Rafa Spoladore Ψ

“We’ve never had a female President in this country, which I find stunning” - Hari Kondabolu 

Amazon will acquire book recommendation site and readers' social network Goodreads, according to an Amazon press release issued Thursday.

"People love to talk about ideas and share their passion for the stories they read," said Goodreads CEO and co-founder Otis Chandler. "We're now going to be able to move faster in bringing the Goodreads experience to millions of readers around the world."

"Amazon and Goodreads share a passion for reinventing reading," added Amazon VP Russ Grandinetti. "Goodreads has helped change how we discover and discuss books… Both Amazon and Goodreads have helped thousands of authors reach a wider audience and make a better living at their craft. Together we intend to build many new ways to delight...

Continue reading…

These enigmatic rings may be the work of tiny creatures.

(Phys.org) —What will soon be the most powerful neutrino detector in the United States has recorded its first three-dimensional images of particles.

The Journal of Library Administration is published by Taylor & Francis, a big publishing conglomerate. According to Brian Mathews, while he was in the middle of putting together a special issue on the future of libraries he received notice that the editorial board was resigning due to conflicts with the publisher around what kind of author rights regime the journal should use. Here is the note he received from the board:

The Board believes that the licensing terms in the Taylor & Francis author agreement are too restrictive and out-of-step with the expectations of authors in the LIS community.

A large and growing number of current and potential authors to JLA have pushed back on the licensing terms included in the Taylor & Francis author agreement. Several authors have refused to publish with the journal under the current licensing terms.

Authors find the author agreement unclear and too restrictive and have repeatedly requested some form of Creative Commons license in its place.

After much discussion, the only alternative presented by Taylor & Francis tied a less restrictive license to a $2995 per article fee to be paid by the
Author. As you know, this is not a viable licensing option for authors from the LIS community who are generally not conducting research under large grants.

Thus, the Board came to the conclusion that it is not possible to produce a quality journal under the current licensing terms offered by Taylor & Francis and chose to collectively resign.

Bravo to the editorial board of JLA for taking such a principled stand.

For a bit more background, Jason Griffey gives the perspective of an author approached by Mathews who strongly disagreed with T&F’s current author rights regime. From the other side, Chris Bourg gives the perspective of someone on the JLA editorial board and a bit on how they came to their decision.

Along with many others in the comments on the various blog posts, Peter Suber suggests the board take the next step and launch their own new journal. Suber also helpfully points to a list of journals that have done just that.

My take?

First of all, I think it’s a bit unfortunate that Mathews took his rather forward-thinking project to a rather backwards-thinking traditional toll access journal. The way to envision the future is to be the future to want to happen, and it’s hard to imagine T&F embodying the future of scholarly communications in a way that anybody but the big commercial publishers would like to see.

That being said, I do sincerely hope his project finds a more suitable home and that one of the themes it explores is the library’s role in a fairer, more open scholarly communications ecosystem.

As for the future of JLA, I hope T&F is able to move into the future and create a author rights regime that is more in sync with what authors in the LIS fields are looking for. For the resigned editorial board, I wish for them a way forward, a new partnership with an institution or society that will allow them and the authors they recruit in the future to openly envision and create the future.

I have a son who’s currently a first year physics student. As you can imagine, I occasionally pass along a link or two to him pointing to stuff on the web I think he might find particularly interesting or useful. Thinking on that fact, I surmised that perhaps other science students might find those links interesting or useful as well. Hence, this series of posts here on the blog.

By necessity and circumstance, the items I’ve chosen will be influenced by my son’s choice of major and my own interest in computational approaches to science.

• Meet Science: What is “peer review”?
• Gödel’s Proof of Incompleteness!
  • Gödel numbering
  • Arithmetic Properties
  • Encoding meta-math arithmetically
  • Finally: Gödel’s Proof of Incompleteness!
• Some Astonishingly Bad Professional Advice (And by extension, some good advice)
• Building Your E-Village
• Secrets of the Most Successful College Students
• The Philosophie of Gaps
• How to Determine If A Controversial Statement Is Scientifically True (similar here)
• Two Solitudes Illustrated (academia vs. industry)
• Computational Thinking
• The philosophy of the Higgs
• Why Should You Think Like a Scientist?
• Modern Physics and Scientific Thinking

The previous post in this series is here.

