andrewgraham:

Last night, I had the privilege of attending a grip-and-grin with the brains behind the Obama campaign’s information technology strategy. And I took some notes:

• The Obama campaign enlisted people with deep, proven IT and engineering backgrounds. “None of us are from the [political] campaign culture,” said one panelist. “We all have engineering backgrounds.” There simply were no junior-level staff writing code or making IT decisions.
• By contrast, the Romney campaign hired expensive consultants and did little to manage their work. One panelist estimated the Obama campaign spent around $500,000 on IT while the Romney campaign spent $15m to build similar infrastructure. “But, you know, I’m sure they did it right,” he said.
• They built both the platform and the apps with open-source technology and deployed them iteratively, with an eye towards scalability. At some points — right before the DNC, I believe, and again after Obama affirmed his support of marriage equality — the infrastructure was processing $2m an hour in donations.
• Another panelist likened the campaign’s technology to a one-billion dollar, “disposable” startup that simply vanished after 18 months, which struck me as a great description. They built the apps and the underlying platform at the same time, apparently.
• “We logged and measured everything,” said another panelist. “I can’t imagine making decisions in any other way.”
• At the same time, they used direct user feedback to tweak the apps and the underlying platform. “If it doesn’t matter to the user, you throw that shit out,” one said.
• Their platform used Amazon SQS to queue messages. A billion messages cost the campaign just a thousand bucks.
• Someone else said: “We weren’t building Narwhal [the Obama campaign’s IT platform] for performance, until we tried importing all the history of voting, ever.” I think this was a joke.
• Apparently, the campaign was using Google Docs to hold and manage so much data that they nearly crashed it.
• They used something called a “sentient chaos monkey” to test redundancy and disaster scenarios. As Hurricane Sandy approached the eastern seaboard, the team moved everything from the East coast to the West coast in less than 24 hours. And the team worked on hypothetical disaster scenarios even as real-world problems with the technology arose.

(Image via Caroline Waxler’s Twitter. Thanks to New Relic for hosting.)

Source: andrewgraham

“The basic idea of the bridge is the union of the secular and spiritual,” explain the designers, noting that the academy was formerly a church. ”The loop on the bridge is a symbolic gate,” they add.

Source: dezeen.com

6architecture, bridge, art, church,

crookedindifference:

A Space Shuttle Before Dawn

(via ohmysagan)

Source: apod.nasa.gov

explore-nature:

Until I get There by Ben Heine on Flickr.

Source: eat-pray-explore

neurosciencestuff:

Study reveals how the brain categorizes thousands of objects and actions

Humans perceive numerous categories of objects and actions, but where are these categories represented spatially in the brain?

Researchers reporting in the December 20 issue of the Cell Press journal Neuron present their study that undertook the remarkable task of determining how the brain maps over a thousand object and action categories when subjects watched natural movie clips. The results demonstrate that the brain efficiently represents the diversity of categories in a compact space. Instead of having a distinct brain area devoted to each category, as previous work had identified, for some but not all types of stimuli, the researchers uncovered that brain activity is organized by the relationship between categories.

“Humans can recognize thousands of categories. Given the limited size of the human brain, it seems unreasonable to expect that every category is represented in a distinct brain area,” says first author Alex Huth, a graduate student working in Dr. Jack Gallant’s laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. The authors proposed that perhaps a more efficient way for the brain to represent object and action categories would be to organize them into a continuous space that reflects the similarity between categories.

To test this hypothesis, they used blood oxygen level-dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging (BOLD fMRI) to measure human brain activity evoked by natural movies in five people. They then mapped out how 1,705 distinct object and action categories are represented across the surface of the cortex of the brain. Their results show that categories are organized as smooth gradients that cover much of the surface of the visual as well as nonvisual cortex, such that similar categories are located next to each other, and notably, this organization was shared across the individuals imaged.

“Discovering the feature space that the brain uses to represent information helps us to recover functional maps across the cortical surface. The brain probably uses similar mechanisms to map other kinds of information across the cortical surface, so our approach should be widely applicable to other areas of cognitive neuroscience,” says Dr. Gallant.

Source: medicalxpress.com