Clipmarks | wildcat's 'science' clips

Marvin Minsky: Mind, Machine

Tue, 30 Jan 2007 13:39:32 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: a thinking being, Minsky!

The Discover Interview: Marvin Minsky

The legendary pioneer of artificial intelligence ponders the brain, bashes neuroscience, and lays out a plan for superhuman robot servants.

(Courtesy of Donna Coveney/MIT)

Marvin Minsky straddles the worlds of science and sci-fi. The MIT professor and artificial intelligence guru has influenced everyone from Isaac Asimov to the digital chess champ Deep Blue to computer movie star HAL of 2001: A Space Odyssey. He may be known around campus as "Old Man Minsky," but the scientist is just as active in AI research today as he was when he helped pioneer the field as a young man in the 1950s.

Although educated in mathematics, Minsky has always thought in terms of mind and machine. For his dissertation at Princeton University in the 1950s, he analyzed a "learning machine," meant to simulate the brain's neural networks, that he had constructed as an undergrad. In his early career he was also an influential inventor, creating the first confocal scanning microscope, a version of which is now standard in labs worldwide. In 1959 Minsky cofounded the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, where he designed and built robotic hands that could "feel" and "see" and manipulate objects, a watershed in the field.

Throughout, Minsky has written philosophically on the subject of AI, culminating in the 1985 book Society of Mind, which summarizes his theory of how the mind works. He postulates that the complex phenomenon of thinking can be broken down into simple, specialized processes that work together like individuals in a society. His latest book, The Emotion Machine, continues ideas begun in Society of Mind, reflecting twenty-some additional years of thought. It is a blueprint for a thinking machine that Minsky would like to build—an artificial intelligence that can reflect on itself—taking us a step forward into a future that may seem as if out of an Asimov story.

What are your latest ideas about the mind, as set out in The Emotion Machine?

Tags: science, research, technology, mind, machine, neurology, intelligence, common sense, ai

Richard Dawkins- the believer

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 12:33:37 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.believermag.com

Dawkins has achieved not only recognition but considerable notoriety—the result, it sometimes seems, of having proposed or defended one controversial idea after another. Over the course of his career he has become associated with, and at times served as a spokesperson for, views and positions including sociobiology, biological reductionism, the gene-centered view of evolution, memetics, atheism, and secular humanism. While he is a prominent Darwinist, Dawkins entirely eschews so-called “Social Darwinism.” He is deeply committed to a progressive agenda that aims to decrease violence and oppression and improve the quality of people’s lives, not only by employing the means of science but by encouraging a better understanding of science.

THE BELIEVER: Why do you think it is that in the United States in particular, the level of ignorance about, and resistance to, Darwinian evolution is so high?

Tags: richard dawkins, believer

The Coming Convergence

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 11:13:34 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: The message is clear: the choices we make now will converge to create a near and distant future that will be almost unbelievably wonderful or unimaginably catastrophic, or both. This knowledgeable, fascinating glimpse into the future is a must read for everyone interested in technology, upcoming innovations in business, science fiction, and the future.

Clip Source: www.sfwa.org

The Coming Convergence
The Surprising Ways Diverse Technologies Interact to Shape Our World and Change the Future

Imagine direct communication links between the human brain and machines, or tailored materials capable of adapting by themselves to changing environmental conditions, or computer chips and environmental sensors embedded into everyday clothing, or medical technologies that eliminate currently untreatable conditions such as blindness and paralysis. Now imagine all of these developments occurring at the same time. The stuff of science fiction?

Not So. These are actually the reasonable predictions of scientists attempting to forecast a few decades into the future based on the rapid pace of innovation.

Longer, healthier lives

Cheap, generally available food, energy, and technology

Reduced pollution and environmental stress

Economic disruption during transitional periods

Excessive power in too few hands

Increased vulnerability from overdependence on technology.

