Albener Pessoa

Submitted by: sulleykid
Posted at: 2012-10-13 20:20:01
See full post and comment: http://9gag.com/gag/5596180

Submitted by: engineb
Posted at: 2012-10-13 16:24:06
See full post and comment: http://9gag.com/gag/5596158

Submitted by: socratezdelcora
Posted at: 2012-10-13 15:59:25
See full post and comment: http://9gag.com/gag/5592386

Submitted by: finklovesbaking
Posted at: 2012-10-13 16:31:09
See full post and comment: http://9gag.com/gag/5592604

1. The bra of the future?  (safe for work)

2. Findings about paper rejections, or why you should love your critics.

3. Good post on the Dunning-Krueger effect.

4. How penicillin reshaped sexuality.

5. Sabina Knight on Mo Yan (short podcast).

6. How Google lobbies for self-driving cars.

It is remarkable how well everything works here, even relative to expectations.  The economic ascendancy of South Korea has been more rapid than that of Japan, and for a larger group of people than Hong Kong or Singapore.  The initial level of education was much lower than in Japan.  The Korean social miracle is no less impressive than the Korean economic miracle.

By the way, can you explain the South and North in a single unified theory of culture and regimes?

French-Korean bakeries are extremely common here.

The Samsung Museum is of higher quality than the National Museum, including for patrimony pieces not just Warhol and Koons.

My hotel toilet is complicated and I am afraid to press the one button which simply says “Enema.”

I saw the two main Korean presidential candidates “debate,” both of them using communitarian redistributionist rhetoric with a rather flat delivery, preceded by and followed by a bow.  Toward the end one of them endorsed the work of Malcolm Gladwell, in front of Gladwell.

I am pleased to have spent one minute inside North Korea, with Alex, guarded by five South Korean martial arts experts and one U.S. soldier.

The question I hear most often is what I think of Gangnam style and the video.  The second is whether I am a Christian.

There are so many coffee shops here.  But why?

South Koreans have now dominated the game of Go for about fifteen years.

 

Ainda não viu as tirinhas do Einstein? Veja aqui.

 

 

Quer mais tias do Sócrates? Clique aqui.

 

Get yourself schooled in some basic fluid dynamics right here!

Submitted by: Unknown (via I Love Charts)

Tagged: best of week , category:Image , density , design , graph , hall of fame , school , science Share on Facebook

Even though the world of software defined radio started out as a Linux-only endeavor, several recent software releases have put the ball fully into the court of OS X users. [hpux735]‘s new Cocoa Radio release provides a (nearly) fully functional software defined radio for anyone with a USB TV tuner and a mac.

Earlier this week, we saw (and tested)  [Elias]‘ port of gqrx and were reasonably impressed. [hpux735]‘s app does the same job and also provides the source so you can compile it yourself.

Previously, [hpux735] ported the osmocom driver for these RTL2832U-based USB TV tuner dongles to the Mac and wrote a small Cocoa driver. The new Cocoa Radio software uses this driver and adds all the features you’d expect from a software radio package; in the title pic for this post, you can see a top 40 radio station near my house and their insipid hatred of dynamic range.

[hpux735] posted a few videos of his development process. You can check those out after the break.

Filed under: radio hacks

Cognitive inhibition is an important mental skill. Stopping or overriding mental processes, whether conscious or unconscious, is often needed - to suppress unwanted or irrelevant thoughts, to suppress inappropriate meanings of ambiguous words.

In other words, it's a vital part of staying focussed.

Decreased cognitive inhibition is associated with creativity, but also with with anxiety and neuroticism, feelings of threat and uncontrollability, altered states of consciousness, intuitive thinking and biases in logical reasoning. And this led Marjaana Lindeman, at the University of Helsinki, Finland, to wonder whether a lack of cognitive inhibition also plays a role in supernatural beliefs.

So, along with her colleagues she took a group of 23 sceptics and believers in the supernatural, and put them in an MRI scanner (AKA brain scanner). While in there, they were given some short stories to read, and then a picture to look at - you can see some examples in the graphic on the right.

They were asked to imagine that they were walking along, thinking hard about the particular issue highlighted in the story, then they looked up to see the picture shown. What thoughts would the picture provoke?

Both groups showed brain activity in a region called the left Inferior Frontal Gyrus (IFG). That's a part of the brain that plays an important role in processing various signs and their meaning, including spoken and written language, sign languages, pantomimes and gestures and other communicative symbols.

