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“You Wouldn’t Expect A Mannequin To Be Observing You”

November 20, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Stores have long spied and eavesdropped on customers, but now they have a still and silent army to aid them in mining data: mannequins. From Andrew Roberts at Bloomberg:

“Store mannequins are meant to catch your eye. Soon you may catch theirs.

Benetton Group SpA is among fashion brands deploying mannequins equipped with technology used to identify criminals at airports to watch over shoppers in their stores.

Retailers are introducing the EyeSee, sold by Italian mannequin maker Almax SpA, to glean data on customers much as online merchants are able to do. The 4,000-euro ($5,072) device has spurred shops to adjust window displays, store layouts and promotions to keep consumers walking in the door and spending.

‘It’s spooky,’ said Luca Solca, head of luxury goods research at Exane BNP Paribas in London. ‘You wouldn’t expect a mannequin to be observing you.'”

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“They Have Some Exciting New Results From One Of The Rover’s Instruments”

November 20, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The Mars Rover has apparently made a significant discovery, but NASA isn’t talking until the data has been confirmed. From Joe Palca at NPR:

“Scientists working on NASA’s six-wheeled rover on Mars have a problem. But it’s a good problem.

They have some exciting new results from one of the rover’s instruments. On the one hand, they’d like to tell everybody what they found, but on the other, they have to wait because they want to make sure their results are not just some fluke or error in their instrument.

It’s a bind scientists frequently find themselves in, because by their nature, scientists like to share their results. At the same time, they’re cautious because no one likes to make a big announcement and then have to say ‘never mind.'”

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“She Had A Private Chef At Newsweek“

November 20, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

When the now-defunct print version of Newsweek ran its asinine “Muslim Rage” cover, I kept thinking it was fine as long as the Mideast version of the cover was entitled “American Rage.” Um, didn’t we only recently kill 45,000 people, minimum, in Iraq for no particular reason? I don’t mean our troops–they were just following orders–I mean our government. But it’s hard to fault a magazine that was obviously on it last legs, wobbling about. From Michael Kinsley’s New York interview with Newsweek and Daily Beast EIC Tina Brown, a passage about the magazine-publishing world’s ridiculously grand days of yore:

“Michael Kinsley:

Newsweek, in its heyday, had correspondents all over the world.

Tina Brown:

Thirty bureaus.

Michael Kinsley:

Thirty bureaus.

Tina Brown:

You know, it was very funny—when I looked at the document of sale, it was like the vestiges of the great galleon it had been. It was like that wreck of theTitanic in the James Cameron film—they’re swimming through the rooms, and you see the chandeliers. Every so often, you would swim around a corner and see a chandelier—things like private dining. You suddenly realize, this was an era when there were things like private dining rooms. 

Michael Kinsley:

Yes.

Tina Brown:

When [Washington Post publisher and Newsweek owner] Kay Graham arrived in a foreign city, she was really like the State Department—the Newsweekbureau would be there to greet her. And that Newsweek bureau would immediately get her an interview with, you know, Ferdinand Marcos.

Michael Kinsley:

She had a private chef at Newsweek. And when she wasn’t in town, I remember the editor at the time, Bill Broyles, got to use the chef.

Tina Brown:

I know.

Michael Kinsley:

How much of that is unnecessary?

Tina Brown:

It’s totally unnecessary.

Michael Kinsley:

But it did add to what made up Newsweek.

Tina Brown:

Absolutely. No, it did, listen—it was very grand.

Michael Kinsley:

So what’s going to happen? You’re not going to be able to do that.

Tina Brown:

No, we’re not. But Newsweek still has a great deal of access and power. You go to Brazil, you go to India—we have a hugely global footprint. You can get an interview with anyone overseas on the basis of being part of Newsweek. It still has a great deal of impact.“

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“Chemical Brain Preservation Is A Technology That May Soon Be Validated”

November 20, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In order to recreate biologically dead human beings, you need their memories, not just skin and hair and eyes. A quartet of predictions about the future from John Smart‘s long-form post at Kurzweil AI about brain preservation::

“1. As I argue in this video, chemical brain preservation is a technology that may soon be validated to inexpensively preserve the key features of our memories and identity at our biological death.

