That Elusive Higgs Boson

Tomorrow at CERN, researchers will announce their latest findings in the search for the last undiscovered particle in the current model of subatomic particles – the Higgs boson. Canadian researchers have a big role in one of the two experiments involved. Perimeter Institute is holding a webinar to discuss the results tomorrow at 12:30 ET http://goo.gl/8kJG0. Also, in Vancouver, TRIUMF will host a public seminar in its auditorium at 2:30 p.m. PT [http://goo.gl/g9YQG].

Why the head should know how the tail is behaving

The next issue of Science News has a good article on predicting financial risk. It covers how traditional models of estimating risk are missing a lot by discounting rare, freak events in their calculations. Gaussian distribution models fail to account for the outliers (the long tail of a probability distribution) that can drastically alter market behaviour. Although a normal distribution model does account for a lot of economic activity, it ignores the rare large freak events, so it doesn’t fully capture reality. Which is where power law models come in.

“Long tails are a mathematical clue that a different kind of behavior may be at play, one that physicists have long been fascinated by. When data follow what is called a power law distribution, the outlandish data points that generate the tail aren’t aberrant freaks; they fit right in.”

Gaussian distribution and power law regimes will predict fairly similar outcomes for unlikely but possible events, such as an event with a one-in-a-hundred likelihood of occurring. But for highly unlikely events, such as a one-in-ten-thousand event, the two models deliver hugely different predictions. The differences can’t be ignored. The article points out that most economists think that current models are too simplistic, but the challenge remains how to reconcile freak occurrences with traditional models based on stability.

La vie est ailleurs

If you haven't yet discovered the most awesome World Science Festival website, I highly recommend you put your evening plans on hold and spend a good few hours checking it out. One of the more recent videos is a three-minute explanation of the Holographic Principle -- the idea that a volume of space, or maybe even the entire universe, can be described as a holographic projection of information encoded elsewhere in a two-dimensional surrounding boundary. Kind of puts a new spin on the old adage, "Life is elsewhere."

http://www.worldsciencefestival.com/2011/08/what_is_the_holographic_principle/

Work-Life Fusion

Doing some research on 20th century art and artists this weekend, I came across some cool photos of Ray and Charles Eames, the great 20th century designers. The couple did some pretty extraordinary work together, even beyond architecture and design, and I was delighted to find their short documentary Powers of Ten (1968) available online.

Narrated by Philip Morrison, the film is a neat examination of perspective, showing the relative scale of the cosmos by factors of ten, from the view of our human world, to the expanse of the observable universe, to up close and personal with a proton.

And for those of you who prefer a more tactile approach to scaling the universe, there's also the Powers of Ten flipbook, which has the special advantage of allowing you to set your own transition pace. Of course it's very easy nowadays to access cool NASA videos of outer space phenomena, but in 1968, when the Eames' film was released, depictions of the universe weren't so prevalent. Nor were extraordinary designing couples like Ray and Charles. So -- today -- as I was reading about this most innovative couple, I was surprised to discover this in their biographical info: They died ten years apart to the day. That day was today, August 21.

I, for one, welcome our new cartographer overlords

So an article was published yesterday in a few journals profiling recent findings by Australian researchers that have developed lingodroids — robots designed to explore, map out, and name places in their environment. The mobile robots were equipped with surveillance apparel (camera, laser, sonar), a syllabary, and technology that enables them 'speak' their invented words to each other. What the researchers found is that they took to socializing — sharing their made-up words and confirming their linguistic agreement by playing several hundred games to demonstrate their mutual understanding.

