Only one third of a search engine is devoted to fulfilling search requests. The other two thirds are divided between crawling (sending a host of single-minded digital organisms out to gather information) and indexing (building data structures from the results). Ed's job was to balance the resulting loads.
When Ed examined the traffic, he realized that Google was doing more than mapping the digital universe. Google doesn't merely link or point to data. It moves data around. Data that are associated frequently by search requests are locally replicated—establishing physical proximity, in the real universe, that is manifested computationally as proximity in time. Google was more than a map. Google was becoming something else. ...
ENGINEERS' DREAMS [7.14.08]
By George Dyson
Introduction by Stewart Brand
How does one come to a new understanding? The standard essay or paper makes a discursive argument, decorated with analogies, to persuade the reader to arrive at the new insight.
The same thing can be accomplished—perhaps more agreeably, perhaps more persuasively—with a piece of fiction that shows what would drive a character to come to the new understanding. Tell us a story!
This George Dyson gem couldn't find a publisher in a fiction venue because it's too technical, and technical publications (including Wired) won't run it because it's fiction. Shame on them. Edge to the rescue.
... |
THE NEW YORK TIMES
July 19, 2008
TALKING BUSINESS
COSTLY TOYS, OR A NEW ERA FOR DRIVERS
Joe Nocera
"In and of itself," said Elon Musk, "a $100,000 sports car is not going to change the world."
Mr. Musk is a 37-year-old technology entrepreneur who became extremely wealthy when eBay bought PayPal, which he had co-founded. A lanky South African, he is using that wealth to finance two quixotic efforts. The first is SpaceX, a company he hopes will one day make it possible to colonize Mars. (I kid you not.)
The second is Tesla Motors, which was started in 2003 — Mr. Musk became its chief backer and board chairman in early 2004. After raising $150 million and going through four years of technological and internal struggles, the company has begun manufacturing the first-ever all-electric sports car, the Tesla Roadster. Its base price is $109,000. And if Mr. Musk is willing to concede that the Roadster, by itself, isn"t a world-changer, he fervently believes that the technology Tesla has created — technology that gives the car a range of 227 miles per battery charge, and enough acceleration to go from zero to 60 in under 4 seconds — will indeed change the world. The age of the electric car, he is convinced, has dawned. ...
... |
THE NEW YORK TIMES
July 15, 2008
THE WILD SIDE
LET'S GET RID OF DARWINISM
Olivia Judson
 Charles Darwin was a giant. He did not merely write "On the Origin of Species" — one of the most important books ever written by anyone — in which he describes how evolution by natural selection works, and what some of its consequences and implications are. He also wrote — and this list is not exhaustive— a treatise on the formation of coral reefs that is still thought to be correct; a definitive monograph on barnacles, both extinct and extant; a book about how earthworms make soil; a now-classic text on carnivorous plants (the ones, like Venus fly-traps, that ensnare and digest insects); a book about the strange ways that orchids get themselves fertilized; and an account of the five years he spent aboard the ship HMS Beagle, which has become a classic of travel writing.
As if that wasn't enough, he proposed sexual selection — the idea that decorations and ornaments, like peacocks' tails, evolve because females in many species prefer to mate with the most beautiful males. Sexual selection has since become a major field of research in its own right.
In short, Darwin did more in one lifetime than most of us could hope to accomplish in two. But his giantism has had an odd and problematic consequence. It's a tendency for everyone to refer back to him. "Why Darwin was wrong about X"; "Was Darwin wrong about Y?"; "What Darwin didn't know about Z" — these are common headlines in newspapers and magazines, in both the biological and the general literature. Then there are the words: Darwinism (sometimes used with the prefix "neo"), Darwinist (ditto), Darwinian.
Why is this a problem? Because it's all grossly misleading. It suggests that Darwin was the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega, of evolutionary biology, and that the subject hasn't changed much in the 149 years since the publication of the "Origin."
He wasn't, and it has. Although several of his ideas — natural and sexual selection among them — remain cornerstones of modern evolutionary biology, the field as a whole has been transformed. If we were to go back in a time machine and fetch him to the present day, he'd find much of evolutionary biology unintelligible — at least until he'd had time to study genetics, statistics and computer science. ...
... |
BRITANNICA BLOG
July 17, 2008
Britannica Forum:
This Is Your Brain; This is Your Brain on the Internet
In his cover article in July/August issue of the The Atlantic Monthly ("Is Google Making Us Stupid?"), Nicholas Carr, a member of Britannica's editorial board, raises what for some will be an alarming prospect: that we may soon face the end of reading, the end of thinking, and the end of culture as we have known them for hundreds of years, thanks to the Internet and the dramatic ways in which it is reshaping the way we learn, interact, and express ourselves. ...
Why Abundance is Good: A Reply to Nick Carr
Clay Shirky
But the anxiety at the heart of "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" doesn't actually seem to be about thinking, or even reading, but culture. ...
... As Carr notes, "we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice." Well, yes. But because the return of reading has not brought about the return of the cultural icons we'd been emptily praising all these years, the enormity of the historical shift away from literary culture is now becoming clear.
And this, I think, is the real anxiety behind the essay: having lost its actual centrality some time ago, the literary world is now losing its normative hold on culture as well. The threat isn't that people will stop reading War and Peace. That day is long since past. The threat is that people will stop genuflecting to the idea of reading War and Peace. ...
