The talkers, together with SHERP students, will be gathered in pandemically fairly safe conditions at Caveat NYC, a spacious cabaret-style speakeasy theater thought to be 75% resistant to acronyms.
posted by Marc Abrahams in Arts and Science, Ig Nobel | Comments Off on Webcast: Discussion About Writing About Weird Science
It can be difficult to recognize someone from a photo of their face if it’s turned upside-down, or presented as a negative. But what if the photos are distorted – fairground-mirror style? Or deliberately blurred?
To find out, Dr Graham Hole and colleagues at the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, University of Sussex, UK, performed a set of experiments.
Finding (amongst other things) that :
Global linear transformations seem to affect recognition remarkably little, considering the extent to which they distort the spatial relationships within a face, which are presumed to be critical for recognition. Recognition was impaired, however, when vertical stretching was applied nonglobally (ie to only half of the face).
In Podcast Episode #1083, Marc Abrahams shows an unfamiliar research study to biomedical researcher Chris Cotsapas. Dramatic readings and reactions ensue.
Remember, our Patreon donors, on most levels, get access to each podcast episode before it is made public.
In recent years, many Chinese variety shows have been draft talents. Zhejiang Satellite TV has taken a different approach. In mid-August, it launched a real-life show “Hi Release”. Wang Jiaer, Ren Jialun and Chen Feiyu served as “Hi Release Explorers”. Li Ronghao ( Participated in the fifth period of recording), Wei Daxun (joined in the fifth period) is the “Hi Broadcast Specialist”. Artist guests include Li Chen, Zheng Kai and Jike Junyi. “Hi” is inspired by the “Ig Nobel Prize“, which is dedicated to exploring scientific research that “makes people laugh at first glance, but is thought-provoking after thinking about it”. The program uses life as the soil and science as the entry point, revealing unexpected scientific conclusions through some seemingly nonsensical experiments.
In this six-minute-long impassioned video, Carl Malamud draws on his considerable poetical and performance skills to introduce The General Index:
What is The General Index, and how can it benefit you? The answer, some of it in the form of questions, is in the video.
Here, to whet your appetite for viewing the video, are some passionate phrases from it, and from the documentation about it:
Topics—Access to Knowledge, Text and Data Mining, Temples of Knowledge, General Index
Language—Science is our universal language.
Public Resource, a registered nonprofit organization based in California, has created a General Index to scientific journals. The General Index consists of a listing of n-grams, from unigrams to five-grams, extracted from 107 million journal articles.
The General Index is non-consumptive, in that the underlying articles are not released, and it is transformative in that the release consists of the extraction of facts that are derived from that underlying corpus. The General Index is available for free download with no restrictions on use. This is an initial release, and the hope is to improve the quality of text extraction, broaden the scope of the underlying corpus, provide more sophisticated metrics associated with terms, and other enhancements.
Access to the full corpus of scholarly journals is an essential facility to the practice of science in our modern world. The General Index is an invaluable utility for researchers who wish to search for articles about plants, chemicals, genes, proteins, materials, geographical locations, and other entities of interest. The General Index allows scholars and students all over the world to perform specialized and customized searches within the scope of their disciplines and research over the full corpus.
Access to knowledge is a human right and the increase and diffusion of knowledge depends on our ability to stand on the shoulders of giants.
