Edge editions

This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge288.html

----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
----------------------------------------------------

THE IMPENDING DEMISE OF THE UNIVERSITY
By Don Tapscott

In the industrial model of student mass production, the teacher is the broadcaster. A broadcast is by definition the transmission of information from transmitter to receiver in a one-way, linear fashion. The teacher is the transmitter and student is a receptor in the learning process. The formula goes like this: "I'm a professor and I have knowledge. You're a student, you're an empty vessel and you don't. Get ready, here it comes. Your goal is to take this data into your short-term memory and through practice and repetition build deeper cognitive structures so you can recall it to me when I test you."... The definition of a lecture has become the process in which the notes of the teacher go to the notes of the student without going through the brains of either.

DON TAPSCOTT is the author of 13 books on new technology in society, most recently Grown Up Digital. He recently completed a $4 million dollar investigation of the Net Generation. He is Chairman of the think tank nGenera Insight and an Adjunct Professor at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
THE REALITY CLUB
----------------------------------------------------

Stewart Brand, Alun Anderson and Laurence Smith on "Will We Decamp for the Northern Rim?

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

FOLLOW EDGE ON TWITTER
http://twitter.com/edge

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
ARTICLES OF NOTE
----------------------------------------------------

THE NEW YORK TIMES
June 2, 2009

ESSAY

Wisdom in a Cleric's Garb; Why Not a Lab Coat Too?
By Dennis Overbye

The movie "Angels & Demons" offers a chance to join an ancient discussion on religion and science.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
NEWSWEEK
June 1, 2009

Can Admitting a Wrong Make It Right?
By Christopher Dickey

To address the future of the Middle East, Obama must look to the past.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
SCIENCE
May 22, 2009

RETROSPECTIVE:

John Maddox (1925–2009)

By Nicholas Wade
Nicholas Wade, now at the New York Times, was at Nature from 1968 to 1971.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
June 1, 2009

Black Swan Fund Makes a Big Bet on Inflation
By Scott Patterson

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW YORK TIMES
May 29, 2009

A Human Language Gene Changes the Sound of Mouse Squeaks
NICHOLAS WADE

People have a deep desire to communicate with animals, as is evident from the way they converse with their dogs, enjoy myths about talking animals or devote lifetimes to teaching chimpanzees how to speak. A delicate, if tiny, step has now been taken toward the real thing: the creation of a mouse with a human gene for language.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
NEWSWEEK
June 8, 2009

Let's Talk About God
By Lisa Miller

A new book redefines the faith debate.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW YORK TIMES
May 28, 2009

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Would You Slap Your Father? If So, You're a Liberal
By Nicholas D. Kristof

...This came up after I wrote a column earlier this year called "The Daily Me." I argued that most of us employ the Internet not to seek the best information, but rather to select information that confirms our prejudices. To overcome that tendency, I argued, we should set aside time for a daily mental workout with an ideological sparring partner. Afterward, I heard from Jonathan Haidt, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia. "You got the problem right, but the prescription wrong," he said.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
NEW YORK TIMES
May 26, 2009

THE WILD SIDE

Guest Column: Loves Me, Loves Me Not (Do the Math)
By Steven Strogatz

"In the spring," wrote Tennyson, "a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love." And so in keeping with the spirit of the season, this week's column looks at love affairs — mathematically.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW YORK TIMES
May 27, 2009

BOOKS OF THE TIMES

Why Are Humans Different From All Other Apes? It's the Cooking, Stupid
By Dwight Garner

Catching Fire" is a plain-spoken and thoroughly gripping scientific essay that presents nothing less than a new theory of human evolution.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

BOOKS FROM EDGE
----------------------------------------------------

NOW AVAILABLE IN BOOKSTORES AND ONLINE

WHAT'S NEXT?
DISPATCHES ON THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE
Edited By Max Brockman

Vintage Books
http://www.amazon.com/Whats-Next-Dispatches-Future-Science/dp/0307389316

If these authors are the future of science, then the science of the future will be one exciting ride! Find out what the best minds of the new generation are thinking before the Nobel Committee does. A fascinating chronicle of the big, new ideas that are keeping young scientists up at night.
-- Daniel Gilbert, author of STUMBLING ON NHAPPINESS

"A preview of the ideas you're going to be reading about in ten years."
- Steven Pinker, author of THE STUFF OF THOUGHT

"Brockman has a nose for talent."
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author THE BLACK SWAN

"Capaciously accessible, these writings project a curiosity to which followers of science news will gravitate." - BOOKLIST

----------------------------------------------------

WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT
Edited by John Brockman
With An Introduction By BRIAN ENO

Harper Perennial
http://www.amazon.com/What-Have-Changed-Your-About/dp/0061686549

Praise for WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT?

The world's finest minds have responded with some of the most insightful, humbling, fascinating confessions and anecdotes, an intellectual treasure trove. ... Best three or four hours of intense, enlightening reading you can do for the new year. Read it now."
San Francisco Chronicle

"The splendidly enlightened Edge website (www.edge.org) has rounded off each year of inter-disciplinary debate by asking its heavy-hitting contributors to answer one question. I strongly recommend a visit." THE INDEPENDENT

"A great event in the Anglo-Saxon culture." EL MUNDO

"As fascinating and weighty as one would imagine." THE INDEPENDENT

"They are the intellectual elite, the brains the rest of us rely on to make sense of the universe and answer the big questions. But in a refreshing show of new year humility, the world's best thinkers have admitted that from time to time even they are forced to change their minds." THE GUARDIAN

"Even the world's best brains have to admit to being wrong sometimes: here, leading scientists respond to a new year challenge." THE TIMES

"Provocative ideas put forward today by leading figures." THE TELEGRAPH

"As in the past, these world-class thinkers have responded to impossibly open-ended questions with erudition, imagination and clarity." THE NEWS & OBSERVER

"A jolt of fresh thinking...The answers address a fabulous array of issues. This is the intellectual equivalent of a New Year's dip in the lake - bracing, possibly shriek-inducing, and bound to wake you up." THE GLOBE & MAIL

"Answers ring like scientific odes to uncertainty, humility and doubt; passionate pleas for critical thought in a world threatened by blind convictions." THE TORONTO STAR

"For an exceptionally high quotient of interesting ideas to words, this is hard to beat. ...What a feast of egg-head opinionating!" NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge288.html

----------------------------------------------------
Edge Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private operating foundation under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
EDGE

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

----------------------------------------------------
EDGE Newsbytes: http://www.edge.org/newsbytes.html
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
---
You are currently subscribed to edge_editions as: wheresrhys@googlemail.com

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-4342802-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL: http://www.edge.org/subscribe.html

Edge 287: Max Brockman: What's Next - Dispatches on the Future of Science

2009-05-27T11:39:00.000-07:00

Edge 287 - May 27, 2009

(10,350 words)

This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge287.html

----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
----------------------------------------------------

"A fascinating chronicle of the big, new ideas that are keeping young scientists up at night."
— Daniel Gilbert

"A preview of the ideas you're going to be reading about in ten years."
— Steven Pinker

WHAT'S NEXT?
DISPATCHES ON THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE
Edited by Max Brockman

[ED. NOTE: What are "the big, new ideas that are keeping young scientists up at night?" Beginning today with Laurence Smith's "Will We Decamp for the Northern Rim", and in the coming weeks, EDGE will publish a selection of the essays in Max Brockman's book WHAT'S NEXT? DISPATCHES ON THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE, published today by Vintage Books.-JB]

Vintage Books
http://www.amazon.com/Whats-Next-Dispatches-Future-Science/dp/0307389316

"To generate this list of contributors, I approached some of today's leading scientists and asked them to name some of the rising stars in their respective disciplines: those who, in their research, are tackling some of science's toughest questions and raising new ones. The list that resulted amounts to a representative who's who of the coming generation of scientists." - Max Brockman

Laurence C. Smith: "WILL WE DECAMP FOR THE NORTHERN RIM?"
"At stake is no less than the global pattern of human settlement in the twenty-first century."

Christian Keysers: "MIRROR NEURONS: ARE WE ETHICAL BY NATURE"
"Evolution has equipped our brains with circuits that enable us to experience what other individuals do and feel."

Nick Bostrom: "HOW SHALL WE ENHANCE HUMAN BEINGS?"
"Given our rudimentary understanding of the human organism, particularly the brain, how can we hope to enhance such a system? It would amount to outdoing evolution...."

Sean Carroll : "OUR PLACE IN AN UNNATURAL UNIVERSE"
"The early universe is hot and dense; the late universe is cold and dilute. Well...why is it like that? The truth is, we have no idea."

Stephon H. S. Alexander: "JUST WHAT IS DARK ENERGY?"
"Dark energy, itself directly unobservable, is the most bewildering substance known, the only "stuff" that acts both on subatomic scales and across the largest distances in the cosmos."

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore: "DEVELOPMENT OF THE SOCIAL BRAIN IN ADOLESCENCE"
"Using modern brain-imaging techniques, scientists are discovering that the human brain does indeed change well beyond early childhood."

Jason P. Mitchell: "WATCHING MINDS INTERACT"
"Perhaps the least anticipated contribution of brain imaging to psychological science has been a sudden appreciation of the centrality of social thought to the human mental repertoire."

Matthew D. Lieberman: "WHAT MAKES BIG IDEAS STICKY?"
"Big Ideas sometimes match the structure and function of the human brain such that the brain causes us to see the world in ways that make it virtually impossible not to believe them."

Joshua D. Greene: "FRUIT FLIES OF THE MORAL MIND"
"People often speak of a "moral faculty" or a "moral sense," suggesting that moral judgment is a unified phenomenon, but recent advances in the scientific study of moral judgment paint a very different picture."

Lera Boroditsky: "DO OUR LANGUAGES SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?"
"Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human. Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity."

Sam Cooke: "MEMORY ENHANCEMENT, MEMORY ERASURE: IS THIS THE FUTURE OF OUR PAST?"
"Once we come to understand how our memories are formed, stored, and recalled within the brain, we may be able to manipulate them—to shape our own stories. Our past—or at least our recollection of our past—may become a matter of choice."

Deena Skolnick Weisberg: "THE VITAL IMPORTANCE OF IMAGINATION"
"The main goal of my research is to discover the nature of the what-if mechanism and how it allows us to create and comprehend fictional worlds."

David M. Eagleman: "BRAIN TIME"
"The days of thinking of time as a river—evenly flowing, always advancing—are over. Time perception, just like vision, is a construction of the brain and is shockingly easy to manipulate experimentally."

Vanessa Woods & Brian Hare: "OUT OF OUR MINDS: HOW DID HUMANS COME DOWN FROM THE TREES AND WHY DID NO ONE FOLLOW?"
"In the 6 million years since hominids split from the evolutionary ancestor we share with chimpanzees and bonobos, something happened to our brains that allowed us to become master cooperators, accumulate knowledge at a rapid rate, and manipulate tools to colonize almost every corner of the planet."

Nathan Wolfe: "THE ALIENS AMONG US"
"While viruses have to infect cellular forms of life in order to complete their life cycles, this does not mean that causing devastation is their destiny. The existing equilibrium of our planet is dependent on the actions of the viral world, and their elimination would have profound consequences."

Seirian Sumner: "HOW DID THE SOCIAL INSECTS BECOME SOCIAL?"
"We would like to know what the conditions and selection pressures were that tipped the ancestors of the eusocial insects over the ledge and down toward eusociality."

Katerina Harvati : "EXTINCTION AND THE EVOLUTION OF HUMANKIND"
"t is now clear that humans (whether fossil or living) are not immune from biological forces and that extinction was (and, indeed, is) a distinct possibility."

Gavin Schmidt: "WHY HASN'T SPECIALIZATION LED TO THE BALKANIZATION OF SCIENCE?"
"Even as scientific output has increased exponentially, concerns have been raised that growing specialization will end by making it impossible for scientists in different fields to communicate, let alone collaborate."

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
WILL WE DECAMP FOR THE NORTHERN RIM?
By Laurence C. Smith

"Already the impacts are obvious in the extreme north, where melting Arctic sea ice, drowning polar bears, and forlorn Inuit hunters are by now iconic images of global warming. The rapidity and severity of Arctic warming is truly dramatic. However, the Arctic, a relatively small, thinly populated region, will always be marginal in terms of its raw social and economic impact on the rest of us. The greater story lies to the south, penetrating deeply into the "Northern Rim," a vast zone of economically significant territory and adjacent ocean owned by the United States, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Russia. As in the Arctic, climate change there has already begun. This zone — which constitutes almost 30 percent of the Earth's land area and is home to its largest remaining forests, its greatest untouched mineral, water, and energy reserves, and a (growing) population of almost 100 million people — will undergo one of the most profound biophysical and social expansions of this century."

LAURENCE C. SMITH is Professor and vice chairman of geography and professor of earth and space sciences at UCLA. He studies likely impacts of northern climate change including the economic effects in the Northern Rim.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

FOLLOW EDGE ON TWITTER
http://twitter.com/edge

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
ARTICLES OF NOTE
----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW YORK TIMES
May 27, 2009

BOOKS OF THE TIMES

Why Are Humans Different From All Other Apes? It's the Cooking, Stupid
By DWIGHT GARNER

Catching Fire" is a plain-spoken and thoroughly gripping scientific essay that presents nothing less than a new theory of human evolution.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
NEW YORK TIMES
May 20, 2009

THE WILD SIDE

Guest Column: Math and the City
BY STEVEN STROGATZ

One of the pleasures of looking at the world through mathematical eyes is that you can see certain patterns that would otherwise be hidden. This week's column is about one such pattern. It's a beautiful law of collective organization that links urban studies to zoology. It reveals Manhattan and a mouse to be variations on a single structural theme.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
BBC NEWS
May 26, 2009

Eno artwork lights up opera house

The artwork of music producer Brian Eno is illuminating the iconic sails of the Sydney Opera House as part of a sound and light festival in the city.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW YORK TIMES
May 26, 2009

LETTERS

Learning to Accept the Unknowable

To the Editor:
Re "What You Don't Know Makes You Nervous," by Daniel Gilbert (Op-Ed, May 21): Professor Gilbert is surely right in arguing that uncertainty plays an important role in human unhappiness. But cognitive psychologists, like the late Albert Ellis, would argue that the way we think about uncertainty is also critical. If we catastrophize about the inherent uncertainty in life — "I can't stand not knowing what the market will do! This is horrible!" — then we will drive our mood much deeper into the ground. ...

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
NEW YORK TIMES
May 26, 2009

Texting May Be Taking a Toll
By KATIE HAFNER

...The rise in texting is too recent to have produced any conclusive data on health effects. But Sherry Turkle, a psychologist who is director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and who has studied texting among teenagers in the Boston area for three years, said it might be causing a shift in the way adolescents develop.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
FAST COMPANY
June 2009

100 Most Creative People in Business

43. Neri Oxman
By Anya Kamenetz

...This laughing, chic young woman in a flowing Helmut Lang jacket is an artist, architect, ecologist, computer scientist, and designer who is not just making new things but also coming up with new ways to make things.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
INTERVIEW MAGAZINE
April 28, 2009

Neri OXMAN
By JOHN ORTVED
Photography TOM ALLEN

Imagine a chair that moves when you move, that adjusts to every muscle in your body, that responds like a living organism . . . a chair kind of like a really excellent lover. Neri Oxman imagined such a chair. Then she built it.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW YORK TIMES
May 24, 2009

The Coming Superbrain
By JOHN MARKOFF

... Profiled in the documentary "Transcendent Man," which had its premier last month at the TriBeCa Film Festival, and with his own Singularity movie due later this year, Dr. Kurzweil has become a one-man marketing machine for the concept of post-humanism.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
WIRED MAGAZINE
May 22, 2007

Secret of Googlenomics: Data-Fueled Recipe Brews Profitability
By Steven Levy

...Ironically, economics was a distant focus in the first days of Google. After Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the company in 1998, they channeled their energy into its free search product and left much of the business planning to a 22-year-old Stanford graduate named Salar Kamangar, Google's ninth employee. The early assumption was that although ads would be an important source of revenue, licensing search technology and selling servers would be just as lucrative.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
WIRED MAGAZINE
May 22, 2007

The New New Economy: More Startups, Fewer Giants, Infinite Opportunity
By Chris Anderson

...This crisis is not just the trough of a cycle but the end of an era. We will come out not just wiser but different.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
WIRED MAGAZINE
May 22, 2007

The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online
By Kevin Kelly

We're not talking about your grandfather's socialism. In fact, there is a long list of past movements this new socialism is not. It is not class warfare. It is not anti-American; indeed, digital socialism may be the newest American innovation.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
LOS ANGELES TIMES
May 22, 2009

BLOWBACK

Why is Charlotte Allen so mad at atheists?
By P.Z. Myers

She says it's because we're boring. More likely, it's because we speak out against the intellectually bankrupt beliefs of religion.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
BLOGGING HEADS TV
May 22, 2009

Science Saturday: Cooking and Violence Edition

JOHN HORGAN
Stevens Center for Science Writings, JohnHorgan.org

RICHARD WRANGHAM
Harvard University

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

BOOKS FROM EDGE
----------------------------------------------------

NOW AVAILABLE IN BOOKSTORES AND ONLINE

WHAT'S NEXT?
DISPATCHES ON THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE
Edited By Max Brockman

Vintage Books
http://www.amazon.com/Whats-Next-Dispatches-Future-Science/dp/0307389316

If these authors are the future of science, then the science of the future will be one exciting ride! Find out what the best minds of the new generation are thinking before the Nobel Committee does. A fascinating chronicle of the big, new ideas that are keeping young scientists up at night.
— Daniel Gilbert, author of STUMBLING ON NHAPPINESS

"A preview of the ideas you're going to be reading about in ten years."
- Steven Pinker, author of THE STUFF OF THOUGHT

"Brockman has a nose for talent."
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author THE BLACK SWAN

"Capaciously accessible, these writings project a curiosity to which followers of science news will gravitate." - BOOKLIST

----------------------------------------------------

WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT
Edited by John Brockman
With An Introduction By BRIAN ENO

Harper Perennial
http://www.amazon.com/What-Have-Changed-Your-About/dp/0061686549

Praise for WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT?

"A great event in the Anglo-Saxon culture." EL MUNDO

"As fascinating and weighty as one would imagine." THE INDEPENDENT

"Even the world's best brains have to admit to being wrong sometimes: here, leading scientists respond to a new year challenge." THE TIMES

"Provocative ideas put forward today by leading figures." THE TELEGRAPH

"As in the past, these world-class thinkers have responded to impossibly open-ended questions with erudition, imagination and clarity." THE NEWS & OBSERVER

"Answers ring like scientific odes to uncertainty, humility and doubt; passionate pleas for critical thought in a world threatened by blind convictions." THE TORONTO STAR

"For an exceptionally high quotient of interesting ideas to words, this is hard to beat. ...What a feast of egg-head opinionating!" NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge287.html

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-4274223-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL: http://www.edge.org/subscribe.html

Edge 286 Chimeras of Experience - A Conversation with Jonah Lehrer

2009-05-21T14:39:00.000-07:00

Edge 286 - May 21, 2009

(11,700 words)

This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge286.html

----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
----------------------------------------------------
CHIMERAS OF EXPERIENCE
A Conversation with Jonah Lehrer

EDGE Video

"The paradox of modern neuroscience is that the one reality you can't describe as it is presently conceived is the only reality we'll ever know, which is the subjective first person view of things. Even if you can find the circuit of cells that gives rise to that, and you can construct a good causal demonstration that you knock out these circuit of cells, and you create a zombie; even if you do that... and I know Dennett could dismantle this argument very, very quickly ... there's still a mystery that persists, and this is the old brain-body, mind-body problem, and we don't simply feel like three pounds of meat."

JONAH LEHRER, Contributing Editor at Wired and the author of How We Decide and Proust Was a Neuroscientist, has written for The New Yorker, Nature, Seed, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
The Third Culture has grown beyond EDGE, as scientists have become increasingly public -- and even famous -- figures. Seed approached six thinkers to ask where we are now: Whether the Two Cultures are still divided, and what role the Third Culture is playing.

SEED CELEBRATES THE QUESTIONS C.P. SNOW RAISED 50 YEARS AGO BY ASKING: WHERE ARE WE NOW?

Video

"Are we beyond the Two Cultures?" asks SEED Magazine in its May 7 commemoration of the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow's Two Cultures lecture. Readers following Edge since it began 12 years, 285 editions, and 2,939,953 words ago, know how to answer this question. Fortunately, Seedfollows up and asks "Where are we now?"

In the videos below, SEED asks six notable scientists, authors, thinkers -- all also early Edge contributors -- (E.O. Wilson, Janna Levin, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Steven Pinker, Marc D. Hauser, and Rebecca Goldstein) to comment on where the third culture is today.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
FOLLOW EDGE ON TWITTER
http://twitter.com/edge

What You Don't Know Makes You Nervous
By DANIEL GILBERT

An uncertain future leaves us stranded in an unhappy present with nothing to do but wait.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
NEW YORK TIMES
May 20, 2009

THE WILD SIDE

Guest Column: Math and the City
BY STEVEN STROGATZ

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
NEW YORK TIMES -- TIERNEY LAB
May 19, 2009

FINDINGS

Message in What We Buy, but Nobody's Listening
By JOHN TIERNEY

If you ask market researchers or advertising executives, you might hear about the difference between "rational" and "emotional" buying decisions, or about products falling into categories like "hedonic" or "utilitarian" or "positional." But GEOFFREY MILLER, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, says that even the slickest minds on Madison Avenue are still in the prescientific dark ages.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
THE REASON PROJECT LAUNCHES IT'S WEBSITE

.. The Reason Project seeks to encourage critical thinking and wise public policy through a variety of interrelated projects. The foundation will convene conferences, produce films, sponsor scientific studies and opinion polls, publish original research, award grants to other charitable organizations, and offer material support to religious dissidents and public intellectuals -- all with the purpose of eroding the influence of dogmatism, superstition, and bigotry in our world.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
May 18, 2009

Rip My Book, Please
An interview with The Long Tail's Chris Anderson on the meaning of free

by Andrew Richard Albanese

One day after News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch told reporters that his company is exploring how to charge for its online content, proclaiming that an "epochal" moment looms in Web history, PW asked Wired editor-in-chief CHRIS ANDERSON, bestselling author of THE LONG TAIL, about the dire state of newspapers in the digital age. "With The Long Tail, people were like, okay, smart guy, fix the music industry," Anderson quipped. "Now, it is going to be, okay, smart guy, fix the newspaper industry! I have to say, I do not have any answers."

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
NEWSWEEK
May 18, 2009

Science Cult:
Ray Kurzweil's vision of a 'Singularity' has attracted some followers, but don't expect it anytime soon.

By John Horgan

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
NEWSWEEK
May 16, 2009

I, Robot:
Ray Kurzweil can't wait to be a Cyborg--a human mind inside an everlasting machine. But is this the next great leap in human evolution

By Daniel Lyons

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
PBS -- BILL MOYERS JOUNRAL
May 15, 2009

Daniel Goleman explains to Bill Moyers how better educated consumers can help build a sustainable economy.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
NATURE
May 14, 2009

COLUMN: MUSE
How much reason do you want?

By Philip Ball

The 'war' between science and religion is stuck in a rut. Can we change the record now, asks Philip Ball?

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
LOS ANGELES TIMES - OPINION
May 17, 2009

Atheists: No God, no reason, just whining
By Charlotte Allen

Superstar atheists are motivated by anger -- and boohoo victimhood.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
SEED
May 16, 2009

ALISON GOPNIK DESCRIBES NEW EXPERIMENTS IN DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY THAT SHOW EVERYTHING WE THINK WE KNOW ABOUT BABIES IS WRONG.

By Evan Lerner

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
NEW SCIENTIST
May 4, 2009

How to map the multiverse
by Anil Ananthaswamy

BRIAN GREENE spent a good part of the last decade extolling the virtues of string theory. [...] "But the fly in the ointment was that string theory allowed for, in principle, many universes," says Greene, who is a theoretical physicist at Columbia University in New York.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
THE WASHINGTON POST
May 6, 2009

paidContent.org - Conde Nast's Carey And Wired's Anderson: Pursuing The 'Fremium' Model

By David Kaplan

CHRIS ANDERSON, Wired: Print is not just about newspapers or magazine, you need to think of books as well. What we're seeing is a distinction between different kinds of print. We're now slowly figuring out what kind of print adds value in the internet age and what kind doesn't.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
COSMOS
October, 2008

Rage of reason
By Robin McKie

Richard Dawkins is a towering figure in evolution who skewers creationists for sport. He doesn't suffer fools gladly, but was kind enough to talk to Robin McKie.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

BOOKS FROM EDGE
----------------------------------------------------
WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT
Edited by John Brockman
With An Introduction By BRIAN ENO

Harper Perennial
http://www.amazon.com/What-Have-Changed-Your-About/dp/0061686549

Praise for WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT?

"A great event in the Anglo-Saxon culture." EL MUNDS

"As fascinating and weighty as one would imagine." THE INDEPENDENT

"Even the world's best brains have to admit to being wrong sometimes: here, leading scientists respond to a new year challenge." THE TIMES

"Provocative ideas put forward today by leading figures." THE TELEGRAPH

"As in the past, these world-class thinkers have responded to impossibly open-ended questions with erudition, imagination and clarity." THE NEWS & OBSERVER

"Answers ring like scientific odes to uncertainty, humility and doubt; passionate pleas for critical thought in a world threatened by blind convictions." THE TORONTO STAR

"For an exceptionally high quotient of interesting ideas to words, this is hard to beat. ...What a feast of egg-head opinionating!" NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge286.html

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

---
You are currently subscribed to edge_editions as: wheresrhys@googlemail.com

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-4216851-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL: http://www.edge.org/subscribe.html

Edge 285: Videos from the Economic Manhattan Project

2009-05-15T12:42:00.000-07:00

Edge 285 - May 15, 2009

(8,200 words)

http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge284.html

This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge285.html

----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
----------------------------------------------------

VIDEOS FROM THE ECONOMIC MANHATTAN PROJECT

In December, EDGE published "Can Science Help Solve the Economic Crisis?" by Mike Brown, Stuart Kauffman, Zoe-Vonna Palmrose, and Lee Smolin. The paper was prompted by a suggestion by Eric Weinstein for an "Economic Manhattan Project".

This led to the Perimeter Institute conference in Waterloo, Ontario: "The Economic Crisis and its Implications for The Science of Economics". According to the organizers, "Concerns over the current financial situation are giving rise to a need to evaluate the very mathematics that underpins economics as a predictive and descriptive science. A growing desire to examine economics through the lens of diverse scientific methodologies — including physics and complex systems — is making way to a meeting of leading economists and theorists of finance together with physicists, mathematicians, biologists and computer scientists in an effort to evaluate current theories of markets and identify key issues that can motivate new directions for research."

Jordan Mejias, arts correspondent for FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG and frequent EDGE contributor, attended the conference and a wrote a article that ran on on the front page of the FAZ Feuilleton. His translation is presented below.

EDGE is pleased to present the videos of the talks during the first day and half of the conference...

A SCIENCE LESS DISMAL: WELCOME TO THE ECONOMIC MANHATTAN PROJECT
Eric R. Weinstein

INTERPRETING THE FAILURE TO PREDICT FINANCIAL CRISES AND RECESSION
Nouriel Roubini

UNTITLED
Nassim Taleb

PANEL DISCUSSION
Nouriel Roubini, Nassim Taleb , Richard Freeman, Eric R. Weinstein

SCIENTISTS, SCIENSTERS, ANTI-SCIENTISTS & ECONOMISTS
Emanuel Derman

THE ADAPTIVE MARKETS HYPOTHESIS AND FINANCIAL CRISIS
Andrew Lo

HUMAN EVOLUTION AND ECONOMICS
Richard Alexander

PANEL DISCUSSION
Emanuel Derman, Andrew Lo, Richard Alexander, Bill Janeway, Zoe-Vonna Palmrose

PHYSICISTS ATTEMPT TO SCALE THE IVORY TOWERS OF FINANCE (TEN YEARS LATER, LOOKING FORWARD)
Doyne Farmer

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------

"The threat of deadly new viruses is on the rise due to population growth, climate change and increased contact between humans and animals. What the world needs to do to prepare."

THE AGE OF PANDEMICS
By Larry Brilliant
In 1967, the country's surgeon general, William Stewart, famously said, "The time has come to close the book on infectious diseases. We have basically wiped out infection in the United States." This premature victory declaration, perhaps based on early public health victories over 19th-century infectious diseases, has entered the lore of epidemiologists who know that, if anything, the time has come to open the book to a new and dangerous chapter on 21st-century communicable diseases.

Indeed, to the epidemiological community, the Influenza Pandemic of 2009 is one of the most widely anticipated diseases in history. Epidemiologists have been shouting from rooftops that a pandemic (or, a world-wide epidemic) of influenza is overdue, and that it is not a matter of "if" but "when." The current pathogen creating the threat is actually a mixture of viral genetic elements from all over the globe that have sorted, shifted, sorted, shifted, drifted and recombined to form this worrisome virus.

No one knows if the 2009 swine flu will behave like the 1918 Spanish flu that killed 50 million to 100 million world-wide, or like the 1957 Asian flu and 1968 Hong Kong flu that killed far fewer. This 2009 flu may weaken and lose its virulence, or strengthen and gain virulence—we just do not know. ...

