http://www.edge.org
(9,500 words)
This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge265.html
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THE THIRD CULTURE
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OF GENITAL THIEVES
The exploration of economic irrationality
Andrian Kreye
It was one of those watershed moments in science at which you would like to have been present. Last summer in Sonoma, three generations behavioral economists convened at a Master Class run by the Edge Foundation. Behavioral economics is a field of science that analyzes market dynamics from the consumers' perspective. The three prominent lecturers were Daniel Kahneman, currently a professor of psychology at Princeton, also a Nobel laureate in Economics for his pioneering work in "behavioral economics"; his younger collaborator Richard Thaler, a professor of behavioral science and economics at Chicago, widely considered to be the "father of behavioral economics"; as well as Thaler's highly-regarded former student Sendhil Mullainathan, now a professor of economics at Harvard, who has applied behavioral economics and psychology to the phenomena of poverty.
Still more prominent were the students of the class itself, above all because Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Google co-founder Salar Kamangar, Blogger founder and Twitter CEO Evan Williams, PayPal founder Elon Musk, former Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold, and Facebook cofounder and founding president Sean Parker, represented just four of the minds present who have shaped the successful part of the new economy. If you are interested in getting your head around the current global economic meltdown, read through the transcript of this master class once more this autumn. You may not find direct answers, but you will certainly find elements of an explanation. ....
ANDRIAN KREYE is the editor of the Feuilleton of Sueddeutsche Zeitung in Munich. He is also an Edge contributor.
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THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
A Talk with Alva Noe
EDGE VIDEO
The problem of consciousness is understanding how this world is there for us. It shows up in our senses. It shows up in our thoughts. Our feelings and interests and concerns are directed to and embrace this world around us. We think, we feel, the world shows up for us. To me that's the problem of consciousness. That is a real problem that needs to be studied, and it's a special problem.
A useful analogy is life. What is life? We can point to all sorts of chemical processes, metabolic processes, reproductive processes that are present where there is life. But we ask, where is the life? You don't say life is a thing inside the organism. The life is this process that the organism is participating in, a process that involves an environmental niche and dynamic selectivity. If you want to find the life, look to the dynamic of the animal's engagement with its world. The life is there. The life is not inside the animal. The life is the way the animal is in the world. ...
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HOW KEVIN BACON CURED CANCER
Steven Strogatz & Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
VIDEO: A new documentary from ABC Television im Australia featuring the work of Duncan Watts, Steven Strogatz and Albert-Laszlo Barabasi.
We've all heard of 'six degrees of separation', the idea that everyone in the world can be connected in just a few steps. But what if those steps don't just relate to people but also to viruses, neurons, proteins and even to fashion trends? What if this 'six degrees of separation' allowed us an insight into something at the core of Nature?...
..Whether natural or man-made, vast diverse networks share a common blueprint, a structure that describes their strengths and weaknesses. In the near future network science will fundamentally change how we control epidemics; power failures; fight wars; save endangered species; prevent crime and disease.
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IN THE NEWS
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EL PAIS
Internet cambia la forma de leer... ?y de pensar?
Abel Grau
..Uno de los mas recientes en plantear el debate ha sido el ensayista estadounidense Nicholas G. Carr, experto en Tecnologias de la Informacion y la Comunicacion (TIC), y asesor de la Enciclopedia britanica. Asegura que ya no piensa como antes. ...
..El planteamiento de Carr ha suscitado cierto debate en foros especializados, como en la revista cientifica online Edge.org, y de hecho no es descabellado. Los neurologos sostienen que todas las actividades mentales influyen a un nivel biologico en el cerebro; es decir, en el establecimiento de las conexiones neuronales, la compleja red electrica en la que se forman los pensamientos. " ....
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SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
Oppenheimer the Opera:
A review of Doctor Atomic
Michael Shermer
There are certain characters in science who stand out for their larger-than-science characteristics: Galileo and his conflicts with Papal authorities; Albert Einstein and his political dabblings and pacifist overtures; Richard Feynman and his safecracking, storytelling antics; Stephen Hawking and his ethereal brain trapped in a frozen body. Biographies, documentaries, films, and even plays have attempted to capture the essence of these giants (see QED, for example, the play starring Alan Alda as Feynman). But to my knowledge, none have had an opera produced in their likeness.
Enter Doctor Atomic, a look at the meaning behind the making of the atomic bomb from the perspective of its paterfamilias J. Robert Oppenheimer and his disparate struggles: with nature to reveal her secrets, with his conscious to ease his guilt. He also struggles with General Leslie R. Groves, the titular military head of the Manhattan Project, and with fellow physicist and future father of the H-Bomb, Edward Teller. ...
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THE TIMES
Ben Macintyre on a people with no history, no fiction and no sense of left or right
In 1980, Daniel Everett, an American missionary and linguist, set off into the heart of the Amazon to track down some of the norld's most elusive words: the language of the Piraha, a small tribe of Amazonian Indians living on the banks of the Maici River in Brazil.
