May 7, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM AZIMUTH

Azimuth originally shared this post: This New Yorker article is a good introduction to state of play in geoengineering – in particularly, the idea that artificially reducing the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth, or deliberately removing CO2 from the air, could limit global warming. I predict that at some point the majority public opinion on geoengineering will flip from “unthinkably risky” to “urgently desirable” – although, of course, not uniformly: it’ll be extremely divisive. “Last fall, the SPICE team decided to conduct a brief and uncontroversial pilot study. At least they thought it would be uncontroversial. To demonstrate how they would disperse the sulfur dioxide, they had planned to float a balloon over Norfolk, at an altitude of a kilometre, and send a hundred and fifty litres of water into the air through a hose. After the date and time of the test was announced, in the middle of September, more than fifty organizations signed a petition objecting to the experiment, in part because they fear that even to consider engineering the climate would provide politicians with an excuse for avoiding tough decisions on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Opponents of the water test pointed out the many uncertainties in the research (which is precisely why the team wanted to do the experiment). The British government decided to put it off for at least six months.” On the other hand, removing CO2 from the air seems harder to do at the necessary scale, but it would prevent ocean acidification, and Richard Branson has offered a Virgin Earth Challenge prize of 25 million dollars to anyone who can devise a process that would drain large quantities of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Thanks to +Jim Stuttard for pointing this out. Can Geoengineering Solve Global Warming? The best solution, nearly all scientists agree, […]
May 6, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM CLIMATE NEWS

h/t +Jon Lawhead Climate News originally shared this post: New forecasting system appeared to accurately forecast the US Summer heat wave. Luo and Zhang in GRL: “We found that starting from April 2011, the operational CFSv2 forecast consistently suggested an elevated probability of extremely hot days during the forthcoming summer over the Central Plains, and as the summer was approaching the forecast became more certain about the summer heat wave in its geographic location, intensity and timing. This study demonstrates the capability of the new seasonal forecast system and its potential usefulness in decision making process.” For more information about CFSv2 see http://cfs.ncep.noaa.gov/cfsv2.info/ h/t David Appell at http://davidappell.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/interesting-new-research.html Did we see the 2011 summer heat wave coming? Geophysical Research Letters publishes short, concise research letters that present scientific advances that are likely to have immediate influence on the research of other investigators. GRL letters …
May 6, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM JOHN BAEZ

John Baez originally shared this post: Most people are below average! Human performance is often not distributed according to the famous ‘bell curve’ or ‘Gaussian’. Instead, a small number of people vastly outperform the rest. A new study shows that in 186 out of 198 groups ranging from physics professors and Grammy nominees to cricketers and swimming champion, a small group of ‘superstars’ account for much of the success of the group as a whole. That means the majority are performing below the mathematical average – or to be precise, the ‘arithmetic mean’. This should not be depressing news, but it does mean that blindly modelling people’s behavior using a bell curve is a bad idea. So is expecting that ‘average’ means ‘typical’. Put Away The Bell Curve: Most Of Us Aren’t ‘Average’ : NPR For decades, teachers, managers and parents have assumed that the performance of students and employees fits what’s known as the bell curve — in most activities, we expect a few people to be very good…
May 6, 2012

WHAT ARE HUMAN RIGHTS? I SEE PEOPLE QUESTIONING…

What are Human Rights? I see people questioning the very idea of “human rights”, usually on the basis of a misunderstanding of just what a “right” is. They ask questions like “where do rights come from”, as if there must be some authority that makes “rights”, and absent such an authority, there are no rights. These are conceptual confusions, a product of a failure to educate ourselves in basic civics. So let’s learn some political theory together! A right is something that a community thinks is necessary for that community to be just. Rights are the duties that the society owes its members in order to respect their basic dignity, humanity, and autonomy. For instance, we think we have a right to free speech. This right doesn’t “come from” anywhere; instead, this is a value our society holds. If we were to stop stop respecting the people’s right to speak freely, we’ve explicitly come to a consensus that this would go against our collective values. If we start repressing free speech, we are in some important sense derelict in our duties to the public. So, for instance, when China violates human rights through internet censorship, the US will openly declare this to be a violation of human rights, and will urge them to change their ways. There is no “objective list” of what these rights are, and they aren’t eternal handed down from some absolute authority. Nevertheless, there are a series of rights that are acknowledged in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is the official UN document that is signed and endorsed by all its member states. The UDHR lists 30 distinct articles including both positive and negative rights. You can read the whole Declaration here: http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/ The preamble gives a great introduction to what a right is, […]
May 5, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM PATRICK BEJA

