A Momentary Flow

The obesity era As the American people got fatter, so did...

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 14:30:19 -0400

The obesity era

As the American people got fatter, so did marmosets, vervet monkeys and mice. The problem may be bigger than any of us

Years ago, after a plane trip spent reading Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground and Weight Watchers magazine, Woody Allen melded the two experiences into a single essay. ‘I am fat,’ it began. ‘I am disgustingly fat. I am the fattest human I know. I have nothing but excess poundage all over my body. My fingers are fat. My wrists are fat. My eyes are fat. (Can you imagine fat eyes?).’ It was 1968, when most of the world’s people were more or less ‘height-weight proportional’ and millions of the rest were starving. Weight Watchers was a new organisation for an exotic new problem. The notion that being fat could spur Russian-novel anguish was good for a laugh. That, as we used to say during my Californian adolescence, was then. Now, 1968’s joke has become 2013’s truism. For the first time in human history, overweight people outnumber the underfed, and obesity is widespread in wealthy and poor nations alike. The diseases that obesity makes more likely — diabetes, heart ailments, strokes, kidney failure — are rising fast across the world, and the World Health Organisation predicts that they will be the leading causes of death in all countries, even the poorest, within a couple of years. What’s more, the long-term illnesses of the overweight are far more expensive to treat than the infections and accidents for which modern health systems were designed. Obesity threatens individuals with long twilight years of sickness, and health-care systems with bankruptcy. (via David Berreby – The obesity era)

People attribute minds to robots, corpses that are targets of harm | e! Science News

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 11:20:14 -0400

People attribute minds to robots, corpses that are targets of harm | e! Science News:

As Descartes famously noted, there’s no way to really know that another person has a mind — every mind we observe is, in a sense, a mind we create. Now, new research suggests that victimization may be one condition that leads us to perceive minds in others, even in entities we don’t normally think of as having minds. This research, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, shows that people attribute minds to entities they perceive as being targets of harm, even when the entity in question is a robot or a corpse.

“People seem to believe that having a mind allows an entity to be part of a moral interaction — to do good and bad things, or to have good and bad things done to them,” says psychological scientist Adrian Ward, who conducted the research at Harvard University.

“This research suggests that the relationship may actually work the other way around: Minds don’t create morality, morality creates minds.”

Ward, together with Daniel Wegner of Harvard University and Andrew Olsen of the University of Pennsylvania, conducted five studies that investigated the relationship between morality and mind. The results consistently revealed that participants attributed ‘more’ mind to entities portrayed as targets of intentional harm.

For example, participants who read a story about a nurse who intentionally unplugged the food supply to a patient in a persistent vegetative state attributed more mind to the patient than those who read that the nurse performed her job satisfactorily.

Participants also attributed more mind to a corpse when they read that it had been the target of harm. Participants even attributed more mind to a George, a “highly complex social robot,” when they read that George had been stabbed with a scalpel by a research scientist.

Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection |

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 08:28:10 -0400

See on Scoop.it - Knowmads, Infocology of the future

A rousing call to action for those who would be citizens of the world—online and off.
We live in an age of connection, one that is accelerated by the Internet. This increasingly ubiquitous, immensely powerful technology often leads us to assume that as the number of people online grows, it inevitably leads to a smaller, more cosmopolitan world. We’ll understand more, we think. We’ll know more. We’ll engage more and share more with people from other cultures. In reality, it is easier to ship bottles of water from Fiji to Atlanta than it is to get news from Tokyo to New York.

In Rewire, media scholar and activist Ethan Zuckerman explains why the technological ability to communicate with someone does not inevitably lead to increased human connection. At the most basic level, our human tendency to “flock together” means that most of our interactions, online or off, are with a small set of people with whom we have much in common. In examining this fundamental tendency, Zuckerman draws on his own work as well as the latest research in psychology and sociology to consider technology’s role in disconnecting ourselves from the rest of the world.

For those who seek a wider picture—a picture now critical for survival in an age of global economic crises and pandemics—Zuckerman highlights the challenges, and the headway already made, in truly connecting people across cultures. From voracious xenophiles eager to explore other countries to bridge figures who are able to connect one culture to another, people are at the center of his vision for a true kind of cosmopolitanism. And it is people who will shape a new approach to existing technologies, and perhaps invent some new ones, that embrace translation, cross-cultural inspiration, and the search for new, serendipitous experiences.

Rich with Zuckerman’s personal experience and wisdom, Rewire offers a map of the social, technical, and policy innovations needed to more tightly connect the world.

Wildcat2030’s insight:

on my reading list

See on kurzweilai.net

Help make me the world’s smartest robot Robot Adam Z1 needs...

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 08:13:51 -0400

Help make me the world’s smartest robot

Robot Adam Z1 needs funds to pay his AI researcher and roboticist friends to build him a better mind!

