CWL

davidreese:

Artist/programmer/designer Marcin Ignac used software to track, measure, and visualize his computer use every day for 2.5 years. The result: This beautiful, simple look at one of the most prominent aspects of daily life in the 21st century. Each line is a single day, with colors representing which app was being used at the time of day. (So, for example, your line might be red during this time, signaling that you’re using your browser.) The black sections are times when he had his computer off—meaning that blacked-out section in every day is probably night.

Universe Grows Like a Giant Brain

The universe may grow like a giant brain, according to a new computer simulation.

Image: A fundamental law of nature may govern the growth of brain networks, social networks, and the expansion of the Universe, a new computer simulation suggests Credit: WGBH Educational Foundation

The results, published Nov.16 in the journal Nature’s Scientific Reports, suggest that some undiscovered, fundamental laws may govern the growth of systems large and small, from the electrical firing between brain cells and growth of social networks to the expansion of galaxies.

“Natural growth dynamics are the same for different real networks, like the Internet or the brain or social networks,” said study co-author Dmitri Krioukov, a physicist at the University of California San Diego.

The new study suggests a single fundamental law of nature may govern these networks, said physicist Kevin Bassler of the University of Houston, who was not involved in the study.

“At first blush they seem to be quite different systems, the question is, is there some kind of controlling laws can describe them?”.

By raising this question, “their work really makes a pretty important contribution,” he said.

Similar Networks

Past studies showed brain circuits and the Internet look a lot alike. But despite finding this functional similarity, nobody had developed equations to perfectly predict how computer networks, brain circuits or social networks grow over time, Krioukov said.

Using Einstein’s equations of relativity, which explain how matter warps the fabric of space-time, physicists can retrace the universe’s explosive birth in the Big Bang roughly 14 billion years ago and how it has expanded outward in the eons since.

So Krioukov’s team wondered whether the universe’s accelerating growth could provide insight into the ways social networks or brain circuits expand.

Brain cells and galaxies

The team created a computer simulation that broke the early universe into the tiniest possible units — quanta of space-time more miniscule than subatomic particles. The simulation linked any quanta, or nodes in a massive celestial network, that were causally related. (Nothing travels faster than light, so if a person hits a baseball on Earth, the ripple effects of that event could never reach an alien in a distant galaxy in a reasonable amount of time, meaning those two regions of space-time aren’t causally related.)

As the simulation progressed, it added more and more space-time to the history of the universe, and so its “network” connections between matter in galaxies, grew as well, Krioukov said.

When the team compared the universe’s history with growth of social networks and brain circuits, they found all the networks expanded in similar ways: They balanced links between similar nodes with ones that already had many connections. For instance, a cat lover surfing the Internet may visit mega-sites such as Google or Yahoo, but will also browse cat fancier websites or YouTube kitten videos. In the same way, neighboring brain cells like to connect, but neurons also link to such “Google brain cells” that are hooked up to loads of other brain cells.

The eerie similarity between networks large and small is unlikely to be a coincidence, Krioukov said.

“For a physicist it’s an immediate signal that there is some missing understanding of how nature works,” Krioukov said.

It’s more likely that some unknown law governs the way networks grow and change, from the smallest brain cells to the growth of mega-galaxies, Krioukov said.

“This result suggests that maybe we should start looking for it,” Krioukov told LiveScience.

John McCarthy — The Father of Artificial Intelligence

John McCarthy (September 4, 1927 – October 24, 2011) was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist.

He invented the term “artificial intelligence” (AI), developed the Lisp programming language family, significantly influenced the design of the ALGOL programming language, popularized timesharing (the sharing of a computing resource among many users by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking), and was very influential in the early development of AI.

McCarthy received many accolades and honors, such as the Turing Award for his contributions to the topic of AI, the United States National Medal of Science, and the Kyoto Prize.

Artificial Universe Similar to Ours Built with Supercomputer

Building a universe from scratch that brims with galaxies resembling those around us is now possible on supercomputers for the first time, researchers say.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is a spiral galaxy with a broad disk and outstretched arms, as are many in our cosmic neighborhood, such as Andromeda, the Pinwheel and the Whirlpool galaxies. Spiral galaxies are common, but past computer models that aimed to accurately simulate the birth and evolution of the universe over billions of years had trouble creating them. Instead, they often generated lots of blobby galaxies clumped into balls.

New computer simulations can now recreate the kind of galactic communities seen in our universe, starting with the observed afterglow of the Big Bang and evolving forward in time. Harvard’s Odyssey supercomputer allowed simulations that compressed nearly 14 billion years into only a few months.

