Amira

"We’re beginning to come to grips with the idea that your brain is not this well-organized hierarchical control system where everything is in order, a very dramatic vision of bureaucracy. In fact, it’s much more like anarchy with some elements of democracy. Sometimes you can achieve stability and mutual aid and a sort of calm united front, and then everything is hunky-dory, but then it’s always possible for things to get out of whack and for one alliance or another to gain control, and then you get obsessions and delusions and so forth. You begin to think about the normal well-tempered mind, in effect, the well-organized mind, as an achievement, not as the base state. (...) You’re going to have a parallel architecture because, after all, the brain is obviously massively parallel. It’s going to be a connectionist network. (...)" - Amira

Bernard Williams: “The generic human need to make and listen to music, for instance, might be explained at the level of evolutionary psychology, but the emergence of the classical symphony certainly cannot. In fact, the insistence on finding explanations of cultural difference in terms of biological evolution exactly misses the point of the great evolutionary innovation represented by Homo sapiens, the massive development of non-genetic learning.” — Truth and Truthfulness, Princeton University Press, 2002, p. 28. - Amira

Kevin Slavin argues that we’re living in a world designed for — and increasingly controlled by — algorithms. In this riveting talk from TEDGlobal, he shows how these complex computer programs determine: espionage tactics, stock prices, movie scripts, and architecture. “We’re writing things (…) that we can no longer read. And we’ve rendered something illegible, and we’ve lost the sense of what’s actually happening in this world that we’ve made. (…) “We’re running through the United States with dynamite and rock saws so that an algorithm can close the deal three microseconds faster, all for a communications framework that no human will ever know; that’s a kind of manifest destiny.” - Amira

“But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can’t tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you’ve just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you’ve let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you? // People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time. Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans. We ask teachers to teach to standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species’ bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good. Every instance of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous. // The same ambiguity that motivated dubious academic AI projects in the past has been repackaged as mass culture today. Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever? While it’s to be expected that the human perspective will be changed by encounters with profound new technologies, the exercise of treating machine intelligence as real requires people to reduce their mooring to reality.” — Jaron Lanier, You are Not a Gadget (2010) - Amira

if you’ve just lowered your own standards of intelligence - don't think so. We just over estimated how little it took to seem human. We can feel sorry for a very basic puppet with a vaguely human face, so it doesn't take much; Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans - not really, it was a scam so all they needed to do was bamboozle customers into thinking it was possible; Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever? - we know it doesn't know what we want and the results are simply better than we had before - Todd Hoff

“New Year’s Eve. It’s a promise of a night. Single, married or widowed, in love, loveless or lovelorn, we all leave our apartments and pick through snow in high heels, or descend subway stairs in tuxedos, lured to wherever we’re going—whether we know it or not, would deny it or not — by the kiss of a stranger.” — Jardine Libaire, Here Kitty Kitty: A Novel, Back Bay Books, 2005. - Amira

"A device the size of your thumb could store as much information as the whole Internet," said Harvard University molecular geneticist George Church, the project's senior researcher. In their work, the group translated the English text of a coming book on genomic engineering into actual DNA. DNA contains genetic instructions written in a simple but powerful code made up of four chemicals called bases: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C) and thymine (T). The Harvard researchers started with the digital version of the book, which is composed of the ones and zeros that computers read. Next, on paper, they translated the zeros into either the A or C of the DNA base pairs, and changed the ones into either the G or T. Then, using now-standard laboratory techniques, they created short strands of actual DNA that held the coded sequence—almost 55,000 strands in all. Each strand contained a portion of the text and an address that indicated where it occurred in the flow of the book. (...)" - Amira

"Research groups in the U.S., Europe and Canada devised ways to use DNA to encode trademarks and secret messages in cells. And when genomics pioneer Craig Venter and colleagues created the first synthetic cell in 2010, they wrote their names into its DNA code, the way an artist might sign a painting, along with three literary quotations and a website address. Other researchers used DNA to encode poetry and popular music inside the living cells of bacteria. (...) The Harvard effort stands out for its large scale, the scientists said. All told, the book contains 53,426 words, 11 illustrations and a JavaScript computer program. The 5.27 megabits of data are more than 600 times bigger than the largest data set previously encoded in DNA. It is the equivalent of the storage capacity of a 3.5-inch floppy computer disk. (...) The method requires a series of advanced laboratory procedures, microarray chips and a high-speed gene-sequencing machine to assemble the strands in the proper order, correct any errors and then read the final text." - Amira

I just got back from the performance... simply wow! - Amira

“What is needed is nothing less than a breakthrough in philosophy, a theory that explains how brains create explanations. (…) What distinguishes human brains from all other physical systems is qualitatively different from all other functionalities, and cannot be specified in the way that all other attributes of computer programs can be. It cannot be programmed by any of the techniques that suffice for writing any other type of program. Nor can it be achieved merely by improving their performance at tasks that they currently do perform, no matter by how much. Why? I call the core functionality in question creativity: the ability to produce new explanations. (…) What is needed is nothing less than a breakthrough in philosophy, a new epistemological theory that explains how brains create explanatory knowledge and hence defines, in principle, without ever running them as programs, which algorithms possess that functionality and which do not. (…)" - Amira