2. If either chemical or cryogenic brain preservation can be validated to reliably store retrievable and useful individual mental information, these medical procedures should be made available in all societies as an option at biological death.

3. If computational neuroscience, microscopy, scanning, and robotics technologies continue to improve at their historical rates, preserved memories and identity may be affordably reanimated by being ‘uploaded’ into computer simulations, beginning well before the end of this century.

4. In all societies where a significant minority (let’s say 100,000 people) have done brain preservation at biological death, significant positive social change will result in those societies today, regardless of how much information is eventually recovered from preserved brains.”

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“We Are On The Threshold Of An Era That Will Be Strongly Influenced, And Quite Possibly Dominated, By Intelligent Machines”

November 19, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In the introduction to his 1960 paper, “Steps Toward Artificial Function,” Marvin Minsky, who later served as a technical consultant for 2001: A Space Odyssey, succinctly described the present and future of computers:

“A VISITOR to our planet might be puzzled about the role of computers in our technology. On the one hand, he would read and hear all about wonderful ‘mechanical brains’ baffling their creators with prodigious intellectual performance. And he (or it) would be warned that these machines must be restrained, lest they overwhelm us by might, persuasion, or even by the revelation of truths too terrible to be borne. On the other hand, our visitor would find the machines being denounced on all sides for their slavish obedience, unimaginative literal interpretations, and incapacity for innovation or initiative; in short, for their inhuman dullness.

Our visitor might remain puzzled if he set out to find, and judge for himself, these monsters. For he would find only a few machines mostly general-purpose computers), programmed for the moment to behave according to some specification) doing things that might claim any real intellectual status. Some would be proving mathematical theorems of rather undistinguished character. A few machines might be playing certain games, occasionally defeating their designers. Some might be distinguishing between hand-printed letters. Is this enough to justify so much interest, let alone deep concern? I believe that it is; that we are on the threshold of an era that will be strongly influenced, and quite possibly dominated, by intelligent problem-solving machines. But our purpose is not to guess about what the future may bring; it is only to try to describe and explain what seem now to be our first steps toward the construction of ‘artificial intelligence.'”

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“It’s One Thing To Be Able To Say Something–That’s Marvelous. As Long As It’s Not A Documentary.”

November 19, 2012 in Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

In 1979, Merv Griffin interviews the big-name cast of The China Syndrome, a drama about a cover-up of security hazards at a nuclear power plant. The talk is largely a Hollywood ass-kissing session. Within a couple of weeks of the film’s release, a real-life version of the horrifying scenario played out as Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island plant melted down. Now that’s a tie-in.

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“When She Was Born, She Didn’t Cry”

November 19, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

There are great moments of invention in any thinking person’s life. I don’t mean in the sense of inventing a product or system or anything like that, though that does happen on occasion. I’m talking about those moments of clarity when we realize something that we didn’t know before–something that a lot of other people might not yet know. It happens more often when we’re young and we have less experience and less information clogging up our brains, but it still can occur at any point in life, especially if you’re making an effort. It’s a positive, delightful experience.

But most learning–at least the really important lessons–isn’t delightful at all. It comes from pain and loss. The kind of shock or defeat that can recalibrate or even shatter a belief system. I’m talking mostly about emotional pain, though we learn, too, from the physical kind. And what becomes of people with a rare disorder that leaves them unable to feel physical pain? How does that affect their growth, their maturation? From a New York Times story by Justin Heckert about a teenager impervious to pain:

“When she was born, she didn’t cry. She barely made a noise, staring out from her swaddling with a blank red face. When she developed terrible diaper rash, so raw that it made Tara wince to even wash her, the pediatrician gave instructions to change her formula and put cream on the rash and keep it dry. ‘I kept thinking, But she’s not crying,’ Tara said. ‘The doctors dismissed it, but we’re thinking, What’s going on?’

When Ashlyn was 3 months old, the Blockers moved from Northern Virginia to Patterson, Ga., where Tara has family. At 6 months, Ashlyn’s left eye was swollen and bloodshot. The doctor suspected pink eye, but Ashlyn didn’t respond to the treatment, so they went to an ophthalmologist, who found a massive corneal abrasion. ‘And Ashlyn is just sitting there, happy as can be,’ Tara recalled. The ophthalmologist assumed she had no corneal sensation in her eyes, and referred them to the Nemours Children’s Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla. It took a while to get an appointment, and before they made it to Jacksonville, Ashlyn rubbed big red splotches on her nose and almost chewed off part of her tongue with her emerging teeth.