LAWRENCE B. BRILLIANT, Executive Director of Google.org. is a medical doctor who was a professor of international health and epidemiology at the University of Michigan from 1976-1986 and prior to that he lived in India and worked as a medical officer for the United Nations World Health Organization helping lead the successful effort to eradicate smallpox. He is a founder and a director of the Seva Foundation, an international organization dedicated to fighting blindness. Brilliant will soon begin work as president of the Skoll Urgent Threats Fund.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
FOLLOW EDGE ON TWITTER
http://twitter.com/edge

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
ARTICLES OF NOTE
----------------------------------------------------
TRUE/SLANT
May 7, 2009

MATT TIABBI
TAIBBLOG

Religion, agnostics, and the cure for baldness

...I'm always on the lookout for religion's latest counter-arguments, the new rhetorical approaches that God People are constantly fine-tuning for use in pimping the righteousness of faith (and for demonstrating the moral dissoluteness of agnostics like myself).

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
NEW YORK TIMES
May 10, 2009

The American Press on Suicide Watch
By Frank Rich

The real question is for the public, not journalists: Does it want to pony up for news, whatever the media that prevail?

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
THE BOSTON GLOBE
May 10, 2009

Perfectly Happy
By Drake Bennett

The new science of measuring happiness has transformed self-help. Now scholars suggest it could transform society.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
PHARYNGULA
May 7, 2009

The Templeton conundrum
By PZ Myers

Money is essential to science, and at the same time it can be a dangerous corrupter.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
PROSPECT
May, 2009

Dr. Pangloss

A living art reborn
Brian Eno

... live music scene is exploding, for, unable to make a living from records sales, more and more bands are playing live.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG
May 7, 2009

Besuch bei Google

"Seid nicht böse!"
Von Alex Rühle

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
DER SPIEGEL
May 8, 2009

HEUTE IN DEN FEUILLETONS

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
BUSINESS DAY (South Africa)
May 8, 2009

OPINION & EDITORIAL

There is no question more important to us than our mortality
By Michel Pireu

APPLETON professor of natural philosophy at Dartmouth College Marcelo Gleiser says that in the future we may be able to master death.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
NOW ON PBS
Week of 5.9.09

Predicting Pandemics

How do we fight both the swine flu pandemic and our fear of it?

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
THE REASON PROJECT
May 7, 2009

Truckling to the Faithful: A Spoonful of Jesus Helps Darwin Go Down
By Jerry Coyne

... Here I argue that the accommodationist position of the National Academy of Sciences, and especially that of the National Center for Science Education, is a self-defeating tactic, compromising the very science they aspire to defend.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
NEW YORKER
May 11, 2009

Profiles
BRAIN GAMES: The Marco Polo of neuroscience

By John Colapinto

... "Ramachandran is a latter-day Marco Polo, journeying the silk road of science to strange and exotic Cathays of the mind," Richard Dawkins once wrote.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
PHARYNGULA
May 5, 2009

The Eagleton Delusion
By PZ Myers

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
NEW YORK TIMES
May 4, 2009

OPINION

GOD TALK
By Stanley Fish

... [Eagleton] is angry, I think, at having to expend so much mental and emotional energy refuting the shallow arguments of school-yard atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
NATURE
April 29, 2009

The worst-case scenario
By STEPHEN SCHNEIDER

Stephen Schneider explores what a world with 1,000 parts per million of CO2 in its atmosphere might look like.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
NATURE
April 29, 2009

Climate change: Too much of a bad thing
By Gavin Schmidt & David Archer

There are various — and confusing — targets to limit global warming due to emissions of greenhouse gases. Estimates based on the total slug of carbon emitted are possibly the most robust, and are worrisome.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
NATURE
April 29, 2009

Obama says more money
President promises rise in research and development funds.

By Jeff Tollefson

Obama called clean energy the current generation's "great project" and said that investment levels must be increased despite ongoing economic woes.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
THE BOSTON GLOBE
April 26, 2009

Beyond Belief: Research on religion goes after a new target: the secular
By Nathan Schneider

As sociologists, psychologists, and physicians turn their attention to measuring the effects of religion, often fueled by grant money from private foundations, the results have percolated swiftly through weekend sermons and the popular media. Being nonreligious, one might conclude, looks more and more like a danger to your health.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

BOOKS FROM EDGE
----------------------------------------------------
WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT
Edited by John Brockman
With An Introduction By BRIAN ENO

"A great event in the Anglo-Saxon culture."
El Mundo

Harper Perennial
http://www.amazon.com/What-Have-Changed-Your-About/dp/0061686549

Praise for WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT?

"A great event in the Anglo-Saxon culture." EL MUNDS

"As fascinating and weighty as one would imagine." THE INDEPENDENT

"Even the world's best brains have to admit to being wrong sometimes: here, leading scientists respond to a new year challenge." THE TIMES

"Provocative ideas put forward today by leading figures." THE TELEGRAPH

"As in the past, these world-class thinkers have responded to impossibly open-ended questions with erudition, imagination and clarity." THE NEWS & OBSERVER

"Answers ring like scientific odes to uncertainty, humility and doubt; passionate pleas for critical thought in a world threatened by blind convictions." THE TORONTO STAR

"For an exceptionally high quotient of interesting ideas to words, this is hard to beat. ...What a feast of egg-head opinionating!" NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge285.html

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-4166567-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL: http://www.edge.org/subscribe.html

Edge 284 - Special Edition - On the 50th Anniversary of C.P. Snow's "The Two Cultures"

2009-05-07T19:18:00.000-07:00

Edge 284 - May 7, 2009

----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
----------------------------------------------------
The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.

On the 50th Anniversary of the Publication of
C.P. Snow's Rede Lecture,
"The Two Cultures"

Today, May 7, 2009, marks the 50th Anniversary of the publication of C.P. Snow's Rede Lecture, "The Two Cultures". In a second edition of The Two Cultures, published in 1963, Snow added a new essay, "The Two Cultures: A Second Look," in which he optimistically suggested that a new culture, a "third culture," would emerge and close the communications gap between the literary intellectuals and the scientists. In Snow's third culture, the literary intellectuals would be on speaking terms with the scientists. This never happened. Although I borrowed Snow's phrase in my 1991 essay "The Third Culture", it does not describe the third culture he predicted.

The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are. Increasingly, The Third Culture has moved into the mainstream and the questions it is asking are those that inform us about ourselves and the world around us.

I am pleased to honor the memory of C.P. Snow and his "Two Cultures" by presenting "The Third Culture" on Edge, 1997 to today.

John Brockman, Editor

----------------------------------------------------
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge284.html
----------------------------------------------------
Edge Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private operating foundation under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.
----------------------------------------------------
EDGE

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

---
You are currently subscribed to edge_editions as: wheresrhys@googlemail.com

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-4090747-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL: http://www.edge.org/subscribe.html

Edge 283 - Maddox by his successor: Philip Campbell

2009-05-04T10:23:00.000-07:00

Edge 283 -- May 4, 2009

(6,000 words)

This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge283.html

----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
----------------------------------------------------

MADDOX BY HIS SUCCESSOR
By Philip Campbell

It has been said of the archetypal Great Man (by Nietzsche) that "he is colder, harder, less hesitating and without fear of opinion". To me, whether Maddox was a Great Man or not, that seems a fair description. Nietzsche also said that such a person "wears a mask: there is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame." Maddox was as capable as anyone of openly enjoying people's company or, when necessary, of good poker-like negotiation. He was someone for whom collegiality mattered, but for whom it was ultimately impersonal. He was a good judge of people, often supportive, never (as far as I know) betraying the interests of his staff whereas, in professional contexts, he could be ruthless and always retained a cool-headed detachment. These qualities, combined with his journalistic virtuosities, made him a controversial editor but also a great one.

PHILIP CAMPBELL succeeded John Maddox as editor of Nature in 1995.

----------------------------------------------------

HOW TO PREVENT A PANDEMIC
By Nathan Wolfe

My organization and its collaborators have recently set up virus monitoring stations in China, Laos, Madagascar, Malaysia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Yet this is just a beginning. To establish a worldwide safety net, we would need to monitor thousands of people exposed to animals in dozens of sites around the world -- not only hunters but also people working on farms and in animal markets. It is important that the American government make pandemic prevention a priority and devote more resources to expanding disease surveillance in people and in wild and domestic animal populations throughout the world.

NATHAN WOLFE is the Lorry Lokey Visiting Professor of Human Biology at Stanford University and directs the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative (www.gvfi.org). His research combines methods from molecular virology, ecology, evolutionary biology, and anthropology to study the biology of viral emergence.

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
FOLLOW EDGE ON TWITTER
http://twitter.com/edge
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
ARTICLES OF NOTE
----------------------------------------------------

NATURE
Obituary: John Maddox (1925-2009)

John Maddox, who died on 12 April, was editor of Nature during 1966-73 and 1980-95. He transformed the journal from a collegially amateurish publication into one that was challenging and professional in its assessment of science and in its journalistic reportage.

Walter Gratzer

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------

THE BOSTON GLOBE
Inside the baby mind
By Jonah Lehrer

It's unfocused, random, and extremely good at what it does. How we can learn from a baby's brain.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------

ABC NEWS
GOOD MORNING AMERICA
April 26, 2009
Swine Flu Hits Mexico

Dr. Nathan Wolfe of the Global Virus Forecasrting Initiative talks about the flu.

GMA: And joining us now is one of the world's most foremost virus hunters. When a bug moves from animals to humans in some exotic corner of the globe, Dr. Nathan Wolfe and his team at Gobo al virus forecasting initiative drop in try try to study and contain it. Good morning to you.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------

NATURE
Tech titans plan to save the planet

Former Google philanthropy chief targets climate change and the Middle East.
Declan Butler

Epidemiologist Larry Brilliant, who helped to eradicate smallpox, is to leave his job as head of Google.org, the search giant's philanthropic arm, to lead the Skoll 'Urgent Threats Fund', created this month by Jeffrey Skoll, former founding president of eBay and head of the Skoll Foundation.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------

NEW YORK TIMES
EDITORIAL

Photos From Saturn

Most of us tend to lose track of space missions, especially unmanned ones. Even a shuttle launch slips by almost unnoticed -- a far cry from the old days when the whole planet paused to watch Gagarin or Shepard or Glenn jump skyward in what now look like pressurized tin cans. Such is the hectic gradualism of modern life. What brings this thought to mind is a new collection of photos from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn since mid-2004.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------

NEW YORK TIMES
OPED PAGE
Don't Waste Time Cutting Emissions

By Bjorn Lomborg

WE are often told that tackling global warming should be the defining task of our age -- that we must cut emissions immediately and drastically. But people are not buying the idea that, unless we act, the planet is doomed. Several recent polls have revealed Americans' growing skepticism. Solving global warming has become their lowest policy priority, according to a new Pew survey.
Moreover, strategies to reduce carbon have failed. Meeting in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, politicians from wealthy countries promised to cut emissions by 2000, but did no such thing. In Kyoto in 1997, leaders promised even stricter reductions by 2010, yet emissions have kept increasing unabated. Still, the leaders plan to meet in Copenhagen this December to agree to even more of the same -- drastic reductions in emissions that no one will live up to. Another decade will be wasted.

[MORE...]

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
BOOKS FROM EDGE
----------------------------------------------------
WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT
Edited by John Brockman
With An Introduction By BRIAN ENO

"A great event in the Anglo-Saxon culture."
El Mundo

Harper Perennial
http://www.amazon.com/What-Have-Changed-Your-About/dp/0061686549

Praise for WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT?

"A great event in the Anglo-Saxon culture." EL MUNDS

"As fascinating and weighty as one would imagine." THE INDEPENDENT

"Even the world's best brains have to admit to being wrong sometimes: here, leading scientists respond to a new year challenge." THE TIMES

"Provocative ideas put forward today by leading figures." THE TELEGRAPH

"As in the past, these world-class thinkers have responded to impossibly open-ended questions with erudition, imagination and clarity." THE NEWS & OBSERVER

"Answers ring like scientific odes to uncertainty, humility and doubt; passionate pleas for critical thought in a world threatened by blind convictions." THE TORONTO STAR

"For an exceptionally high quotient of interesting ideas to words, this is hard to beat. ...What a feast of egg-head opinionating!" NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge283.html

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-4048549-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL: http://www.edge.org/subscribe.html

Edge 282 - Gelernter-Markoff-Shirky: Lord of the Clouds; Edge London Dinner

2009-04-24T10:44:00.000-07:00

Edge 282 -- April 24, 2009
(15,300 words)

This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge282.html

----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
----------------------------------------------------
We met, he kissed me, and then it all fell apart. We just couldn't agree about Jerry Fodor and Bill Bryson. A poignant pic." -- Armand Marie Leroi

EDGE LONDON DINNER -- 2009 PHOTO ALBUM
April 20, 2009 -- Zilly Fish, London

Terry Gilliam & Brian Eno & Alphonso Cuaron & Armand Leroi & Andrew Franklin, Profile Books & Bruno Maddox & Roger Highfield, New Scientist & Richard Dawkins & Sally Gaminera, Transworld Publishers & Brenda Maddox & Katinka Matson Edge Foundation & Maja Hoffmann,Luma Foundation & Hans Ulrich Obrist, Serpentine Gallery & Toby Coppel & Stefan McGrath, Penguin Press & Andrea Cane, Mondadori & Russell Weinberger, Edge Foundation & Peter Sillem, S. Fisher Verlag & Gino, Zilli Fish & James Geary & John Lloyd, QI & Thomas Rathnow, Siedler Verlag & Britta Egetemeier, Piper Verlag & Rupert Sheldrake & Nicholas Humphrey & Vittorio Bo, Genoa Science Festival & Lewis Wolpert & Tom Standage, The Economist & Phillip Campbell, Nature & Jeremy Webb, New Scientist & Helen Conford, Penguin Press & Mark Henderson, The Times; Max Brockman, Brockman, Inc. & Albert Bonnier, Bonnier Publishing & Slav Todorov, Quercus Publishing & Alok Jha, The Guardian & Anjana Ahuja, The Times & AC Grayling & Domi
nque LeGlu, Editions Robert Laffont & Will Goodlad, Penguin Press & Matt Ridley & Lala Ward & David Goodhart, Prospect & Timothy Taylor & Geoffrey Carr, The Economist & Nick Bostrom & Armand Leroi & Andrew Franklin, Profile Books

----------------------------------------------------

The central idea we were working on was this idea of de-localized information -- information for which I didn't care what computer it was stored on. It didn't depend on any particular computer. I didn't know the identities of other computers in the ensemble that I was working on. I just knew myself and the cybersphere, or sometimes we called it the tuplesphere, or just a bunch of information floating around. We used the analogy -- we talked about helium balloons. We used a million ways to try and explain this idea.

LORD OF THE CLOUD
John Markoff and Clay Shirky Talk to David Gelernter
An Edge Roundtable

.Bill Gates's name is synonymous with Microsoft Basic. A mention of Bill Joy in the press is usally accompanied by acknowledgement of his early development work on UNIX. Ted Nelson is always associated with hypertext. Jaron Lanier is often identified and credited with his pioneering work on virtual reality. But rarely are "cloud computing" and "lifestreams" (or "lifestreaming") presented in connection with, and with proper credit to, the visionary behind them.

EDGE asked John Markoff, who covers technology for The New York Times, and first brought Gelernter's ideas to a wide reading public with his 1991 New York Times profile, and social software seer Clay Shirky. a professor at NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), to talk to Gelernter about his ideas. The roundtable took place in New York City on March 25, 2009.

----------------------------------------------------
EDGE VIDEO
----------------------------------------------------

SERPENTINE-EDGE EXPERIMENT MARATHON DO WOMEN HAVE BETTER EMPATHY THAN MEN?
Simon Baron-Cohen

In this Edge Video, psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen looks at one test he's developed to see if there are differences between males and females in the mind.

"It turns out that when you test newborn babies--this experiment was done at the age of 24 hours old, where we had 100 babies who were tested looking at two kinds of objects--a human face and a mechanical mobile. And they were filmed for how long they looked at each of these two objects. What you can see here is that on the first day of life, we had more boys than girls looking for longer at the mechanical mobile and more girls than boys looking at the face. So you can see that these differences when they emerge, first of all they seem to emerge very early--at birth--suggesting that there may be a biological component to a sex difference in, in this case, interest in faces; and secondly, they don't apply to all males or all females, these differences emerge as statistical trends when you compare groups."

----------------------------------------------------
ARTICLES OF NOTE
----------------------------------------------------
NEWSWEEK
Truth and Consequences
By Daniel Goleman

WHY EVOLUTION IS TRUE
Truckling to the Faithful: A Spoonful of Jesus Helps Darwin Go Down
By Jerry Coyne

NEW YORK TIMES
A Conversation With Richard Wrangham
By Claudia Dreifus

WALL STREET JOURNAL
How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write
By Steven Johnson

NEW REPUBLIC
Nudge-ocracy
by Franklin Foer and Noam Scheiber

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
The Green Mind

Why Isn't the Brain Green?
By JON GERTNER

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
Domains | Stewart Brand
On the Waterfront
By Edward Lewine

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
Natural Happiness
By Paul Bloom

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Original Joy of Cooking:
PW Talks with Author Richard Wrangham
by Will Boisvert

HUFFINGTON POST
The Moral Measure of a Civilization Is in Its Treatment of Enemies
By Scott Atran

THE AUSTRALIAN
No, we don't need five planets
By Bjorn Lomborg

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Deal Journal
Financial Meltdown: The Ultimate Human Error

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Firm Lets Others Choose Startups
By Jessica E. Vascellaro

NEWSWEEK
It Doesn't Have To Hurt
By Richard Thaler

PHYSICS WORLD
Cover Story
In search of the black swan

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge282.html

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-3948847-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL: http://www.edge.org/subscribe.html

Edge 279: The End of Universal Rationality - Yochai Benkler

2009-03-31T14:16:00.000-07:00

Edge 279

April 1, 2009
(12,300 words)

This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge279.html

----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
----------------------------------------------------
THE END OF UNIVERSAL RATIONALITY A Talk With Yochai Benkler

EDGE VIDEO

"We have a lot of sophisticated analyses that try, with great precision, to predict and describe existing systems in terms of an assumption of universal rationality and a sub-assumption that what that rationality tries to do is maximize returns to the self. Yet we live in a world where that's not actually what we experience. The big question now is how we cover that distance between what we know very intuitively in our social relations, and what we can actually build with."

YOCHAI BENKLER is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. His research focuses on the effects of laws that regulate information production and exchange on the distribution of control over information flows, knowledge, and culture in the digital environment. He is the author of The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
SERPENTINE~EDGE EXPERIMENT MARATHON
Timothy Taylor: THE TRADESCANT'S ARK EXPERIMENT

EDGE VIDEO

In this Edge Video, archeologist Tim Taylor conducts an experiment about making sense of things.

"There are 43 stones passing amongst you. It's called the Tradescant's Ark Experiment and I've named it in honor of John Tradescant and John Tradescant, Sr. and Jr., father and son, who were collectors of things in the 17th century. They were the exhibitors of the world's first pay-to-view museum and they had a cabinet of curiosities set up in Lambeth, on the Thames, which much later was sold to Elias Ashmole and became the germ of the Ashmolean Museum. Not much of it survives, there are little parts of it in the Ashmolen Museum. What is more important is the intellectual move they made in the catalog, which John Tradescant the younger created and in which he distinguished between 2 types of things, naturalls and artificialls. He divided all the things he collected into those he thought were natural and those that were modified by human hand—what archaelogists today call artifacts."

TIMOTHY TAYLOR teaches in the Department of Archaeological Sciences, University of Bradford, UK, and conducts research on the later prehistoric societies of southeastern Europe. He has presented BBC archaeology programs and he is the author of The Prehistory of Sex: Four Million Years of Human Sexual Culture, and The Buried Soul.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE REALITY CLUB
----------------------------------------------------

MUST WE ALWAYS CATER TO THE FAITHFUL WHEN TEACHING SCIENCE?
By Jerry Coyne

"It seems to me that we can defend evolution without having to cater to the faithful at the same time. Why not just show that evolution is TRUE and its alternatives are not? Why kowtow to those whose beliefs many of us find unpalatable, just to sell our discipline? There are, in fact, two disadvantages to the 'cater-to-religion' stance."

JERRY A. COYNE is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago. His new book is Why Evolution Is True.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------

ON "NEWSPAPERS AND THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE" By Clay Shirky

MARC FRONS: Clay Shirky's shock treatment for newspapers executives — "Nothing will work" — is a refreshing rejoinder to the proponents of the latest batch of so-called solutions to the industry's crisis. His words are all the more important given the fundamentalist certainty with which many of these failed or unrealistic strategies are being advanced. But it is by no means inevitable, as he asserts, that all old media institutions will disintegrate as the printed newspaper itself diminishes in importance and eventually ceases to exist. A few newspapers will make the transition to an all-digital future with their newsrooms largely intact. It's just not obvious yet how they will get there.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
IN THE NEWS
----------------------------------------------------
NEWSWEEK
April 6, 2009

RAGE AGAINST THE ART GENE
By Jeremy McCarter

"Darwin revolutionized our understanding of mankind's origins. Now scientists think they can apply his theories to the source of our creativity without it sounding like a lot of monkey business."

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE ECONOMIST
March 27, 2009

ECONOMIST DEBATES: THE ETHICS OF DNA DATABASING
This house believes that people's DNA sequences are their business, and nobody else's.

Professor J. Craig Venter: "As I suspected he would, Art Caplan raised the fear argument. 'The police, government, medical system, researchers and prosecutors … the military, your out-of-wedlock children, your parents, your boss, doctor, hospital, universities, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies and the immigration service etc., 'are all out to get your DNA and control you'. They know that they can track you, control you and even profit from you."

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
NEW HUMANIST
Sunday, March 29, 2009

Book Review: Questions of Truth: God, Science and Belief by John Polkinghorne and Nicholas Beale
AC Grayling rips into the latest attempt to bridge the God-science gap

By AC Grayling

...This is the strategy adopted by the Templeton Foundation too, of sidling up to proper scientists and scientific establishments and getting their sticky religious fingers on to respectable coat-sleeves in the hope of furthering their agenda - which, to repeat what must endlessly be repeated in these circumstances, is to have the superstitious lucubrations of illiterate goatherds living several thousand years ago given the same credibility as contemporary scientific research.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
FINANCIAL ANALYSTS JOURNAL
January/February 2009

MODELS
By Emanuel Derman

...Financial models [are] best regarded as a collection of parallel, inanimate "thought universes" available for exploration. Each universe should be internally consistent, but the financial/human world, unlike the world of matter, is vastly more complex and vivacious than any model we could ever make of it. The right way to engage with a model is to be like a reader of fiction — to suspend disbelief and then push ahead with the model as far as possible.". ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE TIMES
March 28, 2009

NATURE V NURTURE? PLEASE DON'T ASK
The question has fuelled some of history's fiercest scientific and political feuds. Now we have an answer

By Mark Henderson

...Though well-intentioned, and in some respects an important antidote to pseudoscientific genetic determinism, this view was dangerously inflexible. Any evidence that genetics might be seriously influential after all would threaten the very foundations of liberty and equality - so it would have to be resisted, as would research that might provide it.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Sunday, March 29, 2009

FRONT PAGE

VAST SPY SYSTEM LOOTS COMPUTERS IN 103 COUNTRIES
By John Markoff

TORONTO — A vast electronic spying operation has infiltrated computers and has stolen documents from hundreds of government and private offices around the world, including those of the Dalai Lama, Canadian researchers have concluded.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Sunday, March 29, 2009

SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW

GET SMART
By Jim Holt

Richard E. Nisbett, a prominent cognitive psychologist who teaches at the University of Michigan, doesn't shirk the hard work. In "Intelligence and How to Get It," he offers a meticulous and eye-opening critique of hereditarianism. True to its self-helplike title, the book does contain a few tips on how to boost your child's I.Q. — like exercising during pregnancy (mothers who work out tend to have bigger babies who grow up smarter, possibly because of greater brain size). But its real value lies in Nisbett's forceful marshaling of the evidence, much of it recent, favoring what he calls "the new environmentalism," which stresses the importance of nonhereditary factors in determining I.Q.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
Sunday, March 29, 2009

COVER STORY

THE CIVIL HERETIC
By Nicholas Dawidoff

FOR MORE THAN HALF A CENTURY the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson has quietly resided in Prince ton, N.J., on the wooded former farmland that is home to his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study, this country's most rarefied community of scholars. Lately, however, since coming "out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned," as Dyson sometimes puts it, there has been noise all around him. Chat rooms, Web threads, editors' letter boxes and Dyson's own e-mail queue resonate with a thermal current of invective in which Dyson has discovered himself variously described as "a pompous twit," "a blowhard," "a cesspool of misinformation," "an old coot riding into the sunset" and, perhaps inevitably, "a mad scientist." Dyson had proposed that whatever inflammations the climate was experiencing might be a good thing because carbon dioxide helps plants of all kinds grow. Then he added the caveat that if CO2 levels soared too high, they could be soothed by the mass cultivation of specially bred "carbon-eating trees," whereupon the University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner looked through the thick grove of honorary degrees Dyson has been awarded — there are 21 from universities like Georgetown, Princeton and Oxford — and suggested that "perhaps trees can also be designed so that they can give directions to lost hikers." Dyson's son, George, a technology historian, says his father's views have cooled friendships, while many others have concluded that time has cost Dyson something else. There is the suspicion that, at age 85, a great scientist of the 20th century is no longer just far out, he is far gone — out of his beautiful mind.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW YORK TIMES
March 29, 2009

WIKIPEDIA EXPLORING FACT CITY
By Noam Cohen

Contributors to Wikipedia have wondered aloud lately if — perish the thought — they are running out of topics. The obvious articles, low-hanging fruit like "China," "Moses" and "Homer Simpson," have been written and rewritten hundreds of times. There are more than 2.8 million articles on the English version of Wikipedia alone. Already looking back, Wikipedia this month got its first serious memoir, "The Wikipedia Revolution," by Andrew Lih, an early Wikipedian (yes, that is what they call themselves), who writes about how "a bunch of nobodies created the world's greatest encyclopedia."

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
TED TALKS
March, 2009

TALKS NATHAN WOLFE: HUNTING THE NEXT KILLER VIRUS

Virus hunter Nathan Wolfe is outwitting the next pandemic by staying two steps ahead: discovering new, deadly viruses where they first emerge -- passing from animals to humans among poor subsistence hunters in Africa -- before they claim millions of lives.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
SALON
March 23, 2009

YOU ARE NOT YOUR BRAIN
We have become too reductive in understanding ourselves, argues philosopher Alva Noe. Our thoughts and desires are shaped by more than neurons firing inside our heads.

By Gordy Slack

There's a kind of temporal lobe epilepsy that causes people to experience deeply religious feelings. Couldn't the relevance of that association tell us something about, say, the roots or essence of religious experience?

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
REASON ONLINE
February 2009

'CHIEFS, THIEVES, AND PRIESTS'
Science writer Matt Ridley on the causes of poverty and prosperity

By Ronald Bailey

...It's very clear from history that markets bring forth innovation. If you've got free and fair exchange with decent property rights and a sufficiently dense population, then you get innovation. That's what happens in west Asia around 50,000 years ago: the Upper Paleolithic Revolution.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
BARNES & NOBLE REVIEW
March 23, 2009

THE THINKING READ

WHY EVOLUTION IS TRUE
By A. C. Grayling

...A paradigm case is Jerry Coyne's lucidly brilliant account of evolutionary theory, Why Evolution Is True. For many reasons, among them the rapid advances we are witnessing in contemporary biological science, an understanding of evolution as the central principle of biology is crucial. If we are to be informed participants in the debate about what we want from the applied biological sciences, across the range from medicine to cloning to genetic modification of crops to the saving of endangered species, we need a proper understanding of evolution as the living world's organising principle.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
BOOKS FROM EDGE

Now Available in Bookstores and Online...

WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT (Harper Perennial)
Edited by John Brockman
With An Introduction By BRIAN ENO
http://www.amazon.com/What-Have-Changed-Your-About/dp/0061686549

"An intellectual treasure trove"
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge279.html

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-3814797-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL: http://www.edge.org/subscribe.html

Edge 276: Brian Cox - Is There a Higgs?; Lewis Wolpert on cells and the French Flag problem

2009-03-04T09:33:00.000-08:00

Edge 276 -- March 4, 2009
(10,400 words)

This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge276.html

----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
----------------------------------------------------
"In a very pure sense you build the accelerator you need when you know what the question is."

IS THERE A HIGGS? A Talk With Brian Cox Introduction by Martin Rees

EDGE VIDEO

We've been stuck at a particular point, which is the origin of mass in the universe. This is what the Higgs Boson is supposed to fix. But to many people it looks like classical physicists just looking for another particle, they spend $10 billion and we look for another particle. It's not that at all. The question of mass in the universe is dictated by the place where we've become stuck. It's the door that is closed. I can go into some depth and detail about why that is, but the point is that we know exactly where to look for the origin of mass.

We know what energy to look at and what energy of collisions we need. If you want to think of it this way, we know how far to go back in time to the Big Bang to look. Now, the LHC has plenty of energy to do that, so it will discover the origin of mass in the universe, but that's not an end in itself. That's a door, the door on the main road of physics, which we'll open when we discover it.

BRIAN COX is a Royal Society University Research Fellow based in the Particle Physics group at the University of Manchester, where he holds a chair in Particle Physics. He works on the ATLAS experiment at CERN in Geneva. A former rock star, he has become a well-known public communicator of science to the public through highly-regarded television and radio presentations on the BBC and other networks.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
"I've spoken to these eggs many times and they make it quite clear...they are not a human being."

SERPENTINE~EDGE EXPERIMENT MARATHON Lewis Wolpert HOW OUR LIMBS ARE PATTERNED LIKE THE FRENCH FLAG

EDGE VIDEO

In this EdgeVideo, embryologist Lewis Wolpert talks about how cells divide and introduces the French Flag problem.

"What I'm concerned with is how you develop", he says. "I know that you all think about it perpetually that you come from one single cell of a fertilized egg. I don't want to get involved in religion but that is not a human being. I've spoken to these eggs many times and they make it quite clear...they are not a human being. The cells divide and the question I'm going to deal with a little bit here...how do the cells know what to do. So, how do they end up looking like ... you? It is amazing that you come from one single cell. I'm sorry to give you a lesson in embryology but you should know how you develop."