"The truth is that knowledge consists of conjectured explanations — guesses about what really is (or really should be, or might be) out there in all those worlds. Even in the hard sciences, these guesses have no foundations and don’t need justification. Why? Because genuine knowledge, though by definition it does contain truth, almost always contains error as well. So it is not ‘true’ in the sense studied in mathematics and logic. Thinking consists of criticising and correcting partially true guesses with the intention of locating and eliminating the errors and misconceptions in them, not generating or justifying extrapolations from sense data. And therefore, attempts to work towards creating an AGI that would do the latter are just as doomed as an attempt to bring life to Mars by praying for a Creation event to happen there. (…) Present-day software developers could straightforwardly program a computer to have ‘self-awareness’ if they wanted to. But it is a fairly useless ability.” - Amira

Love the colours and the warm glow that fills the room. :-) - Maitani

Merry Christmas! :) - jose manuel

Merry Christmas Jose! :-) - Amira

A warm atmosphere... this is why I love Christmas! :-) - Amira

I looked for your annual Christmas tree, Amira, and here it is. Merry Christmas to you! :-) - Maitani

haha thank you Maitani! Merry Christmas to you too! :-) - Amira

"A hitherto unknown fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen has been found in an old 15 kilo box at the National Archives. 'A sensational discovery' and 'His first fairy tale'. (...) In particular the 190 year old pages throw light on the important personal relationship that Andersen as a boy had with the woman he gave the fairy tale to – a vicar’s widow Mme Bunkeflod. Mme Bunkeflod lived in a home for respectable ladies and widows opposite Andersen’s childhood home. She was a woman Andersen visited, read for and borrowed books from as a child. ‘To Madam Bunkeflod from her devoted H.C. Andersen’, the front page of the document reads. »It’s a wonderful little document as art of the history of Hans Christian Andersen. The fairy tale was a present. A present of thanks to a woman whose home had been very important to him«, Askgaard says." (...) The little fairy tale has been hidden for ages at the National Archives at the bottom of an archive box marked: “Plum family”." - Amira

Wowzers. - Micah

"The examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated. Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can—if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong—to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition. (...)" - Amira

"We’ve learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature’s phenomena will agree or they’ll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven’t tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it’s this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science. (...) But this long history of learning how not to fool ourselves—of having utter scientific integrity—is, I’m sorry to say, something that we haven’t specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you’ve caught on by osmosis. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that." - Amira

Feynman başgan! - golyandro

"I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you're talking as a scientist" http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51... - golyandro

"Serendipity is the greatest pleasure of browsing [among the shelves], and there is no substitute for being able to hold the physical book in one’s hand. Among other things to be found in books are the markings of previous readers. When I first started buying antiquarian books I rejected those that had been marked, but now I find the markings sometimes more interesting than the books, and certainly revealing of the byways of human psychology. (...) Then there are the underliners. The majority of these rarely get past the first chapter or two; some underline things so banal – Smith then went to London, for example, or The snow fell in flakes – that one wonders what kind of mind wants to commit such things to memory. Philosophy books of the Forties and Fifties, meanwhile, tend to smell strongly of tobacco. The joy of finding something that one did not know existed, and that is deeply interesting or connected in a totally unexpected way with one’s intellectual interests of the moment, is one of the great serendipitous rewards of browsing, and one unknown to those who take a purely instrumental view of bookshops, leaving them the moment they discover that they do not have the very book that they want." - Amira

http://www.flickr.com/photos... - Amira

Richard Feynman courtesy of the Cornell Messenger Lecture Archive. Cornell Mathematics Library. Lecture #6 Probability and Uncertainty in quantum mechanics. - Amira

"With the exception of Pompei and perhaps Chernobil, the city of Famagusta, stands today as a unique worldwide example of a city without residents. A city left behind in time, with no one allowed to live in it. It stands still and isolated as if in a surrealists dream: A desolate landscape, only a sad parallax of it’s former iconic seaside view, reminiscent of images from Antonioni’s film “The Eclipse”. A product perhaps of an anachronistic point of view. Yet, what is now called a “No Man’s Land zone” remains an example of a city that in its infant state of growth, maintains all the potential for becoming an Every Man’s Land. A City for all people. What can one do? What can be proposed as a future? How can the issues that led to this condition be resolved? We looked at the issue of Famagusta through the lens of parametric design: A desing process of no fixed result, no ideal scenario, but rather a set of conditions that we aim to formulate through basic values: Integration, Interconnectivity, Inclusivity and Openness." http://diastudiox.virtualcy.com/... - Amira

