Search engines and market forces

Friedman claimed that if there's demand for some sort of goods or goods with special attributes (like being produced in an environtment-friedly process, by high paid workers, ...) the market will create adequate products - as long as demand means the willingness of the consumers to pay for that special property they request.

Some rather unknown examples or at least rarely used examples for this are "green" or CO2-neutral servers and online services. For search engines, there are several alternatives:

• Forestle promises to enable its partner, the US based organisation "The Nature Conservancy" to reforest 0.1 m^2 of rain forest for every search.
  
• Ecosia supports the WWF in protecting rain forest in Brasil, on average about 2 m^2 per search
  
  The backend of forestle and ecosia is provided by Bing and Yahoo. The operator for both is a for-profit organisation located in Berlin, Germany, which is bound by contract to invest at least 80% of its earnings in these rain forest projects.
  
  
• znout doesn't support anyone, but buys enough CO2-certificates to green-ify the power used by the servers in the search process. Its also the only search engine that uses google (the custom search provided by google)
  
• GoodSearch offers you to choose a US-based charity to give the money to - on average 0.01 USD per search. It features, among many others, amnesty international and the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. Its again a front-end to Yahoo search technology.
  

All search engine providers generate their money via advertisment on the search pages.

Epigenetics

I recently noticed that my knowledge on epigenetics is close to non-exsistent, so I decided to change that.

For entertainment, there is a documentation by BBC called "The ghost in your genes" which seems to cover the basic findings. I embed the first of 4 parts on youtube:


Moreover, there is an inaugural lecture by Professor Paro at the ETH Zürich.

There is also a bunch of papers in different levels of detail and specialization, I didn't read all of them yet:

• Jablonka, E. und Lamb, MJ. (2002): The Changing Concept of Epigenetics. In: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 891
  
• Bradbury, J. (2003): Human Epigenome Project—Up and Running. In: PLoS Biol.

I'll update this post as I discover and read more good resources on this topic.

Recent readings

A few remarks concerning some books I read since my last post:

• Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries presents a board study of democratic governments and classifies them into 'majoritarian' (e.g. UK) and 'consensus' (e.g. Switzerland) systems. He finds 10 items in 2 dimensions (or: the 10 items can be factored in 2 factors which good correlations) which are useful for classification. 36 countries are analysed with respect to this 10 items and the classical prejudices (majoritarian governments can act quicker and thus are better and more decisive, etc) are examined. His conclusion is that most of these turn out to be false; for some, rather the opposite seems to be true.
  
• Qed: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (Princeton Science Library) is a very good popular science book - in my opinion even better for those who have studied the matter beforehand. It does not contain any formulae - something I would complain about a lot if I didn't already know many of them. Otherwise, if you haven't had contact with quantum mechanics at all, it might be too less to be useful.
• The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory is one of the very few books on string theory I got my hands on yet. For a math/science orientated person, it gives a very rough but imprecise picture on the possible solutions string theory /might/ offer/s. On the other hand, it skips quite some of the problems string theory actually has (like the validity of the use of pertubation theory) and mostly due to the nature of string theory itself, doesn't offer any formulae. The recapitulation of relativity and quantum mechanics in the beginning of the book is ok, but not the best I read.
• The other one seems to be available in German only: a collection of papers on the topics of globalization and nongovernment organizations: Die Privatisierung der Weltpolitik. It sheds light on the increasing influence of non-governmental organizations in world politics - not necessarily lobbyists from economy and industry, but also public interest organizations like environmental or animal rights activists. Very enjoyable is the neutral attitude, more analyzing than taking any side.

I ordered a bunch of new books on epigenetics and neurosciences.

Some Videos on Physics

Just some simple popular science talks for some spare time in between:

Sean Carroll on the origin of the universe and the arrow of time

Part 1



Part 2



Brian Greene on String Theory

Writing systems and non-linearity

Some time ago I posted some links, one of them pointing to a non-linear, graph like writing system called Ouwi; meanwhile I spent some time reading up on the topic of writing systems and have some more pointers:

Pinuyo is a pictorial language which indicates grammatical function of the ideograms by placement and surrounding symbols.

I also found a long, but sometimes deviating thread on 2-dimensional writing systems on the conlang mailing list archive. Unfortunatelly many of the links are now dead, the thread is from 2005.

Omniglot is a nice website about alphabets, writing systems and languages. It contains some constructed systems, like block script, a sylabic alphabet for the english language which combines letters to blocks (like the korean script for example). Most of them are linear ones.

I'm still wondering if there are some languages/alphabets optimized for reading speed. Most are either evolved, natural languages, which certainly are a compromise between reading and writing and the constructed ones optimized for speed like the morse code or shorthand.

In an edit, let me just add a few more links, somewhat related:

Láadan, a feminist language designed for countering male-centering of natural languages.
The gripping language, not spoken but transmitted by touching of the hands.

Random Numbers and Certified Randomness

A rather recent edition of the ACM TechNews contained a short report/link on a German team which developed a hardware random number generator [1], that

uses an extra layer of randomness by making a computer memory element, a flip-flop, twitch randomly between its two states 1 or 0. Immediately prior to the switch, the flip-flop is in a "metastable state" where its behaviour cannot be predicted. At the end of the metastable state, the contents of the memory are purely random.

Whereas this device gives me more security, it does not solve the problem of someone sending me supposedly "random numbers" which he might have prepared in advance to even pass statistical tests. A neat solution is provided by quantum mechanics which allows to check randomness of numbers via the violation of the Bell inequality [2] using entangled states.


[1] "A meta-level true random number generator" in Int. J. Critical Computer-Based Systems, 2010, 1, 267-279

[2] Random Numbers Certified by Bell's Theorem

Enthusiasm for Science

I just wanted to point out to a project called 'the symphony of science', available at

http://symphonyofscience.com/videos.html

It consists of a series of music videos, aiming to

"bring scientific knowledge and philosophy to the public, in a novel way, through the medium of music. Science and music are two passions of mine that I aim to combine in a way that is intended to bring a meaningful message to listeners, while simultaneously providing an enjoyable musical experience."

I embed only one of those here:




I really like what the project is aiming for. In my opinion, there is a severe lack of easy accessible material for the general public regarding all fields of science. Publishing in journals and proceedings is good, but doesn't help the non-scientific population at all. Unfortunatelly, writing popular science books isnt' valued in the scientific community at all.