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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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POPSArtificial Intelligence turns 50: Revisiting its Origins
The expression ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI) was introduced by John McCarthy, and the official birth of AI is unanimously considered to be the 1956 Dartmouth Conference. Thus, AI turned fifty in 2006. How did AI begin? Several differently motivated analyses have been proposed as to its origins. In this paper a brief look at those that might be considered steps towards Dartmouth is attempted, with the aim of showing how a number of research topics and controversies that marked the short history of AI were touched on, or fairly well stated, during the year immediately preceding Dartmouth. The framework within which those steps were taken was thedevelopment of digital computers. Earlier computer applications in areas such as complex decision making and management, at that time dealt with by operations research techniques, were important in this story. The time was ripe for AI’s intriguingly tumultuous development, marked as it has been by hopes and defeats, successes and difficulties.
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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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