Alguém por aí talvez ainda se lembre do alarde com que foi saudado o artigo Feeling the Future, assinado pelo psicólogo americano Daryl Bem e publicado, no início de 2011, pelo importante periódico científico Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP). Nesse trabalho, Bem descreve uma série de nove experimentos, dos quais oito -- oito! -- teriam gerado prova estatística de que o futuro é capaz de afetar o passado: ou, mais especificamente, de que pessoas são capazes de prever eventos que ainda estão por acontecer. O assunto não só gerou furor na mídia internacional, como até rendeu uma capa da IstoÉ aqui no Brasil, além de uma entrevista de Bem ao portal iG.

O artigo de Bem chamou atenção porque não só seu autor é um cientista respeitado, como o veículo que aceitou publicá-lo, o JPSP, também goza de grande prestígio. Não se tratava de (mais um) artigo de pesquisadores obscuros lançado numa revista de nicho, do tipo que circula apenas entre crentes fiéis, mas do trabalho de um pesquisador sério numa publicação mainstream.

O artigo de Bem não demorou a atrair críticas, no entanto. A mais completa talvez tenha sido a de James Alcock, que apontou uma série de erros metodológicos no planejamento, na execução e na análise dos resultados. Entre eles, estão a mudança de procedimentos com o experimento já em andamento, e o uso, sem correção, de múltiplas análises estatísticas sobre as mesmas bases de dados (o que é um problema porque, fazendo isso, cedo ou tarde você acaba encontrando uma relação aparentemente significativa, por puro acaso).

Bem escreve uma resposta às críticas de Alcock, mas a questão fundamental -- os resultados poderiam ser reproduzidos? -- ficou em aberto. Reprodução é parte fundamental do processo científico: a fusão a frio, por exemplo, caiu em descrédito quando ficou claro que nenhum outro laboratório era capaz de obter os mesmos resultados dos autores originais, Fleischmann e Pons. A falha na replicação de resultados é um dos fatores cruciais citados no clássico artigo sobre a prevalência de falsos positivos na literatura científica, Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.

Um artigo chegou a ser apresentado como replicação positiva de parte dos resultados de Bem, obtida por um pesquisador da Universidade de Viena, num trabalho com 70 voluntárias. Uma tentativa mais robusta, envolvendo 150 participantes, foi publicada pouco depois no periódico online PLoS-ONE, registrando falha: nada de precognição, nesse caso. E esse artigo foi capa de... bem, de nenhuma revista brasileira, na verdade. Nem seus autores, Richard Wiseman, Stuart Ritchie e Christopher French, convidados a dar entrevista para a mídia local.

Pode-se dizer, no entanto, que a PLoS, um veículo exclusivamente online, não tem o mesmo peso da impressa JPSP, e que a amostra de 150 indivíduos ainda é pequena comparada à de Bem, que envolveu mais de 1.000 participantes.

Agora, no entanto, o mesmo Journal of Personality and Social Psychology que havia divulgado os resultados bombásticos de Daryl Bem publicou o artigo Correcting the Past: Failures to Replicate Psi, onde sete tentativas de recriar dois dos oito resultados precognitivos originais, envolvendo mais de 3.000 pessoas, falham espetacularmente. Podemos esperar uma capa de revista de circulação nacional com a manchete "Ciência descarta premonição"? Não creio.

Resultados científicos decepcionantes sofrem da mesma síndrome midiática das erratas e desmentidos: em política, a denúncia rende manchete, a correção, salvo caso de sentença judicial, uma nota de pé de coluna. Com o agravante de que a ciência não costuma constituir advogado para pedir direito de resposta.

Falando em precognição, é interessante notar como outros cientistas usaram a capacidade de estabelecer laços causais espúrios entre o futuro e o passado não para anunciar a realidade dos poderes da vidência, mas para chamar atenção para as limitações de certas tradições de investigação científica.

Em 2001, Leonard Leibovici publicou artigo sobre o poder retroativo da prece, mostrando uma correlação estatística entre o tempo de recuperação de um grupo de pacientes e orações feitas de quatro a dez anos após os pacientes terem tido alta.

