For some time now, futurists have been talking about a concept called the Singularity, a technological jump so big that society will be transformed. If they’re right, the Industrial Revolution—or even the development of agriculture or harnessing of fire—might seem like minor historical hiccups by comparison. The possibility is now seeming realistic enough that scientists and engineers are grappling with the implications—for good and ill.

When I spoke to technology pioneer and futurist Ray Kurzweil (who popularized the idea in his book The Singularity Is Near), he put it this way: “Within a quarter-century, nonbiological intelligence will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence. It will then soar past it.”

Even before we reach that point, Kurzweil and his peers foresee breathtaking advances. Scientists in Israel have developed tiny robots to crawl through blood vessels attacking cancers, and labs in the United States are working on similar technology. These robots will grow smaller and more capable. One day, intelligent nanorobots may be integrated into our bodies to clear arteries and rebuild failing organs, communicating with each other and the outside world via a “cloud” network. Tiny bots might attach themselves to neurons in the brain and add their processing power—and that of other computers in the cloud—to ours, giving us mental resources that would dwarf anything available now. By stimulating the optic, auditory or tactile nerves, such nanobots might be able to simulate vision, hearing or touch, providing “augmented reality” overlays identifying street names, helping with face recognition or telling us how to repair things we’ve never seen before.

Scientists in Japan are already producing rudimentary nanobot “brains.” Could it take decades for these technologies to come to fruition? Yes—but only decades, not centuries.

{ Popular Mechanics | Continue reading }

related { Interview with Ray Kurzweil about the Documentary Transcendent Man, on the Future of Technology }

In a kind of evolutionary bridge-burning, once a gene has morphed into its current state, the road back gets blocked, new research suggests. So there’s no easy way to turn back. 

“Evolutionary biologists have long been fascinated by whether evolution can go backwards,” said study researcher Joe Thornton.

“But the issue has remained unresolved, because we seldom know exactly what features our ancestors had, or the mechanisms by which they evolved into their modern forms.”

Thornton’s team solved this problem by looking at evolution at the molecular level, where they could figure out the steps taken between the ancestral form of a protein and its successor.

{ LiveScience | Continue reading }

A common line of argument in evolutionary psychology suggests that sexual preferences for certain body types exist because we’ve evolved these desires to maximise our chances of mating with the most fertile or healthiest partner.

For example, studies have interpreted the fact that taller men are more likely to attract mates and reproduce in terms of evolutionary pressures on sexual desire. But most of these and similar studies have been completed on Western samples, while the authors draw conclusions about the ‘universal’ nature of these ‘evolutionary’ pressures.

To test how universal these body preferences really are, anthropologists Rebecca Sear and Frank Marlowe looked at whether similar preferences existed in the Hadza people, a hunter-gather tribe from Tanzania.

It turns out, these supposedly ‘universal preferences’ don’t exist in the Hadza.

{ Mind Hacks | Continue reading }

illustration { Brosmind }

The genome, as we all know, largely determines what we look like, our traits, and, significantly, our susceptibility to disease and other disorders. Ahituv is one of tens of thousands of well-funded researchers around the world trying to determine which segments of the genome contribute to which disorders. It is one of the biggest scientific endeavors in history, premised on the notion that the results can be used to prevent or fix many things, or possibly everything, that ails the human body — from allergies to cancer to aging itself. Dozens of biotech companies have sprung up in the past decade to commercialize this work, and one might assume that a stream of miracle pills will soon be on its way to our pharmacies.

You bet — just as soon as we work through a couple of hitches in this grand genomic enterprise. Scientists have indeed been superb at finding connections between disorders and various strips of DNA. But it turns out that in the vast majority of cases, these connections happen to be hideously convoluted, with any one disorder related to many genes and any one gene affecting many things in the body. Even when researchers are able to highlight a clear relationship between a single gene and a single disorder, they generally have little or no idea how those chunks of DNA are causing problems. (…)

It turns out that many dozens or even hundreds of genes each contribute to any given human attribute, and any one gene might contribute to several. Genes, in other words, turn out to work not as simple disease switches, but in impossibly complex networks.

