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POPSObama To Receive Special Nobel Prize For Replacing Einstein's Theory "Now is that solid or ain't it solid? I mean, except for that fart?" "It's solid!" "No little energy atoms with electrons, wantons and morons!" The president then explained what an idiot Einstein actually was but everyone thought he was smart because he knew a lot of long words. So you heard it here first. President Barack Hussein Obama has won a special Nobel Prize, replacing and disgracing that egghead, Einstein and his energy theory. Obama went on to say, "Look we is all mad up of those atoms and electrons...they repel each other...they are racist....its all relative...you know there are 11 other universes...me and Michelle are hoping to retire to one of them."
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POPSCan Game Theory Predict When Iran Will Get the Bomb? 
positions shifted. American and Israeli national-security players grudgingly accepted that they could tolerate Iran having some civilian nuclear-energy capacity. Ahmadinejad, Khamenei and the religious radicals wavered; then, as the model reached our present day, their power " another variable in Bueno de Mesquita’s model " sagged significantly. Amid the thousands of rows on the spreadsheet, there’s one called Forecast. It consists of a single number that represents the most likely consensus of all the players. It begins at 160 " bomb-making territory " but by next year settles at 118, where it doesn’t move much. “That’s the outcome,” Bueno de Mesquita said confidently, tapping the screen. What does 118 mean? It means that Iran won’t make a nuclear bomb. By early 2010, according to the forecast, Iran will be at the brink of developing one, but then it will stop and go no further. If this computer model is right, all the dire portents we’ve seen in recent months . . .
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POPSCan Game Theory Predict When Iran Will Get the Bomb? Is Iran going to build a bomb? With the help of his undergraduate class at N.Y.U., he researched the primary power brokers inside and outside the country " anyone with a stake in Iran’s nuclear future. Once he had the information he needed, he fed it into his computer model and had an answer in a few minutes. A tall man with a slab of gray hair, Bueno de Mesquita, who is 62, welcomed me with painstakingly prepared cups of espresso. Then he pulled out his beat-up I.B.M. laptop " so old that the lettering on the A, S, D and E keys was worn off " and showed me a spreadsheet that summarized Iran’s future.The spreadsheet included almost 90 players. Some were people, like the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei; others were groups, like the U.N. Security Council and Iran’s “religious radicals.” Next to each player, a number represented one variable in Bueno de Mesquita’s model: the extent to which a player wanted Iran to have the ability
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POPSTop 10 Greatest Chess Players in History There is no doubt that throughout the history of chess there have been many superb players who have reshaped and redefined the way the game is played. This list is an attempt to examine and categorize the greatest of those. No doubt there are many worthy names that could be added, but here is the Top 10 who I believe have rightly earned their places as the greats. The criterion used is based upon a number of factors including dominance over contemporaries, length of career at the top, contributions to chess and individual flair and brilliance. Please note this is not a head to head of who would beat who, as most modern professional players would dominate the forefathers of yesteryear due to developments in Chess Theory, but a historical look at the greats.
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POPSWall Street on Speed
As debates in the blogosphere in the last couple of days have made clear, there are a couple of possibilities of what is at work here. One is that Goldman and others are literally using privileged information to make trades ahead of markets, in which case they are committing a felony. Specifically, the abuse is known as "front-running," or trading ahead of customers, and it is an explicitly illegal form of market manipulation. Front running is epidemic on Wall Street--the whole point of an investment bank trading for its own account is to take advantage of its specialized knowledge of markets--and the SEC or the Justice Department shuts down front-running when it becomes too blatant to ignore. The other possibility is that the Goldmans of the world have found themselves a nice loophole. Tapping into the Stock Exchange's own computers and other sources of trading activity is something that anyone in theory could do, but only a few privileged insiders have the sophistication to exploi
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POPSThe ramifications of learning mathematics Question often asked by students: 'Why I need to learn mathematics?' You never know the ramifications for using such knowledge. Just check how the basic concept of a math game is making an impact in the field of medical genetics.
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POPSCheney's MAD Front the article: "By raising the stakes over the torture issue with his repeated appearances, Dick Cheney isn't merely daring Democratic Congress and the Obama administration to investigate him and other members of the Bush torture team. Cheney's is a scorched earth game he believes he can win. Cheney's MAD strategy goes something like this. If the DOJ or Congress proceeds with torture probes or prosecutions, Republican retaliation will be massive and total. Nominees will be blocked, legislation filibustered and the gridlock in Washington permanent. The blame for the carnage, the theory goes, will go to the side (in this case, Democrats) which launched the first strike. As Ronald Reagan was fond of saying, "a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought."
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POPSJust Follow The Sound Of The Barking "Here's the question reductionists like Zorn don't answer: Why does canine affection have to be a trick or a con? After all, according to the very same logic, I love my wife and daughter because I have strong instinctive attachments for them grounded in my genes. But even if the genetic explanation is absolutely true, it doesn't change the fact that I love my family. Why should it be different with dogs? Do we really want to live in a society in which love is a genetically mandated confidence game? Where will that argument take us? Indeed, if embracing modernity means I have to accept such unlovely idiocy, count me out. I'll be elsewhere. If you need me, just follow the sound of the barking. "
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POPSAcademic Earth - Free Lecture Videos From Top Scholars With so much of this going on (iTunes Store has iTunes U as well, and there must be others) why even bother going to a university for much of a degree? Shouldn't there be a reduced tuition for those who can pass a competency exam based on self-paced online study? Sort of an Internet University BA?
