April 2, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM SCIENCE ON GOOGLE+: A…

Science on Google+: A Public Database originally shared this post: Philosophy of Science Circle Click on the following link to view the profiles in this circle: http://goo.gl/1t8zu. If you have a science related degree, you are a science journalist, you are a K-12 science teacher, or you curate a science page, then add your profile/page to the database (http://goo.gl/vOJoN). Please note that you also have to circle +Science on Google+: A Public Database if you would like to be considered for shared circles. View underlying database: http://goo.gl/Yz8KR View most recent shared circles: http://goo.gl/nO7rB
April 1, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM BETSY MCCALL

Betsy McCall originally shared this post: scipsy: Images produced with Diffusion spectrum… scipsy: “ Images produced with Diffusion spectrum magnetic resonance imaging (DSI) a new tool developed by Van J Wedeen. Here’s an interview, and here’s a slide show. ” Random fact: These methods…
April 1, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM VICTORIA ROSE

Victoria Rose originally shared this post: I brought this up with +Daniel Estrada after he shared an article and I felt like bringing it up into a discussion of its own. There’s talk going on about “digitizing a person” from what I’ve been seeing on a lot of different websites. The argument is that humans are producing their ideas using computers, and that eventually, the machine will simply be a practically immortal representation of that human. But there’s one thing that just keeps bugging me that might void the idea altogether. Is it really possible to fully capture a person and especially their ideas? In reality, an idea isn’t just a single entity on its own – it involves many subsets of thoughts. You can say that you “captured an idea” by making a person write a novel or a song, but it’s likely that they had so many things that they also wanted to do with it. For example, if you’re writing on the income inequality issue of the United States, it’s likely that you start off with, “There’s income equality.” Now go on into why there’s income inequality. More than likely, your brain is about to branch off into 1) gender, 2) race, 3) corporations, 4) taxes, or 5) corruption, and often you’ll have a revelation from one point to another. “But wait, you can’t just jump topics! That’s not proper writing! People will toss your book right out the window!” And you’ll have to re-organize your writing to adapt to that. Therefore, you’re not really capturing the true essence of your idea – because the idea itself WAS that stream of thought that led to that revelation, including the revelation itself. And then, when you get into a topic such as, say, corporations, and you go on […]
April 1, 2012

THE ATTENTION ECONOMY 0: PREAMBLE TODAY…

The Attention Economy 0: Preamble Today begins a series where I clarify and explain the +Attention Economy There is much confusion and uncertainty over what an Attention Economy is, how it works, and what it means for our present and our future. I have some answers to these questions, but they are just rough stones; I hope together we might polish them into something far more valuable. I cannot do this work alone. Over the course of these posts I will try to lay out both the theoretical and scientific justifications for the view. I will also talk about issues of implementation, engineering, and design for an Attention Economy, as well as its implications for politics, governance, and the sustainability of the human population. These are among the most important topics of our time, and I know my communities are filled with incredibly bright people tackling these issues from humblingly diverse and creative perspectives, at times with inspiring success. My ideas here are meant as contributions to this shared project; I hope the view will tie together some of the disjointed threads that might otherwise fray loose. Although I do have some academic goals for this work, I have no special interest, financial or otherwise, in writing these posts. My interest in the topics, and the urgency and earnestness with which I write these words, is entirely a product of being alive in the year 2012. Enough preliminaries, there’s work to do. If you appreciate this work, please participate. ________ The updated, official draft of this document can be found at the google doc here: http://tinyurl.com/cb7cdc7 It is open for commenting. Feel free to leave comments on style, grammar, and so on in the document. It’ll help. This and all source material is being maintained on the Attention Economy Wiki, […]
March 31, 2012

THE PREVIOUS BOT I POSTED IS FROM THE LAB…

The previous bot I posted is from the lab of Raffaello D’Andrea. His revolutionary robotics company Kiva Systems produces the bots in the video you see below. Last week, +Amazon.com acquired Kiva for an astounding 775 million dollars! Soon, Amazon’s 65 (and growing) distribution centers will be fully automated with Kiva robots. You can read more about Amazon’s acquisition of Kiva here: http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/19/amazon-acquires-online-fulfillment-company-kiva-systems-for-775-million-in-cash/ You can read a more about D’Andrea’s ingenious engineering approach here: http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/robotics-software/three-engineers-hundreds-of-robots-one-warehouse I am shamelessly stealing these robot videos and links from the wonderful Robots Podcast. The link below contains a fascinating interview with D’Andrea, which touches on both the robotics and the Amazon deal. http://www.robotspodcast.com/podcast/2012/03/robots-dynamic-systems/ For anyone interested in robotics and cybernetics from a science and engineering perspective, this is a wonderful source of cutting edge work in both the industry and the academy. Their podcast from two weeks ago on Self Organized Systems is required reading for anyone interesting in the complexities of the digital age. https://plus.google.com/u/0/117828903900236363024/posts/ifZhHqeQp9Q http://youtu.be/lWsMdN7HMuA
March 31, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM MATTHEW J PRICE

Matthew J Price originally shared this post: This starts out rather mundane though still cool with traffic prediction, but it gets better around virtual assistant. The most exciting part to me though is the complimentary cognition AI. Seems almost too cool for Microsoft.
March 31, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM MONIKA LJUBI?I?