LEWIS WOLPERT is Professor of Biology as Applied to Medicine in the Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology of University College, London. His research interests are in the mechanisms involved in the development of the embryo. He has presented science on both radio and TV for five years, was Chairman of the Committee for the Public Understanding of Science. His last book is Six Impossible Things To Do Before Breakfast.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
EDGE IN THE NEWS
----------------------------------------------------
The wide appeal of the third-culture thinkers is not due solely to their writing ability; what traditionally has been called "science" has today become "public culture." --John Brockman, "The Third Culture" (1991)

GLOBAL ROUNDUP OF PRESS ON EDGE

Gazeteport.com (Turkey), Salzburger Nachtrichen (Austria), HP/D (Germany), Ohmy News (Korea), Business Day (South Africa), Pagina|12 (Spain), La Repubblica (Italy), La Stampa (Italy), Vrij Nederland (Netherlands), El Periodico.com (Spain), Il Sole 24 Ore (Italy)

----------------------------------------------------
ARTICLES OF NOTE
----------------------------------------------------

BOSTON GLOBE
March 3, 2009

LEARNING FROM SLUMS

..According toStewart Brand, founder of the Long Now Foundation and author of the forthcoming book "Whole Earth Discipline," which covers these issues, "It's a clear-eyed, direct view we're calling for - neither romanticizing squatter cities or regarding them as a pestilence. These things are more solution than problem.".,.

----------------------------------------------------

AMERICAN SCIENTIST

March-April, 2009

Short takes on three books

WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? Today's Leading Minds Rethink Everything. Edited by John Brockman. Harper Perennial, $14.95, paper.

..Last year's question, "What have you changed your mind about?," brought a typically brilliant array of brief essays, by turns provocative, playful and profound. Brockman has collected them into a volume with the question as its title. ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE TIMES
A handy little guide to small talk in the Stone Age
By Mark Henderson, Science Editor

..Mark Pagel of the University of Reading, who leads the research, said that it was nonetheless becoming possible to create a rudimentary Stone Age phrasebook made up of the oldest known words. ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
BBC News
'Oldest English words' identified

"We use a computer to fit a range of models that tell us how rapidly these words evolve," said Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Scandanavian Nonbelievers, Which Is Not to Say Atheists
By Peter Steinfels

Phil Zuckerman spent 14 months in Scandinavia, talking to hundreds of Danes and Swedes about religion. It wasn't easy.. ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
RICHARD DAWKINS.NET
The Four Horsemen HD (video)
Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett

On the 30th of September 2007, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens sat down for a first-of-its-kind, unmoderated 2-hour discussion...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE ECONOMIST
Unfinished Business

Gregory Paul, an independent researcher on evolution, and Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist at Pitzer College in California, have argued controversially that a belief in God is inversely correlated with the level of what might be described as the intensity of the struggle for existence.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE SUN
COMPUTING THE COST: Nicholas Carr On How The Internet Is Rewiring Our Brains
By Arnie Cooper

Nicholas Carr -- author of last July's Atlantic cover story, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" -- believes the distracted nature of Web surfing is reducing our capacity for deep contemplation and reflection.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
TIME
Why Parents (Still) Don't Matter
By Kathleen Kingsbury

Dangerous. Misguided. Untenable. Those were just some of the criticisms leveled at amateur psychologist Judith Rich Harris and the conclusions in her controversial book The Nurture Assumption when it was first published a decade ago.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
WASHINGTON NOTE
The Obama Code
By George Lakoff

..The word "code" can refer to a system of either communication or morality. President Obama has integrated the two. The Obama Code is both moral and linguistic at once.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
BOOKS FROM EDGE

Now Available in Bookstores and Online...

WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT (Harper Perennial)
Edited by John Brockman
With An Introduction By BRIAN ENO
http://www.amazon.com/What-Have-Changed-Your-About/dp/0061686549

"An intellectual treasure trove"
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge276.html

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

---
You are currently subscribed to edge_editions as: wheresrhys@googlemail.com

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-3660381-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL: http://www.edge.org/subscribe.html

Edge 275: Denis Dutton - Art and Human Reality; Arman Leroi on evolution of songs

2009-02-24T09:50:00.000-08:00

Edge 275 -- February 24, 2009
(12,150 words)

This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge275.html

----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
----------------------------------------------------
ART AND HUMAN REALITY
A Talk With Denis Dutton
Introduction By Steven Pinker
EDGE VIDEO

Human life is lived in a middle position between our genetic determinants on the one hand and culture on the other. It's out of that that human freedom emerges. And artistic works, the plays of Shakespeare, the novels of Jane Austen, the works of Wagner and Beethoven, Rembrandt and Hokusai, are among the freest, most human acts ever accomplished. These creations are the ultimate expressions of freedom.

DENIS DUTTON, a philosopher, is founder and editor of the highly regarded Web publication, Arts & Letters Daily (www.aldaily.com). He teaches the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, writes widely on aesthetics. and is editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature, and the author of the recently published THE ART INSTINCT: BEAUTY, PLEASURE, AND HUMAN EVOLUTION

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
SERPENTINE~EDGE EXPERIMENT MARATHON
Armand Leroi
The Song of Songs
EDGE VIDEO

"Songs can survive hundreds of years of geographical and cultural separation."

In this EdgeVideo, evolutionary biologist Armand Leroi reports on his art/science conversation and collaboration with musician Brian Eno which began when the two sat next to each other an an Edge dinner in London. The dinner discussion began with evolution and music, proceeded to the evolution of music, and led to the following question: has anybody attempted to reconstruct the history of human song? People around the world sing in different ways. Is it possible to retrieve that history. Can we do for songs what we've done for genes, for language?

THE SONG OF SONGS
Armand Leroi

ARMAND LEROI is a Reader in Evolutionary Developmental Biology at Imperial College, London. He is the author of MUTANTS: ON GENETIC VARIETY AND THE HUMAN BODY, winner of The Guardian First Book Award, 2004.

This is the first in a series of Edge Videos of "table-top experiments" presented as part of the 2007 Edge/Serpentine collaboration during Serpentine Gallery Experiment Marathon in London, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist under the leadership of Director Julia Peyton-Jones. Edge presenters were zoologist Seirian Sumner, archeologist Timothy Taylor, evolutionary biologist Armand Leroi, psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, geneticist Steve Jones, physicist Neil Turok, embryologist Lewis Wolpert, and psychologist Steven Pinker and playwright Marcy Kahan. The live event was featured at the Serpentine as part of the Edge/Serpentine collaboration:"What Is Your Formula? Your Equation? Your Algorithm? Formulae For the 21st Century."

Writing in Sueddeutsche Zeitung ("Short Answers To Big Questions"), Feuilleton editor Andrian Kreye noted that: "The experiment is not only represents a collaboration by Brockman and Obrist's of their own work; it is also a continuation of a movement that began in the '60s on America's East Coast. John Cage brought together young artists and scientists for symposia and seminars to see what what would happen in the interaction of big thinkers from different fields. The resulting dialogue, which at the time seemed abstract and esoteric, can today be regarded as the forerunner to interdisciplinary science and the digital culture."

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE REALITY CLUB
----------------------------------------------------
Michael Shermer on Jerry Coyne's "Does The Empirical Nature Of Science Contradict The Revelatory Nature Of Faith?"

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
IN THE NEWS
----------------------------------------------------
NEWSWEEK
The Evolution of Art
By James Q. Wilson

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE ECONOMIST
What's Cooking

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE OBSERVER
Science Is Just One Gene Away From Defeating Religion
Colin Blakemore

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
AMERICAN SCIENTIST
An Interview with Jerry Coyne
Greg Ross

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
NEW SCIENTIST
Darwin Was Right
Daniel Dennett, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, and Paul Myers

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
WALL STREET JOURNAL
How I learned Not To Fear The Anti-God Squad
By Maurice O'Sullivan

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW YORKER
The Background Hum
Ian McEwan and the science of suspense.
by Daniel Zalewski

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
PROSPECT
Obama's Moral Majority
Jonathan Haidt

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
NEW SCIENTIST
How Your Looks Betray Your Personality
by Roger Highfield, Richard Wiseman and Rob Jenkins

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------

THE AUSTRALIAN
The Masterly Blasphere
Ian McEwan

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
NEWSWEEK
Who Says Stress Is Bad For You?
By Mary Carmichael

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE COLBERT REPORT
STEVEN PINKER--February 11, 2009

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
NATURE
Natural Selections 150 Years On
Mark Pagel

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
NATURE
Darwin 200: Should scientists study race and IQ?
A Debate
NO: Steven Rose
YES: Stephen Ceci & Wendy M. Williams

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
NATURE
Darwin 200: Human Nature: The Remix
Dan Jones

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
CNBC
PREDICTING CRISIS: DR. DOOM & THE BLACK SWAN
Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Taleb

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
DAWKINS ON DARWIN
Richard Dawkins

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE COLBERT REPORT
DENIS DUTTON -- January 28, 2009

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
BLOGGINHEADS.TV
SCIENCE SATUDAY: THE ARTISTIC ANIMAL
John Horgan & Denis Dutton

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
BOOKS FROM EDGE

Now Available in Bookstores and Online...

WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT (Harper Perennial)
Edited by John Brockman
With An Introduction By BRIAN ENO
http://www.amazon.com/What-Have-Changed-Your-About/dp/0061686549

"An intellectual treasure trove"
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge275.html

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

---
You are currently subscribed to edge_editions as: wheresrhys@googlemail.com

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-3617068-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL: http://www.edge.org/subscribe.html

Edge 274: The Edge Dinner-2009; Harris & Pinker on Reconciling Science and Faith

2009-02-10T07:17:00.000-08:00

"EDGE: brilliant, essential and addictive. The result of this ambitious venture, for those who have already experienced navigating the web pages of edge.org, is not only brilliant, but addictive. It interprets, it interrogates, it provokes. Each text can be a world in itself." —Publico (Lisbon), Cover Story Sunday Magazine

Edge 274 - February 9, 2009
(8,400 words)

This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge274.html

----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
----------------------------------------------------
"John Brockman, a literary agent, is the shadowy figure at the top of the cyberfashion food chain."

—Ted Nelson, Geeks Bearing Gifts: How The Computer World Got This Way

THE EDGE DINNER 2009
Long Beach, California — February 5, 2009—L'Opera

Yves Behar, FuseProject; Jeff Bezos, Amazon; Zack Bogue; Stewart Brand, Long Now Foundation; Max Brockman, Brockman, Inc.; Rod Brooks, Robotocist, Heartland Robotics; Geoffrey Carr, The Economist; Steve Case, Revolution Health; Jean Case, Case Foundation; Larry Cohen, Gates Foundation; Keith Coleman, Google G-Mail; Brian Cox, CERN; Daniel C. Dennett, Tufts; Susan Dennett; Peter Diamandis, X-Prize Foundation; Juan Enriquez, Excel Medical Ventures; Tony Fadell, Apple; Peter Gabriel; Bill Gates, Gates Foundation; Saul Griffith, Makani Power; Pati Hillis; Danny Hillis, Applied Minds; Arianna Huffington, Huffington Post; Joi Ito, Creative Commons, Neotony; Bill Joy, Kleiner Perkins; Dean Kamen, Deka Research; Jon Kamen, Radical Media; Mickey Kaus, Slate; Kevin Kelly, kk.org; Danielle Lambert; Jaron Lanier; Steven Levy, Wired; Katinka Matson, edge.org, Brockman, Inc.; Marissa Mayer, Google; Nathan Myhrvold, Intellectual Ventures; Shannon O'Leary; Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly's Radar; Anne Ornish; Dean Ornish, Preventive Medicine Research Institute; Pierre Omidyar, Omidyar network; Pam Omidyar, Omidyar Network; Larry Page, Google; Lori Park, Google; Nick Pritzker; Lisa Randall, Harvard; Jacqui Safra; Linda Stone; Yossi Vardi; Evan Williams, Twitter; Nathan Wolfe, Stanford; Richard Saul Wurman, Founder, TED

Photos by Nathan Myhrvold

----------------------------------------------------
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL — ALL THINGS DIGITAL
BOOM TOWN
February 9, 2009

THE BILLIONAIRES' DINNER' AT TED: READJUSTED FOR THE 2009 ECONALYPSE
By Kara Swisher

Many years ago in the midst of the Web 1.0 boom, when working as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, BoomTown redubbed an annual dinner that book agent John Brockman threw at the TED conference.

It was jokingly called the "Millionaires' Dinner," but I renamed it the "Billionaires' Dinner."

That was due to the frothy fortunes that had been made at the time by the Internet pioneers, from Amazon to AOL to eBay. Get it?!?

Well, despite the economic meltdown, there were still a lot of billionaires in attendance at Brockman's most recent dinner last Thursday in Long Beach. But he recounted to me that the proceedings were a lot more focused on the serious times we are in, as was the whole digerati-packed conference held last week. ...

[Photo Album]

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW YORKER
CHECKPOINTS
February 9, 2009

Where accuracy meets Flair
by John McPhee

Sara Lippincott retired as an editor at this magazine in the early nineteen-nineties, having worked in The New Yorker's fact-checking department from 1966 until 1982. She had a passion for science. In 1973, a long piece of the writer's called "The Curve of Binding Energy" received her full-time attention for three or four weeks and needed every minute of it. Explaining her work to an audience at a journalism school, Sara once said, "Each word in the piece that has even a shred of fact clinging to it is scrutinized, and, if passed, given the checker's imprimatur, which consists of a tiny pencil tick." The writer describes a paragraph from his sixty-thousand-word piece—which was about weapons-grade nuclear material in private industry and what terrorists might do with it—which presented Sara with a certain degree of difficulty. Physicist John A. Wheeler had told the writer about a Japanese weapon balloon landing on a nuclear reactor at the Hanford Engineer Works, in the winter of 1944 or 45. If Wheeler's story were true, it would make it into print. If unverifiable, it would be deleted. Sara's telephone calls ricocheted all over the U.S. Hanford Engineer Works, of the Manhattan Project, was so secret that the Joint Chiefs of Staff didn't know about it. ...

[MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE REALITY CLUB
----------------------------------------------------

SAM HARRIS, STEVEN PINKER on Jerry Coyne's "Does The Empirical Nature Of Science Contradict The Revelatory Nature Of Faith?"

HARRIS:And yet, there is more to be said against the likes of Coyne and Dennett and Dawkins (he is the worst!). Patrick Bateson tells us that it is "staggeringly insensitive" to undermine the religious beliefs of people who find these beliefs consoling. I agree completely. For instance: it is now becoming a common practice in Afghanistan and Pakistan to blind and disfigure little girls with acid for the crime of going to school. When I was a neo-fundamentalist rational neo-atheist I used to criticize such behavior as an especially shameful sign of religious stupidity. I now realize—belatedly and to my great chagrin—that I knew nothing of the pain that a pious Muslim man might feel at the sight of young women learning to read. Who am I to criticize the public expression of his faith? Bateson is right. Clearly a belief in the inerrancy of the holy Qur'an is indispensable for these beleaguered people.

How can a militant secularist atheist neo-dogmatist like Coyne not see the plain truth? There simply IS no conflict between religion and science. And even if there were one, it would be an utter waste of time to say anything about it. Lawrence Krauss has established this second point beyond any possibility of doubt. Go back and read his essay. It'll just take you five seconds. I've read it upwards of seventy times, and each perusal brings fresh insight.

PINKER: Jerry Coyne applies rigorous standards of logic and evidence to the claims of religion and to the attempts to reconcile it with science. Many scientists who share his atheism still believe that he is somehow being rude or uncouth for pressing the point. But he is right to do so. Knowledge is a continuous fabric, in which ideas are connected to other ideas. Reason-free zones, in which people can assert arbitrary beliefs safe from ordinary standards of evaluation, can only corrupt this fabric, just as a contradiction can corrupt a system of logic, allowing falsehoods to proliferate through it.

Science cannot be walled off from other forms of belief. That includes meaning and morality – reason connects them all. The same standards of evidence that rule out unparisimonious, unfalsifiable, or empirically refuted hypotheses in science also rule out crackpot conspiracy theories, totalizing ideologies, and toxic policy nostrums. Moral systems depend on factual beliefs, informed by psychology and biology, about what makes human beings suffer or prosper. They depend on standards of logical consistency that make it possible to apply the principle of fairness. And they depend on meta-ethical propositions about what morality is, and on how we can decide what is moral in particular cases. Just as coherent biological reasoning cannot proceed under the assumption that God can step in at any moment and push the molecules around, coherent moral reasoning cannot proceed under the assumption that the universe unfolds according a divine merciful plan, that humans have a free will that is independent of their neurobiology, or that people can behave morally only if they fear divine retribution in an afterlife.

Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. And no, this isn't having "faith" in reason (in the same way that some people have faith in miracles), because we don't "believe" in reason; we use reason.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
EDGE VIDEO
----------------------------------------------------

"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.

"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. 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. - Boston Globe

EDGE VIDEO: http://www.edge.org/edge_video.html

----------------------------------------------------
IN THE NEWS
----------------------------------------------------
WASHINGTON POST
The Death of 'Rational Man'
By David Ignatius

...That's why Greenspan didn't see it coming, argues Daniel Kahneman, a Princeton professor who is often described as the father of behavioral economics. His rational-actor model wouldn't let him...

...One of the most powerful ideas I heard at Davos was the idea of "pre-mortem" analysis, which was first proposed by psychologist Gary Klein and has been taken up by Kahneman.

A pre-mortem analysis can provide a real "stress test" to conventional thinking. Let's say that a company or government agency has decided on a plan of action. But before implementing it, the boss asks people to assume that five years from now, the plan has failed -- and then to write a brief explanation of why it didn't work. This approach stands a chance of bringing to the surface problems that the decision makers had overlooked -- the "black swans," to use former traderNassim Nicholas Taleb's phrase, that people assumed wouldn't happen in the near future because they hadn't occurred in the recent past. ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW YORK TIMES
When Humans Need a Nudge Toward Rationality
By Jeff Sommers

...After the flies were added, "spillage" on the men's-room floor fell by 80 percent. "Men evidently like to aim at targets," said Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago, an irreverent pioneer in the increasingly influential field of behavioral economics.

Mr. Thaler says the flies are his favorite example of a "nudge" — a harmless bit of engineering that manages to "attract people's attention and alter their behavior in a positive way, without actually requiring anyone to do anything at all." What's more, he said, "The flies are fun."

...Nudging derives from research by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate in economics; by Mr. Kahneman's late colleague, Amos Tversky; and by Mr. Thaler and others over several decades. Mr. Kahneman, a psychologist, gives Mr. Thaler considerable credit for the birth of behavioral economics. ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Education Is All in Your Mind
By Richard Nisbett
...James Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago, has estimated that for every dollar spent on a prekindergarten like Perry, $8 has been gained in higher incomes for participants and in savings on the costs of extra schooling, crime and welfare.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
BLOOMBERG NEWS
Taleb Says Nationalize Banks, You Can't Trust Them (Update2)
By Svenja O'Donnell and Francine Lacqua

...Bank nationalizations are "absolutely necessary" to stop them damaging the financial system further with more losses, said Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the best-selling finance book "The Black Swan." ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
HUFFINGTON POST
Gabbing with Gates: We Talk Meltdown, Malaria, Mosquitoes, and How Not Getting Enough Sleep Lowers His IQ
By Arianna Huffington

......He has clearly been leading by example in changing both the business world and the world of philanthropy. But when it comes to sleep, all I can say is that when I left a dinner given by EDGE's John Brockman after midnight last night, Gates was still there talking away with X Prize's Peter Diamandis about providing big rewards for scientific breakthroughs...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW SCIENTIST
Born believers: How your brain creates God
By Michael Brooks

...Religious ideas are common to all cultures: like language and music, they seem to be part of what it is to be human. Until recently, science has largely shied away from asking why. "It's not that religion is not important," says Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University, "it's that the taboo nature of the topic has meant there has been little progress."...

...The religion-as-an-adaptation theory doesn't wash with everybody, however. As anthropologist Scott Atran of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor points out, the benefits of holding such unfounded beliefs are questionable, in terms of evolutionary fitness. "I don't think the idea makes much sense, given the kinds of things you find in religion," he says. A belief in life after death, for example, is hardly compatible with surviving in the here-and-now and propagating you. ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE ECONOMIST
Godless watch, continued

A few years ago, Daniel Dennett, an atheist philosopher, wrote

"Politicians don't think they even have to pay us lip service, and leaders who wouldn't be caught dead making religious or ethnic slurs don't hesitate to disparage the "godless" among us. From the White House down, bright-bashing is seen as a low-risk vote-gette."

Not this White House

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
SCIENCE
Friendship as a Health Factor

BOSTON—On the first snowy day in December, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler are ensconced in Christakis's rambling home in Concord, Massachusetts, plotting their next conquest. Christakis, at his desk, is nearly hidden behind two enormous Apple computer screens that beam dizzying network patterns of lines and circles representing community ties. Fowler sits cross-legged and barefoot on the couch, a laptop balanced on his knees.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
PORTFOLIO
5 Steps to Fix the Banks
By Chris Anderson
Over the past decade, we have built a country-sized economy online where the default price is zero -- nothing, nada, zip. Digital goods -- from music and video to Wikipedia -- can be produced and distributed at virtually no marginal cost, and so, by the laws of economics, price has gone the same way, to $0.00. For the Google Generation, the Internet is the land of the free.

Which is not to say companies can't make money from nothing. Gratis can be a good business. How? Pretty simple: The minority of customers who pay subsidize the majority who do not. Sometimes that's two different sets of customers, as in the traditional media model: A few advertisers pay for content so lots of consumers can get it cheap or free. The concept isn't new, but now that same model is powering everything from photo sharing to online bingo. The last decade has seen the extension of this "two-sided market" model far beyond media, and today it is the revenue engine for all of the biggest Web companies, from Facebook and MySpace to Google itself. ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
PORTFOLIO
5 Steps to Fix the Banks

Guest Commentary: Pulling banks out of their apparent death spiral won't be easy. But these simple principles should frame the debate.

By Andrew M. Rosenfield

As the liquidity crisis continues, the problem is clear—it's the solution that remains opaque.

The problem with the U.S. banking system is simple: It's largely insolvent. Banks have far too little capital to supply the credit needed to finance recovery let alone growth.

The insolvency problem is centered around so-called "toxic" or troubled assets that banks hold in great amount and which are today worth far less than cost—generally securitized residential home loans.

But the problem of insolvency is centered around toxic assets only in the sense that the problem of a burning house is "centered" around the place the fire started. ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
BLOOMBERG NEWS
Wall Street Bonuses May Go Way of Dodo Amid Bailouts (Update2)
By Dawn Kopecki and Christine Harper

The current system of "asymmetric compensation," in which people are rewarded when they do well and aren't required to return the rewards when they lose money, is detrimental to society and needs to change, said Nassim Taleb, a professor at New York University and author of "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable," in an interview.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
BOOKS FROM EDGE

Now Available in Bookstores and Online...

WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT (Harper Perennial)
Edited by John Brockman
With An Introduction By BRIAN ENO
http://www.amazon.com/What-Have-Changed-Your-About/dp/0061686549

"An intellectual treasure trove"
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge274.html

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-3547053-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL: http://www.edge.org/subscribe.html

Edge 273: Nathan Wolfe, Daniel Kahneman, Nassim Taleb

2009-01-30T13:42:00.000-08:00

Edge 273 -- January 30, 2009
(11,250 words)

This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge273.html

----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
----------------------------------------------------
WAITING FOR "THE FINAL PLAGUE"
A Talk with Nathan Wolfe

We should be and we can be doing a much better job to predict and prevent pandemics. But the really bold idea is that we could reach a point--and this is a distant point in the future--where we become so good at this that we really reach a point where we have the "final plague," and where we are really capable of catching so many of these things that new pandemics become an oddity. I think that is something that we should certainly have as an ideal.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
EDGE @ DLD
REFLECTIONS ON A CRISIS
Daniel Kahneman & Nassim Nicholas Taleb: A Conversation in Munich
(Moderator: John Brockman)
EDGE VIDEO

View the complete 1 hour HD streaming video of the EDGE event that took place at Hubert Burda Media's Digital Life Design Conference (DLD) in Munich on January 27th as the greatest living psychologist and the foremost scholar of extreme events discuss hindsight biases, the illusion of patterns, perception of risk, and denial.

----------------------------------------------------

[From FOCUS ONLINE - "Are Bankers Charlatans?" (translated):

"At blame for the financial crisis is the nature of man, say two renowned scientists: Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and bestselling author Nassim Taleb ( "The Black Swan").

"Two men sitting on the stage. Left. Daniel Kahneman, 74, bright-eyed, Nobel Prize winner. Right Nassim Taleb, 49, former Wall Street banker, best-selling author. Both speak on the future of Digital Life Design Conference (DLD) in Munich on the financial crisis, about the beginning--mainly they talk about people. They say it is due to human nature, that the crisis has broken out. And they choose harsh words in discussing the scale of the disaster.

"Kahneman explains why there are bubbles in the financial markets, even though everyone knows that they eventually burst. The researchers used the comparison with the weather: If there is little rain for three years, people begin to believe that this is the normal situation. If over the years stocks only increase, people can't imagine a break in this trend.

"Those responsible must go--today and not tomorrow"

"Taleb speaks out sharply against the bankers. The people in control of taxpayer's money are spending billions of dollars. "I want those responsible for the crisis gone today, today and not tomorrow," he says, leaning forward vigorously. The risk models of banks are a plague, he says, the bankers are charlatans.

"It is nonsense to think that we can assess risks and thus protect against a crash. Taleb has become famous with his theory of the black swan described in his eponymous bestsellers described. Black swans, which are events that are not previously seen--not even with the best model. "People will never be able to control a coincidence," he says.

The early warning

"Taleb had an early warning before the crisis. In 2003 he took note of the balance sheet of the U.S. mortgage finance giant Fannie Mae, and he saw "dynamite".

"In autumn last year, the U.S. government instituted A dramatic bailout. Taleb said in the "Sunday Times" in 2008: "Bankers are very dangerous." And even now, he sees a scandal: He provocatively asks what have the banks done with the government bailout money. "They have paid out more bonuses, and they have increased their risks." And it was not their own money.

"Taleb calls for rigorous changes: nationalize banks--and abolish financial models. Kahneman does not quite agree with him. Certainly, the models are not capable of predicting a collapse. But one should not ignore our human nature. People will always require and use models and get benefit from them--even if they are wrong."]

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
HOW WORDS COULD END A WAR
By Scott Atran and Jeremy Ginges

..Across the world, people believe that devotion to sacred or core values that incorporate moral beliefs -- like the welfare of family and country, or commitment to religion and honor -- are, or ought to be, absolute and inviolable. Our studies, carried out with the support of the National Science Foundation and the Defense Department, suggest that people will reject material compensation for dropping their commitment to sacred values and will defend those values regardless of the costs.

In our research, we surveyed nearly 4,000 Palestinians and Israelis from 2004 to 2008, questioning citizens across the political spectrum including refugees, supporters of Hamas and Israeli settlers in the West Bank. We asked them to react to hypothetical but realistic compromises in which their side would be required to give away something it valued in return for a lasting peace.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE REALITY CLUB
----------------------------------------------------
On Jerry Coyne's "Does The Empirical Nature Of Science Contradict The Revelatory Nature Of Faith?": George Dyson, Emanuel Derman, Karl W. Giberson, Kenneth R. Miller

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
IN THE NEWS
----------------------------------------------------
FOCUS ONLINE
ARE BANKERS CHARLATANS?
Sind Banker Scharlatane? (German Original)
By Ansgar Siemens, FOCUS online editor

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
BLOOMBERG NEWS
Wall Street Bonuses May Go Way of Dodo Amid Bailouts (Update2)
By Dawn Kopecki and Christine Harper

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW YORK TIMES
DAVOS DIARY
Nassim Taleb: "I Was Happy Lehman Went Bust"
Edited by Andrew Ross Sorkin

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
BLOOMBERG NEWS
Taleb Says Nationalize Banks, You Can't Trust Them (Update2)
By Svenja O'Donnell and Francine Lacqua

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
NEW YORKER
THE DYSTOPIANS
By Ben McGrath

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE GUARDIAN
Those genius financial doomsayers: a round-up
By Stephen Moss

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
BBC NEWS
How Bad Is The Crisis Going To Get
By Tim Weber

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
BOOKS FROM EDGE

Now Available in Bookstores and Online...

WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT (Harper Perennial)
Edited by John Brockman
With An Introduction By BRIAN ENO
http://www.amazon.com/What-Have-Changed-Your-About/dp/0061686549

"An intellectual treasure trove"
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge273.html

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

---
You are currently subscribed to edge_editions as: wheresrhys@googlemail.com

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-3493701-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL: http://www.edge.org/subscribe.html

Edge 272: Jerry Coyne: Does The Empirical Nature Of Science Contradict The Revelatory Nature Of Faith?

2009-01-23T14:34:00.000-08:00

Edge 272 - January 23, 2008
(6,700 words)

This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge272.html

----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
----------------------------------------------------

COMING SOON...

11:30 Tuesday, January 27th, Munich

REFLECTIONS ON A CRISIS
Daniel Kahneman & Nassim Nicholas Taleb: A Conversation in Munich
(Moderator: John Brockman)

The greatest living psychologist and the foremost scholar of extreme events discuss hindsight biases, the illusion of patterns, perception of risk, and denial

An EDGE @ DLD Event

----------------------------------------------------

DOES THE EMPIRICAL NATURE OF SCIENCE CONTRADICT THE REVELATORY NATURE OF FAITH?
By Jerry Coyne
An Edge Special Event

"The real question," writes biologist Jerry Coyne in his New Republic article "Seeing And Believing", is whether there is a philosophical incompatibility between religion and science. Does the empirical nature of science contradict the revelatory nature of faith? Are the gaps between them so great that the two institutions must be considered essentially antagonistic?

