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Letras Libres
December 16, 2008

Science in the Street

By Ramón González & Férriz Y Diego Salazar

Humanism today limps as Andalusia ostensibly despises science. Gonzalez and Salazar Férriz indicate a new and commendable effort to remedy that Soanish ignorance: Culture 3.0.

In the preface to the recent reissue of The betrayal of the intellectuals, 1927 Julien Benda (Galaxia Gutenberg), Fernando Savater stated that "perhaps the greatest paradox of the paradoxes of the twentieth century is this: there has never been a time in human history in which more developed the ability to produce tools and knowledge the inner structure of reality in all fields. So, never was more scientific and technical brilliance. But neither had ever so many ideological movements based (or better, desfondados) as irrational, dogmatic or unverifiable, above all, never was such a wealth of supporters of rapture or intuitive certainty blood among the elite of servers for high spiritual functions. "In the words of Benda," men whose function is to defend and selfless eternal values such as justice and reason, and I call intellectuals have betrayed that role for practical interests, which often result in the conversion of a mere intellectual ideologue who aspires to a space power...

...Following the wake of Snow and probably trying to repair the betrayal of Benda-speaking, John Brockman in 1988 founded the Edge Foundation (www.edge.org), an organization that seeks to reintegrate, under the idea of a "Third Culture "scientific and humanistic discourse and contribute to that science has a key role in the discussion of public affairs. ...

SPANISH ORIGINAL
GOOGLE TRANSLATION

TORONTO STAR
December 28, 2008

On second thought: Why being wrong can be a good thing
When scientists change their minds, posits a new book, it can be the prelude to a breakthrough
By Peter Calamai

The neuron "crackpots" were finally declared correct by their fellow brain scientists in the 1990s, and today adult neurogenesis – the fancy name for making new neurons – is a burgeoning field of study for people such as Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, who originally dismissed the idea.

Sapolsky is one of 130-plus scientists and "thinkers" who have contributed highly personal revelations to What Have You Changed Your Mind About?, due next month.

Book marketing seems to demand sensational subtitles, but Today's Leading Minds Rethink Everything turns out to be an accurate guide to the content. In almost 400 pages, the contributors cover frontier aspects of all three scientific arenas: physical, biomedical and social.

It should come with a warning: "Reading this book may be dangerous to your cherished myths and perceptions."

THE UNION OF EVOLUTION AND DESIGN
How ought we, in this historical moment, use science and technology to remake the world?

Jonathan Pfeiffer

...The Left — the party of science, environmentalism, equality, and choice — would do well to understand what this job does and does not include. First, as Oliver Morton explained a couple of years ago on Edge.org, it does not include saving the planet. Earth and its biosphere is resilient enough in the long term to take what we are giving it: fresh water depletion, species losses, a boosted greenhouse effect, and more. Nothing we can do (or at least, are at all likely to do) can stop biological and geological evolution on Earth. But while the planet can adapt, humans, especially the poorest, could be greatly harmed. The strongest arguments for cutting greenhouse gas emissions start by honoring human solidarity, not the intrinsic value of sea ice. ...

THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
December 15, 2008

Just because you're smart doesn't mean you get things right the first time. That's the premise behind What Have You Changed Your Mind About? (Harper Perennial), a new anthology. In it, 150 "big thinkers" describe what they now think they were wrong about earlier in their lives. Much of this has to do with technology and education. Among the highlights:

Ray Kurzweil no longer thinks that intelligent aliens exist. The oft-cited futurist and inventor, a pioneer in artificial intelligence and in making reading machines for the blind, says that conventional thinking holds there should be billions of such civilizations and a number of them should be ahead of us, "capable of vast, galaxy-wide technologies. So how can it be that we haven't noticed" all of the signals they should be creating? "My own conclusion is that they don't exist."

Roger C. Schank used to say "we would have machines as smart as we are within my lifetime." Now Mr. Schank, a former Yale University professor and director of Yale's artificial-intelligence project, says: "I no longer believe that will happen… I still believe we can create very intelligent machines. But I no longer believe that those machines will be like us." Chess-playing computers that beat people are not good examples, he says. Playing chess is not representative of typical human intelligence. "Chess players are methodical planners. Human beings are not." We tend, Mr. Schank says, "to not know what we know."

Randolph M. Nesse "used to believe that truth had a special home at universities." Mr. Nesse, professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan and an expert on evolution and medicine, now thinks "universities may be the best show in town for truth pursuers, but most of them stifle innovation and constructive engagement of real controversies — not just sometimes but most of the time, systematically." Faculty committees, he complains, make sure that most positions "go to people just about like themselves." Deans ask how much external financing new hires will bring in. "No one with new ideas … can hope to get through this fine sieve."

THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
December 15, 2008

Yesterday I listed a few flip-flops by leading thinkers chronicled in a new anthology, What Have You Changed Your Mind About? (Harper Perennial). Whether universities were really that great was one of them. But there are more.

One of the major things that bright minds have rethought is that the Internet will be a boon to humanity. Here is why:

It does not fight authority. Nicholas Carr, who wrote the recent best seller The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google, used to believe the Internet would shift the bulk of power to the little people, away from big companies and governments. But "its technical and commercial working actually promote the centralization of power and control," he says. Although the overall number of Web sites has increased from 2002 through 2006, the concentration of traffic at the 10 most popular sites has grown from 31 percent to 40 percent of all page views. Further, "look at how Google continues to expand its hegemony over Web searching," Mr. Carr says. "To what end will the Web giants deploy their power? They will, of course, seek to further their own commercial or political interests."

A few bad people counteract many good people, and machines can't fix that. Xeni Jardin, co-editor of the tech blog Boing Boing, says comments on the blog were useful and fun, originally. But as the blog grew more popular, so did antisocial posts by "trolls," or "people for whom dialogue wasn't the point." Things got so nasty that Boing Boing editors finally removed the ability for readers to comment. Now she has reinstated comments, because "we hired a community manager. … If someone is misbehaving, she can remove all the vowels from their screed with one click." There is no automated way to do this, Ms. Jardin says, and "the solution isn't easy, cheap, or hands-free. Few things of value are."

Essays and Opinion

Witch hunters in Africa lynch “thieves” who rob men of their masculinity. Many people’s grasp of economics is at the same level. The Edge economics course is an curative... more» ... Class no. 1 ...

SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG
November 11, 2008

Unter Geschlechtsräubern
Die Erforschung der wirtschaftlichen Unvernunft
Andrian Kreye

Es war einer jener traumhaften Momente der Wissenschaft, bei dem man gerne dabei gewesen wäre. Im vergangenen Sommer trafen sich im kalifornischen Sonoma drei Generationen der Verhaltensökonomie zu einer Meisterklasse der Edge Foundation, jener Forschungsrichtung also, die versucht, den Mechanismen des Marktes aus dem Blickwinkel der Menschen zu begegnen. Daniel Kahnemann war der Älteste der drei prominenten Gäste, eigentlich Professor der Psychologie in Princeton, aber eben auch Wirtschaftsnobelpreisträger für seine Pionierarbeit in "Behavioral Economics", sein Schüler Richard Thaler, Ökonom in Harvard und als "Vater der Verhaltensökonomik" bekannt sowie dessen Schüler Sendhil Mullainathan, ebenfalls aus Harvard, der die Verhaltensökonomie auf die Phänomene der Armut angewandt hatte. ...

Internet cambia la forma de leer... ¿y de pensar?
La lectura en horizontal, a saltos rápidos y muy variados se ha extendido - ¿Puede la Red estar reeducando nuestro cerebro?

Abel Grau

...Uno de los más recientes en plantear el debate ha sido el ensayista estadounidense Nicholas G. Carr, experto en Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación (TIC), y asesor de la Enciclopedia británica. Asegura que ya no piensa como antes. ...

...El planteamiento de Carr ha suscitado cierto debate en foros especializados, como en la revista científica online Edge.org, y de hecho no es descabellado. Los neurólogos sostienen que todas las actividades mentales influyen a un nivel biológico en el cerebro; es decir, en el establecimiento de las conexiones neuronales, la compleja red eléctrica en la que se forman los pensamientos. " ....

THE BOSTON GLOBE
November 2, 2008

U Tube
Want a free education? A brief guide to the burgeoning world of online video lectures.
By Jeffrey MacIntyre

Graduate Studies: Edge.org

For those seeking substance over sheen, the occasional videos released at Edge.org hit the mark. The Edge Foundation community is a circle, mainly scientists but also other academics, entrepreneurs, and cultural figures, brought together by the literary agent John Brockman.

Edge's long-form interview videos are a deep-dive into the daily lives and passions of its subjects, and their passions are presented without primers or apologies. It is presently streaming excerpts from a private lecture, including a thoughtful question and answer session, by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman to Edge colleagues on the importance of behavioral economics.

It won't run to everyone's tastes. Unvarnished speakers like Sendhil Mullainathan, a MacArthur recipient with intriguing insights on poverty, are filmed in casual lecture, his thoughts unspooling in the mode of someone not preoccupied with clarity or economy of expression. The text transcripts are helpful in this context.

