Global Brain

Did tech giants like Google, Facebook or Apple really give the NSA unfettered access to their user's data? On Thursday, almost all of them denied that.

ABSTRACT

In addition to its broad popularity Wikipedia is also widely used for scholarly purposes. Many Wikipedia pages pertain to academic papers, scholars and topics providing a rich ecology for scholarly uses. Although many recognize the scholarly potential of Wikipedia, as a crowdsourced encyclopedia its authority and quality is questioned due to the lack of rig-

orous peer-review and supervision. Scholarly references and mentions on Wikipedia may thus shape the\societal impact" of a certain scholarly communication item, but it is not clear whether they shape actual \academic impact". In this paper we compare the impact of papers, scholars, and topics according to two dierent measures, namely scholarly citations and Wikipedia mentions. Our results show that academic and Wikipedia impact are positively correlated. Papers, authors, and topics that are mentioned on Wikipedia have higher academic impact than those are not mentioned. Our ndings validate the hypothesis that Wikipedia can help assess the impact of scholarly publications and underpin relevance indicators for scholarly retrieval or recommendation systems.

The authors: "This implies that Wikipedia does serve as a collaborative social ltering system which is able to favor \classical" papers, authors, and topics, and recommend them to the general public."

Source:

A Comparative Study of Academic Impact and Wikipedia Ranking
Xin Shuai, Zhuoren Jiang, Xiaozhong Liu and Johan Bollen. JCDL 2013, Indianopolis, Indiana

Fulltext: http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~xshuai/papers/acm_wiki.pdf

Research has progressed through three ages: the individual, the institutional and the national. Nations competed to be at the cutting edge because this contributed to the wider economy through knowledge, new processes and products.

Today, we are entering a fourth age of research, driven by international collaborations between elite research groups. This will challenge the ability of nations to conserve their scientific wealth either as intellectual property or as research talent. Tensions are growing: between the knowledge a country needs to remain competitive and the assets it can exclusively secure, and between the collaborative and domestic parts of the research base. Institutions that do not form international collaborations risk progressive disenfranchisement, and countries that do not nurture their talent will lose out entirely.

Collaborations: The fourth age of research

Jonathan Adams
Nature 497, 557–560 (30 May 2013) http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/497557a

FROM C-3PO of Star Wars to Wall-E, the sentient garbage collector, the prevalence of conscious machines in the stories we tell seems to reflect humanity's deep desire to turn creator and design an artificial intelligence.

It might seem as if we stand little chance of making an artificial consciousness when the natural variety remains such an enigma. But in fact the quest for machine consciousness may be key to solving the mystery of human consciousness, as even scientists outside AI research are starting to acknowledge. "The best way of understanding something is to try and replicate it," says psychologist Kevin O'Regan of Descartes University in Paris, France. "So if you want to understand what consciousness is, well make a machine that's conscious.

Virtually all talk of cognitive enhancement focuses exclusively on the enhancement of individual intelligence. But what about enhancing group intelligence?

 Artificial Intelligence
Chris Eliasmith and his team's Semantic Pointer Architecture Unified Network, SPAUN are determined to answer deep questions in computational neuroscience. SPAUN is...
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It's 6.5 times bigger than the network Google premiered last year, which has learned to recognize YouTube cats.

If there’s a single factor that reliably sparks social unrest, it’s food becoming too scarce or too expensive.

Confusion surrounding the secret NSA surveillance program PRISM continues. Can the NSA really access Internet companies' user data directly, like the initial reports about PRISM suggested?

As the world becomes increasingly complex and interconnected, some of our biggest challenges have begun to seem intractable. What should we do about uncertainty in the financial markets? How can we predict energy supply and demand? How will climate change play out? How do we cope with rapid urbanization? Our traditional approaches to these problems are often qualitative and disjointed and lead to unintended consequences. To bring scientific rigor to the challenges of our time, we need to develop a deeper understanding of complexity itself.

27 creativity & innovation tools is an overview of various commonly used techniques in creativity, innovation, research & development processes. All in one-pag

A startup that lets you have your own cloud servers at home is part of a movement that is turning its back on conventional cloud computing

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IS THIS the death of the cloud as we know it? Space Monkey certainly seems to think so – it is planning to build a better one. When its Kickstarter campaign ended last week, the startup had received more than three times its $100,000 funding target.

Set to launch in the next few months, Space Monkey aims to replace public cloud service providers such as Dropbox and Google Drive with a cloud of thousands of devices that sit in our homes. For a monthly fee, Space Monkey will lease subscribers a device containing a 2-terabyte hard drive and software that connects to all other Space Monkey devices on the internet.

Only half the storage space is for you – the rest is filled with other subscribers' data. Everything stored on a Space Monkey device is copied and split into many encrypted pieces distributed over the network. If you want to watch one of your videos away from home, it will be put together from the pieces copied onto devices closest to your current location. It is much like torrent downloads from file-sharing websites, which assemble fragments of a file from different machines on a peer-to-peer network.

Space Monkey claims that its cloud will give users upload and download speeds that are 12 times as fast as those offered by existing services – and as the network of subscribers grows the rate could be 60 times faster. "Each new user adds bandwidth," says co-founder Alen Peacock.

Recently I interviewed Roman Yampolskiy, Latvian born computer scientist at the University of Louisville, known for his work on behavioral biometrics, security of cyberworlds and artificial intelligence safety.