“We’ve created the full variety of galaxies we see in the local universe,” said study author Mark Vogelsberger at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

laboratoryequipment:

Allowing Errors Makes Chip More Powerful, Efficient

Researchers have unveiled an “inexact” computer chip that challenges the industry’s 50-year pursuit of accuracy. The design improves power and resource efficiency by allowing for occasional errors. Prototypes unveiled this week at the ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers in Cagliari, Italy, are at least 15 times more efficient than today’s technology.

The research, which earned best-paper honors at the conference, was conducted by experts from Rice Univ., Singapore’s Nanyang Technological Univ. (NTU), Switzerland’s Center for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM) and the Univ. of California, Berkeley.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news-Allowing-Errors-Makes-Chip-More-Powerful-Efficient-051712.aspx

Data as Art: 10 Striking Science Maps

The computer age triggered a seemingly endless stream of scientific data, but such incoming mountains of information come at a cost. The more data you amass, the tougher it is to comprehend what you’re dealing with.

In a push for better perspective, a group of information scientists in 2005 created a decade-long competitive art exhibit called Places & Spaces: Mapping Science. From artistic pop-culture plots to illustrations of the state of scientific collaboration (above), the founders hope winning entries inspire researchers to present their troves of data in clever and digestible ways.

“Good science maps give you a holistic understanding of how the data is structured,” said information scientist Katy Börner of Indiana University, a founder and curator of the exhibit. She is also author of the Atlas of Science, a collection of the maps gathered over the years. “You don’t just have to use maps to find your way home. They can be ways to get global overviews on topics.”

From Neurons to Conductors: The Computer Brain

Neuroscientists frequently compare the brain to an extremely super computer. Down to the Neuron’s which in a computer would be the Conductors or Memristors that carry out bits of information throughout a motherboard much like neurons carry bits of information throughout the brain. Since a computer is simpler than a brain we can look to the computer to get a simple story to how our brain works and reacts to certain things. The software being our genetic code which tells us what to do, who to be, how to be. The software is joined by a bigger network which is the mind, the OS, the Windows 7. Notice how in computers, all it takes is a well written code for one to crash a piece of the hardware which is what hackers have been doing since Windows was DOS. The same can be applied to our brain, one screw up in the genetic makeup and unfortunately someone ends up with a third arm too much. This is one of the main reasons why once you see the mind for what it is, you gain this sort of mind control on your own self. Because you understand your computer, your brain.

Text: Cwl

Image: HowStuffWorks

From Neurons to Conductors: The Computer Brain

Neuroscientists frequently compare the brain to an extremely super computer. Down to the Neuron’s which in a computer would be the Conductors or Memristors that carry out bits of information throughout a motherboard much like neurons carry bits of information throughout the brain. Since a computer is simpler than a brain we can look to the computer to get a simple story to how our brain works and reacts to certain things. The software being our genetic code which tells us what to do, who to be, how to be. The software is joined by a bigger network which is the mind, the OS, the Windows 7. Notice how in computers, all it takes is a well written code for one to crash a piece of the hardware which is what hackers have been doing since Windows was DOS. The same can be applied to our brain, one screw up in the genetic makeup and unfortunately someone ends up with a third arm too much. This is one of the main reasons why once you see the mind for what it is, you gain this sort of mind control on your own self. Because you understand your computer, your brain.

Text: Cwl

Image: HowStuffWorks

Data as Art: 10 Striking Science Maps

The computer age triggered a seemingly endless stream of scientific data, but such incoming mountains of information come at a cost. The more data you amass, the tougher it is to comprehend what you’re dealing with.

In a push for better perspective, a group of information scientists in 2005 created a decade-long competitive art exhibit called Places & Spaces: Mapping Science. From artistic pop-culture plots to illustrations of the state of scientific collaboration (above), the founders hope winning entries inspire researchers to present their troves of data in clever and digestible ways.

“Good science maps give you a holistic understanding of how the data is structured,” said information scientist Katy Börner of Indiana University, a founder and curator of the exhibit. She is also author of the Atlas of Science, a collection of the maps gathered over the years. “You don’t just have to use maps to find your way home. They can be ways to get global overviews on topics.”

Data as Art: 10 Striking Science Maps

The computer age triggered a seemingly endless stream of scientific data, but such incoming mountains of information come at a cost. The more data you amass, the tougher it is to comprehend what you’re dealing with.

In a push for better perspective, a group of information scientists in 2005 created a decade-long competitive art exhibit called Places & Spaces: Mapping Science. From artistic pop-culture plots to illustrations of the state of scientific collaboration (above), the founders hope winning entries inspire researchers to present their troves of data in clever and digestible ways.

“Good science maps give you a holistic understanding of how the data is structured,” said information scientist Katy Börner of Indiana University, a founder and curator of the exhibit. She is also author of the Atlas of Science, a collection of the maps gathered over the years. “You don’t just have to use maps to find your way home. They can be ways to get global overviews on topics.”