randformblog on math, physics, art, and design |
alcohol may alter brain states
For those who are interested there is a discussion about determinism and freedom, free will, privacy etc. at the blog backreaction following a post with the title: 10 Misconceptions about free will, which I found problematic. If you want to know more you may read my comment also after the klick.
randform wishes all it’s readers happy holidays and a good new year 2014!
rest of a silvester rocket in a tree in the outskirts of Berlin
We preferred to stay in the outskirts of Berlin on New Years Eve. Even in the outskirts there is still enough fireworks. An aquaintance of us lost a couple of years one eye by just walking on new years eve on a street. If you still want to experience new years eve in Berlin then since there are no noise barriers and roofs against rockets and bangers on the street then our advise is to at least use some hearing protectors if that doesn’t give you too much head aches and safety glasses when moving around on the streets of Berlin on that time of the year.
mysterious stone* in our kitchen
Glowlum tapping along a dull wire, artwork by Hucky Finn, oil on canvas, inspired by a photography by Baertels, www.plainpicture.com.
There have been quite some discussions here in Germany about the revelations about the surveillance of ordinary citizens and the protection of ordinary citizens data in general.
While updating my post about taxes in Greece and their semantic accessability, I looked at some current projects in “big data” and statistics and found an interesting application called Rapid Miner LOD Extension (I haven’t tried it though), which allows to do operations on linked open data (LOD) (see e.g. the european gateway to LOD) via the data mining program Rapid Miner.
The Rapid Miner LOD extension was amongst others used by the winners of the Semantic Statistics Challenge. The winner’s slideshare link hosts some examples, like maps which investigate the correlation between unemployment and police stations in France, which display a bit the capabilities of the involved programms and databases.
According to the notice “NBS signs data agreement with hi-tech firms” on Chinadaily there is also a lot going on in China:
The National Bureau of Statistics teamed up with 11 high-tech firms to use big data technology in the collecting, processing and analyzing of important statistics.
and
Under this partnership, the bureau and the 11 companies will co-develop a standard on how to use big data in statistics.
So it will be interesting to see wether some of this high tech data will enter the Linked open data pool and wether we will get to see soon some interesting visualizations of it.
Price competition in a handicraft store
There is currently some debate here in Europe about how to deal with prostitution.
Read the rest of this entry »
There seems to be an interesting article adressing climate change challenges called: “Intra- and intergenerational discounting in the climate game.” Despite the fact that the article claims to contribute to a better dissemination of knowledge about climate change the article is behind a pay wall. And despite the fact that at least some of the authors seem to be payed (?) by a german public institution (that is they are listed under staff) the article seems also not available via their institutions list of publications. Are the authors or the institutions paid by the publisher? Anyways one diagram of the article is visible and it seems to tell quite a bit about the content of the article.
(via phys.org)
The German Chancellery in Berlin
Do you think stable looking democracy in Germany could crumble in a nearer future? No?
Actually this could take place on sunday.
Waste disposal facility in Berlin. The german word “Entsorgung” means literally: getting rid of sorrows
John Baez has a new blog post about Europe using wood burning for energy generation. My comment to the blog post is rather detailled and it is also a comment to the currently ongoing debate in Berlin about how to organize its energy supply. This debate was initiated by the socalled Berliner Energietisch (unfortunately not yet in english) so I thought I should maybe post the comment also here.