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POPSQuantum Theory May Explain Wishful Thinking The intriguing title hides an interesting application of mathematical tools used in quantum mechanics to model decision making under condition of uncertainty. Pothos and Busemeyer hope that further research on quantum probability models of human cognition could help answer fundamental questions about the nature of how we think. For example, what does it mean to be rational? Another example is Schrodinger’s equation, which predicts a periodic oscillation between choices after a minimum length of time. This oscillation matches with electroencephalography signals and may explain why the longer you debate on a decision, the more you fluctuate. Overall, if our brains use quantum principles, and quantum computation is known to be fundamentally faster than classical computation in computers, then perhaps quantum principles can even help explain the success of human cognition.
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POPS Let's Play O'bama ~ O'Bingo “Since the Great Depression” – The economic one, not the feeling you’ve had since he signed the “stimulus” bill. “Save or create” jobs – Obama’s new metric whereby he can claim credit for the outcome no matter what happens (how exactly does one determine the number of “saved” jobs?) “Crisis” - Excuse to hike taxes and grow the government per Rahm Emanuel’s theory: “Never let a crisis go to waste.” “Stimulus” – The 1,000 page Pelosi-Reid-Obama pork bill rushed through in the dead of night with no transparency and that not a single member of Congress who voted for it actually read. “Hope” – The optimistic expectation, against all evidence that this government will be the first in the history of time to succeed in spending its way out of economic problems. “Change” – Take-home pay of future generations due to massive spending increases and government expansion. “Bipartisan” – “Pelosi and Reid get to decide what we
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POPS5. A 'sheep theory' A confidence trick or confidence game IS an attempt to defraud a person or group by gaining their confidence.
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POPSGame Theory Explains Why You Can’t Hurry Love It shows that extended courtship can take place, with a good male being willing to court for longer than a bad male and the female delaying mating. In this way the duration of a male’s courtship effort carries information about his type. By delaying mating, the female is able to make some use of this information to achieve a degree of screening. Because bad males have a greater tendency to quit the courtship game early, as time goes on and the male has not quit it becomes increasingly probable that he is a “good” male.
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POPS'Tetris' can wipe out your traumas Then they asked half of them to play Tetris, while the other half apparently did nothing. In Oxford, that probably means reading a little Dostoyevsky while sipping a Pimms. The Tetris players apparently suffered significantly fewer nasty memories of those ugly images than did those who were left idle. The researchers are extrapolating that this might help people deal with post- traumatic stress disorder.
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POPSHow Personalities Evolved "Game theory’ is used to predict the behaviour of individuals when making choices that depend on the choices of others. First developed as a tool for understanding economic behaviour, game theory is increasingly used in many diverse fields, ranging from biology and psychology to sociology and philosophy. Using a mathematical model developed by Professor John McNamara the team adapted the theory to allow individuals playing the ‘game’ to have some variation in their personalities to start with, and to monitor each other’s cooperative tendencies as the game was being played."
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POPSCounterintuitive physics may help everyone drive home quicker
The second concept, the Nash equilibrium, occurs when an individual cannot choose a better strategy for himself if other individuals keep their strategies unchanged (i.e. an individual can not improve his situation by changing unilaterally). In the traffic situation, say you know which routes the other drivers take, maybe because you’ve tried different routes to find out which is the fastest way to get home from work. After trying different routes, you choose the route that is fastest for yourself. Then you cannot find a faster route as long as the other drivers stick to their same routes (which they do, because they cannot find faster routes, either). But if many drivers could change their routes simultaneously, then the effect might be a decrease in everyone’s travel time, and society would come closer to the social optimum rather than languishing in the Nash equilibrium. The scientists found that modifying the network structure can sometimes lead to faster overall travel times,
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POPSPopulation Control This is really from the horses mouth. People need to know who is setting the rules of the game and what the eventual outcome is planned to be. Soon you will hear of people voluntaryily sterilising themselves to save mother earth. You now have the correct frame by which you can understand the motives for such behaviour. They are coercive forces at play in our societies and you are seeing one manifestation of them in what is NOW called "Climate Change". This movement or revolution has many purposes and just one of them is de-population. Research those popular movements and you will see the same players behind them. There is no theory about this. That is just a label people, who do not want to know, put on such facts.
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POPSOLDS: Preparing for a neuroscience revolution Our challenge is that we don't pay enough attention to such game-changing discoveries as they are happening. And when we don't pay attention, then the societal conversations that need to happen to reach consensus on policy also don't happen - at least in a proactive fashion. We end up reacting instead. In the case of the uncovering the secrets of the human mind, such proactive consideration would be better off earlier than later. The writer is James Olds is the director of the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University. This is an important read.
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POPSHow a simple mathematic formula is starting to explain the bizarre prevalence of altruism in society This new mathematic model for society’s evolution is particularly interesting because not only it reveals a logic behind the large numbers of cooperators that we know exist in all human societies, but also it gives us a glimpse of the principles that can help “pushing” them into a better, fairer, path. Evolutionary game theory is a mathematical approach used to study (and predict) the evolution of social interactions, in which the study of conflict and decision-making is treated – like its name indicates – as a game.
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POPSRockstar paid $100,000 for the voice of Niko Bellic "Had this been a television program, a film, an album, a radio show or virtually any other sort of traditional recorded performance, Mr. Hollick and the other actors in the game would have made millions by now," writes Schiesel -- and important sentence cut out by Clipmarks. Essentially the theory here is that videogame companies need to offer royalties to all the voice actors in the game. The problem, however, is figuring out where to draw the line once you start paying royalties. Is a voice actor more important than an animator? This is one of the concerns facing EA in the possible acquisition of Take-Two: The Houser brothers receive generous royalties from Take-Two that, if acquired, might cause insurrection within Electronic Arts' other studios.
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