What’s, in a way, missing in today’s world is more biology of the Internet. More people like Nils Barricelli to go out and look at what’s going on, not from a business or what’s legal point of view, but just to observe what’s going on.

Many of these things we read about in the front page of the newspaper every day, about what’s proper or improper, or ethical or unethical, really concern this issue of autonomous self-replicating codes. What happens if you subscribe to a service and then as part of that service, unbeknownst to you, a piece of self-replicating code inhabits your machine, and it goes out and does something else? Who is responsible for that? And we’re in an increasingly gray zone as to where that’s going.

The most virulent codes, of course, are parasitic, just as viruses are. They’re codes that go out and do things, particularly codes that go out and gather money. Which is essentially what these things like cookies do. They are small strings of code that go out and gather valuable bits of information, and they come back and sell it to somebody. It’s a very interesting situation. You would have thought this was inconceivable 20 or 30 years ago. Yet, you probably wouldn’t have to go … well, we’re in New York, not San Francisco, but in San Francisco, you wouldn’t have to go five blocks to find five or 10 companies whose income is based on exactly that premise. And doing very well at it. […]

In 1945 we actually did create a new universe. This is a universe of numbers with a life of their own, that we only see in terms of what those numbers can do for us. Can they record this interview? Can they play our music? Can they order our books on Amazon? If you cross the mirror in the other direction, there really is a universe of self-reproducing digital code. When I last checked, it was growing by five trillion bits per second. And that’s not just a metaphor for something else. It actually is. It’s a physical reality. […]

The best example of this is what we call the flash crash of May 6th, two years ago, when suddenly, the whole system started behaving unpredictably. Large amounts of money were lost in milliseconds, and then the money came back, and we quietly (although the SEC held an investigation) swept it under the rug and just said, “well, it recovered. Things are okay.” But nobody knows what happened, or most of us don’t know. […]

What’s the driver today? You want one word? It’s advertising. And, you may think advertising is very trivial, and of no real importance, but I think it’s the driver. If you look at what most of these codes are doing, they’re trying to get the audience, trying to deliver the audience. The money is flowing as advertising.

{ George Dyson/Edge | Continue reading }

Suppose in a large city somewhere in the western world, a man discovers on awaking from a two-hour nap that several hundred car accidents had occurred in the city while he slept. He wonders why. […] Something must be wrong with the traffic lights. He concludes that the lights are not working, leaving the drivers to figure out how to negotiate the intersections on their own. […] His wife […] suggests:  “If you came to a traffic light and saw it was not working at all, wouldn’t you slow down and proceed cautiously? In fact, after Hurricane Katrina didn’t people in New Orleans just treat broken traffic lights like four-way stops, without explicit direction to do so?” […] It’s not that the traffic lights were not functioning at all, but rather they were all green. […] Not only do green lights mean go, they also mean that the cross-traffic has stopped. […]

Not only was it not a dream, it was the reality of the post-2001 boom that generated the financial crisis and Great Recession. The Austrian economist Israel Kirzner has long used traffic lights as an analogy for prices. In the case of the boom and bust, the key price was the interest rate.  […] When the central bank intervenes, however, it turns all the lights green.

{ The Freeman | Continue reading }

photo { Lee Friedlander }

Queuing theory is the study of lines. All kinds of lines. The lines at supermarket checkouts, the lines at toll booths, the lines of people on hold waiting for someone, anyone, to pick up at the cable company’s 1-800 number. […]

Since the mid-20th century, queuing theory has been more about feelings than formulas. For example: Midcentury New York featured a rush-hour crisis—not out on the roads, but inside office tower lobbies. There weren’t enough elevators to handle the peak crowds. Complaints were mounting. “One solution would have been to dynamite the buildings and build more elevator shafts,” says Larson. “But someone figured out the real problem isn’t just the duration of a delay. It’s how you experience that duration.” Some buildings installed floor-to-ceiling mirrors near the elevators and, entertained by their own reflections and by the flirting that sometimes ensued, people stopped complaining quite as much about the wait time.

There are three givens of human nature that queuing psychologists must address: 1) We get bored when we wait in line. 2) We really hate it when we expect a short wait and then get a long one. 3) We really, really hate it when someone shows up after us but gets served before us.

