Edge editions: 2009

Thursday, June 4, 2009

Edge 288: Don Tapscott - The Impending Demise of the University

Edge 288 - June 4, 2009

(11,675 words)

http://www.edge.org/

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

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THE THIRD CULTURE
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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.

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

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ARTICLES OF NOTE
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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...]

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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...]

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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...]

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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
June 1, 2009

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

[MORE...]

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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...]

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NEWSWEEK
June 8, 2009

Let's Talk About God
By Lisa Miller

A new book redefines the faith debate.

[MORE...]

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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.

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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...]

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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...]

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BOOKS FROM EDGE
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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

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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

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

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

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

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

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EDGE Newsbytes: http://www.edge.org/newsbytes.html
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Wednesday, May 27, 2009

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

Edge 287 - May 27, 2009

(10,350 words)

http://www.edge.org/

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

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THE THIRD CULTURE
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"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...]

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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...]

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ARTICLES OF NOTE
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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...]

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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...]

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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...]

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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. ...

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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...]

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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...]

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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...]

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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...]

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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...]

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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...]

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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...]

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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...]

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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...]

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BOOKS FROM EDGE
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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

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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

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Edge 286 Chimeras of Experience - A Conversation with Jonah Lehrer

Edge 286 - May 21, 2009

(11,700 words)

http://www.edge.org/

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

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THE THIRD CULTURE
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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...]

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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...]

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FOLLOW EDGE ON TWITTER
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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...]

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NEW YORK TIMES
May 20, 2009

THE WILD SIDE

Guest Column: Math and the City
BY STEVEN STROGATZ

[MORE...]

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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...]

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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.

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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...]

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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...]

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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...]

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PBS -- BILL MOYERS JOUNRAL
May 15, 2009

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

[MORE...]

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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...]

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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...]

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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...]

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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.

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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...]

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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...]

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BOOKS FROM EDGE
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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

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Friday, May 15, 2009

Edge 285: Videos from the Economic Manhattan Project

Edge 285 - May 15, 2009

(8,200 words)

http://www.edge.org/

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

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THE THIRD CULTURE
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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...]

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"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...]

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ARTICLES OF NOTE
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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...]

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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...]

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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...]

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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...]

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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...]

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SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG
May 7, 2009

Besuch bei Google

"Seid nicht böse!"
Von Alex Rühle

[MORE...]

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DER SPIEGEL
May 8, 2009

HEUTE IN DEN FEUILLETONS

[MORE...]

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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...]

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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...]

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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...]

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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...]

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PHARYNGULA
May 5, 2009

The Eagleton Delusion
By PZ Myers

[MORE...]

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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...]

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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...]

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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...]

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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...]

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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...]

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BOOKS FROM EDGE
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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

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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

Thursday, May 7, 2009

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

Edge 284 - May 7, 2009

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

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THE THIRD CULTURE
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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

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

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

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022
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Monday, May 4, 2009

Edge 283 - Maddox by his successor: Philip Campbell

Edge 283 -- May 4, 2009

(6,000 words)

http://www.edge.org/

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

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THE THIRD CULTURE
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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.

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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.

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FOLLOW EDGE ON TWITTER
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ARTICLES OF NOTE
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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...]

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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...]

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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...]

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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...]

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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...]

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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...]

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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

Friday, April 24, 2009

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

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

http://www.edge.org/

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

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THE THIRD CULTURE
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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

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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.

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EDGE VIDEO
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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."

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ARTICLES OF NOTE
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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

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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
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Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Edge 279: The End of Universal Rationality - Yochai Benkler

Edge 279

April 1, 2009
(12,300 words)

http://www.edge.org/

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

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THE THIRD CULTURE
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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.

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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]

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THE REALITY CLUB
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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.

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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]

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IN THE NEWS
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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]

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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."

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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.

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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.". ...

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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
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Wednesday, March 4, 2009

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

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

http://www.edge.org/

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

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THE THIRD CULTURE
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"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.

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"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.

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EDGE IN THE NEWS
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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)

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ARTICLES OF NOTE
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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.".,.

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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. ...

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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. ...

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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.

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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.. ...

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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...

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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]

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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

---
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Edge editions

My new campsite map website

Thursday, June 4, 2009

Edge 288: Don Tapscott - The Impending Demise of the University

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

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

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Edge 286 Chimeras of Experience - A Conversation with Jonah Lehrer

Friday, May 15, 2009

Edge 285: Videos from the Economic Manhattan Project

Thursday, May 7, 2009

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

Monday, May 4, 2009

Edge 283 - Maddox by his successor: Philip Campbell

Friday, April 24, 2009

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

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Edge 279: The End of Universal Rationality - Yochai Benkler

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

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

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