a state of exactly contrary swings if it happened that they moved otherwise at first, and from this finally the motion of the beam completely ceases.” The study of coupled
oscillators has since become an active branch of mathematics, with applications in physics, biology, and chemistry. In physics, one encounters coupled oscillators in arrays of Josephson junctions [Chung et al., 1989, Blackburn et al., 1994], in modelling molecules [Sage, 1994], and in coupled lasers [Dente et al., 1990]. Coupled oscillators are also prevalent in biological systems. Most organisms appear to be coupled to various periodicities extant in our surroundings, such as the rotation of the earth about the sun, the alternation of night and day, or the tides. Not only do organisms exhibit periodicities due to their environment, but they also exhibit innate periodic behavior. Breathing, pumping blood, chewing, and galloping are examples of rhythmic patterns of motion…
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http://web.cse.ohio-state.edu/pnl/theses/campbell/Ch1.pdf

Computer Vision
&…Hallucinationshttp://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.16420,y.2015,no.5,content.true,page.1,css.print/issue.aspx Instead of training a neural network, train an image to fit it. Dreams emerge
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“The algorithm behind the deep dream images was devised by Alexander Mordvintsev, a Google software engineer in Zurich. In the blog posts he was joined by two coauthors: Mike Tyka, a biochemist, artist, and Google software engineer in Seattle; and Christopher Olah of Toronto, a software engineering intern at Google.

Here’s a recipe for deep dreaming. Start by choosing a source image and a target layer within the neural network. Present the image to the network’s input layer, and allow the recognition process to proceed normally until it reaches the target layer. Then, starting at the target layer, apply the backpropagation algorithm that corrects errors during the training process. However, instead of adjusting connection weights to improve the accuracy of the network’s response, adjust the source image to increase the amplitude of the response in the target layer. This forward-backward cycle is then repeated a number of times, and at intervals the image is resampled to increase the number of pixels.”
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Most popular coding languages, according to @GitHub are javascript (#1), Java, Ruby, PHP, Python, CSS, C++, C# & C
https://agenda.weforum.org/2015/08/the-9-most-popular-coding-languages

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“That means GitHub is a great place to gauge which of the world’s many thousands of programming languages are the most popular — especially since a popular programming language is always a good job skill for anybody to have in this age of technological transformation. Without further ado, here are the top programming languages on GitHub. No. 9 — C: The original C, invented in 1972, is still incredibly popular. That’s not least because it works on just about any computing platform ever made, and it’s super stable and understood by
programmers everywhere.
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LinkedIn’s Plan for World Domination http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/12/the-network-man No job security, everyone’s an entrepreneur, enlarging prof’l #networks is key

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“Manyika understood that not every chief executive in Silicon Valley could sign the statement, but he was gently trying to pull Hoffman to the left, and he knew how to frame the argument so that it would appeal to him. He went on, “We cannot ignore this problem. Right now, everybody’s punting. We know the share of income that goes to wages is a declining portion, compared with capital expenditures. What does that mean for jobs? Entrepreneurship is part of the answer. Mass-scale entrepreneurship. Before you even get to A.I.”

“You have to be able to let people adapt,” Hoffman said. “You have to have cheap resources to put across the whole system. How do you get inclusion within the tech ecosystem?”

“Very few of the programs have scale,” Manyika said.

“You have to scale to infinite,” Hoffman said.
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HGP: 25yrs of big biology
http://www.nature.com/news/human-genome-project-twenty-five-years-of-big-biology-1.18436 6 lessons: embrace Partnering, data Sharing & Analytics + Tech & ELSI; be Bold & Flexible

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Embrace partnerships. By necessity, the HGP broke the mould of individual researchers toiling away in isolation to answer a small set of scientific questions. It also ran against the grain of
hypothesis-driven research, focusing instead on the discovery of fundamental information that would inform many follow-on
investigations.
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