At the clinic, they drew Ashlyn’s blood and took scans of her brain and her spine, but the tests were inconclusive. Over the next 18 months, there were more tests. A nerve biopsy from the back of her leg left stitches that ripped when she was running. When the doctor finally gave his diagnosis, Tara was afraid she would forget the words, so she asked him to write them down. The doctor took out a business card and wrote on the back: ‘Congenital insensitivity to pain.'”

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“The Goal Was Not To Build A Product. The Goal Was To Reelect The President.”

November 18, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Alexis Madrigal has an interesting article in the Atlantic about the data stream vs. anecdotal evidence divide of the recent Presidential election. An excerpt about Obama’s tech team:

“To really understand what happened behind the scenes at the Obama campaign, you need to know a little bit about its organizational structure. Tech was Harper Reed’s domain. ‘Digital’ was Joe Rospars’ kingdom; his team was composed of the people who sent you all those emails, designed some of the consumer-facing pieces of BarackObama.com, and ran the campaigns’ most-excellent accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, video, and the like. Analytics was run by Dan Wagner, and those guys were responsible for coming up with ways of finding and targeting voters they could persuade or turn out. Jeremy Bird ran Field, the on-the-ground operations of organizing voters at the community level that many consider Obama’s secret sauce . The tech for the campaign was supposed to help the Field, Analytics, and Digital teams do their jobs better. Tech, in a campaign or at least this campaign or perhaps any successful campaign, has to play a supporting role. The goal was not to build a product. The goal was to reelect the President. As Reed put it, if the campaign were Moneyball, he wouldn’t be Billy Beane, he’d be ‘Google Boy.’

There’s one other interesting component to the campaign’s structure. And that’s the presence of two big tech vendors interfacing with the various teams — Blue State Digital and NGP Van. The most obvious is the firm that Rospars, Jascha Franklin-Hodge, and Clay Johnson co-founded, Blue State Digital. They’re the preeminent progressive digital agency, and a decent chunk — maybe 30 percent — of their business comes from providing technology to campaigns. Of course, BSD’s biggest client was the Obama campaign and has been for some time. BSD and Obama for America were and are so deeply enmeshed, it would be difficult to say where one ended and the other began. After all, both Goff and Rospars, the company’s principals, were paid staffers of the Obama campaign. And yet between 2008 and 2012, BSD was purchased by WPP, one of the largest ad agencies in the world. What had been an obviously progressive organization was now owned by a huge conglomerate and had clients that weren’t other Democratic politicians. 

One other thing to know about Rospars, specifically: ‘He’s the Karl Rove of the Internet,’ someone who knows him very well told me. What Rove was to direct mail — the undisputed king of the medium — Rospars is to email. He and Goff are the brains behind Obama’s unprecedented online fundraising efforts. They know what they were doing and had proven that time and again.”

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“I Think We’ll Be In Augmented Reality All The Time”

November 18, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Via Computerworld, a passage on Ray Kurzweil holding forth at the DEMO conference last week: “You can learn new material at any age, but there is a limited capacity. That’s one of the things we will overcome by basically expanding the brain into the cloud,’ he said. ‘We need to be able to repurpose our neocortex to learn something new. People who have a rigid process and hold onto old information; they will have a hard time doing that. You need to be able to move on.’

While Kurzweil did not give a timetable for these predictions, he said the notion of ‘brain extenders’ has already begun thanks to technology including IBM’s Watson supercomputer and augmented reality. ‘I think we’ll be in augmented reality all the time,’ Kurzweil said.”

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“I Began The Search For The Yeti With Some Skepticism”

November 18, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I put up a post last month when I began reading The Three Christs of Ypsilanti (and, wow, what a reading experience it was). At midway point or so, there’s a reference to a 1961 Life magazine article about Sir Edmund Hillary preparing for a Himalayas expedition to search for the Abominable Snowman. It’s difficult to fathom that anyone still believed that such a thing possibly existed in the same decade we were to reach the moon, but it’s true. The New Zealand mountaineer actually penned the piece himself. The opening:

“Does the yeti or ‘abominable snowman’ really exist? Or is it a myth without practical foundation? For the last four months our Himalayan scientific and mountaineering expedition has been trying, to find out–and now we think we know the answer.

