Various interesting science and technology (2)
Brain/AI
Diligent music practice encourages brain growth in children
http://sciencenow.sciencemag
Can practice increase IQ?
http://www.newscientist.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04
Sensitive Artificial Listener (SAL) system will help human-computer interaction
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub
Computer aided memory
http://www.wired.com/medtech
AI Risk
http://www.singinst.org/upload
Learning is useful but it seems it can also be damaging
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05
Evidence for bacteria learning
'When E. coli enters a person’s body, its environment immediately becomes warmer. Later, as the microbe moves into the person’s gut, oxygen becomes scarce. Tavazoie and his colleagues found that warm temperatures alone triggered the microbes to switch to a less efficient, low-oxygen mode. The bacteria anticipated the coming lack of oxygen and were preparing for it, the researchers reported online May 8 in Science. This proactive behavior challenges the view that microbes can only react after-the-fact to changes that occur in their environments...
'Bacteria obviously have no brains or nervous systems. Instead, the microbes learn through evolutionary changes in their complex networks of interacting genes and proteins. Over hundreds of generations, the “intelligence” needed to predict a coming event based on present clues becomes encoded in these networks. An individual bacterium can’t learn this way; later generations gain this embedded intelligence over evolutionary time.
http://www.sciencenews.org
Will Power
'... The brain has a limited capacity for self-regulation, so exerting willpower in one area often leads to backsliding in others. The good news, however, is that practice increases willpower capacity, so that in the long run, buying less now may improve our ability to achieve future goals... The brain’s store of willpower is depleted when people control their thoughts, feelings or impulses, or when they modify their behavior in pursuit of goals. Psychologist Roy Baumeister and others have found that people who successfully accomplish one task requiring self-control are less persistent on a second, seemingly unrelated task.
‘In one pioneering study, some people were asked to eat radishes while others received freshly baked chocolate chip cookies before trying to solve an impossible puzzle. The radish-eaters abandoned the puzzle in eight minutes on average, working less than half as long as people who got cookies or those who were excused from eating radishes. Similarly, people who were asked to circle every “e” on a page of text then showed less persistence in watching a video of an unchanging table and wall.
‘Other activities that deplete willpower include resisting food or drink, suppressing emotional responses, restraining aggressive or sexual impulses, taking exams and trying to impress someone. Task persistence is also reduced when people are stressed or tired from exertion or lack of sleep.
‘What limits willpower? Some have suggested that it is blood sugar, which brain cells use as their main energy source and cannot do without for even a few minutes. Most cognitive functions are unaffected by minor blood sugar fluctuations over the course of a day, but planning and self-control are sensitive to such small changes. Exerting self-control lowers blood sugar, which reduces the capacity for further self-control. People who drink a glass of lemonade between completing one task requiring self-control and beginning a second one perform equally well on both tasks, while people who drink sugarless diet lemonade make more errors on the second task than on the first. Foods that persistently elevate blood sugar, like those containing protein or complex carbohydrates, might enhance willpower for longer periods.
‘In the short term, you should spend your limited willpower budget wisely. For example, if you do not want to drink too much at a party, then on the way to the festivities, you should not deplete your willpower by window shopping for items you cannot afford. Taking an alternative route to avoid passing the store would be a better strategy.
‘On the other hand, if you need to study for a big exam, it might be smart to let the housecleaning slide to conserve your willpower for the more important job. Similarly, it can be counterproductive to work toward multiple goals at the same time if your willpower cannot cover all the efforts that are required. Concentrating your effort on one or at most a few goals at a time increases the odds of success.
‘Focusing on success is important because willpower can grow in the long term. Like a muscle, willpower seems to become stronger with use. The idea of exercising willpower is seen in military boot camp, where recruits are trained to overcome one challenge after another.
‘In psychological studies, even something as simple as using your nondominant hand to brush your teeth for two weeks can increase willpower capacity. People who stick to an exercise program for two months report reducing their impulsive spending, junk food intake, alcohol use and smoking. They also study more, watch less television and do more housework. Other forms of willpower training, like money-management classes, work as well.
‘No one knows why willpower can grow with practice but it must reflect some biological change in the brain. Perhaps neurons in the frontal cortex, which is responsible for planning behavior, or in the anterior cingulate cortex, which is associated with cognitive control, use blood sugar more efficiently after repeated challenges. Or maybe one of the chemical messengers that neurons use to communicate with one another is produced in larger quantities after it has been used up repeatedly, thereby improving the brain’s willpower capacity.
‘Whatever the explanation, consistently doing any activity that requires self-control seems to increase willpower — and the ability to resist impulses and delay gratification is highly associated with success in life.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04
Frontiers of AI
"After three decades of disappointments, artificial intelligence researchers are making progress. Recent developments made possible spam filters, Microsoft’s new ClearFlow traffic maps and the driverless robotic cars that Stanford teams have built for competitions sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency... Called the Bayesian approach, it centers on a formula for updating the probabilities of events based on repeated observations. The Bayes rule, named for the 18th-century mathematician Thomas Bayes, describes how to transform a current assumption about an event into a revised, more accurate assumption after observing further evidence... Her tools led to a new type of cancer gene map based on examining the behavior of a large number of genes that are active in a variety of tumors. From the research, scientists were able to develop a new explanation of how breast tumors spread into bone..."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05
The spread of medical robotics
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05
Cognitive robots
"The CoSy ACS is indeed greater than the sum of its parts. It incorporates a range of technologies from a design for cognitive architecture, spatial cognition, human-robot interaction and situated dialogue processing, to developmental models of visual processing... The researchers have made the ACS architecture toolkit they developed available under an open source license... Instead of using just geometric data to create a map of its surroundings, the Explorer also incorporates qualitative, topographical information. Through interaction with humans it can then learn to recognise objects, spaces and their uses. For example, if it sees a coffee machine it may reason that it is in a kitchen. If it sees a sofa it may conclude it is in a living room."
http://www.sciencedaily.com
DARPA plans for cyberwar - looking to build model of the internet with replicant humans fighting Info War... [NB. DARPA is the most successful tech incubator in the world.]
'Congress has ordered the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, to put together a National Cyber Range, as part of a massive (and massively secret) $30 billion, government-wide effort better prep for battle online. The project is now considered a top priority for the Agency. And to make sure the facility is as true-to-life as possible, Darpa wants the contractors running the Range to be able to "replicate realistic human behavior on nodes," a request for proposals, released today, reveals."'
http://blog.wired.com/defense
DARPA begins studies on "shape-shifting robots"... This program is looking at meso-scale machines with 1,000 modules - a 20-fold increase in complexity over the current state of the art. The long-term goal is nano-scale machines with millions of modules.
http://www.armedforcesjournal
How the brain processes emotions
http://www.newscientist.com
fMRI scans of people making moral decisions about feeding poor children
http://sciencenow.sciencemag
Robot conducts orchestra
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap
Myths about the ageing brain
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05
Research by Professor Bartlett and his QBI colleague Dr Tara Walker has identified the resident stem cell in the hippocampus and, even more importantly, has discovered how it can be activated to produce new neurons.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub
Vatican astronomer talks of possibility of 'brother extraterrestrials'
"Just as there is a multiplicity of creatures on earth, there can be other beings, even intelligent, created by God. This is not in contrast with our faith because we can't put limits on God's creative freedom. Why can't we speak of a 'brother extraterrestrial'? It would still be part of creation."
http://www.iht.com/articles
Bostom on intelligent life
http://www.technologyreview
Neuro-marketing
http://www.roughtype.com
http://sds.hss.cmu.edu/media
http://www.forbes.com/2007/01
http://www.businessweek.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03
Information Theory
New study of information flow in complex networks
http://www.pnas.org/cgi
Com Sys and hierarchies
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub
Finance
Charlie Munger on economics
http://vinvesting.com/docs
InfoProc on the credit crunch...
