You know the arXiv. Here’s the snarXiv.

As its name indicates, snarXiv is a parody of arXiv. You can test your bogus-title detection skills at snarXiv vs arXiv. I didn’t get over 60-65% myself (after some 15-20 trials); I could detect the really blatant fakes (“Towards some general examples”), but really my performance is only modestly better than a coin-flip. In my own defense, I’m not a physicist, leave alone a high-energy theoretical physicist. How did you do?

The Dunbar Number

This post is a collection of links about the existence and consequences of the Dunbar number.

Wikipedia:

Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number, but a commonly cited approximation is 150.

The Wall Street Journal:

there is reason to believe that the social-networking sites will enable their users to burst past Dunbar’s number for friends, just as humans have developed and harnessed technology to surpass their physical limits on speed, strength and the ability to process information.

The Economist:

What mainly goes up [in the number of Facebook contacts], therefore, is not the core network but the number of casual contacts that people track more passively. This corroborates Dr Marsden’s ideas about core networks, since even those Facebook users with the most friends communicate only with a relatively small number of them.

The Monkeysphere:

So how many monkeys would you have to own before you couldn’t remember their names? At what point, in your mind, do your beloved pets become just a faceless sea of monkey? Even though each one is every bit the monkey Slappy was, there’s a certain point where you will no longer really care if one of them dies.

Zhou, Sornette, Hill & Dunbar:

Using fractal analysis, we identify with high statistical confidence a discrete hierarchy of group sizes with a preferred scaling ratio close to 3: rather than a single or a continuous spectrum of group sizes, humans spontaneously form groups of preferred sizes organized in a geometrical series approximating 3, 9, 27,…

Bruce Schneier:

The smallest, three to five, is a “clique”: the number of people from whom you would seek help in times of severe emotional distress. The twelve to 20 group is the “sympathy group”: people with which you have special ties. After that, 30 to 50 is the typical size of hunter-gatherer overnight camps, generally drawn from the same pool of 150 people. No matter what size company you work for, there are only about 150 people you consider to be “co-workers.” The 500-person group is the “megaband,” and the 1,500-person group is the “tribe.” Fifteen hundred is roughly the number of faces we can put names to, and the typical size of a hunter-gatherer society.

Steven Chu: “The Energy Problem and the Interplay between Basic and Applied Research”

US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu gave an interesting Compton Lecture at MIT on May 12, 2009, on how researchers can fit in with providing energy for a crowded world.

more about "Steven Chu: "The Energy Problem and t…", posted with vodpod

Of Researchers, Entrepreneurs and Philanthropists

Consider this quote:

I think there are some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally, that is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments, to do the right things. And only by paying attention to these things, and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make as much progress as we need to.

That was said by Bill Gates at the 2009 TED conference.

The fascinating thing about the quote is that it could be used word-for-word to justify research, entrepreneurship, and philanthropy (not to mention public service and policy). An interesting reminder of their interrelationship.