{ The Gene Bubble: Why We Still Aren’t Disease-Free | Fast Company | Continue reading }

color lines { Ellsworth Kelly | Reifenhäuser }

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Attempts at lie-detection have been around ever since we first deceived - pretty much as soon as humans walked upright. Most countries outside the US have moved on from the polygraph - although prosecutors in India are now using electroencephalograms to “prove” guilt, despite the science being bitterly disputed.

So are there any reliable indicators of mendacity? Tics - fidgeting, stuttering - are mistakenly attributed to cheats across many societies (psychologist Charles Bond has noted this belief in 63 countries) without recourse to scientific proof.

Ditto the avoidance of eye contact - dropping your inquisitor’s gaze is often given anecdotally as confirmation of guilt.

“Eye contact has been proven the least accurate thing to watch for,” says Stan Walters, author of The Truth About Lying. “Most reliable cues typically come from the voice, in specific, the words.”

Professor Richard Wiseman (…) says that common sense is the lie-buster’s best weapon, and affirms that it is aural rather than visual clues that are key. (…)

“Lying taxes the mind,” Wiseman explains. “It involves thinking about what is plausible. People tend to repeat phrases, give shorter answers, and hesitate more. They will try to distance themselves from the lie, so use far more impersonal language. Liars often reduce the number of times that they say words like ‘I’, ‘me’, and ‘mine’. To detect deception, look for aural signs associated with having to think hard.”

According to the Canadian Journal of Police and Security Services, another side-effect of lying that forensic interrogators will look for is the avoidance of verbal contractions - using “I am” instead of “I’m” and so on.

Nature reported another study by Ioannis Pavlidis of Honeywell Laboratories in Minnesota. He established that many people blush when they are telling a lie - a subtle, but detectable, phenomenon.

{ Wired UK | Continue reading }

{ This is the graph the record industry doesn’t want you to see. It shows the fate of the three main pillars of music industry revenue - recorded music, live music, and PRS revenues (royalties collected on behalf of artists when their music is played in public) over the last 5 years. | Times | Continue reading }

{ In 2007, Google sent out an army of hybrid electric automobiles, each one bearing nine cameras on a single pole. Armed with a GPS and three laser range scanners, this fleet of cars began an endless quest to photograph every highway and byway in the free world. | The Nine Eyes of Google Street View by Jon Rafman | Art Fag City | Continue reading }

related:

{ Prostitutes on Google Street View }

The naked mole-rat is the longest living rodent with a maximum lifespan exceeding 28 years. [Mice live a couple of years.] In addition to its longevity, naked mole-rats have an extraordinary resistance to cancer as tumors have never been observed in these rodents.

{ PNAS | Continue reading }

Naked mole-rats aren’t likely to win any beauty contests. Some might refer to them as downright ugly, resembling an overcooked hotdog with teeth. Nonetheless, biologists and zoogoers are enchanted with these bizarre rodents.

Naked mole-rats spend virtually their entire lives in the total darkness of underground burrows. Ensconced in the arid soils of Africa, these three-inch-long creatures must continually dig tunnels in search of sporadic food supplies and evade the deadly jaws of snakes. Within this formidable environment, naked mole-rats have broken many mammalian rules and evolved an oddly insect-like social system.

Despite the fact that they burrow underground like moles and have rat-like tails, naked mole-rats are in fact neither moles nor rats. The majority of the species referred to as mole-rats belong instead to the family Bathyergidae and are more closely related to porcupines, chinchillas, and guinea pigs than to their namesakes.

Much like ants, termites, and some bees and wasps, naked mole-rats are considered “eusocial,” or truly social. They live in large colonies, presided over by a queen, in which only the queen and a few select males breed while the rest of the colony—all members of the same family—work together to raise young and maintain the colony.

{ Smithsonian Zoogoer magazine | Continue reading }

Naked mole-rats are the exception to biologists’ one-half rule , which describes the fact that mammals have half as many babies, on average, as they have mammary glands. H. glaber breeding females average 12 mammary glands to feed their 11-16 young, and an odd number of mammaries — nine, 11 or 13 — occurs frequently.