{ Slate | Continue reading }

Americans spend a ton of time commuting. According to happiness researchers, commuting is the low point of the typical day. If you look at the jobs that people actually do, though, it’s hard to understand why so many workers continue to commute. Given a computer and high-speed Internet, most desk jobs could now be done from home – or so it seems. Telecommuting wouldn’t just save workers time, frustration, and fuel; it would also let firms drastically reduce their overhead – and pass the savings along to their customers.[…]

[Alas,] workers physically commute for signaling reasons. Employers can monitor your productivity better when you actually come to the office. Workers who telecommute put themselves on the slow track to success – if they can even get hired in the first place.

{ EconLib | OvercomingBias | Continue reading }

photo { Michal Pudelka }

I’ve always been not only a “late adopter” but a “panicky retreater” when it comes to new media, and the something that should be said about when I first went online—which was early enough that I remember watching Web sites load as if being painted on the other side of a glass—was that I also immediately went offline. As I still often do.

{ Jonathan Lethem/The New Yorker | Continue reading }

photo { Vivian Maier }

Imagine someone of the type we call neurotic in common parlance. He is wiry, looks contorted, and speaks with an uneven voice. His neck moves around when he tries to express himself. When he has a small pimple his first reaction is to assume that it is cancerous, that the cancer is of the lethal type, and that it has already spread. […] In the office, he is tuned to every single possible detail, systematically transforming every molehill into a mountain. The last thing you want in life is to be in the same car with him when stuck in traffic on your way to an important appointment. The expression overreact was designed with him in mind: he does not have reactions, just overreactions.

Compare him to someone with the opposite temperament, imperturbable, with the calm under fire that is considered necessary to become a leader, military commander or a mafia godfather. Usually unruffled and immune to small information —they can impress you with their self-control in difficult circumstances. For a sample of a composed, calm and pondered voice, listen to interviews of “Sammy the Bull” Salvatore Gravano who was involved in the murder of nineteen people (all competing mobsters). He speaks with minimal effort. In the rare situations when he is angry, unlike with the neurotic fellow, everyone knows it and takes it seriously.

The supply of information to which we are exposed under modernity is transforming humans from the equable second fellow to the neurotic first. For the purpose of our discussion, the second fellow only reacts to real information, the first largely to noise. The difference between the two fellows will show us the difference between noise and signal. Noise is what you are supposed to ignore; signal what you need to heed. […]

A not well discussed property of data: it is toxic in large quantities —even in moderate quantities.

{ Nassim Taleb | Continue reading }

{ The publishing and design communities now know that a printed magazine can not only be used to kill at will, but as particularly efficient tool for political assassinations. | Adam Rothstein/The New Inquiry | full story }

David Dunning and Justin Kruger (both at Cornell University’s Department of Psychology at the time) conducted a series of four studies showing that, in certain cases, people who are very bad at something think they are actually pretty good. They showed that to assess your own expertise at something, you need to have a certain amount of expertise already. […]

It is important to realize that the Dunning-Kruger paper was not such a shocking finding. It was, for instance, already known that seemingly everyone evaluates themselves as above average in everything.

{ Ars Technica | Continue reading }

artwork { Dan Witz, ABC No Rio, 2011 }

{ Eylül Aslan }

The other influence happened when I was nine or ten. I went back East to visit relatives in New York and one of my uncles took me to a Russian Jewish bathhouse. It was exotic and interesting and although I don’t remember it from a sensual level, it was an unusual experience. I realized that bathing was an activity that people could indulge in. I remember, too, that there was food afterwards — it was great! Later, when I was in architecture school at UCLA, I visited a place that had a nice bath, and I began to take baths in the afternoon. I liked to take a bath after lunch. I know it is an odd time for it, but if you’re self-employed and are kind of a dreamer, it works. Then in Japan I started to take a bath before dinner, at six or seven o’clock. […]

Bathrooms are everywhere. Just about everyone has one. And every bathroom, no matter how crude or sophisticated, comes equipped with all the elements of primal poetry:

Water and/or steam.
Hot, cold, and in between.
Nakedness.
Quietness.
Illumination.

[…]

The WET distribution system started really small — hand delivery to a few select shops — and grew significantly through the life of the magazine.

