...you casually find papers like "Biological Brain-Inspired Genetic Complementary Learning for Stock Market and Bank Failure Prediction" (Tan et. al. , Computational Intelligence Vol. 23, No. 2. (May 2007), pp. 236-261). So don't even give me that "where's my jetpack and hover car!" whining because when a computer can use properties of our brains and genetic algorithms to learn when the stock market is going to crash, you can tell we've come a long way.

This paper attempts to tackle a common problem in the realm of computational finance, using computers to make millions. The use of all our super-computing power for financial applications only makes sense in order to get the maximum amount of cash-money, but when stuff like surfing the internet and word processing causes my computer to crash, it makes you wonder how hard it must be to model something like stock market strategies.

So smart computer scientists take a tip from right at home, our brains, and they use computational intelligence tools such as artificial neural networks, fuzzy logic, Bayesian statistics, and evolutionary computing to give computers a bit of a heads-up. This paper proposes a nice slurry of the tools above in the design of a neural network called a GLC (Genetic Complementary Learning Fuzzy Neural Network) and genetic algorithms to use human pattern recognition and gene selection to learn good financial decisions.

Tan et. al. analyzes the accuracy of the HAL 9000 computational finance tool for bank failure and stock market prediction in many real situations. The GLC performed competently and gave good results on both tests, which is essentially a giant leap towards the hover car. So keep your fingers crossed!

You can get the article mentioned above here or search for it using your library's journal subscriptions.

A recent article in PLoS Biology about coral reef bleaching caused my thoughts to turn to tiny creatures that live inside corals, the zooxanthellae (zoo-ZAN-thell-ee)! These are the little beasties that give corals their fantastic array of colours, along with being one of the most fun biology terms to scream ("ZOOXANTHELLAE!").

Zooxanthellae are not actually beasties sensu stricto; they are algae, which are unicellular plants. So what the hell are algae doing living inside coral? Like lichens, coral have formed a symbiotic relationship with algae. By forming this association, the coral (an animal) receives photosynthetic products (sugars) and the zooxanthellic algae (a plant) receives shelter and the carbon dioxide it needs to survive. Also like lichens, the coral/zooxanthellae symbiotic relationship is "obligate". That is, neither the coral nor the zooxanthellae could survive on their own if they were separated.

Weird under-sea animals aside, obligate symbiosis is by no means an exotic phenomenon in the natural world. For example, the mitochondria and the cells of your body are in an obligate symbiotic relationship. That's right, mitochondria are in reality totally separate organisms from humans. They even have their own DNA. Like the zooxanthellae of plants, the mitochondria produce a resource (adenosine triphosphate) in exchange for a safe and happy environment in which to live their tiny lives in peace.

Jumping on the bandwagon with the cephalopod sensation thats sweeping the blogging nation, I thought I'd post this documentary. If anything just watch the introduction and picture chameleons across the globe eating their heart out. The quality of the video is a bit hard on the eyes, but the Cuttlefish are anything but (actually, you can download the torrent of this documentary in high definition on Demonoid if you have an account).

Mothers around the world know that fresh air is good for you--or as a scientist could tell you, bad for bacteria. Now a UK company has developed a product that produces hydroxyl radicals by reacting terpenes (a class of hydrocarbons produced by plants and contained in many essential oils) with atmospheric ozone. The germkilling radicals, consisting of a neutral but highly reactive OH molecule with an unpaired electron, prevent bacteria from absorbing nutrients properly, but are harmless to humans. Hospitals, lately worried about the threat of 'superbug' epidemics--infections of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, could reduce a heavily contaminated room to below infectious levels in minutes. And doesn't that smell sweet?

