From Silicon Republic: “A group of researchers from University of Arizona in the US have come up with a robotic set of legs to mimic the act of walking. They’re claiming their robotic innovation is the first to fully model walking in a biologically accurate manner.
Researchers from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Arizona are behind the robotic legs. To create the legs, they studied the neural musculoskeletal architecture and sensory feedback pathways in humans, before simplifying them and weaving them into the robot to make it mirror the act of walking.”
From Sarah KoronesSmart Planet piece about the cultural conditions that lead to creation:
“So which cultures lend themselves to innovation?
According to research from the Georgia Institute of Technology, both individualistic and patriotic cultures tend to breed innovation. After examining 20 years worth of data on 62 different countries, researchers found that individualism consistently had a strong, positive effect on innovation. But individual-centered cultures weren’t the only ones to breed success: certain types of collectivist cultures, like those with strong attitudes of patriotism and nationalism, also fared well on the advancement scale.
In cultures that place a premium on individuality, such as the U.S., the drive to innovate is closely linked to the personal rewards that might be reaped following the success of a new product or invention. One look towards Silicon Valley with its seemingly constant stream of millionaires and it’s not hard to see why so many people strive to create something new in America.
But some types of collectivist cultures enjoy equally high rates of innovation for completely different reasons.”
A photo process that used a metal plate and electrical charge to take trippy, often spectral-looking pictures, Kirlian photography was thought at one point to perhaps be able to reveal the “auras” of its subjects. Could it read the mental states of people whose thumbs were photographed? Could it tell who was suffering from cancer before other tests could reveal the disease? No, it couldn’t. The process discovered by accident in 1939 by Semyon Kirlian, while oddly beautiful to look at, ultimately had no scientific application. Footage is from UCLA in 1974, when that university was heavily researching parapsychology.
From a 2010 Daily Bruin article about UCLA parapsychology research:“The phone calls would come in, and the voice on the other side would ask, ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’
This wasn’t a prank. It was an investigation of ghostly phenomena.
The year was 1968, and UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute was the new home for a controversial type of research – parapsychology.
Dr. Thelma Moss, a late psychology professor, headed the lab, which conducted scientific experiments in clairvoyance, telepathy and haunted houses until 1978.
‘It was a very exciting period of time. Things go in trends, and in the ’70s, there was a tremendous interest in parapsychology,’ said Kerry Gaynor, a former research assistant. ‘We were getting calls and letters every day. We were hearing about this kind of phenomena from all around the country and all around the world.'”
Every now and then, the perfect writer meets the perfect subject. Such is the case with Franklin Foer’s article of a doomed May-December D.C. relationship in this week’s New York Times Magazine. An excerpt from “The Worst Marriage in Georgetown,” a love story, among other things:
“From their first date, Viola and Albrecht enjoyed provoking one another. At night, they would lie in their separate beds, arguing in German. But every so often, their disagreements would escalate. In 1992, Muth was convicted of beating Drath, the beginning of a rap sheet that hardly reflects the many lesser occasions of abuse. Once when they were staying at the Plaza Hotel, he threw her clothes into the hall and locked her out of the room. ‘He has all my credit cards,’ she told Gary Ulmen on the phone, who rushed to the hotel and lent her cash to buy a train ticket back to Washington.
Where Drath nursed deep feelings and wrote passionately about her love for him, Muth was in the relationship for something else. He described their marriage as transactional, an example of a Washington coupling where husband and wife merge in order to aggregate their talents and social capital. When a local television reporter named Kris Van Cleave asked Muth how his marriage overcame so many obstacles, Muth replied, ‘Why does Secretary Clinton remain with President Clinton?’
Perhaps Drath should have suspected that he was gay earlier — he was actively having affairs with men. But once she came to terms with Muth’s sexual orientation, he did little to disguise it. He even briefly moved in with a boyfriend in 2002. ‘He was the boy, she was the wife,’ Muth explained in an e-mail he sent to friends. ‘You have the one for one set of reasons, the other another, the lives were fully integrated.’ They were so integrated that the boyfriend suffered the same abuse as the wife. When Muth threatened to kill him, he obtained a restraining order.