{ Leonard Koren/LA Review of Books | Continue reading }

The way that children reason about the world, there’s a lot of good evidence to suggest that there are domains of knowledge: physical, reasoning about the physical world; biological, reasoning about the living world; and reasoning about the psychological world. Those three domains are the physics, the biology and the psychology, and are deemed to cover the majority of what we do when we’re thinking about concepts. […]

This is work I’ve done with Paul Bloom. We initially started looking at sentimental objects, the emergence of this bizarre behavior that you find in children in the West. They form these emotional attachments to blankets and teddy bears and it initially starts off as an associative learning type of situation where they need to self-soothe, because in the West we typically separate children, for sleeping purposes, between one and two years of age. In the Far East they don’t, they keep children well into middle childhood, so they don’t have as much attachment object behavior. It’s common, about three out of four children start off with this sort of attachment to particular objects and then it dissipates and disappears.

What Paul and I are interested in is whether or not it was the physical properties of the object or if there was something about the identity or the authenticity of the object which is important. We embarked on a series of studies where we convinced children we had a duplicating machine, and basically we used conjuring tricks to convince the child that we could duplicate any physical object. We have these boxes which looked very scientific, with wires and lights, and we place an object in one, and activate it, and after a few seconds the other box would appear to start up by itself and you open it up and you see you’ve got two identical objects. The child spontaneously said, “Oh, it’s like a copying machine.” It’s like a photocopier for objects, if you like. Once they’re in the mindset this thing can copy, we then test what you can get away with. They’re quite happy to have their objects, their toys copied, but when it comes to a sentimental object like a blanket or a teddy bear, then they’re much more resistant to accepting the duplicate. […]

Also, we’re getting into the territory of authenticity and identity. There are some fairly old philosophical issues about what confers identity and uniqueness, and these are the principles, quiddity and haecceity. I hadn’t even heard of these issues until I started to research into it, and it turns out these obscure terms come from the philosopher Duns Scotus. Quiddity is the invisible properties, the essence shared by members of a group, so that would be the ‘dogginess’ of all dogs. But the haecceity is the unique property of the individual, so that would be Fido’s haecceity or Fido’s essence, which makes Fido distinct to another dog, for example.

These are not real properties. These are psychological constructs, and I think the reason that people generate these constructs is that when they invest some emotional time or effort into an object, or it has some significance towards them, then they imbue it with this property, which makes it irreplaceable, you can’t duplicate it. […]

The sense of personal identity, this is where we’ve been doing experimental work showing the importance that we place upon episodic memories, autobiographical memories. […] As we all know, memory is notoriously fallible. It’s not cast in stone. It’s not something that is stable. It’s constantly reshaping itself. So the fact that we have a multitude of unconscious processes which are generating this coherence of consciousness, which is the I experience, and the truth that our memories are very selective and ultimately corruptible, we tend to remember things which fit with our general characterization of what our self is. We tend to ignore all the information that is inconsistent. We have all these attribution biases. We have cognitive dissonance. The very thing psychology keeps telling us, that we have all these unconscious mechanisms that reframe information, to fit with a coherent story, then both the “I” and the “me”, to all intents and purposes, are generated narratives.

{ Bruce Hood/Edge | Continue reading }

photo { Todd Fisher }

In August 2011 two researchers at the University of California at San Diego reported that in a controlled experiment, “subjects significantly preferred spoiled over unspoiled stories in the case of both ironic twist stories and mysteries.” In fact, it seems “that giving away surprises makes readers like stories better “perhaps because of the “pleasurable tension caused by the disparity in knowledge between the omniscient reader and the character.”

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Charlie Engman }

Microsoft tops the list of companies making the most requests to Google to takedown copyrighted material.

Google’s Transparency Report previously tracked the number of requests from governments and released data on copyright requests to the Chilling Effects website. Now, it has decided to start publishing more details after a jump in the number of copyright-related notices, largely under the US DMCA, which requires Google to stop linking to sites if it receives a complaint.

“These days it’s not unusual for us to receive more than 250,000 requests each week, which is more than what copyright owners asked us to remove in all of 2009.”

{ PC Pro | Continue reading }

painting { Franz Kline, Suspended, 1953 }

A Swedish word for love, “kär-lek [love–play]” gave an impetus for this article that aims at defining two mysterious and fascinating phenomena: love and play. They are analogous by many of their features. It is difficult to define them comprehensively and they both develop individually and in stages. Furthermore, as we tried to create an overall picture about these phenomena, we found many combining questions: where does love/play start and to what extent imagination maintains both these phenomena? Both love and play involves joy and pleasure but also insecurity and risks. Or do they both consist merely of work, learning, and practicing? People’s ability to play and love does not disappear with age. Is love thus play and play love?