There has been a growing pile of evidence in favor of the creature’s existence: the tracks seem by many explorers or Himalayan glaciers, the complete conviction for the local people that yetis roam the mountains, the yeti scalps and hands kept as relics in the high monasteries, the many stories by people who claimed to have seen them.

But despite the firm belief of many Himalayan explorers and of some anthropologists, I began the search for the yeti with some skepticism.”

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“The Erection Of A Modestly-Sized Greenhouse Might Not Appear Worthy Of Much Attention”

November 16, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’ve posted before about the possibilities and perils of terraforming on Earth. A Norwegian firm is currently drastically altering a ribbon of desert in Qatar. From CNN:

“In a region known for its towering skyscrapers, the erection of a modestly-sized greenhouse might not appear worthy of much attention.

But this small construction site near the coast in Qatar’s Mesaieed Industrial City could help transform the landscape forever, says its developers, turning desert land into flourishing centers of food and freshwater production.

The $5.3 million, one-hectare pilot plant opens later this month and is a major milestone of the Sahara Forest Project (SFP) — a concept that has been developed by a Norwegian company since 2008.”

“The Ultimate Destiny Of The Futuristic System Would Be To Shift Aging Tech Entrepreneurs Around Their Retirement Communities On Mars”

November 16, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’m fairly consumed by Elon Musk’s proposal for the Hyperloop, a high-speed and futuristic transportation which can whisk passengers via tubes across states without leaving a carbon imprint. Some new details from the Register:

“Elon Musk dropped a few further hints about his Hyperloops transit plan in London last night, saying it is ‘a cross between a Concorde and a rail gun” whose biggest hurdles included ‘right-of-way’ issues.

And it seems that the ultimate destiny of the futuristic system would be to shift aging tech entrepreneurs around their retirement communities on Mars.

The sometime net-payments kingpin turned car designer turned rocketman told an audience at theEconomist‘s Innovation Awards that he hoped to publish some actual details of the project before the end of the year.”

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“False Narratives Can Have Serious Consequences”

November 16, 2012 in Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Baseball is just fun, not important. There are no real ramifications. There are errors, sure, but each one is spelled with a small “e.” I can understand children crying or being really depressed if their favorite team loses. They haven’t had enough life experience to be consumed by headier matters. But adults who behave this way are lacking something. They haven’t evolved properly, haven’t developed the best priorities.

So it doesn’t really matter that the wrong player won the AL MVP award yesterday when Miguel Cabrera beat Mike Trout, or that many of the voters used stubbornly illogical, irrational reasons to justify their choice. The world will be fine despite this mistake.

But it’s still a little galling to see so many educated adults use such faulty reasoning, to cling to a narrative of their choosing in the face of facts. It was simple: Trout added more value to his team than Cabrera did for his, when you factor in offense, defense and baserunning. It doesn’t take a degree in advanced statistics to figure this out. The sportswriters who supported Cabrera did so because they cherry-picked certain statistics (offense, in this case) because they wanted to choose a player who won the Triple Crown (led his league in homers, RBIs and batting average). They wanted to reward the “historical importance” of such a feat. Except that at best it’s a tradition steeped in false logic and one that’s selective reasoning when used as the crux of an MVP argument.

They chose the narrative they cared about most for emotional reasons. The sad thing is, Trout, the actual best player. had a very real and wonderful narrative. A 22-year-old rookie who was the absolute best player in either league in his initial season? Such a rare and wonderful thing.