Why Skepticism is Good: My Reply to Clay Shirky
Nicholas Carr
It's telling that Shirky uses gauzily religious terms to describe the Internet—"our garden of ethereal delights"—as what he's expressing here is not reason but faith. I hope he's right, but I think that skepticism is always the proper response to techno-utopianism. ...
A Defense of Tolstoy & the Individual Thinker: A Reply to Clay Shirky
Larry Sanger
I've already responded in another forum to Nick Carr's essay, which I thought was very thought-provoking, if not entirely on target; I won't repeat here what I said there. But in it you can see that I would disagree almost perfectly with Clay Shirky, who I want to respond to separately here.
I want to respond to Clay Shirky. I've read War and Peace twice. It's one of my very favorite novels, and I love it—it's enormously interesting. In Clay's view, it seems, the new speed and deeply social nature of intellectual discourse means that, soon, the only relevant discourse will occur in blog- or Twitter-sized chunks. Is this the hip "upstart literature," proudly "diverse, contemporary, and vulgar," that is now "the new high culture"?
If so, God help us. ...
Yes, the Internet Will Change Us (But We Can Handle It)
Matthew Battles
Nick Carr's Atlantic essay has also prompted a discussion over at publisher John Brockman's blog The Edge. Brockman's authors include computer science visionaries, evolutionary biologists, and cognitive scientists, and Carr's concerns about the cognitive effects of the Internet are very much their cup of tea. ...
Further Reading: The Reality Club—On "Is Google Making Us Stupid" By Nicholas Carr—W. Daniel Hillis, Kevin Kelly, Larry Sanger, George Dyson, Jaron Lanier, Douglas Rushkoff |
NPR
July 18, 2008
ON THE MEDIA
Search and Destroy
The ability to search through massive amounts of data, Google-style, is having far-reaching effects. And, according to Wired Magazine's Chris Anderson, one of the most significant casualties may be the venerable scientific method. He explains why in the age of the petabyte, scientific testing is forever changed and why the numbers now speak for themselves. ...
[Transcripts will be available 7.21.]
...
Further Reading: The End Of Theory: Will the Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete? By Chris Anderson [6.30.08]
|
THE TELEGRAPH
July 17, 2008
AMAZON TRIBE HAS NO WORDS FOR DIFFERENT NUMBERS
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
The idea that people have an innate mathematical ability has been questioned by a study of an Amazonian tribe that has no sense of number.
• Modern texters scooped 3,000 years ago;-)
• Scientist says numeracy theories don't add up
• Amazon tribesmen pass geometry test
The ability of tribal adults of the Pirahã to conceptualise numbers is no better than that of infants or even some animals and their language, with only 300 speakers, has no word even to express the concept of "one" or any other specific number.
The team, led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of brain and cognitive sciences Edward Gibson, found that members of the Pirahã tribe in remote northwestern Brazil use language to express relative quantities such as "some" and "more," but not precise numbers.
It is often assumed that counting is an innate part of human cognition, said Prof Gibson, "but here is a group that does not count. They could learn, but it's not useful in their culture, so they've never picked it up."
The study, which appeared in the journal Cognition, offers evidence that number words are a concept invented by human cultures as they are needed, and not an inherent part of language, said Prof Gibson, who did the study with Michael Frank, Dr Evelina Fedorenko, and Prof Daniel Everett, of Illinois State University.
The work builds on a study published in 2005 by Prof Everett, who lived with the tribe for much of his life between 1977 and 2007, which found that the Pirahã had words to express the quantities "one," "two," and "many." ...
...
See: Recursion And Human Thought Why the Pirahã Don't Have Numbers, A Talk With Daniel L. Everett [6.14.07] |
AXESS
Nr 1, 2008
THE RETURN OF RELIGION
Roger Scruton
Faced with the spectacle of the cruelties perpetrated in the name of faith, Voltaire famously cried 'Ecrasez l"infâme!'. Scores of enlightened thinkers followed him, declaring organised religion to be the enemy of mankind, the force that divides the believer from the infidel and which thereby both excites and authorises murder. Richard Dawkins is the most influential living example of this tradition, and his message, echoed by Dan Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, sounds as loud and strident in the media today as the message of Luther in the reformed churches of Germany. The violence of the diatribes uttered by these evangelical atheists is indeed remarkable. After all, the Enlightenment happened three centuries ago; the arguments of Hume, Kant and Voltaire have been absorbed by every educated person. What more is to be said? And if you must say it, why say it so stridently? Surely, those who oppose religion in the name of gentleness have a duty to be gentle, even with – especially with – their foes?...
... |
 [The July/August issue of Atlantic Monthly features a cover story by Nicholas Carr: "Is Google Making Us Stupid: What The Internet is doing to Our Brains". Carr is author of the recently published The Big Switch: Rewiring the world, from Edison to Google and a blogger: Rough Type. He is also an Edge contributor.