I was pleased to come across this nice list of The Best Thought Experiments on Wired recently. Many of which are cool to think about and don't require a hefty science background. But for those who are jonesing for some real deep cosmic thinking look no further than Wikipedia (especially those philosophy ones, yikes!). Thankfully for us practical types who don't like to think too hard, I remembered a great thought experiment from  Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman which is especially appropriate for these steamy summer days:

You have an S-shaped lawn sprinkler-an S-shaped pipe on a pivot-and the water squirts out at right angles to the axis and makes it spin in a certain direction. Everybody knows which way it goes around; it backs away from the outgoing water. Now the question is this: If you had a lake, or swimming pool-a big supply of water-and you put the sprinkler completely under water, and sucked water in, instead of squirting it out, which way would it turn? Would it turn the same way as it does when you squirt water out into the air, or would it turn the other way?

To be honest, I haven't quite figured it out! And Feynman only uses the example to lead into some hilarious lab hi jinx with exploding water bottles. Help me out!

Some people would say that dropping Asian elephants into nature reserves in North America is irresponsible. Those people clearly didn't consider A) the potentially hilarious and heart-warming results (see Operation Dumbo Drop) or B) that those elephants might have the ability to resuscitate ecosystems that disappeared over 13,000 years ago.

Believe it or not, serious conservation biologists have speculated that if living rough approximations of long-dead megafauna were introduced into appropriate North American ecosystems, they might have the ability to revert those ecosystems back to the state they were in 13,000 years ago. But why should we care about restore crazy ancient ecosystems? Well, the extinction of the original megafauna is attributed to over-hunting by ancient humans! Its our own fault that we're not all living in a prehistoric wonderland!

Humans: driving rare and beautiful animals to extinction since 11,000BC.

Further reading: "The Pleistocene re-wilding gambit" by Tim Caro in the June 2007 issue of Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

When I'm not getting my daily lulz from xkcd.com, i'm getting it from Dinosaur Comics thanks to a recommendation from Kieran approx. 3 years ago. Although, today's gem is more true than it is full of lulz, and only solidifies my jealousy of Richard Feynman. Actually, a few days ago I thought this one was hilarious until I saw the following video on Science Notes.

Most of my time this summer will be spent watching bumble bees on a computer screen. Here's a taste of the sheer exhilaration I experience every day:

A modern day poet once said:

"My hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump; My hump, my hump my lovely little lumps. Check it out" - My Humps, The Black Eyed Peas

Fergie was clearly alluding to the Gaussian Function pictured above, a lovely little lump. Although, I'm not sure she truly appreciates the significance of the equation and how it permeates our culture. I couldn't have chosen a more appropriate equation to start off my "Equation of the Month" post series. Great equations small and large will be discussed and how their applications shape our lives!

You can't really talk trash about the Gaussian because it's so damn useful. Here are just a handful of its supporters.

• Statisticians love it for probability distributions and related purposes.
• Graphic Designers dig it for blurring your images (ie, gaussian blur in Photoshop).
• Professors use it to bell curve the hell out of your marks.
• Accountants like it because it's the logarithm of stock price indices, exchange rates and possibly other financial variables.
• Chemists appreciate it for helping to compute electron orbitals.
• Mathematicians use it in studying hermite polynomials, which in turn gets put to good use my Physicists. Not to mention it's a great time to integrate and use as an error function.
• Physicists love it for beam purposes and photon counting in optics. But personally I like it because it describes the wave function of ground state of the harmonic oscillator. Yes!
• Psychologists like it because supposedly it describes the results of IQ tests and makes them wonder if intelligence is normally distributed across the population aswell.
• Even Paddington Bear Likes It

So think twice next time you listen to Fergie!
Note: The Equation listed above is 1-dimensional case with constants a,b, and c, and does not correspond to the 2-dimensional graphical depiction.

Some species of bird are just lazy. So lazy, that they don't even want to take care of their own lazy-ass babies. We call these birds "brood parasites".

To get out of their normal parental duties, these birds lay eggs in the nests of other (non-lazy) birds, and hope for the best. Once these parasitic eggs show up in a nest, the host bird cares for and invests resources in the extra egg. As a result, the "real" eggs in the nest receive less attention and food.

So why would the non-lazy bird (the host) accept eggs that are clearly not her own? Read the rest of this entry »