We no longer have President George W. Bush, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, and Senator John McCain announcing in August 2006 their support for teaching Intelligent Design in pubic schools. That was a mobilizing moment for the champions of rational thinking such as Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and P.Z. Myers to mount an unrelenting campaign against superstition, supernaturalism, and ignorance. The dilemma as Coyne notes is that against the backdrop of scientific knowledge available to us today, these three words are applicable not only to the texts that inform literal fundamentalists but also to the rarefied theological mumbo-jumbo of the most refined, liberal theologians.

On inauguration day, President Obama announced the goal of "restoring science to its rightful place" while, in the same speech, acknowledging that nonbelievers are citizens of this nation in the same way as followers of religion. Isn't now time for scientists to stop the disengenuous and hypocritical homage to what Dennett has termed "belief in belief", and once and for all put a nail in the coffin of the late Stephen Jay Gould's problematic "non-overlapping magisteria" (NOMA)? Isn't it time for science to speak the truth?

But as Coyne points out:

Would that it were that easy! True, there are religious scientists and Darwinian churchgoers. But this does not mean that faith and science are compatible, except in the trivial sense that both attitudes can be simultaneously embraced by a single human mind. (It is like saying that marriage and adultery are compatible because some married people are adulterers. ) It is also true that some of the tensions disappear when the literal reading of the Bible is renounced, as it is by all but the most primitive of JudeoChristian sensibilities. But tension remains. The real question is whether there is a philosophical incompatibility between religion and science. Does the empirical nature of science contradict the revelatory nature of faith? Are the gaps between them so great that the two institutions must be considered essentially antagonistic? The incessant stream of books dealing with this question suggests that the answer is not straightforward."

In the next few days, Edge plans to publish a series of brief responses by selected contributors addressing these issues. ...

THE REALITY CLUB

Lawrence Krauss, Howard Gardner, Lisa Randall, Patrick Bateson, Daniel Everett, Daniel C. Dennett, Lee Smolin ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
OAF OF OFFICE
By Steven Pinker

How could a famous stickler for grammar have bungled that 35-word passage, among the best-known words in the Constitution? Conspiracy theorists and connoisseurs of Freudian slips have surmised that it was unconscious retaliation for Senator Obama's vote against the chief justice's confirmation in 2005. But a simpler explanation is that the wayward adverb in the passage is blowback from Chief Justice Roberts's habit of grammatical niggling. ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
ARTICLES OF NOTE
----------------------------------------------------

PUBLICO EDICAO LISBOA
Cover Story--Sunday Magazine
Our Dog Will Become Our Cat
By Ana Gerschenfeld

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------

SEED
THE SEED SALON
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi + James Fowler

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------

SPEIGEL ONLINE
Series Announcement:
What Will change Everything

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------

THE NEW REPUBLIC
STRIKING A NEW CHORD
by John McWhorter

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------

THE SUNDAY HERALD-SUN (MELBOURNE)
Quest for a sacred presence
Bryan Patterson

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
SCIENCE JOURNAL
The Brain, Your Honor, Will Take the Witness Stand
By Robert Lee Hotz

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
BOOKS FROM EDGE
----------------------------------------------------
"An intellectual treasure trove"
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

EDGE Presents...

WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT
TODAY'S LEADING MINDS RETHINK EVERYTHING
Edited by John Brockman
With An Introduction By BRIAN ENO

ORDER NOW
http://www.amazon.com/What-Have-Changed-Your-About/dp/0061686549

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge272.html

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

[If at any time you want your name to be taken off this mail list, please let us know.]

---
You are currently subscribed to edge_editions as: wheresrhys@googlemail.com

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-3458319-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL: http://www.edge.org/subscribe.html

Edge 271: The Nobel Prize and After - A Talk with Frank Wilczek

2009-01-15T12:29:00.000-08:00

Edge 271 - January 15, 2009
(8,600 words)

This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge271.html

----------------------------------------------------
EDGE: LIVE IN NEW YORK
----------------------------------------------------
Discussion & Book Signing...

WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? (HarperPerennial)

When: Monday, January 19th 7:00pm
What: A panel discussion
Who: John Brockman (moderator); Douglas Rushkoff, Gino Segre, Gary Marcus, Janna Levin, Helen Fisher

Where: Borders Books
10 Columbus Circle
New York, NY 10019
212.823.9775

----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
----------------------------------------------------
THE NOBEL PRIZE AND AFTER
A Talk with Frank Wilczek

The most exciting thing that can happen is when theoretical dreams that started as fantasies, as desires, become projects that people work hard to build. There is nothing like it; it is the ultimate tribute. At one moment you have just a glimmer of a thought and at another moment squiggles on paper. Then one day you walk into a laboratory and there are all these pipes, and liquid helium is flowing, and currents are coming in and out with complicated wiring, and somehow all this activity is supposedly corresponds to those little thoughts that you had. When this happens, it's magic. ...

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE - Cover Story

MY GENOME, MY SELF
By Steven Pinker

A RENOWNED SCIENTIST OF THE MIND PONDERS THE IDENTITY BURIED IN HIS OWN DNA

In the coming era of consumer genetics, your DNA will have much to tell you about the biological bases of your health, your physique and even your personality. But will this knowledge really amount to self-knowledge?

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
NEW YORK TIMES
In Venting, a Computer Visionary Educates
By John Markoff

BEFORE the personal computer, and before the Web, there was Theodor Holm Nelson, who almost half a century ago understood how computers would transform the printed page.

Mr. Nelson anticipated and inspired the World Wide Web, and he coined the term "hypertext," which embodies the idea of linking a web of objects including text, audio and video.

In his self-published new book, "Geeks Bearing Gifts: How the Computer World Got This Way" (available on lulu.com), Mr. Nelson, 71, takes stock of the computing world. The look back by this forward-thinking man is not without its bitterness. The Web, after all, can be seen as a bastardization of his original notion that hyperlinks should point both forward and backward.

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
ARTICLES OF NOTE
----------------------------------------------------
EL MUNDO
Impios deseos al empezar el ano
By Arcadia Espada

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
SPEIGEL ONLINE
Heute In Den Feuilletons

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG
Visionen der Wissenschaft
Wenn die Intelligenz von sich selber traumt
Von Thomas Thiel

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
LOS ANGELES TIMES
Here's a radical idea--getting fit is fun and contagious
By Carole Carson

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
THE GUARDIAN
The shape of things to come
Tom Teodorczuk

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW YORK TIMES
London Journal
Atheists Send a Message, on 800 Buses
By Sarah Lyall

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
BOOKS FROM EDGE
----------------------------------------------------

Now Available in Bookstores and Online...

WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT (Harper Perennial)
Edited by John Brockman
With An Introduction By BRIAN ENO
http://www.amazon.com/What-Have-Changed-Your-About/dp/0061686549

Praise for WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT?

"A great event in the Anglo-Saxon culture."

"A great event in the Anglo-Saxon culture." EL MUNDO

"As fascinating and weighty as one would imagine." THE INDEPENDENT

"Even the world's best brains have to admit to being wrong sometimes: here, leading scientists respond to a new year challenge." THE TIMES

"Provocative ideas put forward today by leading figures." THE TELEGRAPH

"As in the past, these world-class thinkers have responded to impossibly open-ended questions with erudition, imagination and clarity." THE NEWS & OBSERVER

"Answers ring like scientific odes to uncertainty, humility and doubt; passionate pleas for critical thought in a world threatened by blind convictions." THE TORONTO STAR

"For an exceptionally high quotient of interesting ideas to words, this is hard to beat. ...What a feast of egg-head opinionating!" NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge271.html

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

[If at any time you want your name to be taken off this mail list, please let us know.]

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-3420643-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL: http://www.edge.org/subscribe.html

Edge 270: Edge Annual Question 2009; Ramachandran; Matson

2009-01-07T09:44:00.000-08:00

"Answer is the betrayal of the open spirit of Question."

Edge 270 - January 7, 2009
(13,300 words)

This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge270.html

----------------------------------------------------
THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER
----------------------------------------------------
THE EDGE ANNUAL QUESTION 2009
151 Contributors (107,000 words)

WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING?
"What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?"

Contributors: Alan Alda, Chris Anderson, Alun Anderson, Stephon H. Alexander, Mahzarin R. Banaji, John D. Barrow, Patrick Bateson, Gregory Benford, Yochai Benkler, Jesse Bering, David Berreby, Jamshed Bharucha, Susan Blackmore, David Bodanis, Stefano Boeri, Lera Boroditsky, Nick Bostrom, Stewart Brand, Rodney Brooks, David Buss, William Calvin, Leo Chalupa, Nicholas A. Christakis, Andy Clark, Gregory Cochran, M. Csikszentmihalyi, Austin Dacey, David Dalrymple, Paul Davies, Richard Dawkins, Aubrey de Grey, Emanuel Derman, Daniel C. Dennett, Keith Devlin, Betsy Devine, Eric Drexler, Freeman Dyson, George Dyson, David Eagleman, Brian Eno, Juan Enriquez, Daniel Everett, Paul Ewald, Christine Finn, Eric Fischl, Helen Fisher, Kenneth W. Ford, Richard Foreman, Howard Gardner, Joel Garreau, James Geary, David Gelernter, Neil Gershenfeld, Marcelo Gleiser, Daniel Goleman, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Brian Goodwin, Alison Gopnik, April Gornik, John Gottman, Jonathan Haidt, Haim Harari, Henry Harpending, Sam Harris, Marc D. Hauser, Marti Hearst, Roger Highfield, W. Daniel Hillis, Gerald Holton, Donald D. Hoffman, Verena Huber-Dyson, Nicholas Humphrey, Marco Iacoboni, Eric Kandel, Stuart Kauffman, Kevin Kelly, Marcel Kinsbourne, MD, Brian Knutson, Terence Koh, Bart Kosko, Stephen M. Kosslyn, Kai Krause, Laurence Krauss, Andrian Kreye, A. Garrett Lisi, Seth Lloyd, Gary Marcus, Ian McEwan, Thomas Metzinger, Oliver Morton, David G. Myers, P.Z. Myers, Steve Nadis, Monica Narula, Randolph Nesse, Tor Norretranders, Hans Ulrich Obrist, James J. O'Donnell, Gloria Origgi, Dean Ornish, M.D., Mark Pagel, Bruce Parker, Philippe Parreno, Gregory Paul, Irene Pepperberg, Clifford A. Pickover, Steven Pinker, Ernst Poppel, Corey S. Powell, Robert R. Provine, Lisa Randall, Ed Regis, Howard Rheingold, Carlo Rovelli, Douglas Rushkoff, Karl Sabbagh, Paul Saffo, Scott Sampson, Robert Sapolsky, Dimitar Sasselov, Roger Schank, Stephen H. Schneider, Peter Schwartz, Charles Seife, Gino Segre, Tino Sehgal, Terrence Sejnowski, Martin Seligman, Robert Shapiro, Rupert Sheldrake, Michael Shermer, Kevin Slavin, Barry Smith, Laurence C. Smith, Lee Smolin, Dan Sperber, Maria Spiropulu, Paul J. Steinhardt, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Timothy Taylor, Max Tegmark, Frank J. Tipler, John Tooby & Leda Cosmides, Joseph F. Traub, Sherry Turkle, Alexander Vilenkin, J. Craig Venter, Frank Wilczek, Ian Wilmut, Anton Zeilinger

Press Coverage: Arts & Letters Daily, The Guardian, The Times, Xconomy, The Guardian (Science Blog), The Telegraph, O'Reilly Radar, NPR, The Dallas Morning News, Beliefnet, The Herald, Grist, Pharyngula, Newsweek, The News & Observer

----------------------------------------------------
"Question was open because it had not yet received any form; it was a kind of prime matter, or a substance that existed in a realm of potentiality, an indefinite state that had not yet become anything in particular and maybe never would. But any formed object, on the other hand, would have denied all that: if it has already received form it is over, closed, ended; it has slid from the vague cloud of potentiality into a collision with the flat wall of fact that lay hidden behind it. " (Thomas McEvilley (Art in America, November, 2008)

JAMES LEE BYARS
A STUDY OF POSTERITY
By Thomas McEvilley
A profile of the late James Lee Byars, founder of The World Question Center

Though James Lee Byars has been increasingly identified since his death, with elegant, reductive objects, his most radical-and characteristic-works were ephemeral and even immaterial.

Further Reading on Edge on James Lee Byars and The World Question Center: "He Confuses One And Two The 200 I.Q.: Mr. Byars By Mr. Brockman"

----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
----------------------------------------------------

THREE TULIPS
A new exhibition by Katinka Matson

----------------------------------------------------

SELF AWARENESS: THE LAST FRONTIER
By V.S. Ramachandran
An Edge Original Essay

One of the last remaining problems in science is the riddle of consciousness. The human brain's mere lump of jelly inside your cranial vault--can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space and grapple with concepts such as zero and infinity. Even more remarkably it can ask disquieting questions about the meaning of its own existence. "Who am I" is arguably the most fundamental of all question.

It really breaks down into two problems--the problem of qualia and the problem of the self. My colleagues, the late Francis Crick and Christof Koch have done a valuable service in pointing out that consciousness might be an empirical rather than philosophical problem, and have offered some ingenious suggestions. But I would disagree with their position that the qualia problem is simpler and should be addressed first before we tackle the "Self." I think the very opposite is true. I have every confidence that the problem of self will be solved within the lifetimes of most people reading this column. But not qualia.

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN is a Neuroscientist, Director, Center for Brain and Cognition, University of California, San Diego; Author, "Phantoms in the Brain".

THE REALITY CLUB

On "The Last Frontier" by V.S. Ramachandran:
Marc D. Hauser, V.S. Ramachandran, Timothy D. Wilson, Arnold Trehub, Robert Provine

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
LETRAS LIBRES
Science in the Street
By Ramon Gonzalez & Ferriz Y Diego Salazar

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
NEWSWEEK
On Second Thought...
By Sharon Begley

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
Not So Smart: Aliens, Computers, and Universities
By Josh Fischman

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
Not So Smart II: The Internet Doesn't Work So Well
By Josh Fischman

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
Risk Mismanagement
By Joe Nocera

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
THE GUARDIAN
Darwin shouldn't be hijacked by New Atheists - he is an ethical inspiration
Madeline Bunting

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
BOSTON REVIEW
God
Alex Byrne

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
TORONTO STAR
On second thought: Why being wrong can be a good thing
By Peter Calamai

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW
Interview with Clay Shirky,
Part I / Part II
By Russ Juskalian

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
THE TIMES
Why the Pope is right--and wrong
Mark Henderson

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW YORK TIMES
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Not-So-Lonely Planet
By Oliver Morton

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
BOSTON GLOBE
IDEAS
Paradigm lost
By Drake Bennett

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
The Science of Spore--The "Evolution" of Gaming
By Ed Regis

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
Evolution of the Mind: 4 Fallacies of Psychology
By David J. Buller

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
3 QUARKS DAILY
THE UNION OF EVOLUTION AND DESIGN
Jonathan Pfeiffer

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
Individual versus Group in Natural Selection
Steve Mirsky

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
THE ECONOMIST
Why we are, as we are

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
PROSPECT
A progressive manifesto
By David Bodanis

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
BOSTON GLOBE
A Talk With Lisa Randall
Particle physics, the aria
By Samuel P. Jacobs

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
NATURE
Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthyBy Henry Greely, Barbara Sahakian, John Harris, Ronald C. Kessler, Michael Gazzaniga, Philip Campbell & Martha J. Farah

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
BOOKS FROM EDGE

Now Available in Bookstores and Online...

WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT (Harper Perennial)
Edited by John Brockman
With An Introduction By BRIAN ENO
http://www.amazon.com/What-Have-Changed-Your-About/dp/0061686549

"A thought-provoking collection of focused and tightly argued pieces demonstrating the courage to change strongly held convictions."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

"An intellectual treasure trove"
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

EDGE Presents...

WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT
TODAY'S LEADING MINDS RETHINK EVERYTHING
Edited by John Brockman
With An Introduction By BRIAN ENO

Contributors include: STEVEN PINKER on the future of human evolution * RICHARD DAWKINS on the mysteries of courtship * SAM HARRIS on why Mother Nature is not our friend * NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB on the irrelevance of probability * ALUN ANDERSON on the reality of global warming * ALAN ALDA considers, reconsiders, and re-reconsiders God * LISA RANDALL on the secrets of the Sun * RAY KURZWEIL on the possibility of extraterrestrial life * BRIAN ENO on what it means to be a "revolutionary" * HELEN FISHER on love, fidelity, and the viability of marriage

Praise for WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT?

"A great event in the Anglo-Saxon culture." EL MUNDS

"As fascinating and weighty as one would imagine." THE INDEPENDENT

"Even the world's best brains have to admit to being wrong sometimes: here, leading scientists respond to a new year challenge." THE TIMES

"Provocative ideas put forward today by leading figures." THE TELEGRAPH

"As in the past, these world-class thinkers have responded to impossibly open-ended questions with erudition, imagination and clarity." THE NEWS & OBSERVER

"Answers ring like scientific odes to uncertainty, humility and doubt; passionate pleas for critical thought in a world threatened by blind convictions." THE TORONTO STAR

"For an exceptionally high quotient of interesting ideas to words, this is hard to beat. ...What a feast of egg-head opinionating!" NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge270.html

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

[If at any time you want your name to be taken off this mail list, please let us know.]

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-3386047-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL: http://www.edge.org/subscribe.html

Edge 269: Can Science Help Solve The Economic Crisis?

2008-12-12T08:20:00.000-08:00

Edge 269 - December 11, 2008
(13,000 words)

This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge269.html

----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
----------------------------------------------------
JOHN MARKOFF TO JOIN SCIENCE

[Announcement from The New York Times:]

John Markoff, whose trailblazing work for The Times is a virtual history of the computer age, is taking an exciting new assignment. John is switching from Business Day to Science, where he will write widely and deeply about the impact of computer science in every modern endeavor.

One of the more alarming areas John will explore — you don't even want to know — is cyberwarfare and cybersecurity. He will cover, too, advances in computational science that are transforming the pursuit of other kinds of science. And he will peer into the future of computing to tell us how our everyday lives may change.

Another important part of his portfolio will be national science and technology policy, as the Obama administration gears up for a new era of government investment in research and development. To the extent that this push is tied to hopes for economic recovery and American competitiveness, John will often find himself in the thick of the news. ...

For more than three decades John has been the pre-eminent chronicler of Silicon Valley, having started as a defense and technology writer for Pacific News Service in 1977. He joined The Times in 1988, and has since been regaling and informing readers about this fascinating and increasingly important part of our world. ... And he was the first to write about the ever-evolving World Wide Web.

----------------------------------------------------

CAN SCIENCE HELP SOLVE THE ECONOMIC CRISIS?
By Mike Brown, Stuart Kauffman, Zoe-Vonna Palmrose and Lee Smolin

The economic crisis has to be stabilized immediately. This has to be carried out pragmatically, without undue ideology, and without reliance on the failed ideas and assumptions which led to the crisis. Complexity science can help here. For example, it is wrong to speak of "restoring the markets to equilibrium", because the markets have never been in equilibrium. We are already way ahead if we speak of "restoring the markets to a stable, self-organized critical state."
In the near-term, Eric Weinstein has spoken about an "economic Manhattan project". This means getting a group of good scientists together, some who know a lot about economics and finance, and others, who have proved themselves in other areas of science but bring fresh minds and perspectives to the challenge, to focus on developing a scientific conceptualization of economic theory and modeling that is reliable enough to be called a science.

MIKE BROWN is Past Chairman of The Nasdaq Stock Market Board of Directors, past governor of the National Association of Securities Dealers, and past CFO of Microsoft Corporation, currently a director of EMC Corporation, VMware, Administaff Inc., Pipeline Financial Group Inc., and Thomas Weisel Partners. Mike Brown's Edge Bio Page.

STUART KAUFFMAN is Professor of biology, physics and astronomy and head of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics, University of Calgary , also emeritus professor of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, a MacArthur Fellow and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Author of The Origins of Order, At Home in the Universe, Investigations and Reinventing the Sacred. Stuart Kauffman's Edge Bio Page.

ZOE-VONNA PALMROSE is PricewaterhouseCoopers Professor of Auditing and Accounting, University of Southern California. Formerly served as Deputy Chief Accountant for Professional Practice in the Office of the Chief Accountant at the Securities and Exchange Commission. Co-author, with Mike Brown, of Thog's Guide to Quantum Economics. Zoe-Vonna Palmrose's Edge Bio Page.

LEE SMOLIN is Founding and senior faculty, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Author of Life of the Cosmos, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity and The Trouble with Physics. Lee Smolin's Edge Bio Page.

----------------------------------------------------
THE REALITY CLUB
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Douglas Rushkoff, Larry Sanger, Mike Brown, George Dyson, Emanuel Derman. Michael Shermer, Paul Romer, Tor Nørretranders
----------------------------------------------------

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: I urge you all scientists to go take your "science" where it may work—and leave us in the real world without more problems. Please, please, enough of this "science". We have enough problems without you. ...

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF: The greatest danger of this compromised and arbitrary "scientific-style" approach to economics is that it implies an equivalence of the economy with nature. The sense is that the economy is really an ecology in which the laws of physics and nature actually apply. Sure they apply, but only as much as they apply to any utterly synthetic and manufactured environment. ...

MIKE BROWN: I think the main thing science has to offer in this crisis right now is a little dose of its traditional empirical humility, and when things have gotten pretty screwed up, that is usually a good place to start, if only just for good form. It would also, of course, be wise to remain skeptically mindful of where science may have contributed to the mess. ...

LARY SANGER: Any scientific project to take on economics and boldly transform it into a hard science will run into that problem of a complexity that is not amenable to rigorous scientific model-building. The other trouble with an "economic Manhattan project" suggestion is the fact that work in the social sciences is inherently ideological. I suppose that the title of the article's section 4, "What is to be done?" was chosen ironically—being the title of Lenin's most famous tract and all. ...

GOERGE DYSON: "Ten years ago I started a company based on the assumption that people are basically good," argued E-Bay founder Pierre Omidyar (at the Santa Fe Institute) in 2004. "And now I have the data to prove it." Instead of putting a dozen scientists in a room to come up with a better model of the existing global financial system, we should put a dozen Pierre Omidyars, Elon Musks, Salar Kamangars, and Jeff Bezoses in a room (with Danny Hillis) and let them actually build one (a new financial system, not another model). ...

EMANUEL DERMAN: This is a noble proposal, but I remain a bit of a skeptic with respect to the ability of a cohort of scientists and economists to find a scientific solution to the problems of our economy. Economies are living organisms, about as old as the oldest profession, and rebuilding the economic system from scratch is a problem in engineering and social engineering, not in science. Human's and scientists don't have a good history as regards social engineering. ...

MICHAEL SHERMER: Expand the problem by many orders of magnitude and we get a sense of the breathtaking inanity of trying to control an entire economy, no matter how smart the experts in our hypothetical economic Manhattan Project may be. The economy is a product of human action, not of human design. Trying to redesign something that was never designed in the first place is futile. I vote no on an economic Manhattan Project. ...

PAUL ROMER: To be successful, a Capital Markets Safety Board (CMSB) would require both funding and careful attention to incentives. Like the NTSB, a CMSB should be truly independent from the government agencies that are responsible for crisis prevention and crisis management. It should also be protected from influence by firms in the financial sector. In its data collection efforts, it should not rely on university researchers who are themselves susceptible to influence by the interested government agencies or the private sector players. Nor should it use academics who have a personal or professional stake in any particular view about what caused a crisis. It's the soft corruption of lobbying and regulatory capture that should worry us, not ideology. Institutionalized transparency is the best antidote. ...

TOR NØRRETRANDERS: We now know from experimental economics, game theory and the anthropology of gift giving that this creature exists only in the mind of economists, not in the real world. Humans (and other primates) treat each other with empathy and a striving for fair play (often through the punishment of free riders). Therefore the laudable new discussion of models of the economic system fail to discuss the real issue: Our model of human beings. And it fails to discuss the crucial externality to the economic process: Sometimes we decide to do great things that will lift each and everyone up where we belong. ...

----------------------------------------------------
ARTICLES OF NOTE
----------------------------------------------------

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Stoking Fear Everywhere You Look
By David Carr

...With unemployment, auto sales, home foreclosures and consumer confidence all benchmarking historic levels of distress, news outlets are hardly making it up. But the machinery of the economy began to freeze in place far more quickly than it has in the past, in part because so much scary data is circulating so much faster than it used to. This recession got deeper faster because we knew more bad stuff quickly.

"Our collective hive-mind gets into a tizzy over other things that suddenly zoom into focus," said Xeni Jardin, one of the editors of the blog Boing Boing. "It's a hurricane! OMG, salmonella in the hamburgers! Wait, we're all fat! There is an escalation of attention that feeds itself, because this recession is appearing throughout all forms of digital human expression. And unlike any of those other topics, this affects everyone."...

...There is a kind of emotional contagion afoot. James H. Fowler, an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego, recently co-wrote a study looking at how happiness can be spread among friends. The opposite is true as well.

"There are studies on bank runs, and it shows that people who know others who have taken their money out of the bank are much more likely to do it as well," he said. "We always overshoot the upside and, because of the same contagious effects, we overshoot the downside. Everything is fine, and then all of the sudden we are looking for water and supplies to ride out the coming storm."...

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------

FINANCIAL TIMES
Bystanders to this financial crime were many
By Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Pablo Triana

On March 13 1964, Catherine Genovese was murdered in the Queens borough of New York City. She was about to enter her apartment building at about 3am when she was stabbed and later raped by Winston Moseley. Moseley stole $50 from Genovese's wallet and left her to die in the hallway.

...Not surprisingly, the Genovese case earned the interest of social psychologists, who developed the theory of the "bystander effect". This claimed to show how the apathy of the masses can prevent the salvation of a victim. Psychologists concluded that, for a variety of reasons, the larger the number of observing bystanders, the lower the chances that the crime may be averted.

We have just witnessed a similar phenomenon in the financial markets. A crime has been committed. Yes, we insist, a crime. There is a victim (the helpless retirees, taxpayers funding losses, perhaps even capitalism and free society). There were plenty of bystanders. And there was a robbery (overcompensated bankers who got fat bonuses hiding risks; overpaid quantitative risk managers selling patently bogus methods). ....

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------

CHARLIE ROSE
A conversation with Nassim Nicholas Taleb about his book The Black Swan

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
BOOKS FROM EDGE
----------------------------------------------------
PRE-ORDER NOW:
http://www.amazon.com/What-Have-Changed-Your-About/dp/0061686549

"A thought-provoking collection of focused and tightly argued pieces demonstrating the courage to change strongly held convictions."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

"An intellectual treasure trove"
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

EDGE Presents...

WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT
TODAY'S LEADING MINDS RETHINK EVERYTHING
Edited by John Brockman
With An Introduction By BRIAN ENO

Forthcoming, Harper Perennial, January 6, 2009

Praise for WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT?

"A great event in the Anglo-Saxon culture." EL MUNDS

"As fascinating and weighty as one would imagine." THE INDEPENDENT

"Even the world's best brains have to admit to being wrong sometimes: here, leading scientists respond to a new year challenge." THE TIMES

"Provocative ideas put forward today by leading figures." THE TELEGRAPH

"As in the past, these world-class thinkers have responded to impossibly open-ended questions with erudition, imagination and clarity." THE NEWS & OBSERVER

"Answers ring like scientific odes to uncertainty, humility and doubt; passionate pleas for critical thought in a world threatened by blind convictions." THE TORONTO STAR

"For an exceptionally high quotient of interesting ideas to words, this is hard to beat. ...What a feast of egg-head opinionating!" NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge269.html
----------------------------------------------------
Edge Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private operating foundation under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
EDGE

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-3284604-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL: http://www.edge.org/subscribe.html

Edge 267: La Tercera Cultura En Espana; Kahneman & Rosenfield on The Big Three Bankruptcy

2008-11-26T06:49:00.000-08:00

"The third culture is a very powerful idea." -- Stephen Jay Gould

Edge 267 - November 25, 2008
(4,500 words)

This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge267.html

----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
----------------------------------------------------

SYNC, AND SWIM TOGETHER
By Daniel Kahneman and Andrew M. Rosenfield

"When faced with disaster, the natural response of people -- and businesses -- is to fight for time and hope for the best. The likely outcome of this strategy would be a succession of failures that would spare no one. We believe that there is a better way: simultaneous bankruptcy filing by all three companies would substantially reduce both the uncertainty and the stigma for each one."

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

THE THIRD CULTURE IN SPAIN

"The purpose of this initiative is to establish a movement in Spain based on this new way of perceiving culture, and promote it as a vehicle for development of critical opinion in our country. More and more people willing to educate themselves and get rid of superstitions and dogmas which reduces your field of personal and social action. Democracy works with people armed with critical thinking. A society of illiterates in the hands of scoundrels (Perez Reverte), can never be democratic." -- Arcadi Espada

[...MORE]

PRESENTACION TERCERA CULTURA
Slide Show

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
PRESENTACION PLATAFORMA CULTURA 3.0
Tercera cultura en Madrid

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
YOU TUBE
Cultura 3.0 en Madrid

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
EL MUNDO por dentro
Hoy Si Que Esta El Periodico En El Filo (Edge) De La Noticia
Arcadi Espada

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
EL MUNDO
Nace La Plataforma Tercera Cultura
(Birth of the Third Culture)
Rosa M. Tristan

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
EL MUNDO por dentro
La Tercera Cultura En Espana
Arcadi Espada

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
LA REVOLUCION NATURALISTA
Presentacion De Cultura 3.0

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
ARTICLES OF NOTE
----------------------------------------------------

THE NEW YORK TIMES
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
Polly Wanna Cracker? Squawk! Do Better, That's So Bush League
By Michiko Kakutani

When Alex the African gray parrot died in 2007, the world mourned. The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe ran articles reviewing his life achievements. The Economist devoted its obituary for the week of Sept. 22, 2007, to Alex. (Earlier weeks had featured Luciano Pavarotti and Ingmar Bergman.) ABC News, CNN and National Public Radio did segments about his lifetime collaboration with the scientist Irene M. Pepperberg. And an Internet condolence book (remembering-alex.org) was set up so that fans could grieve in public. ...