Danny Hillis disagrees with his argument. Here is Hillis's comment which is hopefully the beginning of an interesting Edge Reality Club discussion. —JB]
ON "IS GOOGLE MAKING US STUPID"
By Nicholas Carr
W. Daniel Hillis, Kevin Kelly, Larry Sanger, George Dyson, Jaron Lanier, Douglas Rushkoff
W. DANIEL HILLIS: We evolved in a world where our survival depended on an intimate knowledge of our surroundings. This is still true, but our surroundings have grown. We are now trying to comprehend the global village with minds that were designed to handle a patch of savanna and a close circle of friends. Our problem is not so much that we are stupider, but rather that the world is demanding that we become smarter. Forced to be broad, we sacrifice depth. We skim, we summarize, we skip the fine print and, all too often, we miss the fine point. We know we are drowning, but we do what we can to stay afloat. ...
...
|
THE NEXT RENAISSANCE
A Tallk By Douglas Rushkoff
Computers and networks finally offer us the ability to write. And we do write with them. Everyone is a blogger, now. Citizen bloggers and YouTubers who believe we have now embraced a new "personal" democracy. Personal, because we can sit safely at home with our laptops and type our way to freedom.
But writing is not the capability being offered us by these tools at all. The capability is programming—which almost none of us really know how to do. We simply use the programs that have been made for us, and enter our blog text in the appropriate box on the screen. Nothing against the strides made by citizen bloggers and journalists, but big deal. Let them eat blog.
[Text and video of the keynote address at Personal Democracy Forum 2008 (PDF) which took place June 23-24 in New York City.]
... |
THE GUARDIAN
July 12, 2008
From Obama to Cameron, why do so many politicians want a piece of Richard Thaler?
 Richard Thaler, Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago. Photograph: Felix Clay |
 What is the big idea of Richard Thaler, the economist quoted by David Cameron and Barack Obama? It comes down to this: you're not as smart as you think. Humans, he believes, are less rational and more influenced by peer pressure and suggestion than governments and economists reckon.
"Economists assume people have brains like supercomputers that can solve anything," says Thaler. "But human minds are more like really old Apple Macs with slow processing speeds and prone to frequent crashes."
According to this view, voters are less Mr Spock than Homer Simpson and they could do with a bit of help - what Thaler terms a "nudge" - to save more, eat more healthily and do all the other things that they know they should.
Cameron is so interested in the idea that in a speech last month he mentioned Thaler, his co-author Cass Sunstein and even the fact they had a new book out, Nudge. He then summed up their argument: "One of the most important influences on people's behaviour is what other people do ... with the right prompting we'll change our behaviour to fit in with what we see around us." It was surely the best plug two Chicago academics with a book about the obscure discipline of behavioural economics could hope for. ...
... |
NEW YORKER
July 21, 2008
ANNALS OF SCIENCE
SURFING THE UNIVERSE
Benjamin Wallace-Wells
In
June, 2007, a thirty-nine-year-old unemployed physicist named
Garrett Lisi arrived at a professional conference
in Morelia, Mexico, to give a twenty-minute
talk. The conference was attended
by all the top researchers in a field
called loop quantum gravity, which had
emerged as a leading challenger to string
theory. Morelia is in a region susceptible
to earthquakes, and it occurred to Lisi
that if there was an earthquake string
theory might predominate for the next
twenty years. This thought was not
pleasing to him.
Lisi
had not been to a professional conference in eight years, and
he was anxious about speaking in public. He has
since learned that he can conquer this fear
if he writes out all his remarks and reads
from the script. But he hadn't yet learned
that tactic, and so he overcame his nerves
by submerging his ideas in a mass of
equations.
In
the audience was a physicist named Lee
Smolin, one of the three
founders of the field of loop quantum gravity and a
prominent member of the faculty at the
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics,
in Ontario. Smolin had a bad cold that
day, and so, through the double fog of his
illness and of Lisi's exceedingly technical
language, he grasped only the contours of
what he was listening to. Lisi believed that
he had discovered what physicists call a
Theory of Everything—a unifying idea
that aims to incorporate all the universe's
forces in a single mathematical framework.
The Theory of Everything has been
the holy grail of theoretical physics for a
century; Nobels are won for partial contributions
to it. Here was somebody, with
no reputation, saying that he might have
figured out the key to the whole thing.
Within four months, however, and after
a second talk, Smolin was telling Lisi that
he had "one of the most compelling
unification models I've seen in years."
''There's
a dream that underlying the physical universe is some beautiful
mathematical structure, and that the job of
physics is to discover that," Smolin told
me later. "The dream is in bad shape," he
added. "And it's a dream that most of us
are like recovering alcoholics from." Lisi's
talk, he said, "was like being offered
a drink."
There
is a persistent legend in physics of the hermit genius, the
scientist who drops out of academia and then returns,
many years later, with an insight
that moves the discipline forward. The
brilliant outsider has become almost a
stock character. David Deutsch, a British
pioneer of quantum computer theory,
had dropped out of paid academia several
years before his theories won wide
acclaim. Julian Barbour, whose theories
helped pioneer a key physics concept
known as background independence, left
the university and never returned, holding
forth in a farmhouse twenty miles
outside Oxford and receiving graduate
students as pilgrims. The most famous
outsider genius was the patent clerk
Albert Einstein. "Look, in my experience,:
the style of a well-trained Ph.D.
going away, thinking hard about something
for a long time, and coming back
with something very original, something
that's a well-worked-out and wellthought-
through point ofview, is an essential,
if rare, part of how theoretical
physics progresses," Smolin said. "Garrett
fit the pattern."