As I said, it won’t do any harm. But in other areas of life false narratives can have serious consequences. People can be passed over for employment or housing because “common wisdom” says certain things about certain people. Believing a narrative instead of facts can convince parents to not immunize children because of unwarranted fear. Mitt Romney lost nine out of ten swing states not only because he was a weak candidate but because of his campaign’s disdain for numbers. Facts matter and it would probably be a good thing if we practice using them even when considering the less important things in life.•

“Their Use Must Be Drastically Reduced In The Next 20–40 Years Or We Will Begin To Starve”

November 15, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From financier Jeremy Grantham’s impassioned, new Nature article about the scary potential of climate change, which is rushing at us like Yeats’ sun, blank and pitiless:

“Then there is the impending shortage of two fertilizers: phosphorus (phosphate) and potassium (potash). These two elements cannot be made, cannot be substituted, are necessary to grow all life forms, and are mined and depleted. It’s a scary set of statements. Former Soviet states and Canada have more than 70% of the potash. Morocco has 85% of all high-grade phosphates. It is the most important quasi-monopoly in economic history.

What happens when these fertilizers run out is a question I can’t get satisfactorily answered and, believe me, I have tried. There seems to be only one conclusion: their use must be drastically reduced in the next 20–40 years or we will begin to starve.

The world’s blind spot when it comes to the fertilizer problem is seen also in the shocking lack of awareness on the part of governments and the public of the increasing damage to agriculture by climate change; for example, runs of extreme weather that have slashed grain harvests in the past few years. Recognition of the facts is delayed by the frankly brilliant propaganda and obfuscation delivered by energy interests that virtually own the US Congress. (It is not unlike the part played by the financial industry when investment bubbles start to form … but that, at least, is only money.) We need oil producers to leave 80% of proven reserves untapped to achieve a stable climate. As a former oil analyst, I can easily calculate oil companies’ enthusiasm to leave 80% of their value in the ground — absolutely nil.

The damaging effects of climate change are accelerating.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“Lately, Dr. Spock Has Broadened His Range And Often Speaks Out About Politics”

November 15, 2012 in Politics, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Dr. Benjamin Spock, the pediatrician who encouraged parents to be more affectionate to their children and protested the Vietnam War, is interviewed by Merv Griffin in 1966.

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“A Higher Percentage Of Conservatives Are More Inclined To Question Empirical Methods”

November 15, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Nate Silver, the erstwhile baseball numbers cruncher, who, from what I hear, now does political predictions, just completed a chat with readers at Deadspin. The opening follows.

______________________________________

Question: 

Will you be forecasting the 2014, and 2016 election?

Nate Silver:

As tempting as it might be to pull a Jim Brown/Sandy Koufax and just mic-drop/retire from elections forecasting, I expect that we’ll be making forecasts in 2014 and 2016. Midterm elections can be dreadfully boring, unfortunately. But the 2016 G.O.P. primary seems almost certain to be epic.

Question: 

Hypothetically, if the GOP presidential nom starts getting up big in the polls in 2016, do you fear a backlash from your most ardent supporters/fanbase?

Nate Silver:

We got a modest amount of this in 2010, where I’d get Tweets saying things like “When did Nate become a Republican?”

But I don’t want to make it sound as though the two sides are equal. It seems as though a higher percentage of conservatives are more inclined to question empirical methods, to put it diplomatically. 

Question:

Nate – Who gave the most ridiculous refutations of your work? Old school baseball guys, or GOP media a couple weeks ago? 

Nate Silver:

It’s MUCH worse in politics, I think:

1) People in sports will make lots of silly refutations of your arguments. But they do tend to deal with your arguments, rather than attack your character or your integrity.

2) A lot of people in politics operate in a “post-truth” worldview, whether they realize it or not. Less of that in sports.

3) In sports, scouts actually contribute a lot of value, even though statistics are highly useful as well. In politics, the pundits are completely useless at best, and probably harm democracy in their own small way.

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“Avoid Missing Ball For High Score”

November 14, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Erika Anderson of Guernica interviewed Clive Thompson about his theory that early arcade games featured a type of information sharing that’s being used to greater good in our more interconnected world. The opening:

“Guernica:

How would you describe the evolution of video games?

Clive Thompson:

When games started out, they were very, very simple affairs, and that was partly just technical—you couldn’t do very much. They had like 4K of memory. And so the games started off really not needing instructions at all. The first Pong game had one instruction. It was, ‘Avoid missing ball for high score.’ So it was literally just that: don’t fail to hit the ball. I remember when I read it, it was actually a confusing construction: avoid missing ball for high score. It’s weirdly phrased, as if it were being translated from Swedish or something, you know? But they didn’t know what they were doing.