However, although the left IFG was activated the same in both groups, the right IFG light up more strongly in the sceptics than in the believers. That's important, because the right IFG is an area of the brain that is associated with cognitive inhibition.

As you might expect, the believers were more likely than the sceptics to say that they saw the pictures to be sign of some kind - an indication of how the situation was going to turn out. This suggests that the initial associations, made in the left IFG, were not suppressed by the right IFG.

As a result, says Lindeman, this "supports the argument that the skeptics suppressed the potential idea of a supernatural sign in the pictures as irrelevant, while believers did not. This interpretation is in line with previous findings showing that skeptics perform better on inhibitory tasks than supernatural believers do."

It also fits with earlier research by Lindeman suggesting that supernatural believers get confused when thinking about how the world works.

And she goes on to conclude that:

Although people’s general inclination toward supernatural beliefs may be understood as a form of natural information processing, weak cognitive inhibition may explain why supernatural beliefs are not typical of everybody but especially of, for example, children, old people, creative individuals, intuitive thinkers, people in distress and with mental disorders, as well as during decreased sense of control and altered states of consciousness

In other words, although we are born with hyperactive brains looking for signs and signals, we are not all born believers - because many of us are also born sceptics!

---

Lindeman M, Svedholm AM, Riekki T, Raij T, & Hari R (2012). Is it just a brick wall or a sign from the universe? An fMRI study of supernatural believers and skeptics. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience PMID: 22956664

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com
title: "notFinal.doc" - originally published 10/12/2012 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

DirecTV’s Genie DVR can record up to five shows at once, and play back video to up to four TVs at once. Image: DirecTV

The DVR is a piece of technology that brings just as much pain into our lives as it does joy. Being able to record a TV show so you can watch it on your own time is a beautiful thing. Thank you, technology. But limitations like being able to record only two shows at a time and not being able to watch a third program while two are recording are points of frustration for TV watchers.

DirecTV says it has a solution — a new DVR called the Genie, which allows users to record up to five HD programs at the same time. And it’s one DVR for the whole house, capable of playing back content on any TV in any room, without the need for additional boxes. There’s also an opt-in feature called “Genie Recommends” that will suggest shows you might like based on your past viewing habits.

But the Genie, as with any product from pay-for-TV companies, won’t quite grant all your wishes. While it can record up to five shows at once, simultaneous playback is limited to four. Still, that means up to four different live or recorded HD shows playing on four different TVs at the same time from one box.

While those TVs won’t need separate set-top boxes, each will need a small receiver, called a Genie Mini, to connect to the DVR — unless those TVs RVU enabled and can connect to the DVR wirelessly. But so far, only a small number of TVs are shipping with certified RVU capability.

On the plus side, with 1 terabyte of storage space, DirecTV promises that the Genie can record up to four times as much programming as DVRs from cable companies. Most people should be able to record about 200 hours of HD content on a Genie, said Jon Gieselman, senior vice president of marketing at DirecTV.

Of course, there’s a cost associated with bringing a Genie and a Genie Mini into your home. Currently, for new DirecTV subscribers, the Genie and as many as four Genie Minis are free, but there’s an “advanced receiver service” fee of $20 per month that is required when taking on all the equipment. The $20 fee can be cut to $10 a month if a subscriber has auto bill pay set up on their account, Gieselman told Wired.

Existing customers won’t get the Genie or Genie Minis for free but will instead have to pay a one-time hardware charge that can be as much as $99 for each Genie and Genie Mini, according to Gieselman. Pricing varies depending on how long a subscriber has been a DirecTV customer, how old their existing hardware is and other promotions the company has going on, Gieselman said. Genie Mini’s aren’t currently available for existing DirecTV subscribers, but they will be starting next month.

“Prices will drop in November for the Genie across the board, but we actually haven’t decided how much everything will cost yet,” Gieselman said. “We’re going to wait to see what the demand is from customers. But the point is to wait until next month if you’re an existing customer.”

Submitted by: Unknown (via Youtube)

Tagged: guitar , heavy metal , video Share on Facebook

Submitted by: scoobydook
Posted at: 2012-10-08 17:09:57
See full post and comment: http://9gag.com/gag/5559294

Ads by Project Wonderful! Your ad could be here, right now.

11. If you try it again, it only lasts a few years and is even more unbearable.

Submitted by: ale1509
Posted at: 2012-10-10 00:20:23
See full post and comment: http://9gag.com/gag/5566612

In the never-ending arms race between systems to prove that you're a human and computers that can fake it, here's a captcha that tests whether you have human feelings.