In May 2006, Drath was eating dinner on her couch while Muth sat on the other side of the room, drunk. Your daughter isn’t a lawyer, he blared to his wife, she’s a saleswoman. (In fact, she is a judge in Los Angeles.) It might have been best to let Muth rant, but Drath defended her daughter, telling Muth that he wasn’t smart enough to get into law school. According to the detectives’ report, he responded by swinging a chair at her, knocking her from the sofa and then repeatedly pounding her head against the floor. The next morning, Drath escaped to her daughter’s home and phoned 911. When the police finally arrested Muth, he left Drath behind — an exit everyone close to her hoped would be final.”
Biotech and performance enhancement will continue blurring more and more lines–and not just for horses. From Will Oremus at Slate:
‘Reversing an earlier ban, the international governing body for equestrian sports has decided that cloned horses can compete alongside their traditionally bred counterparts.
‘The FEI will not forbid participation of clones or their progenies in FEI competitions,’ the Federation Equestre Internationale said after its June meeting in Lausanne, Switzerland, according to The Chronicle of the Horse. ‘The FEI will continue to monitor further research, especially with regard to equine welfare.’
That’s good news for two companies—ViaGen in Texas and Cryozootech in France—that have successfully cloned champion horses, mainly for breeding purposes. Cryozootech has produced two clones of the American show-jumping champion Gem Twist. ViaGen, which owns the rights to the technology that produced the famous cloned sheep Dolly, has cloned several horses, including a quarter horse, a barrel racer, and a polo pony.”
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Mark Walton, President of ViaGen, the “cloning company”:
This week I’m going to read Thomas Fleming’s essay-length Kindle book, What America Was Really Like in 1776. The excerpt in the Wall Street Journalis well-written and informative, though it’s odd to comment on the U.S. economy of 236 years ago without mentioning slave labor. I’m sure the book goes into that topic, but the WSJ passage doesn’t. An excerpt:
“Those Americans, it turns out, had the highest per capita income in the civilized world of their time. They also paid the lowest taxes—and they were determined to keep it that way.
In the northern colonies, according to historical research, the top 10% of the population owned about 45% of the wealth. In some parts of the South, 10% owned 75% of the wealth. But unlike most other countries, America in 1776 had a thriving middle class. Well-to-do farmers shipped tons of corn and wheat and rice to the West Indies and Europe, using the profits to send their children to private schools and buy their wives expensive gowns and carriages. Artisans—tailors, carpenters and other skilled workmen—also prospered, as did shop owners who dealt in a variety of goods. Benjamin Franklin credited his shrewd wife, Deborah, with laying the foundation of their wealth with her tradeswoman’s skills.”
“This development matters because predictions matter.” (Image by John Haslam.)
Plenty of insiders were wrong about the Supreme Court decision regarding the Affordable Care Act, but how did large collections of outsiders do? Not so hot. From David Leonhardt’s analysis at the New York Times of the cooling of prediction markets and what that means:
“With the rumors swirling, I began to check the odds at Intrade, the online prediction market where people can bet on real-world events, several times a day. The odds had barely budged. They continued to show about a 75 percent chance that the law’s so-called mandate would be ruled unconstitutional, right up until the morning it was ruled constitutional.
The market — the wisdom of crowds — turned out to be wrong.
I have since come to think of the court’s ruling as the signature example of the counterattack of the insiders. After the better part of a decade in which various markets, from Intrade to the stock market, became many people’s preferred way to peer into the future, a backlash is clearly under way. Not so long ago, knowing about the existence of Intrade was a mark of being in the vanguard. Today, mocking Intrade, ideally on Twitter, is a sign of sophistication.
This development matters because predictions matter. They allow government officials, corporate executives and citizens to plan for the future. They are an unavoidable part of life.”