Tags: convergence, technologies, future, singularity

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 15:08:58 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: Video games are reshaping how we perform and promote science. A review by Seed Mag

Clip Source: www.seedmagazine.com

The digital revolution now engulfing our world emerged from the events during and immediately after the Second World War, when intellectual titans such as Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, and Claude Shannon roamed the Earth. Many of the predictions they made for the future in those early days are now reality, or something close to it. Turing foresaw computers as artificial intelligences. Neumann imagined machines that could reproduce themselves. Wiener guessed at a merging of biology and technology, and Shannon predicted the primacy of pure information over physical matter. But were these "founding fathers" to somehow see the state of modern computer science, they might be surprised that some of their wildest dreams are being fulfilled not under the explicit auspice of research, but of recreation

Emergence & Complexity
Spore

www.spore.com

Brain-Computer Interaction
Emotiv Systems' EPOC headset

Crowdsourcing
Foldit

Science Education
Immune Attack

3D Virtual Creature Evolution

Tags: video games, digital revolution

What's wrong with science as religion

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:44:19 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: "Piercing a Communion wafer with a nail and throwing it in the garbage, as one crusading biologist recently did, does science no favors"

Clip Source: www.salon.com

Jul. 31, 2008 | PZ Myers is a true believer, a science crusader with the singled-minded enthusiasm of a televangelist. A biologist at the University of Minnesota at Morris and a columnist for Seed magazine, Myers has earned notoriety with his blog, Pharyngula, in which he reports on new developments in biology and indiscriminately excoriates those he views as hostile to science, a pantheon of straw men and women that includes theologians, journalists and churchgoers. He is Richard Dawkins without the fame or felicitous prose style.

Religion is dangerous, he wrote; it breeds hatred and idiocy. It is our job to advance humanity's knowledge "by winnowing out the errors of past generations and finding deeper understanding of reality." There is no wisdom in our dogmas, Myers warned, just "self-satisfied ignorance." We find truth only in science, looking at the world "with fresh eyes and a questioning mind."

Tags: science, vs, religion

Please Help Scientists By Participating In National Orgasm Day July 31st

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 19:05:04 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: So, Britain, privatize your National Health Services and cut the welfare - tell those people in Manchester the steel industry is never coming back so they should get other jobs. Then you could put money toward science studies that really count, like this.

After all, this is not a gender-specific issue. Having British women famous for lack of orgasms really doesn't make the men there look all that great either.

Clip Source: www.scientificblogging.com

I'm taking a moment away from crafting "Journey To The Center Of The Uterus", my opus on reproduction and culture, to discuss something of equal import - namely, orgasms.

It will shock you to know this, but nearly 50% of British women don't have orgasms. Are they frigid? No, not at all, as my 1999 layover at Heathrow can attest. Science funding is the issue, as we shall see.

As we have discussed in articles like The Science of Orgasms and Would Female Orgasms Kill Men?, (1) orgasms are tricky business but scientists know what they are doing. Fewer scientists means fewer orgasms. Britain is in the throes of a science funding meltdown so the problem for British women will only get worse. With fewer scientists there can be fewer studies on important stuff like this.

What are we talking about?

To celebrate National Orgasm Day on July 31, concerned groups in the UK have been conducting a survey on female orgasms - and the results are not good

Tags: humor, britain

Artificial Intelligence under the spotlight at BA Festival

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 12:34:25 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: ‘Computers are now one million times more powerful than when I started my research career – no field has come close to this rate of development,’ he says. ‘If transport had progressed at the same rate we would be flying from London to New York in less than a tenth of second.’

Clip Source: www.ecs.soton.ac.uk

Although Hollywood often likes to present us with a world full of self-aware and destructive robots in the style of I Robot, this is not the way the science of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is headed, says British Computer Society President and ECS Professor of Artificial Intelligence Nigel Shadbolt.

Speaking at the BA Festival of Science in York tomorrow (Tuesday 11 September), Professor Shadbolt will outline how developments in the speed and power of computers, the emergence of the World Wide Web, and our deeper understanding of human and animal intelligence is producing a different but no less exciting future.

‘AI has had a huge influence on the past and present of computer science – it will be a large part of the future but not in the way you might think,’ says Professor Shadbolt, an AI expert in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton.

