A dream Thanksgiving vacation in the Big Apple turned into the nightmare before Christmas for a California couple whose Airbnb reservation went bust. Annette van Duren, a 63-year-old talent agent f…
Links
Chris Aldrich is reading “My 2017 Food-Trend Predictions Are the Only 2017 Food-Trend Predictions You Need to Read, Because…”
A new year is apparently beginning, and so those of us who both eat and write feel compelled to tell you what you should expect from the…
Chris Aldrich is reading “Clinton’s Substantial Popular-Vote Win” | New York Times
She won by more than Gore in 2000, Nixon in 1968 or Kennedy in 1960, it seems. And therein lies a dilemma.
🔖 H-theorem in quantum physics by G. B. Lesovik, et al.
Abstract
Remarkable progress of quantum information theory (QIT) allowed to formulate mathematical theorems for conditions that data-transmitting or data-processing occurs with a non-negative entropy gain. However, relation of these results formulated in terms of entropy gain in quantum channels to temporal evolution of real physical systems is not thoroughly understood. Here we build on the mathematical formalism provided by QIT to formulate the quantum H-theorem in terms of physical observables. We discuss the manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics in quantum physics and uncover special situations where the second law can be violated. We further demonstrate that the typical evolution of energy-isolated quantum systems occurs with non-diminishing entropy. [1]
Footnotes
#DTMH2016: Saving Online News | NPR RAD recap
Dodging The Memory Hole is an action-oriented conference and event series that brings together journalists, technologists, and information specialists to strategize solutions for organizing and preserving born-digital news.
Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group: 2016-10-13: Dodging The Memory Hole 2016 Trip Report (#dtmh2016)
A summary/recap of the Dodging the Memory Hole 2016 conference held at UCLA's Charles Young Research Library in Los Angeles, California over two days in October to discuss and highlight potential solutions to the issue of preserving born-digital news.
Chris Aldrich is reading “Instapaper is joining Pinterest”
Today, we’re excited to announce that Instapaper is joining Pinterest. In the three years since betaworks acquired Instapaper from Marco Arment, we’ve completely rewritten our backend, overhauled our mobile and web clients, improved parsing and search, and introduced tons of great features like highlights, text-to-speech, and speed reading to the product.
Warren Weaver Bot!
This is the signal for the second.
Now I’m waiting for a Shannon bot and a Weiner bot. Maybe a John McCarthy bot would be apropos too?!
Tangled Up in Spacetime
Hundreds of researchers in a collaborative project called "It from Qubit" say space and time may spring up from the quantum entanglement of tiny bits of information.
🔖 Free download of Quantum Theory, Groups and Representations: An Introduction by Peter Woit
“contains significant amounts of material not well-explained elsewhere.”He expects to finish up the diagrams and publish it next year some time, potentially through Springer.
Disconnected, Fragmented, or United? A Trans-disciplinary Review of Network Science
Abstract
During decades the study of networks has been divided between the efforts of social scientists and natural scientists, two groups of scholars who often do not see eye to eye. In this review I present an effort to mutually translate the work conducted by scholars from both of these academic fronts hoping to continue to unify what has become a diverging body of literature. I argue that social and natural scientists fail to see eye to eye because they have diverging academic goals. Social scientists focus on explaining how context specific social and economic mechanisms drive the structure of networks and on how networks shape social and economic outcomes. By contrast, natural scientists focus primarily on modeling network characteristics that are independent of context, since their focus is to identify universal characteristics of systems instead of context specific mechanisms. In the following pages I discuss the differences between both of these literatures by summarizing the parallel theories advanced to explain link formation and the applications used by scholars in each field to justify their approach to network science. I conclude by providing an outlook on how these literatures can be further unified.
How publications are committing harakari!
I have become increasingly frustrated by the fact that many of the publications I used to like are turning into churnicle factories, creating platforms for anybody and everybody to post whatever dr…
Ten Simple Rules for Taking Advantage of Git and GitHub
Bioinformatics is a broad discipline in which one common denominator is the need to produce and/or use software that can be applied to biological data in different contexts. To enable and ensure the replicability and traceability of scientific claims, it is essential that the scientific publication, the corresponding datasets, and the data analysis are made publicly available [1,2]. All software used for the analysis should be either carefully documented (e.g., for commercial software) or, better yet, openly shared and directly accessible to others [3,4]. The rise of openly available software and source code alongside concomitant collaborative development is facilitated by the existence of several code repository services such as SourceForge, Bitbucket, GitLab, and GitHub, among others. These resources are also essential for collaborative software projects because they enable the organization and sharing of programming tasks between different remote contributors. Here, we introduce the main features of GitHub, a popular web-based platform that offers a free and integrated environment for hosting the source code, documentation, and project-related web content for open-source projects. GitHub also offers paid plans for private repositories (see Box 1) for individuals and businesses as well as free plans including private repositories for research and educational use.
Lessons Learned from IndiewebCamp and WordCamp – David Shanske
For a little over two years, I have been involved in Indiewebcamp. This past weekend, for the first time in five years, I was able to attend WordCamp. WordCamp NYC was a massive undertaking, to which I must give credit to the organizers. WordCamp was moved to coincide with OpenCamps week at the United Nations, …
The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes
Advances in computing power, natural language processing, and digitization of text now make it possible to study our a culture's evolution through its texts using a "big data" lens. Our ability to communicate relies in part upon a shared emotional experience, with stories often following distinct emotional trajectories, forming patterns that are meaningful to us. Here, by classifying the emotional arcs for a filtered subset of 1,737 stories from Project Gutenberg's fiction collection, we find a set of six core trajectories which form the building blocks of complex narratives. We strengthen our findings by separately applying optimization, linear decomposition, supervised learning, and unsupervised learning. For each of these six core emotional arcs, we examine the closest characteristic stories in publication today and find that particular emotional arcs enjoy greater success, as measured by downloads.