{ Cornell University | Continue reading }

Some of the “hottest” research on naked mole rats today concerns senescence, or aging. Naked mole rats in the lab have reached up to 28 years of age. And it’s not just the controlled environments of their captivity that are doing this. Braude has observed mole rats in the wild that are 17 years and older. But these are the breeders. Lab researchers didn’t realize that in the wild workers only live two or three years. “For a rodent of this size, they are ridiculously long-lived,” said Braude.

{ ScienceDaily | Continue reading | Mole Rats May Hold Key to Human Longevity | NY Times }

Like the flu, a person’s emotional state can be contagious. Watch someone cry, and you’ll likely feel sad; think about the elderly, and you’ll tend to walk slower. Now a study suggests that we can also catch someone else’s irrational thought processes.

Anyone who’s lost money on a fixer-upper may have succumbed to a classic economic fallacy known as “sunk costs.” You make a bad investment in a home that’s never going to sell for more than you put in to it, yet you want to justify your investment by continuing to throw money into renovations. One way to avoid this hole is to get advice from someone who has no self-interest in the project. But is the outsider still somehow susceptible to your mindset?

To find out, social psychologist Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and colleagues asked college students to take over decision-making for a person they had never met–and who they didn’t know was fictitious. The volunteers were split into two groups: one that felt some connection with the decision-maker and another that didn’t. (…)

The results suggest that companies trying to reverse results of bad decisions should find true outsiders. He points to troubled automaker Ford as an example. Instead of hiring from within–as General Motors (GM) recently did–Ford made Alan Mulally from Boeing, an aerospace company, their chief executive officer. Many experts believe that Ford is now recovering quicker than GM.

{ Science | Continue reading }

illustration { Mike Mitchell }

The busy folks at the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation — the name keeps getting longer — posted a paper Monday with the provocative title: “Do Envious CEOs Cause Merger Waves?” The study, by DePaul finance professor Anand Goel and Washington University in St. Louis finance prof Anjan Thakor, puts forth the theory that CEOs engage in merger activity out of envy of other CEOs who have boosted their company’s size through M&A and thus succeeded in raking in more pay for themselves. Not only that, but that powerful engine of envy is perfectly capable, they argue, of being set off by what they describe as an “idiosyncratic shock,” which seems to be defined as anything that’s not envy-driven, and which then creates a kind of cascade of greedy longing, as one CEO after another engages in a feverish attempt to keep up with the Joneses.

{ The Deal | Continue reading }

A Hindu spirit is stalking the streets of Stockholm, armed with this Nordic capital’s latest fad: the nail bed.

It is not the wood and iron nail variety used by Hindu fakirs, but instead a modern Swedish variation that usually consists of a light foam rubber pad, covered in cotton sacking and embedded with small, hard plastic disks with sharp little spikes. Modernized or not, it hurts. And the fewer the spikes, the more they hurt.

“It’s quite painful initially,” said Catarina Rolfsdotter-Jansson, 46, a yoga instructor and writer who uses her nail bed almost every day. “The trick is, all the adrenaline rushes, after which you relax and feel nice again.”

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Scientific advice may suggest how dangerous things are - like smoking cannabis, taking ecstasy and horse riding - but risk is not all about numbers. (…)

The tables tell us, among myriad morbid details, that through a variety of causes 23 people drowned in the bath in 2008, 108 died from “inhalation of gastric contents” and five starved to death. (…)

There is evidence that the more we try to protect some people from the risks they take, the more danger they seek.

This is known as risk homeostasis and acts like a personal thermostat, so that if someone gives you an airbag, you feel more at liberty to put your foot down. (Funnily enough, one psychological trait among the young is a tendency to overestimate the likelihood of bad things happening. They think the chance of HIV-Aids is far greater than it really is. But does that stop unprotected sex?)

There can also be confusion between the probability of a harm occurring and the severity of that harm. So if a chief scientist says nuclear power isn’t risky, he might mean it’s highly unlikely to go wrong. Someone else might think, “but if it does…”

{ BBC | Continue reading }

photo { Ryan Robinson }

But what do we mean by “art”?

