anthropometaphors

Dear Vacation Fairy,

For my next holiday from work I would love to volunteer with an animal rehabilitation program.  I have been working very hard at my office job and miss feeling the breeze in my hair and seeing the sun rise and set.  My love for animals continues to grow and I feel a yearning to help large wildlife.

Gratefully yours,

Morethangray

Morethangray!  So good to hear from you.  Have you seen this website?  It may guide you toward your next holiday.

Happy tails,

VF

I’ve made the jump from eating simple veggie-matarian fare into the land of the big vee; I am only eating vegan food.  I still eat honey, which I’ve heard can be a controversial issue.

For some time now I’ve chosen non-leather products.  What was once known as vinyl is now green, and considered a vegan-friendly alternative to leather.  While I’ll purchase canvas and the occasional vinyl item, I’m not sold on the environmental aspect of using vinyl as an alternative to leather.  There are so many variables to consider when deeming something “green”, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn a graduate student was writing their PhD dissertation on the results of their analysis of the leather vs vinyl debate.

Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

Created as a critique of data mining, Personas is one part of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit on display at the MIT Museum through the month of September.  And what a critique it is — the Personas vector created based on my name has absolutely nothing to do with me.  I know because I watched as the Internet was scoured for characterizing statements to use in its analysis; all the information used came from other people who share my name.

Josh Witten Persona’d his name multiple times to get a sense of the reproducibility of the analysis.  While his Personas vector was created based on his own information, his analysis (of the analysis of him) indicates the Personas vector is generated randomly.  Josh ran three independent trials, resulting in three truly independent Personas vectors.

While I may not learn much about myself using Personas, the schematic is nice.  The clean appearance and abbreviated legend are what I would like to see in a Personas vector of my very own.  Until then, here is the first Personas vector I mapped to Morgan Gray:

Morgan Gray, as the Internet sees her

Francoa ramosa (bridal wreath)

Category: Perennial

Family: Saxifragaceae (Saxifrages)

Origin: Chile (South America)

Evergreen: Yes

Flower Color: White or pink

Bloom time: Summer

Height: 2-3 feet

Width: 1-2 feet

Exposure: Cool Sun/Light Shade

Irrigation: Medium Water Needs

Winter Hardiness: 20-25° F

Notes: This is an evergreen, herbaceous, clumping (1-2 feet across), spreading perennial which produces large basal leaves and multi-branched flowering stalks (3-5 feet tall) of white or pink flowers in summer. The one foot long leaves are fiddle-shaped with deep lobes and slightly sticky to the touch. Plant in part day sun (takes full coastal) to light shade in warm location in well-draining soil and give average watering.

Blushing bloom of unknown species

I’ll ping Julie Gordon and see if she can name the second plant.  There are a few of them in the yard and I’d love to know more about the massive blooms it creates.

The hubs pulled out the new power drill yesterday, and installed a new mailbox and numbers for the house.  All went well;  the decaying wooden box that was serving as a mail box is now off duty, and our house is numbered for the first time since the front gate went down in July.  Luckily, our postal carrier is not easily fooled.  We can take down our home numbers, move our mailbox across the yard, and then buy a different mailbox and mount it on the side of the house…and we’ll still get our mail.

Just a quick clip about AI.

On a recent drive home from work I noticed a circus off I-880.  The advertisements featured tigers, which immediately caught my attention.  I fantasized about how to meet the tigers, partly to have a close encounter and partly to assess their conditions in circus captivity.  Needless to say, nothing came of these fantasies.

wtf

I’m not the only one interested in the health and well-being of captive animals.  A recent article in Animal Welfare describes the results of a study designed to assess the welfare of animals in circuses.  Not surprisingly, circus life is unhealthy for wild animals.  A combination of lack of space, social contact and exercise is beastly; when combined with stage performance and travel conditions, the confinement of animals to a circus is simply brutal.

Stars of the show they may be, but elephants, lions and tigers are the wild animals least suited to life in a circus, concludes the first global study of animal welfare in circuses.

