Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Interesting threads from blogs

One of the crticisms of Putnam's social capital is that it is a local and small scale. Responses to pandemics may show how to combine such local efforts when there is a common cause. The science blog 'Effect Measure'
has the surprising example of Hezobollah's organization as a network of local units without strict hierarchies of conventional armies which makes it effecive and suggests similar strategies to fight pandemics:
http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2006/08/what_hesbollah_can_teach_publi.php#more
SciDev.Net has continuous updates of efforts and news from all over the world.

There are several new articles on mirror neurons, parly stimulated by a sceptical post in 'mixing memory':
http://scienceblogs.com/cgi-bin/MT/mt-search.cgi?search=mirror%20neurons&Template=combinedSearch

It is not clear what makes a topic break the 36 hour life span. Possibly topics taken up by main stream media still make them popular in blogs. An article in New york times describing the role of early development on health in later life seems to be generating a fair amount of discussion:http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2006/07/on-being-your-mothers-son.php
Related work of Robert Fogel and others is reviewd in
http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A1UF3SPVQUE2RH/103-9810104-7233449?ie=UTF8
I hope to learn more of this.

I am still looking for a nice and simple write up on Bernoulli Effect with some pointers to everyday life.

2 comments:

Subrahmanya said...

Just saw your comment on nanopoliton. I post semi-technical posts on my blogsite.
btw, your profile does not give any info on you? Just interested in knowing what is Gadde.

gaddeswarup said...

There is some information at:
http://www.ms.unimelb.edu.au/~gadde/
But it is old information. I will update it at some stage. I worked in topology and geometric group theory. I studied in Loyola collge, Madras. When I was a student, I saw a book by Hausdorff called "Set Theory". It mentioned various theorems of Brouwer. They sounded very fascinating and I have been in topological topics since then. Gadde is the family name; it means seat or throne. In Andhra we write it first. Now I am an Australian and write it last in official documents. I have retired now and am busy at the moment with a grand child (first).