American Madness

It’s strange that we live in a data driven world, however, most people have a desperately limited knowledge of how to analyze data and understand what the information actually means. On a daily basis we are always hearing news reports about this study or that study, but only the most simplified dumbed down data and charts are ever presented to the viewers.

Data junkies like myself now have a nifty new data visualization tool at our disposal. Many Eyes from IBM is a community driven website for creating and sharing visualizations of data. Users can create visualizations with a host of graph types to choose from. There is everything from the good ol’ bar graph and line graph to scatter plots, bubble chart, matrix diagrams, and many more.

Some of you may be interested to see maps depicting the extent of the subprime crisis.

Others will be interested to see the topic hub on global warming.

Critiques can be hashed out in the comments section that is attached to each visualization, and of course users can introduce their own improved and updated visualizations.

I’m off to create my first visualization. Enjoy.

Well, that is one of the many creatures found off the coast of Antarctica during a survey done by a team of New Zealand scientists during the beginning of this year.

The sea pig (in her hand on the right) is a member of the sea cucumber family and is just one of the “Giant, Unknown Animals Found Off Antarctica.” Another find may be a totally new species, the Hydroid.

During the two month excursion the scientists collect more than 30,000 different sea-creatures. a bunch of them new. National Geographic (or NatGeo for those in the know) has some beautiful images of some of the finds.

Stephen Shankland over at CNet (does anyone else remember when CNet used to stick to technology reviews and news and we liked it that way?) has found this dandy of a research project conducted by California Institute of Technology and Stanford’s business school that says people think they like wine when it costs more.

A sample of the results:

Researchers from the California Institute of Technology and Stanford’s business school have directly seen that the sensation of pleasantness that people experience when tasting wine is linked directly to its price. And that’s true even when, unbeknownst to the test subjects, it’s exactly the same Cabernet Sauvignon with a dramatically different price tag.

Specifically, the researchers found that with the higher priced wines, more blood and oxygen is sent to a part of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex, whose activity reflects pleasure. Brain scanning using a method called functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) showed evidence for the researchers’ hypothesis that “changes in the price of a product can influence neural computations associated with experienced pleasantness,” they said.

First, I must take exception with how the results were presented. At no point in the write up does the author point to results that found wine priced at $90/bottle is somehow tastier than the $10/bottle comparison. Rather, people’s brain waves acted in a certain way to provide pleasure.

What is this a cigarette ad? Are they actually trying to say taste equals pleasure?

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This week we have announcements of two developments that are bound to help out with airport security, protecting us from all thoe people planning to plant weapons in their shoes and making all of our lives easier by not having to take our shoes off at the airport.

First up we have the MagShoe “a high-speed, shoes-on, portable footwear weapons detection system.” It is currently used in Madrid, Prague and Budapest and may be making its way to the US and the UK. Basically it scans your feet for concealed metal objects that may be missed by your standard metal detector. I have to ask though, how does it respond to things like steel-toed boots or shoes with metal shanks (though apparently shoe manufacturers have been dealing with this issue since 2003).

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Watch this. The Washington Post and 60 Minutes reveal that 30 years of FBI science in “bullet lead analysis” was junk all along. And that when the FBI found out, the bureau did nothing to let convicted felons know that they might have cause for appeal. Because of the story, now they will. One man has already been freed from an unjust imprisonment.

This is journalism at its best.

Yeah, I am aware that this is like seriously old news, especially with the story life-cycle that goes on in cyberspace, but still I have had it sitting waiting to be written about since the beginning of July (I saw the initial write up on the 11th) and, well, it is only fair that it gets its day in the sun.

This article comes to us all the way from Australia, apparently some of their scientists have figured out a way to possibly teleport atoms from one location to another. The article references the idea of the teleportation machine in Star Trek- highly functional, space aged and futuristic… Unfortunately I drift more towards the fly when Jeff Goldblum gets crossed with a fly while teleporting from one location to another.

The concept (for the actual teleportation, not Star Trek’s or Jeff Goldblum’s) was figured out by physicists Murray Olsen, Ashton Bradley, Simon Haine of the Australian Research Council Centre for Quantum-Atom Optics, and and Joseph Hope of ANU. Working together they figured that if you get some atoms really cold (close to absolute zero) and zapped them with some lasers you could then shoot them, via fiber-optic cable, to another location.

The theory, according to Dr. Haine, is pretty simple (compared to previous theories) and looks like it could be in use within the next four years according to Dr. Olsen. In the meanwhile further experimentation will be conducted to make sure that everything is working all fine-and-dandy to prepare for the possibility of actual teleportation by 2011.