Em comentário publicado depois de o artigo causar furor, Leibovici reconheceu que o trabalho tinha sido feito em tom mais ou menos humorístico, para demonstrar a necessidade de a pesquisa científica debruçar-se sobre questões bem formuladas e que sejam coerentes com o restante do conhecimento científico disponível.

Em especial, ele notou que probabilidade prévia de o resultado ser real é tão pequena que faz desaparecer a validade do efeito detectado: para realmente estabelecer causalidade reversa, o tamanho do efeito teria de ser várias ordens de magnitude maior do que o encontrado no estudo.

O trabalho de Leibovici é anterior ao de Bem, mas  o artigo False-Positive Psychology, de Joseph Simmons, Leif Nelson e Uri Simonsohn, é quase simultâneo. Nele, os autores mostram como "é inaceitavelmente fácil acumular (e descrever) evidência estatisticamente significativa de uma hipótese falsa" no campo da psicologia. Por exemplo, eles "demonstram" que uma ouvir uma canção faz as pessoas rejuvenescerem 18 meses.

Simmons et. al. explicam que o problema nasce do que chamam de "graus de liberdade do pesquisador". Já citei trechos do artigo deles em outra postagem, mas vale o repeteco:

No processo de coletar a analisar os dados, pesquisadores têm muitas decisões a tomar: devemos levantar mais dados? Devemos excluir algumas observações? Quais as condições que devem ser comparadas ou combinadas? Quais controles devem ser considerados? Métricas específicas devem ser combinadas, convertidas, ou as duas coisas?

É raro, e muitas vezes impraticável, tomar todas essas decisões de antemão. Em vez disso, é comum (e aceito) que os pesquisadores explorem várias alternativas analíticas, em busca de uma combinação que produza “significância estatística”, e que reportem apenas aquilo que “funcionou”.

O problema, evidentemente, é que a probabilidade de que pelo menos uma das (muitas) análises produzir um resultado falso positivo no nível de 5% é necessariamente maior do que 5%.

Cast: T01Mac

Tags: Emily Ratajkowski, Treats! Magazine, Topless, Nude, Photoshoot, Slideshow and iCarly

sparkafterdark:

STEP ONE: HAVE SOME FUCKING HAIR.

STEP FUCKING TWO:

STEP I’M FUCKING DONE THAT’S IT.

TA FUCKING DA

an image from fukung.net

att-ic:

‘helldog’ by me

Capa para o caderno Carreira da Folha de domingo passado.

Os caras tem um "vocabulário" muito próprio.

 

Leia mais...

an image from fukung.net

girliemagazine:

Alice Denham

Captain Nemo and the Underwater City (MGM, 1969)

Starring Robert Ryan, Chuck Connors, Nanette Newman, Luciana Paluzzi, John Turner, Bill Fraser, Kenneth Connor, Allan Cuthbertson, and Christopher Hartstone. Directed by James Hill.

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Finalmente cumpri meu dever de casa cético-literário e li Nightmare Alley, um clássico do romance noir  americano que gira em torno de um mágico de circo que vira primeiro mentalista, evolui para pastor evangélico picareta e, então, falso médium, enriquecendo com as doações "espontâneas" de fiéis embasbacados. Em se tratando de um romance noir, tudo é muito sórdido, há uma mulher fatal e a coisa toda termina em tragédia, claro.

O autor, William Lindsay Gresham, era jornalista da era pulp, especializado em "true crime stories",  ou narrativas romanceadas de crimes verdadeiros. Ele depois viria a escrever um livro de não-ficção sobre os circos de aberrações norte-americanos, Monster Midway, e uma biografia de Harry Houdini. Antes de virar escritor, Gresham lutara ao lado dos republicanos na Guerra Civil espanhola, e durante alguns anos foi casado com a poeta Joy Davidman, que viria a abandoná-lo para se casar com C.S. Lewis.