The descriptions of the technology don’t do it justice, but the example applications at the end of this video will make your imagination run wild. Screenless devices ftw. h/t +Rebecca Spizzirri Patrick Beja originally shared this post: “Touché” brings touch technology to doorknobs and water. Yes, seriously. This opens up a bunch of cool possibilities that I can’t wait to see materialized into the world by science and tech warlocks. Cool stuff ! (source: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/05/touche-brings-touch-controls-t.html)
May 4, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM JERRY NGUYEN

This isn’t just one stupid judge. These are systemic problems. The existing order of things is categorically incapable of handling the terms and conditions of the digital age responsibly and coherently. We don’t just need news judges or new laws. We need a new organizational system entirely. Jerry Nguyen originally shared this post: Judge Jackson made it clear that Facebook posts (e.g. status updates, comments, etc.) “…constituted enough speech to be considered speaking out as a matter of public concern.” This wins Facebook posts that coveted “protected speech’ status. In other words, posts contain “actual statements”, but Facebook “likes”? A Facebook like “…is not the kind of substantive statement that has previously warranted constitutional protection.” Um…better write more posts! Thanks +Radium Yttrium for the article! Judge rules that you can be fired for “Liking” the wrong thing on Facebook You thought things were tense at the office when you hit ‘Like’ on the Team Edward Facebook page when your boss was overwhelmingly Team Jacob. This case involving a sheriff’s election might just make…
May 3, 2012

ANTS USE SOPHISTICATED FORMS OF AGRICULTURE…

Ants use sophisticated forms of agriculture and architecture, requiring domestication and engineering techniques that easily match human efforts in scale and sheer awe. But unlike human beings, ants have been using these technologies sustainably for over 100 million years. We have the audacity to openly speculate whether we are the only intelligent life form in the universe, while these technological wizards are working miracles right under our noses. #ants are #awesome “The ants cut hairs from the plant and weave them together into a hollow gallery, which extends down the side of the tree’s branches. Within the gallery, the ants hide inside small holes, jaws agape. From the outside, nothing can see them. If an insect lands on the trap, hundreds of lurking jaws seize its legs and pull it spread-eagled, as if on a medieval ‘torture rack’. The victim is overpowered and dismembered. This alliance between ant and plant involves a third partner. Within their shelters, the ants grow a single species of fungus from the Chaetothyriales group. Many ants, including the famous leaf-cutters, grow fungi for food but the Allomerus ants use their fungi for construction instead. It acts as the glue that binds the plant hairs in their traps. The plant provides the bricks and the foundations, the fungus provides the mortar, and the ants do the manual labour.” Read more here: http://io9.com/5907344/these-amazonian-ants-build-one-of-the-freakiest-deathtraps-in-the-animal-kingdomh/t +Matt Uebel Allomerus decemarticulatus trap on Hirtella physophora
May 3, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM ERGIN KOCYILDIRIM

“Cordyceps fungi can decimate entire ant colonies, but some colonies can keep an infestation at bay and survive for long periods of time. A new study now reveals how they do so. It turns out that the zombie-ant fungus is itself parasitized by another fungus, which limits its ability to reproduce and prevents it from overwhelming the colony. This microbial defence system allows the two species to stably co-exist and ensures the long-term survival of the colony despite a high rate of infection. “The Cordyceps fungi manipulate worker ants to leave their nest and march off to a nearby site where they will eventually meet their fate. These sites are mass graves littered with the bodies of nest-mates that have succumbed to the fungus. They can persist in the same location for years, growing steadily as ants arrive one by one to die. “Sandra Andersen of the University of Copenhagen and her colleagues took advantage of this. They analysed the growth rate of five graveyards containing ant corpses infected with Ophiocordyceps camponoti-rufipedis, all located within a 400 hectare nature reserve in the Brazilian rain forest. “They identified a total of 432 infected ants in the five sites, and characterized each one according to the developmental stage of the fungus. This showed that 1/8 of the ants had been freshly killed, and a similar number were somehow damaged and showed no obvious signs of fungal growth. Another 1/8 had an immature mushroom growing from their heads, but only 1/16 had mature mushrooms that produced spores. They also found that more than half of the dead ants in each graveyard harboured a second parasitic fungus.” #ants #awesome Ergin Kocyildirim originally shared this post: Walking Dead This is a bit scary… Zombie-ant parasitic fungus kept in check by hyperparasitic fungus Ant colonies are […]
May 3, 2012

