Genie: Good afternoon! I am a genie. Mind you, I’m not your regular kind of genie. My friends say I’m a bit “eccentric.” But hey, what do you expect after being cooped up in a lamp for so long! Anyways, I would like the three of you to come up with a list of three wishes. Since there are three of you, why don’t you come up with one wish each? But there are two conditions you must adhere to.

Condition #1: Your wish must be for something that explicitly benefits humanity in general, not any named individual. I can’t stand egoists who wish riches for themselves!

Condition #2: You cannot wish for something that you believe is impossible to achieve in the real world. So no flying pigs or bringing people back from the grave.

If you violate one of these two conditions, your wish will be invalidated. So, what shall it be?

Student #1: Well, it might be tough to get all three of us to agree on our wishes since we are philosophers and love to debate. And there are many worthy causes. But without a doubt I think the most important thing would be to eradicate global poverty. I spent three months as a visiting student in a developing country last summer and I think it is tragic that so many people still live in severe poverty. So that is my wish.
 
Genie: Excellent! Very noble.
 
Student #2: My mother died of breast cancer at the age of 55. And I don’t want anyone else to lose a loved one like I did. My wish is to eradicate all human disease.
 
Genie: Very good! Another noble choice.

{ Colin Farrelly/Journal of Evolution and Technology | Continue reading }

The peak of the Spice Girls’ popularity has long passed, but Victoria Beckham – aka Posh Spice – still has massive media exposure. And Paris Hilton, who is famous for her lifestyle alone, makes world headlines daily.

A new psychology study helps explain why some stars burn bright, long, long after their talent has faded – if it ever was there to begin with.

Simply put, says Nathanael Fast of Stanford University in California, people need something to talk about. The human desire to find common ground in conversation pushes us to discuss already popular people, he says.

Fast’s team focused not on gossip column celebrities, but on professional baseball players in the US

“We realised that there’s a ton of stats and performance data available for baseball, so if we can show that famous or well-known baseball players become more prominent than unknown baseball players who perform just as well or better, we’re able to make a convincing case,” he says. (…)

Volunteers who were baseball fans themselves tended to pick an obscure player if they thought they were emailing an expert. Yet the same fans tended to converse about prominent players when they didn’t know anything about their correspondent.

“The very experts who could kind of inform everyone else don’t. They actually keep feeding them the information they already know because that helps establish a connection,” Fast says.

{ New Scientist | Continue reading }

{ Fragonard, The Swing, ca. 1767 | It is considered as one of the masterpieces of the rococo era. }

Understanding the biology of mental illness would be a paradigm shift in our thinking about mind. It would not only inform us about some of the most devastating diseases of humankind but, because these are diseases of thought and feeling, it would also tell us more about who we are and how we function. I naively thought we were on the verge of such a paradigm change in 1983, when James Gusella and Nancy Wexler were tracking down the gene that causes Huntington’s disease. I expected that within 10 years we would have found the major genes that contribute to schizophrenia, depression, and autism. Since then, there has been a lot of enthusiasm about genes and mental illness and some false starts, but surprisingly little progress.

In the past few years, however, certain advances in genetics have given us new reasons for optimism. Now that we can look at the whole human genome, there is a logic to it that we could not appreciate when looking at genes in isolation. As a result, there is reason to believe that the next 10 to 20 years will be more fruitful than the past two decades have been. (…)

The most convincing scientific progress in psychiatry in the past decade has had little to do with genomics. It is the rigorous, scientific verification that certain forms of psychotherapy are effective. This is perhaps not surprising. One of the major insights in the modern biology of learning and memory is that education, experience, and social interactions affect the brain. When you learn something and then remember it for a long time, it’s because genes are being turned on and off in certain brain cells, leading to the growth of new synaptic contacts between the nerve cells of the brain. Insofar as psychotherapy works and produces stable, learned changes in behavior, it can cause stable anatomical changes in the brain.

{ Newsweek | Continue reading }

What might be deemed frivolous aspects of language can have far-reaching subconscious effects on how we see the world. Take grammatical gender. In Spanish and other Romance languages, nouns are either masculine or feminine. In many other languages, nouns are divided into many more genders (”gender” in this context meaning class or kind). For example, some Australian Aboriginal languages have up to sixteen genders, including classes of hunting weapons, canines, things that are shiny, or, in the phrase made famous by cognitive linguist George Lakoff, “women, fire, and dangerous things.”