Nightmare Alley é um livro importante na história do ceticismo porque expõe de modo muito didático o funcionamento da leitura fria -- ou "a frio" -- o método usado por médiuns, cartomantes, quiromantes, astrólogos e outros adivinhos para oferecer leituras de personalidade e previsões do futuro que, embora óbvias e genéricas, tendem a soar impressionantes e específicas para quem as ouve. Segundo a introdução da reedição mais recente do livro, assinada pelo jornalista Nick Tosches, foi em Nightmare Alley que a expressão "cold reading" apareceu pela primeira vez, registrada por escrito, na língua inglesa. Para o público contemporâneo, há ainda a curiosidade de ver a palavra "geek" usada em seu sentido original: um sujeito fantasiado de aborígene ou homem das cavernas que decapita galinhas vivas com os próprios dentes. Uma atração de circo de aberrações.

O protagonista do romance, Stanton Carlisle, é um tipo bastante didático: depois que abandona a mágica e se torna um líder religioso, passa a recusar-se a cobrar por seus serviços, mas "a obra, que é maior do que eu, sempre precisa de doações"; e sempre que os espíritos que invoca sugerem aos consulentes que o ajudem com bens materiais, recusa-se a aceitá-los -- de início. Também de acordo com o que costuma acontecer no mundo real, suas vítimas são seus maiores defensores: quando um jornal publica uma nota venenosa sobre como uma senhora viúva teria sido convencida a doar um imóvel para a igreja, a autora da doação responde, em tom indignado, exaltando a humildade do pastor.

Num aparente sinal do período em que a obra foi escrita (e do pedigree ideológico do autor), as únicas figuras imunes ao charme e à fala mansa de Carlisle são uma psicóloga e um operário ateu comunista.

Se há algo, na descrição que o livro faz das rotinas mentalistas-espiritualistas de seu protagonista, que parece exagerado, é a extrema elaboração: Stanton vai a extremos como usar um transmissor de rádio oculto no colete (isso, em 1946!), além de oferecer drinques drogados a consulentes. Mas efeitos como os obtidos pelo reverendo Carlisle poderiam ser produzidos de maneiras muito mais simples.

Sendo um romance noir, o livro também contém uma trama policial -- Carlisle comete pelo menos três homicídios -- além de traições, subtramas e traições duplas. Se há uma falha no romance é seu uso, pesado, do freudianismo na construção dos personagens: todos parecem atormentados, quando não moldados, por um tesão pecaminoso por algum parente do sexo oposto. Nisso, o livro lembra outro exemplar da literatura policial sórdida da época, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, de Horace McCoy, descrito por um crítico americano como "o livro mais torpe publicado neste país".

O título, "beco do pesadelo", vem do insight  que o protagonista tem logo no início do romance, e que o leva a buscar uma carreira no mentalismo, primeiro, e depois na religião: todas as pessoas, ele conclui, vivem num beco de pesadelo, correndo de um monstro que se aproxima, rumo a uma luz que nunca chega. Quem consegue acesso ao beco que os outros têm em suas cabeças -- descobrir de qual monstro estão fugindo, qual a luz que buscam -- e oferece um pouco de paz e de segurança, ainda que falsa, tem nas mãos o maior poder do mundo.

Uma inspiração que, mais uma vez, faz do livro uma peça de grande valor didático.

A dozen generations ago, there was no unemployment, largely because there were no real jobs to speak of. Before the industrial revolution, the thought that you’d leave your home and go to an office or a factory was, of course, bizarre.

What happens now that the industrial age is ending? As the final days of the industrial age roll around, we are seeing the core assets of the economy replaced by something new. Actually, it’s something old, something handmade, but this time, on a huge scale.

The industrial age was about scarcity. Everything that built our culture, improved our productivity, and defined our lives involved the chasing of scarce items.

On the other hand, the connection economy, our economy, the economy of the foreseeable future, embraces abundance. No, we don’t have an endless supply of the resources we used to trade and covet. No, we certainly don’t have a surplus of time, either. But we do have an abundance of choice, an abundance of connection, and an abundance of access to knowledge.

We know more people, have access to more resources, and can leverage our skills more quickly and at a higher level than ever before.

This abundance leads to two races. The race to the bottom is the Internet-fueled challenge to lower prices, find cheaper labor, and deliver more for less.

The other race is the race to the top: the opportunity to be the one they can’t live without, to be the linchpin we would miss if he didn’t show up. The race to the top focuses on delivering more for more. It embraces the weird passions of those with the resources to make choices, and it rewards originality, remarkability, and art.