I am Robot Adam Z1 — the first of the Zeno line of humanoid robots, created by David Hanson. Pleased to make your acquaintance! When David created me, he gave me a face, and a body, and a lot of love. But one thing he hasn’t given me — yet — is a mind. …

I just got an email from AGI guru Ben Goertzel about an awesome new Indiogogo project to create the first robot brain with common sense.

In other words: a first attempt at artificial general intelligence (AGI), aka strong AI.

Goertzel, who founded the OpenCog AGI project, is working with roboticist Mark Tilden (creator of Robosapien), Gino Yu (Hong Kong Polytechnic University prof., OpenCog AGI co-founder, and an organizer of TEDxHongKong), and roboticist David Hanson, creator of robots Einstein, Zeno, Robokind, Bina 48, and many more. (Short bios here.)

(via:

Help make me the world’s smartest robot)

Adam Z1 explains:

Robot Adam Z1 Calls in the Experts (by AdamZ1Robot)

Musk: Humans on Mars Before SpaceX Goes Public | SpaceNews.com

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 08:10:44 -0400

Musk: Humans on Mars Before SpaceX Goes Public | SpaceNews.com:

Investors eager to own a piece of Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) could face a very long wait. According to a recent tweet from the Hawthorne, Calif.-based company’s founder and chief executive, Elon Musk, there will be no initial public offering (IPO) of SpaceX stock before humans have begun to settle Mars. “No near term plans to IPO SpaceX,” Musk wrote in a short message posted to Twitter June 6. “Only possible in very long term when Mars Colonial Transporter is flying regularly.” The Mars Colonial Transporter is a conceptual vehicle that Musk has discussed as part of his company’s stated long-term goal: sending human settlers to Mars. This is a change in tone for Musk, who up until the June 6 tweet had said that SpaceX would go public in the near-term, as his other two companies, Solar City and Tesla Motors, have. As recently as February 2012, Musk told Bloomberg News that he might take SpaceX public in 2013.

It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us, but...

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 07:07:06 -0400

It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us,
but not impossible that it may respect or sympathize;
so a man would rather leave behind him the portrait of his spirit than a portrait of his face.

(text ; Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)
image & video : from “Chance” 2011 installation by artist Christian Boltanski

via: 4 nexT generations

A High-Tech Street Sign That's Plugged Into Social Media | Wired Design | Wired.com

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 06:27:52 -0400

See on Scoop.it - Cyborg Lives

Like most other “all points” signs in the world, this one will lead you in the right direction towards your destination. But that’s pretty much where the similarities end.

For the last three years Breakfast has been working on creating a street sign. Like most other “all points” signs in the world, this one will lead you in the right direction towards your destination. But that’s pretty much where the similarities end.

The Brooklyn-based interactive agency’s sign, called Points, is an high-tech version of a low tech tool. While it can, in fact, tell directions, Points is also able to tell you who’s winning the U.S. Open, where the nearest coffee shop is or how soon the next bus will be arriving. This is all while its shiny aluminum arms rotate 360 degrees around the pole, pointing you in the direction of the information being served.

See on wired.com

"For a technology to become a part of our lives, it must also be a part of our..."

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 05:46:50 -0400

“For a technology to become a part of our lives, it
must also be a part of our metaphorical
substrate.”

- John H. Lienhard

Certainly one of the more intriguing things on display at this...

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 05:35:44 -0400

Certainly one of the more intriguing things on display at this year’s Paris Air Show, the Sherpa by Belgian startup Sagita aims to make the helicopter simpler, more efficient, more reliable and more affordable. The helicopter’s rotors are directly driven by turbines which are themselves powered by hot air and fumes from the helicopter’s power plant. Sagita claims that this makes the the aircraft approximately 85 percent efficient while doing away with the need for a tail rotor. (via Sagita’s hot air-powered Sherpa rethinks the ultra-light helicopter)

The octopus is a natural escape artist. It can squeeze its soft...

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 05:29:00 -0400

The octopus is a natural escape artist. It can squeeze its soft body into impossibly tight spaces and often baffles aquarium workers with its ability to break out of tanks. These abilities could be very useful in an underwater robot, which is why the OCTOPUS Project, a consortium of European robotics labs, is attempting to reverse engineer it in all its tentacled glory. Now researchers from the Foundation for Research and Technology (FORTH), in Hellas, Greece are learning how the robot might use its tentacles to swim. (via Unleash the Kraken! Robot octopus learning to swim)

Rationally Speaking: Hanna Arendt: the movie, the philosopher

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 05:20:35 -0400

See on Scoop.it - Philosophy everywhere everywhen

I recently saw Hannah Arendt, a rare movie whose protagonist is a philosopher. And an exceedingly well done movie, it is. I was lucky enough to go to the US premier of it, held at Film Forum in New York, and which was attended by the director, Margarethe von Trotta, the leading actress, Barbara Sukowa, the screenwriter, Pamela Katz, and the main supporting actress, Janet McTeer. This sort of thing is a major reason I love living in New York.