Everything about this is great. I’m guessing this is probably the most educational music video ever made. That’s not saying much, so I’ll just repeat: the video is really good, and Bjork’s dissonant nega-beats compliment it beautifully. Monika Ljubi?i? originally shared this post: Björk has premiered the official music video for her track Hollow. If you never got enough close ups of what makes up your body in science class this clip may be for you.
March 31, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM WARD PLUNET

“Using sensors in our smartphones and other wearable devices, we can chart how many calories we burn, our body fat percentage, how many steps we take in a day, how long we sleep — even how many hours a week we spend commuting or sitting at a desk. Soon we’ll be able to access the same kind of statistics on our digital selves: Social reach and influence; tastes and preferences; achievements; credibility and reputation; habits; expertise. All that information at your fingertips at all times theoretically allows you to carefully chart a path for improvement—and share your winning strategy and stats with others. On a grand scale, that makes for an interconnected world of healthier, happier people making much more informed decisions.” It isn’t enough to just have personalized information about one’s own self. Having this information open and public is also the only way to measure and improve our social organizations. Ward Plunet originally shared this post: The ‘So What’ Of The Quantified Self The quantified self (QS) is growing – and an interesting perspective in this article. “proprietary data equals power, but insights equals gold.” So while it’s important to build up a data set comprised of useful and complementary signals, it’s the “so what?” that allows you really make money from the numbers. Unfortunately, I’m only playing “Foodville” in my mind, and don’t have a simple, gamified app that I can share or play with others. Perhaps a slick app encompassing elegant use of social and game mechanics would enable multiplayer modes, P2P pressure/obligation/guilt loops, use of Seven Deadly Sin motivators, progressive and adaptive leveling, and other tools to make Foodville palatable and easier to begin playing for mass audiences? I’m hoping to see clever QS + gamification designers team up to come up with such apps, […]
March 31, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM TIM O’REILLY

“The above chart shows a distribution of 2500 newly printed fiction books selected at random from Amazon’s warehouses. What’s so crazy is that there are just as many from the last decade as from the decade between 1910 and 1920. Why? Because beginning in 1923, most titles are copyrighted. Books from before 1923 tend to be in the public domain, and the result is that Amazon carries them — lots of them. The chart comes from University of Illinois law professor Paul Heald.” Tim O’Reilly originally shared this post: This is the most amazing graph that demonstrates what our wrong-headed copyright regime has done to suppress rather than encourage economic activity! If only our policy makers were driven by data rather than lobbying by copyright interests! The Missing 20th Century: How Copyright Protection Makes Books Vanish Because of the strange distortions of copyright protection, there are twice as many newly published books available on Amazon from 1850 as there are from 1950
March 31, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM CAS-GROUP

CAS-Group originally shared this post: CAS-Group Blog » Blog Archive » Anonymity and brevity as adaptation Stanley Milgram was an American social psychologist. In one of his studies he wondered how city dwellers manage to live in such proximity to each other. As this PsyBlog article says, he found that the…
March 30, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM CHAD HANEY

Chad Haney originally shared this post: Humans’ social games closely resemble those of apes and monkeys This is like “A Beautiful Mind” meets Jane Goodall. OK, not really, but that’s the first thing that popped into my head. A new take on the games people play in their relationships | UChicago News Human nature has deep evolutionary roots and is manifested in relationships with family members, friends, romantic and business partners, competitors, and strangers more than in any other aspects of b…
March 30, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM MICHAL NOVÁK

Michal Novák originally shared this post: How does Shazam work to recognize a song ? | So, you code ? So, you want to know how Shazam works? What is Shazam, you may ask ? Let’s say you’re in a bar, and they play a song that you like and you don’t know its name ? Shazam can help you find out what is th…
November 19, 2007

A CASCADE OF IMITATION

Led by Robots, Roaches Abandon Instincts They set up a cockroach arena one yard in diameter. Two six-inch-wide plastic discs were suspended over it, providing the dark shelters that cockroaches prefer to congregate in. But one disc was darker and a more likely cockroach hangout. When 16 cockroaches were placed in the arena, they naturally gravitated toward the darker disc, following what the researchers believe is an internal calculation of the amount of light and the number of other roaches, finding comfort in company. Dr. Halloy then replaced four of the cockroaches with four robots equipped with sensors to measure light and the proximity of other robots. When the robots emulated the real roaches, the group continued to seek the dark and crowded place. When the four robotic roaches were reprogrammed to prefer the lighter disc, however, the real roaches followed them about 60 percent of the time, in essence deferring their own judgment as the preference grew more popular. (The other 40 percent of the time, the robotic roaches succumbed to peer pressure and headed for the darkest place.) “It’s a cascade of imitation, so a small effect can become quite large,” said Stephen Pratt, a professor of life sciences at Arizona State University. “This one is a real step forward. They’ve developed these theories about what kinds of individual behavior rules would have to follow to generate a collective intelligence. I thought it was very gratifying they could get the roaches to do what they normally would not do.” See the special robot edition of Science this week for more info, and related articles. Thanks again to Steve for the heads up. I think that this is the right direction for robot research to go: looking at how to integrate machines into an entrenched social environments. It might […]
November 20, 2007