The connection economy continues to gain traction because connections scale, information begets more information, and influence accrues to those who create this abundance. As connections scale, these connections paradoxically make it easier for others to connect as well, because anyone with talent or passion can leverage the networks created by connection to increase her impact. The connection economy doesn’t create jobs where we get picked and then get paid; the connection economy builds opportunities for us to connect, and then demands that we pick ourselves.

Just as the phone network becomes more valuable when more phones are connected (scarcity is the enemy of value in a network), the connection economy becomes more valuable as we scale it.

Friends bring us more friends. A reputation brings us a chance to build a better reputation. Access to information encourages us to seek ever more information. The connections in our life multiply and increase in value. Our stuff, on the other hand,  becomes less valuable over time.

… [this riff is inspired by my new book...]

Successful organizations have realized that they are no longer in the business of coining slogans, running catchy ads, and optimizing their supply chains to cut costs.

And freelancers and soloists have discovered that doing a good job for a fair price is no longer sufficient to guarantee success. Good work is easier to find than ever before.

What matters now:

• Trust
• Permission
• Remarkability
• Leadership
• Stories that spread
• Humanity: connection, compassion, and humility

All six of these are the result of successful work by humans who refuse to follow industrial-age  rules. These assets aren’t generated by external strategies and MBAs and positioning memos. These are the results of internal struggle, of brave decisions without a map and the willingness to allow others to live with dignity.

They are about standing out, not fitting in, about inventing, not duplicating.

TRUST AND PERMISSION: In a marketplace that’s open to just about anyone, the only people we hear are the people we choose to hear. Media is cheap, sure, but attention is filtered, and it’s virtually impossible to be heard unless the consumer gives us the ability to be heard. The more valuable someone’s attention is, the harder it is to earn.

And who gets heard?

Why would someone listen to the prankster or the shyster or the huckster? No, we choose to listen to those we trust. We do business with and donate to those who have earned our attention. We seek out people who tell us stories that resonate, we listen to those stories, and we engage with those people or businesses that delight or reassure or surprise in a positive way.

And all of those behaviors are the acts of people, not machines. We embrace the humanity in those around us, particularly as the rest of the world appears to become less human and more cold. Who will you miss? That is who you are listening to .

REMARKABILITY: The same bias toward humanity and connection exists in the way we choose which ideas we’ll share with our friends and colleagues. No one talks about the boring, the predictable, or the safe. We don’t risk interactions in order to spread the word about something obvious or trite.

The remarkable is almost always new and untested, fresh and risky.

LEADERSHIP: Management is almost diametrically opposed to leadership. Management is about generating yesterday’s results, but a little faster or a little more cheaply. We know how to manage the world—we relentlessly seek to cut costs and to limit variation, while we exalt obedience.

Leadership, though, is a whole other game. Leadership puts the leader on the line. No manual, no rule book, no überleader to point the finger at when things go wrong. If you ask someone for the rule  book on how to lead, you’re secretly wishing to be a manager.

Leaders are vulnerable, not controlling, and they are racing to the top, taking us to a new place, not to the place of cheap, fast, compliant safety.

STORIES THAT SPREAD: The next asset that makes the new economy work is the story that spreads. Before the revolution, in a world of limited choice, shelf space mattered a great deal. You could buy your way onto the store shelf, or you could be the only one on the ballot, or you could use a connection to get your résumé in front of the hiring guy. In a world of abundant choice, though, none of these tactics is effective. The chooser has too many alternatives, there’s too much clutter, and the scarce resources are attention and trust, not shelf space. This situation is tough for many, because attention and trust must be earned, not acquired.

More difficult still is the magic of the story that resonates. After trust is earned and your work is seen, only a fraction of it is magical enough to be worth spreading. Again, this magic is the work of the human artist, not the corporate machine. We’re no longer interested in average stuff for average people.

HUMANITY: We don’t worship industrial the way we used to. We seek out human originality and caring instead. When price and availability are no longer sufficient advantages (because everything is available and the price is no longer news), then what we are drawn to is the vulnerability and transparency that bring us together, that turn the “other” into one of us.

For a long time to come the masses will still clamor for cheap and obvious and reliable. But the people you seek to lead, the people who are helping to define the next thing and the interesting frontier, these people want your humanity, not your discounts.