“THERE ARE NO RULES IN STARCRAFT. UNLESS…

“There are no rules in Starcraft. Unless you hack the program with a 3rd party mod, there’s literally nothing you can do in-game that is “unfair” or “against the rules”. You can’t break the law because there are no laws to break; anything you do within the game is considered fair. You can cheese, but everyone understands that cheesing is part of the game and dealing with it correctly is part developing your skills. There are referees in tournament play and sometimes refs issue decisive rulings, but those rulings almost always have to do with instances where the game has broken down through no fault of the players, either by lag or a disconnect or some other technical problem. The only way to cheat at Starcraft is to hack the technical infrastructure; otherwise, it’s all fair game. So there are security issues to manage hacking, but the issue of ensuring a fair match between the players themselves has almost no refereeing overhead. Like chess, but unlike just about every other sport, the game of Starcraft allows opponents to engage in full out, no-holds-barred competition. And in some deeply meaningful way, for patrick and thousands of other gamers, this competition is fair. Cruel, perhaps, but ultimately just.” #starcraft #attentioneconomy #playtowin Starcraft 2 is brutally honest: Lessons for the Attention Economy Starcraft 2 is brutally honest. You open it up, log on to Battle.net, click Find Match, and you’re almost instantly paired up with someone deemed to be within your skill level. Then you play, you …
May 3, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM ERGIN KOCYILDIRIM

If Prof. Ishiguro looks familiar, you might remember seeing lots of him before: Robot Looks Like Inventor Ergin Kocyildirim originally shared this post: Huggable robot with a beating heart The Hugvie is a cushion in a minimalistic human form. It contains a pocket into which you can put your mobile phone, transforming it into a physical communication medium. The shape of this huggable cushion is based on the Telenoid robot developed by Osaka University’s Professor Ishiguro. It contains a microcontroller and vibrators which match the characteristics of the caller’s voice, so people can have a richer communication experience when talking on the phone with loved ones. The two vibrators produce a throbbing sound like a heartbeat. That pulse can get faster or stronger, depending on the volume and tone of the caller’s voice.
May 3, 2012

STARCRAFT 2 IS BRUTALLY HONEST: LESSONS FOR THE ATTENTION ECONOMY

The title comes from Playing to Win (at life). For context: Starcraft 2 is brutally honest. You open it up, log on to Battle.net, click Find Match, and you’re almost instantly paired up with someone deemed to be within your skill level. Then you play, you win or you lose, and eventually it’s over. You can study the graphs and the replays, you can watch professional streams and the Day[9] Daily and read all the forum threads you want–at pretty much no point does the game not reward you for doing an infinite amount of homework–but at the end of the day, you have to click that Find Match button again, play another game, and inevitably lose if you want to get better. As professional player Aleksey “White-Ra” Krupnik puts it, “More GG, more skill.” There are plenty of games that are competitive. You can play Call of Duty online and get your balls e-stomped by lots of folks. The difference is that Starcraft 2 don’t fuck around. There are no teammates or lucky shots. There is no respawning. There are no unlockables or pay-to-win mechanics. The only difference between you and the guy who won is that the guy who won has trained harder and worked more so he was capable of outplaying you and sending you back to the Lose screen that helpfully reminds you that you’re ranked in the bottom 20th percentile in the world. It is cruel, almost. It’s a fandom article, and it is passionate and sincere so I mean that with all due respect. I like that the author makes good on the frequent comparisons between Starcraft and chess, which which are easy to dismiss as superficial by someone not immersed in the community. But I want to give a bit more of an […]
May 2, 2012

ARE ASTEROIDS A “NATURAL RESOURCE”?