'I'd like to hear a believer in efficient markets try to tell the story of Bear Stearns' demise. One week it was OK for them to be levered 30 to 1, the next week it wasn't? When the stock was at 65 people were comfortable with their exposure to mortgages, but then suddenly they weren't? Come on. When the stock was at 65, what was the implied probability of a total collapse, based on out of the money puts? Zero.
'Markets are complex dynamical systems that undergo phase transitions. Even sophisticated institutional investors are mostly just following the herd. Prices can disconnect wildly from real value for long periods of time, until suddenly they jump, often overshooting in the other direction. Huge risks, which in hindsight are obvious, build up in plain view while escaping notice from all but a few Cassandras. Robert Rubin, the Chairman of Citigroup, former co-head of Goldman, former Treasury Secretary, doesn't know what a SIV is until after the crisis has hit. Tens of trillions of dollars in off the books credit default swaps are traded (often recorded on scraps of paper!) before Wall St. CEOs, central bankers and regulators realize the instabilities involved.'
http://infoproc.blogspot.com
InfoProc on maths and physics / finance / the world [politicians should ponder the consequences of so many of the highest IQ people - those studying advanced maths and physics - increasingly clustering in boutique financial companies that are necessarily secretive about the nature of the mathematical/scientific discoveries they make... If they are doing this, then they are not applying the same cutting edge stuff - including in Artificial Intelligence - to other problems humans face...]
http://infoproc.blogspot.com
http://www.alphamagazine.com
Merton [who was one of the Nobel winners working at LTCM when it blew up in 1998 after the Russian defaults...]
http://www.technologyreview
Choice
http://www.physorg.com/news1274
InfoProc on subprime
http://infoproc.blogspot.com
InfoProc: Money DOES buy happiness
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/
Miscellaneous...
National Intelligence Council report: 6 disruptive technologies out to 2025
http://www.dni.gov/nic/PDF_GIF
Wiki science
http://www.sciam.com/article
Teen crime
http://www.newscientist.com
Bionic eyes
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi
This YouTube video made by IBM years ago - Powers of Ten - illustrates the scale of the universe's complexity.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v
InfoProc on elite education
'It's interesting that, in the past, elite education did not result in greater average earnings once SAT scores are controlled for (see below). But I doubt that will continue to be the case today: almost half the graduating class at Harvard now head into finance, while the top 'Oregon students don't know what a hedge fund is.'
http://infoproc.blogspot.com
Thiel interview
http://reason.com/news/printer
NASA plans to land on asteroid
http://www.guardian.co.uk
Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point and Blink) on innovation
http://www.newyorker.com
Interesting comments from InfoProc blog
"... he produces an interesting profile of Myhrvold (although see here for a much better one from 1997 by Ken Auletta) and friends, but seems to entirely miss a number of important points. Intellectual Ventures is not about real inventions, but about patenting around ideas so that they have a future claim on the ones that turn out the be useful. In other words, they are patent trolls. Gladwell does not seem to realize the difference between rampant speculation and true invention: the hours of painstaking work in the lab required to convert an idea into reality.
"Here's an excerpt about how the "invention" process works -- get some smart guys in a room and let them talk (every theory group lounge is a fount of commercializable ideas ;-). Yes! if your inventors are smart enough, they can produce 36 new inventions at dinner! Is this a statement about real innovation, or about what a patent attorney might manage to get the understaffed, overburdened USPTO to approve? It makes a mockery of what real inventors and innovators do. Why start a company and hire engineers to build a prototype? Just get a few lawyers and patent everything in sight...
"… Let me close with my usual observation (specifically aimed at venture capitalists, research lab directors and university administrators) concerning an asymmetry in cognitive depth: yes, physicists can casually read the New England Journal of Medicine and come up with interesting insights, but, no, biologists and medical doctors cannot read Physical Review."
