Vineet KewalRamani originally shared this post: Already surrounded by machines that allow him, painstakingly, to communicate, the physicist Stephen Hawking last summer donned what looked like a rakish black headband that held a feather-light device the size of a small matchbox. Called the iBrain, this simple-looking contraption is part of an experiment that aims to allow Dr. Hawking — long paralyzed by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease — to communicate by merely thinking. iBrain, a Device That Can Read Thoughts NeuroVigil’s iBrain may help people with A.L.S., like Stephen Hawking, communicate using advanced machine-brain interfaces.

Betsy McCall originally shared this post: 10,000 simulations show warming range of 1.4 to 3 degrees by 2050 A project running almost 10,000 climate simulations on volunteers’ home computers has found that a global warming of 3 degrees Celsius by 2050 is ‘equally plausible’ as a rise of 1.4 degrees.

This is a very interesting article, I’m not quite sure what to make of it. The quote +John Kellden cites below is worth reading, but I’m not sure what “Kantian wholes” Kaufmann is referring to. Is he talking about selves? Is this an explicitly panpsychist position hidden behind a veil of holism? Not that I’d object… The quote I’ll pick is below. “Life keeps making room for itself!” I’ll just note that this is true of the niches humans create too, of course. Not just our economies in the financial sense meant in this article, but for the literal environments that our bodies and its supporting infrastructure creates. And not the biological niches either, the ones filled by raccoon and your pet cat, or the bacteria in your gut. We create, along with these biological cohabitants, any number of technological devices, objects, highly industrially designed to play any number of niche roles in ones daily life. These objects, which are as (and usually more) resource-intensive as any living creature, is also part of the life we continue to make room for. The very part of us that makes us human is the part of us that is making ourselves digital. “This niche creation via the expanding Adjacent Possible expands Darwin’s wedge filled floor with ever more wedges! Life keeps making more room for itself! Competition tempers this expansion. More, I think that, on average, each new species, alone or with others, creates more than one new empty Adjacent Possible niche, generating a self amplifying, “supracritical” explosion of ever new species occupying the ever new niches they create without selection. The biopshere explodes in interwoven diversity. This explosion process is interrupted by small and large extinction events.” John Kellden originally shared this post: Insights, part 26: Beyond Adjacent Possible “…new niches […]

Oh this is so so great. Lorna Salgado originally shared this post: Mathematician Marcus du Sautoy has been to meet the first robot to mimic in anatomical detail the movements of the human body. The anthropomimetic robot, which has joints, bones, muscles and tendons will, according to Professor Owen Holland from the University of Sussex, bring us closer to true artificial intelligence. Horizon: The Hunt for AI is on BBC Two at 9pm on Tuesday 3 April. Watch online (UK only) or see more clips at the above link. #ai #science #tech The robot with a human skeleton The world’s first anthropomimetic robot, which moves and thinks like human, has been built by Professor Owen Holland.

Copying +Billy Hung‘s comment as well, since it bears repeating: I am also sad to see that Koch didn’t get tenure. However, what I find most admirable about this is that Koch went into this following his own priority of educating and mentoring students. He was clear that he would be evaluated on a different standard, but chose to do what his heart told him is the right thing. This is a form of civil disobedience against the academia, and I think he deserves a great amount of credit for it. As with most schools, the tenure process is one that has rules and guidelines. In fact, most schools could possibly use more detailed guidelines to make it less a guess-what-we-want process. It is sad that UNM couldn’t fit Koch’s work into the existing guidelines, but I think the criticism here should be on their inability to adjust these guidelines to take into account newer forms of scholarship, and not on the fact that they followed existing guidelines. Mark Hahnel originally shared this post: http://www.science3point0.com/evomri/2012/03/30/university-of-new-mexico-just-missed-an-opportunity-to-be-ahead-of-the-curve/ University of New Mexico just missed an opportunity to be ahead of the curve | Research cycle research Steve Koch, one of the most active practitioners of open science, announced today that he has not been awarded tenure, despite the considerable support he had received from the global open science com…

FF: So now you had an absurdly powerful chess playing system. What does one do with it? Playing against humans would not be sensible, and even other computers would be simply killed by it. VR: That was not the point, not my intention. I have been using it for purely analytical purposes, to try to solve certain openings. What does “to solve” in this context mean? And how do you go about it. We developed an algorithm which attempts to classify chess positions into wins, draws and losses. Using this algorithm, we have just finished classifying the King’s Gambit. In other words, the King’s Gambit is now solved. http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=8047 ChessBase.com – Chess News – Rajlich: Busting the King’s Gambit, this time for sure Publisher of high quality chess programs and databases. Offers a free access to a regulary updated online database.