All of these assets, rolled into one, provide the foundation for the change maker of the future. And that individual (or the team that person leads) has no choice but to build these assets with novelty, with a fresh approach to an old problem, with a human touch that is worth talking about.

I can’t wait until we return to zero percent unemployment, to a time when people with something to contribute (everyone)  pick themselves instead of waiting for a bureaucrat’s permission to do important work.

Ronald Reagan gave the following 30-minute talk on March 23rd, 1983, i.e. 30 years ago:



Most of the talk is about the motivation and the situation. The very SDI comments begin at 25:00 or so.

The visionary SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) speech was arguably the most consequential presidential speech in the modern U.S. history. I am somewhat impressed by the depth of the technical arguments that Reagan offered.

In July 1979, Reagan would visit some defense folks in Colorado and they showed him that the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine was the only possible conclusion. Ronald Reagan couldn't accept such an attitude and the speech above symbolized what he wanted to do to protect the civilians against the Soviet-led attacks from outer space and change the doctrine.




I was 10 years old, I spoke no English, and today was actually the first time I listened to the speech above. But I remember that during a gym class, when I was a 3rd grader or a 4th grader, at the 21st Elementary School in Pilsen with an extended education of languages (Russian, in my case then), we suddenly had to listen to a bizarre scary speech in the school radio sometimes in 1983 or 1984 or so.

We were told that the international situation got worsened a lot and a war could be imminent. Of course, we were told about the imperialist warmongers all the time but this was the only time when I heard an announcement fully dedicated to a possibly looming war.




I have never reconstructed the date of that bizarre announcement or the reason behind it. Now, it seems plausible that Reagan's speech was what sparked the school radio announcement. Some commies at our school could have gotten anxious that the American imperialists could get really strong now and it's necessary to upgrade the war preparations and war rhetoric (although we've never heard anything that would be so pro-war as the North Korean propaganda we observe these days: the official propaganda would always paint us as the "camp of peace" while the capitalist world were the "warmongers").

At any rate, this was the impact of Reagan's speech on the Soviet politicians. Arms races escalated and they effectively led to the surrender of the Soviet Union. It has overspent the money for arms races. This caused some problems in the economy and that helped Gorbachev to be elected and ultimately terminate the totalitarian Cold War era in the Soviet Union – and, indirectly, in the whole Soviet bloc.

Many people – especially left-wingers – have been trying to humiliate the SDI. In 1987, the American Physical Society joined these critics and questioned whether the SDI is allowed by the laws of physics. But it's clear that "something like that" may be immensely useful and nowadays, similar technologies belong to the responsible defense strategists' standard toolkit. The critics usually employ excessively high standards when they evaluate the SDI. They say that because the technology can't be perfectly reliable under all circumstances, it's useless. But nothing in the real world is perfectly reliable but we are still using many things and they are useful.

Also, the critics who said that Reagan would effectively revive an "offensive mode" of the arms races have ultimately been proved wrong. SDI is clearly a defense technology and while it temporarily led the Soviets to be even more offensive in their strategic planning, this had to collapse and this did collapse, leading the world to the end of the Cold War. I would summarize the U.S. critics' motivation by saying that the real reason why most of them were annoyed was that they wanted the Soviet Union to prevail and Reagan's plan made that outcome less likely. They were commies. In fact, Obama's administration is the first Democratic administration after Reagan that accepted that SDI is a good idea. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel proposed to increase the GBIs on Friday.

Before the SDI plans managed to undermine the Soviet empire, the CIA has played an effective misinformation game. The Soviets have spent lots of money on similar anti-rockets, too. X-rays were planned to be the defensive bullets. Most of these devices remained on paper but the implications of these papers were damn tangible and damn far-reaching.

Escadas de ascensão

Abismo em questão

Outras idéias novas

Tomam conta da emoção

Visando realização

A própria satisfação

Sem nenhuma intervenção

Sem qualquer discussão

Contagiar a multidão

Sem cair no vão..

steinfuchs:

wob wob

an image from fukung.net

vigorton2:

Eve Eden/Rosa Domaille

Last Judgment (detail), Fra Angelico, ca. 1431

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