Category: Nets ‘n’ webs
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The terrible truth about economics
“Compared to physics, it seems fair to say that the quantitative success of the economic sciences is disappointing,” begins Jean-Philippe Bouchaud, an econophysicist at Capital Fund Management in Paris. That’s something of an understatement given the current global financial crisis. Economic sciences have a poor record of success, partly because they are hard (Newton once…
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Why ant colonies don’t have traffic jams
Traffic jams are the bane of modern life. But could it be possible that one of this planet’s more ancient life forms could show us how to better regulate road traffic? That’s the claim of congestion expert Dirk Helbing at the Dresden University of Technology in Germany and pals using a remarkable insight gained from…
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How religions spread like viruses
“Religions are sets of ideas, statements and prescriptions of whose validity and applicability individual humans can become convinced,” say Michael Doebeli and Iaroslav Ispolatov at the University of Vancouver. In other words, religions are memes, units of cultural inheritance just like songs, languages or political beliefs. Richard Dawkins proposed the idea that memes spread much…
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New fractal pattern found in milk and coffee
Next time you stare into your 9am double tall latte, look with new respect. Japanese scientists have discovered a new type of fractal in the patterns coffee makes as mixes with milk. Placing a heavier fluid onto a lighter fluid always results in an disturbance at their boundary known as a Rayleigh–Taylor instability. Michiko Shimokawa…
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How big is a city?
That’s not as silly a question as it sounds. Defining the size of a city is tricky task that has major economic implications: how much should you invest in a city if you don’t know how many people live and work there? The standard definition is the Metropolitan Statistical Area, which attempts to capture the…
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Schroedinger-like PageRank wave equation could revolutionise web rankings
The PageRank algorithm that first set Google on a path to glory measures the importance of a page in the world wide web. It’s fair to say that an entire field of study has grown up around the analysis of its behaviour. That field looks set for a shake up following the publication today of…
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The curious kernels of dictionaries
If you don’t know the meanng of a word, you look it up in the dictionary. But what if you don’t know the meaning of any of the words in the definition? Or the meaning of any of the words in the definitions of these defining words? And so on ad infinitum. This is known…
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Cellphone records reveal the basic pattern of human mobility
A few months back, we saw what happens when researchers get their paws on anonymixed mobile phone records. Albert-Laszlo Baribasi at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana and some buddies used them to discover entirely new patterns of human behaviour. Now Baribasi has dug deeper into the data and discovered a single basic pattern…
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Why do online opinions evolve differently to offline ones?
The way in which opinions form, spread through societies and evolve over time is a hot topic among researchers because of their increasing ability to measure and simulate what’s going on. The field offers some juicy puzzles that look ripe for picking by somebody with the right kind of insight. For example, why do…
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The science of scriptwriting
You don’t have to delve far into the realms of scriptwriting before you’ll be pointed towards a book called Story by Robert McKee, which explains why scriptwriting is more akin to engineering than art. McKee examines story-telling like a biologist dissecting a rat. But after taking it apart, he explains how to build a story…