And curiously, and interestingly, it looks as though at any time about half the ants in the colony are just doing nothing. So, despite what it says in the Bible, about, you know, “Look to the ant, thou sluggard,” in fact, you could think of those ants as reserves. That is to say, if something happened — and I’ve never seen anything like this happen, but I’ve only been looking for 20 years — if something happened, they might all come out if they were needed. But in fact, mostly they’re just hanging around in there. And I think it’s a very interesting question — what is there about the way the colony is organized that might give some function to a reserve of ants who are doing nothing? And they sort of stand as a buffer in between the ants working deep inside the nest and the ants working outside. And if you mark ants that are working outside, and dig up a colony, you never see them deep down. So what’s happening is that the ants work inside the nest when they’re younger. They somehow get into this reserve. And then eventually they get recruited to join this exterior workforce. And once they belong to the ants that work outside, they never go back down. http://www.ted.com/talks/deborah_gordon_digs_ants.html #attentioneconomy #selforganization #mythoflazy Deborah Gordon digs ants | Video on TED.com TED Talks With a dusty backhoe, a handful of Japanese paint markers and a few students in tow, Deborah Gordon digs up ant colonies in the Arizona desert in search of keys to understanding complex syst…

Deen Abiola originally shared this post: Tesler’s Theorem states that “AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet.” From this we can deduce that once AI reaches human parity we will have to conclude that there is no such thing as intelligence.

What happened to society because we made a lot of little boy scouts? We produced generations of campers. We distributed enough skills, knowledge, interest, and appreciation of camping among the public that interest in camping sustains itself. +Mark Surman says we need a new scouting movement that will prepare our kids for the world they’ll be living in. We need a scouting movement for coding the web. He’s exactly right. Not just about the need for coders. This is how we should be thinking about skills-based learning generally. Not just in terms of the brain in front of us (though that matters a lot!) but also about the networks that brain will be part of in the future. The whole talk is brilliant. Rebecca MacKinnon originally shared this post: A scouting movement for the web I’ve been thinking about ‘a scouting movement for the web’ for a while: a practical movement focused on the skills and creativity that spring from the internet. I finally got around to doing a talk on this idea at last week’s TEDx Seneca. Here is a video of the talk: You do not have sufficient freedom levels to view this video. The talk starts with a question: what was the most important social innovation that scouting gave to the world? Answer: civilian camping . Before Baden Powell, only …

However, it is still unclear about the attention dynamics of the vast majority of topics and stories that never reach the critical mass. As such, it has remained an open question about the attention dynamics and the initial growth of these items. We attempt to propose dynamics of the user attention, measured in the number of user comments, for these general items on social media websites. #attentioneconomy Bruno Gonçalves originally shared this post: From User Comments to On-line Conversations. (arXiv:1204.0128v1 [cs.CY]) We present an analysis of user conversations in on-line social media and their evolution over time. We propose a dynamic model that accurately predicts the growth dynamics and structural properties of conversation threads. The model successfully reconciles the differing observations that have been reported in existing studies. By separating artificial factors from user behaviors, we show that there are actually underlying rules in common for on-line conversations in different social media web…

Steve Ogilvie originally shared this post: MIT news New algorithms could enable heaps of ‘smart sand’ that can assume any shape, allowing spontaneous formation of new tools or duplication of broken mechanical parts.

“The more humans and nonhumans share existence, the more humane the collective is.” -Latour Quoting +Azimuth: The German branch of Wikimedia is trying to develop Wikidata, a database of knowledge that can be read and edited by both humans and machines. It’s being funded through a donation of 1.3 million euros, half coming from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, an organization established by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen in 2010. This is the kind of thing we need to help save the planet. Robin Green originally shared this post: TechCrunch | Wikipedia’s Next Big Thing: Wikidata, A Machine-Readable, User-Editable Database Funded By Google, Paul Allen And Others Wikidata, the first new project to emerge from the Wikimedia Foundation since 2006, is now beginning development. The organization, known best for its user-edited encyclopedia of knowledge Wikipedia, …