February 18, 2009 by sean.

Could transparency of government data itself [see Recovery.gov] help boost the private Numerati [via Wired]?

[A]ccessible government information—particularly databases released in machine-readable formats, like RSS, XML, and KML—spawn new business and grease the wheels of the economy. “The data is the infrastructure,” in the words of Sean Gorman, the CEO of FortiusOne, a company that builds layered maps around open-source geographic information. For every spreadsheet squirreled away on a federal agency server, there are entrepreneurs like Gorman ready to turn a profit by reorganizing, parsing, and displaying it…

[O]bvious economic benefits, however, will come from innovations that pop up around freely available data itself. Robinson and three Princeton colleagues argue in a recent Yale Journal of Law and Technology article that the federal government should focus on making as much data available as RSS feeds and XML data dumps, in lieu of spending resources to display the data themselves. “Private actors,” they write, “are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data.”

Posted in mathematics, innovation, pervasive computing | No Comments »

February 18, 2009 by sean.

New research ties social isolation and brain fucntion [via Science Daily]:

Researchers found that the ventral striatum—a region of the brain associated with rewards—is much more activated in non-lonely people than in the lonely when they view pictures of people in pleasant settings. In contrast, the temporoparietal junction—a region associated with taking the perspective of another person—is much less activated among lonely than in the non-lonely when viewing pictures of people in unpleasant settings.

“Given their feelings of social isolation, lonely individuals may be left to find relative comfort in nonsocial rewards,” said John Cacioppo, the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Professor in Psychology at the University. He spoke at the briefing along with Jean Decety, the Irving B. Harris Professor in Psychology and Psychiatry at the University.

The ventral striatum, which is critical to learning, is a key portion of the brain and is activated through primary rewards such as food and secondary rewards such as money. Social rewards and feelings of love also may activate the region.

Posted in neuroscience | No Comments »