Spirit. Science. Art

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You should have scalability in the back of your mind anytime you do a web project. Here’s a cool intro to scalability for websites on the LAMP stack. Watch it on Academic Earth

When I was learning to program not too long ago, the MIT Opencourse Program was incredibly helpful in learning the basics of code. Although I most of what I learned about hacking came through actually building cool applications and contributing to opensource projects it was good to have a understanding of the underlying theory. Stanford has a similar program with it’s engineering school. There are some really cool topics for people who want an introduction Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, and even Iphone Application development. I may be doing the Machine... Read The Rest →

On Saturday, I went to Caltech to attend a talk on the “Opportunities in Healthcare IT.” It was a great panel that included former entrepreneurs, CIOs, and people on the regulations side. Here were the key takeaways. Take Advantage of Open Data The HHS is opening a slew up important data sources that innovative entrepreneurs can use to building incredibly useful mobile/web applications. We were working all last month with HHS eldercare, hospital, and medical center data to submit our application to the Health 2.0 competition. There’s a treasure trough... Read The Rest →

You can easily lose your shirt if you don’t keep a careful eye on your adwords campaign. SEM is a jumping off point for a lot of my projects. By testing ads and keywords in adwords, I can easily gauge the interest of visitors and gain a better understanding on product/market fit. You can do customer development this way as well by setting up a PPC campaign and driving your customers to a landing page which collects their contact information. From their, you reach out to them directly either by... Read The Rest →

What is a Neural Network? Neural Networks return output based on inputs – as simple as that. The beauty lies in its ability to learn what outputs to return by teaching it. Why use a Neural Network? Neural Networks are useful when we deal with logic that is not explicitly true or false. When we want our program to learn. When we want to define rules as the program is in use or when programming the rules manually is much too time consuming. Check out this Opensource Project

Most people know that I have a huge interest in mindful living and neuroscience, but most people don’t know that I’m contributing to a research project by the Brain & Creativity Institute at USC. I think it’s incredibly important that people understand that compassion is not merely an ethical/moral topic, it also has important consequences having to do with being a well adjusted human being. Here’s a link to a PDF of a study similar to the one I’m working on From a neuroanatomical standpoint, the findings are also useful... Read The Rest →

Interesting article on neuromarketing on the midterm elections here republished from http://www.fastcompany.com/1699985/politicians-using-neuromarketing-in-ads-to-win-votes There are a multitude of reasons the Republicans regained control of Congress in Tuesday’s elections–unemployment, voter discontent, tea party-ism. But the one influential factor you aren’t likely to hear about is the use of political neuromarketing during the campaign. During the 2008 presidential election, neuromarketers went public with research showing how political ads can drive emotional triggers in our unconscious brains. By reading the responses taken from people linked to fMRI or EEG machines, neuromarketers and their clients... Read The Rest →