{ Maxwell Scientific Organization | Continue reading }

photo { Dash Snow }

Many of the great clinicians who studied psychosis in the last two hundred years became famous for their specific nosologic contribution when they sought to define and uncover specific psychotic entities or illnesses. Other clinicians owed their fame to their description of certain original symptoms of psychosis. However, when possible, few of them were able to avoid the temptation to formulate their own nosology, and subsequently engage in scholastic disputes in defending their findings. Insofar as a clinical approach to psychosis implies a high focus on symptomatology, few researchers and clinicians would attempt to formulate a global system to define and explain psychotic symptomatology and the mechanisms for the production of psychotic symptoms. Many of those who did attempt to do so failed because they were unable to reconcile what seemed to be contradictory concepts, or because they often failed to coherently recognize, define and categorize the disparate symptoms of psychosis. However, one clinician was able to succeed. Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault was able to formulate an exhaustive and coherent system of psychotic symptom categorization. As a result, in retrospect, Clérambault would most likely emerge as one of the most prominent figures of descriptive psychopathology of psychosis. 


This French alienist of the early part of the twentieth century was a complex man who was recognized to hold a variety of expertises in many areas. Clérambault is most well known in the Anglo-Saxon literature for his work on the ‘psychose passionelle’ (erotomania) otherwise known as Clérambault’s Syndrome. He also excelled in ethnographic anthropology and his lectures at the Beaux Arts and the Sorbonne in Paris were said to be legendary. However, it is his contribution to psychiatric semeology which would prove to be most fundamental. He was able to establish a coherent system whereby the understanding of the basic characteristics of psychotic symptoms would go in pair with the description of their alleged underlying neural processes. These underlying neural processes would be defined in terms of abnormal behaviors of neural connectivity. Rather than simply drafting an arbitrary listing of symptoms, Clérambault would provide an exhaustive taxonomy of psychotic symptoms based on the description of their most subtle features and nuances. Clérambault’s catalogue of psychotic symptoms is original in the sense that each symptom finds its place within a category defined by either a specific characteristic or a specific predominance of one or several characteristics. He would create groups and subgroups for these symptoms when deemed necessary. These groups would be placed into subcategories which were in turn grouped into larger categories. The main categories would include the sensory, the motor and the mental phenomena. However, the great value of Clérambault’s system is that all the groups, subgroups, subcategories and categories, and therefore all the categorized psychotic symptoms, would be defined by one characteristic common to all, their automatic and autonomous nature.

The psychotic symptoms would thus become referred to as automatisms.

Generally speaking, the notion of automatism is a synonymous concept to that of a very basic category of psychotic symptoms. In fact, aside from delusions, automatisms represent all other psychotic symptoms. However, one of the novelties of Clérambault’s concept is that automatisms can occur in the context of normal or subnormal function, that is in the context of the normal thinking process and the so-called subnormal conditions when the nervous system is strongly challenged. As we will see, within the larger concept of automatism, the boundaries of psychosis and normal function are redefined.

{ Paul Hriso | Continue reading }

French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan attributed his ‘entry into psychoanalysis’ as largely due to the influence of de Clérambault, whom he regarded as his ‘only master in psychiatry.’

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.

{ Antonin Artaud, Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society, 1947 }

No one personifies the thorny entanglement between modernism and the science of the soul better than Dr. Gaston Ferdière, the psychiatrist who administered no less than 58 electroshock treatments to the Surrealist playwright Antonin Artaud during the Second World War. Determined to reconcile poetry and medicine, Ferdière had studied under “Professor Claude”— target of Breton’s anti-psychiatric rants—at Sainte-Anne while at the same time passing as a “star of Surrealism in the bistros” of Paris in the mid-1930s. A friend of Breton, Desnos, Péret, and Crevel, the young Dr. Ferdière arranged to have a mural painted in the Sainte-Anne guardhouse by an artist close to the movement, and he even published several volumes of poetry himself.