But what started happening very early on was that if you were in the arcades as I was—I’m 44 in October, so I was right at that age when these games were coming out—the games were really quite hard in a way, and because they were taking a quarter from you, their goal was to have you stop playing quickly because they need more money. They ramped up in difficulty very quickly, like the next wave is harder, and the third wave is unbelievably harder. And so you had to learn how to play them by trial and error with yourself but you only had so much money. And so what you started doing was you started observing other people and you started talking to all the other people. What you saw when you went to a game was one person playing and a semi-circle of people around them and they were all talking about what was going on, to try to figure out how to play the game. And they would learn all sorts of interesting strategy.”

••••••••••

In 1972, Rod Serling teaches Steve Allen how to play the home version of Pong (forward to the 15:40 mark):

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“Although They Promise Nature, They Are Necessarily Unnatural”

November 14, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I think of modern zoos as something far different from their sickening antecedents which displayed animals–even humans–in in awful conditions with no regard to the creatures. And they are far better–though that doesn’t mean the tension between our needs and the subject’s has disappeared. In his Aeon essay on the topic, Stephen Cave uses the death of a polar bear named Knut as a springboard. An excerpt:

“This is the paradox of the modern zoo: although they promise nature, they are necessarily unnatural. We visit them in search of the unpredictable, the vital — the sublime that cannot be found in the clockwork world we have built for ourselves. Yet they are made by humans, with all the artifice, technology and tools at our disposal. The lion and the zebra in the zoo will never meet in mortal struggle as they do daily on the Serengeti, but instead each is carefully contained, their needs met by plans, plumbing, and delivery vans.

Zoos have redefined their mission since the days of the menagerie, when people were content to show animals as spectacles and subjugates. Today, keeping wild animals behind bars demands justification beyond amazing or amusing us, and this is made on three grounds: research, education, and conservation. Each of these depends upon an idea of nature out there, beyond the city limits — a nature to be researched and understood; a nature about which we can and should be educated; and a nature that zoos want to help us conserve.”

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“I Have So Much To Tell You”

November 14, 2012 in Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

ToyTalk has raised a boatload of capital in anticipation of its forthcoming “intelligent” teddy bear. It will make your child’s current favorite doll seem unclean and illiterate. (Thanks Singularity Hub.)

“If You Can Link The Sound Of A Word To A Picture Representing Its Meaning, It’ll Be Far More Memorable”

November 12, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I’ve always assumed there’s been a connection between my lack of musical ability and difficulty learning foreign languages–I just don’t have the ear for it. Joshua Foer, who is obsessed with memory, claims to not be very good at languages, either. Yet he was able to converse in an obscure tongue after a very short course of study thanks to a particular method of mnemonics. From his new article in the Guardian:

“I have never been particularly good with languages. Despite a dozen years of Hebrew school and a lifetime of praying in the language, I’m ashamed to admit that I still can’t read an Israeli newspaper. Besides English, the only language I speak with any degree of fluency is Spanish, and that came only after five years of intense classroom study and more than half a dozen trips to Latin America. Still, I was determined to master Lingala before leaving for the Congo. And I had just under two and a half months to do it. When I asked Ed if he thought it would be possible to learn an entire language in such a minuscule amount of time using Memrise, his response was matter-of-fact: ‘It’ll be a cinch.’

Memrise takes advantage of a couple of basic, well-established principles. The first is what’s known as elaborative encoding. The more context and meaning you can attach to a piece of information, the likelier it is that you’ll be able to fish it out of your memory at some point in the future. And the more effort you put into creating the memory, the more durable it will be. One of the best ways to elaborate a memory is to try visually to imagine it in your mind’s eye. If you can link the sound of a word to a picture representing its meaning, it’ll be far more memorable than simply learning the word by rote.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“[It’s] A Breakthrough That Could Be The Beginnings Of A New Kind Of Robot Skin”

November 12, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Via Clay Dillow at PopSci, a report about the development of artificial human skin that repairs itself at room temperature:

“Before we can construct the realistic humanoid robots that populate our most vivid sci-fi-driven dreams, there are a lot of human systems that researchers are going to have to emulate synthetically. Not the least challenging is human skin; filled with nerve endings and able to heal itself over time, our skin serves as both a massive sensory system and a barrier between our innards and the outside world. Now, an interdisciplinary team of Stanford researchers has created the first synthetic material that is both self-healing at room temperature and sensitive to touch–a breakthrough that could be the beginnings of a new kind of robot skin (and in the meantime enjoy much more practical applications like enhanced prosthetics).”