...
Further
Reading on Edge:
Loop
Quantum Gravity: Lee Smolin [2.24.03]
It's
A Much Bigger Thing Than It Looks: A Talk With David Deutsch [11.20.00]
The
End of Time: A Talk With Julian Barbour [8.16.99] |
THE TIMES
July 14, 2008
Why Barack Obama and David Cameron are keen to 'nudge' you
Richard Thaler, professor of economics and behavioural science at Chicago Graduate School of Business, talks about his new book and why nudging has caught the imagination of top politicians
Carol Lewis
Download our podcast to hear Richard Thaler, professor of economics and behavioural science at Chicago Graduate School of Business and co-author of Nudge, explains the concept of nudging and how it could lead to better forms of government. Both the Conservative leader, David Cameron, and Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama, have expressed an interest in what is being dubbed the new third way.
What is a nudge? - Nudge is the title of a new book by Richard Thaler and Harvard Law Professor Cass R Sunstein. The authors explain in the book that nudges are not mandates, they are gentle non-intrusive persuaders such as default rules, incentives, feedback mechanisms, social cues, which influence your choice in a certain direction. However, they can be ignored - it is your choice to be nudged. For example, putting fruit at eye level in a school canteen to encourage healthy eating is a nudge, banning junk food is not.
Doesn't sound very academic? - The academic term for a nudge is libertarian paternalism. Described by Thaler and Sunstein as "a relatively weak, soft, and non-intrusive type of paternalism where choices are not blocked, fenced off, or significantly burdened. A philosophic approach to governance, public or private, to help homo sapiens who want to make choices that improve their lives, without infringing on the liberty of others." ...
... |
THE BUSINESS TIMES (SINGAPORE)
July 12-13, 2008
PSYCHOLOGY'S AMBASSADOR TO ECONOMICS
The father of behavioural economics Daniel Kahneman talks to VIKRAM KHANNA about cognitive illusions, investor irrationality and measures of well-being
...Many mainstream economists
still view behavioural economics
with a mixture of curiosity
and suspicion, but they are
increasingly coming around, because
some of its findings are
too compelling to ignore.
Prof Kahneman does not
however consider himself an
economist. "Absolutely not," he
says. "I study judgement and decision-
making. I never really
made a transition into the field
of economics. What happened
is that some economists became interested in
our work. I learnt some economics from my
friends over the years, but these were friends
who were interested in what I was doing."
It is evident from Prof Kahneman's deeply
introspective autobiography that his interest
in the workings of the human mind goes back
to his childhood. At the age of seven, in German-
occupied France, he was already convinced,
as his mother had told him, that "people
were endlessly complicated and interesting".
About this fundamental truth, he was to
discover more and more, in a lifetime of study
of the human psyche. One of his key findings
was that people suffer from various cognitive
illusions, which affect their decisions and
their behaviour. He has documented scores of
these and inspired other researchers to find
even more. ...
|
WASHINGTON POST
July 13, 2008
Jason Calacanis' First New Email Post
Nik Cubrilovic
TechCrunch.com
Jason Calacanis announced on Friday that he was retiring from blogging. There was a very mixed reaction to the news, with most believing it to be a publicity stunt. Jason said in his farewell post that instead of blogging, he would instead be posting to a mailing list made up of his followers, capped at 750 subscribers. That subscriber limit was reached very quickly, and today Jason sent out his first new 'post' to that mailing list, which we have included below.
We expect that moving his posts to a mailing list will not achieve what he has set out for - and that is to have a conversation with the top slice of his readers. Instead, you will likely see his emails re-published, probably on a blog and probably with comments and everything else.
> From: "Jason Calacanis"> Date: July 13, 2008 11:16:15 AM PDT> To: jason@binhost.com> Subject: [Jason] The fallout (from the load out)>> Brentwood, California> Sunday, July 12th 11:10AM PST.> Word Count: 1,588> Jason's List Subscriber Count: 1,095> List: http://tinyurl.com/jasonslist>> Team Jason,>> Wow, it's been an amazing 24 hours since I officially announced my> retirement from blogging (http://tinyurl.com/jasonretires). .... John Brockman explained to me at one time that some> of the most interesting folks he's met have, over time, become less> vocal. He explained, that there was a inverse correlation between your> success and your ability to tell the truth. When I met John I was> nobody and I promised myself I would never, ever censor myself if I> become successful. ... Comments on blogs inevitably implode, and we all accept it> under the belief that "open is better!" Open is not better. Running a> blog is like letting a virtuoso play for 90 minutes are Carnegie Hall,> and then seconds after their performance you run to the back Alley and> grab the most inebriated homeless person drag them on stage and ask> them what they think of the performance they overheard in the Alley.> They then take a piss on the stage and say "F-you" to the people who> just had a wonderful experience for 90 or 92 minutes. That's openness> for you¿ my how far we've come! We've put the wisdom of the deranged> on the same level as the wisdom of the wise.>> You and I now have a direct relationship, and I'm cutting the mailing> list off today so it stays at 1,000 folks. I'll add selectively to> the list, but for now I'm more interested in a deep relationship with> the few of you have chosen to make a commitment with me. Perhaps some> of you will become deep, considered colleagues and friends¿something> that doesn't happen for me in the blogosphere any more.>> Much of my inspiration for doing this comes from what I've seen with> John Brockman's Edge.org email newsletter. When it enters my inbox I'm> inspired and focused. I print it, and I don't print anything. The> people that surround him are epic, and that's my inspiration¿to be> surrounded by exceptional people.>>>...