Looking for a loan of $4000. Willing to pay it back with interest within 2 months tops. Due to me being a victim of identity theft, my credit isn’t good enough for a bank loan. I work a great paying job for about 7 years now and i have great references. I can give all documents necessary. Willing to pay back a negotiable amount. You can come to my home to talk about this. Email me your number if your willing to help. Please no schemes, I’m in desperate need. Thank you!
“Home on the Range,” one of the prettiest songs ever about genocide, features lyrics written originally in 1873 by Dr. Brewster M. Higley, though the line about the “Red Man” was added later. Still the state song of Kansas, here are versions by Western icons Roy Rogers and Gene Autry.
“Milwaukee, Wis.—Barney Baldwin, the dime museum freak, who is known as ‘the living man with the broken neck,’ attempted suicide here last evening by taking poison. He was removed to the Emergency Hospital and is in a fair way to recover.”
This classic photograph by Francis M. Fritz of John Muir shows the California conservationist in late life, seven years before his passing. Muir spent the majority of his years studying rocks, icebergs, forest and birds, and pressing successfully for the formation of national parks. A folksy story about him that was republished in the April 24, 1901 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“A writer in Ainslie’s Magazine tells this of John Muir:
John Muir, the mountain climber, is a fascinating companion. He abounds in fun and his talk is apt to become a monologue, as listeners grow too interested even for comment. He runs in a steady, sparkling stream of witty chat, charming reminiscences of famous men, of bears in the woods and red men in the mountains; of walks with Emerson, of tossing in a frail kayak on the storm-tossed waters of Alaskan floods. By turn he is a scientist, mountaineer, story-teller and light-hearted school boy.
Alhambra Valley, where he has a home of many broad acres, is a beautiful vale curled down in the lap of Contra Costa hills, sheltered from every wind that blows and warmed to the heart by the genial California sunlight. Here he dwells, a slender, grizzled man, worn-looking and appearing older than he is, for hard years among the mountains have told upon him.
It was a fair picture of peace and plenty under the soft, blue September sky. A stream ran close at hand, shaded by alders and sycamores and the sweet-scented wild willow. On the bank nearest us stood a solitary blue crane, surveying us fearlessly. A flock of quail made themselves heard in the undergrowth, and low above the vineyards a shrike flew, uttering his sharp cry. Noting him I said to Mr. Muir:
Question (nyseed): When you interviewed Mark Cuban about the problems with high-frequency trading you asked him “What’s the solution?” How would you respond to the same question?
Answer (scott_patterson): The regulators need to get on top of what’s going on and fast. The public is losing trust in the markets and right now our regulators can’t give them any assurances that they’re wrong. Right now we just don’t know and our regulators don’t either — that’s why the market is dark.
Question (davidmanheim): Is there a possibility of knowing what is going on if the markets remain fully automated, and computerized trading can go on at speeds that make the data processing to understand them so difficult? How can regulators understand a market with arbitrarily complex, constantly changing automatic program running on them? Do changes need to be made first?
Answer (scott_patterson): They simply need to get the computer fire power to monitor the market, and it exists. They just haven’t done it yet. There’s a proposal to build a so-called Conoslidated Audit Trail that could help solve some of these problems. I wrote about it for WSJ last year.
Question (hatetosayit): I’m suspicious about this concept have having a government computer monitor an automated market. As long as it’s a bunch of computers operating based on set rules, won’t there be room to invent new exploits that take advantage of those rules without being detected?
Answer (scott_patterson): Are you suspicious of cops using radar to catch speeders on the highway? Because right now the SEC doesn’t have that radar.
Question (nyseed): Honestly, how confident are you that this could actually happen? Can the public help? Or is reform just a faint hope?
Answer (scott_patterson): I’m not confident, but I’m hopeful. I’m hopeful that my book might help trigger enough outrage that they’re forced to do it. But it’s a hard fight because the industry has all the money and the lobbyists. Regulation is a dirty word on Wall Street.
