Partially Attended

We are just unpacking some more furniture and we have discovered that the spacers inside the boxes were made up of cut up pieces of IKEA furniture, probably items that had been returned. It reminded my of the cells ability to recycle old components. Read and post comments | Send to a friend ... (more)

So after reading about some economists who decided to use economic theory to loose weight I have decided to follow suit. They both decided to loose a certain amount of weight by a certain time and places $5000 in a bond. Whoever didn't make the weight lost their portion of the money to the other person. The idea was to affect behavior through an incentive that was significant. Well, I'm not a well paid economist, but I have decided to ... (more)

Well, a prediction about a new market that will spring up (perhaps it already has) around the iPhone. So it costs $99 dollars to get an app that you have built onto the phone through the App Store. If I design a vanity app I'm not going to want to pay that much, but I might pay 5, 10 or even 15 dollars to see the child of my creativity bouncing around on the little ... (more)

I just discovered this after poking around for an inordinate amount of time. The trick is to use Time::HiRes instead. Now someone should write a bridge function that overloads the Time::HR functions with Time::HiRes functions which would make a code change as easy as loading the overload module. Read and post comments | Send to a friend ... (more)

I've been trying the free account this week. I've backed up 1.6 GB of data. It took, with given interruptions of a normal work day, about 4 days to backup this amount of Data. I am beginning to think that the world of offline remote backups is still a little bit away! Read and post comments | Send to a friend ... (more)

I'm in Norwich all this week attending Netsci08 http://www.ifr.ac.uk/netsci08/, the internatinal workshop and conference on network science. It's a week long event, and broadly speaking it looks like there are three types themes that are being discussed here: biological networks, pure networks science and community detection in networks, principlaly emergent networks of the kind we see in the internet. I'm twittering about the meeting using the tag #netsci08, but it seems ... (more)

Nicholas Christakis, Harvard, "eat drink and be merry, the spread of health phenomena in social networks". This talk is looking at the spread of desies throgh social interactions, rather than other types of interactins. The main study was looking at obesity using the Framingham Heart Study Social Network. This seems like a very famouse social network health related study, so I'm not going to go into detail about that, but the bottom line is that they were able to ... (more)

I'm really torn by the number of great talks on today. There are three parallel sessions, and for each time slot I want to be in at least two places at once. I'm going to try to pick out talks that have some relation to online social networks, community detection and scientific networks, but some of the talks on the theory of clustering are conflicting directly with some use cases of looking at some online ... (more)

Mark Newman, Networks in Space, This is about networks in geographic space. Mark is looking at properties of networks that are tied to geography. Transport networks are a good example, and we are looking at the difference between road and air networks. The road and air networks are very different, even though you use both of them for getting from A to B. There is different bahviour, could I say 'driving' the use of these ... (more)

The second talk in the evening CREEN parallel session is from J. Holyst about phase transitions in coupled complex networks where the network properties are different in the two groups. In one group there are a smaller number of members, but they are tightly coupled. The second group is larger, but less tightly coupled. The model uses an Ising model. The less coupled group has higher fluctuation in ... (more)