... |
NEW SCIENTIST
July 5-11, 2008
Interview: The language detective
A WAY WITH WORDS
Jo Marchant
Everyone's favourite linguist, Steven Pinker, is known for his theory that the mental machinery behind language is innate. In his latest book, The Stuff of Thought, he asks what language tells us about how we think. He says the words and grammar we use reflect inherited rules that govern our emotions and social relationships. Jo Marchant asked Pinker why he thinks that concepts of space, time and causality are hard-wired in our brain, and why he's turning his thoughts to violence
...How do you go about working out what makes societies less violent?
By looking at historical records. One hypothesis is that the development of a judicial system can mitigate people's thirst for vengeance: they can present their grievances to a disinterested party and see the offender punished, rather than going the route of vendettas and blood feuds. That can be tested by looking at violence rates after a judicial system is introduced, or by comparing similar societies with and without a judicial system. Another hypothesis is that trade diminishes violence. If you want what someone else has, you buy it from him rather than kill him.
Do you hope to find answers that can be applied to society in the future?
I hope so. People like to moralise about violence - to say that there are bad people who like war, and good people who like peace, and that we need to make people more peace-loving. Perhaps, but that should be treated as a testable hypothesis, not a self-evident truth. Does pacifism lead to a less violent society, or does it lead to appeasement, and hence to more violence? I hope that violence can be treated as an empirical, not just a moral, question.
... |
HIGHFIELD NAMED EDITOR OF NEW SCIENTIST
ROGER HIGHFIELD, award-winning Science Editor of The Daily Telegraph, where he worked for more than 20 years, has been named as the next Editor of New Scientist magazine, which is now the world's biggest selling weekly science and technology magazine.
Jeremy Webb, New Scientist's Editor-in-Chief, said: "Roger is a formidable force in science journalism. He has immense knowledge and wisdom and is brimming with new ideas. We are expanding in the US, into new markets in India and elsewhere, and improving our web offering. The magazine is right at the centre of all these efforts and we need a strong, creative editor to lead it. I can't wait to start working with Roger."
Before starting at The Daily Telegraph, Highfield was News Editor of Nuclear Engineering International and clinical reporter for Pulse, the magazine for family doctors. He has an MA and DPhil in chemistry from the University of Oxford and spent time working as a scientist at Unilever and Institut Laue Langevin, Grenoble, France, where he became the first person to bounce a neutron off a soap bubble. He is the author of six popular science books and an Edge contributor.
Roger Highfield's Edge Bio Page |
|
ON CHRIS ANDERSON'S "THE END OF THEORY"
George Dyson, Kevin Kelly, Stewart Brand,
W. Daniel Hillis, Sean Carroll, Jaron Lanier, Joseph Traub, John Horgan, Bruce Sterling, Douglas Rushkoff, Oliver Morton, Daniel Everett, Gloria Origgi, Lee Smolin, Joel Garreau
[...continue to The Reality Club] |
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
July 1, 2008
MIND & BRAIN
The Mirror Neuron Revolution: Explaining What Makes Humans Social
Neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni discusses mirror neurons, autism and the potentially damaging effects of violent movies.
Jonah Lehrer
Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California at Los Angeles, is best known for his work on mirror neurons, a small circuit of cells in the premotor cortex and inferior parietal cortex. What makes these cells so interesting is that they are activated both when we perform a certain action—such as smiling or reaching for a cup—and when we observe someone else performing that same action. In other words, they collapse the distinction between seeing and doing. In recent years, Iacoboni has shown that mirror neurons may be an important element of social cognition and that defects in the mirror neuron system may underlie a variety of mental disorders, such as autism. His new book, Mirroring People: The Science of How We Connect to Others, explores these possibilities at length. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Iacoboni about his research. ...
LEHRER: What first got you interested in mirror neurons? Did you immediately grasp their explanatory potential?
 IACOBONI: I actually became interested in mirror neurons gradually. [Neuroscientist] Giacomo Rizzolatti and his group [at the University of Parma in Italy] approached us at the UCLA Brain Mapping Center because they wanted to expand the research on mirror neurons using brain imaging in humans. I thought that mirror neurons were interesting, but I have to confess I was also a bit incredulous. We were at the beginnings of the science on mirror neurons. The properties of these neurons are so amazing that I seriously considered the possibility that they were experimental artifacts. In 1998 I visited Rizzolatti's lab in Parma, I observed their experiments and findings, talked to the anatomists that were studying the anatomy of the system and I realized that the empirical findings were really solid. At that point I had the intuition that the discovery of mirror neurons was going to revolutionize the way we think about the brain and ourselves. However, it took me some years of experimentation to fully grasp the explanatory potential of mirror neurons in imitation, empathy, language, and so on—in other words in our social life.
