The Global Brain Institute The GBI uses scientific methods to better understand the global evolution towards ever-stronger connectivity between people, software and machines. By developing concrete models of this development, we can anticipate both its promises and its perils. That would help us to steer a course towards the best possible outcome for humanity. Objectives (for more details, check our strategic objectives and activities) Assumptions We see people, machines and software systems as agents that communicate via a complex network of communication links. Challenges that cannot be fully resolved by a single agent are propagated to other agents, along the links in the network. The propagation of challenges across the global network is a complex process of self-organization.
The Freenet Project - /whatis "I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she's too young to have logged on yet. Here's what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say 'Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?'" --Mike Godwin, Electronic Frontier Foundation Freenet is free software which lets you anonymously share files, browse and publish "freesites" (web sites accessible only through Freenet) and chat on forums, without fear of censorship. Communications by Freenet nodes are encrypted and are routed through other nodes to make it extremely difficult to determine who is requesting the information and what its content is. Users contribute to the network by giving bandwidth and a portion of their hard drive (called the "data store") for storing files. Sounds good?
Human Connectome Project | Gallery A coronal slice of a diffusion tensor imaging data, each pixel is represented with an ellipsoid glyph depicting water molecule diffusion. Alternate: HARDI (high-angular resolution diffusion imaging), Coronal view. The tensor can be visualized as an ellipsoid in 3D space, showing fluid mappings and brain connectivity. Image by David Shattuck, PhD. and Paul M. Thompson, PhD.HARDI (high-angular resolution diffusion imaging), Coronal view. The tensor can be visualized as an ellipsoid in 3D space, showing fluid mappings and brain connectivity. A sagittal slice of a diffusion tensor imaging data, each pixel is represented with an ellipsoid glyph depicting water molecule diffusion. An axial slice of a diffusion tensor imaging data, each pixel is represented with an ellipsoid glyph depicting water molecule diffusion. An axial slice of a diffusion tensor imaging dataset set inside a brain surface. A detailed view of axial slice of a diffusion tensor imaging dataset.
How to Burst the "Filter Bubble" that Protects Us from Opposing Views The term “filter bubble” entered the public domain back in 2011when the internet activist Eli Pariser coined it to refer to the way recommendation engines shield people from certain aspects of the real world. Pariser used the example of two people who googled the term “BP”. One received links to investment news about BP while the other received links to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, presumably as a result of some recommendation algorithm. This is an insidious problem. This is the filter bubble—being surrounded only by people you like and content that you agree with. And the danger is that it can polarise populations creating potentially harmful divisions in society. Today, Eduardo Graells-Garrido at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona as well as Mounia Lalmas and Daniel Quercia, both at Yahoo Labs, say they’ve hit on a way to burst the filter bubble. They found over 40,000 Twitter users who had expressed an opinion using the hashtags such as #pro-life and #pro-choice.
Semantic Web The promise of web standards W3C standards define an open web platform for application development. The web has the unprecedented potential to enable developers to build rich interactive experiences, that can be available on any device. The platform continues to expand, but web users have long ago rallied around HTML as the cornerstone of the web. Many more technologies that W3C and its partners are creating extend the web and give it full strength, including CSS, SVG, WOFF, WebRTC, XML, and a growing variety of APIs. Read more about W3C Standards Why W3C web standards? W3C publishes recommendations, that are considered web standards. W3C develops technical specifications according to the W3C Process, which is designed to maximize consensus, ensure quality, earn endorsement and adoption by W3C Members and the broader community. W3C web standards are optimized for interoperability, security, privacy, web accessibility, and internationalization. Value of creating standards at W3C
Massive Brain Map Should Include Star Cells, Study Says A huge, federally funded project to map the human brain is incomplete because it ignores some of the brain's star players, a new editorial argues. The $100 million Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, which is slated to begin in 2014, should map not only neurons, the brain cells that send electrical signals, but also the supportive cells in the brain called glia, according to the editorial published today (Sept. 4) in the journal Nature. "The fact is that the greater mysteries in the brain right now are what the non-neuronal cells are doing," said author Doug Fields, a neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Health. Mysterious purpose Though neurons get the most attention, there are millions of other brain cells that have critical functions. Research has suggested that glia play a role in a host of diseases. But relatively little is known about how glial cells are connected to each other, or what roles they play in the healthy brain.
US Military Scientists Solve the Fundamental Problem of Viral Marketing Viral messages begin life by infecting a few individuals and then start to spread across a network. The most infectious end up contaminating more or less everybody. Just how and why this happens is the subject of much study and debate. Network scientists know that key factors are the rate at which people become infected, the “connectedness” of the network and how the seed group of individuals, who first become infected, are linked to the rest. It is this seed group that fascinates everybody from marketers wanting to sell Viagra to epidemiologists wanting to study the spread of HIV. So a way of finding seed groups in a given social network would surely be a useful trick, not to mention a valuable one. These guys have found a way to identify a seed group that, when infected, can spread a message across an entire network. Their method is relatively straightforward. This process finishes when there is nobody left in the network who has more friends than the threshold. Expect to hear more!
EXCLUSIVE: Woman can use Facebook to serve divorce papers - NY Daily News A Brooklyn woman scored a judge’s approval to legally change her relationship status to “single” via Facebook. In a landmark ruling, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Matthew Cooper is allowing a nurse named Ellanora Baidoo to serve her elusive husband with divorce papers via a Facebook message. Baidoo, 26, “is granted permission serve defendant with the divorce summons using a private message through Facebook,” with her lawyer messaging Victor Sena Blood-Dzraku through her account, Cooper wrote. “This transmittal shall be repeated by plaintiff’s attorney to defendant once a week for three consecutive weeks or until acknowledged” by her hard-to-find hubby. “I think it’s new law, and it’s necessary,” said Baidoo’s lawyer, Andrew Spinnell. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images A Manhattan Supreme Court has ruled that a Brooklyn woman can use Facebook to serve her hard-to-find husband with divorce papers. “She wanted their families there,” the lawyer said.
3D model of a nerve terminal in atomic detail | Mo Costandi | Science The electrochemical jelly inside your head contains something like one quadrillion synapses, the junctions at which nerve cells talk to one other by converting electrical signals into chemical ones and then back again. They have two components (sometimes three): the nerve terminal of one cell, which stores and releases neurotransmitter molecules, and the 'post-synaptic' membrane of another cell, which contains binding sites for the neurotransmitters. Synapses are miniscule – nerve terminals are about one thousandth of a millimetre in diameter, and the space between them and the membrane they contact a mere 20-40 millionths of a millimetre wide – and are densely packed in the grey matter of the brain tissue, making them notoriously difficult to study. Inside the nerve terminal, neurotransmitter molecules are stored in tiny spheres called synaptic vesicles, which are "docked" in an "active zone" just beneath the cell membrane. Rizzoli readily acknowledges this. Reference: Wilhelm, B.