I DO NOT WANT TO DO THIS ANYMORE

November 27, 2007

STUPID ROBOT ARTICLE OF THE WEEK, INHUMAN EDITION

Everything I Need to Know About (Real) Robots I Learned From Transformers (Wired, via AAAI) Transformers don’t care about people, period… With their blatant disregard for people, Transformers burned into my psyche the idea that robots didn’t have to depend on—or be limited in the same ways as—humans. That was the kind of robot I wanted to build. It’s a subtle but important lesson: Ballsy independent robots designed to sense, think, and act according to their own, nonhuman rules can transcend human abilities rather than pathetically imitate them. Real-life examples of this abound today: In 2001, the Deep Space 1 smart probe used an AutoNav system to choose its own path to Comet Borrelly; the Seahorse autonomous underwater vehicle from the US Navy can search unmanned for submerged mines; and in recent military demonstrations, bullet trackers like iRobot’s RedOwl can pinpoint camouflaged snipers in milliseconds. None of these robots want to be a human, hurt a human, or even ask a human for directions.
November 27, 2007

ROMANCING THE CORE

November 29, 2007

BLUEBRAIN

A representation of a mammalian neocortical column, the basic building block of the cortex. The representation shows the complexity of this part of the brain, which has now been modeled using a supercomputer. |link| Thanks Steve
December 7, 2007

INTERNET ON HAND

We are quite close to having internet everywhere. I am always please to see people walking around with cell phones in hand or fussing with an iPod, because it shows just how accustomed we have become to having small portable connected devices around us at all times. These devices don’t just make calls or play music, they keep us connected and facilitate social networking, which is the lifeblood of the net. I am occasionally tickled at the phenomena of text messaging, which by all outward appearances is a technological step backwards, something like the equivalent of going from cell phones back to pagers, but bitches like textin. But the internet is dynamic and complicated in a way that doesn’t translate well to small portable devices, so having the internet everywhere is a really tough problem that has yet to see a real good solution. My PDA works in a pinch, but the technology is now about 4 years old and can only provide a stripped down, slow internet that is visually unappealing and functionally unsatisfying. I am told that iPhones are decent, but I haven’t had much experience with them so I can’t say for sure. It is probably the closest we’ve come yet, but Apple products strike me as more like a fashion accessory than a useful tool. I want an internet leatherman, not a katana. I’d like to get my hands on a Nokia N810 (attn christmas shoppers) since I don’t really care about having a phone as much as I need the internet. The N810 runs linux, and it looks like you can dig in and customize it as you see fit (once the software gets written, that is), and that seems to make it well suited to the needs of the net. At the other end […]
December 12, 2007

QUICK PHILOSOPHY OF MIND II

From Norms, Networks, and Trails by Adrian Cussins If the ‘rules’ don’t pre-empt what is properly possible in the ‘game’, then the ‘rules’ become part of what is negotiated by the ‘players’. If the ‘rules’ become part of what is negotiated by the ‘players’, then we end up with the comical but also absurd activity of “Calvinball” from the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon strip. Counter-examples: 1) The US Constitution contains provisions for revising and amending the constitution. 2) Wikipedia encourages active discussion of its policies and guidelines. Perhaps these processes are comical and absurd, but I don’t think they undermine the normative structure of the game as such. Am I wrong?
December 12, 2007

QUICK PHILOSOPHY OF MIND

From What is it like to be a Thermostat? by David Chalmers. What Lloyd’s approach brings out is that when we try to isolate the kind of processing that is required for conscious experience, the requirements are remarkably hard to pin down, and a careful analysis does not throw up processing criteria that are more than minimal. What are some reasonable-seeming functional criteria for conscious experience? One traditional criterion is reportability, but this is far too strong to be an across-the-board requirement. It seems reasonable to suppose that dogs and cats have conscious experience, even in the absence of an ability to report. If we seriously discussing panpsychism, why should we think that ‘reportability’ should be a strong requirement? To me, reportability seems very weak. My cat Gus lets me know he wants to go outside by knocking things off my desk. Gus is letting me know about his current internal state. If it is reasonable to suppose that Gus is having conscience experiences, then ‘wanting to go outside’ is a very likely candidate for an internal state that is associated with a phenomenological experience. So Gus exhibits exactly the sort of behavior we are looking for in an ability to report. If conscious states, as Chalmers assumes, are functionally independent of linguistic behavior, then there is no reason to assume that reportability as a criteria of consciousness rests on an ability to use language. Gus reports his internal states all the time, in a variety of ways, most of which annoy the shit out of me, and none of which are linguistic, but can very easily be taken as a evidence of an internal conscious state. Only when reportability is a weak requirement does the possibility of panpsychism become a live option, because its very easy to exhibit behavior […]
December 15, 2007

I AM A NODE OF SERVER

December 31, 2007

TERMINUS

Happy New Year
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