... |
ATLANTIC MONTHLY
July/August 2008
What the Internet is doing to our brains
IS GOOGLE MAKING US STUPID
By Nicholas Carr
 ...I think I know what's going on. For more than a decade now, I've been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I've got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I'm not working, I'm as likely as not to be foraging in the Web's info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they're sometimes likened, hyperlinks don't merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they've been widely described and duly applauded. "The perfect recall of silicon memory," Wired's Clive Thompson has written, "can be an enormous boon to thinking." But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
I'm not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they're having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. ...
... |
BLOGGINHEADS TV
July 5, 2008
JOHN HORGAN
Stevens Center for Science Writings,
JohnHorgan.org |
GEORGE JOHNSON
talaya.net, Fiire in the Mind, The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments |
Science Saturday: Summer Doldrums Edition
The end of science: Wired Magazine steps on John's turf (07:25)
AI's as-yet-unfulfilled promise (09:41)
The limits of medical science (07:54)
Political pundits: just a bunch of dart-throwing monkeys (13:01)
Who cares why quantum mechanics works? (05:59)
Incredible propaganda for psychedelic drugs (02:40)
... |
LOS ANGELES TIMES
June 28, 2008
MYSTERIES OF TIME, AND THE MULTIVERSE
In his studies of entropy and the irreversibility of time, Caltech physicist Sean Carroll is exploring the idea that our universe is part of a larger structure.
By John Johnson Jr.
Caltech physicist Sean M. Carroll has been wrestling with the mystery of time. Most physical laws work equally well going backward or forward, yet time flows only in one direction. Writing in this month's Scientific American, Carroll suggests that entropy, the tendency of physical systems to become more disordered over time, plays a crucial role. Carroll sat down recently at Caltech to explain his theory. ...
Are you saying that our universe came from some other universe?
Right. It came from a bigger space-time that we don't observe. Our universe came from a tiny little bit of a larger high-entropy space.
I'm not saying this is true; I'm saying this is an idea worth thinking about.
You're saying that in some universes there could be a person like you drinking coffee, but out of a blue cup rather than a red one.
If our local, observable universe is embedded in a larger structure, a multiverse, then there's other places in this larger structure that have denizens in them that call their local environs the universe. And conditions in those other places could be very different. Or they could be pretty similar to what we have here.
How many of them are there? The number could well be infinity. So it is possible that somewhere else in this larger structure that we call the multiverse there are people like us, writing for newspapers like the L.A. Times and thinking about similar questions.
So how does the arrow of time fit into this?
Our experience of time depends upon the growth of entropy. You can't imagine a person looking around and saying, "Time is flowing in the wrong direction," because your sense of time is due to entropy increasing. . . . This feeling that we're moving through time has to do with the fact that as we live, we feed on entropy. . . . Time exists without entropy, but entropy is what gives time its special character.
... |
SEED MAGAZINE
July 1, 2008
THE SEED SALON
THE TRANSCRIPT: TOM WOLFE + MICHAEL GAZZANIGA
The father of cognitive neuroscience and the original New Journalist discuss status, free will, the human condition, and The Interpreter.
TW: ... Many of today's leading theorists, such as E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and Dan Dennett, probably know about as much on the human brain as a second-year graduate student in neuropsychology. That isn't their field. Wilson is a great zoologist and a brilliant writer. Dawkins, I'm afraid, is now just a PR man for evolution. He's kind of like John the Baptist — he goes around announcing the imminent arrival. Dennett, of course, is a philosopher and doesn't pretend to know anything about the brain. I think it has distorted the whole discussion.
 MG: Well, let me roll the cameras back to the '80s and '90s, when neuroscience was taking off. There were new techniques available to understand the chemical, physiological, and anatomical processes in the brain. Imaging was starting up and the inrush of data was enormous and exciting. So there was a hunger for the big picture: What does it mean? How do we put it together into a story? Ultimately, everything's got to have a narrative in science, as in life. And there was a need for people who didn't spend their time looking down a microscope to tell a story of what this could mean. I would say that some of the people who've made attempts at that did a very good job. But I will hold out for the fact that if you haven't slaved away looking at the nervous system with the tools of neuroscience — if you're only talking about it — you don't quite have the same respect for it. Because it is an extraordinarily complex machine. ...
[...]
|
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
July-AUGUST 2008
SHOULD YOU INVEST IN THE LONG TAIL?
by Anita Elberse
It was a compelling idea: In the digitized world, there's more money to be made in niche offerings than in blockbusters. The data tell a different story.
...Much has changed in commerce, however, in the decades since the blockbuster strategy first took hold. Today we live in a world of ubiquitous information and communication technology, where retailers have virtually infinite shelf space and consumers can search through innumerable options. When books, movies, and music are digitized and therefore cheap to replicate, the question arises: Is a blockbuster strategy still effective?
One school of thought says yes. Well represented by the economists Robert Frank and Philip Cook, in their 1995 book The Winner-Take-All Society, that school argues that broad, fast communication and easy replication create dynamics whereby popular products become disproportionately profitable for suppliers, and customers become even likelier to converge in their tastes and buying habits. The authors offer three reasons for their view: First and foremost, lesser talent is a poor substitute for greater talent. Why, for example, would people listen to the world's second-best recording of Carmen when the best is readily available? Thus even a tiny advantage over competitors can be rewarded by an avalanche of market share. Second, people are inherently social, and therefore find value in listening to the same music and watching the same movies that others do. Third, when the marginal cost of reproducing and distributing products is low—as it certainly is with goods that can be digitized—the cost advantage of a brisk seller is huge. Frank and Cook were elaborating on the economist Sherwin Rosen's earlier work describing the "superstars" effect, in which a field's few top performers pull ever further away from the pack. According to this line of thought, hits will keep coming—to the increasing detriment of also-rans.
