facility:university of minnesota

PLOS ONE: Sweet Puppies and Cute Babies: Perceptual Adaptation to Babyfacedness Transfers across Species
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0058248

Infant faces are very salient stimuli. The #Kindchenschema describes specific features that characterize a cute infant face. In this study we used a visual adaptation paradigm to investigate the universality of the perceptual properties of the Kindchenschema. In Experiment 1, twenty-four participants adapted to cute and less cute human infant faces and in Experiment 2, twenty-four new participants adapted to cute and less cute faces of puppy dogs. In both experiments the task was to assess the cuteness of subsequently presented human infant faces. The results revealed cuteness after-effects for human infant faces in both adaptation conditions, suggesting a common mechanism coding cuteness in human and non-human faces. This study provides experimental evidence for the universality of the well-described concept of the Kindchenschema.

(via http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/seriouslyscience/?p=34)

Poll : majority of Americans opposed to being killed by drone -
►http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/borowitzreport/2013/03/poll-majority-of-americans-opposed-to-being-killed-by-drone.html

The poll, which has a margin of error of plus or minus five percentage points, showed that ninety-seven per cent of those surveyed “strongly agreed” with the statement, “I personally do not want to be killed by a drone,” with three per cent responding “Don’t know/No opinion”

Poll: Majority of Americans Opposed to Being Killed by Drone : The New Yorker
►http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/borowitzreport/2013/03/poll-majority-of-americans-opposed-to-being-killed-by-drone.html

The poll, which has a margin of error of plus or minus five percentage points, showed that ninety-seven per cent of those surveyed “strongly agreed” with the statement, “I personally do not want to be killed by a drone,” with three per cent responding, “Don’t know/No opinion.”

“There’s no other way to interpret these numbers,” said the University of Minnesota’s Davis Logsdon, who oversaw the survey. “The idea of being killed by a drone is not playing well out there.”

And while the poll numbers may not augur well for the Administration’s expanding use of drones, the response was even more negative in a focus group of likely drone victims.

#drone #canular

Texte éclairant sur les mauvaises tentations nationalistes de l’opinion publique azérie par un ancien activiste récemment exilé aux USA
http://caucasusedition.net/analysis/hero-or-hear
#azerbaidjan #aylasli #safarov

Analysis : Emerging deadly virus demands swift sleuth work | Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/27/us-coronavirus-idUSBRE91Q0MD20130227

Bonne synthèse de Reuters sur le NCoV (Novel CoronaVirus).

“What we know really concerns me, but what we don’t know really scares me,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the U.S.-based Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy and a professor at the University of Minnesota.

7 morts sur les 13 dont on est certain qu’ils étaient infectés.
S’agit-il de tous les cas d’un virus agressif mais peu répandu ?
S’agit-il de la partie émergée de l’iceberg ?

Se transmet-il uniquement par l’animal ou entre humains ?

En conclusion : c’est ouvert…

Despite this, Ian Jones, a professor of virology at Britain’s University of Reading, said he believes “the most likely outcome for the current infections is a dead end” - with the virus petering out and becoming extinct.

Others say they fear that is unlikely.

“There’s nothing in the virology that tells us this thing is going to stop being transmitted,” said Osterholm. “Today the world is one big virological blender. And if it’s sustaining itself (in humans) in the Middle East then it will show up around the rest of the world. It’s just a matter of time.”

University of Minnesota compiles database of peer-reviewed, open-source textbooks | Inside Higher Ed
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/05/10/university-minnesota-compiles-database-peer-reviewed-open-source-tex

Minnesota launched an online catalog of open-source books last month and will pay its professors $500 each time they post an evaluation of one of those books. (Faculty members elsewhere are welcome to post their own reviews, but they won’t be compensated.) Minnesota professors who have already adopted open-source texts will also receive $500, with all of the money coming from donor funds.

The project is meant to address two faculty critiques of open-source texts: they are hard to locate and they are of indeterminate quality. By building up a peer-reviewed collection of textbooks, available to instructors anywhere, Minnesota officials hope to provide some of the same quality control that historically has come from publishers of traditional textbooks.

#enseignement #éducation #livres #open_source via @opironet

Mysterious hog farm explosions stump scientists
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/03/mysterious-hog-farm-explosions-stump-scientists.ars
#mystere #nature #moisissure

Amateur Biologists Are New Fear in Making a Mutant Flu Virus - NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/06/health/amateur-biologists-are-new-fear-in-making-a-mutant-flu-virus.html

Over the past decade, more amateur biologists have started to do genetic experiments of their own. One hub of this so-called D.I.Y. biology movement, the Web site DIYbio.org, now has more than 2,000 members.

“I worry about the garage scientist, about the do-your-own scientist, about the person who just wants to try and see if they can do it,” Michael T. Osterholm of the University of Minnesota said last week at a meeting of #biosecurity experts in Washington.

#h5n1 #biohacking #biosécurité

’I’m a Marxist,’ Dalai Lama tells Chinese students - Faith & Reason
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/Religion/post/2011/06/dalai-lama-china-marx-communism/1?csp=34

When one student asked it this didn’t contradict the Dalai Lama’s philosophy, he replied:

Marx was not against religion or religious philosophy per se but against religious institutions that were allied, during Marx’s time, with the European ruling class. He also provided an interesting anecdote about his experience with Mao. He said that Mao had felt that the Dalai Lama’s mind was very logical, implying that Buddhist education and training help sharpens the mind. He said he met with Mao several times, and that once, during a meeting in Beijing, the Chinese leader called him in and announced: “Your mind is scientific!” — an assessment that was followed by the famous line, “religion is poison.”

#religion #bouddhisme #chine

The cyberweapon that could take down the internet http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20113-the-cyberweapon-that-could-take-down-the-internet.html

Attention, l’article est très sensationnaliste. Celui-ci, malgré un titre débile, http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/how-to-crash-the-internet/680 est bien meilleur, notamment par les détails techniques et les références qu’il fournit.

De toute façon, il vaut mieux lire le papier original http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~mohaisen/doc/lci-ccs10-abs.pdf Il est très court et conclus qu’en cassant suffisamment de sessions BGP, on peut effectivemement tout couper, le « churn » empêchant les survivants de faire un travail utile.

Je trouve qu’il ne détaille pas tellement les conditions et les contre-mesures par exemple l’effet du « dampening ».

Il ne fait que simuler théoriquement les résultats d’une attaque plus ancienne http://www.isoc.org/isoc/conferences/ndss/07/papers/low-rate_TCP-targeted_DOS_attacks.pdf C’est avec elle que les sessions BGP sont coupées.

#bgp #résilience #Internet