Oh but don’t get your hopes up for beaming yourself home just yet, this won’t be a viable method of teleportation for humans, at least not in its current form, but still, pretty damn impressive if you ask me. If this is all successful, I’d give it about 5 years before they start trying to figure out how to do it on living organisms.

As I type this I know my computer is headed for a crash, so I am going to make this brief, to the point and save it before I reach the point of impending doom where I actually loose data.

Anyway, I came across this article the other day about… well, the title kind of explains it: “Peruvians get sick from apparent meteorite crater,” of course, you guessed it, this is another one from Reuter’s “Oddly Enough” section of the paper meaning they don’t really see it as news, but more of a fluff piece that people will enjoy reading and maybe even have a nice little chuckle over.

Well, I read the article, the gist of it being that over 100 Peruvians who have visited the site of an apparent meteorite crater (that crashed down over the weekend of the 15th) have been vomiting and experiencing massive headaches. After some researchers had a chance to check it out they said, yes, it probably was a meteorite and that folks were probably getting sick from the gases it had released.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t exactly find that to be very comforting, nor would I think the sick Peruvians would either. I’d want a much more detailed explanation of what these so-called gases were and an explanation of how long these symptoms were going to last (as of the writing of the article folks were sick for as many as 3 days already). A mysterious meteorite falls to Earth and folks near it start getting massively sick- this sounds like the start of a comibook or Sci-Fi monster movie, not something to be written off and tossed into the “Oddly Enough” bin.

Also, I guess there is a moral to this story- Don’t go visiting random craters that mysteriously appear over the weekend, you never know what they might contain or what might happen to you.

When Monsterous Peruvians infect with some space virus come attacking your town, don’t say I didn’t warn you…

Okay, time to restart.

Neatorama has a posting today of the 5 videos you have to see from Videosift, a site that, at least theoretically, sifts through the videos on YouTube and gets rid of all the crap. Of the top 5 that Neatorama claims you need to see I am passing on only one of them- A NASA experiment involving space and a sphere of water. I could explain how mesmerizing it is to watch waves travel back and forth through the sphere, or the reaction when Alka Seltzer is added to it, but I really wouldn’t be able to get the idea across which is why I have embedded the video. While this is all terribly fascinating it does raise the question: Why is NASA doing this? What purpose does it actually serve to see how Alka-Seltzer reacts with water in space? Anyway, try not to ponder that too much while you watch the video (there is another similar video you can dig around for that is just clips of Alka-Seltzer being introduced to a sphere of water in space).

via videosift.com

Even with all the Super Soldier postings listed yesterday there were still a few I didn’t get a chance to cover, so we are following up with a couple of more Super Soldier postings today, not to worry, thee will be other content as well.

We start the day with a tidbit from Aviation Week: We have another DARPA project (Actually DARPAtech according to the article) that deals with MEMS program or Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems, basically very very small computers. Actually, the focus is on a subgroup of the MEMS program, the HI-MEMS- Hybrid Insect Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems.

Researchers are injecting MEMS into moths during the pupa stage of development and become integrated into the moths’ bodies. They have got this covered and, apparently it works, now they are working on figuring out what they can actually do with this technology.

Yes, you read that correctly, they decided to fiddle about with moths, impeding mini-computers into them and yet they have no application yet for doing this. Kind of seems a bit backwards.

Researchers are working to figure out if they’ll be able to use the MEMS to control the moth’s flight and are working on other applications that might be possible. Dr. Amit Lal, who presented on this topic “closed his presentation with references to science fiction and fantasy: R2-D2 helped Luke pilot his X-Wing fighter. Could insects assist human flight?”

Apparently the pentagon is planning a new program to implant microchips into soldiers. They claim it is so that they can monitor their biological activities like brain waves, stress-levels, heart-rate, etc., but we all know it is so that they can take over their minds and turn them into brainless killing machines.

Fortunately for us, before the military has their computer-controlled human killing-machines they need to develop them first. The Department of Defense has awarded the $1.6 million dollar contract to development the microchips to the Center for Bioelectronics, Biosensors and Biochips (C3B) at Clemson University.

According to the Press Esc, Anthony Guiseppi-Elie, C3B director, believes that the chip will have many benefits, including feeding back vital information on injured soldiers that would other wise take crucial time to figure out as the injured party got worse. Beyond just military applications, Guiseppi-Elie sees other applications like monitoring blood-sugar levels in diabetics and “getting vital information such as how much oxygen is in the tissue back to ER physicians and medical personnel… Our goal is to improve the quality and expediency of care for fallen soldiers and civilian trauma victims… The biochip also may be injected as a precaution to future traumas.”

Although the chip is 5 years away still don’t surprised to see a run on tin foil hats in the years leading up to their eventual implantation into the nex-wave of soldiers.