Regardless, the decidedly noncommercial nature of Edge's offerings, and the egghead imprimatur of the Edge community, lend its videos a refreshing air, making one wonder if broadcast television will ever offer half the off-kilter sparkle of their salon chatter. ...

...

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
November 3, 2008

What Have You Changed Your Mind About?
Today's Leading Minds Rethink Everything
Edited by John Brockman. Harper Perennial, $14.95 paper (384p)

In this wide-ranging assortment of 150 brief essays, well-known figures from every conceivable field demonstrate why it's a prerogative of all thoughtful people to change their mind once in a while. Technologist Ray Kurzweil says he now shares Enrico Fermi's question: if other intelligent civilizations exist, then where are they? Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan) reveals that he has lost faith in probability as a guiding light for making decisions. Oliver Morton (Mapping Mars) confesses that he has lost his childlike faith in the value of manned space flight to distant worlds. J. Craig Venter, celebrated for his work on the human genome, has ceased to believe that nature can absorb any abuses that we subject it to, and that world governments must move quickly to prevent global disaster. Alan Alda says, “So far, I've changed my mind twice about God,” going from believer to atheist to agnostic. Brockman, editor of Edge.org and numerous anthologies, has pulled together a thought-provoking collection of focused and tightly argued pieces demonstrating the courage to change strongly held convictions. (Jan.)

HUFFINGTON POST
November 2, 2008

Man Versus Machine
Thomas B. Edsall

...Jaron Lanier takes on the debate about the role and power of computers in shaping human finances, behavior and prospects from a radically different vantage point faulting -- in an article published on the Edge web site -- "cybernetic totalists" who, absolve from responsibility for "whatever happens" the individual people who do specific things. I think that treating technology as if it were autonomous is the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy. There is no difference between machine autonomy and the abdication of human responsibility. . . .There is a real chance that evolutionary psychology, artificial intelligence, Moore's law fetishizing, and the rest of the package will catch on in a big way, as big as Freud or Marx did in their times.

[Also: Nathan Myhrvold, George Dyson, Ray Kurzweil]

...

THE RECORD (WATERLOO)
November 1, 2008

This is the column that changed the world
Bill Bean

I was watching a PBS production the other day entitled Dogs That Changed the World, and wondered about our contemporary fascination with things "That Changed the World."

The Machine That Changed the World (a 1991 book about automotive mass production). Cod: A Biography of The Fish That Changed the World (a 1998 book about, well, cod). The Map That Changed The World (2002 book about geologist William Smith). 100 Photographs That Changed the World (Life, 2003). Bridges That Changed the World (book, 2005). The Harlem Globetrotters: The Team That Changed the World (book, 2005). How William Shatner Changed the World (documentary, 2006). Genius Genes: How Asperger Talents Changed the World (book on brilliant people with autism, 2007). The Book That Changed the World (2008 article in the Guardian, about The Origin of Species).

This "Changed the World" stuff is getting to be a bit tedious, isn't it? Now that we have Dogs That Changed the World, can Cats That Changed the World be far behind? ...

...Bill Bean notes that there is already a place to read about People Who Changed the World and Then Changed Their Minds. Every year, the people at the Edge Foundation ask writers, thinkers, psychologists, historians and others what major ideas they have changed their minds about. Go to www.edge.org. It's good reading.

...

TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
November/December 2008

Wikipedia and the Meaning of Truth
Why the online encyclopedia's epistemology should worry those who care about traditional notions of accuracy.
By Simson L. Garfinkel

... In a May 2006 essay on the technology and culture website Edge.org, futurist Jaron Lanier called Wikipedia an example of "digital Maoism"--the closest humanity has come to a functioning mob rule. ...

.. Lanier's complaints when his Wikipedia page claimed that he was a film director couldn't be taken seriously by Wikipedia's "contributors" until Lanier persuaded the editors at Edge to print his article bemoaning the claim. This Edge article by Lanier was enough to convince the Wikipedians that the Wikipedia article about Lanier was incorrect--after all, there was a clickable link! Presumably the editors at Edge did their fact checking, so the wikiworld could now be corrected. ...

...

THE NEW YORK TIMES
October 11, 2008

OPED PAGE

THE RISE OF THE MACHINES
By Ricard Dooling

...In a 1981 documentary called "The Day After Trinity," Freeman Dyson, a reigning gray eminence of math and theoretical physics, as well as an ardent proponent of nuclear disarmament, described the seductive power that brought us the ability to create atomic energy out of nothing.