What it means for a language to have grammatical gender is that words belonging to different genders get treated differently grammatically and words belonging to the same grammatical gender get treated the same grammatically. Languages can require speakers to change pronouns, adjective and verb endings, possessives, numerals, and so on, depending on the noun’s gender. For example, to say something like “my chair was old” in Russian (moy stul bil’ stariy), you’d need to make every word in the sentence agree in gender with “chair” (stul), which is masculine in Russian. So you’d use the masculine form of “my,” “was,” and “old.” These are the same forms you’d use in speaking of a biological male, as in “my grandfather was old.” If, instead of speaking of a chair, you were speaking of a bed (krovat’), which is feminine in Russian, or about your grandmother, you would use the feminine form of “my,” “was,” and “old.”

Does treating chairs as masculine and beds as feminine in the grammar make Russian speakers think of chairs as being more like men and beds as more like women in some way? It turns out that it does. In one study, we asked German and Spanish speakers to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a “key” — a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish — the German speakers were more likely to use words like “hard,” “heavy,” “jagged,” “metal,” “serrated,” and “useful,” whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say “golden,” “intricate,” “little,” “lovely,” “shiny,” and “tiny.” To describe a “bridge,” which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, the German speakers said “beautiful,” “elegant,” “fragile,” “peaceful,” “pretty,” and “slender,” and the Spanish speakers said “big,” “dangerous,” “long,” “strong,” “sturdy,” and “towering.” This was true even though all testing was done in English, a language without grammatical gender. The same pattern of results also emerged in entirely nonlinguistic tasks (e.g., rating similarity between pictures). And we can also show that it is aspects of language per se that shape how people think: teaching English speakers new grammatical gender systems influences mental representations of objects in the same way it does with German and Spanish speakers. Apparently even small flukes of grammar, like the seemingly arbitrary assignment of gender to a noun, can have an effect on people’s ideas of concrete objects in the world.

{ Lera Boroditsky/Edge | Continue reading }

unrelated { Aphex Twin, Come to daddy }

In January 1944, Wright described his choice of color and material as “Exterior: Red-marble and long-slim pottery red bricks.”

If Wright had had his way with his wealthy client, Solomon R. Guggenheim, the mining entrepreneur, the Guggenheim Museum would not have been near white. The architect made designs not only in red, but in pink, peach, and a sort of ivory. He also proposed black marble.

In the end, Wright finally specified a paint color identified as “PV020 Buff.” By the time of the opening in October 1959, Wright was dead and the color had been changed on the job to a tint of cream and very soft yellow.

{ NY Times | full story | slide show }

Enthusiasm for flying cars reached a peak in the 1950s when the Ford Motor Company almost started mass-producing one. Studies done at the time showed such a vehicle was technically feasible, was fairly easy to manufacture and had commercial appeal. The markets identified for it included the police, ambulance and other emergency services plus the armed forces and wealthy individuals.

The problems then, as now, were more regulatory than technical or economic. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was aghast at the volume of additional air traffic Ford had in mind. The air-traffic control systems of the day would have been overwhelmed. Ford promptly abandoned the idea, even though its flying car would have been cheaper to build and operate than the helicopters that subsequently took over most of their intended roles.

Since then, a number of diehards and dreamers have laboured on. (…) There are those who believe the best—though, technically, the most challenging—way to build a flying car is to adopt a vertical take-off and landing approach. One enthusiast, Canadian-born Paul Moller of Davis, California, has spent an estimated $250m of his own and other people’s money over the past 45 years trying get his fan-powered Skycar off the ground. So far, none of his vertical take-off and landing prototypes has risen much more than a few feet. (…)

There are at least four reasons why motorists are unlikely ever to take to the skies. Planes like the Transition are not glorified cars; they are aircraft strictly for licensed pilots. Admittedly, a sport pilot licence will get an owner airborne. But without a proper instrument rating, owners will be restricted to daytime flying, in good weather and in uncongested airspace below 10,000 feet. The Transition and its ilk are niche products, alongside other light sport aircraft, for people willing to spend time and money getting a pilot’s licence.

