Attack of the Bots (quest for the data)!

Is this the signature of an advertising bot invasion? To find out, look over the following three graphs and then compare with this post on a traffiic surge involving Bitcoin and the Ukraine from Summer 2014.

1) traffic spike over a period of 36 hours.

2) traffic entering blog from a large number of short URLs (some belonging to advertising networks).

3) traffic going to no specific set of posts (traffic patterns are not much different that that of a typical week).

Darwin Day Short

He did it all for the finches (and their beaks).

Here's wishing everyone a Happy Darwin Day for 2015 (Darwin's 206th posthumous birthday)! Here is a short pictoral profile. And check out the hashtag #darwinday on Tumblr for more features and events. And, as a bonus, here is a new paper in Nature [1] that uses genome resequencing to better understand the adaptive variation in finch beaks.

Young Darwin

Middle-aged Darwin

Old Man Darwin

NOTES:

[1] Lamichhaney, S.     Evolution of Darwin’s finches and their beaks revealed by genome sequencing. Nature, doi:10.1038/nature14181 (2015).

Scientific Paradigm Network

Sometimes, a picture is worth 1000 morsels of food for thought. Here is a map of selected scientific topical categories courtesy of Seed Magazine and Map of Science. In this graph, each of the 776 categories is a paradigm with an epistomological basis. The linkages between them represent shared papers between paradigms. Visit the Information Esthetics website for more information (reprints of the poster version are sold out). Having been originally published in 2006, the arcs of the network (citation information) are bit out of date. The overall topology, however, is still valid.