"I have felt it myself," he warned. "The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it's there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles—this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds."

...As the current financial crisis spreads (like a computer virus) on the earth's nervous system (the Internet), it's worth asking if we have somehow managed to colossally outsmart ourselves using computers. After all, the Wall Street titans loved swaps and derivatives because they were totally unregulated by humans. That left nobody but the machines in charge.

How fitting then, that almost 30 years after Freeman Dyson described the almost unspeakable urges of the nuclear geeks creating illimitable energy out of equations, his son, George Dyson, has written an essay (published at Edge.org) warning about a different strain of technical arrogance that has brought the entire planet to the brink of financial destruction. George Dyson is an historian of technology and the author of "Darwin Among the Machines," a book that warned us a decade ago that it was only a matter of time before technology out-evolves us and takes over.

His new essay—"Economic Dis-Equilibrium: Can You Have Your House and Spend It Too?"—begins with a history of "stock," originally a stick of hazel, willow or alder wood, inscribed with notches indicating monetary amounts and dates. When funds were transferred, the stick was split into identical halves—with one side going to the depositor and the other to the party safeguarding the money—and represented proof positive that gold had been deposited somewhere to back it up. That was good enough for 600 years, until we decided that we needed more speed and efficiency.

Making money, it seems, is all about the velocity of moving it around, so that it can exist in Hong Kong one moment and Wall Street a split second later. "The unlimited replication of information is generally a public good," George Dyson writes. "The problem starts, as the current crisis demonstrates, when unregulated replication is applied to money itself. Highly complex computer-generated financial instruments (known as derivatives) are being produced, not from natural factors of production or other goods, but purely from other financial instruments." ...

...

FINANCIAL TIMES
September 30, 2008

The Short View: Political risk
By John Authers, Investment Editor

At last, we have a black swan. The credit crisis began last year soon after the publication of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's bestselling Black Swan, which tackled the impact of unexpected events, such as the discovery of black swans in Australia by explorers who had thought all swans were white. ...

...Prediction markets, summing the market's wisdom, had it wrong. Last week, the Intrade market put the odds that the Tarp would have passed by now at more than 90 per cent.

Models using market extremes to predict political interventions were also fooled. When volatility rises as high as in the past few weeks, it has in the past been a great bet that the government will do something—which is in part why spikes in volatility tend to be great predictors of a subsequent bounce.

Taleb himself suggested recently that investors should rely least on normal statistical methods when they are in the "fourth quadrant"—when there is a complex range of possible outcomes and where the distribution of responses to those outcomes does not follow a well understood pattern.

Investors were in that quadrant on Monday morning. They were vulnerable to black swans and should not have relied on statistics as a guide.

One prediction for the future does look safe, however: investors will spend much more time making qualitative assessments of political risk.

...

DER SPIEGEL
September 10, 2008

"Was halten Sie für wahr, ohne es beweisen zu können?"
("What We Believe But Cannot Prove?")

Google Translation

...

THE NEW YORK TIMES
September 11, 2008

DOMESTIC DISTURBANCES
Judith Warner

No Laughing Matter

..."Palin Power" isn't just about making hockey moms feel important. It's not just about giving abortion rights opponents their due. It's also, in obscure ways, about making yearnings come true — deep, inchoate desires about respect and service, hierarchy and family that have somehow been successfully projected onto the figure of this unlikely woman and have stuck.

For those of us who can't tap into those yearnings, it seems the Palin faithful are blind – to the contradictions between her stated positions and the truth of the policies she espouses, to the contradictions between her ideology and their interests. But Jonathan Haidt, an associate professor of moral psychology at the University of Virginia, argues in an essay this month, "What Makes People Vote Republican?", that it's liberals, in fact, who are dangerously blind.

Haidt has conducted research in which liberals and conservatives were asked to project themselves into the minds of their opponents and answer questions about their moral reasoning. Conservatives, he said, prove quite adept at thinking like liberals, but liberals are consistently incapable of understanding the conservative point of view. "Liberals feel contempt for the conservative moral view, and that is very, very angering. Republicans are good at exploiting that anger," he told me in a phone interview.

Perhaps that's why the conservatives can so successfully get under liberals' skin. And why liberals need to start working harder at breaking through the empathy barrier.

...

FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG
September 15, 2008

Amazons Lesegerät Kindle
Das Buch, das aus dem Äther kam
Von Hubert Spiegel

...Viele Beobachter glauben, dass sich das e-book vor allem im Bereich des Sachbuchs rasch Terrain erobern könnte. John Brockman und seine Frau Katinka Matson gehören zu den einflussreichsten Akteuren der amerikanischen Verlagswelt. Die Literaturagenten, die sich auf wissenschaftliche Publikationen und populäre Sachbücher spezialisiert haben, sagen der neuen Technologie eine große Zukunft voraus. Sie selbst lese zwar nach wie vor lieber in einem Buch, sagt Katinka Matson, aber der Kindle sei nun mal "viel praktischer, ein wirklich cooles Gerät: Ich kann im Bett liegen und mir jedes Buch aus dem Netz herunterladen." Brockman und seine Frau sind davon überzeugt, dass der Kindle unsere Lesegewohnheiten revolutionieren werde. "Aber Bücher müssen deshalb nicht anders geschrieben werden, und Autoren sollten den Kindle auch nicht bei der Konzeption ihrer Werke berücksichtigen." ...

Google Translation

...

NATIONAL REVIEW
September 12, 2008

THE CORNER

What Makes People Vote Republican [John Derbyshire]
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has a long piece titled "What Makes People Vote Republican" on Edge.org. Don't be put off by the whiffs of liberal-intellectual snobbery in Haidt's opening remarks. He has interesting things to say; and the follow-up discussion is very good. Snobbery-wise, Roger Schank takes the palm at the end of those follow-ups:

The Haidt article is interesting, as are the responses to it, but these pieces are written by intellectuals who live in an environment where reasoned argument is prized. I live in Florida.

...

THE GUARDIAN
September 9, 2008

OLIVER BURKEMAN'S CAMPAIGN DIARY BLOG

Tuesday memo: The road to the bridge to nowhere that wasn't there
Fun with expenses, Alaska-style; why do people vote Republican?; Obama calls in the cavalry

There's unanimity that Palin's statements about the Bridge to Nowhere are... what do you call that thing where something's not true and you know it? Ah, yes. She also supported building a road to the Bridge to Nowhere, even though the bridge wasn't built: a road to a bridge to nowhere that wasn't even there itself. [Newsweek, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal]

No issue's off the table, ABC News insists, for Charlie Gibson's exclusive Sarah Palin interview, to be broadcast on Thursday and Friday, although obviously questioning her suitability for the role would be sexist. [Associated Press]

Why do people vote Republican? A psychologist investigates. [Edge.org]

...

THE MALTA INDEPENDENT
September 13, 2008

J’accuse: The meaning of life
by Jacques René Zammit

...That leads me to the other big issue for me this week. Admittedly it has not been in the news but my meanderings on the net led me to an extremely interesting article by Jonathan Haidt – a researcher on psychology and emotion. In his article "What makes people vote Republican?", Haidt examines the divide between liberals and conservatives and the values they hold to heart. It is an eye-opener for righteous liberals like myself who tend to believe that a conservative position is rooted in narrow-minded blindness.

What Haidt concludes is that the value structure of liberals is radically different from that of conservatives (duh!). In essence, conservatives value norms because they provide stability. Whether those norms emanate from socially developed values or from belief systems, the inherent stability they provide when everybody adheres to the system make them something worth fighting for.

For millennia, the guiding light for a large number of societies has been the same source such as religious belief. This leads to society being seen as an entity in itself that values its very integrity and identity of the collective. Look back at ancient norms – just open your Bible at Leviticus and you will find rules about menstruation, who can eat what and who can have sex with whom. Oftentimes rationality is not the basis of these laws but they provide comfort and a set of guidelines to live "safely". ...

...

LAS VEGAS SUN
September 14, 2008

POLITICAL MEMO:
It's not the issues that likely make up many minds
Experts say uninformed voters have power

By J. Patrick Coolican

...Within this context of "character," how do voters make up their minds?

There are many theories, none conclusive.

"Why People Vote Republican," a recent essay by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt, offers some clues, tying "why" to the origins of morality.

He posits that liberal-leaning Americans tend to subscribe to social contract ethics: You and I agree we're equals, and we won't get in each other's way. The basic values: fairness, reciprocity and helping those in need. ...

Other theories:

University of California, Berkeley, linguist George Lakoff thinks conservatives are more aware of the importance of metaphor and language, and thus frame political debates to their advantage. So, for example, President Bush proposed "tax relief," which made the current tax structure seem like an affliction. Who could oppose that? Examples are endless. ...

...