Tags: ai, the net, robotics

Five Ways Reality Went Sci-Fi So Far This Century

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 11:18:34 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: io9.com

We love a good science fiction story, but sometimes reality is just as strange. While we may have seen 2001 come and go without an actual space odyssey, the last eight years have been full of events that - had they not actually happened - could easily pass for science fiction. Here are five real life events that still seem like they've come straight from the set-up of a big budget summer blockbuster.

Estonian Cyberwar: It may not have been the biggest cyber attack ever, but it's probably the strangest. Last year, Russian hackers got so ticked off when the tiny nation of Estonia digs up the remains of Soviet war heroes that they shut down Estonian newspapers, banks, and practically the entire government by using denial of service attacks on a huge scale.

CERN: You need only look at pictures from inside the Large Hadron Collider to realize the incredible, science fictional scale of the apparatus.

Space Tourism:

SARS, bird flu, and the other near-pandemics:

9/11:

Tags: reality, sci-fi

Are We Living in a Giant Void?

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 12:54:55 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: Their theory posits that if in fact Earth and our surrounding neighbors are in fact in an unusual or special region of space, ie, a void, then our perspective on the universe would be severely challenged

Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

As a science fiction fan, I have come across something that annoys me. There seem to be a limited number of things that can happen in a series, and episodes start repeating themselves from series to series. One such occurrence is the idea of a ship being trapped in a void of stars; being literally nowhere near another star, and thus, all in black.

This void, as most episodes are entitled, is similar to the descriptions that filter out of Antarctica. When explorers are traversing miles and miles of white, they begin to lose the ability to determine where they are, and if they are moving.

The idea of an astronomical void is not just science fiction fodder however, and rather, according to Timothy Clifton and colleagues Pedro G. Ferreira and Kate Land at the University of Oxford, a possible explanation for why it looks as if our universe is expanding at an accelerated pace.

It is no surprise that Clifton’s theories are speculative, but the best science always starts out that way

Tags: life, giant void, astronomy

Science meets Poetry at ESOF2008

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:36:20 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: lucky he who could attend

Clip Source: www.esof2008.org

The Science meets Poetry Session provides the participants of ESOF2008 with a unique opportunity to meet contemporary poets from all over Europe, some of whom write about science, some of whom are themselves scientists (including even a Nobel Laureate from the USA), and some who are simply poets, but fascinated by science as we all are.

The purpose of this session is to demonstrate that literature and science are not poles apart, as people sometimes imagine, but actually come together in our modern world. It will be argued that poets are in fact closer to scientists in their way of thinking, in their sociology and in many of their preoccupations than previously suspected. Poet-scientists have probably always existed, but, today, there is a growing band of poets – some of whom are not scientists – for whom science is a key subject of inspiration.

Tags: esof2008, science, poetry

Is the Internet Bad for Science?

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 02:28:26 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: as always, the answer depends on the person, in this case, who is the scientist doing the research.

Clip Source: blog.wired.com

Using the internet to search for scientific articles is bad for researchers, says University of Chicago sociologist James Evans in an article published today in Science.

His argument is a classic computer-versus-paper library dilemma, updated for science: when researchers search online, they tend to arrive at just a few high-ranking articles. Lost is the breadth of scholarship encountered by old-fashioned, page-turning browsing.

"As more journal issues came online, the articles referenced tended to be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and more of the citations were to fewer journals and articles," writes Evans, who analyzed the citation patterns of 34 million journal articles that went online between 1998 and 2005.

He conclues, "The forced browsing of print archives may have stretched scientists and scholars to anchor findings deeply into past and present scholarship

Tags: internet, science, journals, articles

Build a synthetic lifeform

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:14:04 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: io9.com

Mad Science Contest: Build a Lifeform and We'll Send You to Hong Kong or Give You $1000

io9 wants to encourage mad scientists in every field, but especially in the area of synthetic biology. That's because synthetic biologists are the people who are going to build new life forms, like ligers and unicorns and people with claws and glowing eyes. OK, they might build bacteria that can clean up oil spills and repair damaged kidneys too. The point is, building new lifeforms is the science of the future and therefore you can never have too many garage laboratories and mad scientists devoted to it. That's why io9 is sponsoring a contest to find two of the best synthetic life forms you can design for us. The winners in our two categories will get either an all-expenses-paid trip to the kickass Synthetic Biology Conference in Hong Kong this October, or $1000 and a chance to have their creature drawn by a cool comic book artist. Find out more below.