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------

YOUTUBE
Missionary Linguist Loses Faith

Daniel Everett on the Piraha language and culture. ...

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------

NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
Becoming Screen Literate
By Kevin Kelly

Everywhere we look, we see screens. The other day I watched clips from a movie as I pumped gas into my car. The other night I saw a movie on the backseat of a plane. We will watch anywhere. Screens playing video pop up in the most unexpected places -- like A.T.M. machines and supermarket checkout lines and tiny phones; some movie fans watch entire films in between calls. These ever-present screens have created an audience for very short moving pictures, as brief as three minutes, while cheap digital creation tools have empowered a new generation of filmmakers, who are rapidly filling up those screens. We are headed toward screen ubiquity. ...

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------

INTELLIGENT LIFE
The Rise of the Journo-Gurus

..The Gladwell of the new economy is Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine. (For the record: Anderson used to work at The Economist and shared an office with this author.) In "The Long Tail" he argued that the internet is shifting the focus of the economy from producing a small number of big hits to satisfying a legion of niche markets. Amazon and iTunes can stock virtually everything. And the falling cost of distribution means that every niche consumer can get their hands on what they want. ...

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------

SALON
Good Enough
By Steve Paulson

We should see the ceaseless creativity of nature as sacred, argues biologist Stuart Kauffman, despite what Richard Dawkins might say.. ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Regenerating a Mammoth for $10 Million

A third issue is that the DNA of living cells can be modified only very laboriously and usually at one site at a time. Dr. Schuster said he had been in discussion with George Church, a well-known genome technologist at Harvard Medical School, about a new method Dr. Church has invented for modifying some 50,000 genomic sites at a time. ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
BOOKS FROM EDGE
----------------------------------------------------
PRE-ORDER NOW:
http://www.amazon.com/What-Have-Changed-Your-About/dp/0061686549

"A thought-provoking collection of focused and tightly argued pieces demonstrating the courage to change strongly held convictions."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

"An intellectual treasure trove"
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

EDGE Presents...

WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT
TODAY'S LEADING MINDS RETHINK EVERYTHING
Edited by John Brockman
With An Introduction By BRIAN ENO

Forthcoming, Harper Perennial, January 6, 2009

Praise for WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT?

"A great event in the Anglo-Saxon culture." EL MUNDS

"As fascinating and weighty as one would imagine." THE INDEPENDENT

"Even the world's best brains have to admit to being wrong sometimes: here, leading scientists respond to a new year challenge." THE TIMES

"Provocative ideas put forward today by leading figures." THE TELEGRAPH

"As in the past, these world-class thinkers have responded to impossibly open-ended questions with erudition, imagination and clarity." THE NEWS & OBSERVER

"Answers ring like scientific odes to uncertainty, humility and doubt; passionate pleas for critical thought in a world threatened by blind convictions." THE TORONTO STAR

"For an exceptionally high quotient of interesting ideas to words, this is hard to beat. ...What a feast of egg-head opinionating!" NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge267.html

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

---
You are currently subscribed to edge_editions as: wheresrhys@googlemail.com

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-3234571-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL: http://www.edge.org/subscribe.html

Edge 266 Christopher Badcock: The Imprinted Brain Theory

2008-11-21T07:31:00.000-08:00

Edge 266 - November 20, 2008
(5,000 words)

This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge266.html

----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
----------------------------------------------------
THE IMPRINTED BRAIN THEORY
By Christopher Badcock

According to a recent New York Times Science Times article ("In a Novel Theory of Mental Disorders, Parents' Genes Are in Competition" by Benedict Carey, November 10, 2008) Christopher Badcock and Bernard Crespi have presented a new theory that purports to resolve some long-standing contradictions in explaining mental illness.

Edge wrote to Badcock, an early member of the Edge community, to ask him for a summary of his new theory for our readers.

"At first sight," he wrote back in an email, "it would seem that no single theory could explain these seemingly contradictory facts-and certainly not an evolutionary or genetic one-but an attempt is underway to do exactly that which has just passed its first major test. In 2006 Bernard Crespi (Killam Research Professor in the Department of Biosciences, Simon Fraser University) and I published a paper in The Journal of Evolutionary Biology setting out the theory in relation to autism. Earlier this year Behavioral and Brain Sciences published a second paper along with 23 expert commentaries and the authors' replies which extends the idea to psychoses like schizophrenia. More recently still, Nature has published our essay on the theory ("Battle of Sexes May Set The Brain", 28 August 2008)."

Read on.

- John Brockman

CHRISTOPHER BADCOCK is a Reader in Sociology at the London School of Economics and the author of PsychoDarwinism and Evolutionary Psychology: A Clinical Introduction.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE REALITY CLUB
----------------------------------------------------

Arnold Trehub on Alva Noë's "The Problem With Consciousness"

What Alva Noe and others with similar views about consciousness seemingly fail to understand is that the very world with which we are dynamically interacting is both a real and a phenomenal world. It is the real world in which our actions must be adaptive and creative, but-and this is the key point-our consciously initiated actions can only be governed by the features of our phenomenal world. It is the phenomenal world that poses the essential problem of conscious experience. ...

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
ARTICLES OF NOTE
----------------------------------------------------

ARTS & LETTERS DAILY
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 ...

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------

THE NEW YORK TIMES
SCIENCE TIMES
In a Novel Theory of Mental Disorders, Parents' Genes Are in Competition"
By Benedict Carey

Two scientists, drawing on their own powers of observation and a creative reading of recent genetic findings, have published a sweeping theory of brain development that would change the way mental disorders like autism and schizophrenia are understood.

The theory emerged in part from thinking about events other than mutations that can change gene behavior. And it suggests entirely new avenues of research, which, even if they prove the theory to be flawed, are likely to provide new insights into the biology of mental disease.

At a time when the search for the genetic glitches behind brain disorders has become mired in uncertain and complex findings, the new idea provides psychiatry with perhaps its grandest working theory since Freud, and one that is grounded in work at the forefront of science. The two researchers - Bernard Crespi, a biologist at Simon Fraser University in Canada, and Christopher Badcock, a sociologist at the London School of Economics, who are both outsiders to the field of behavior genetics - have spelled out their theory in a series of recent journal articles. ...

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------

NATURE
ESSAY
Battle of the sexes may set the brain

A tug-of-war between the mother's and father's genes in the developing brain could explain a spectrum of mental disorders from autism to schizophrenia, suggest Christopher Badcock and Bernard Crespi. ...

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
(COVER STORY)

ENCELADUS: SECRETS OF SATURN'S STRANGEST MOON

Wrinkled landscapes and spouting jets on Saturn's sixth-largest moon hint at underground waters

By Carolyn Porco

On the Saturnian moon Enceladus, jets of powdery snow and water vapor, laden with organic compounds, vent from the "tiger stripes," warm gashes in the surface. How can a body just over 500 kilometers across sustain such vigorous activity?

The answer may be the presence of underground fluids, perhaps a sea, which would increase the efficiency of heating by tidal effects. Support for this idea has come from recent flybys.

If Enceladus has liquid water, it joins Mars and Jupiter's moon Europa as one of the prime places in the solar system to look for extraterrestrial life. ...

[...MORE]

"A thought-provoking collection of focused and tightly argued pieces demonstrating the courage to change strongly held convictions."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

"An intellectual treasure trove"
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

EDGE Presents...

WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT
TODAY'S LEADING MINDS RETHINK EVERYTHING
Edited by John Brockman
With An Introduction By BRIAN ENO

Forthcoming, Harper Perennial, January 6, 2009

Praise for WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT?

"A great event in the Anglo-Saxon culture." EL MUNDS

"As fascinating and weighty as one would imagine." THE INDEPENDENT

"Even the world's best brains have to admit to being wrong sometimes: here, leading scientists respond to a new year challenge." THE TIMES

"Provocative ideas put forward today by leading figures." THE TELEGRAPH

"As in the past, these world-class thinkers have responded to impossibly open-ended questions with erudition, imagination and clarity." THE NEWS & OBSERVER

"Answers ring like scientific odes to uncertainty, humility and doubt; passionate pleas for critical thought in a world threatened by blind convictions." THE TORONTO STAR

"For an exceptionally high quotient of interesting ideas to words, this is hard to beat. ...What a feast of egg-head opinionating!" NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge266.html

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-3225375-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL: http://www.edge.org/subscribe.html

Edge 265: Andrian Kreye on Genital Thieves, Alva Noe on Consciousness

2008-11-13T16:44:00.000-08:00

Edge 265 - November 14, 2008

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

----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
----------------------------------------------------
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.

----------------------------------------------------
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. ...

----------------------------------------------------
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.

----------------------------------------------------
IN THE NEWS
----------------------------------------------------

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. " ....
----------------------------------------------------

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. ...

----------------------------------------------------
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. ...

----------------------------------------------------
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. ...

----------------------------------------------------
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. ...

----------------------------------------------------
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. ...

----------------------------------------------------
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.

----------------------------------------------------
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. ...

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
This online EDGE edition with links and EDGE Video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge265.html
----------------------------------------------------
Edge Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private operating foundation under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
EDGE

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

[If at any time you want your name to be taken off this mail list, please let us know.]

---
You are currently subscribed to edge_editions as: wheresrhys@googlemail.com

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-3208297-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL: http://www.edge.org/subscribe.html

Edge 264: Putting Psychology Into Behavioral Economics - Thaler, Mullainathan, Kahneman

2008-11-08T05:12:00.000-08:00

Edge 264 — November 7, 2008

(16,450 words)

This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge264.html

----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
----------------------------------------------------
THE DOUBLE HELIX MEDAL FOR SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH
James D. Watson & J. Craig Venter

At the Cold Spring Harbor Board of Director's Dinner in New York City, James Watson and Craig Venter were co-recipients of the Double Helix Medal for Scientific Research.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------

SWATTING ATTACKS ON FRUIT FLIES AND SCIENCE
By Jerry Coyne

Sarah Palin's criticism of the critters is just bad buzz. Research on them offers insights into learning, genes, diseases.

In her usual faux-folksy style, Palin lit out after a congressional earmark involving these insects: "You've heard about some of these pet projects ó†they really don't make a whole lot of sense ó†and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit-fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not." (Reading this diatribe is not sufficient; only video reveals the scorn and condescension dripping from her words.)

JERRY COYNE is a professor in the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, where he works on diverse areas of evolutionary genetics. He is the author (with H. Allen Orr) of Speciation, and Why Evolution Is True.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------

Once again, real life is not a casino with simple bets. This is the error that helps the banking system go bust with an astonishing regularity.

REAL LIFE IS NOT A CASINO
By Nassim Nicholas Taleb

On New Years day I received a a prescient essay from Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, as his response to the 2008 Edge Question: "What Have You Change Your Mind About?" In "Real Life Is Not A Casino", he wrote:

"I've shown that institutions that are exposed to negative black swans—such as banks and some classes of insurance ventures—have almost never been profitable over long periods. The problem of the illustrative current subprime mortgage mess is not so much that the "quants" and other pseudo-experts in bank risk-management were wrong about the probabilities (they were) but that they were severely wrong about the different layers of depth of potential negative outcomes."

Taleb had changed his mind about his belief "in the centrality of probability in life, and advocating that we should express everything in terms of degrees of credence, with unitary probabilities as a special case for total certainties and null for total implausibility".

"Critical thinking, knowledge, beliefs—everything needed to be probabilized. Until I came to realize, twelve years ago, that I was wrong in this notion that the calculus of probability could be a guide to life and help society. Indeed, it is only in very rare circumstances that probability (by itself) is a guide to decision making. It is a clumsy academic construction, extremely artificial, and nonobservable. Probability is backed out of decisions; it is not a construct to be handled in a stand-alone way in real-life decision making. It has caused harm in many fields."

The essay is one of more than one hundred that have been edited for a new book What Have You Changed Your Mind About? (forthcoming, Harper Collins, January 9th).

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB is an essayist and mathematical trader and the author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------

PUTTING PSYCHOLOGY INTO BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS
A Talk By Richard Thaler, Daniel Kahneman, Sendhil Mullainathan

Class 6: A Short Course In Behavioral Economics
Sean Parker, Anne Treisman, Paul Romer, Danny Hillis, Jeff Bezos, Salar Kamangar, George Dyson, France LeClerc

RICHARD THALER: ehavioral economics and good psychology, there's a lot of art. There is science and there are well-crafted experiments, but thinking about what the right experiment to run, was art and, there are 80 gazillion experiments, which ones are relevant to getting people to plant the right seed. That's a problem that Sendhil and I have been talking about for, well, since he was born. You're now seeing the results of 15 years of conversations. And there wasn't a scientific way of answering that question.

SENDHIL MULLAINAITHAN: A lot of what makes behavioral economics interesting is psychology, it is about what happens inside the mind. These phenomena are taking things that are happening inside the mind and interfacing them with things happening in the world, the environment, and getting feedback or getting interesting responses from that.

We happen to call the word economics. But it's not economics. You could be talking about crime, you could be talking about many things, in the social domain, the entire spectrum of human behavior. Anyone who is interested in the broader world should be interested in something we currently call "behavioral economics".

DANIEL KAHNEMAN: What we're saying is that there is a technology emerging from behavioral economics. It's not only an abstract thing. You can do things with it. We are just at the beginning. I thought that the input of psychology into behavioral economics was done. But hearing Sendhil was very encouraging because there was a lot of new psychology there. That conversation is continuing and it looks to me as if that conversation is going to go forward. It's pretty intuitive, based on research, good theory, and important.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
ARTICLES OF NOTE
----------------------------------------------------

FINANCIAL TIMES
Obama's technology czar: the betting begins
By Richard Waters

Obama's technology czar: the betting begins
By Richard Waters

Barack Obama's promise to appoint the first chief technology officer for the US has had Silicon Valley buzzing all year. Now the election is over, it's time for the real horse race to begin.

John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins got things going this afternoon at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Asked who should get the job, the always-outspoken Doerr didn't hesitate.

His first pick was Sun co-founder, Kleiner partner and all-round brainiac Bill Joy (pictured above left.)

As an alternative he suggested Danny Hillis (above right), a supercomputer pioneer and leading exponent of artificial intelligence.
Both men would certainly be a good fit for Doerr's personal job description for the first US CTO: someone to lead a new, much-needed focus on fundamental research, the sort of work that will bring new breakthroughs as significant as the birth of the internet (a product of DARPA.) ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
Science: The Coming Century
By Martin Rees

...Science is the only truly global culture: protons, proteins, and Pythagoras' theorem are the same from China to Peru. Research is international, highly networked, and collaborative. And most science-linked policy issues are international, even global—that's certainly true of those I've addressed here.

It is worth mentioning that the United States and Britain have been until now the most successful in creating and sustaining world-class research universities. These institutions are magnets for talent—both faculty and students—from all over the world, and are in most cases embedded in a "cluster" of high-tech companies, to symbiotic benefit.

By 2050, China and India should at least gain parity with Europe and the US—they will surely become the "center of gravity" of the world's intellectual power. We will need to aim high if we are to sustain our competitive advantage in offering cutting-edge "value added." ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------

THE NEW YORK TIMES
A Conversatrion with Stuart L. Pimm
By Claudia Dreyfus

'I realized that extinction was something that as a scientist, I could study. I could ask, Why do species go extinct?'

For a man whose scholarly specialty is one of the grimmest topics on earth — extinction — Stuart L. Pimm is remarkably chipper. On a recent morning, while visiting New York City, Dr. Pimm, a 59-year-old zoologist, was full of warm stories about the many places he travels: South Africa, Madagascar and even South Florida, which he visits as part of an effort to save the endangered Florida panther. Fewer than 100 survive in the wild. In 2006, Dr. Pimm, who holds the Doris Duke professorship of Conservation Ecology at Duke University, won the Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences, the Nobel of the ecology world. ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------

SCIENCE
THE GONZO SCIENTIST
Flunking Spore
John Bohannon

...So over the past month, I've been playing Spore with a team of scientists, grading the game on each of its scientific themes. When it comes to biology, and particularly evolution, Spore failed miserably. According to the scientists, the problem isn't just that Spore dumbs down the science or gets a few things wrong--it's meant to be a game, after all--but rather, it gets most of biology badly, needlessly, and often bizarrely wrong. I also tracked down the scientists who appeared on television in what seemed like an endorsement of Spore's scientific content on the National Geographic channel. They said they had been led to believe that the interviews were for a straight documentary about "developmental evolutionary" science rather than a video promoting a computer game (see the news story in Science's 24 October issue). "I was used," says Neil Shubin, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois, who worries that science has been "hijacked" to promote a product. How did things go so wrong for a game that seemed so good? ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------

THE BOSTON GLOBE
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. ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
What Have You Changed Your Mind About?
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.)

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------

HUFFINGTON POST
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]

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------

WALL STREET JOURNAL
October Pain Was 'Black Swan' Gain
Scott Patterson

For most of October, it seemed nearly everything that could go wrong with the markets did. But the rout turned into a jackpot for author and investor Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Mr. Taleb last year published "The Black Swan," a best-selling book about the impact of extreme events on the world and the financial markets. He also helped start a hedge fund, Universa Investments L.P., which bases many of its strategies on themes in the book, including how to reap big rewards in a sharp market downturn. Like October's. ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------

PROSPECT
The emerging moral psychology
Dan Jones

Long thought to be a topic of enquiry within the humanities, the nature of human morality is increasingly being scrutinised by the natural sciences. This shift is now beginning to provide impressive intellectual returns on investment. Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, economists, primatologists and anthropologists, all borrowing liberally from each others' insights, are putting together a novel picture of morality—a trend that University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt has described as the "new synthesis in moral psychology." The picture emerging shows the moral sense to be the product of biologically evolved and culturally sensitive brain systems that together make up the human "moral faculty."...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------

THE RECORD (WATERLOO)
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.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------

FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG
The Turkey Was Amazed
By Frank Schirrmacher

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, professor of risk research, had already described the process of the financial crisis, when Ben Bernanke believed we were already in an "era of security". His new book could become to the standard work of a society, that is experiencing the destruction of its life security. ..

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Your Comments On The Economy Column
By Nicholas Kristof

...Yet I also think that it's important to keep the economy in perspective. During the boom years, we tended to equate wealth with happiness, and if there's some reordering of our national value system, that would be a good thing. Over the last year, I've become interested in the work of social psychologists like Jonathan Haidt who have conducted research on happiness. And the evidence is pretty strong that the things that we believe will make us happy, such as winning the lottery, won't do that except in the short term. In the long term, the way to be happy is to have friends and spend time with them, and to connect to a cause larger than yourself that gives you a sense of meaning.

As my column suggested, I'm influenced by the work of Alan Krueger at Princeton. He believes that networks are truly important for happiness and fulfillment — and the cost of a lay-off or foreclosure is that it tears people out of their networks. So he thinks that falling incomes aren't so bad as we may think, but that layoffs and evictions are worse, and that makes sense to me. ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
ATLANTIC ONLINE
Too Soon To Tell
Ross Douthat

I've written before about Jonathan Haidt's view that our moral impulses can be grouped into five categories, two "liberal" (harm/care, and fairness/reciprocity) and three "conservative" (ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity) - and I've argued before with Will Wilkinson about whether it's possible to envision a successful society in which the liberal impulses dominate completely, and the conservative impulses are stigmatized and/or essentially disappear. Haidt, for his part, thinks that it probably isn't; here's Will arguing with him:

?Frankly, I find this extremely unconvincing, and I daresay even pernicious ... What Jon needs to show is that there is a threshold on the conservative channels of the moral equalizer below which social stability is threatened. In the talk, he barely gestures toward evidence to this effect ... Indeed, my sense is that the societies in which the space between high liberal settings and low conservative settings is the greatest-that is, the most imbalanced-are by and large the best places for human beings to live."...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------

TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
Wikipedia and the Meaning of Truth
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. ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------

TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
Moving Freely between Virtual Worlds
By Erica Naone

...But the issue goes deeper than virtual cars and shopping malls. Jaron Lanier, interdisciplinary scholar in residence at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a virtual-reality pioneer, says that the search for a 3-D Internet is important for humanity. "Human cognition was designed to function in 3-D, and our computation eventually has to have a 3-D interface to maximize the matchup with the human brain as it evolved," he says. People will need to find a way to combine a concrete, 3-D spatial understanding with the connective power of the 2-D Internet, Lanier says. ...

... Lanier, who notes that he has many professional connections to people involved with virtual worlds, says that while he very much wants the 3-D Internet to succeed, he is skeptical about whether it will be possible for developers to agree on a set of standards. "There's a virtual land rush of people who want to come in and grab the standard," he says, noting that the history of IBM and Microsoft provides some indication of the money that can be made by establishing a standard. But Lanier thinks a successful standard for the 3-D Internet is unlikely to develop the same way that HTML did--that is, as an abstract definition that people then adopted. He thinks it is more likely that a well-designed package will become a standard, similar to the way that Adobe Flash is becoming standard for rich Internet applications.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------

TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
Immortalizing a Piece of Yourself
By Emily Singer

Church won't be alone in distributing his cells. The scientist aims to create hundreds or thousands of cell lines over the next few years as part of the Personal Genome Project, an effort that he launched two years ago to capitalize on advances in gene-sequencing technologies. So far, the project has enrolled 10 volunteers--and garnered headlines, mainly for its genomic-era exhibitionism. Volunteers, including Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker and entrepreneur Ester Dyson, released their medical records and preliminary genetic analyses on the Web earlier this month. But media attention has mostly ignored that fact that they've also given something that may be even more personal. Each has undergone a skin biopsy, which will be used to generate stem-cell lines.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------

TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
Linda Avey and Anne Wojcicki
The founders of startup 23andMe want to know your genome.
By Emily Singer

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge264.html

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-3192285-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL: http://www.edge.org/subscribe.html

Edge 263: Sendhil Mullainathan - "The Irony of Poverty"

2008-10-29T13:49:00.000-07:00

Edge 263 - October 30, 2008

(16,460 words)

This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge263.html

----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
----------------------------------------------------
I want to close a loop, which I'm calling "The Irony of Poverty." On the one hand, lack of slack tells us the poor must make higher quality decisions because they don't have slack to help buffer them with things. But even though they have to supply higher quality decisions, they're in a worse position to supply them because they're depleted. That is the ultimate irony of poverty. You're getting cut twice. You are in an environment where the decisions have to be better, but you're in an environment that by the very nature of that makes it harder for you apply better decisions.

THE IRONY OF POVERTY
A Talk By Sendhil Mullainathan

SENDHIL MULLAINATHAN, a Professor of Economics at Harvard, a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant", conducts research on development economics, behavioral economics, and corporate finance. His work concerns creating a psychology of people to improve poverty alleviation programs in developing countries. He is Executive Director of Ideas 42, Institute of Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University.

Sendhil Mullainathan's Edge Bio Page: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/mullainathan.html

Daniel Kahneman, Paul Romer, Richard Thaler, Danny Hillis, Jeff Bezos, Sean Parker, Anne Treisman, France LeClerc, Salar Kamangar, George Dyson

Class 5: A Short Course In Behavioral Economics
Edge Video

---------------------------

SENDHIL MULLAINATHAN: I told you there was a bunch of pieces to the puzzle to the poor, and I wanted to finish that argument because I got out the first piece of the puzzle, but there are two other pieces that are important and I want to kind of walk through those pieces. I'll walk through the other piece of the puzzle, and then I'll close on a slide about mental models. I realized in trying to write that up, everything can be shown in this one slide, and it's kind of a stunning fact.

To recap: The first piece of the puzzle is that scarcity buys a broader frame, the need for a broader frame. And one implication of a lot of this which is worth keeping in the back of your mind and that what should resonate for a lot of you is that even positive expenditures are tainted by the trade-offs.

If you're poor and you spend money on a luxury good, you're always at least partly thinking during the moment of consumption about what you're giving up to buy that good. If you are time scarce and you're spending time on a leisure good, you're at least partly thinking about what you're not doing during that time. That's an interesting hedonic aspect of things, which could turn out to be important.

The problem of a broader frame isn't just a planning problem, there's also a hedonic problem that it induces, which is the inability to not think about trade-offs during the consumption. That's an interesting indication. I won't talk more about it because I'm not talking that much about hedonics. But it's important.

Here's the second piece of the puzzle. And this is related to the question of, what is causing, what's preventing the vendors from saving up? Here's a little thought experiment. Eve and Ben both pass by a clothing store. A summer suit draws their eye and in a moment of weakness both make an ill-advised purchase.

Eve goes home and thinks, what a bad purchase. Ben goes home and thinks, what a bad purchase; now I won't have the money to repair my car. Why is this example is useful? It's that temptations have consequences. If you have slack, the consequences are that you've now used up some of your slack on this pointless purchase. And you may feel bad because it was a pointless purchase and it was in the spur of the moment. Of course, we're tempted by certain consumption acts. The poor are tempted by certain consumption acts. Here's an interesting observation. Suppose that the goods that tempt us, so say I make ten times as much as somebody else, suppose the goods that tempt me are ten times as expensive as the goods that tempt the other person. Then we both face the same structural problem. We've taken one problem and scaled it up.

It's like an exchange rate. Just multiply it by ten, but everything else is still the same, so nothing has changed. If, on the other hand, the things that tempt me are only twice as expensive or three times as expensive it's interesting that now I face the fundamentally easier problem than the poorer person. Does that make sense to everybody?

What that means is now that if I cave in, I'm caving in. The psychological experience is the same. I'm giving into something I don't want to give in to, but the monetary consequence is very different. It's going to be in proportion to my slack, my income it's one tenth as big. ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
IN THE NEWS
----------------------------------------------------

THE NEW YORK TIMES
OP-ED COLUMN
THE BEHAVIORAL REVOLUTION
By David Brooks

...Economists and psychologists have been exploring our perceptual biases for four decades now, with the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, and also with work by people like Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, John Bargh and Dan Ariely.

My sense is that this financial crisis is going to amount to a coming-out party for behavioral economists and others who are bringing sophisticated psychology to the realm of public policy. At least these folks have plausible explanations for why so many people could have been so gigantically wrong about the risks they were taking.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has been deeply influenced by this stream of research. Taleb not only has an explanation for what's happening, he saw it coming. His popular books "Fooled by Randomness" and "The Back Swan" were broadsides at the risk-management models used in the financial world and beyond.

In "The Black Swan," Taleb wrote, "The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup." Globalization, he noted, "creates interlocking fragility." He warned that while the growth of giant banks gives the appearance of stability, in reality, it raises the risk of a systemic collapse - "when one fails, they all fail."

Taleb believes that our brains evolved to suit a world much simpler than the one we now face. His writing is idiosyncratic, but he does touch on many of the perceptual biases that distort our thinking: our tendency to see data that confirm our prejudices more vividly than data that contradict them; our tendency to overvalue recent events when anticipating future possibilities; our tendency to spin concurring facts into a single causal narrative; our tendency to applaud our own supposed skill in circumstances when we've actually benefited from dumb luck. ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THIS IS MONEY
NASSIM TALEB AND THE SECRET OF THE BLACK SWAN
Bill Condie, Evening Standard

Options trader turned author and philosopher Nassim Taleb has delivered returns of 50% - in some cases 110% - for investors he advises this year despite the market meltdown, thanks to his non-conformist view on managing risk. The Evening Standard investigates...

Lebanese-born Taleb is scathing of traditional risk-managers and says they should be jailed for the pain they have caused.
'We would like society to lock up quantitative risk managers before they cause more damage,' he says.

Those same risk managers have scoffed at Taleb's theories but may have to think again after his extraordinary returns over the past months.

'I am very sad to be vindicated,' Taleb says.

'I don't care about the money. We're proud we protected our investors.'

Taleb wrote last year at length about the market risks that have come home to roost lately. 'The financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks - when one fails, they all fall,'

Taleb wrote in his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, published last year. He warned specifically of the dangers from mortgage finance giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE TELEGRAPH
DEAN KAMEN: PART MAN, PART MACHINE

Some see Dean Kamen as a Willy Wonka character whose most famous invention - the Segway personal transporter - is still the butt of jokes. Others compare him to Henry Ford. His next project, after perfecting an electric car, is to 'to fix the world' - using a 200-year-old engine nobody else thinks can work. By Adam Higginbotham

Ten years ago, on the summit of a hill in the verdant New England countryside, at the highest point he could find between Boston and Manchester, New Hampshire, Dean Kamen designed and built the sprawling, hexagonal house he called Westwind. Filled with gadgets, tools and curios - including a 25-ton tugboat steam engine that once belonged to Henry Ford and an elevator featured in The Sting - and furnished with a 50,000 watt wind turbine to generate electricity and a floodlit baseball field to entertain his employees, it lies just seven miles from the headquarters of his research and development company, Deka.

Now 57, Kamen has a variety of ways of covering this distance: at the wheel of his gleaming black Humvee, or perhaps his Porsche coupé, the journey takes some 20 minutes; often, he chooses to pilot his helicopter, a two-seat, jet-powered Enstrom 480, which he keeps in a hangar beneath the house, and will put the inventor on the roof of his office in about three -and-a-half minutes. ...