THE GUARDIAN
August 12, 2008

THE RELIGION OF POLITICS
For some, the notion of an amoral world is not in conflict with hope. But what happens when politics appropriates faith and morality?
Andrew Brown

...It's a commonplace that to call yourself an atheist in the US is to render yourself unelectable. Richard Dawkins' agent, John Brockman, told me once that he would never identify as an atheist, even though he is one. The last 29 years have been terrible for American believers in reason and progress. They have been pushed further and further to the margins of a society where once they could believe themselves the vanguard. The process started with the election of Ronald Reagan, but it was Jimmy Carter before him who made it clear that evangelical Christianity was something that could elect presidents. Carter, a devout, old-fashioned Baptist, believes in the separation of church and state. But his successors as Christians in public life have not been so scrupulous. ...

...

NEWSWEEK
AUGUST 9, 2008

NOT QUITE HAL 9000, BUT IT VACUUMS
The inventor of the Roomba describes what's in store for the future of human-robot interaction.

By Katie Baker

MIT robotics professor Rodney Brooks helped bring about a paradigm shift in robotics in the late 1980s when he advocated a move away from top-down programming (which required complete control of the robot's environment) toward a biologically inspired model that helped robots navigate dynamic, constantly changing surroundings on their own. His breakthroughs paved the way for Roomba, the vacuuming robot disc that uses multiple sensors to adapt to different floor types and avoid obstalces in its path. (Brooks is chief technology officer and cofounder of Roomba's parent company, iRobot.) Brooks talked to NEWSWEEK's Katie Baker about the challenges involved in creating robots that can interact in social settings. ...

NEWSWEEK: Sociologists talk about the importance of culture and sociability in humans, and why [it should be equally important] in robots. Do roboticists consider things such as culture when thinking about how to integrate robots into human lives?

Rodney Brooks: Some of us certainly do, absolutely. My lab has been working on gaze direction. This is the one thing that you and I don't have right now [over the telephone], but if we were doing some task together, working in the same workspace, we would continuously be looking up at each other's eyes, to see what the other one was paying attention to. Certainly that level of integration with a robot has been of great interest to me. And if you're going to have a robot doing really high-level tasks with a person, I think you will want to know where its eyes are pointing, what it's paying attention to. Dogs do that with us and we do that with dogs, it happens all the time. Somehow cats don't seem to bother. ...

...So are there ethical implications involved when you think about developing sociable robots, in terms of how they might change human behavior?

Well, every technology that we build changes us. There's a great piece on Edge.org by Kevin Kelly, I think it was, talking about how printing changed us, reading changed us. Computers have changed us, and robots will change us, in some way. It doesn't necessarily mean it's bad.

...

CONDE NAST PORTFOLIO
February 11, 2008

TECH OBSERVER
by Kevin Maney

Daily Brew: Valuable Reasons to Check Your Kid's Closet

RacketBoy.com: They must be lying around the house somewhere. (Try your kid's closet). The rarest and most valuable Super Nintendo video games.

NYTimes.com: In the country of record debt and credit card lovin', how do Americans spend their money?

LATimes.com: The upside of pollution--all our man-made junk is giving life to a new breed of organism.

Edge.org: From the existence of ghosts to losing faith in equality, the world's top scientific thinkers change their minds on some provocative issues.

SmashingMagazine.com: 10 principles of effective web design in the age of A.D.D.

--Kevin Maney and Andrea Chalupa

GENETICS REVOLUTION

Craig Venter wants to email life (Craig Venter will Lebewesen e-mailen)
By Christian Stöcker

A pioneer in the field of genetics can envision a fantastic future in which genetic codes are sent by email and then reassembled as living beings at the other end.  Or so Craig Venter forecast at an Internet conference in Munich.  He also hopes to solve the problem of global warming—with designer microbes. ...

... Venter, who last made headlines when he published his personal genome in full on the Internet, made brazen claims, but nobody reacted. Venter insisted that climate change represents a much greater risk to humanity than genetic engineering, which could actually help fight it.  For example, with genetically manipulated microbes capable of absorbing CO2: "We can change the environment through genetic engineering."  John Brockman, who is the literary agent of both Dawkins and Venter, had the role of moderator, but let Dawkins take over. When Venter began to speak of specific genetically engineered correctives for the environment, however, he abruptly woke up.  Somebody once explained to him that when you talk about these subjects in Germany, "it causes an uproar—but everyone appears so calm!"  And he is right.

...