Tags: science, building, life, synthetic

The Science of Sarcasm (Not That You Care)

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 12:55:32 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

There was nothing very interesting in Katherine P. Rankin’s study of sarcasm — at least, nothing worth your important time. All she did was use an M.R.I. to find the place in the brain where the ability to detect sarcasm resides. But then, you probably already knew it was in the right parahippocampal gyrus.

What you may not have realized is that perceiving sarcasm, the smirking put-down that buries its barb by stating the opposite, requires a nifty mental trick that lies at the heart of social relations: figuring out what others are thinking. Those who lose the ability, whether through a head injury or the frontotemporal dementias afflicting the patients in Dr. Rankin’s study, just do not get it when someone says during a hurricane, “Nice weather we’re having.”

Tags: science, sarcasm

According to Popper

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:16:45 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: According to Popper, a science without limits or imperfections or fixable flaws isn't science: it's metaphysics. In this sense, the end goal of science - the construction of a perfect mirror to reality - isn't just unrealistic: it's also unscientific.

Clip Source: scienceblogs.com

It's a truism that the favorite philosopher of every scientist is Karl Popper. (In my own experience, this truism is mostly true.) Popper, or so the story goes, stood up for empirical fact when the post-modernists were descending into Deleuze and Derrida and difference. His popularity among experimentalists is also a side-effect of simplicity, as his fundamental idea is easy enough for just about anyone to understand: Popper famously pointed out that science never proves things true, it merely proves things false (this is the falsifiability doctrine). In other words, scientists proceed in stuttering steps, advancing by saying what theories are wrong. The truth is just what (temporarily) survives.

it's easy to not notice how radical an idea this is. But look closer. For Popper, all discovery is really just criticism

Scientific truth is true precisely because it is open to change, willing to reverse itself and admit its errors

Tags: popper, science, philosophy

Science fiction hall of fame 2008

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:08:12 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.empsfm.org

Inductees Named for 2008 Science Fiction Hall of Fame

On Saturday, June 21, EMP|SFM will hold its 2008 Science Fiction Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Those being honored this year are Betty and Ian Ballantine (Literature Category), William Gibson (Literature Category), Richard M. Powers (Art Category), and Rod Serling (Film, Television and Media Category.) The annual celebration starts at 8:00 p.m. in EMP|SFM’s Sky Church. Science fiction author Connie Willis will host the evening’s events.

2008 Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony >>

2008 Hall of Fame Inductees Press Release >>

2008 Inductees

Ian Ballantine 1916 - 1995
Betty Ballantine 1919 -

Rod Serling 1924 - 1975

William Gibson 1948 -

Richard M. Powers 1921 - 1996

About the Science Fiction Hall of Fame

The Hall of Fame honors the lives, works, and ongoing legacies of science fiction's greatest creators.

Tags: scifi, hall of fame

Clipmarks | wildcat's 'science' clips

Marvin Minsky: Mind, Machine

Richard Dawkins- the believer

The Coming Convergence

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Emergence & Complexity Spore

Brain-Computer Interaction Emotiv Systems' EPOC headset

Crowdsourcing Foldit

Science Education Immune Attack

What's wrong with science as religion

Please Help Scientists By Participating In National Orgasm Day July 31st

Artificial Intelligence under the spotlight at BA Festival

Five Ways Reality Went Sci-Fi So Far This Century

Are We Living in a Giant Void?

Science meets Poetry at ESOF2008

Is the Internet Bad for Science?

Build a synthetic lifeform

Mad Science Contest: Build a Lifeform and We'll Send You to Hong Kong or Give You $1000

The Science of Sarcasm (Not That You Care)

According to Popper

Science fiction hall of fame 2008

Emergence & Complexity
Spore

Brain-Computer Interaction
Emotiv Systems' EPOC headset

Crowdsourcing
Foldit

Science Education
Immune Attack