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“In The Future We Will Need To Change Our Bodies And Brains”

November 11, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The opening of “Will Robots Inherit the Earth?” Marvin Minsky’s 1994 Scientific American article about the end of carbon’s dominance:

“Everyone wants wisdom and wealth. Nevertheless, our health often gives out before we achieve them. To lengthen our lives, and improve our minds, in the future we will need to change our bodies and brains. To that end, we first must consider how normal Darwinian evolution brought us to where we are. Then we must imagine ways in which future replacements for worn body parts might solve most problems of failing health. We must then invent strategies to augment our brains and gain greater wisdom. Eventually we will entirely replace our brains — using nanotechnology. Once delivered from the limitations of biology, we will be able to decide the length of our lives–with the option of immortality — and choose among other, unimagined capabilities as well.

In such a future, attaining wealth will not be a problem; the trouble will be in controlling it. Obviously, such changes are difficult to envision, and many thinkers still argue that these advances are impossible–particularly in the domain of artificial intelligence. But the sciences needed to enact this transition are already in the making, and it is time to consider what this new world will be like.

Such a future cannot be realized through biology.”

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1 Thing About Us Future People Won’t Believe

November 10, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

  • Cosmetics: Long before bioengineering allowed us to look exactly as we wished, people used to approximate beauty by crudely drawing on their faces with colored sticks and brushes. It was considered attractive even though now it horrifies us. More women did this than men because in their benighted societies females were judged more heavily on their looks. There were people who did this professionally, paid to try to cover up the hideousness of these primitive, imperfect people. Everybody pretended to not notice how phony it looked. Or perhaps they were too unintelligent to be aware.

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“The Notes That Do Survive Have Done So Thanks To ‘Long Periods Of Benign Neglect'”

November 9, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Miami has the greatest concentration of Art-Deco architecture of any city (though not the most, overall) because it was so unattractive a place to builders for for so long. It was left to debilitate, though it turned out to be surprisingly benign neglect. No one wanting to build there for decades allowed for the survival of those gorgeous old buildings that had passed into disrepair. They otherwise most certainly would have been razed and replaced with lesser structures. By the time Miami was ready to roar back, the citizens realized they possessed unburied treasures. Thus we have modern Miami, an architectural hotspot. Decay–to a point–can be a favor.

Information, like architecture, often requires benign neglect to survive, especially since it’s not always immediately clear what information is most vital. From Sebastian Stockman’s Atlantic article about the history of note-taking:

“Historically, notes were not always well preserved. Pliny the Elder, for instance, took ‘prodigious’ notes, according to the conference’s other co-organizer, Harvard history professor Ann Blair. Pliny would have first made notes on clay tablets before copying them to parchment. But no third copies were made, and we only know that Pliny the Elder was a serious note-taker because Pliny the Younger said so.

The notes that do survive, Blair said, have done so thanks to ‘long periods of benign neglect, combined with crucial moments of careful stewardship’ by various libraries and other institutions. This conference was held in part to highlight such stewardship at many of Harvard’s libraries, and the fact that anyone can now view digitized versions of these annotations here. You can examine high-resolution images of John Hancock’s commonplace book, say, or pages from William James’diary. You might also follow one or more of the guided itineraries through the collections, curated by conference participants and others. (Price’s tour is here; Blair’s is here.)

While there was plenty of fascinating history (Did you know that ‘off the cuff’originally referred not to the practice of extemporaneous speaking, but to a speaker’s surreptitious glance at penciled notes on his starched shirt cuff? Or that Elizabethan-era theater-goers used to crib from plays not the main plot points, but the funniest jokes or the best pick-up lines?), the conference considered the future of note-taking.

Because it does have a future.”

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“This Could Be The New Phase Of Singapore Culture”

November 9, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Vertical farming in Singapore attempts to bring crops to urban areas. It’s still more expensive right now than traditional farming, but if there’s expansion the scale may take care of that. (Thanks Next Big Future.)

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