Edge in the News: 2013
...The Times started its science section in 1978. A year later the same folks who publish Penthouse brought forth Omni, a mix of science and speculation. In rapid succession the American Association for the Advancement of Science, publisher of the journal Science, started Science79; Time Inc. started Discover; and Science Digest expanded to a full-size glossy magazine. The New York Academy of Sciences published The Sciences.
This profusion led to a hiring frenzy for science journalists, who, for a golden while anyway, had a blast producing magazines on scales of time and money that seem unworldly today.
A decade later most were gone or struggling for lack of advertising, despite circulations in the range of half a million and despite the growing importance of science in an age of climate change, energy crises and AIDS. The lone survivor of that golden era, Discover, has been sold four times. A more recent arrival, Seed, noted for its edginess, exists only online.
The audience has fragmented among stalwarts like National Geographic and Scientific American; blogs; and new-media adventures like the TED talks, the World Science Festival and Edge.org, the online salon, and Simons Science News, a new effort by the mathematician and philanthropist James H. Simons. ...
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Meet the 'Edge Series' organizer John Brockman
"In asking some of the the most sophisticated thinkers in the world 'What are the questions you are asking yourselves?' I am aware that this is not for everybody. I am aiming at the brightest people and fortunately, there enough people out there interested in the latest knowledge derived from empirical scientific investigations."
...The office window in John Brockman's (age 72) office looks out at the Empire State Building. He is an architect and impresario of 'scientific ideas' and a showman. Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel Steven Pinker's How The Mind Works .... these towering books, representative of his interests, go through his hands, both in his professional role as a literary agent and CEO of Brockman, Inc. and in wearing his nonprofit hat as President of Edge Foundation, Inc. and publisher and editor of Edge.
Brockman has taken scientists out of their usual territory, and secured for them a global role as the most highly recognized thinkers in the society of informed intellectuals.
Thus, the focus of the new Edge book This Will Change Everything is concerned with predictions about the future based on empirical scientific evidence. Korean translation by Kim So. Published by Galleon.
Every year, Edge.org, the virtual scientific think tank, a central question. This time the result is a collection full of articles that becoming a simple, non-obvious idea provides an explanation for a complex series of phenomena…
…This explains everything nicely shows that not clear formulated questions can lead. produce excellent insights Precisely because of the different individual interpretations of the question by the contributors is a wonderfully varied trip through the intersection of the worlds of aesthetics and truth become a must for any interested layman.
...IvyConnect membership perks include “preferential table reservations” at the Dream Downtown hotel’s rooftop lounge, according to the group’s website, plus discounts to the Guggenheim Museum and Juice Press, which sells unpasteurized smoothies and cleanses. An online philanthropy page lists “curated social-impact projects,” and its section on ideas features links to NYU journalism professor Clay Shirky’s TED talk and New York Times columnist David Brooks’ foreword to a book titled This Will Make You Smarter.
Edge.org is highly recommendable if you think it's interesting to hear and read interviews about the latest philosophical thinking. . . . It is a gathering of highly skilled minds who are trying to diagnose themselves. There are posts from particular Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Ai Weiwei, Brian Eno, Kevin Kelly, Danny Hillis, Marissa Meyer, Stewart Brand, Howard Gardner, Matt Ridley. Our own Tor Nørretranders is the only Dane in the club.
When Prospect magazine listed Britain's leading public intellectuals in 2004 and invited readers' votes, it was Richard Dawkins who emerged as No 1. Nine years on, the biologist, author and campaigner has bettered that by topping its "world thinkers" rankings, beating four Nobel prize winners (and another contender regarded as certain to receive one soon) in a poll based on 65 names chosen by a largely US- and UK-based expert panel.
Joining him in the top 10 are the psychologists Steven Pinker (3) and Daniel Kahneman (10), the economists Paul Krugman (5) and Amartya Sen (7) and the philosopher Slavoj Žižek (6), who all, like him, figured in the magazine's first list of world-class thinkers in 2005.
Playing a more influential role than editors, referred to as the 'culture conductor' or 'enzymes of knowledge', John Brockman is at the forefront of knowledge with the Edge Foundation, which has more than 700 people contributing...
John Brockman's new book is rich with the latest by cultural studies experts in various fields, such as author and geography scholar Jared Diamond, the popular musician and cultural theorist Brian Eno, Harvard Medical School professor Nicholas Christakis, famous for his study of social network contagion effect...
Brockman, the rare individual who can comfortably call New York's avant-garde artists and Nobel Prize winners alike, has been a consultant to The White House and to the Pentagon. Every year, he hosts the "Edge Dinner'. among the Internet industry bigwigs who have attended what has become known as "The Billionaires' Dinner ' are Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, Amazon founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, as well as Facebook's founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg,
Now anyone can now have the benefit of the brains of the best contemporary scholars such as Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene.
To put together this 'dangerous' book, John Brockman established Edge (http://www.edge.org/) and asked more than 600 international scholars, among them many famous authors, to share their research and their knowledge.
The conversation concerns the 'edge' of today's state-of-the-art knowledge and discussion about thorny issues. It's an ongoing online conversation in which the words, ideas, and studies of the notable minds of the salon are also stored and archived.
Intrerest for the latest information on the edge in their respective among new users is increasing. In particular, in universities such as Oxford, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, the latest theories of the professors or experts are now readily available to the public. With the publication of this book in Korea, Edge, so widely known in academia, now will reach the general readers as well.
In addition to Diamond and Dawkins, among the members of Edge whose writing are represented in 'Culture Shock' are Steven Pinker, author of The Blank Slate, and Mihalyi Csikzentmihalyi, author of Flow.
IS OBESITY CONTAGIOUS
Chosun
[4.8.13]
Culture: The 'Best Of Edge' series second book edited by John Brockman presents the extraordinary intelligence of the online salon Edge (www.edge org), in the articles, interviews, lectures of seventeen of its members, including Jared Diamond, Nicholas A. Christakis, Daniel Dennett. ...
https://www.edge.org/
The Edge.org: "Excellent training environment and global scientific discussion" ...
The multimedia artist, publisher, representative, American John Brockman has the most expensive "address book" in the world. Edge was established in 1996 as a foundation to both the humanities, science, art, business, and he was recruited throughout his outstretched connections. Special lectures, annual dinners and the conversations convey a world where knowledge is produced. Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Jared Diamond, Daniel Kahneman are some of the members of the Foundation.
Of the 'Best of Edge Series' by Edge Foundation, CULTURE is the second volume. By several intellectuals, it introduces the key issues and trends in the field....
Since last October I'm in San Sebastian, Spain, as a writer in residence at the DIPC (Donostia International Physics Center and Center Donostia International Physics), led by physicist Pedro Miguel Echenique. Participated crossbreeding project, which seeks to move the boundaries between art, science and humanities, and aims-to-share deal is a transdisciplinary perspective. In particular, we are currently working on the borders between literature and science: what CP Snow (a famous lecture in 1959) called "the two cultures". In recent times, inspired by that debate I installed Snow, thinkers like John Brockman coined and popularized concepts such as "third culture" towards greater communication and understanding between the scientific and humanistic culture. ...
KUALA LUMPUR, (Bernama)—The Maylasian government, pushing for the adoption of the English language throughout the country and the imporvement of English proficiency, has implemented MUET, "The Malaysian University English Test", which is being administered to all university students.
To test reading comprehension, the material chosen includes "adaptations from the Harvard Business Review, the New York Times, and a book entitled This Will Change Everything, [edited] by John Brockman" [i.e. Edge].
Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller's original Edge essay, "Chinese Eugenics", a response to the 2013 Question, "What Should We Be Worried About?" has gone viral on the Web, picked up by a range of publications: Vice, Slate, BBC Future, American Conservative, Reddit, among others. Click here to read Miller's original essay.
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He spent the 2012 and the world did not end: now what? That same uncertainty overflew the site Edge.org when called on its members to respond, as every year, the same question. That's how some of the scientific minds, brightest artistic and journalistic research centered on the world faced the big question after the apocalypse that was not: "Why should we fear in the coming years?". As it has done every year, selected and translated Radar best (and most terrifying) answer: the end of the individual and the technology transfer to the mysteries of the mind and the risks of living too. …
Maybe he can criticize Kosmopolis 13, the feast of the amplified literature (translation: here amplified means in relation to other disciplines and technologies), the absence of illustrious visitors. And the crisis is pressed.
But you can not deny the ideas and proposals. So, this seventh edition, which opens tomorrow with a conversation between the writer and the critic Jaume Cabre Xavier Pla, and runs until Saturday at the CCCB, drive shaft is the relationship between science and science fiction humanities. Kosmopolis uses the concept of third culture, coined by John Brockman, to launch a series of events inspired by recent scientific developments, such as the arrival of the robot Curiosity to Mars or the probable existence of Higgs Hicks. And at a more popular level, the director Nacho Vigalondo and critic Jorge Carrion marked dialectical pulse face their respective defenses of film and television in the field of science fiction.
But they do like to talk about beauty, a lot, at least when mass media are listening. Edge.org, a gathering point for celebrity scientists and public intellectuals, spent the whole of 2012 mulling over a question proposed by Canadian psychologist Steven Pinker: “What is your favourite elegant, deep or beautiful explanation?” The 194 submissions, which included quantum theory and Einstein’s explanation of gravity, were recently published by Harper Perennial under the title This Explains Everything.
In 2006, Philip E. Tetlock published a landmark book called "Expert Political Judgment." While his findings obviously don't apply to me, Tetlock demonstrated that pundits and experts are terrible at making predictions. …
… Tetlock is now recruiting for Year 3. (You can match wits against the world by visiting http:www.goodjudgmentproject.com.) He believes that this kind of process may help depolarize politics. If you take Republicans and Democrats and ask them to make a series of narrow predictions, they'll have to put aside their grand notions and think clearly about the imminently falsifiable.
[ED NOTE: See: "How To Win At Forecasting: A Conversation with Philip Tetlock" on Edge http://bit.ly/14aZrqQ]
However, Tetlock found two distinguishable groups of thinkers among the experts: hedgehogs and foxes.
...These findings taught Tetlock, the author of Expert Political Judgment, a few lessons about pundits. They "were hard pressed to do better than chance, were overconfident, and were reluctant to change their minds in response to new evidence. That combination doesn't exactly make for a flattering portrait of the punditocracy," he recently told Edge.org.
"...if it bleeds it leads, if it bleeds then sells. The good news is not news. Even the best of all, that we live in a more peaceful era of all time. If it seems otherwise, we change the lenses. Assume the long perspective and realize that the extraordinary disasters today are nothing compared to ordinary pandemonium yesterday.
"Professor, why did you decide to write a book so counterintuitive?"
"Working on previous texts I had accumulated data in the dramatic reduction of violent deaths by non-state players today, as well as other advances such as the end of slavery and the abolition of corporal punishment. So when Edge.org asked me 'what I was optimistic about?, I said 'the decline of violence'. Other scholars commented, adding various other evidence in favor. It convinced me that it was not yet a well-known story."
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