And forget about taking off or landing on public roads. The only place in America where that is legal is Alaska—a place notorious for its air crashes. Most other countries have similarly strict rules about operating aircraft on public roads.

Then there is the air-traffic control problem.

{ Economist | Continue reading }

{ Plan 9.001 }

Intelligence is a big deal. Humanity owes its dominant position on Earth not to any special strength of our muscles, nor any unusual sharpness of our teeth, but to the unique ingenuity of our brains. It is our brains that are responsible for the complex social organization and the accumulation of technical, economic and scientific advances that, for better and worse, undergird modern civilization.

All our technological inventions, philosophical ideas and scientific theories have gone through the birth canal of the human intellect. Arguably, human brain power is the chief limiting factor in the development of human civilization. (…)

There are multiple paths to greater intelligence. By “intelligence,” I here refer to the panoply of cognitive capacities, including not just book smarts but also creativity, social intuition, wisdom and so on.

There are traditional means of enhancing intelligence, like education, and newer means like biotechnology. Perhaps the smartest and wisest thing the human species could do would be to work on making itself smarter and wiser. In the longer run, however, biological human brains might cease to be the predominant nexus of earthly intelligence.

Machines will have several advantages: most obviously, faster processing speed. An artificial neuron can operate a million times faster than its biological counterpart. Machine intelligences may also have superior computational architectures and learning algorithms. These “qualitative” advantages, while harder to predict, may be even more important than the advantages in processing power and memory capacity.

Furthermore, artificial intellects can be easily copied, and each new copy can–unlike humans–start life fully fledged and endowed with all the knowledge accumulated by its predecessors. Given these considerations, it is possible that one day we may be able to create “superintelligence,” a general intelligence that vastly outperforms the best human brains in every significant cognitive domain.

{ Forbes | Continue reading }

July 2007: Online DVD rental outfit Netflix caused a real buzz last October when it announced the competition. If anyone can come up with a recommender system for predicting customer DVD preferences that beats its own algorithm (Cinematch) by a certain amount, Netflix will hand over $1million. The prize got a lot of attention because it exemplifies the idea of crowdsourcing. Not only does Netflix rely on crowdsourcing of DVD ratings (user ratings of DVD titles) but the competition itself is an attempt to use crowdsourcing to develop the algorithms to make the most of those ratings. Instead of doing the work itself, or hiring specialists, Netflix lets whoever anyone enter their competition and pays the winner.

{ Whimsley | Continue reading }

June 26, 2009: Today our team submitted our solution to the Netflix Prize, resulting in a score of .8558, which corresponds to an improvement over Netflix Cinematch algorithm of 10.05%.  This is the first submission in the competition to break the 10% barrier and sets off a 30 day period where all competitors are invited to submit their best and final solutions.

{ BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos }

After nearly three years and entries from more than 50,000 contestants, a multinational team says that it has met the requirements to win the million-dollar Netflix Prize.

The online movie rental service uses its Cinematch software to analyze each customer’s film-viewing habits and recommends other movies that customer might enjoy. Because accurate recommendations increase Netflix’s appeal to its customers, the movie rental company started a contest in October 2006, offering $1 million to the first contestant that could improve the predictions by at least 10 percent.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

On Tuesday an independent magazine backed by private equity owners succumbed to the punishing ad market and announced it would cease publication immediately. It was, as things go in publishing these days, a fairly routine story.

Routine except the magazine had an 800,000 circulation, was founded by the music impresario Quincy Jones and had an alluring name that came to be synonymous with hip-hop and R&B: Vibe.

Plenty of magazines have been felled by the punishing economics of print publishing, but few left the footprint that Vibe did after just 16 years. Founded with a test issue in 1992 by Time Warner and commencing regular issues in 1993, Vibe was a magazine about hip-hop, R&B and urban youth culture that brought luxe design values and major-league photography and writing to the music that dominated and shaped American pop culture in the late 1990s.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

The San Francisco Chronicle just finished a 144-day retrospective of its first 144 years. It was fascinating and fun, but it also begged a question: why celebrate 144 years? Why not wait for 150? Is there some special, local significance to 144?

No. It’s just that the Chronicle may not survive to 150.

{ The Undressing of America | Continue reading }