There’s been lots of recent discussion about mining space asteroids, and everyone is in a tizzy about how awesome it is to be alive in such exciting times. Criticisms over the proposal are largely over whether it is technically feasible, and whether it is a good (read: profitable) idea. I want to approach the question from a different direction. The Planetary Resources video (which curiously has not itself gone viral, even if the news of it has) ends with the following line: “We are going to change the way the world thinks about natural resources.” You might immediately react to this line: Good! Wonderful! We treat natural resources like trash right now. Our poor treatment of this environment is part of the reason why we are looking for off-planet solutions. Hopefully we do start to think about natural resources differently, and if this massive and inspiring project can help us do so, all the better! So how exactly will the mining of asteroids change the way we think about natural resources? Well, the engineering and economic challenges are formidable, of course, but the engineering challenges for terrestrial mining are no joke either. Everyone got a nice long look at the incredible engineering feats responsible for both building and then repairing the Deepwater Horizon mining operation. Okay, space mining might be more challenging in the details (bigger profits, vastly more epic failures), but is this really “changing the way we think about natural resources”? Or is it more of the same at a more dramatic scale? For that matter, how do we think about natural resources now? The natural answer to this kind of question in the Digital Age is to consult Wikipedia’s entry on natural resources. But the Wiki definition starts off by distinguishing natural resources as “undisturbed by humans”; […]
September 21, 2006

THESE MACHINES ARE METHODICALLY KILLING OUR SOULS!

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by GoogleBy Bruce Sterling And Shakespeare. I used to hate Shakespeare, because the teachers would park us in front of the webcam terminals, turn on the Shakespeare lessons and leave the building. But then, somehow, they showed us Macbeth, a play which actually MEANS something to us. Grown-ups don’t understand that (or they wouldn’t be teaching it) but Macbeth is the true authentic story of my generation. This is Macbeth’s world, and us teenagers just live in it. Dig this: those “Three Weird Sisters”, who mysteriously know everything? They can foretell anything, instantly, like Google? Plus, the witches make it all sound really great – only, in real life, it totally sucks? Well, those “Three Weird Sisters” are the “Internet of Things”, they’re “Ubiquitous Computation”, they’re “Ambient Findability”. The truth is written all over the page (or the screen – my school can’t afford to give us any “pages”). Just read that awesome part where they’re boiling pseudocode in their witch-cauldron! They talk like web designers!
September 25, 2006

DROP AND GIVE ME 10100

Overheard on NPR: Potential recruits spend four times as long on average (roughly 16 minutes) talking to Sgt. Star than they do talking to a human recruiter in a chat room.
September 27, 2006

HACK THE GIBSON

GideonTech: Top Ten Worst Portrayals of Technology in a film I’m not very happy with this list. Notably absent: The Net and Enemy of the State. Also, to this day I am envious of Boris’ ability to type with one hand.
September 28, 2006

THIS CAN ROBOTIC

Two items: Japanese robot suit to let paralyzed move again. The robotic suit, which slips over a person’s upper body and arms, weighs only 1.8 kilograms (four pounds).When a person who suffered a stroke moves his or her active arm while wearing the suit, the paralyzed other arm will make the same motion by stretching and bending compressors that act as muscles. “By helping the paralyzed arm stretch and bend like the good arm, patients can remember the feelings of moving the arm themselves,” he said. |Link via Engadget| Uncrewed aircraft swarm together indoors A video shows one of the vehicles landing on a moving truck (wmv format), while using a camera to lock onto the target and landing pad. In another experiment, each UAV was programmed to automatically land on a stationary recharging station when running low on battery power. Another video shows two aircraft working together to track a moving ground vehicle. The UAVs automatically take turns tracking the target at low altitude. |Link via BoingBoing|
October 2, 2006

