Interesting Links and Octopus vs Cancer

Here are a few items of interest:

• Cable set up a site where we are going to put some of the our finding with regards to robust video denoising
• Muthu wonders if there are new ideas in compression
• Reeno asks what should be added to the SPARCO toolbox. Tell him, he was tasked to add features.
• After asking the question on Quora for the purpose of evaluating what sort of gamification should be implemented on top of an arixv+review system, I was told to check the gamification wiki.
• Andrew Stacey just launched Math 2.0 (http://www.math.ntnu.no/~stacey/Mathforge/Math2.0) to discuss an arix+review system.

I remember in High School, we had this discussion with our philosophy professor about the intelligence of animals. His take was that there really was no intelligence that came even close to that of the humans. Most of us were flabbergasted, because we felt that his point of view was disingenuous at best as it reflected more his need to continue on being a professor of philosophy than from any actual knowledge of the situation. Take for instance the case of the octopus. The following video is in french but it should not be too hard to understand (except when the aquarium folks tell the story that these octopuses besides spying on them, literally go from one aquarium to the next, go hunting for some fish there and then come back in their home aquarium).

Poulpe thalassa 005_5'44 se ballader, dévisser- 1er st résoudre 1 pb nouveau Vidéo Tad-coz sélectionnée dans Animaux

A species that spies on us and display learning abilities beyond that of chimps, that would certainly qualify as getting close to human learning. Why am I talking about this ? I just read this entry on David Rosenthal's blog entitled Tide Pools and Terrorists and couldn't shake off the similarities between underestimating cancer cells (Cancer is just as deadly as it was 50 years ago. Here’s why that’s about to change.) and how smart octopuses are. The tentacles part is also striking. 

Source: National Cancer Institute.


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