Saturday, April 21, 2012

morning reading on my subjects of interest

OK --
these I thought interesting from the title to read today (all from Science Daily ):

Can Social Media Detect the Changes in Public Mood?
"It is important to remark that the real-time detection of social trends via the analysis of social media content, presents various possible limitations. Social media analysis can only be accomplished with text mining technologies, which are less accurate than human assessment, but can be applied to vast amounts of data. Also the population that is assessed is necessarily that of Twitter users, which is a biased subsample of the general population. Particular care needs to be paid when extracting information but also when reporting it."
Sticking to Our Goals: What's the Best Approach for Success?
"Starting toward a goal can often feel easier than following through and reaching this goal's end state, as individuals with good intentions often fail to invest the time, effort, or monetary resources required to bring their goals to completion. We predict that individuals will express greater motivation to pursue actions when they focus on whichever is smaller in size -- the area of their completed actions or of their remaining actions -- because motivation increases with the perceived impact of each new step, and each new step will appear more impactful if compared to a smaller set of other steps toward the goal."
Your Left Side Is Your Best Side: Our Left Cheek Shows More Emotion, Which Observers Find More Aesthetically Pleasing
Your best side may be your left cheek. Images of the left side of the face are perceived and rated as more pleasant than pictures of the right side of the face, possibly due to the fact that we present a greater intensity of emotion on the left side of our face. (Credit: © Gerry Pelser / Fotolia)
My observation on this: I seems to prefer drawing faces with the right side of the face showing toward the looker. And on photos from me, mainly on the ones with my right faceside showing more than the left I seem to smile much nicer.

It's the Network: Ever Wonder Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You or Diamond Is Harder Than Graphite?
The authors argue that, as network research matures, there will be increasing opportunities to exploit network concepts to also engineer new systems with desirable properties that may not be readily available in existing ones. Examples include emerging areas such as synthetic biology and microfluidics, which could be radically changed by rational circuit design, but also established areas such as traffic and materials research.
Motter and Albert consider the problem of network control, particularly in the context of biological networks as a promising new avenue for disease treatment. Cascading processes, in particular, in which successive elements in a complex network fail, are shown to be not as unstoppable as previously thought.
They also discuss at length how collective behavior may depend on properties of the underlying network, even when composed of the exact same nodes -- as in the case of radically different materials made of the same chemical element.
Cassini Finds Titan Lake Is Like a Namibia Mudflat
 While the liquid on Titan is methane, ethane and propane rather than water, the cycle appears to work in a very similar fashion to the water cycle on Earth. Beyond Earth, Titan is the only other world known to bear stable liquids on its surface. There, the full hydrocarbon cycle is based on hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen, and takes place between the atmosphere, the surface and the subsurface. Titan's lakes are an integral part of this process.
NASA Image Gallery Highlights Earth's Changing Face
In celebration of this year's Earth Day on April 22, NASA's Webby Award-winning Global Climate Change website, http://climate.nasa.gov , has unveiled a new version of its popular image gallery, "State of Flux." The gallery, which can be found at http://climate.nasa.gov/sof , presents stunning images, mostly from space, of our ever-changing planet, chronicling changes taking place over time periods ranging from days to centuries.
New Kind of Quantum Junction
A new type of quantum bit called a "phase-slip qubit," devised by researchers at the RIKEN Advanced Science Institute and their collaborators, has enabled the world's first-ever experimental demonstration of coherent quantum phase slip (CQPS). The groundbreaking result sheds light on an elusive phenomenon whose existence -- a natural outcome of the hundred-year-old theory of superconductivity -- has long been speculated, but never actually observed.

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