From BLDG BLOG, a post about Yodaville, an insta-ghost town in the Arizona desert that the U.S. military built to blow up:
“Yodaville is a fake city in the Arizona desert used for bombing runs by the U.S. Air Force. Writing for Air & Space Magazineback in 2009, Ed Darack wrote that, while tagging along on a training mission, he noticed ‘a small town in the distance—which, as we got closer, proved to have some pretty big buildings, some of them four stories high.’
As towns go, this one is relatively new, having sprung up in 1999. But nobody lives there. And the buildings are all made of stacked shipping containers. Formally known as Urban Target Complex (R-2301-West), the Marines know it as ‘Yodaville’ (named after the call sign of Major Floyd Usry, who first envisioned the complex).
As one instructor tells Darack, ‘The urban layout is actually very similar to the terrain in many villages in Iraq and Afghanistan.’
The Urban Target Complex, or UTC, was soon ‘lit up with red tracer rounds and bright yellow and white rocket streaks,’ till it “looked like it was barely able to keep standing.'”
“Human capital is vastly increased Crowdsourcing brings people together to solve problems. Yet far fewer than one per cent of the world’s population is involved. We need expand human capital. Most of the world does not have access to the education afforded a small minority. For every Albert Einstein, Yo-Yo Ma or Barack Obama who has educational opportunities, uncountable others do not. This squandering of talent translates into reduced economic output and a smaller pool of problem solvers. The net opens the gates education to anyone with a computer. A motivated teen anywhere on the planet can walk through the world’s knowledge — from the webs of Wikipedia to the curriculum of MIT’s OpenCourseWare. The new human capital will serve us well when we confront existential threats we’ve never imagined before.”
I’ve asked this question before, but how different would the United States be if 22 of our 44 Presidents had been women? How changed would the nation be and how different the relations between men and women?
Ms. magazine turns 40 years old this month, having leftthe pages of New Yorkto become its own brand in 1972. A look at Gloria Steinem, one of the founders, a year before the publication was launched.
When a pigeon in a lab setting believes wrongly that some incidental behavior it has displayed is the reason why it’s being fed, it takes about 1,000 repetitions in which the food no longer appears before the behavior ceases. Humans are also not always great at recognizing truth in patterns. Not every cluster has a cause. Spikes and discrepancies can occur naturally. They will occur naturally. It’s easy to confuse correlation and causation, to misread outliers. From B.F. Skinner’s 1948 paper “Superstition in the Pigeon“:
“The experiment might be said to demonstrate a sort of superstition.The bird behaves as if there were a causal relation between its behavior and the presentation of food, although such a relation is lacking. There are many analogies in human behavior. Rituals for changing one’s luck at cards are good examples. A few accidental connections between a ritual and favorable consequences suffice to setup and maintain the behavior in spite of many unreinforced instances.The bowler who has released a ball down the alley but continues to behave as if he were controlling it by twisting and turning his arm and shoulder is another case in point. These behaviors have, of course, noreal effect upon one’s luck or upon a ball half way down an alley, just as in the present case the food would appear as often if the pigeon did nothing — or, more strictly speaking, did something else.”
The Ministry of Supply is doing a Kickstarter campaign for a futuristic, sweat-resistant dress shirt, called the Apollo, which is based on NASA Spacesuit technology. And not a moment too soon because it’s hot as hell out there. Some of you smell like a stable with a dead horse in it. And some of you reek like gun powder that was just used to shoot a hobo.
“As early as 1945, the American engineer and inventor Vannevar Bush described the potentials of a hypothetical system he dubbed ‘Memex’: a single device within which a compressed, searchable form of all the records and communications in someone’s life could be stored. It’s a project whose spirit lives on in Microsoft’s MylifeBits project, among other places, which attempted digitally to record every single aspect of a modern life – and presented the results in a book by researchers Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell entitled Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything.