“It’s no one single factor,” says Stephen Harris of the University of Bristol, UK, and lead researcher of the study. “Whether it’s lack of space and exercise, or lack of social contact, all factors combined show it’s a poor quality of life compared with the wild,” he says.

The survey concludes that on average, wild animals spend just 1 to 9 per cent of their time training, and the rest confined to cages, wagons or enclosures typically covering a quarter the area recommended for zoos.

Worst affected are elephants, lions, tigers and bears. Often they’re confined to cages where they pace up and down for hours on end.

“Even if they are in a larger, circus pen, there’s no enrichment such as logs to play with, in case they use them to break the fence and escape,” says Harris.

(from New Scientist)

Where in the world is there a home for such fierce predators?

I have a headache.  My body is incredibly tired.  The thermometer reads 99.6°F.  I left work an hour early to crawl into bed and sleep.  While I probably don’t have swine flu, the possibility has crossed my mind.

Overreacting by almapottery

There’s a lot of hype about the H1N1 virus (aka “swine flu”).  A friend-of-a-friend at Stanford put together a survey to assess how people think and feel about swine flu.  It’s a short, well-designed survey.  Take a look and contribute to science!

Test Your Swine IQ

Keeping within the H1N1 vein, Stephan Zielinski has taken an amino acid sequence from the swine flu virus and translated it into ambient music (via BoingBoing).  I’m listening to the piece as I write this, and I find it to be calming, eerie and somehow holy.  Here’s a link to the hear the mp3 on Zielinski’s site, or you can download the mp3 here.

And now, back to bed for me.  Stay well, wash your hands and cover those sneezies.

Virus Embroidery by The Floss Box

If the internet gained consciousness, I imagine it would be lonely.

by Wexford Girl (aka Annie Galvin)

Consider Jane, from Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s series.  A sentient being, Jane arose from a pattern-recognition and prediction program that ran long enough to be able to recognize and reprogram itself.  Being the only one of her kind, Jane was understandably lonely.

The Mind Game, whose purpose was to seek out patterns across wide fields of data, is modified to predict markets and invest Ender’s trust fund appropriately, which it proves alarmingly good at; it is also used to review demographic data…It is assumed to have grown in complexity during the 3000-year gap between Shadow of the Giant and Speaker for the Dead, especially as Graff describes the Mind Game as being able to reprogram itself, and finally becomes the sentient Jane.

Some scientists claim the internet, our internet, is already semi-conscious.  Full consciousness would entail the internet evolving into a self-aware network that constantly strives to become better at what it does, reorganizing itself and filling gaps in its own knowledge and abilities.  That’s a high bar for consciousness; I wonder what percent of humans would meet that set of criteria.

I lurve visualizing information.

In a past life, I was a Research Associate in Product Development.  The highlight of the job was using statisical analysis to design and analyze experiments.  The end product of my work happened to be a molecular diagnostic for genetic variation.  I found satisfaction in developing a robust, reliable tool for genetic analysis, but ultimately it was the analytical process I enjoyed.

I’ve stayed in the biostatistics loop — the teams I now manage have a statistical analysis component.  I no longer do the actual stats work, but I get to have fun conversations at the water cooler.

So when I heard of Wolfram | Alpha, an analytical search engine, I was excited.  I mean really, really excited.  While screen shots from the engine aren’t being posted, a webcast is available in which Wolfram talks about the engine.

Wolfram is the creator of what I consider the holy grail of stats packages: Mathematica.  The marketing language for the newest version, Mathematica 6, claims a user can “Visualize Anything”.  While that may not be entirely true, the program can be used to visualize a fair amount.

High-Impact Adaptive Visualization

A special feature over at New Scientist called The Five Ages of the Brain is an interesting (and readable) survey of human brain capability and functional change during the following formative stages: gestation, childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age.

Throughout life our brains undergo more changes than any other part of the body. These can be broadly divided into five stages, each profoundly affecting our abilities and behaviour.

But we are not just passengers in this process, so how can we get the best out of our brains at every stage and pass the best possible organ on to the next?