REFUSENIKS

I was strolling around the internet when I happened upon this quote: A recent Pew Internet and American Life Project survey notes that 42 percent of respondents fear that humans will lose control of technology, creating dangers like those in science fiction movies such as “The Terminator” or “The Matrix.” Some even believe that the intelligent robots we create will wind up treating us like pets. |link| After searching around for a while, I found that the Pew foundation recently updated its famous Internet survey (PDF) from the beginning of 2005. The original was rather bright-eyed and optimistic, with the most surprising statistics detailing the vast market penetrability of the internet (upwards of 70%) and broadband (around 40%) in American households. This newest survey is simultaneously more speculative and more reserved, and asks over 700 ‘experts’ in technology and related fields about their predictions for future. Specifically, they posed seven possible (and in most cases, compatible) scenarios obtaining in the year 2020, and asked if they agree with these scenarios. The scenario the media clinged onto was the following: The Future of the Internet II Autonomous technology is a problem: By 2020, intelligent agents and distributed control will cut direct human input so completely out of some key activities such as surveillance, security and tracking systems that technology beyond our control will generate dangers and dependencies that will not be recognized until it is impossible to reverse them. We will be on a “J-curve” of continued acceleration of change. Agree: 42% Disagree: 54% No reply: 4% Although Kurzweil is not among the responders, his influence in this question in particular is obvious. I’m not sure what, if anything, should be made about these results. In fact, most of the scenarios offered are pretty evenly balanced, with a disparity just large […]
October 5, 2006

EXA

Exa is six orders of magnitude above tera. Most Sun readers know about gigabytes and megabytes. But it’s estimated that in the year 2002 we created five exabytes (that’s a byte followed by 18 noughts) of information. |Link| I have trouble imagining that amount of data. I’m sure Eric Schmidt does too, but to him its just a mountain of rough diamonds waiting to be polished by Google. And his plans look, well, ambitious. And then there’s my dream product — I call it serendipity.It works like this. You have two computer screens. On one you’re typing, on the other comments appear checking the accuracy of what you are saying, suggesting better ways of making the same point. This would be good for journalists and politicians too! Impossible you might say. But I’m an optimist about human nature. History has proven that we have the ability and ingenuity to solve problems and improve our lives if only we are given the freedom to do so. And that’s exactly what the Internet does. Sounds innocent and helpful enough, but Schmidt clearly means this as a kind of political watchdog. He predicted that “truth predictor” software would, within five years, “hold politicians to account.” People would be able to use programs to check seemingly factual statements against historical data to see to see if they were correct. “One of my messages to them (politicians) is to think about having every one of your voters online all the time, then inputting ‘is this true or false.’ We (at Google) are not in charge of truth but we might be able to give a probability,” he told the newspaper. |link| Combine this with GooglePAC, and you have the biggest name on the Internet looking to take on Washington. Now, I don’t want to disturb […]
October 11, 2006

NOTES

To be expanded later From Hastert’s press conference last week: … our system obviously isn’t designed for the electronic age of Instant Messages. Also: Google and YouTube
October 12, 2006

I HAD TO PUT THIS UP HERE AT SOME POINT

I was inspired to post this picture after it was used in a PowerPoint slide by Siva Vaidhyanathan who today gave a talk today on Google. Details coming soon.
October 12, 2006

BOY/GIRL/ROBOT

I messed around with photoshop last night because clearly I have nothing else to do. Follow the jump for the results: boy girl robot
October 13, 2006

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN

I boldly stepped outside of Greg Hall today to attend a talk offered by the Library and Information Sciences Department. I felt the talk, entitled “What’s an Author to Do? Google, Digitization, and the Future of Books”, by Vaidhyanathan, was somewhat scattered, but it was aimed at a Library Sciences audience so that might have been par for the course. The room was certainly packed. The talk was motivated by the ‘public debate’ between Kevin Kelly and John Updike that played out in the NYT over the issues arising from Google Books. Vaidhyanathan dismissed both positions as ‘technofundamentalist’, which as I understood from the talk is roughly the idea that technological change is a kind of inevitable progress, and that whatever unintended externalities arise due to technological change can be resolved by further technological advancement. Updike was simply less optimistic of the change represented by Google Books, and claimed a nostalgia for the days of book stores and libraries. Instead of offering an alternative to fundamentalism, Vaidhyanathan suggested some important questions worth raising about Google Books that are notably absent from the public debate, with help from Lessig’s discussion of cyberspace IP law. Among the suggestions were all the usual suspects: privacy and confidentiality issues, transparency on Google’s end, a more open discussion of the what, when, and how of digital archiving, and so on. On the whole, Vaidhyanathan was cautiously optimistic about the prospects of a great big Google Library. He was very critical of Google’s privacy policy (he said there is no privacy), and was generally skeptical of Google’s closed-door, big corporation approach to the archive process. He did give two, I think very helpful, suggestions to the librarians; first, that ink and paper will never be replaced, nor will book sales be negatively affected by the digitization […]
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