By the time Artaud showed up on his doorstep at Rodez psychiatric hospital, Ferdiére had long since abandoned his poetic aspirations. Yet his old interests were rekindled in long conversations with the Surrealist playwright, whose talents he sought to revive by a combination of “art therapy”—writing, drawing, translating Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass—and shock treatments—six courses ranging from 4 to 13 sessions each between June 20th, 1943 and January 24th, 1945. Electroshock was still in its experimental phase—the machine had hardly rolled in the door at Rodez—and the convulsions were so severe that Artaud fractured a vertebra in his neck during one of the treatments.

The strange case of Ferdière and Artaud remains a source of controversy to this day. On the one hand, there can be little doubt that the psychiatrist saved Artaud’s life by taking him in. The playwright had been confined to various mental hospitals since suffering a psychotic break in 1936, but with the outbreak of war the Nazis restricted food supplies to asylum patients, and by 1943 Artaud was on the brink of starvation. Spirited out of Occupied France to the “free zone,” he quickly recovered under the care of Dr. Ferdière, who openly defied the restrictions and kept his patients well fed by working the black market.

{ Yale University, | PDF | Antonin Artaud (1896 – 1948) was a French playwright, poet, actor and theatre director. | Wikipedia }

artwork { Robert Motherwell, Africa Suite, Africa 6, 1970 }

Do facts exist? At least one person has claimed that facts do not exist and that thinking they exist would violate Occam’s razor [a simpler explanation is better than a more complex one]. However, there is much to be said as to why we have reason to believe that facts exist, such as the reasons to endorse various kinds of realism. I will discuss what facts are, whether they are supposed to refer to something that exists, whether any facts exist, and an objection against their existence. I will argue that all objections to the existence of facts are self-defeating and we have more reason to believe that some facts exist than that no facts exist as a result.

{ Ethical Realism | Continue reading }

painting { Picasso, La Celestina, 1904 }

Great ideas come when you aren’t trying. […]

A study suggests that simply taking a break does not bring on inspiration — rather, creativity is fostered by tasks that allow the mind to wander.

{ Nature | Continue reading }

Millennium Challenge 2002 (MC02) was a major war game exercise conducted by the United States armed forces in mid-2002, likely the largest such exercise in history. The exercise cost $250 million, involved both live exercises and computer simulations.

MC02 was meant to be a test of future military “transformation”—a transition toward new technologies that enable network-centric warfare and provide more powerful weaponry and tactics.

Red, commanded by retired Marine Corps Lt. General Paul K. Van Riper, used old methods to evade Blue’s sophisticated electronic surveillance network. Van Riper used motorcycle messengers to transmit orders to front-line troops and World War II light signals to launch airplanes without radio communications. … In a preemptive strike, Red launched a massive salvo of cruise missiles that overwhelmed the Blue forces’ electronic sensors and destroyed sixteen warships. […]

Another significant portion of Blue’s navy was “sunk” by an armada of small Red boats, which carried out both conventional and suicide attacks that capitalized on Blue’s inability to detect them as well as expected.

At this point, the exercise was suspended, Blue’s ships were “re-floated”, and the rules of engagement were changed. … The war game was forced to follow a script drafted to ensure a Blue Force victory. […] Red Force was ordered to turn on all his anti-aircraft radar in order for them to be destroyed, and Red Force was not allowed to shoot down any of the aircraft bringing Blue Force troops ashore. … They also ordered Red Force not to use certain weapons systems against Blue Force and even ordered that the location of Red Force units to be revealed. […]

Due to his criticism regarding the scripted nature of the new exercise, Van Riper resigned his position in the midst of the war game.

War colleges, where people learn to be soldiers, often have war simulations where different people play different parts of a war between “us” and “them.” Students and others are told that these are realistic, or at least as realistic as is feasible given the simplifications that simulations and games require.

But I’ve now heard personally from enough independent expert insider sources that I’m willing to post it: the above example was not a rare exception; war games are mostly fake.

{ OvercomingBias | Continue reading }

There are several trends that might suggest a diminishing role for mathematics in engineering work. First, there is the rise of software engineering as a separate discipline. It just doesn’t take as much math to write an operating system as it does to design a printed circuit board. Programming is rigidly structured and, at the same time, an evolving art form—neither of which is especially amenable to mathematical analysis.

{ IEEE | Continue reading }

photo { Guillaume Zuili }