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POPS2057: The World, The City, The Body 2057 is a Discovery Channel television program hosted by theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. It premiered on January 28, 2007 and attempts to predict what the world will be like in 50 years based on current trends. The show takes the form of a docu-drama with three separate episodes, each having informative stories ingrained into the plot. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2057_%28TV_series%29 Via {{thefoxalmighty}}'s clip
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POPSNanoEthics Journal Via {{wildcat}}'s clip Nanoethics -- The watchdog of a new technology? This is the link to the (freely online available) journal NanoEthics and its first (and sofar only) articles. NanoEthics: Ethics for Technologies that Converge at the Nanoscale will focus on the philosophically and scientifically rigorous examination of the ethical and societal considerations and the public and policy concerns inherent in nanotechnology research and development. These issues include both individual and societal problems, and include individual health, wellbeing and human enhancement, human integrity and autonomy, distribution of the costs and benefits, threats to culture and tradition and to political and economic stability. Additionally there are meta-issues including the neutrality or otherwise of technology, designing technology in a value-sensitive way, and the control of scientific research.
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POPSSciTalks SciTalks collects talks and lectures by scientists on a variety of topics.
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POPSThe Politicization of Science Great article! You'll need bugmenot to log in & read it. Apart from the fact that in reality decision-makers rarely are the wise, unbiased, and entirely objective people textbooks would have them be, this model fails to consider the real-world phenomenon of “an excess of objectivity.” “Excess of objectivity” is a term coined by Dan Sarewitz, professor of science and society at Arizona State University (ASU), who, in an interview for bridges, claims that “there is plenty of science to go around. You don’t really need to distort the science. All you need to do in many cases is find the right science. That is not an indictment of science or scientists, but a statement about the complexity of reality and nature and the difficulty of defining problems in very narrow ways.”
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POPSInfant Collaborators & the Evolution of Speech Full paper We argue for the importance of processes of shared intentionality in children's early cognitive development. We look briefly at four important social-cognitive skills and how they are transformed by shared intentionality. In each case, we look first at a kind of individualistic version of the skill – as exemplified most clearly in the behavior of chimpanzees – and then at a version based on shared intentionality – as exemplified most clearly in the behavior of human 1- and 2-year-olds. We thus see the following transformations: gaze following into joint attention, social manipulation into cooperative communication, group activity into collaboration, and social learning into instructed learning. We conclude by highlighting the role that shared intentionality may play in integrating more biologically based and more culturally based theories of human development.
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POPSHappy Hubble Day High Resolution Image: (6.2MB JPEG, 6000x2906): http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/2007/16/images/a/formats/hires_jpg.jpg More image & info here: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2007/16/image/a/ Still not pleased? They also offer a Full Resolution image (200MB JPEG or 500MB TIFF) at 29566 X 14321 pixels.
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POPSA New Kind of Science - Stephen Wolfram (Lecture) worth watching, on cellular automata, complexity, randomness, nature, mathematics, science, biology, natural selection, networks, space-time, physics, causality, relativity, determinism, quantum mechanics, computational irreducibility, ... (not necessarily in that order) His book is freely available online: http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/toc.html (see also The Nature of Code )
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POPSThe Neuroscience of Choice In The Science of Good and Evil (Times Books, 2004), I argued that we evolved moral emotions that operate similarly to other emotions, such as hunger and sexual appetite. Thinking of these emotions as proxies for highly efficient computational programs deepens our understanding of the process. Similarly, in making moral choices about whether to be altruistic or selfish, we feel guilt or pride for having done the wrong or right thing. But the moral calculations of what is best for the individual and the social group were made by our Paleolithic ancestors. Emotions such as hunger, lust and pride are stand-ins for such computations.
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