Although that thesis continues to hold sway, another idea has emerged in recent years—presented just as persuasively, and proposing the opposite. The "long tail" theory took shape in an article by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine, which grew into the 2006 book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. The book's subtitle puts the strategic implications in a nutshell. Now that consumers can find and afford products more closely tailored to their individual tastes, Anderson believes, they will migrate away from homogenized hits. The wise company, therefore, will stop relying on blockbusters and focus on the profits to be made from the long tail—niche offerings that cannot profitably be provided through brick-and-mortar channels. (See the sidebar "The Long-Tail Theory in Short.") ...
• BLOG: Read a response from Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, and participate in this online discussion.
• BLOG: Read Anita Elberse's response to Chris Anderson and participate in this online discussion.
... |
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
July 2, 2008
PORTALS
By LEE GOMES
STUDY REFUTES NICHE THEORY SPAWNED BY WEB
A book from 2006, "The Long Tail," was one of those that appear periodically and demand that we rethink everything we presume to know about how society works. In this case, the Web and its nearly unlimited choices were said to be remaking the economy and culture. Now, a new Harvard Business Review article pushes back, and says any change occurring may be of an entirely different sort.
The Long Tail theory, as explained by its creator, Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson, holds that society is "increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of 'hits' (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail."....
...Since appearing two years ago, the book has been something of a sacred text in Silicon Valley. Business plans that foresaw only modest commercial prospects for their products cited the Long Tail to justify themselves, as it had apparently proved that the Web allows a market for items besides super-hits. If you demurred, you were met with a look of pity and contempt, as though you had just admitted to still using a Kaypro.
That might now start to change, thanks to the article (online at tinyurl.com/3rg5gp), by Anita Elberse, a marketing professor at Harvard's business school who takes the same statistically rigorous approach to entertainment and cultural industries that sabermetricians do to baseball. ...
... |
NEWSWEEK
June 16, 2008
THE FUTURE OF ENERGY
A BUG TO SAVE THE PLANET
Genome pioneer Craig Venter wants to make a bacterium that will eat CO2 and produce fuel.
By Fareed Zakaria
No one would accuse Craig Venter of harboring humble ambitions. In 2000 he decoded the human genome faster than anyone else—and he did it more cheaply than a well-funded government team. More recently he's set a new goal for himself: to replace the petrochemical industry. In a Maryland lab, he's manipulating chromosomes in the hopes of creating an energy bug—a bacterium that will ingest CO2, sunlight and water, and spew out liquid fuel that can be pumped into American SUVs. NEWSWEEK's Fareed Zakaria spoke to Venter about the brave new world of biologically based fuels. Excerpts: ...
... |
THE END OF THEORY
Will the Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete? [6.30.08]
By Chris Anderson
 Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.
The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies.
... |
Der Tagesspiegel
June 26, 2008
A NEW HUMANISM ("EIN NEUER HUMANISMUS")
There are things that are a bad mix: water and oil, for example. Or nature and humanities. But they are approaching each other.
By Kai Kupferschmidt
...as early as 1959 the physicist and writer Charles Percy Snow lamented that the humanities and natural sciences were adrift. Snow coined the phrase "two cultures". At the same time, he said saw a need for a "third culture" that would require a common culture of humanities and natural scientists.
The mid-nineties saw the American literary agent John Brockman present his idea of the third culture. It was different than the one imagined by Snow. Brockman noted that natural scientists such as the biologist Richard Dawkins or the physicist Roger Penrose had taken over the function which had previously been played by literary scholars by by writing books that explained science to the public. Brockman that this was the third culture.
Meanwhile, Snow's original idea is slowly becoming a reality. A second third culture is opening up. In Germany, traditional humanities scholars and scientists are moving together. Despite practical problems, there is a growing will on both sides to understand each other ...
Der Tagesspiegel: German Original
Google Translation
... |
THE NEW REPUBLIC
July 9, 2008
HEDONIC MAN
The new economics and the pursuit of happiness.
Alan Wolfe
The collaboration of Kahneman and Tversky produced one of the major intellectual accomplishments of the late twentieth century: a series of ingeniously designed experiments that raised uncomfortable questions about "utility maximization," which was the major assumption of microeconomics. To wit: it makes no difference in theory whether you lose a ticket to a play or lose the $10 that the ticket cost, but when people lose the ticket they are far less likely to buy another one than when they lose the money. Kahneman and Tversky's explanation is that we create a mental account such that it makes sense to us to pay $10 to see a play but not $20, even though the utility sacrificed by losing the ticket and the money is identical.
Tversky died of cancer in 1996. Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002, and is an emeritus professor at Princeton. Between them, they rattled the role of reason in the pantheon of human motives. They made clear that even if we think we know what is in our own best interest, we frequently make decisions based on misinformation, myopia, and plain quirkiness. The picture of human nature that they developed was--in contrast to the world of homo economicus-- ironic, skeptical, almost wickedly complex.