Art is… what? A pursuit of excellence, a pursuit of meaning, a way of trying to make sense of the world. The arts, we’d say, are part of our life, our language, our way of seeing. The arts tell us truths about ourselves and each other and our society that reach parts of us that politics and journalism don’t. Art is passionate, ambiguous, complex, mysterious, and thrilling. It helps us to fit the disparate pieces of the world together; it helps us to try to make form out of chaos.

From all this I don’t imagine you’d dissent. And perhaps we could all agree on a hierarchy, a pantheon that would include, say, Shakespeare, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Rembrandt, Mahler, Matisse, Dickens, Beckett, Picasso, Stravinsky, Auden, Hughes, Renoir, Fellini, Orson Welles, Charlie Parker – and so on, all dead, all tested by time, all enduringly popular.

{ Richard Eyre/The Independent | Continue reading }

artwork { Roni Horn, Clown Mirror, 2001 | And more }

Does the recovery we’ve seen in fits and starts have any legs at all, outside of the major emerging markets? Or is it a mirage?

I don’t think it’s possible to infer from the stock market rally anything resembling a sustained recovery. The third quarter GDP number of 3.5% growth was at least half due to one-off government measures. In any case, the U.S. consumer is constrained by horrible balance sheet problems – excessive leverage and severely reduced real estate values on the assets side. The stock market rally has been largely due to near-zero interest rates and a weaker dollar. In foreign currency terms there’s been no rally. (…)

At some point it is absolutely inevitable that the U.S. will have to ‘default’ on part of its existing liabilities, since the long-run trajectory of government borrowing is clearly unsustainable. With the unfunded liabilities of the Social Security and Medicare systems now around $100-trillion, these look like the most vulnerable budget headings.

{ Niall Ferguson interview | The Globe and Mail | Continue reading }

photo { Brian Ulrich }

A few days ago I followed a link to Omniglot, a treasure-trove of comparative linguistics for laymen and the lovers of global alphabets, of which I am both. The page I landed on was titled Translations of Hello in many languages and featured a giant three-column table offering standard greetings in 182 languages. (…) a three-column chart? For along with “Language” and “Hello” there was the distinct-yet-apparently-essential column labelled “Hello (on phone).”

Scrutinizing column three got me thinking about how technology, language and culture intersect and interact. It’s fascinating that the telephone would require its own category of greeting—at least for 27 of the 182 languages listed. Moreover, for the vast majority of those, the word for “Hello (on phone)” is a cognate of the English hello—good news for any of us planning to answer the phone in Arabic, Armenian, Bengali, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, French, Georgian, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Kurdish, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukranian, Urdu or Vietnamese. (…)

The history of hello is long and mired in many vowels. Though it didn’t show up in its current form till the mid-19th century, its forbears are many and obvious: hallo, halloo, hillo, holla (a Shakespearean favourite recently returned to slang prominence), hollo, holloa—all generally being a combination get-attention-and-greet, useful for hailing passing boats and that sort of thing.

{ Cardus | Continue reading }

photo { Helen Levitt }

Anyone who can remember a vivid dream knows that at times the strange nighttime scenes reflect real hopes and anxieties: the young teacher who finds himself naked at the lectern; the new mother in front of an empty crib, frantic in her imagined loss.

But people can read almost anything into the dreams that they remember, and they do exactly that. In a recent study of more than 1,000 people, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Harvard found strong biases in the interpretations of dreams.

For instance, the participants tended to attach more significance to a negative dream if it was about someone they disliked, and more to a positive dream if it was about a friend.

In fact, research suggests that only about 20 percent of dreams contain people or places that the dreamer has encountered. Most images appear to be unique to a single dream.

Scientists know this because some people have the ability to watch their own dreams as observers, without waking up. This state of consciousness, called lucid dreaming, is itself something a mystery. But it is a real phenomenon.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

For nearly a decade, writer and artist Ken Habarta has been scanning newspapers, FBI alerts, and the internet for information on bank robberies. He’s especially drawn to robberies that involve a note. “The single most popular way of robbing banks,” he says, “is the quieter, gentler act of passing a note.” Gone are the days of pistols in the waist line.

Habarta posts the notes, security camera stills, and other details of bank robberies to his blog.

{ UTUNE | Continue reading | Bank Notes | Ken Habarta’s blog }