Amazing as this all is, I do think the suggestion that the robots have invented a language is questionable; a better description is that they are developing a lexicon. Whether that grows into a language with verbs (expressing descriptions of time, which is more than just nominal descriptions of space) is another question. If so, just wait until they develop syntax and inflection. Despite the hype about the language, though, the "spoken words" documented in this study do seem like a byproduct of the robots' spatial calculations, facilitated by the technology that enables them to make sound, and then reinforced by trial and error identification. What is really cool about this experiment, though, is that the robots invented names (and several of them) for places that they couldn’t explore. For some reason, the article includes this as parenthetical information, but it seems to me that that is mindblowingly sophisticated. The robots' capacity to create and corroborate identities for locations other than where they are physically situated — mapping the elsewhere, so to speak — suggests that they have some 'awareness' not only of each other, but of each other's abilities to detect the world beyond their immediate physical environment.

Walk softly and carry a big stick

We’re just over a week into the federal election campaign here in Canada and that means candidates are doing a lot of traveling across the country hoping for great photo ops. Check out this chart comparing the carbon footprints to date of five party leaders on the campaign trail.

This is how a revolution is tweeted

This is a very cool data visualization of how many people were communicating about Egypt on February 11, the day autocratic President Hosni Mubarak resigned from office. It tracks the usage of the hashtag #jan25. Nodes are Twitter users and links between nodes indicate retweets..

All of these tweets represent a sample of only 10 percent of the actual activity and were collected in a single hour. Read the creator's piece on how it was done here.

There has been an ongoing debate about the viability of social media to effect real societal change. The discussion was amplified in the public sphere following the publication of Malcolm Gladwell's now-famous New Yorker article, which I previously posted about.

Principle Interest

A StatsCan study released yesterday found that the number of people making principled purchasing decisions is on the rise. In 2008, the proportion of people who had purchased or boycotted a product for ethical reasons rose to 27%, compared to 20% in 2003.

"Levels of education and income had an effect on the probability of having chosen or boycotted a product for ethical reasons. For example, in 2008, 41% of people with a university degree had purchased or boycotted a product for ethical reasons, compared with 22% of those whose highest level of education was a high school diploma. Also, people with the highest income were much more likely to have consumed or boycotted a product for ethical reasons than those with a lower income.

"The other factors associated with greater participation in ethical consumption were being born in Canada; living common-law or being single; living in a metropolitan area; having little confidence in major corporations; not having any religious affiliation; having a greater sense of personal control; and actively participating in several organized groups.

The Long Take

It took only took five seconds into this new decade before a new world record was set: On January 1, at 12:00:04 a.m., 6,939 tweets were sent within the space of one second in Japan.

No doubt a huge number of those messages were seasonal greetings to ring in the new year, but I'm old enough to remember a time when at the stroke of midnight on NYE, people would open their front doors and shout their good wishes to their neighbours from their porches. Who knew, in 1980, that in thirty years we would be able to reach people around the world with the same messages without leaving our sofas.

It is this great benefit of accessibility that gets obscured by those who criticize social media tools, like Twitter, for disseminating misinformation and degenerating the level of public discourse. (Of course, these phenomena are not the fault of the technology.)

In a short article published recently in Wired, Clive Thompson proposes that in fact what we're seeing is not a degeneration of discourse, but a new way of organizing it. He argues that tools such as Twitter and Facebook are being used to share headlines, make brief statements of fact or spread short bits of gossip and the like, but that blogs are being used to publish in-depth analyses and reports. He calls this publishing style the long take (a nod to the long tail concept popularized by Chris Anderson.) The long take blog post has several benefits over traditional print media: it can reach a wider audience, its shelf-life is way longer than what magazines and newspapers could ever offer, and you don't have to be employed by a media outlet to make your voice heard. Anyone can publish. Oh, and it's generally free.

I'm not sure I totally agree that the 'middle take' is going the way of the dodo, but my experience of social media is in complete accord with his schema: headlines that are tweeted and texted point me in the direction of where I'd like to pursue further in-depth reading.

The point is that social media technologies are for sharing information. It's unlikely, for example, that a wikipedia entry would ever be used to substantiate a claim in a fact-based argumentative paper, but that's not what wikipedia is for. Its content is user-generated, so it's merely a starting point. It can give you an idea of what's already being talked about on a given topic. Verifying the information is up to the reader. Hasn't that always been the case?