...Kamen is now regarded as one of the most accomplished electro-mechanical engineers in the world - 'He's extraordinary,' says Bob Tuttle, who has worked with him since 1976 and is now executive vice-president of Deka, 'the ultimate systems engineer.'

'He's often compared to Thomas Edison or Henry Ford,' says Bill Doyle, who met Kamen while working at Johnson & Johnson in the mid-1990s. 'The comparisons are not without merit.' ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE GUARDIAN
'PEOPLE SAY I'M STRIDENT'

He sold 1.5m copies of The God Delusion, and this week stumped up £5,500 for atheist adverts. So why does Richard Dawkins think science is losing its war with religion?

By Decca Aitkenhead

...This week, as Dawkins retires from the Charles Simonyi professorship for the public understanding of science, the Oxford post he has held for 12 years, you might expect him to feel that the secular, scientific cause to which he has devoted his career is winning. On Tuesday, campaigners announced plans for an atheist advertising campaign to appear on the side of buses with the message: "There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." The campaign, which was launched by TV comedy writer Ariane Sherine, blogging on Commentisfree.co.uk, hoped to raise £5,500 from supporters, which Dawkins had pledged to match with his own money, but by yesterday public donations had already raised more than £96,000.

In the same week, immigration minister, Phil Woolas, predicted that constitutional reforms would banish bishops from the House of Lords within the next 50 years, and record numbers of new maths and science undergraduates were reported. Even in America, the religious right seemed to be losing its grip.

But when I ask Dawkins, now 67, if he feels that public understanding of science has improved during his career, he looks doubtful. "I would say that when my academic career began there was probably just as much ignorance - but less active opposition [to science]. If you were to actually travel around schools and universities and listen in on lectures about evolution you might find a fairly substantial fraction of young people, without knowing what it is they disapprove of, think they disapprove of it, because they've been brought up to."

Does he attribute that to lower standards of scientific education, or to the rise of religious fundamentalism? "Oh," he says without hesitation, "I think it's due to greater religious influence."

In Dawkins' view, there is a battle taking place in Britain between the forces of reason, and religious fundamentalism and it is far from won. He is one of its most famous and prolific combatants - but the question might be whether he is among its most effective. The God Delusion's stated aim was to "convert" readers to atheism - but he admits that as a proselytising tool it has broadly failed. "Yes," he smiles. "I think that was a bit unrealistic. A worthwhile aim, but unrealistic." ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE TELEGRAPH
HARRY POTTER FAILS TO CASE SPELL OVER PROFESSOR RICHARD DAWKINS
By Martin Beckford and Urmee Khan

Harry Potter has become the latest target for Professor Richard Dawkins who is planning to find out whether tales of witchdraft and wizardy have a negative effect on children.

The prominent atheist is stepping down from his post at Oxford University to write a book aimed at youngsters in which he will warn them against believing in "anti-scientific" fairytales.

Prof Dawkins said: "The book I write next year will be a children's book on how to think about the world, science thinking contrasted with mythical thinking.

"I haven't read Harry Potter, I have read Pullman who is the other leading children's author that one might mention and I love his books. I don't know what to think about magic and fairy tales."

Prof Dawkins said he wanted to look at the effects of "bringing children up to believe in spells and wizards".

"I think it is anti-scientific - whether that has a pernicious effect, I don't know," he told More4 News.

"I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's something for research." ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
TIME
Q & A
NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB
By Tim Morrison

...You've said that this current market crisis isn't necessarily a black swan event. People did see this coming.

It is a white swan, but very few people saw it coming, I guarantee. Nobody saw the real cost. And let me tell you the problem. The system used to analyze risk is completely defective, and actually could not keep up with the complexity of the financial products that are involved. You have what I call a geometric or exponential increase in risks. For example, if the market drops 10% you lose $100 million. But if the market drops 15%, you don't lose another $50 million, you lose an extra $2 billion. And if the market moves an extra 5% you lose an extra $10 or $15 billion. All the metrics have the effect of underestimating the impact of the possibility of very large deviations. In other words it tells you how uncomfortable the plane ride is going to be, but tells you nothing about the crash.

But how do you get beyond that besides widening your margins of risk?

Eliminating leverage. If you don't have leverage, you don't have that problem. We have a faulty risk management system that underestimated probabilities while giving people the illusion of understanding them. It gave people the illusion of comfort. If I give you a number, you're going to take more risk. Regardless of the confidence you have in the number. It's psychological. If I ask you to write down the last 4 digits of your social security number, and then take you out to lunch and ask you how many dentists there are in Manhattan, there's going to be a high correlation between those two numbers. What happens is that the number psychologically makes you feel confident. It's kind of like a seatbelt on a plane. It doesn't do anything. ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE VANCOUVER SUN
MOTIVATED BY FEAR
By Peter McKnight

Recent volatility in the markets is largely a result of mob mentality and the herding instinct, with anxiety spreading faster than any virus

By Peter McKnight

...This presents a problem for economists in their attempts to explain what's happening now and to predict what will happen in the future since many economic theories depend on the assumption that investors will act rationally. But what if that assumption is wrong, as seems to be the case right now?

Perhaps it's time to turn to psychology, as many economists have done in recent years. While psychologists and economists didn't have much to do with each other throughout most of the 20th century, the last few decades have seen something of a rapprochement between these two seemingly disparate disciplines, a meeting of minds that has produced the interdisciplinary field of behavioural economics.

The seeds of this rapprochement were sown by famed psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who in the 1970s demonstrated the phenomenon known as loss aversion. Despite having never taken an economics course, Kahneman was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics for his work; Tversky unfortunately died in 1996.

As the name of the theory suggests, loss aversion tells us that people are much more concerned with avoiding losses than they are with making gains. ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
NATURE
Editorial
A LOOK WITHIN

A series of Essays examines what science has to say about being human.

...The combustibility of the interface between science and society is one major reason for the extraordinary fragmentation of research that tackles human behaviour. In part because of the sociobiology battle, most social scientists still steer clear of using evolutionary hypotheses. And even researchers who do work under the unifying framework of evolution tend to fall into distinct camps such as gene-culture co-evolution or human behavioural ecology - their practitioners divided by differences of opinion on, say, the relative importance of culture versus genes.

Given that humans are such a complicated species, it is no surprise that researchers from fields such as economics, political science, anthropology and biology are driven to pursue similar questions using their own distinct tools and approaches. But the lack of crosstalk between disciplines and subdisciplines means that efforts are too often duplicated, and opportunities to exchange insights lost. Much of the ethnographic data on hunter-gatherers collected by anthropologists, for instance, are largely unknown to modellers interested in the emergence of particular human traits. Similarly, evolutionary biologists constantly accuse social scientists of either ignoring evolution or invoking outdated versions of evolutionary theory.

It doesn't have to be this way. In other domains, such as the study of complex systems, scientists from biological, physical and social sciences are increasingly sharing information. Now is a particularly opportune moment for those studying human behaviour to follow suit. Genomics is beginning to provide a window onto many thousands of years of human history. Advances in mathematical analyses have greatly clarified our picture of the evolutionary process. And, because of the rapid assimilation of nomadic hunter-gatherer populations into modern societies, researchers have collected most of the ethnographic data on these groups they are ever likely to obtain.

In the spirit of fostering dialogue between disparate fields of research, Nature has commissioned a series of Essays that asks how discoveries in psychology, anthropology, genetics, neuroscience, game theory and network engineering are altering our understanding of particular human characteristics, or of issues that are central to human life. Starting this week with religion (see page 1038), and appearing every two weeks for the next five months, these Essays move from human prehistory to look at how we operate within self-made highly interconnected cities and communication networks. ...

[EDITOR NOTE: Philip Campbell is Editor of Nature]

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
NATURE

Essay

BEING HUMAN: RELIGION: BOUND TO BELIEVE?

Pascal Boyer

Pascal Boyer is in the Departments of Psychology and Anthropology, Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, USA, and is the author of Religion Explained.

Atheism will always be a harder sell than religion, Pascal Boyer explains, because a slew of cognitive traits predispose us to faith.

Is religion a product of our evolution? The very question makes many people, religious or otherwise, cringe, although for different reasons. Some people of faith fear that an understanding of the processes underlying belief could undermine it. Others worry that what is shown to be part of our evolutionary heritage will be interpreted as good, true, necessary or inevitable. Still others, many scientists included, simply dismiss the whole issue, seeing religion as childish, dangerous nonsense.

Such responses make it difficult to establish why and how religious thought is so pervasive in human societies - an understanding that is especially relevant in the current climate of religious fundamentalism. In asking whether religion is one of the many consequences of having the type of brains we come equipped with, we can shed light on what kinds of religion 'come naturally' to human minds. We can probe the shared assumptions that religions are built on, however disparate, and examine the connection between religion and ethnic conflict. Lastly, we can hazard a guess at what the realistic prospects are for atheism. ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge263.html
----------------------------------------------------
Edge Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private operating foundation under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
EDGE

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

---
You are currently subscribed to edge_editions as: wheresrhys@googlemail.com

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-3159598-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL: http://www.edge.org/subscribe.html

Edge 262: Daniel Kahneman: "Two Big Things Happening in Psychology Today"

2008-10-23T06:59:00.000-07:00

Edge 262 - October 23, 2008

(16,000 words)

This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge262.html

----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
----------------------------------------------------
There's new technology emerging from behavioral economics and we are just starting to make use of that. I thought the input of psychology into economics was finished but clearly it's not!

TWO BIG THINGS HAPPENING IN PSYCHOLOGY TODAY
A TALK BY DANIEL KAHNEMAN

EDGE Video

DANIEL KAHNEMAN, a psychologist at Princeton University, is the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for his pioneering work integrating insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty. Daniel Kahneman's Edge Bio page: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/kahneman.html

Danny Hillis, Richard Thaler, Nathan Myhrvold, Elon Musk, France LeClerc, Salar Kamangar, Anne Treisman, Sendhil Mullainathan, Jeff Bezos, Sean Parker

Class 4
A Short Course In Behavioral Economics

DANIEL KAHNEMAN: I want to tell you a bit of straight psychology that I find very exciting, that I found more exciting this year than I had before, and that in some ways is changing my view about a lot of things in psychology.

There are two big things happening in psychology today. One, of course, is everything that's got to do with the brain, and that's dominating psychology. But there is something else that is happening, which started out from a methodological innovation as a way to study memory, and we've always known, that's the idea of the notion of association of ideas, which has been around for 350 years at least.

We know about how associations work because we have one thought, and when it leads to another windows and doors and things like that, or white and black and we have our ideas of associations, and it's always been recognized as important and interesting. But our view of how associations work has been changed in a profound way by a technical innovation, which is something that happens a great deal in psychology and I suppose in all sciences.

This innovation is the following: If, for example, you hear the word "sick", there are few associations that come to mind. But there are a number of other things that you can do, that are little more refined. You can present words, and measure the amount of time that it takes people to read the words. Or you can measure words and non-words, and the task is to decide whether they're a set of letters, or a word, or a non-word, and it's the ease with which words are recognized as words as against non-words. I'll begin by focusing on reaction time, because that's the simplest one.

Here's how it works: after the presentation of the word "sick", the number of words that are affected to which you react differently than you reacted before is enormous. You will be faster, obviously, to "ill", and to "death", and so on, but it will be "hospital", and it will be "nurse", and it will be "doctor", and all of a sudden you've got a huge range of things to which the response is influenced by just presenting that one thing. We find that associative networks that we have in our minds appear to be a lot richer than it did before.

But that's not the only thing that happens. It turns out that the kinds of associations that are built in are a lot richer than we thought. When I want to make an impression while giving a talk, I put the word "vomit" on the screen. Just imagine the word "vomit" on the screen. I point out we know from experiments what happens to people within the first second or two that the word "vomit" is present. In the first place there is that enormous range of changes in the associative structure, and the readiness as well. ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE REALITY CLUB
----------------------------------------------------

On "Two Big Things Happening In Psychology Today:
A Talk By Daniel Kahneman"

W. Daniel Hillis, Daniel Kahneman, Nathan Myhrvold, Richard Thaler

DANIEL KAHNEMAN: Let me postulate a few things:

1) I know my date of birth. Priming will not change my mind about it.
2) I do not believe there is anything anyone could do within the law to make me vote for a Republican this November.

So yes, of course there are limits to priming effects and to all forms of influence. My point was not that priming can make a person do anything at all. It was that priming has much more influence than people think it could have. Furthermore, people are generally not aware of having been influenced. [MORE...]

NATHAN MYHRVOLD: Priming as Danny presents it is quite a strange phenomenon:

* Omnipresent-happening all the time, all around you.

* Impossible to guard against.

* Equally hard to detect-in yourself anyway, but also in others (unless you have a control group and can do the statistics, as one does in an experiment).

* Very important to understanding human perception.

* Also very important in terms of real world impact on thinking and decisions, with large real-world consequences.

I'm pretty sure Danny said each of these, one way or another. Or maybe I was just primed to draw these conclusions myself, but I think they are accurate.

If find that set of characteristics to be fascinating. However, they are also strange, and perhaps a bit alarming if you really take them seriously. It very naturally begs a set of other questions. [...MORE]

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
IN THE NEWS
----------------------------------------------------
THE GUARDIAN
Comment Is Free

ALL ABOARD THE ATHEIST BUS CAMPAIGN
It's real, it's happening: you can sponsor the first atheist advert on a bus - and Richard Dawkins will match your money

By Ariane Sherine

[bus photo caption: The godless move in mysterious ways: what the atheist bus campaign's advert will look like.]

The atheist bus campaign launches today thanks to Comment is free readers. Because of your enthusiastic response to the idea of a reassuring God-free advert being used to counter religious advertising, the slogan "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life" could now become an ad campaign on London buses - and leading secularists have jumped on board to help us raise the money.

The British Humanist Association will be administering all donations to the campaign, and Professor Richard Dawkins, bestselling author of The God Delusion, has generously agreed to match all contributions up to a maximum of £5,500, giving us a total of £11,000 if we raise the full amount. This will be enough to fund two sets of atheist adverts on 30 London buses for four weeks.

If the buses hit the road, this will be the UK's first ever atheist advertising campaign. It's an exciting development, which I never expected when I first proposed the idea on Cif in June. Back then, I was just keen to counter the religious ads running on public transport, which featured a URL to a website telling non-Christians they would spend "all eternity in torment in hell", burning in "a lake of fire". ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW YORK TIMES
The DNA Age - Taking a Peek at the Experts' Genetic Secrets
By Amy Harmon

Is Esther Dyson, the technology venture capitalist who is training to be an astronaut, genetically predisposed to a major heart attack?
Does Steven Pinker, the prominent psychologist and author, have a gene variant that raises his risk of Alzheimer's, which his grandmother suffered from, to greater than 50 percent?...

...On Monday, they may learn the answers to these and other questions - and, if all goes according to plan, so will everyone else who cares to visit a public Web site, www.personalgenomes.org. The three are among the first 10 volunteers in the Personal Genome Project, a study at Harvard University Medical School aimed at challenging the conventional wisdom that the secrets of our genes are best kept to ourselves. ...

...The project is as much a social experiment as a scientific one. "We don't yet know the consequences of having one's genome out in the open," said George M. Church, a human geneticist at Harvard who is the project's leader and one of its subjects. "But it's worth exploring." ...

...J. Craig Venter, a pioneer in human genome sequencing, said his nonprofit institute planned to sequence several dozen human genomes by the end of next year and to deposit the information in the public domain along with phenotype information in a model similar to that of the PGP. He said he had already heard from thousands of volunteers.

...And Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, recently revealed on his blog that he learned he has a considerably higher than average risk of developing Parkinson's disease, which was diagnosed in his mother several years ago. (Mr. Brin is the husband of Anne Wojcicki, a co-founder of 23 and Me.)
...
Further Reading on Edge: "Life: What A Concept!" [8.27.07] (George Church, J. Craig Venter et al); "George Church: Constructive Biology" [6.26.06]

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE ATLANTIC
Why Washington's crusade against swearing on the airwaves is f*cked up
By Steven Pinker

A WORD IS an arbitrary label that's the foundation of linguistics. But many people think otherwise. They believe in word magic: that uttering a spell, incantation, curse, or prayer can change the world. Don't snicker: Would you ever say "Nothing has gone wrong yet" without looking for wood to knock?

Swearing is another kind of word magic. People believe, contrary to logic, that certain words can corrupt the moral order-that piss and Shit! and fucking are dangerous in a way that pee and Shoot! and freakin' are not. This quirk in our psychology lies in the ability of taboo words to activate primitive emotional circuits in the brain.

My interest in swearing is (I swear) scientific. But swearing is not just a puzzle in cognitive neuroscience. It has figured in the most-famous free-speech cases of the past century, from Ulysses and Lady Chatterley to those of Lenny Bruce and George Carlin. Over the decades, the courts have steadily driven government censors into a precarious redoubt. In 1978, the Supreme Court, ruling on a daytime broadcast of Carlin's "Filthy Words" monologue, allowed the Federal Communications Commission to regulate "indecency" on broadcast radio and television during the hours when children were likely to be listening. The rationale, based on rather quaint notions of childhood and of modern media, was that over-the-air broadcasts are uninvited intruders into the home and can expose children to indecent language, harming their psychological and moral development.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW YORK TIMES
The Downturn's Upside
By Nicholas D. Kristof

Income doesn't have much to do with happiness. Americans haven't become any happier as they have prospered in the last half-century. And winning the lottery doesn't make people happier in the long term.

This is called the Easterlin Paradox: Once they have met their basic needs, people don't become happier as they become richer. In recent years, new research has undermined the Easterlin Paradox, yet it's still true that happiness has less to do with money than with friendships and finding meaning in a cause larger than oneself.

"There's pretty good evidence that money doesn't matter much for how you feel moment to moment," said Alan Krueger, a Princeton University economist who is conducting extensive research on happiness. "What seems to matter much more is having good friends and family, and time to spend on social activities."
The big exception to all this is people who lose their jobs or homes, and the new president should act immediately to help them. Professor Krueger argues that for these people, the losses are greater than we have generally realized, for their losses are not only monetary but also the erosion of self-esteem and friendships as they are wrenched out of social networks that enrich their lives (and help them find new jobs). And for those who lose health insurance, a medical or dental problem is enormously stressful, even life-threatening.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
NATURE

The Cranial Endoskeleton of Tiktaalik Roseae
By Jason P. Downs, Edward B. Daeschler, Farish A. Jenkins & Neil H. Shubin

Among the morphological changes that occurred during the 'fish-to-tetrapod' transition was a marked reorganization of the cranial endoskeleton. Details of this transition, including the sequence of character acquisition, have not been evident from the fossil record. Here we describe the braincase, palatoquadrate and branchial skeleton of Tiktaalik roseae, the Late Devonian sarcopterygian fish most closely related to tetrapods. Although retaining a primitive configuration in many respects, the cranial endoskeleton of T. roseae shares derived features with tetrapods such as a large basal articulation and a flat, horizontally oriented entopterygoid. Other features in T. roseae, like the short, straight hyomandibula, show morphology intermediate between the condition observed in more primitive fish and that observed in tetrapods. The combination of characters in T. roseae helps to resolve the relative timing of modifications in the cranial endoskeleton. The sequence of modifications suggests changes in head mobility and intracranial kinesis that have ramifications for the origin of vertebrate terrestriality.

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Fish Fossil Yields Anatomical Clues on How Animals of the Sea Made It to Land
By John Noble Wilford

Fish Fossil Yields Anatomical Clues on How Animals of the Sea Made It to Land
By John Noble Wilford

In a new study of a fossil fish that lived 375 million years ago, scientists are finding striking evidence of the intermediate steps by which some marine vertebrates evolved into animals that walked on land. ...

...Several skeletons of the fish were excavated four years ago on Ellesmere Island, in the Nunavut Territory of Canada, 700 miles above the Arctic Circle, by a team led by Neil H. Shubin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago and the Field Museum, and Ted Daeschler of the Academy of Natural Sciences. The Devonian Age rocks containing the fossils indicated that the fishapod lived in shallow waters of a warm climate. It may have made brief forays on land. ...

...Dr. Shubin said Tiktaalik was "still on the fish end of things, but it neatly fills a morphological gap and helps to resolve the relative timing of this complex transition."

For example, fish have no neck but "we see a mobile neck developing for the first time in Tiktaalik," Dr. Shubin said.

"When feeding, fish orient themselves by swimming, which is fine in deep water, but not for an animal whose body is relatively fixed, as on the bottom of shallow water or on land," he added. "Then a flexible neck is important."

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
BLOGGINGHEADS.TV
John Horgan & David Berreby

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge262.html
----------------------------------------------------
Edge Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private operating foundation under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
EDGE

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-3137892-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL: http://www.edge.org/subscribe.html

Edge 260: A Short Course In Behavioral Economics - Class 2

2008-10-09T14:50:00.000-07:00

Edge 260 - October 9, 2008

(14,500 words)

This online EDGE edition with graphics and video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge260.html

----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
----------------------------------------------------

A SHORT COURSE IN BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS

At a minimum, what we're saying is that in every market where there is now required written disclosure, you have to give the same information electronically and we think intelligently how best to do that. In a sentence that's the nature of the proposal. —Richard Thaler

CLASS 2:
RICHARD THALER & SENDHIL MULLAINATHAN

Jeff Bezos, Nathan Myhrvold, Salar Kamangar, Daniel Kahneman, Danny Hillis,
Paul Romer, Elon Musk, Sean Parker

Edge Master Class 2008
Richard Thaler, Sendhil Mullainathan, Daniel Kahneman
Sonoma, CA, July 25-27, 2008

AN EDGE SPECIAL PROJECT

Permilink: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/thaler_sendhil08/class2.html

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
IN THE NEWS
----------------------------------------------------

FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG
Feuilleton
ASSUME THE FETAL POSITION!
By Frank Schirrmacher
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge260.html#faz

NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
STRUGGLE FOR THE ISLANDS
By Freeman Dyson
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge260.html#nyrb

STRATEGY & BUSINESS
TEA AND EMPATHY WITH DANIEL GOLEMAN
By Lawrence M. Fisher
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge260.html#sb

FINANCIAL TIMES
THE SHORT VIEW: POLITICAL RISK
By John Authers, Investment Editor
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge260.html#ft

NEW SCIENTIST
ANYONS: THE REAL BREAKTHROUGH QUANTUM COMPUTING NEEDS?
Don Monroe
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge260.html#ns

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

This online EDGE edition with graphics and video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge260.html

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-3116454-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL: http://www.edge.org/subscribe.html

Edge 259: Thaler, Mullainathan, Kahneman: A Short Course In Behavioral Economics

2008-10-03T10:16:00.000-07:00

Edge 259 - October 3, 2008

(17,100 words)

This online EDGE edition with graphics and video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge259.html

----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
----------------------------------------------------

A SHORT COURSE IN BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS
EDGE Master Class 2008
Sonoma, CA, July 25-27, 2008

RICHARD THALER, SENDHIL MULLAINATHAN, DANIEL KAHNEMAN

The Master Class with text and video is comprised of six classes which is being published one per week for the next six weeks. Class One is published in today's EDGE edition. The PERMALINK URL is: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/thaler_sendhil08/thaler_sendhil_index.html

----------------------------------------------------

A year ago, EDGE convened its first "Master Class" in Napa, California, in which psychologist and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman taught a 9-hour course: "A Short Course On Thinking About Thinking". Among the attendees were a "who's who" of the new global business culture.

This year, to continue the conversation, we invited Richard Thaler, the father of behavioral economics, to organize and lead the class: "A Short Course On Behavioral Economics". Thaler, in turn, invited Harvard economist and former student Sendhil Mullainathan, as well as Daniel Kahneman, to teach the class with him.

Beginning October 1st, EDGE will begin to publish on a weekly basis the text, selected video highlights, and photos of the six classes comprising "A Short Course In Behavioral Economics". This EDGE edition includes the Table of Contents, Introduction By Daniel Kahneman, Summary of Day 1 By Nathan Myhrvold, Summary of Day 2 By George Dyson; Link to the Photo Gallery; and Link to Class One.

-John Brockman, Editor

RICHARD H. THALER is the father of behavioral economics-the study of how thinking and emotions affect individual economic decisions and the behavior of markets. He investigates the implications of relaxing the standard economic assumption that everyone in the economy is rational and selfish, instead entertaining the possibility that some of the agents in the economy are sometimes human. Thaler is Director of the Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. He is coauthor (with Cass Sunstein) of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.

DANIEL KAHNEMAN is Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology, Princeton University, and Professor of Public Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his pioneering work integrating insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty.

PARTICIPANTS: Jeff Bezos, Founder, Amazon.com; John Brockman, Edge Foundation, Inc.; Max Brockman, Brockman, Inc.; George Dyson, Science Historian; Author, Darwin Among the Machines; W. Daniel Hillis, Computer Scientist; Cofounder, Applied Minds; Author, The Pattern on the Stone; Daniel Kahneman, Psychologist; Nobel Laureate, Princeton University; Salar Kamangar, Google; France LeClerc, Marketing Professor; Katinka Matson, Edge Foundation, Inc.; Sendhil Mullainathan, Professor of Economics, Harvard University; Executive Director, Ideas 42, Institute of Quantitative Social Science; Elon Musk, Physicist; Founder, Tesla Motors, SpaceX; Nathan Myhrvold, Physicist; Founder, Intellectual Venture, LLC; Event Photographer; Sean Parker, The Founders Fund; Cofounder: Napster, Plaxo, Facebook; Paul Romer, Economist, Stanford; Richard Thaler, Behavioral Economist, Director of the Center for Decision Research, University of Chicago Graduate School of Business; coauthor of Nudge; Anne Treisman, Psychologist, Princeton University; Evan Williams, Founder, Blogger, Twitter.

http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge259.html#shortcourse
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
NOTABLE QUOTE
----------------------------------------------------

"Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial Institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks - when one fails, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crisis less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur Š.I shiver at the thought."

- Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan (2006)

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
IN THE NEWS
----------------------------------------------------

NEW SCIENTIST
EDITORIAL: WHEN THE NUMBERS DON'T ADD UP
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge259.html#nstaleb

BOSTON GLOBE
WHAT ABOUT AUSTERITY?
By Juan Enriquez and Jorge Dominguez
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge259.html#enriquez

THE NEW YORK TIMES
PRIVATE COMPANY LAUNCHES ITS ROCKET INTO ORBIT
By John Schwartz
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge259.html#nytmusk

YOU TUBE
ELON MUSK'S SPACEX SUCCESSFULLY LAUNCHES FALCON 1
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge259.html#yt

BOSTON GLOBE
HIDDEN HISTORIES
By Jonathan Gottschall
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge259.html#globe

BLOGGINGHEADS TV
John Horgan & George Johnson
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge259.html#bh.928

THE OBSERVER
THE NEW SAGE OF WALL STREET
Profile: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Edward Helmore
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge259.html#observer

THE COLBERT REPORT
Nicholas Carr
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge259.html#colbert

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

This online EDGE edition with graphics and video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge259.html

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-3108778-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL: http://www.edge.org/subscribe.html

Edge 258: Nassim Taleb: "The Fourth Quadrant"

2008-09-25T06:50:00.000-07:00

Edge 258 - September 25, 2008

(5,150 words)

http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge258.html#dysong

This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge258.html

----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
----------------------------------------------------
ECONOMIC DIS-EQUILIBRIUM
Can You Have Your House And Spend It Too?
By George Dyson

George Dyson writes: "Readers of Nassim Taleb's The Fourth Quadrant may enjoy the following piece on fraud-resistant financial instruments of the 13th century—progenitors of a multitude of derivatives that are plaguing us today." ...

...The breakthrough was in money being duplicated: the King gathered real gold and silver into the treasury through the Exchequer, with the tally given in return attesting to the credit of the holder who could enter into trade, manufacturing, or other ventures, eventually producing real wealth with nothing more than a notched wooden stick. So what's the problem? Aren't we just passing around digital versions of the tallies we've been using for almost one thousand years? Aren't mortgages, whether prime or sub-prime, just a modern version of paying for houses with fraud-resistant sticks? ...

----------------------------------------------------
THE REALITY CLUB
----------------------------------------------------

Jaron Lanier & George Dyson
On Nassim Taleb's "The Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics"

GEORGE DYSON: ...What to do now? I'd prefer less Paulson, and more Newton. In the 17th century, English coinage had become widely debased, much as our system of financial instruments has become debased today. In 1696, Sir Isaac Newton was appointed Warden of the Mint, with authority to prosecute counterfeiters, who were not only hung, but drawn and quartered. This, accompanied by a systematic recoinage, worked.

JARON LANIER: This is a superb piece and I hope it is widely read and taken to heart in Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Washington. All these centers of power and creativity are drowning in illusions brought about by thunderous misuses of statistics that have become implacably seductive only with the recent availability of vast, connected computer resources.