Instead of your run-of-the-mill alphanumeric gibberish, or random selection of words, the Civil Rights Captcha presents you with a short blurb about a Civil Rights violation and asks you how you feel about it. Ostensibly robots (and trolls) won't make it through because they'll remark that a human rights activist's murder makes them feel "aroused" instead of "upset." And bots will still have to make it past standard Captcha hurdles before they can even pick one of the choices.

The easy way to attack this system is to create a library with all the correct answers.

How soon before Deckard has to come to our house to administer a test?

C is a beautiful language perfectly suited for development on low-power devices such as the 8-bit microcontrollers. With newer, more powerful ARM microcontrollers making their way onto the market and workbenches around the world, it was only fitting that Oracle got in on the action. They released a version of Java targeted at these newer, more powerful microcontrollers called Java ME embedded.

The new embedded version of Java has everything you would expect from a microcontroller development platform – access to GPIO pins, including SD cards and I2C devices. The new Java machine is designed for full headless operation and is capable of running on devices with as little as 130 kB of RAM and 350 kB of ROM.

As for the utility of programming a microcontroller in Java, it’s still the second most popular language, after spending the better part of a decade as the number one language programmers choose to use. The requirements of the new embedded version of Java are far too large to fit onto even the best 8-bit microcontrollers, but with a new crop of more powerful ARM devices, we’ll expect to see more and more ARM/Java projects making their way into the Hackaday tip line in the coming months.

Tip ‘o the hat to [roger] for sending this one in.

Filed under: ARM, Software Development

Google’s maps of Seoul are peculiar, they offer public transit directions but not driving directions. Turns out that this is due to Korean law (the Measurement Act) which prohibits the export of Korean map data without obtaining government approval. (The distinction appears to be that driving directions are ”new” maps and thus unapproved while transit directions are fixed and can be approved in advance of generation.)

Local versions of Google satellite imagery are also much lower resolution in South Korea due to military restrictions. Google has argued that by satisfying the law within a country it satistifes that country’s law, a policy rule on Google’s part that I applaud, but this policy does lead to the paradox that the images of South Korea available in South Korea are not as high resolution as those available in North Korea!

More generally, however, the bigger Google gets the more countries it has a physical presence in (servers, sales staff and support etc.) and thus the more leverage individual countries, especially large countries, will have to degrade the services that Google offers not just within-country but to the world.

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For the pointer I thank John Farrier.

100,000: The number of Portuguese living in Angola last year, up from 21,000 in 2003. That is more than triple the number of Angolans living in Portugal. Migration flows are beginning to reverse, with thousands of construction workers from Europe flocking to Africa to find jobs in the boom.

Here is more bullish information on Africa, via Michelle Dawson.

iPhone back tracking. Photo: Canopy

Controlling your smartphone from the screen? How boring. Controlling a smartphone with a capacitive touch case from the back — that’s the smudge-free display future.

That’s how accessory maker Canopy sees it, anyway. The company introduced the Sensus iPhone case with a capacitive touch back at the 2012 GDC (Game Developers Conference) on Wednesday. The case plugs into the smartphone’s dock connector and adds an additional interface dimension to the device.

Touch-capacitive sensors are located on the back and right edges of the case. From the looks of the video on Canopy’s pre-order page, the company is clearly courting gamers and game developers. The case moves fingers off the front of the iPhone and out of the way of the action. Dual processors that reside in the case support multi-touch gestures and free the iPhone from having to power an additional input device, which can be a drain on performance. Canopy also introduced a free SDK for developers to create games that take advantage of the case’s backside controls.

But even non-gamers will find the case worth a look. Users can control photo zoom via the sensor along the right edge of the case and can pan maps by sliding fingers across the back of the Sensus while in landscape mode.

The Sensus case is available for pre-order for the iPhone 4 and 4S for $59 and will ship in the first quarter of 2013. The iPhone 5 and 5th-generation iPod touch cases are expected to ship in late spring of 2013.

OLIMPO - Em votação recorde, o ministro Joaquim Barbosa foi escolhido por 95% dos eleitores indignados para assumir o cargo de Messias. "O combate à corrupção necessita de alguém que supere as limitações humanas. Um Ser livre de problemas cotidianos, como dores nas costas, gripe, mau humor e insônia" escreveu o blogueiro Ronaldo Azedo.

Today’s cartoon is dedicated to Jillian and Patrick – Happy anniversary, you two!

And today’s cartoon is also my 2000th Savage Chickens comic! How crazy is that? Woohoo!!