What Google’s glasses suggest to me, though, is a giant leap forward in the sheer ease of capturing and broadcasting our lives from minute to minute – something that smartphones have already revolutionised once during the space of the last decade. Far more than mere technological possibility, it’s this portability and seamlessness that seem likely to most transform the way we live over the coming century. And it makes me wonder: what exactly does it mean when a computer’s memory becomes a more and more integral part of our own process of remembering?
The word ‘memory’ is the same in both cases, but there’s a huge gulf between the phenomena it describes in people and in machines. Computers’ memories offer a complete, faithful and objective record of whatever is put into them. They do not degrade over time or introduce errors. They can be shared and copied almost endlessly without loss, or precisely erased if preferred. They can be fully indexed and rapidly searched. They can be remotely accessed and beamed across the world in fractions of a second, and their contents remixed, augmented or updated endlessly.”
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Animated version of Vannevar Bush’s Memex diagrams:
From “As We May Think,” by Vannevar Bush in the Atlantic,1945: “There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.
Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose. If the aggregate time spent in writing scholarly works and in reading them could be evaluated, the ratio between these amounts of time might well be startling. Those who conscientiously attempt to keep abreast of current thought, even in restricted fields, by close and continuous reading might well shy away from an examination calculated to show how much of the previous month’s efforts could be produced on call. Mendel’s concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential.
The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.
But there are signs of a change as new and powerful instrumentalities come into use.”
As thrilled as I am to see the Higgs Boson particle–the so-called “God Particle”–was almost definitely discovered by the Large Hadron Collider, it brings to mind that America, with all its amazing academic science departments, should have been doing work on this scale. Not every federal project, even ones that fail, are bridges to nowhere, but in this political climate anything the government wants to invest in is treated as suspect. The free market is great, but you notice it didn’t lead to a collider here that is on par with the European one. How do we find thousands of lives and a trillion dollars to spend on a war that we don’t need to fight but not 1/100th of that for something that could put us at the vanguard of science?
As I recall, the LHC was mocked initially because of difficulties that slowed it down. Similarly, the Hubble Telescope in the U.S. was treated as a punchline when it encountered problems at the outset of its use. But both have turned out to contribute greatly to scientific knowledge.
And what if they hadn’t? What if they had been failures? Science and engineering are about searching and there is always an element of risk, sometimes a high one, in building something new with just a blueprint. But there’s a difference between folly and failure and we should be willing to risk the latter in the name of progress.•
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“Without engineers, none of this would ever have happened. There would be no disasters–but also no achievement”:
A brief piece about the ghoulish mummy trade in Egypt that ran in the June 17, 1888 Brooklyn Daily Eagle and was originally published in the Portland Oregonian:
“A gentleman who has just returned from an extended foreign tour was asked yesterday why he had not brought home from Egypt, among other curios, a mummy. He said there was a great deal of fraud in the mummy business. Persons purchasing mummies, of course, like to get them as well preserved and natural looking as possible, and as those found are generally in a more or less dilapidated condition, vendors have engaged in the business of manufacturing bogus mummies. They bargain with tramps, beggars and such people for their defunct carcasses, paying them a sum sufficient to make their remaining days short and sweet. These fellows are preserved and pickled and then smoked till they are good imitations of the genuine mummy. Whole rows of these articles can be seen in smokehouses at once. When sufficiently dry, they are wrapped in mummy cloth and sold, to Americans chiefly, bringing in a high price.”
Today is a special day when Americans eat too much, drink too much and blow stuff up. That’s right, it’s Wednesday.
Oh, and it’s also July 4th, the birthday of the U.S.A., the greatest nation in the history of the world. If you forget that America is the best country ever, we’ll remind you again in ten minutes. That’s because we’re large yet insecure, much like Alec Baldwin. Luckily, other countries are far worse so they can’t say shit. Yup, Somalia, I’m looking at you. Suck it.
Anyhow, enjoy a safe and happy holiday!
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Ray Charles singing “America the Beautiful” at Wrestlemania 2 in 1986:
