“When we venture beyond the edge of our knowledge, all we have is art.” — Jonah Lehrer on creating a “fourth culture” where we “freely transplant knowledge between the sciences and the humanities, and focus on connecting the reductionist fact to our actual experience.” (via explore-blog)
(via poptech)
To Boldly Go Where No Bee Has Gone -
Just like humans have astronauts and mountain climbers, honeybee societies have their own brave explorers: scouts, the bees that venture out to find new food sources. A new study examines scouts’ brains and finds that novelty-seeking in humans and bees seems to be based on some of the same genes.
“I think it’s often challenging in the educational system for people to understand with clarity (a) what they’re really good at, and interested in, and (b) what kinds of niches there are in the world. Too often, people get tracked according to what they happen to do well at early on, and never think outside. In that model, I would have done much less interesting things…” — Stephen Wolfram at Reddit
A forest of food, for the people, by the people: After nearly three years of planning, Beacon Hill residents are breaking ground on what will be the nation’s largest public food forest.
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Is the Occupy movement growing up?
“In the months since Occupy Wall Street pitched its first tents last September, one criticism of the movement has been that it does not offer much in the way of solutions. Enter Occupy the SEC, an Occupy offshoot made up of activists and veterans of the financial sector. Instead of taking the public stand of OWS, they’re using a different tactic: They’ve written a detailed 325-page analysis of the Volcker rule. And, in my view, they’ve got it exactly right.”
—Jared Bernstein, “Former Obama Official: Why I Applaud ‘Occupy the SEC’ “
Photo courtesy of The Guardian.
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Physicists Create a Working Transistor From a Single Atom -
By JOHN MARKOFF
Australian and American physicists have built a working transistor from a single phosphorus atom embedded in a silicon crystal.
While no parent wants a petulant, argumentative teenager, cultivating a skill set for feisty debate in secondary school may be the most effective way to ensure a reasoned adulthood.
Columbia University’s Deanna Kuhn, a psychology professor whose work in cognitive science and education was recently profiled by Miller-McCune (now called Pacific Standard, by the way), worries argument “based on substantive claims, sound reasoning, and relevant evidence” is dying out—yet, in our ever more complex world, is ever more crucial. How, she set out to uncover, could we foster a generation of rational, well-informed citizens to meet the challenges of tomorrow?
Though a geeky staple of secondary education, debate club was not the solution Kuhn investigated. Instead, she went meta. As in, metaphysical.
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DARPA Has a Simple Solution to Authentication: Reading Users' Minds -
Having contributed in large part to the Internet’s very existence, DARPA is now setting out to make its secure networks more secure. But rather than relying upon the conventional notion of a password—a complex string of letters and numerals that an individual must remember—the agency is looking to create a “cognitive fingerprint” for individuals that constantly authenticates that person for the duration of the time he or she has access to a network.
DARPA’s approach relies on biometrics, but not the usual brand of biometrics we’re used to seeing, like iris or fingerprint scans. DARPA wants to employ what it calls software-based biometrics—biometrics that don’t require any extra equipment and can be deployed on any computer via a software package—to recognize individual humans.
That means identifying humans not by a physical characteristic, but via a blend of mental or behavioral traits that are inherent in the way the person interacts with the terminal and the network. These things could include analysis of patterns in a person’s keystrokes, use of a computer’s built-in camera to track eye-movement patterns, semantic analysis that evaluates how a user searches and selects information (how you structure search queries, for instance, or what verbs and predicates you tend to use), the structure and syntax of a user’s sentences, the speed with which an individual tends to read content—the list goes on.
» via Popular Science
“Technology” dogs discovered umpteen thousands of years ago. =)
“The inconsistency of genius is a consistent theme of creativity: Even those blessed with ridiculous talent still produce works of startling mediocrity. (The Beatles are the exception that proves the rule, although their subsequent solo careers prove that even Lennon and McCartney were fallible artists.) The larger point is that mere imagination is not enough, for even those with prodigious gifts must still be able to sort their best from their worst, sifting through the clutter to find what’s actually worthwhile.” —
How Do We Identify Good Ideas? | Wired Science | Wired.com (via infoneer-pulse)
Keats (in a letter to his brothers) might have called it an example of
Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
(via infoneer-pulse)
“MKIDs rely on resonating circuits made of superconducting materials, in which the electrons move in ‘Cooper pairs’ that are bound by low-temperature quantum effects. When a photon strikes the circuit, it breaks apart one or more Cooper pairs, shifting the resonant frequency of the circuit and increasing energy losses. These two signals can be measured by a microwave probe of the circuit.” —
Superconducting Detectors Offer High-Speed Astronomy: Scientific American
yum!~