Edge.org has become the most dramatic point of contact between the critics and supporters of the fallacies Taleb elucidates. ...

http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge258.html#rc

----------------------------------------------------
IN THE NEWS
----------------------------------------------------

BLOGGINGHEADS TV
Sean Carroll & Jenifer Ouellette
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge258.html#bh

ECONOMIC TIMES
Enlightened Pursuit Of Pleasure
By Vithal C Nadkarni
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge258.html#etimes

NEWSWEEK
When Atheists Attack
By Sam Harris
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge258.html#harris

GAWKER
What We Need More Of Is Science
Scientists Explain Why People Vote For Republicans
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge258.html#gawker

SEEKING ALPHA
Managing Risk: A Probability Model
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge258.html#alpha

DESERET NEWS — SALT LAKE CITY
Gps Units, Internet Helping Little Dogies Get Along
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge258.html#deseret

PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE
Hardwired Conservatives
Compiled by Greg Victor
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge258.html#pittsburgh

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Technology Doesn't Dumb Us Down. It Frees Our Minds.
By Damon Darlin
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge258.html#nytdarlin

THE ECONOMIST
User-Generated Science
Web 2.0 tools are beginning to change the shape of scientific debate
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge258.html#economist

THE GUARDIAN
Turkish Court Bans Richard Dawkins Website
By Riazat Butt
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge258.html#guardianturkey

NEWSWEEK
Is Morality Natural?
By Marc D. Hauser
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge258.html#mdh

FLORIDA TREND
Darwin, Einstein, and Five Challenges for Florida
By Juan Enriquez
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge258.html#enriquez

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge258.html
----------------------------------------------------
Edge Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private operating foundation under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
EDGE

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

---
You are currently subscribed to edge_editions as: wheresrhys@googlemail.com

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-3096290-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL: http://www.edge.org/subscribe.html

Edge 257: Nassim Taleb - "The Fourth Quadrant"

2008-09-15T14:35:00.000-07:00

Edge 257 - September 15, 2008

(7,950 words)

This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge257.html

----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
----------------------------------------------------
"Statistical and applied probabilistic knowledge is the core of knowledge; statistics is what tells you if something is true, false, or merely anecdotal; it is the "logic of science"; it is the instrument of risk-taking; it is the applied tools of epistemology; you can't be a modern intellectual and not think probabilistically - but... let's not be suckers. The problem is much more complicated than it seems to the casual, mechanistic user who picked it up in graduate school. Statistics can fool you. In fact it is fooling your government right now. It can even bankrupt the system (let's face it: use of probabilistic methods for the estimation of risks did just blow up the banking system). "

THE FOURTH QUADRANT: A MAP OF THE LIMITS OF STATISTICS
By Nassim Nicholas Taleb

An Edge Original Essay

Introduction

When Nassim Taleb talks about the limits of statistics, he becomes outraged. "My outrage," he says, "is aimed at the scientist-charlatan putting society at risk using statistical methods. This is similar to iatrogenics, the study of the doctor putting the patient at risk." As a researcher in probability, he has some credibility. In 2006, using FNMA and bank risk managers as his prime perpetrators, he wrote the following:

"The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deemed these events 'unlikely.' "

In the following Edge original essay, Taleb continues his examination of Black Swans, the highly improbable and unpredictable events that have massive impact. He claims that those who are putting society at risk are "no true statisticians", merely people using statistics either without understanding them, or in a self-serving manner. "The current subprime crisis did wonders to help me drill my point about the limits of statistically driven claims," he says.

Taleb, looking at the cataclysmic situation facing financial institutions today, points out that "the banking system, betting against Black Swans, has lost over 1 Trillion dollars (so far), more than was ever made in the history of banking".
But, as he points out, there is also good news.

"We can identify where the danger zone is located, which I call "the fourth quadrant", and show it on a map with more or less clear boundaries. A map is a useful thing because you know where you are safe and where your knowledge is questionable. So I drew for the Edge readers a tableau showing the boundaries where statistics works well and where it is questionable or unreliable. Now once you identify where the danger zone is, where your knowledge is no longer valid, you can easily make some policy rules: how to conduct yourself in that fourth quadrant; what to avoid."

-John Brockman

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB, essayist and former mathematical trader, is Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University's Polytechnic Institute. He is the author of Fooled by Randomness and the international bestseller The Black Swan.

PERMALINK: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/taleb08/taleb08_index.html

----------------------------------------------------
IN THE NEWS
----------------------------------------------------

DER SPIEGEL
"Was halten Sie für wahr, ohne es beweisen zu können?"
By John Brockman
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge257.html#spiegel

THE NEW YORK TIMES
No Laughing Matter
By Judith Warner
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge257.html#nyt

FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG
Amazons Lesegerät Kindle
Das Buch, das aus dem Äther kam
Von Hubert Spiegel
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge257.html#faz

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE
The Corner
BY John Derbyshire
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge257.html#nro

THE GUARDIAN
Tuesday memo: The road to the bridge to nowhere that wasn't there
By Oliver Burkeman
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge257.html#guardian

THE MALTA INDEPENDENT
J'accuse: The meaning of life
by Jacques René Zammit
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge257.html#malta

LAS VEGAS SUN
It's not the issues that likely make up many minds
By J. Patrick Coolican
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge257.html#vegas

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge257.html
----------------------------------------------------
Edge Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private operating foundation under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
EDGE

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-3079920-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL: http://www.edge.org/subscribe.html

Edge 255: Clay Shirky: "Gin, Television, and Cognitive Surplus"

2008-08-22T09:40:00.000-07:00

Edge 255 - August 21, 2008

(6,340 words)

This online EDGE edition with links and streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge255.html

----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
----------------------------------------------------

GIN, TELEVISION, AND COGNITIVE SURPLUS (VIDEO)
A Talk by Clay Shirky

And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of thatÝ is 98 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you?

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
IN THE NEWS
----------------------------------------------------
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Campaign observers: Time is ripe for Obama to step up his game
By Carla Marinucci

... At the Saddleback forum with Pastor Rick Warren on Saturday in San Diego, the Republican presidential candidate delivered on-the-money messages and answers so effective they were "scary to me," said George Lakoff, a renowned author and UC Berkeley linguistics professor who has studied how the human brain absorbs and processes messages. ...

[...MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
ABC NEWS
Party Time: From Dreams And Delusions To Wars And Wiretapping
By John Allen Paulos

...Thinking about the genesis and consequences of the Iraq War and the recently passed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that authorizes wholesale wiretapping, I recalled a relevant party game I once wrote about. The game, described by philosopher Daniel C. Dennett in his book "Consciousness Explained," is a variant of the familiar childhood game requiring that one try to determine by means of Yes or No questions a secretly chosen number between one and one million. ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
SCIENCE & SPIRIT
Daniel Dennett's Darwinian Mind: An Interview with a 'Dangerous' Man
By Chris Floyd

Dennett has famously called Darwinism a "universal acid," cutting through every aspect of science, culture, religion, art and human thought. "The question is," he writes in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, "what does it leave behind? I have tried to show that once it passes through everything, we are left with stronger, sounder versions of our most important ideas. Some of the traditional details perish, and some of these are losses to be regretted, but...what remains is more than enough to build on." ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Together Again In Different Time Zones
By John Parales

David Byrne and Brian Eno were the songwriter and producer on the most radical albums by Talking Heads, and they collaborated on a 1981 album, "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts." Now, 27 years later, they have reunited to make their second duo album, "Everything That Happens Will Happen Today." It is being released digitally on Aug. 18 via everythingthathappens.com, a month later on major commercial download sites and, as soon as it can be manufactured and distributed, as a physical CD. ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE GUARDIAN
The Religion Of Politics
By 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. ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Secondary Sources: Credit Crisis, Authoritarian Fed, Nudges

More on Nudges: Writing for the Financial Times, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, who wrote a book on nudging people to make better choices, look at political proposals that are backed by their findings. "It is not surprising that policy teams for Barack Obama, the U.S. Democratic presidential candidate, and David Cameron, the U.K.'s Conservative party leader, have shown an interest in nudge-like solutions to social problems. ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
FINANCIAL TIMES
The Dramatic Effect Of A Firm Nudge
By Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler

In the past three decades, psychologists and behavioural economists have learnt that people's choices can be dramatically affected by subtle features of social situations. For example, inertia turns out to be a powerful force. If people's magazine subscriptions are automatically renewed, they renew a lot more than if they have to send in a renewal form. Moreover, people are influenced by how problems are framed. If told that salami is "90 per cent fat-free" they are far more likely to buy salami than if they are told it is "10 per cent fat". ...

[...MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
This online EDGE edition with links and streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge255.html

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

---
You are currently subscribed to edge_editions as: wheresrhys@googlemail.com

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-3035227-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL: http://www.edge.org/subscribe.html

Edge 253: Edge Master Class 08: A Short Course In Behavioral Economics - Thaler, Mullainathan, Kahenman

2008-08-07T12:11:00.000-07:00

Edge 253 - August 7, 2008

(1,070 words)

This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge253.html

----------------------------------------------------
EDGE FEATURE
----------------------------------------------------

"Retreating to the luxury of Sonoma to discuss economic theory in mid-2008 conveys images of Fiddling while Rome Burns. Do the architects of Microsoft, Amazon, Google, PayPal, and Facebook have anything to teach the behavioral economists-and anything to learn? So what? What's new?? As it turns out, all kinds of things are new." -George Dyson

A SHORT COURSE IN BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS
Edge Master Class 08
Richard Thaler, Sendhil Mullainathan, Daniel Kahneman
Gaige House, Glen Ellen, CA. July 25-27, 2008

AN EDGE SPECIAL PROJECT

RICHARD H. THALER is considered to be one of the founders of behavioral economics-the study of how thinking and emotions affect individual economic decisions and the behavior of markets. He investigates the implications of relaxing the standard economic assumption that everyone in the economy is rational and selfish, instead entertaining the possibility that some of the agents in the economy are sometimes human. Thaler is Director of the Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. He is coauthor (with Cass Sunstein) of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.

SENDHIL MULLAINATHAN, a Professor of Economics at Harvard, is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" and conducts research on development economics, behavioral economics, and corporate finance. His work concerns creating a psychology of people to improve poverty alleviation programs in developing countries. He Executive Director of Ideas 42, Institute of Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University.

ATTENDEES: Jeff Bezos, Founder, Amazon.com; John Brockman, Edge Foundation, Inc.; Max Brockman, Brockman, Inc.; George Dyson, Science Historian; Author, Darwin Among the Machines; W. Daniel Hillis, Computer Scientist; Cofounder, Applied Minds; Author, The Pattern on the Stone; Daniel Kahneman, Psychologist; Nobel Laureate, Princeton University; Salar Kamangar, Google; France LeClerc; Katinka Matson, Edge Foundation, Inc.; Sendhil Mullainathan, Professor of Economics, Harvard University; Executive Director, Ideas 42, Institute of Quantitative Social Science; Elon Musk, Physicist; Founder, Telsa Motors, SpaceX; Nathan Myhrvold, Physicist; Founder, Intellectual Venture, LLC; Event Photographer; Sean Parker, The Founders Fund; Cofounder: Napster, Plaxo, Facebook; Paul Romer, Economist, Stanford; Karla Taylor, Edge Foundation, Inc.; Richard Thaler, Behavioral Economist, Director of the Center for Decision Research, University of Chicago Graduate School of Business; coauthor of Nudge; Anne Treisman, Psychologist, Princeton University; Evan Williams, Founder, Blogger, Twitter

INTRODUCTION

This edition of Edge is a preliminary report of the second annual Edge "Master Class," which occurred July 25-27 in Sonoma, which was followed on July 28th by a San Francisco dinner.

Below we present a summary of the Master Class by Nathan Myhrvold (Day 1) and George Dyson (Day 2) as well as some spirited exchanges among the attendees regarding the reports. Also, you will find the photo galleries of both the Master Class and the dinner. ...

[More]

----------------------------------------------------
PHOTO GALLERY
----------------------------------------------------

SAN FRANCISCO SCIENCE DINNER 08-PHOTO GALLERY
Kokkari Estiatorio, July 28, 2008

Anne Anderson, former Editor, Nature Genetics ; Chris Anderson, Editor, Wired; Author, The Long Tail; W. Brian Arthur, Economist, External Professor, Santa Fe Institute; Yves Behar, Industrial Designer, Fuseproject; Lera Boroditsky, Psychologist, Stanford; Stewart Brand, Long Now Foundation; Author, How Buildings Learn; Larry Brilliant, Director, Google.org; John Brockman, Edge Foundation, Inc.; Max Brockman, Brockman, Inc.; Daniel Kahneman, Psychologist, Nobel Laureate, Princeton University; Drew Endy, Genomics Researcher, MIT; Sunnie Evers; Salar Kamangar, Google; Kevin Kelly, Editor-At-Large, Wired; Author, New Rules for the New Economy; Heather Kowalski, J. Craig Venter Institute; Brian Knutson, Neuroscientist, Stanford University; Jaron Lanier, Computer Scientist and Musician; George Lakoff, Cognitive Scientist, Rockridge Institute, Berkeley; Author, The Political Mind; John Markoff, Technology Correspondent, New York Times; Katinka Matson, Edge Foundation, Inc.; Sendhil Mullainathan, Professor of Economics, Harvard University; Executive Director, Ideas 42, Institute of Quantitative Social Science; Erling Norrby, Virologist, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences; Larry Page, Cofounder, Google; Sean Parker, Founders Fund; Cofounder: Napster, Plaxo, Facebook; David Pescovitz, Cofounding Editor, BoingBoing.Net; Ryan Phelan, Founder, DNA Direct; Stanley Prusiner, Neurologist, Biochemist, and Nobel Laureate, UCSF Medical School; Lisa Randall, Theoretical Physicist, Harvard; Author, Warped Passages; Paul Romer, Economist, Stanford University; Frank Sulloway, Visiting scholar, Institute of Personality and Social Research, Berkeley, Author, Born to Rebel; Leonard Susskind, Theoretical Physicist, Stanford; Author, The Black Hole War; Karla Taylor, Edge Foundation, Inc.; Richard Thaler, Behavioral Economist, Chicago; Coauthor, Nudge; J. Craig Venter, Human Genomics Researcher; Founder, Synthetic Genomics; Author, A Life Decoded; Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
Look, this is science. Belief isn't an option. -Daniel Kahneman

FIRST DAY REPORT-EDGE MASTER CLASS 08
By Nathan Myhrvold

DR. NATHAN MYHRVOLD is CEO and managing director of Intellectual Ventures, a private entrepreneurial firm. Before Intellectual Ventures, Dr. Myhrvold spent 14 years at Microsoft Corporation. In addition to working directly for Bill Gates, he founded Microsoft Research and served as Chief Technology Officer.

The recent Edge event on behavioral economics was a great success. Here is a report on the first day.

Over the course of the last few years we've been treated to quite a few expositions of behavioral economics-probably a dozen popular books seek to explain some aspect of the field. This isn't the place for a full summary but the gist is pretty simple. Classical economics has studied a society of creatures that Richard Thaler, an economist at University of Chicago dubs the "Econ". Econs are rather superhuman in some ways-they do everything by optimizing utility functions, paragons of bounded rationality. Behavioral economics is about understanding how real live Humans differ from Econs.

In previous reading, and an Edge event last year I learned the most prominent differences between Econs and Humans. Humans, as it turns out, are not always bounded rational-they can be downright irrational. Thaler likes to say that Humans are like Homer Simpson, Econs are like Mr Spock. This is a great start, but to have any substance in economics one has to understand that in the context of economic situations. Humans make a number of systematic deviations from the Econ ideal, and behavioral economics has categorized a few of these. So, for example, we humans fear loss more than we love gain. Humans care about how a question is put to them-propositions which an Econ would instantly recognize as mathematically equivalent seem different to Humans and they behave differently.

Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate for his work in behavioral economics told us about priming-how a subtle influence radically shifts how people act. So, in one experiment people are asked to fill out a survey. In the corner of the room is a computer, with a screen saver running. That's it-nothing overt, just a background image in the room. If the screen saver shows pictures of money, the survey answers are radically different. Danny went through example after example like this where occurred. The first impulse one has in hearing this is no, this can't be the case. People can't be that easily and subconsciously influenced. You don't want to believe it. But Danny in his professorial way says "Look, this is science. Belief isn't an option". Repeated randomized trials confirm the results. Get over it. ...
[More]

----------------------------------------------------
There's new technology emerging from behavioral economics and we are just starting to make use of that. I thought the input of psychology into economics was finished but clearly it's not!
-Daniel Kahneman

SECOND DAY REPORT-EDGE MASTER CLASS 08
By George Dyson

GEORGE DYSON, a historian among futurists, is the author Baidarka; Project Orion; and Darwin Among the Machines

The weekend master class on behavioral economics was productive in unexpected ways, and a lot of good ideas and thoughts about implementing them were exchanged.

Day 2 (Sunday) opened with a session led by Sendhil Mullainathan, followed by a final wrap-up discussion before we adjourned at noon. Elon Musk, Evan Williams, and Nathan Myhrvold had departed early. In the absence of Nathan's high-resolution record, a brief summary, with editorial comments, is given here.

"I refuse to accept however, the stupidity of the Stock Exchange boys, as an explanation of the trend of stocks," wrote John von Neumann to Stanislaw Ulam, on December 9, 1939. "Those boys are stupid alright, but there must be an explanation of what happens, which makes no use of this fact." This question led von Neumann (with the help of Oskar Morgenstern) to his monumental Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, a precise mathematical structure demonstrating that a reliable economy can be constructed out of unreliable parts.

The von Neumann and Morgenstern approach (developed further by von Neumann's subsequent Probabilistic Logics and the Synthesis of Reliable Organisms From Unreliable Components) assumes that human unreliability and irrationality (by no means excluded from their model) will, in the aggregate, be filtered out. In the real world, however, irrational behavior (including the "stupidity of the stock exchange boys") is not completely filtered out. Daniel Kahneman, Richard Thaler, Sendhil Mullainathan, and their colleagues are developing an updated theory of games and economic behavior that does make use of this fact.

Sendhil Mullainathan opened the first hour, on the subject of scarcity, by repeating the first day's question: what is it that prevents the fruit vendors (who borrow their working capital daily at high interest) from saving their way out of recurring debt? According to Sendhil, many vendors do manage to escape, but a core group remain trapped.

Sendhil shows a graph with $$ on the X-axis and Temptation on the Y-axis. The curve starts out flat and then ascends steeply upward before leveling off. The dangerous area is the steep slope when a person begins to acquire disposable income and meets rapidly increasing temptations. "To understand the behavior you have to understand the scale." Thaler interjects: "It's a mental accounting problem-but I think everything is a mental accounting problem." All human beings are subject to temptation, but the consequences are higher for the poor. Conclusion: temptation is a regressive tax.

Paul Romer notes that the temptation of time is a progressive tax, since time, unlike money, is evenly distributed, and wealthy people, no matter how well supplied with money, believe they have less spare time. Bottom line: the effects of temptation do not scale with income.

How best to intervene? Daniel Kahneman notes: "Some cultures have solved that problem... there seems to be a cultural solution." Sendhil, whose field research may soon have some answers, believes that lending at lower interest rates may help but will not solve the problem, and adds: "It would be better for the microfinanciers to come in and offer money at the same rate as the existing lenders, and then make the payoff in some other ways." The problem is the chronic effects of poverty, not the lending institutions (or lack thereof). ....

[More]

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
THE REALITY CLUB

Comments on The EDGE Master Class 08:

W. Daniel Hillis, Daniel Kahneman, Nathan Myhrvold, Richard Thaler, Daniel Kahneman, Nathan Myhrvold

----------------------------------------------------
W. DANIEL HILLIS

Just one more minor observation.

Dick Thaler assumed that we already understood and accepted the standard models economic discussion making. When you think about it, it is very flattering-he assumed that we had internalized the standard models to such a degree that we needed to be talked out of them.

----------------------------------------------------
DANIEL KAHNEMAN

Quick reply to Nathan on priming-I believe that the comparison of priming with the curiosities of visual illusions sells it short.

[MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
NATHAN MYHRVOLD

One reply to Danny Kahneman's reply about optical illusions and priming...

After reading your response, I still wonder if the optical illusion analogy isn't quite apt. I say "wonder" because I don't really know and it would require more thinking-and probably some experiments-to really tell.

[MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
RICHARD THALER

Nathan, lots of good questions here, except the last one. Being with you for 36 hours was enough to not be surprised that you are still pushing the debate! Danny is really the right one to have this debate with but I am not sure your questions have good answers. For example, we have no idea what percentage of the time we are fooled by optical illusions. Presumably the answer is a small number, but how would we know?

[MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
DANIEL KAHNEMAN

I have no problems with Nathan's discussion of illusions and the Necker cube-both appear in early chapters in what I have been writing. Indeed, illusions have something in common with priming effects and with most of mental life: the processes that determine them are not represented in consciousness. As Nathan suspected, my objection to the comparison of priming to illusions related to their importance. Illusions do not play a very important role in the modern study of perception, whereas priming is, I believe, critical to understanding how the mind works.

[MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
NATHAN MYHRVOLD

Well, I am going to sound like I was primed by the recent X files movie, but Danny, I want to believe!

Nevertheless it is not easy to believe it. Despite your having primed me, I'm just not getting it. So while I believe you that it does work on me, in this particular instance it seems to be failing me. So I have a couple more questions.

[MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge253.html
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
Edge Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private operating foundation under
Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.
----------------------------------------------------
EDGE Newsbytes: http://www.edge.org/newsbytes.html
----------------------------------------------------
EDGE

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
---
You are currently subscribed to edge_editions as: wheresrhys@googlemail.com

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-3015176-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL: http://www.edge.org/subscribe.html

Edge #252 - Hyperpolitics (American Style) By Mark Pesce

2008-07-28T07:02:00.000-07:00

Edge 252 - July 29, 2008

(4,335 words)

This online EDGE edition, with large graphic images, is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge252.html

----------------------------------------------------
EDGE FEATURE
----------------------------------------------------

"The power redistributions of the 21st century have dealt representative democracies out. Representative democracies are a poor fit to the challenges ahead, and 'rebooting' them is not enough. The future looks nothing like democracy, because democracy, which sought to empower the individual, is being obsolesced by a social order which hyperempowers him."

HYPERPOLITICS (AMERICAN STYLE)
A Talk By Mark Pesce

Introduction

In his well-received talk at this year's Personal Democracy Forum (organized by Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry), "digital ethnologist" Mark Pesce makes the point that "we have a drive to connect and socialize: this drive has now been accelerated and amplified as comprehensively as the steam engine amplified human strength two hundred and fifty years ago. Just as the steam engine initiated the transformation of the natural landscape into man-made artifice, the 'hyperconnectivity' engendered by these new toys is transforming the human landscape of social relations.This time around, fifty thousand years of cultural development will collapse into about twenty.

In presenting his ideas on "the human network" Pesce references the work of archeologist Colin Renfrew, that "we may have had great hardware, but it took a long, long time for humans to develop software which made full use of it"; and Jared Diamond's ideas in Guns, Germs, and Steel, that "where sharing had been a local and generational project for fifty thousand years, it suddenly became a geographical project across nearly half the diameter of the planet".

In the 21st century, it's time to "Fasten your seatbelts and prepare for a rapid descent into the Bellum omnia contra omnes, Thomas Hobbes' "war of all against all." A hyperconnected polity—whether composed of a hundred individuals or a hundred thousand—has resources at its disposal which exponentially amplify its capabilities. Hyperconnectivity begets hypermimesis begets hyperempowerment. After the arms race comes the war."

To understand this new kind of mob rule, it's necessary to realize that "Sharing is the threat. Not just a threat. It is the whole of the thing. A photo taken on a mobile now becomes instantaneously and pervasively visible on Flickr or other sharing websites. This act of sharing voids "any pretensions to control, or limitation, or the exercise of power".

Pesce concludes that "the power redistributions of the 21st century have dealt representative democracies out. Representative democracies are a poor fit to the challenges ahead, and 'rebooting' them is not enough. The future looks nothing like democracy, because democracy, which sought to empower the individual, is being obsolesced by a social order which hyperempowers him."

Read on.

—JB

MARK PESCE is an expert in social media, best known for his work blending VR with the Web to create VRML, the distant ancestor of Second Life. Pesce is an author, teacher, inventor, and well-known media personality in Australia. For the last four years has practiced "digital ethnology," studying the behavioral, cultural and political changes wrought by the new technologies of sharing and communication.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge252.html#pesce

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
ARTICLE OF NOTE
----------------------------------------------------

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
THE CHRONICLE REVIEW
August 1, 2008

THE SCIENCE OF SATIRE
Cognition studies clash with 'New Yorker' rationale

By Mahzarin R. Banaji

On the morning of July 14, the Internet was clogged with discussions of the latest New Yorker cover depicting a Muslim Barack Obama and a terrorist Michelle Obama in fist-bumping celebration before a fireplace in which lies a burning American flag, while above it hangs a portrait of Osama bin Laden...

...It is not unreasonable, given the inquiring minds that read The New Yorker, to expect that an obvious caricature would be viewed as such. In fact, our conscious minds can, in theory, accomplish such a feat. But that doesn't mean that the manifest association (Obama=Osama lover) doesn't do its share of the work. To some part of the cognitive apparatus, that association is for real. Once made, it has a life of its own because of a simple rule of much ordinary thinking: Seeing is believing. Based on the research of my colleague, the psychologistDaniel Gilbert, on mental systems, one might say that the mind first believes, and only if it is relaxing in an Adirondack chair doing nothing better, does it question and refute. There is a power to all things we see and hear — exactly as they are presented to us.

For decades, psychologists have described the "sleeper effect" — the idea that information, even information we might reject at first blush, ends up persuading us, contrary to our intention, over time. That often occurs when the content of the message (Obama=Islamist) and the source providing the message (The New Yorker trying to be cute) have split off in our minds. When satire isn't done right, as in the case of the Obama cover, the intended parody easily splits off from the actual and more blatant association. The latter then has the power to persuade over the long haul, when conscious cognition isn't up to policing it. Communicators of mass media should be alert to that, so that decisions about particular portrayals are based on knowledge of their full impact, and the justification for the supposedly sophisticated cognitive function they serve offered in light of such basic knowledge. ...

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge252.html#mb

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
This online EDGE edition, with large graphic images, is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge252.html
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
Edge Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private operating foundation under
Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.
----------------------------------------------------
EDGE Newsbytes: http://www.edge.org/newsbytes.html
----------------------------------------------------
EDGE

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

---
You are currently subscribed to edge_editions as: wheresrhys@googlemail.com

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-2998036-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL: http://www.edge.org/subscribe.html

Edge #251 Nathan Myhrvold's Iceland and Greenland Panoramas

2008-07-21T12:28:00.000-07:00

Edge 251 - July 21, 2008

(7,170 words)

This online EDGE edition, with large graphic images, is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge251.html

----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
----------------------------------------------------

Imagine telling Ansel wait for new algorithms, so your pictures can improve. It's a very different world today. ...

PANORAMAS AND PHOTO TECHNOLOGY FROM ICELAND AND GREENLAND Photo Essay By Nathan Myhrvold

The previous messages about my Iceland/Greenland trip were about conventional pictures. This feature contains some panoramic shots that are created by stitching together multiple frames into one picture. These were mostly taken during my recent trip to Iceland and Greenland.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge251.html#myhrvold

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
THE REALITY CLUB

ON "IS GOOGLE MAKING US STUPID?" By Nicholas Carr

W.DANIEL HILLIS

-----

BRITANNICA FORUM This is Your Brain on the Internet

Clay Shirky, Nicholas Carr, Larry Sanger, Matthew Battles, Clay Shirky

-----

Why Abundance is Good: A Reply to Nick Carr
Clay Shirky

... As Carr notes, "we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice." Well, yes. But because the return of reading has not brought about the return of the cultural icons we'd been emptily praising all these years, the enormity of the historical shift away from literary culture is now becoming clear. And this, I think, is the real anxiety behind the essay: having lost its actual centrality some time ago, the literary world is now losing its normative hold on culture as well. The threat isn't that people will stop reading War and Peace. That day is long since past. The threat is that people will stop genuflecting to the idea of reading War and Peace. ...
...

-----

Why Skepticism is Good: My Reply to Clay Shirky
Nicholas Carr

It's telling that Shirky uses gauzily religious terms to describe the Internet—"our garden of ethereal delights"—as what he's expressing here is not reason but faith. I hope he's right, but I think that skepticism is always the proper response to techno-utopianism. ...

-----

A Defense of Tolstoy & the Individual Thinker: A Reply to Clay Shirky
Larry Sanger

In Clay's view, it seems, the new speed and deeply social nature of intellectual discourse means that, soon, the only relevant discourse will occur in blog- or Twitter-sized chunks. Is this the hip "upstart literature," proudly "diverse, contemporary, and vulgar," that is now "the new high culture"?

If so, God help us. ...

-----

Yes, the Internet Will Change Us (But We Can Handle It)
Matthew Battles

Nick Carr's Atlantic essay has also prompted a discussion over at publisher John Brockman's blog The Edge. Brockman's authors include computer science visionaries, evolutionary biologists, and cognitive scientists, and Carr's concerns about the cognitive effects of the Internet are very much their cup of tea. ...

-----

Why Abundance Should Breed Optimism: A Second Reply to Nick Carr
Clay Shirky

...Carr calls me an optimist, which is true. Here's why: Every past technology I know of that has increased the number of producers and consumers of written material, from the alphabet and papyrus to the telegraph and the paperback, has been good for humanity.

Carr argues that our period of abundance is different. The worries are numerous: the increased volume and availability of writing is leading not to wisdom but to triviality and distractions. The young are abandoning the classical in favor of the vulgar. Venerable institutions are under possibly crushing new pressures. These complaints are not just familiar, they are accurate. However, they also have an inevitable feel about them, having been made at the beginning of every such expansion, from the printing press to the comic book to the act of writing itself. ...

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge251.html#rc
----------------------------------------------------

W. DANIEL HILLIS:

For those of you who have not been following the action on the ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA BLOG, here is the latest: Clay Shirky dissed Tolstoy and Nicholas Carr zinged back with a smackdown about Clay's "highbrow form of philistinism". Ouch.

Clay Shirky is not just questioning Tolstoy, he is questioning the culture of literature. He asks, What's so great about WAR AND PEACE? Maybe it does have themes of power, fate, and personal responsibility, but it is really any more enriching than, say, a season of THE WIRE? And Shirky is not alone in his blasphemy. Back on the EDGE, George Dyson is speculates, "Perhaps books will end up back where they started, locked away in monasteries (or the depths of Google) and read by a select few". For a readership of bibliophiles, this is treason. ...

