For the first time on the web (in non-pirated fashion anyway), my most recent film:
For the first time on the web (in non-pirated fashion anyway), my most recent film:
So at&t "accidentally" shut off our internet 3 days ago. They figured it out today, lied saying they would call us back to "expedite" turning it back on after trying to rip us off on a new account that we didn't need, and completely failed us for absolutely no reason. Luck of the draw? So we have no internet, no WiFi, and no way to even contact customer service until tomorrow. I am flabbergasted...
In this visualization, we see the tipping point where minority opinion (shown in red) quickly becomes majority opinion. Over time, the minority opinion grows. Once the minority opinion reached 10 percent of the population, the network quickly changes as the minority opinion takes over the original majority opinion (shown in green). Credit: SCNARC/Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. The scientists, who are members of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) at Rensselaer, used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion. The finding has implications for the study and influence of societal interactions ranging from the spread of innovations to the movement of political ideals.
"When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority," said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. "Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame."
As an example, the ongoing events in Tunisia and Egypt appear to exhibit a similar process, according to Szymanski. "In those countries, dictators who were in power for decades were suddenly overthrown in just a few weeks."
The findings were published in the July 22, 2011, early online edition of the journal Physical Review E in an article titled "Social consensus through the influence of committed minorities."
An important aspect of the finding is that the percent of committed opinion holders required to shift majority opinion does not change significantly regardless of the type of network in which the opinion holders are working. In other words, the percentage of committed opinion holders required to influence a society remains at approximately 10 percent, regardless of how or where that opinion starts and spreads in the society.
To reach their conclusion, the scientists developed computer models of various types of social networks. One of the networks had each person connect to every other person in the network. The second model included certain individuals who were connected to a large number of people, making them opinion hubs or leaders. The final model gave every person in the model roughly the same number of connections. The initial state of each of the models was a sea of traditional-view holders. Each of these individuals held a view, but were also, importantly, open minded to other views.
Once the networks were built, the scientists then "sprinkled" in some true believers throughout each of the networks. These people were completely set in their views and unflappable in modifying those beliefs. As those true believers began to converse with those who held the traditional belief system, the tides gradually and then very abruptly began to shift.
"In general, people do not like to have an unpopular opinion and are always seeking to try locally to come to consensus. We set up this dynamic in each of our models," said SCNARC Research Associate and corresponding paper author Sameet Sreenivasan. To accomplish this, each of the individuals in the models "talked" to each other about their opinion. If the listener held the same opinions as the speaker, it reinforced the listener's belief. If the opinion was different, the listener considered it and moved on to talk to another person. If that person also held this new belief, the listener then adopted that belief.
"As agents of change start to convince more and more people, the situation begins to change," Sreenivasan said. "People begin to question their own views at first and then completely adopt the new view to spread it even further. If the true believers just influenced their neighbors, that wouldn't change anything within the larger system, as we saw with percentages less than 10."
The research has broad implications for understanding how opinion spreads. "There are clearly situations in which it helps to know how to efficiently spread some opinion or how to suppress a developing opinion," said Associate Professor of Physics and co-author of the paper Gyorgy Korniss. "Some examples might be the need to quickly convince a town to move before a hurricane or spread new information on the prevention of disease in a rural village."
The researchers are now looking for partners within the social sciences and other fields to compare their computational models to historical examples. They are also looking to study how the percentage might change when input into a model where the society is polarized. Instead of simply holding one traditional view, the society would instead hold two opposing viewpoints. An example of this polarization would be Democrat versus Republican.
Provided by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (news : web)
-->via physorg.com
So, I officially deleted my myspace page this week after all these years. 4000+ "friends" I didn't know, rampant porn-bots/spam-bots, and an unreliable, ever-changing copycat user interface finally brought me to it. I have to credit myspace for being the tool that taught me much of the html that I know and gave me some good years of artistic self promotion. In its heyday, it was a great place to flaunt your individuality and make often valuable connections. It will be interesting to see if social media includes some of the positive elements found in myspace as it evolves.
by Brandon Gray
Smoking Fast and Furious's April opening record, Fast Five made off with a redline-busting estimated $83.6 million at 3,644 locations over the weekend. The action sequel shot past Fast and Furious's $71 million start for a new franchise high.
Fast Five more than doubled fellow Rio de Janeiro adventure, Rio ($39.2 million), to claim the biggest opening of 2011. It was also the third highest-grossing opening weekend outside of the summer and holiday seasons, behind Alice in Wonderland (2010)'s $116.1 million and The Passion of the Christ's $83.8 million. If one counted Fast Five as the summer's early start, as its marketing insisted, its gross would have ranked seventh among past summer kick-offs (Spider-Man 3 holds that record with $151.1 million).
With Fast Five, distributor Universal Pictures celebrated its biggest-grossing opening weekend ever, surpassing The Lost World: Jurassic Park's $72.1 million. However, adjusted for ticket price inflation, The Lost World is still Universal's champ at nearly $126 million, and Fast Five rates closer to The Bourne Ultimatum. Included in Fast Five's run were 243 IMAX venues, which contributed an estimated $8.3 million or around ten percent of the gross. Universal's research showed that 56 percent of Fast Five's audience was male (about the same as Fast Four), 52 percent was under 25 years old (skewing older than Fast Four), 35 percent white (compared to Fast Four's 28 percent) and 33 percent Hispanic (down from Fast Four's 46 percent).
While Fast Five sizzled, the three other new nationwide releases fizzled. Prom went stag, grossing a soft estimated $5 million at 2,730 locations. The ensemble teen comedy sold about as many tickets out of the gate as Sleepover (from the same director), BRATZ and I Love You Beth Cooper. A generic-brand movie about a nondescript "prom" wasn't a compelling offering. "Prom" is inert without a focused storyline, which meant a narrow audience for the movie: distributor Walt Disney Pictures' exit polling indicated that a whopping 66 percent of Prom's audience was under 18 years old, and 82 percent was female.
Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil mustered just around $4.1 million at 2,505 locations (77 percent of the gross was from 3D presentations at close to 1,900 locations). That was a fraction of the first Hoodwinked's $12.4 million start from over five years ago, and Hoodwinked Too! sunk lower than the likes of Mars Needs Moms and Drive Angry to claim the weakest debut yet for a broadly-released modern 3D movie.
Dylan Dog: Dead of Night was even worse, grossing a mere $885,000 estimate at 875 locations. Horror comedies frequently flop, and Dylan Dog can take solace in not being quite as pathetic as Transylmania. Its distributor Freestyle Releasing, though, was highly optimistic in its estimate: they projected an increase on Sunday, so it would not be surprising if Dylan Dog winds up as the most overestimated movie of the weekend.
Most holdovers took a greater hit than they were accustomed to, in part due to Easter falling on last weekend. Ranking second, Rio dropped 45 percent to an estimated $14.4 million. With a $103.6 million total in 17 days, the animated comedy rose to third place on the 2011 chart, behind Rango ($119.9 million) and Hop ($105.3 million), and it will soon surpass those titles.
Tyler Perry's Madea's Big Happy Family fell 60 percent to an estimated $10.1 million for a $41.1 million tally in ten days. Its percentage drop was in line with Why Did I Get Married Too? and Madea Goes to Jail, but its grosses are much lower than those movies.
Water for Elephants retreated 46 percent to an estimated $9.1 million for a $32.3 million sum in ten days. Its percentage decline was almost as steep as Dear John and The Time Traveler's Wife, among comparable fare. Draining faster than Oceans, African Cats was declawed in its second weekend, off 61 percent to an estimated $2.3 million for a $10.6 million tally in ten days.
Given its subject, Hop was the most susceptible to post-Easter disinterest, and it plummeted 79 percent from its Easter bump to an estimated $2.6 million.
Related Story:
• Forecast: 'Fast Five' FeverLast Weekend
• 'Rio' Edges Out 'Madea' Over Easter WeekendThis Timeframe in Past Years:
• 2010 - 'Nightmare' Wakes Up in Top Spot
• 2009 - Moviegoers Fixate on 'Obsessed'
• 2008 - 'Baby Mama,' 'Harold & Kumar' Yuk It Up
• 2007 - 'Disturbia' Tops Idle Weekend
• 2006 - 'United 93' Doesn't Match Press Hype
• 2005 - 'Hitchhiker' Beams, 'XXX' Reamed
• 2004 - 'Mean Girls' Surprisingly NiceRelated Charts
• Weekend Box Office Results
• April Opening Weekends
• 'Fast and Furious' Face-Off
Incomprehensible as it sound, inflation poses that the universe initially expanded far faster than the speed of light and grew from a subatomic size to a golf-ball size almost instantaneously.
CREDIT: NASA
A refreshingly simple new idea has emerged in the complicated world of high energy physics. It proposes that the early universe was a one-dimensional line. Not an exploding sphere, not a chaotic ball of fire. Just a simple line of pure energy.
Over time, as that line grew, it crisscrossed and intersected itself more and more, gradually forming a tightly interwoven fabric, which, at large distances, appeared as a 2-D plane. More time passed and the 2-D universe expanded and twisted about, eventually creating a web — the 3-D universe we see today.
This concept, called "vanishing dimensions" to describe what happens the farther one looks back in time, has been gaining traction within the high energy physics community in recent months.
If correct, it promises to bridge the gap between quantum mechanics -- the physics of the very small -- and general relativity – the physics of space-time. It would also make sense of the properties of a hypothetical elementary particle called the Higgs boson. And best of all, it would do so with elegant simplicity.
"In the last 30 years, [physicists] were trying to make our theories more complicated by introducing more particles, more dimensions," said Dejan Stojkovic, a physicist at the University of Buffalo who researches vanishing dimensions. "We decided to go the other way and make theories less complicated in the high energy realm. At high energy [in the early universe], we are changing the background on which the standard model of particle physics is formulated. In 1-D, the problem greatly simplifies." [The Strangest Things in Space]
Life on a line
According to the theory, for the first thousand-trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, up until the moment when the universe cooled to an average temperature of 100 teraelectronvolts (TeV are actually a measure of energy, but energy and temperature correspond), it was a 1-D line.
So what would the young universe have been like?
"In 1-D, there's a new sense of unification," Stojkovic told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to SPACE.com. "Right now, you see the diverse world because you're in 3-D. When you go down to 1-D, things become much simpler. Properties that distinguish all the different particles don't exist anymore, so they all become alike. There is no rotation. All you have is forward and backward, and energy moving in either direction."
"As time goes on, the 1-D string universe evolves, intersecting itself many times to build a fabric," he said. The second dimension is built, and later, the third, in the same way that a 2-D sheet of paper can be folded to make a pop-up book. [Does the Universe Have an Edge?]
But Stojkovic hasn't yet identified the mechanism that causes the universe to evolve as time passes.
"We need to explain what caused the evolution from different energies to happen. You need a precise model that starts with a string and creates higher dimensions as it evolves in time to create the space-time we see today," Stojkovic said.
In its skeletal form, Stojkovic calls vanishing dimensions a framework rather than a theory. "As a framework, it's beautiful. But we need to work out the details," he said.
Put to the test
Unlike string theory, a similarly beautiful conceit that describes the architecture of the universe, the vanishing dimensions framework may be verifiable through experimentation: This month, Stojkovic and Jonas Mureika, a physicist at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, have published the first peer-reviewed article on the topic in the prestigious journal Physical Review Letters, and in it they lay out an experiment designed to test whether the early universe really was one-dimensional.
The experiment involves gravity waves — faint oscillations thought to emanate from massive objects and travel through space-time. Gravity waves have never been detected, but their existence is predicted by the standard model of particle physics, and physicists hope to observe them within the next decade using a network of satellites in space.
Gravity waves carry an energy signature of the objects that created them. If Stojkovic is right, then no gravity waves should exist from before the time the universe became three-dimensional.
"Gravity waves don't travel in less than three spatial dimensions," Stojkovic said. "If you go down to two dimensions, gravity waves don't exist. Neither do they exist in one dimension."
"If our proposal is correct, the crossover from 2-D to 3-D happened when the energy of the universe cooled to 1 TeV," Stojkovic added. That happened one-trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. "When the early universe was 1 TeV hot, it transitioned from 2-D to 3-D, and at that point gravity waves began to be produced — only after that crossover, not before," he said. An absence of gravity waves with associated energies greater than 1 TeV would give this theory weight.
Cosmic frequency fracas?
When future satellites measure the frequencies (and corresponding energies) of gravity waves, Stojkovic hopes that they'll see a frequency cutoff.
"There would be a cutoff in frequencies above which you don't measure gravity waves, corresponding to the transition from 2-D to 3-D," Stojkovic said. If these instruments identify the cutoff that Stojkovic predicts, vanishing dimensions will get a big boost. [Top 10 Revelations of the Space Age]
Some physicists object to the premise of the experimental test; namely, that gravity waves will cut off above a certain frequency.
"There is gravitational radiation at all frequencies," high energy physicists Thomas Sotiriou, at the University of Cambridge, and Silke Weinfurtner, at the SISSA Institute in Italy, wrote in an email. "This is not to say that this gravitational radiation will not carry some imprint of the vanishing dimensions," they explained – but not in the way Stojkovic and Mureika have laid out. "It would not be a generic absence of any radiation over a certain frequency, as Stojkovic and Mureika suggest."
Sotiriou and Weinfurtner also object to the lack of an underlying mechanism to explain the evolution of the universe and the emergence of dimensions. "The [PRL] Letter by Stojkovic et al. is extremely vague," they wrote. "They refer to vanishing dimensions at high energies and in the context of gravity but they practically say nothing specific about the mechanism via which this would be achieved."
"The idea of vanishing dimensions is quite interesting and potentially fruitful, as long as one clarifies exactly what is meant by 'vanishing dimensions.' Without a concrete, mathematically well-defined model of how dimensions will vanish, one cannot say much," Sotirious and Weinfurtner wrote. Along with Matt Visser of Victoria University in New Zealand, they are presenting their views on vanishing dimensions in an upcoming issue of Physical Review Letters.
Cosmic ray hints
Vague as the concept may be, there may be one hint of evidence in favor of vanishing dimensions already. "When cosmic rays collide with particles in the atmosphere, this creates a shower of other particles," Stojkovic said. "That shower looks like a cone. And as you can imagine, a cross-sectional slice of the cone looks like a circle." [What Are Cosmic Rays?]
"Well, it looks like the highest-energy cosmic ray collisions are instead planar, meaning they happen in 2-D rather than 3-D," Stojkovic added. Dimensions seem to vanish for particle collisions that are as energetic as the early universe. In two dimensions, "a cosmic ray hits a particle, then creates a shower of particles that travel out in a circle. A slice of the circle looks like a line, and that's what detectors very high up in the atmospheres have seen."
Experiments at the Large Hadron Collider should be able to probe high-enough energies to see the same 2-D realm, researchers said.
"The LHC should see the same alignment," Stojkovic explained. "The particle events should align on a plane."
If that happens, the new vanishing dimensions framework will gain more traction, and the beautifully simple picture of the early universe will come into greater focus.
This article was provided by Life’s Little Mysteries, a sister site of SPACE.com. Follow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter @nattyover.
On Friday, Sony's PlayStation Network continued to be inaccessible.
(Credit: Screenshot by Erica Ogg/CNET)Sony's PlayStation Network is in its second day of being inaccessible to users, and the outlook for getting the service back online isn't very encouraging.
Since yesterday, users trying to access the service via the PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, or the official Web site have received a message saying only that "an error" had occurred. Though Sony acknowledged the outage yesterday, the company hasn't offered an explanation for what's knocked the service offline.
"While we are investigating the cause of the network outage, we wanted to alert you that it may be a full day or two before we're able to get the service completely back up and running," the company posted to the official PlayStation blog.
The PlayStation Network is a way for users to download movies, TV shows, and games over the Web to a PlayStation. Access to the network is free, though users have to pay for some of the content.
There has been speculation that the outage could be caused by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Two weeks ago, the hacker group known as Anonymous took down several Sony Web sites in a DDoS attack in response to Sony's legal battle against a PlayStation Network user known as "GeoHot." The company sued the user, whose real name is George Hotz, for jailbreaking his PlayStation 3 and distributing the tools for others to do the same thing. Jailbreaking allows users to load unapproved and pirated applications onto the PS3.
Sony and Hotz reached a legal settlement April 11.
Anonymous has not claimed credit for the current outage and wouldn't necessarily have reason to attack again since Sony settled with Hotz. But an observer of the IRC forum used by members of Anonymous speculated that the attackers likely behind this current Sony outage appear to have learned their methods from Anonymous' activities of two weeks ago.
A Sony representative didn't immediately have a comment on the matter.
We're also waiting to hear back about how Sony plans on compensating paying members. While the PlayStation Network is a free service, PSN Plus is a subscription available to PSN users for $50 a year for early access to games and exclusive content.
Update 11:55 a.m. PT: Anonymous appears to be denying participation in any attack on PSN. A representative of the group posted an editorial to a news aggregation site saying it had no time to devise a new strategy against Sony and "entirely lost interest."
CNET's Elinor Mills contributed to this story.