...
See "A Short Course In Thinking About Thinking: A 'Master Class' By Danny Kahneman" [9.25.07] |
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
June 26, 2008
HOW THE RICH SPEND THEIR TIME: STRESSED
By Robert Frank
Leisure class gives way to workaholic elite scrambling to maintain their place in life
...The leisure class has given way to what I call the workaholic wealthy -- an elite of BlackBerry-crazed, network-obsessed, peripatetic travelers who have to keep scrambling to maintain their place in life.
According to research by Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist, quoted in an article in the Washington Post, "being wealthy is often a powerful predictor that people spend less time doing pleasurable things and more time doing compulsory things and feeling stressed."
... |
NEW YORKER
June 30, 2008
ANNALS OF MEDICINE
THE ITCH
Its mysterious power may be a clue to a new theory about brains and bodies.
by Atul Gawande
The theory—and a theory is all it is right now—has begun to make sense of some bewildering phenomena. Among them is an experiment that Ramachandran performed with volunteers who had phantom pain in an amputated arm. They put their surviving arm through a hole in the side of a box with a mirror inside, so that, peering through the open top, they would see their arm and its mirror image, as if they had two arms. Ramachandran then asked them to move both their intact arm and, in their mind, their phantom arm—to pretend that they were conducting an orchestra, say. The patients had the sense that they had two arms again. Even though they knew it was an illusion, it provided immediate relief. ...
... |
NEW YORKER
June 25, 2008
BOOKS
WHAT WAS I THINKING?
The latest reasoning about our irrational ways.
by Elizabeth Kolbert
As an academic discipline, Ariely's field—behavioral economics—is roughly twenty-five years old. It emerged largely in response to work done in the nineteen-seventies by the Israeli-American psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. (Ariely, too, grew up in Israel.) When they examined how people deal with uncertainty, Tversky and Kahneman found that there were consistent biases to the responses, and that these biases could be traced to mental shortcuts, or what they called "heuristics." Some of these heuristics were pretty obvious—people tend to make inferences from their own experiences, so if they've recently seen a traffic accident they will overestimate the danger of dying in a car crash—but others were more surprising, even downright wacky. For instance, Tversky and Kahneman asked subjects to estimate what proportion of African nations were members of the United Nations. They discovered that they could influence the subjects' responses by spinning a wheel of fortune in front of them to generate a random number: when a big number turned up, the estimates suddenly swelled.
... |
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
June 24, 2008
FREE TO CHOOSE, BUT OFTEN WRONG
By David A. Shaywitz
...When psychologists Daniel Kahneman and the late Amos Tversky conducted an experimental survey in the early 1980s asking people to answer this simple question, they discovered, to their surprise, that most respondents picked "b," even though this was the narrower choice and hence the less likely one. It seems that saliency – in this case, Linda's passionate political profile – trumps logic.
Over the past quarter-century, Mr. Kahneman and his colleagues have gone on to identify a range of flaws in our critical faculties, reshaping the study of economics by challenging the assumption that a person, when faced with a choice, can be counted on to make a rational decision.
... |
WASHINGTON POST
June 23, 2008
HOW RICH PEOPLE SPEND THEIR TIME
People invariably believe that money can make them happy -- and rich people usually do report being happier than poor people do. But if this is the case, shouldn't wealthy people spend a lot more time doing enjoyable things than poor people?
Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman has found, however, that being wealthy is often a powerful predictor that people spend less time doing pleasurable things, and more time doing compulsory things and feeling stressed. ...
... |
PUT A LITTLE SCIENCE IN YOUR LIFE
By Brian Greene
...And when we look at the wealth of opportunities hovering on the horizon — stem cells, genomic sequencing, personalized medicine, longevity research, nanoscience, brain-machine interface, quantum computers, space technology — we realize how crucial it is to cultivate a general public that can engage with scientific issues; there's simply no other way that as a society we will be prepared to make informed decisions on a range of issues that will shape the future. ...
... |
NEW YORKER
June 23, 2008
ANNALS OF TECHNOLOGY
"HELLO, HAL"
by John Seabrook
...Roger Schank was a twenty-two-year-old graduate student when "2001" was released. He came toward the end of what today appears to have been a golden era of programmer-philosophers-men like Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert, who, in establishing the field of artificial intelligence, inspired researchers to create machines with human intelligence. Schank has spent his career trying to make computers simulate human memory and learning. When he was young, he was certain that a conversational computer would eventually be invented. Today, he's less sure. What changed his thinking? Two things, Schank told me: "One was realizing that a lot of human speech is just chatting." Computers proved to be very good at tasks that humans find difficult, like calculating large sum quickly and beating grand masters at chess, but they were wretched at this, one of the simplest of human activities. The other reason, as Schank explained, was that "we just didn't know how complicated speech was until we tried to model it." Just as sending men to the moon yielded many fundamental insights into the nature of space, so the problem of making conversational machines has taught scientists a great deal about how we hear and speak. As the Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker wrote to me, "The consensus a far as I have experienced it among A.I. researchers is that natural-language processing is extraordinarily difficult, as it could involve the entirety of a person's knowledge, which of course is extraordinarily difficult to model on a computer." After fifty years of research, we aren't even close. ...
... |
THE GUARDIAN
June 17, 2008
| |