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge251.html#rc
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
IN THE NEWS
----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Costly Toys, Or A New Era For Drivers
By Joe Nocera

"In and of itself," said Elon Musk, "a $100,000 sports car is not going to change the world."

Mr. Musk is a 37-year-old technology entrepreneur who became extremely wealthy when eBay bought PayPal, which he had co-founded. A lanky South African, he is using that wealth to finance two quixotic efforts. The first is SpaceX, a company he hopes will one day make it possible to colonize Mars. (I kid you not.)...

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge251.html#nyt2
----------------------------------------------------

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Let's Get Rid of Darwinism
By Olivia Judson

...But his giantism has had an odd and problematic consequence. It's a tendency for everyone to refer back to him. "Why Darwin was wrong about X"; "Was Darwin wrong about Y?"; "What Darwin didn't know about Z" — these are common headlines in newspapers and magazines, in both the biological and the general literature. Then there are the words: Darwinism (sometimes used with the prefix "neo"), Darwinist (ditto), Darwinian.

Why is this a problem? Because it's all grossly misleading. It suggests that Darwin was the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega, of evolutionary biology, and that the subject hasn't changed much in the 149 years since the publication of the "Origin."...

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge251.html#nyt

----------------------------------------------------

NPR ON THE MEDIA
Search and Destroy

The ability to search through massive amounts of data, Google-style, is having far-reaching effects. And, according to Wired Magazine's Chris Anderson, one of the most significant casualties may be the venerable scientific method. He explains why in the age of the petabyte, scientific testing is forever changed and why the numbers now speak for themselves.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge251.html#npr

----------------------------------------------------
THE TELEGRAPH
Amazon Tribe Has No Words For Different Numbers
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor

... The study, which appeared in the journal Cognition, offers evidence that number words are a concept invented by human cultures as they are needed, and not an inherent part of language, said Prof Gibson, who did the study with Michael Frank, Dr Evelina Fedorenko, and Prof Daniel Everett, of Illinois State University.

The work builds on a study published in 2005 by Prof Everett, who lived with the tribe for much of his life between 1977 and 2007, which found that the Pirahã had words to express the quantities "one," "two," and "many." ...

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge251.html#telegraph

----------------------------------------------------

AXESS
The Return of Religion By Roger Scruton

... Richard Dawkins is the most influential living example of this tradition, and his message, echoed by Dan Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, sounds as loud and strident in the media today as the message of Luther in the reformed churches of Germany. The violence of the diatribes uttered by these evangelical atheists is indeed remarkable. After all, the Enlightenment happened three centuries ago; the arguments of Hume, Kant and Voltaire have been absorbed by every educated person. What more is to be said? And if you must say it, why say it so stridently?...

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge251.html#axess

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
This online EDGE edition, with large graphic images, is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge251.html
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
Edge Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private operating foundation under
Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.
----------------------------------------------------
EDGE Newsbytes: http://www.edge.org/newsbytes.html
----------------------------------------------------
EDGE

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

---
You are currently subscribed to edge_editions as: wheresrhys@googlemail.com

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-2986037-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL: http://www.edge.org/subscribe.html

Edge 250: "Engineers' Dreams" by George Dyson; "The Next Renaissance" by Douglas Rushkoff; Reality Club: "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

2008-07-15T14:45:00.000-07:00

Edge 250 - July 15, 2008

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge250.html#businesstimes

(9,670 words)

This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge250.html

----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
----------------------------------------------------

Only one third of a search engine is devoted to fulfilling search requests. The other two thirds are divided between crawling (sending a host of single-minded digital organisms out to gather information) and indexing (building data structures from the results). Ed's job was to balance the resulting loads.

When Ed examined the traffic, he realized that Google was doing more than mapping the digital universe. Google doesn't merely link or point to data. It moves data around. Data that are associated frequently by search requests are locally replicated—establishing physical proximity, in the real universe, that is manifested computationally as proximity in time. Google was more than a map. Google was becoming something else. ...

ENGINEERS' DREAMS
By George Dyson

Introduction by Stewart Brand

How does one come to a new understanding? The standard essay or paper makes a discursive argument, decorated with analogies, to persuade the reader to arrive at the new insight.

The same thing can be accomplished—perhaps more agreeably, perhaps more persuasively—with a piece of fiction that shows what would drive a character to come to the new understanding. Tell us a story!

This George Dyson gem couldn't find a publisher in a fiction venue because it's too technical, and technical publications (including Wired) won't run it because it's fiction. Shame on them. Edge to the rescue.
—SBB

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge250.html#dyson

----------------------------------------------------

THE NEXT RENAISSANCE
A Talk By Douglas Rushkoff

Computers and networks finally offer us the ability to write. And we do write with them. Everyone is a blogger, now. Citizen bloggers and YouTubers who believe we have now embraced a new "personal" democracy. Personal, because we can sit safely at home with our laptops and type our way to freedom.

But writing is not the capability being offered us by these tools at all. The capability is programming—which almost none of us really know how to do. We simply use the programs that have been made for us, and enter our blog text in the appropriate box on the screen. Nothing against the strides made by citizen bloggers and journalists, but big deal. Let them eat blog.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge250.html#rushkoff

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
THE REALITY CLUB

ON "IS GOOGLE MAKING US STUPID?" By Nicholas Carr

W. Daniel Hillis, Kevin Kelly, Larry Sanger, George Dyson, Jaron Lanier, Douglas Rushkoff

----------------------------------------------------

The July/August issue of Atlantic Monthly features a cover story by Nicholas Carr: "Is Google Making Us Stupid: What The Internet is doing to Our Brains". Carr is author of the recently published The Big Switch: Rewiring the world, from Edison to Google and a blogger: Rough Type. He is also an Edge contributor.

Danny Hillis disagrees with his argument. Here is Hillis's comment which is hopefully the beginning of an interesting Edge Reality Club discussion. —JB

W. DANIEL HILLIS: We evolved in a world where our survival depended on an intimate knowledge of our surroundings. This is still true, but our surroundings have grown. We are now trying to comprehend the global village with minds that were designed to handle a patch of savanna and a close circle of friends. Our problem is not so much that we are stupider, but rather that the world is demanding that we become smarter. Forced to be broad, we sacrifice depth. We skim, we summarize, we skip the fine print and, all too often, we miss the fine point. We know we are drowning, but we do what we can to stay afloat. ...

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge250.html#rc

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
IN THE NEWS
----------------------------------------------------
THE GUARDIAN
From Obama to Cameron, why do so many politicians want a piece of Richard Thaler?
By Aditya Chakrabortty

What is the big idea of Richard Thaler, the economist quoted by David Cameron and Barack Obama? It comes down to this: you're not as smart as you think. Humans, he believes, are less rational and more influenced by peer pressure and suggestion than governments and economists reckon. ...

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge250.html#guardian

----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW YORKER
Surfing the Universe
By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

ANNALS OF SCIENCE about physicist Garrett Lisi's "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything." Writer describes Lisi giving a talk at a conference in Morelia, Mexico in June of 2007. The conference was attended by the top researchers in a field called loop quantum gravity, which has emerged as a leading challenger to string theory. ...

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge250.html#newyorker

----------------------------------------------------
THE TIMES
Why Barack Obama and David Cameron are keen to 'nudge you'
By Carol Lewis

Richard Thaler, professor of economics and behavioural science at Chicago Graduate School of Business, talks about his new book and why nudging has caught the imagination of top politicians.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge250.html#times

----------------------------------------------------
THE BUSINESS TIMES (SINGAPORE)
Psychology's Ambassador to Economics

The father of behavioural economics Daniel Kahneman talks to VIKRAM KHANNA about cognitive illusions, investor irrationality and measures of well-being

...Many mainstream economists still view behavioural economics with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion, but they are increasingly coming around, because some of its findings are too compelling to ignore.

----------------------------------------------------
THE WASHINGTON POST
Jason Calacanis' First New Email Post
By Nik Cubrilovic
TechCrunch.com

Jason Calacanis announced on Friday that he was retiring from blogging. There was a very mixed reaction to the news, with most believing it to be a publicity stunt. Jason said in his farewell post that instead of blogging, he would instead be posting to a mailing list made up of his followers, capped at 750 subscribers. That subscriber limit was reached very quickly, and today Jason sent out his first new 'post' to that mailing list, which we have included below.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge250.html#wapo

----------------------------------------------------
NEW SCIENTIST
A Way With Words
By Jo Marchant

Interview: The language detective

Everyone's favourite linguist, Steven Pinker, is known for his theory that the mental machinery behind language is innate. In his latest book, The Stuff of Thought, he asks what language tells us about how we think. He says the words and grammar we use reflect inherited rules that govern our emotions and social relationships. Jo Marchant asked Pinker why he thinks that concepts of space, time and causality are hard-wired in our brain, and why he's turning his thoughts to violence.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge250.html#newscientist

----------------------------------------------------
HIGHFIELD NAMED EDITOR OF NEW SCIENTIST

ROGER HIGHFIELD, award-winning Science Editor of The Daily Telegraph, where he worked for more than 20 years, has been named as the next Editor of New Scientist magazine, which is now the world's biggest selling weekly science and technology magazine.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge250.html#highfield

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge250.html
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
Edge Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private operating foundation under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.
----------------------------------------------------
EDGE Newsbytes: http://www.edge.org/newsbytes.html
----------------------------------------------------
EDGE

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

---
You are currently subscribed to edge_editions as: wheresrhys@googlemail.com

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-2978016-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL:

Edge 249: Summer Reading Issue; Reality Club: "The End of Theory"

2008-07-09T13:23:00.000-07:00

Edge 249 - July 8, 2008

(10,600 words)

This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge249.html

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE

SUMMER READING
Recent and Forthcoming Titles from Edge Contributors

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge249.html#summer
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
THE REALITY CLUB

RESPONSES TO CHIS ANDERSON'S THE END OF THEORY

George Dyson, Kevin Kelly, Stewart Brand, W. Daniel Hillis, Sean Carroll, Jaron Lanier, Joseph Traub, John Horgan, Bruce Sterling, Douglas Rushkoff, Oliver Morton, Daniel Everett, Gloria Origgi, Lee Smolin, Joel Garreau
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge249.html#rc

----------------------------------------------------

GEORGE DYSON: Just as we may eventually take the brain apart, neuron by neuron, and never find the model, we may discover that true AI came into existence without anyone ever developing a coherent model of reality or an unambiguous theory of intelligence. Reality, with all its ambiguities, does the job just fine. It may be that our true destiny as a species is to build an intelligence that proves highly successful, whether we understand how it works or not. ... [MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge249.html#dysong

KEVIN KELLY: My guess is that this emerging method will be one additional tool in the evolution of the scientific method. It will not replace any current methods (sorry, no end of science!) but will compliment established theory-driven science. Let's call this data intensive approach to problem solving Correlative Analytics. I think Chris squanders a unique opportunity by titling his thesis "The End of Theory" because this is a negation, the absence of something. Rather it is the beginning of something, and this is when you have a chance to accelerate that birth by giving it a positive name. ... [MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge249.html#kelly

STEWART BRAND: Digital humanity apparently crossed from one watershed to another over the last few years. Now we are noticing. Noticing usually helps. We'll converge on one or two names for the new watershed and watch what induction tells us about how it works and what it's good for. . .. [MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge249.html#brand

W. DANIEL HILLIS: Chris Anderson says that "this approach to science—hypothesize, model, test—is becoming obsolete". No doubt the statement is intended to be provocative, but I do not see even a little bit of truth in it. I share his enthusiasm for the possibilities created by petabyte datasets and parallel computing, but I do not see why large amounts of data will undermine the scientific method.
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge249.html#hillis

SEAN CARROLL: ... Sometimes it will be hard, or impossible, to discover simple models explaining huge collections of messy data taken from noisy, nonlinear phenomenon. But it doesn't mean we shouldn't try. Hypotheses aren't simply useful tools in some potentially-outmoded vision of science; they are the whole point. Theory is understanding, and understanding our world is what science is all about. [MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge249.html#carroll

JARON LANIER: Anderson pretends it's useless to be a human. Machines should now do the thinking, and be the heroes of discovery. ...I say "pretends" because I don't believe he is being sincere. I think it's a ploy to get a certain kind of attention. Hearing anti-human rhetoric has the same sting as a movie plot about a serial killer. Some deep, moral part of each of us is so offended that we can't turn off our attention. ... [MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge249.html#lanier

JOSEPH TRAUB: I agree with Danny Hillis that large amounts of data will not undermine the scientific method. Indeed, scientific laws encode a huge amount of data. Think of Maxwell's equations or Kepler's laws for example. Why does Chris Anderson think that with still more data, laws (what he calls theory) will become less important?
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge249.html#traub

JOHN HORGAN: Chris Anderson seems to think computers will reduce science to pure induction, predicting the future based on the past. This method of course can't predict black swans, anomalous, truly novel events. Theory-laden human experts can't foresee black swans either, but for the foreseeable future, human experts will know how to handle black swans more adeptly when they appear. ... [MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge249.html#horgan

BRUCE STERLING: ... I do have to wonder why—after Google promptly demolished advertising—Chris Anderson wants Google to pick on scientific theory. Advertising is nothing like scientific theory. Advertising has always been complete witch-doctor hokum. After blowing down the house of straw, Google might want to work its way up to the bricks. ... [MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge249.html#sterling

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF: When I read Anderson's extremely astute arguments about the direction of science, I find myself concerned that science could very well take the same course as politics or business. The techniques of mindless petabyte churn favor industry over consideration, consumption over creation, and—dare I say it—mindless fascism over thoughtful self-government. ... [MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge249.html#rushkoff

OLIVER MORTON: Chris Anderson's provocations spur much thought—I'll limit it to two specifics and two generalities. The first specific is that Anderson mischaracterises particle physics. The problem with particle physics is not data poverty—it is theoretical affluence. The Tevatron, and LEP before it, have produced amounts of data vast for their times—data is in rich supply. The problem is that the standard model explains it all. The drive beyond the standard model is not a reflection of data poverty, but of theory feeding on theory because the data are so well served. ... [MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge249.html#morton

DANIEL EVERETT: More intriguingly, do children acquire language based on a genetically limited set of hypotheses or do they treat language like the internet and function as statistical calculators, little "Googlers"? ... [MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge249.html#everett

GLORIA ORIGGI: Science may become a cheaper game from the point of view of the investment for discovering new facts: but, as a philosopher, I do not think that cheap intellectual games are less challenging or less worth playing. ... [MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge249.html#origgi

LEE SMOLIN: To see what to think about Anderson's hypothesis that computers storing and processing vast amounts of data will replace the need to formulate hypotheses and theories, one can look at whether it has any relevance to how supercomputers are actually being used in contemporary physics. ... [MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge249.html#smolin

JOEL GARREAU: Maybe things are different in physics and biology. But in my experience studying culture, values and society, data lags reality by definition—they are a snapshot of the past. And when human reality does not conveniently line up with established ways of thinking, the data can lag by years, if not decades. ... [MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge249.html#garreau

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
IN THE NEWS
----------------------------------------------------
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
The Mirror Neuron Revolution: Explaining What Makes Humans Social
By Jonah Lehrer

Neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni discusses mirror neurons, autism and the potentially damaging effects of violent movies.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge249.html#iac

----------------------------------------------------
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
By Nicholas Carr

... As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge249.html#atl

----------------------------------------------------
BLOGGINGHEADS TV
Science Saturday: Summer Doldrums Edition
John Horgan & George Johnson

The end of science: Wired Magazine steps on John's turf (07:25)
AI's as-yet-unfulfilled promise (09:41)
The limits of medical science (07:54)
Political pundits: just a bunch of dart-throwing monkeys (13:01)
Who cares why quantum mechanics works? (05:59)
Incredible propaganda for psychedelic drugs (02:40)

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge249.html#btv

----------------------------------------------------
LOS ANGELES TIMES
Mysteries of Time, and the Multiverse
By John Johnson Jr.

In his studies of entropy and the irreversibility of time, Caltech physicist Sean Carroll is exploring the idea that our universe is part of a larger structure.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge249.html#lat

----------------------------------------------------
SEED MAGAZINE
THE SEED SALON
The Transcript: Tom Wolfe + Michael Gazzaniga

The father of cognitive neuroscience and the original New Journalist discuss status, free will, the human condition, and The Interpreter.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge249.html#seed

----------------------------------------------------
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
Should You Invest in the Long Tail?
By Anita Elberse

It was a compelling idea: In the digitized world, there's more money to be made in niche offerings than in blockbusters. The data tell a different story.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge249.html#hbr

----------------------------------------------------
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
PORTALS
Study Refutes Niche Theory Spawned by Web
By Lee Gomes

A book from 2006, "The Long Tail," was one of those that appear periodically and demand that we rethink everything we presume to know about how society works. In this case, the Web and its nearly unlimited choices were said to be remaking the economy and culture. Now, a new Harvard Business Review article pushes back, and says any change occurring may be of an entirely different sort.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge249.html#wsj

----------------------------------------------------
NEWSWEEK
THE FUTURE OF ENERGY
A Bug to Save the Planet
By Fareed Zakaria

Genome pioneer Craig Venter wants to make a bacterium that will eat CO2 and produce fuel.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge249.html#nwbug

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge249.html
----------------------------------------------------
Edge Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private operating foundation under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
EDGE

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022
----------------------------------------------------

---
You are currently subscribed to edge_editions as: wheresrhys@googlemail.com

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-2967231-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL:

Edge 248: The End of Theory By Chris Anderson

2008-07-01T10:01:00.000-07:00

Edge 247 - June 30, 2008

(11,000 words)

This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge248.html

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE

THE END OF THEORY
Will the Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete?
By Chris Anderson

Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.

The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies.

[MORE]

----------------------------------------------------

THE REALITY CLUB

George Dyson, Kevin Kelly, Stewart Brand respond to "The End of Theory"

[MORE]

----------------------------------------------------

IN THE NEWS

----------------------------------------------------

DER TAGESSPIEGEL
A NEW HUMANISM
("EIN NEUER HUMANISMUS")
By Kai Kupferschmidt

...as early as 1959 the physicist and writer Charles Percy Snow lamented that the humanities and natural sciences were adrift. Snow coined the phrase "two cultures". At the same time, he said saw a need for a "third culture" that would require a common culture of humanities and natural scientists.

The mid-nineties saw the American literary agent John Brockman present his idea of the third culture. It was different than the one imagined by Snow. Brockman noted that natural scientists such as the biologist Richard Dawkins or the physicist Roger Penrose had taken over the function which had previously been played by literary scholars by by writing books that explained science to the public. Brockman that this was the third culture.

[MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW REPUBLIC
Hedonic Man
By Alan Wolfe

The collaboration of Kahneman and Tversky produced one of the major intellectual accomplishments of the late twentieth century: a series of ingeniously designed experiments that raised uncomfortable questions about "utility maximization," which was the major assumption of microeconomics.

[MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
WALL STREET JOURNAL
How The Rich Spend their Time: Stressed
By Robert Frank

According to research by Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist, quoted in an article in the Washington Post, "being wealthy is often a powerful predictor that people spend less time doing pleasurable things and more time doing compulsory things and feeling stressed."

[MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW YORKER
The Itch
By Atul Gawande

The theory—and a theory is all it is right now—has begun to make sense of some bewildering phenomena. Among them is an experiment that Ramachandran performed with volunteers who had phantom pain in an amputated arm.

[MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW YORKER
What Was I Thinking
By Elizabeth Kolbert

As an academic discipline, Ariely's field—behavioral economics—is roughly twenty-five years old. It emerged largely in response to work done in the nineteen-seventies by the Israeli-American psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. (Ariely, too, grew up in Israel.) When they examined how people deal with uncertainty, Tversky and Kahneman found that there were consistent biases to the responses, and that these biases could be traced to mental shortcuts, or what they called "heuristics."

[MORE]

----------------------------------------------------

WALL STREET JOURNAL

Free To Choose, But Often Wrong

By David A. Shaywitz

...When psychologists Daniel Kahneman and the late Amos Tversky conducted an experimental survey in the early 1980s asking people to answer this simple question, they discovered, to their surprise, that most respondents picked "b," even though this was the narrower choice and hence the less likely one. It seems that saliency – in this case, Linda's passionate political profile – trumps logic.

[MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
WASHIINGTON POST

How Rich People Spend Their Time

Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman has found, however, that being wealthy is often a powerful predictor that people spend less time doing pleasurable things, and more time doing compulsory things and feeling stressed. ...

[MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge248.html
----------------------------------------------------
Edge Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private operating foundation under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
EDGE

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022
----------------------------------------------------

---
You are currently subscribed to edge_editions as: wheresrhys@googlemail.com

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-2952721-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL:

Edge 246: THE (CHINESE) EMPEROR'S OLD CLOTHES

2008-06-11T06:34:00.000-07:00

Edge 246 - JUNE 10, 2008

(6,650 words)

This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge246.html

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

"There is a profound issue lurking here," writes Pinker. "Everyone says that China will be the next scientific and economic power. Is this compatible with their ongoing rejection of open debate and exploration of ideas? Is a technologically advanced society compatible with anti-intellectualism and suppression of debate?" ...

THE (CHINESE) EMPEROR'S OLD CLOTHES

EDGE has received notice from the publisher that acquired PRC Chinese language rights to "What Is Your Dangerous Idea?: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable" that the book "can't be published in China because some content is not accordant to Chinese regulations, for example, some content about religious, soul." [sic]

The book, based on an edited selection from The 2006 EDGE Question, was published last year in the US (HarperCollins) and the UK (Free Press) as well as a number of foreign-language markets.

Steven Pinker, who also wrote the Introduction to the book, posed the EDGE Question:

WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?

The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?

Richard Dawkins wrote the Afterword. ...

[MORE]
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
Edge Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private operating foundation under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
EDGE

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

---
You are currently subscribed to edge_editions as: wheresrhys@googlemail.com

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-2935508-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL:

Edge 245: Experiment Marathon Reykjavik

2008-06-05T16:02:00.000-07:00

Edge 245 — June 5, 2008

[9,400 words]

----------------------------------------------------
This EDGE edition, with links, graphics, & video is available online at
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge245.html
----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
----------------------------------------------------

EXPERIMENT MARATHON REYKJAVIK
Reykjavík Art Museum
Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist
In Collaboration With Artist Olafur Elíasson

BRIAN ENO
Leads Impromptu A Capella Group

___

WALL STREET JOURNAL
In Iceland, Building Bridges for Art
By Cathryn Drake

THE BOSTON GLOBE
Creators of Cool
By Tom Haines

ART FORUM
Amazing Race — Reykjavik
Cathryn Drake

ARTNET
Fire And Ice
By Ben Davis

ART REVIEW
Reykjavik Arts Festival Diary, Days 1–4
By James Westcott

ART FACT.NET
Art Facts.Net Interviews Hans Ulrich Obrist
Marek Claassen

---------------------------------------------------
THIRD CULTURE NEWS
---------------------------------------------------

FRANKFURTER RUNSCHAU
Die Mondflüge der Philosophie
Von Christian Schluter

NEW YORK TIMES
The Future Is Now? Pretty Soon, at Least
By John Tierney

NEW YORK TIMES
Dark, Perhaps Forever
By Dennis Overbye

NEW YORK TIMES
An Overflowing Five-Day Banquet of Science and Its Meanings
By Dennis Overbye

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Put a Little Science in Your Life
By Brian Greene

THE SUNDAY TIMES
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: the prophet of boom and doom
By Brian Appleyard

NATURE
Why we should love logarithms
By Philip Ball

NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
The Question of Global Warming
By Freeman Dyson

THE NEW REPUBLIC
The Stupidity of Dignity
By Steven Pinker

THE NEW YORK TIMES
The Alpha Geeks
By David Brooks

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Study Finds Big Social Factor in Quitting Smoking
By Gina Kolata

THE BOSTON GLOBE
The secret to happiness? Who knows?
By Alex Beam

WIRED
15th Anniversary: The Brian Eno Evolution
By Steven Leckart

THE INDEPENDENT
Brian Eno: As he turns 60, the professor of rock is as creative as ever
By Nick Hasted

NATURE
Written in the skies
Zeeya Merali

THE NEW YORK TIMES
The Neural Buddhists
By David Brooks

SEED MAGAZINE
The Seed Salon
Marc Hauser + Errol Morris

THE NEW YORKER
Birdbrain: The woman behind the world's chattiest parrots
By Margaret Talbot

SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG
Talent and Patents: The sciences fight for intellectual jurisdiction
By Andrian Kreye

SCIENCE
Neurobiology: The Roots of Morality
By Greg Miller

LOS ANGELES TIMES
Does your brain have a mind of its own?
By Gary Marcus

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
Does Time Run Backward in Other Universes?
By Sean Carroll

THE SUN
Reconsiderations: Richard Dawkins and His Selfish Meme
By Pat Shipman

BLOOMBERG MARKETS
Flight of the Black Swan
By Stephanie Baker-Said

NEW YORK MAGAZINE
If God Is Dead, Who Gets His House?
By Sean McManus

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
This EDGE edition, with links, graphics, & video is available online at
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge245.html
----------------------------------------------------
EDGE Newsbytes:
http://www.edge.org/newsbytes.html
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
EDGE

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

EDGE Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private operating foundation under
Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
---
You are currently subscribed to edge_editions as: wheresrhys@googlemail.com

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-2932092-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL:

Edge 244: Hans Ulrich Obrist: A Rule Of the Game

2008-05-08T06:25:00.000-07:00

Edge 244 - May 8, 2008

http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge244.html

(5,340 words)

This online EDGE edition with links and graphics is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge244.html

----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
----------------------------------------------------
These are exhibitions which are not material, but which are more virtual, virtual in the sense of them always being able to be reactualized. They can be revisited and reactualized and updated, and they are also not related to a place. The exhibition can go to where the viewer is. Anybody in the world can download these formulas and pin them on the wall, or they can do their own and trigger their own formulas. We are in the very early days of understanding how the Internet can be used for exhibitions.

A RULE OF THE GAME
A Talk With Hans Ulrich Obrist

15 May – 17 August 2008
Reykjavik Art Museum – Hafnarhús

                      Experiment
                       Marathon
                       Reykjavík

Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist
In collaboration with artist Olafur Elíasson

Beginning May 15, EDGE travels to Iceland for the Reykjavik Arts Festival, which will reprise the EDGE "Formulae of the 21st Century" project, presented last October at the Serpentine Gallery, London, by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director of the Serpentines Exhibitions and Programmes.

That EDGE project was a response to Obrist's question: "What Is Your Formula? Your Equation? Your Algorithm?" One of the highlights of the Reykjavik Arts Festival will be the Experiment Marathon Reykjavík, an exhibition and program of related events organized by the Reykjavík Art Museum and the Serpentine Gallery, London. Lasting from 15 May through August 17, the focus of the project is experimentation. The RAM [Reykjavik Art Museum] will become a laboratory in which leading artists, architects, film-makers, and scientists will create an environment of invention through a series of installations, performances and experimental films.

Additionally, previous related projects will be presented as archives within the exhibition. The exhibition and related events are curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects, Serpentine Gallery, London, in collaboration with artist Olafur Elíasson.

The Experiment Marathon Reykjavík builds on the enormous success of the recent Serpentine Gallery Marathons which have taken place in successive Serpentine Gallery Pavilions, an annual architectural commission conceived in 2000 by Serpentine Gallery Director, Julia Peyton-Jones. In the 2007 Serpentine Gallery Experiment Marathon, which took place in the Pavilion designed by Olafur Elíasson and Kjetil Thorsen, leading artists, writers and scientists performed a huge variety of experiments, exploring perception, artificial intelligence, the body and language.

Participants included John Brockman, Steven Pinker, Marina Abramovic and John Baldessari. The event was collaboration with Thyssen- Bornemisza Art Contemporary. The Serpentine Gallery Marathon series began in 2006 with the 24-hour Interview Marathon conducted by Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist. A presentation of these previous programs will be shown in the Reykjavik Experiment Marathon in a pavilion of archives designed by Ólafur Elíasson and Einar orsteinn. Another collection of archives will refer to Hans Ulrich Obrist's and Barbara Vanderlinden's exhibition, Laboratorium, from 1999.

A substantial catalogue will be published on this occasion, documenting the Experiment Marathon Reykjavík together with previous marathons and with textual contributions by Bruno Latour and others. Obrist and I, as Edge readers may recall, have a mutual connection: we both worked closely with the late James Lee Byars, the conceptual artist who, in 1971, implemented "The World Question Center" as a work of conceptual art.

As a curator, he is ever curious about the world around him and this includes the latest ideas and developments in science. Obrist interviewed me for Art Orbit in the 90's. With this Edge feature, I get to ask the questions.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST, a Swiss curator, is Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects, of the Serpentine Gallery in London.

[MORE]

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
IN THE NEWS
----------------------------------------------------

THE NEW YORKER
May 12, 2008

ANNALS OF INNOVATION

IN THE AIR: Who says big ideas are rare?
By Malcolm Gladwell

... In 1999, when Nathan Myhrvold left Microsoft and struck out on his own, he set himself an unusual goal. He wanted to see whether the kind of insight that leads to invention could be engineered. He formed a company called Intellectual Ventures. He raised hundreds of millions of dollars. He hired the smartest people he knew. It was not a venture-capital firm. Venture capitalists fund insights-that is, they let the magical process that generates new ideas take its course, and then they jump in. Myhrvold wanted to make insights-to come up with ideas, patent them, and then license them to interested companies. ...

[MORE]

[ED. NOTE: See Lions: Africa's Magnificent Predators: A Photo Essay By Nathan Myhrvold, 8.1.07]

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

This online EDGE edition with links and graphics is available at:

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

Edge Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private operating foundation under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.

----------------------------------------------------
EDGE

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
---
You are currently subscribed to edge_editions as: wheresrhys@googlemail.com

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-2911229-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL: