+Fraser Cain‘s crew of astronomers are doing awesome work with their weekly Hangouts. They are trailblazing the developing art of educational streaming, and they are setting the bar quite high. I’ve been putting together a plan for doing some educational streaming of my own starting this fall, and these hangouts have been both inspirational and highly instructive. Anyone interested in the future of online education or the future of streaming online content should be paying close attention. Fraser Cain originally shared this post: What we learned from broadcasting the Venus transit If you haven’t already read my Tips and Tricks for Hangouts on Air, you might want to give it a read (https://plus.google.com/110701307803962595019/posts/PaeeynDx34L). These are my additional thoughts after running a HoA that had a massive viewership. 😉 As you probably know, we wrapped up about 6 hours of coverage of the transit of Venus yesterday as a live Google+ Hangout. Our “television show”, if you can call it that, consisted of a few live video feeds of the Sun with a black dot (Venus) slowly moving across it. And then some expert commentary and analysis from PhD astronomers. When we first went live with the Hangout on Air, it was like a dam burst. The number of viewers went to 1000, 2000… 5000… 6000+. Clearly there was a pent up interest in sharing the experience with other people. The total number of viewers tailed down a bit, settling at around 2000 for the duration of the event. The fact that 2000 people stuck around to share the experience was pretty mind bending. Let me start by saying that the Hangouts on Air technology worked absolutely perfectly. We had some internet problems with some of the participants, and they were dropping out from time to time, but for most people, […]

Prometheus and the Creation Myth Some friends and I went to see a midnight showing last night. Although none of us really liked the film, we spent a long time talking about its themes and how it ties into the larger Alien saga. I found the results of the conversation to be interesting, and made me appreciate the film a lot more. Here’s a sample of what we came up with. Spoiler warning. Prometheus is about creation. Specifically, it is about the paradoxical relation between the creator and the thing created. The film is full of creator-created chains: Engineers – Humans Engineers – Aliens as weapons stockpile Engineers – Aliens as bioengineered lifeform Weyland – David Humans – Androids Humans – Weyland Corp. Father – daughter Mother – fetus More easily come to mind. Although the creator in these pairs often identifies with the act of creation (and indeed, their position as creator is often a defining characteristic), the products thus created may resist or augment the creators intentions in unexpected ways. This tension between creator and thing created drives the entire series of films. It’s the Sorcerer’s Apprentice motif that has occupied science fiction since Frankenstein. Ridley Scott’s twist on the theme is that the humans in this film consciously recognize themselves as simultaneously occupying both the role of creators and thing created, and yet are unable to resolve the paradox. In fact, far from wielding power as creators, we are something of hapless puppets in the cycle. Frankenstein’s monster had a very dim understanding of its own existence as a monster. In Prometheus, humanity itself is a stage in that monster’s life cycle. This twist lets the film explore the dim understanding we have of ourselves instead of merely dwelling on the distruction we cause as a result. […]

Using computer simulations and mathematical models, a group of scientists around Julian Garcia from the Max-Planck Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Plön have developed a new model that is taking both concepts into account. They discovered that direct reciprocity alone is not enough, and that population structure is necessary in order to reach a high level of cooperation. When there is some reciprocity, the average level of cooperation increases because alike types are more likely to interact with each other. Additionally, the researchers observed that cooperation occurs if cooperative and defective individuals are highly clustered and repetition is rare. And surprisingly, too much repetition can even harm cooperation in cases when the population structure makes cooperation between individuals very likely. This is due to the fact that reciprocity can protect defectors from invasion by defectors in a similar manner that it prevents cooperation from being invaded by defectors. “Without population structure, cooperation based on repetition is unstable,” Garcia explains one of the main findings. This is especially true for humans, where repetition occurs regularly and who live in fluid, but not totally unstructured populations. A pinch of population structure helps a lot if repetition is present. “Therefore, the recipe for human cooperation might be: a bit of structure and a lot of repetition,” says Julian Garcia. This phenomenon results in a high average level of cooperation. Betsy McCall originally shared this post: I don’t think it’s “And”, I think it’s “Or”. Does cooperation require both reciprocity and alike neighbors? Scientists have developed a new theoretical model on the evolution of cooperation. Evolution by definition is cold and merciless: it selects for success and weeds out failure. It seems only natural to…

Status Quo Bias By Nick Bostrom Disaster! A hazardous chemical has entered our water supply. Try as we might, there is no way to get the poison out of the system, and there is no alternative water source. The poison will cause mild brain damage and thus reduced cognitive functioning in the current population. Fortunately, however, scientists have just developed a safe and affordable form of somatic gene therapy which, if used, will permanently increase our intellectual powers just enough to offset the toxicity-induced brain damage. Surely we should take the enhancement to prevent a decrease in our cognitive functioning. Many years later it is found that the chemical is about to vanish from the water, allowing us to recover gradually from the brain damage. If we do nothing, we will become more intelligent, since our permanent cognitive enhancement will no longer be offset by continued poisoning. Ought we try to ?nd some means of reducing our cognitive capacity to offset this change? Should we, for instance, deliberately pour poison into our water supply to preserve the brain damage or perhaps even undergo simple neurosurgery to keep our intelligence at the level of the status quo? Surely, it would be absurd to do so. Yet if we don’t poison our water supply, the consequences will be equivalent to the consequences that would have resulted from performing cognitive enhancement in the case where the water supply hadn’t been contaminated in the ?rst place. Since it is good if no poison is added to the water supply in the present scenario, it is also good, in the scenario where the water was never poisoned, to replace that status quo with a state in which we are cognitively enhanced. ____ Bostrom talks about the so-called “double-reversal test” as a method for arguing in […]

Cristian Lorenzutti originally shared this post: Word Lens, augmented reality translation app, now on Android […]Tuna with hot sauce. Beach closed. Please use caution. Apple users of iOS devices, drawing envy with their cooler than cool apps, have since 2010 enjoyed Word Lens, an application that instantly provides a foreign language translation of a menu or road sign just by the user hovering the device’s camera over the foreign language content in realtime. Now Word Lens is offering its translation app for Android too. The Android app will do translations between English and Spanish, Italian, and French using just the video camera. The nice feature of the app is that network connectivity is not required.[…] Via Phys.og: http://goo.gl/KVOPn Free demo version here: http://goo.gl/NuJEH #technology #android #augmentedreality #language #translator

Attention +Sebastian Thrun: this is what a biologically inspired digital overlay looks like. I sure hope the kids at Google X understand this, because the existing +Project Glass demo is clearly designed to serve up apps and advertisements, and that’s about the worst possible way to waste our visual system. Cyborgs can do so much better. Allison Sekuler originally shared this post: Hidden Patterns in the Bee’s Garden I posted a longer piece for #ScienceSunday (http://goo.gl/9d2Ab) describing how bees see the world differently than humans do. For example, *bees can see UV (ultraviolet) light where we can’t. That difference produces some spectacular patterns, which are invisible for us.* Fortunately, photographer *Bjørn Rørslett* has taken a huge range of UV photos of flowers, documenting the UV bull-eye landing pattern bees can use to navigate right to the centre of flowers, where the pollen awaits. The images below show two of my favourite examples from Bjørn Rørslett’s photos: two (left) with our visible light, and two (right) with UV filters. Note that these haven’t been adjusted for the bees optics or other aspects of their vision. You can see many more examples of the hidden patterns bees might see in our gardens at Rørslett’s website: http://goo.gl/ydHIr And you can learn more about bee vision – including a hands-on demo of how bee optics change their view of Einstein – in my longer post, here: http://goo.gl/9d2Ab for #ScienceSunday curated by me, +Robby Bowles , +Rajini Rao , and +Chad Haney

Derya Unutmaz originally shared this post: Stephen Quake, is a professor of bioengineering and applied physics at Stanford University where he studies microfluidic large-scale integration. The prodigious professor’s work has thus far led to the creation of four companies and 82 patents. Dr. Quake used the principles of an integrated circuit to develop a ‘biochip’ that can perform nearly 10,000 independent simultaneous measurements – orders of magnitude above and beyond pipetting scientists in the lab. The chip is already being used to perform basic research and to discover new drugs. For his ingenuity, the chip’s inventor was recently awarded the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT prize for exceptional innovators. He co-founded San Francisco-based Fluidigm Corp in 1999 to sell the chip. Labs are already using the chip to grow proteins into the crystalline arrangements necessary for studying protein structure. The structures for both the Ebola virus and the H5N1 Influenza virus were solved using the chip. Source: Singularityhub.com #ScienceSunday

I’m not sure that the spatial metaphors of “nearness” are adequate here. What is missing is a unified theory that explains neural organization and its functional role in the survival of the organism. We have mountains and mountains of data, and we can tell from brute force alone that we are sniffing around in the right areas. We might, in fact, be quite near a general solution and not even know it, since we lack the theoretical tools to orient ourselves in the search space. In other words, we are making substantial progress despite not really knowing what we are doing. That’s rather importantly different from being “nowhere near”, since the latter at least suggests that we know where we are going. Comment reposted from OP Mark Changizi originally shared this post: More on being nowhere near artificial brains. Later Terminator: We’re Nowhere Near Artificial Brains | The Crux | Discover Magazine Mind & Brain | artificial intelligence | I can feel it in the air, so thick I can taste it. Can you? It’s the we’re-going-to-build-an-artificial-brain-at-any-moment feeling. It’s exuded into the

By matching search queries with information from sensors and cross-referencing data from social networks such as Twitter, users will be able to receive detailed responses to questions such as ‘What part of the city hosts live music events which my friends have been to recently?’ or ‘How busy is the city centre?’ Currently, standard search engines such as Google are not able to answer search queries of this type. Dr Iadh Ounis, of the University of Glasgow’s School of Computing Science, said: “The SMART project will be built upon an open-source search engine technology known as Terrier we have been developing at the University since 2004, and we’re pleased to be involved in this innovative research initiative. “The SMART engine will be able to answer high-level queries by automatically identifying cameras, microphones and other sensors that can contribute to the query, then synthesising results stemming from distributed sources in an intelligent way. ___________ The problem, of course, is that these distributed sensors are usually proprietary with restricted access. These restrictions might invalidate this kind of technology (which is essential for a functional #attentioneconomy )before it even gets off the ground. via +Anthony Beavers Peter Suber originally shared this post: Searching the network of sensors The article focuses on the implications for city management. But think about the implications for data collection and data analysis in meteorology, ecology, economics, and any other science that invents a use for real-world sensors. Researchers developing new type of internet search engine (Phys.org) — Computer scientists at the University of Glasgow are participating in a new project to develop a search engine which will draw its results from sensors located in the physical world.

David McCumber originally shared this post: When the world sleeps, based on Twitter activity Twitter engineers Miguel Rios and Jimmy Lin explored tweet volumes in different cities and found some interesting tidbits about how people use the service. We see different patterns of activity between the four cities. For example, waking/sleeping times are relatively constant throughout the year in Tokyo, but the other cities exhibit seasonal variations. We see that Japanese users’ activities are concentrated in the evening, whereas in the other cities there is more usage during the day. In …