For the next 20 years Everett, the son of a California cowboy, tried to hack his way through this impenetrable language, coming across verbs that grew into the most contorted shapes, sentences without subordinate clauses and forests of nouns that seemed to change without reason or pattern. ...
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THE GUARDIAN
The Power of Speech
Patrick Barkham
When Daniel Everett first went to live with the Amazonian Piraha tribe in the late 70s, his intention was to convert them to Christianity. Instead, he learned to speak their unique language - and ended up rejecting his faith, losing his family and picking a fight with Noam Chomsky. Patrick Barkham meets him
Daniel Everett looks and talks very much like the middle-aged American academic he is - until he drops a strange word into the conversation. An exceptionally melodic noise tumbles from his mouth. It doesn't sound like speaking at all. Apart from his ex-wife and two ageing missionaries, Everett is the only person in the world beyond the sweeping banks of the Maici river in the Amazon basin who can speak Piraha. ...
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WALL STREET JOURNAL
A New Dawn
Bjorn Lomborg, Ian McEwan
A NEW DAWN
ESSAY
The benefits of climate-change policies are limited and costly. Instead, the president-elect needs to coolly evaluate competing priorities, says Bjorn Lomborg. ...
ESSAY
As Barack Obama shifts from a waking dream to the real world, he faces the near-virtual reality of climate change. He has to move decisively, Ian McEwan writes. ...
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HARVARD MAGAZINE
What Makes the Human Mind?
By Ashley Pettus
What Makes the Human Mind?
By Ashley Pettus
During the past few decades, a mounting body of evidence has shown that animals possess a number of cognitive traits once thought to be uniquely human. Bees "talk" through complex dances and sounds; birds act as "social tutors," teaching song repertoires to their young; monkeys use tools and can sort abstract symbols into categories. Yet the more scientists learn about the similarities between human and animal thought, the greater the need to explain the dramatic divide. Are the human faculties associated with language simply an advanced version of capacities that are found in animals, or do they represent something that is qualitatively new?
This puzzle has drawn the attention of professor of psychology, organismic and evolutionary biology, and biological anthropology Marc Hauser, who has written widely on human and animal cognition. Drawing on a range of recent studies that link the fields of linguistics, biology, and psychology, Hauser has attempted to isolate the aspects of human thought that account for what he terms "humaniqueness." He maintains that even though human brains have inherited many of the raw abilities observed in nonhuman animal species, a divergence arises from the ways in which multiple capacities interact in humans, allowing them to convert information into myriad forms to serve infinitely diverse ends. ...
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LOS ANGELES TIMES
McCain's science earmark error
By Lawrence M. Krauss
OPINION
McCain's science earmark error
Millions to study grizzly bear DNA is 'a waste of money,' McCain says. Wrong.
By Lawrence M. Krauss
..Fruit flies can be made to seem like a silly thing to spend money on. But Palin was referring to research at a lab in France supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The subject is the olive fruit fly, which threatens the California olive industry. The U.S. is working with France because that nation has dealt with an olive fruit fly infestation for decades, far longer than California.
Maybe Palin also should have been told that a University of North Carolina fruit fly study last year demonstrated that a protein called neurexin is required for nerve-cell connections to form and function correctly. That discovery may lead to advances in understanding, among other things, autism, one of the childhood disorders that has been stressed by the McCain-Palin campaign.
It is easy to attack what you don't understand. But politicians would be wiser to attempt to better appreciate how science affects the issues central to our political priorities before rushing to use scientific research and education as a scapegoat in their campaigns.
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SLATE
Does Religion Make You Nice?
By Paul Bloom
.Arguments about the merits of religions are often battled out with reference to history, by comparing the sins of theists and atheists. (I see your Crusades and raise you Stalin!) But a more promising approach is to look at empirical research that directly addresses the effects of religion on how people behave.
In a review published in Science last month, psychologists Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff discuss several experiments that lean pro-Schlessinger. In one of their own studies, they primed half the participants with a spirituality-themed word jumble (including the words divine and God) and gave the other half the same task with nonspiritual words. Then, they gave all the participants $10 each and told them that they could either keep it or share their cash reward with another (anonymous) subject. Ultimately, the spiritual-jumble group parted with more than twice as much money as the control. Norenzayan and Shariff suggest that this lopsided outcome is the result of an evolutionary imperative to care about one's reputation. ...
..It is at this point that the "We need God to be good" case falls apart. Countries worthy of consideration aren't those like North Korea and China, where religion is savagely repressed, but those in which people freely choose atheism. In his new book, Society Without God, Phil Zuckerman looks at the Danes and the Swedes-probably the most godless people on Earth. They don't go to church or pray in the privacy of their own homes; they don't believe in God or heaven or hell. But, by any reasonable standard, they're nice to one another. ...
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This online EDGE edition with links and EDGE Video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge265.html
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Edge Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private operating foundation under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.
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EDGE
John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant
Copyright (c) 2008 by EDGE Foundation, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
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