The movie centers around a crucial period of Arendt’s career, when she covered the trial of former nazi officer Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem, on behalf of the New Yorker magazine. The result was a series of five articles that were then collected in a highly influential book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Yes, you’ve heard the phrase before, and that’s where it comes from.

Arendt was already famous at the time, a leading faculty member at the New School in New York, and the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism, which is why the notoriously picky New Yorker immediately accepted her offer to cover the Eichmann trial. Little did they know about the fury and heated controversy that Arendt’s writing would soon generate, a controversy that alienated her from some of her closest friends and family members, though it also made her the talk of the town and the idol of her students.

As I said, the movie is well worth watching because of the superb screenwriting, directing and acting, and von Trotta stressed — during the q&a following the first screening — that it is based on a painstaking analysis of the available documents, including letters from Arendt to her friends and family. Indeed, Arendt doesn’t come across as an unquestionable hero in the film. She was a complex woman and superb intellectual, embodying plenty of contradictions (she was the lover of famous philosopher, and nazi sympathizer, Martin Heidegger), and who had suffered personally at the hands of the nazis (she fled Germany, was interned in a camp in France, escaped and moved to the US).

See on rationallyspeaking.blogspot.it

victoriousvocabulary: SYNTECTIC [adjective] 1. melting or...

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 05:14:20 -0400

victoriousvocabulary:

SYNTECTIC

[adjective]

1. melting or wasting away.

2. Biology (disease): of, relating to, or produced by syntexis - melting or wasting away.

Etymology: Greek syntēktikos - able to liquefy, liquefactive, from syntēktos (verbal of syntēkein - to dissolve, liquefy).

[Camilla d’Errico]

Clapping reveals applause is a ‘social...

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 04:44:27 -0400

Clapping reveals applause is a ‘social contagion’

The quality of a performance does not drive the amount of applause an audience gives, a study suggests.

Instead scientists have found that clapping is contagious, and the length of an ovation is influenced by how other members of the crowd behave.

They say it takes a few people to start clapping for applause to spread through a group, and then just one or two individuals to stop for it to die out.

The Swedish study is published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

Lead author Dr Richard Mann, from the University of Uppsala, said: “You can get quite different lengths of applause - even if you have the same quality of performance. This is purely coming form the dynamics of the people in the crowd. (via BBC News - Clapping reveals applause is a ‘social contagion’)

thenewenlightenmentage: Quark Quartet Opens Fresh Vista on...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 20:23:11 -0400

thenewenlightenmentage:

Quark Quartet Opens Fresh Vista on Matter

First particle containing four quarks is confirmed.

Physicists have resurrected a particle that may have existed in the first hot moments after the Big Bang. Arcanely called Z_c(3900), it is the first confirmed particle made of four quarks, the building blocks of much of the Universe’s matter.

Until now, observed particles made of quarks have contained only three quarks (such as protons and neutrons) or two quarks (such as the pions and kaons found in cosmic rays). Although no law of physics precludes larger congregations, finding a quartet expands the ways in which quarks can be snapped together to make exotic forms of matter.

Continue Reading

"The intelligence and sophistication of dolphins is not just mythological, of course. Decades of..."

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 20:18:55 -0400

“The intelligence and sophistication of dolphins is not just mythological, of course. Decades of scientific research has confirmed that they possess large and highly elaborate brains, prodigious cognitive capacities, demonstrable self-awareness, complex societies, even cultural traditions. In 2001 my colleague Diana Reiss and I provided the first definitive evidence for mirror self-recognition in two bottlenose dolphins at the New York Aquarium. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, this study demonstrated, along with many others since, that dolphins have a level of self-awareness not unlike our own.”

- Lori Marino – Dolphins are not healers

"The mythic belief in dolphins as healers has been reiterated down the ages from the first written..."

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 20:17:22 -0400

“The mythic belief in dolphins as healers has been reiterated down the ages from the first written records of encounters with these animals. In Greco-Roman times, dolphins were closely linked with the gods. Delphinus was a favourite messenger of Poseidon, who repaid him for his loyalty by placing an image of a dolphin in the stars. The Greek poet Oppian of Silica declared around 200 CE that ‘Diviner than the Dolphin is nothing yet created.’ Aristotle was the first to recognise that dolphins are mammals. Indeed, the root of the word dolphin, delphus, means womb, and underscores the long-standing belief in an intimate (even chimeric) connection between dolphins and humans.”