German Language Original

NEWS @ORF.at
January 9, 2008

Wenn Wissenschaftler ihre Meinung ändern Lukas Wieselberg, science.ORF.at

"Flip-Flops" werden im Englischen verächtlich Menschen genannt, die plötzlich ihre Meinung ändern. Was bei Politikern oft als ein Zeichen von Opportunismus interpretiert wird, gehört in der Wissenschaft zum Wesen. Dennoch ist es auch unter Forschern und Forscherinnen nicht üblich, sich öffentlich zu einem Sinneswandel zu bekennen. Genau das haben sie aber nun gemacht. Bereits zum elften Mal hat der New Yorker Literaturagent John Brockman namhaften Wissenschaftlern zum Jahreswechsel knifflige Fragen gestellt. Diesmal lauten sie "Wobei haben Sie Ihre Meinung geändert? Und warum?"

Die Antworten von insgesamt 165 Forschern und Expertinnen sind unterschiedlich und oft amüsant: Der Biologe Richard Dawkins erklärt, warum Meinungswandel kein evolutionärer Nachteil sind; die Philosophin Helena Cronin zeigt, dass es unter Männer zwar mehr Nobelpreisträger gibt, aber auch mehr Trottel; und Anton Zeilinger erzählt von seinem Irrtum, die Quantenphysik einst für "nutzlos" gehalten zu haben. ...

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THE GLOBE AND MAIL
January 9, 2008

RECOMMENDED LINKS

IT doublethink
Shane Schick

Even IT gurus have the right to think twice.

This year the online salon Edge.org has drawn a lot of attention for the annual question it put out to a mixture of scientists and artists: What have you changed your mind about?

Contributors range from actor Alan Alda to folk singer Joan Baez, but some of the real gems came from technology visionaries who decided to take a second look at their original visions.

[Note to Globe and Mail: It's "the mathematician physicist John C. Baez", not his cousin the "folk singer Joan Baez", daughter of the physicist Albert Baez.]

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TEMPOS DEL MUNDO (Buenos Aires)
January 8, 2008

The most prestigious scientists also change their minds

BUENOS AIRES, jan. 8 (UPI) — On the occasion of the new year, the most sublime thinkers of the world have recognized that, from time to time, they are obliged to rectify their views.

When addressing topics as diverse as evolution man, the laws of physics and differences sex, a group of scientists and philosophers, among Which includes Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, Paul Davies and Richard Wrangham, have confessed, all of them Without exception, they have changed their minds, reports Madrimasd.org.

This exhibition of scientific modesty has occurred As a result of the questions, coinciding with New year, annually raised the website edge.org, which has obtained responses from more than 120 of the most Important thinkers in the world.

A recurring theme in the answers is that what distinguishes science from other forms of knowledge and faith is that new ideas based on quickly replace old ones when they are based on evidence produced by tests. Accordingly, in the intellectual scope there is nothing of shameful in recognizing that one has changed positions.

[Spanish Original ...]

SÜDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG — Munich
January 8, 2008FEUILLETON — Page 1

Die Partei der Zweifler;
Bei der Frage des Jahres im Onlinemagazin Edge machen
sich Wissenschaftler Gedanken Ÿber ihre eigene Fehlbarkeit
Ralf Bönt

Eines der anregendsten intellektuellen Spiele findet sich jedes Jahr im Januar auf der Website Edge.org, wenn Wissenschaftler und Künstler im "World Question Center" auf die Frage des Jahres antworten. 2007 prügelte man mit Vehemenz auf die Religionen ein, und so klingt schon die Frage für 2008 wie ein erneuter Generalangriff auf die Seligen: "Welche Ihrer Meinungen haben Sie einmal geändert?" Ist die Religion doch der Ort der göttlichen Wahrheit, die sich nicht begründen muss und nicht bezweifelt werden kann. Wenn er einer Partei angehöre, hatte der Agnostiker Camus auch gesagt, dann der des Zweifels. Keine Konfrontation sollte mehr gescheut werden. Die letzte Heimat der Unverzweifelten bleibt dagegen der Glaube. Was Edge angeht, wird diese Erwartung jedoch enttäuscht. ...

IL GIORNALE (Genoa)
January 6, 2008

Turnaround for Scientists
Matteo Sacchi

What is the coolest online forum, one where scientists and great minds from all over the world exchange opinions and ideas, and the one that keeps the scientific debate alive? Almost certainly it’s edge.org, an American website whose most ardent supporters include, to quote some of the best known, Richard Dawkins, the famous and controversial evolutionary biologist and author of The Selfish Gene; Brian Eno, the visionary music producer; psychologist Steven Pinker; and physicists like Alan Guth or Gino Segré, who are changing the present vision of the universe. This where you’ll run into debates that count, thanks also to a device that has started a cultural trend: every year edge.org asks an artful question that the big brains who haunt its electronic pages are invited to answer. This year’s question is: What have you changed your mind about? Why?

The mea culpa flocked in in great numbers and from prestigious sources, (more than a hundred in a few days), revealing that the greatest minds are changing their opinions on a lot of subjects, from the expansion of the universe to evolution, from the meaning of science to the workings of the human brain through the value of the Roman Empire in front of the barbarians.

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THE NEWS & OBSERVER — Raleigh-Durham
January 6, 2008

Zane:

The changing of the mind
By J. Peder Zane, Staff Writer

... As in the past, these world-class thinkers have responded to Web site editor John Brockman's impossibly open-ended questions with erudition, imagination and clarity.

In explaining why they have cast aside old assumptions, the respondents' short essays tackle an array of subjects, including the nature of consciousness, the existence of the soul, the course of evolution and whether reason will ultimately triumph over superstition.

Two of the most interesting answers may signal a cease-fire in the gender wars.

In 2005, Harvard President Lawrence *. Summers was assailed for suggesting that innate differences might explain why there are few top women scientists. Now Diane F. Halpern, a psychology professor at Claremont Mc-Kenna College and a self-described "feminist," says Summers was onto something.

"There are real, and in some cases sizable, sex differences with respect to cognitive abilities," she writes.

Her views are echoed by Helena Cronin, a philosopher at the London School of Economics.

"Females," she writes, "are much of a muchness, clustering around the mean." With men, "the variance — the difference between the most and the least, the best and the worst — can be vast." Translation: There may be fewer female geniuses in certain fields, but there are also fewer female morons...

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BLOGGINGHEADS TV
January 5, 2008

Science Saturday: New Beliefs for a New Year

• Edge.org’s annual question
• George’s answer to the Edge question
• John’s answer to the Edge question

John Horgan & George Johnson

John and George’s New Year resolutions; John softens his pessimism about neuroscience ; The soccer club theory of terrorism; The trouble with relying on experts; How George got hooked on garage-band science; Happiness is a burning bridge.

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THE GLOBE AND MAIL
January 5, 2008
OPINIONS

Hark! A shriek-inducing wake-up call; Culture can change our genes. Men really do outperform women. We can't predict the future ...

Margaret Wente Comment Column; Second Thoughts

If you want to start your year with a jolt of fresh thinking, I have just the thing. Each year around this time, a Web-based outfit called the Edge Foundation asks a few dozen of the world's brightest scientific brains one big question. This year's question: What have you changed your mind about?

The answers address a fabulous array of issues, including the existence of God, the evolution of mankind, climate change and the nature of the universe. Some of the most provocative responses deal with the bonanza of new evidence from the fast-evolving fields of genetics, neuroscience and evolutionary biology. This is the intellectual equivalent of a New Year's dip in the lake - bracing, possibly shriek-inducing, and bound to wake you up. For the full menu, go to www.edge.org. Meantime, here's a taste. ...

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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
January 5, 2008

The Informed Reader
CULTURE
Change of Mind Could Spur A Hardening of the Heart
• EDGE -- JAN. 4

When scientists and other prominent intellectuals change their mind about important things, their new outlook often is gloomier. That, at least, is the theme of responses to a survey conducted by online science-and-culture publication the Edge, which asked some influential thinkers: "What have you changed your mind about? Why?"

...Fittingly, Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert says he has changed his mind about the benefits of changing one's mind. In 2002, a study showed him that people are more satisfied with irrevocable decisions than with ones they can reverse. Acting on the data, he proposed to his now-wife. "It turned out that the data were right: I love my wife more than I loved my girlfriend."

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TORONTO STAR
January 5, 2008

CHANGING YOUR MIND
In praise of the flip

Ralph Waldo Emerson called consistency the hobgoblin of little minds, yet we live in a world where 'flip-floppers' are treated with contempt. An ambitious new survey of top thinkers, however, serves as a reminder of how healthy it is to change one's mind

Sandro Contenta
Staff Reporter

...Challenging this complacency is a project by the Edge Foundation, a group promoting discussion and inquiry into issues of our time. To kick off the New Year, the group put this statement and question to many of the world's leading scientists and thinkers:

"When thinking changes your mind, that's philosophy. When God changes your mind, that's faith. When facts change your mind, that's science. What have you changed your mind about?"

Answers, posted on the website www.edge.org, came from 164 people, many of them physicists, philosophers, psychologists and anthropologists. They ring like scientific odes to uncertainty, humility and doubt; passionate pleas for critical thought in a world threatened by blind convictions. In short, they're calls for more people who can change their minds. ...

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