SCLoS Engineer

Fear is a Disease?

2007-08-20T12:08:00.001-07:00

We'll have nothing to fear but the absence of fear itself.

MIT finds cure for fear

Submitted by Vidura Panditaratne on Sun, 2007-07-15 19:37.

MIT biochemists have identified a molecular mechanism behind fear, and successfully cured it in mice, according to an article in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Researchers from MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory
hope that their work could lead to the first drug to treat the millions
of adults who suffer each year from persistent, debilitating fears -
including hundreds of soldiers returning from conflict in Iraq and
Afghanistan.

SOUTH CAROLINA LEAGUE OF THE SOUTH

See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign

2007-08-19T12:37:00.000-07:00

Do you Wiki? I do. And I have been known to edit out slanders against the South - there are so many! But it's the big boys who try to recreate reality itself, wholesale. They have ways of ~~making you talk~~ putting words in you mouth. Watch out.

The following is from wired.com

See Who's Editing Wikipedia - CIA

By John Borland 08.14.07 2:00 AM

CalTech graduate student Virgil Griffith built a search tool that traces IP addresses of those who make Wikipedia changes.
Photo: Jake Appelbaum

On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company's machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.

In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations.

Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.

Inspired by news last year that Congress members' offices had been editing their own entries, Griffith says he got curious, and wanted to know whether big companies and other organizations were doing things in a similarly self-interested vein.

"Everything's better if you do it on a huge scale, and automate it," he says with a grin.

READ IT AND WEEP

SOUTH CAROLINA LEAGUE OF THE SOUTH

Evolving Excellence: Power Laws and Pull Platforms

2007-07-06T18:38:00.000-07:00

Bell Curve or Power Law, that is the question.

This, from Evolving Excellence:

"Power Laws and Pull Platforms

Today's post is guest authored by Craig Woll. Craig has a unique background in developing and applying instructional learning systems to lean manufacturing.

------

I always appreciate reading an article written by someone with a heavier head than mine. In this case John Hagel contemplates on a serious topic 'The Power of Power Laws'. His article caught my attention quite some time ago but I've struggled articulating what I find so intriguing about his perspective. Maybe it is the mere fact that I had to use Merriam-Webster to look up half the words.

A gaussian distribution is used 'as a as a way to characterize the probability of events – most of us know it as the familiar bell curve with a significant hump in the middle and two relatively modest tails on either side of the hump.' On the other hand you have the 'Pareto, or power law, probability distribution'. One form of this is called the 80/20 rule.

We often attempt to describe the world in view of one of these two paradigms. I found myself on the left side of the bell curve in my statistics class so I won't even attempt further explanation at the risk of sounding foolish. However, I will take the liberty of quoting a journal article from Bill McKelvey and Pierpaolo Andriani:

Read more: Evolving Excellence: Power Laws and Pull Platforms:

South Carolina League of the South

Be careful what you write online

2007-07-06T16:04:00.000-07:00

from SeoPedia.org

Because it could cost you your job and it’s definitely true.

These days, Google and the rest of the search engines (eg. Live, Yahoo!, Ask and so on) have become the central location where everyone can find information about anyone or anything:

According to a recent survey by CareerBuilder.com:

One in four managers now ‘Google’ potential employees and 51% of applications were rejected because of what was found.

When asked to divulge the types of information discovered on the Web that caused them to dismiss potential employees, hiring managers pointed to the following:

31% - candidate lied about qualifications
25% - candidate had poor communication skills
24% - candidate was linked to criminal behavior
19% - candidate bad-mouthed their previous company or fellow employee
19% - candidate posted information about them drinking or using drugs
15% - candidate shared confidential information from previous employers
12% - candidate lied about an absence
11% - candidate posted provocative or inappropriate photographs
8% - candidate’s screen name was unprofessional

Read more: Be careful what you write online

South Carolina League of the South