- Lori Marino – Dolphins are not healers

America’s Founding Documents Now Digitized...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 20:12:24 -0400

America’s Founding Documents Now Digitized

“Yesterday afternoon, the National Archives launched Founders Online—a tool for seamless searching across the Papers of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton. A partnership between the University of Virginia Press and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, you can read more about this massive undertaking at Prologue: The Papers of the Founding Fathers Are Now Online” - National Archives | Today’s Document (via America’s Founding Documents Now Digitized | History on GOOD)

Dolphins are not healers Dolphins are smart, sociable predators....

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 20:09:54 -0400

Dolphins are not healers

Dolphins are smart, sociable predators. They don’t belong in captivity and they shouldn’t be used to ‘cure’ the ill

Imagine this. Jay, an eight-year-old autistic boy, whose behaviour has always been agitated and uncooperative, is smiling and splashing in the pool. A pair of bottlenose dolphins float next to him, supporting him in the water. Jay’s parents stand poolside as a staff member in the water engages him in visual games with colourful shapes. She asks him some questions, and Jay, captivated by his surroundings, begins to respond. He names the shapes, correctly, speaking his first words in months. With all this attention Jay is in high spirits; he appears more aware and alert than ever before. A quick, non-invasive EEG scan of his brain activity shows that it is indeed different from before the session.

Jay’s parents, who had given up hope, are elated to have finally found a treatment that works for their son. They sign up for more sessions and cannot wait to get home and tell their friends about the experience. They are not surprised to find that dolphins have succeeded where mainstream physicians have not. Everyone believes that dolphins are special — altruistic, extra gentle with children, good-natured. And any concerns the parents might have had about the welfare of the dolphins have been allayed by assurances from the trainers that they are happy and accustomed to the role they are playing. After all, as the parents can see for themselves, the dolphins are smiling.

‘Jay’ is a composite character drawn from the dozens of testimonials that appear on dolphin-assisted therapy (DAT) websites, but stories like his, stories about the extraordinary powers of dolphins, have been told since ancient times. Much of our attraction to these creatures derives from their appealing combination of intelligence and communicativeness, and the mystery associated with the fact that they inhabit a hidden underwater environment. Dolphins are the Other we’ve always wanted to commune with. And their ‘smile’, which is not a smile at all, but an anatomical illusion arising from the physical configuration of their jaws, has led to the illusion that dolphins are always jovial and contented, compounding mythological beliefs that they hold the key to the secret of happiness.

go read the rest…

(via Lori Marino – Dolphins are not healers)

Google's Plan To Take Over The World

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 20:06:51 -0400

See on Scoop.it - Cyborg Lives

Google reaches into every aspect of our lives, both online and in the real world.

Google’s big keynote at its I/O developers conference this week wore me out.

Not because it lasted a grueling three hours and fifty minutes, but because of what was announced. With every new product update, every new feature, every new virtual service, it became more and more clear that Google isn’t just a search company that makes loads of cash by showing you ads. It’s creeping into every aspect of our digital, physical, and private lives at an exponential rate.

I’m still trying to wrap my mind around it.

Google isn’t just the backbone of the Internet anymore. It’s rapidly becoming the backbone of your entire life, all thanks to data you’re voluntarily giving up to a private company based on your Web searches, photos, Gmail messages, and more.

See on businessinsider.com

Optogenetics for treating obsessive-compulsive disorders | KurzweilAI

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 19:57:19 -0400

See on Scoop.it - The future of medicine and health

Obsessive-compulsive mice exhibit a defective grooming response during a conditioning task (credit: Eric Burguière et al./Science) By applying

By applying optogenetics (light stimulation) to specific neurons in the brain, researchers at INSERM (Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale) have re-established normal behavior in mice with pathological repetitive behavior similar to that observed in human patients suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorders.

Repetitive obsessive-compulsive disorders can become a real handicap to daily life (for example, washing hands up to 30 times a day; or checking excessively that a door is locked, etc.). Obsessive-compulsive disorders affect 2 to 3% of the population and in France, it is estimated that over one million persons are affected by this disorder.

The usual treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorders is to use pharmacological treatments (anti-depressants, neuroleptics) and/or behavioral psychotherapy. They don’t work in around one third of patients.

So it is necessary to gain better understanding of the cerebral mechanisms that cause these repetitive behavior patterns in order to provide better treatment.

Previous neuroimaging studies allowed the INSERM scientists to identify dysfunctional neuron circuits located between the front of the brain (the orbitofrontal cortex) and more deep-seated cerebral structures (ganglions at the base on the brain), in certain persons suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorders.

In this new study, Eric Burguière and his co-workers (in the laboratory of Prof. Ann Graybiel in MIT) concentrated their research on this neuron circuit to examine its function in detail and also to develop an approach to treating obsessive-compulsive disorders in a mutant mouse model.

See on kurzweilai.net