Can gaming cure disease? By creating games like EteRNA for protein folding and nano-engineering, Adrien Treuille and his colleagues are outsourcing research, each week scoring and then actually synthesizing top players' work. By studying players' strategies, scientists can improve their computer modeling while also creating new ways to fight disease.
Phi Beta Iota: Major observation by speaker: humans not only beat the computers, but they also learned and became more intuitive and innovative, vastly superior to the computers, over time. Also introduces the term crowd-solving.
The article on PRNewswire titled Attivio and Quant5 Partner to Bring Fast and Reliable Predictive Customer Analytics to the Cloud explains the partnership between the two analytics innovators. Aimed at producing information from data without the hassle of a team of data scientists, the partnership promises to effectively create insights that companies will be able to act on. The partnership responds to the growing frustration some companies face with gleaning useful information from huge amounts of data. The article explains,
There just never seems to be an end to the bad news about our food supply. I don't know how it could be any clearer that Big Pharma has only one interest and that is profit. Truly a disgusting story, for both humans and animals.
Social problems are often addressed through the top-down forms of ādistributive justiceā: intervention from government agencies and regulations for example. But science and technology innovations have opened new possibilities for āgenerative justiceā: bottom-up networks that strive for a more equitable and sustainable world through communitarian value generation. Some examples of generative justice involve lay innovation: maker spaces, DIY movements, and āappropriatedā technologies. Ā Other examples are more focused on nature as a generator of value, such as urban agriculture, food justice, and indigenous harvesting. Some focus on the framework of Open Source, putting code, blueprints and manufacturing processes into the public domain. Generative justice can apply to social entrepreneurship, restorative justice, Ā community media, social solidarity economies, and many other structures that allow those who generate value to directly participate in its benefits, create their own conditions of production, and nurture sustainable paths for its circulation.
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We invite presentation and panel proposals on the theory and practice of generative justice. What theories of ethics, law, epistemology and politics can help to define this concept and improve its utility? What research methods are best used to explore it, and in what analytic frameworks can it be deployed? Are the relations between distributive and generative justice best viewed as opposite ends of a continuum? As mutually supportive symbiosis? How might generative justice experiences and outcomes differ across identities such as race, gender, class, and sexual orientation; across geographic and national differences; across ideological and institutional spectrums? How can we distinguish generative justice from bottom-up forms of exploitation, oppression, or unsustainable ecologies? What kinds of technologies and scientific programs might foster more generative justice, and conversely, how might generative justice contribute to better STEM education, research, and infrastructure? Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā (For more see the Generative Justice wiki)
Please complete the form below to submit a proposal. Proposals will be considered through March 31, 2014.
Proposals can be individual or panels. We ask that all participants be on board before you submit your proposal. Additionally, you can propose a panel and ask for others to apply to participate.
Public pressure has helped push back against a bill in Congress that would have torn up the negotiated agreement with Iran by imposing yet more sanctions on the people of that country. The people of this country are not eager for another war, and have not accepted that sanctions lead away from war rather than into it.
But supporters and opponents of that bill tend to agree that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, and that this program must be stopped by one means or another.Ā This underlying assumption is not supported by any evidence and never has been.Ā We've heard it propounded for over thirty years, and the repetition has had its intended effect, but any evidence at all has always been lacking. A belief without evidence is a myth.
Iran has a nuclear energy program because the U.S. and European governments wanted Iran to have a nuclear energy program. The U.S. nuclear industry took out full-page ads in U.S. publications bragging about Iran's support for such an enlightened and progressive energy source. The U.S. was pushing for major expansion of Iran's nuclear program just before the Iranian revolution of 1979.
Since the Iranian revolution, the U.S. government has opposed Iran's nuclear energy program and misled the public about the existence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran.Ā This story is well-told in Gareth Porter's new book, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, and by Porter is his upcoming interview this week on Talk Nation Radio.
The U.S. assisted Saddam Hussein's Iraq in a war against Iran in the 1980s, in which Iraq attacked Iran with chemical weapons.Ā Iran's religious leaders had declared that chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons must not be used, even in retaliation.Ā And they were not. Iran could have responded to Iraqi chemical attacks with chemical attacks of its own and chose not to.
Iran is committed to not using or possessing weapons of mass destruction. The results of inspections bear that out. Iran's willingness to put restrictions on its legal nuclear energy program — a willingness present both before and after sanctions — bears that out. Inspections should continue. All steps should be taken to move the world toward safe and sustainable energy sources. But can we drop the idea that Iran wants to nuke us?
TinyTinyRSS – an open source web-based news feed (RSS/Atom) reader and aggregator designed to allow you to read news from any location while feeling as close to a real desktop application as possible
UNetbootin – creates bootable Live USB drives to Ubunto, Fedora, and other Linux distributions without burning a CD
Wagn – free open means of creating team-driven websites
Zotero – free tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research sources