"The ‘Art of Making’ series aspires to display and highlight people who go against the spirit of today’s pessimism and desperation. They dare to dream and create with zeal and imagination. Armed with passion for knowledge and emotion, they attempt to combine the precision of science with the elegance and resourcefulness of art." - Amira

"A research by Brent Berlin, an anthropologist, and Paul Kay, a linguist. They made the first hypothesis about how color terms enter a language in a certain order. Later, I came across the World Color Survey, which was established in an effort to continue research into Berlin and Kay’s hypothesis. The WCS makes their data available to the public, and I found that this was exactly what I needed to help answer my many questions. The result of the WCS data exploration is below, where about 800,000 individual color chips are grouped by the terms used to describe them. (...) The WCS collected data from 2696 native speakers, representing 110 languages, asking each of them to identify 330 colors. With Processing, I wrote code to read the survey data and explore different ways to categorize and group it. These sketches developed into the final image, where results for each language are shown as a series of blocks that extend from the center, in order of the most frequently used term to the least. For instance, terms used for a greenish-blue color are most prevalent, followed by terms for what we might perceive as red, black, white, etc." - Amira

"The speakers of one language used only three color terms to describe the color spectrum, while others used over sixty. Organizing the languages by geographic location highlights regional similarities in the number of unique color terms. Languages are also grouped by family within each geographic location. (...) Color naming has been a useful tool for understanding the relativist and universalist views because it is ubiquitous. It has practical applications across languages because it can be used to identify food, objects, places, even feelings e.g. the blues. Cultures celebrate the world in many ways, but finding connections that might demonstrate how we see the world in similar ways is an exciting and worthwhile exploration." - Amira

See also: The crayola-fication of the world: How we gave colors names, and it messed with our brains http://ff.im/Z5LfD - Amira

“Artists and scientists analyze the world in surprisingly similar ways.” (...) “[The residual purpose of art is] purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life - not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.” (John Cage) - Amira

Photographer: Mierswa & Kluska - Amira

"Located in Kenya, just about 12 miles outside of Nairobi, Giraffe Manor is 12 acres of private land and 140 acres of indigenous forest that is home to a herd of Rothschild Giraffe. (...) Built in 1932, the manor décor is a combination of traditional and modern, with a two-story entrance hall, majestic staircase, and immaculately furnished interiors. Guests are offered the opportunity to interact with the giraffes at all times of day. According to the website, “Giraffe Manor offers you an unparalleled experience of the giraffes, with them vying for your attention at the breakfast table, the front door and even your bedroom window.” The grounds also accommodate various animals including warthogs, bushbuck, dik dik (a type of small antelope), and 180 species of birds. There are a number of unique things to do when you visit Giraffe Manor—you can spend the day interacting with the animals, meander along the nature trail, or even visit the nearby capital city of Nairobi." - Amira

"Announced in 2008, DARPA’s SyNAPSE program calls for developing electronic neuromorphic (brain-simulation) machine technology that scales to biological levels, using a cognitive computing architecture with 1010 neurons (10 billion) and 1014 synapses (100 trillion, based on estimates of the number of synapses in the human brain) to develop electronic neuromorphic machine technology that scales to biological levels.” IBM says it has now accomplished this milestone with its new “TrueNorth” system running on the world’s fastest operating supercomputer, the Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LBNL) Blue Gene/Q Sequoia, using 96 racks (1,572,864 processor cores, 1.5 PB memory, 98,304 MPI processes, and 6,291,456 threads). (...)" - Amira

“Computation (‘neurons’), memory (‘synapses’), and communication (‘axons,’ ‘dendrites’) are mathematically abstracted away from biological detail toward engineering goals of maximizing function (utility, applications) and minimizing cost (power, area, delay) and design complexity of hardware implementation.” (...) “This fulfills a core vision of the DARPA SyNAPSE project to bring together nanotechnology, neuroscience, and supercomputing to lay the foundation of a novel cognitive computing architecture that complements today’s von Neumann machines.” - Amira

See also: CogniMem demonstrates 40,000-neuron, scalable cognitive memory computing system at SC12 Conference http://www.embedded.com/electro... - Amira

The story about how a dream team of engineers from Facebook, Twitter, and Google built the software that drove Barack Obama's reelection: "It was like someone had written a Murphy's Law algorithm and deployed it at scale. (...) The team had elite and, for tech, senior talent -- by which I mean that most of them were in their 30s -- from Twitter, Google, Facebook, Craigslist, Quora, and some of Chicago's own software companies such as Orbitz and Threadless, where Reed had been CTO. But even these people, maybe *especially* these people, knew enough about technology not to trust it. "I think the Republicans fucked up in the hubris department," Reed told me. "I know we had the best technology team I've ever worked with, but we didn't know if it would work. I was incredibly confident it would work. I was betting a lot on it. We had time. We had resources. We had done what we thought would work, and it still could have broken. Something could have happened." - Amira

"In fact, the day after the October 21 game day, Amazon services -- on which the whole campaign's tech presence was built -- went down. (...) Hurricane Sandy hit on another game day, October 29, threatening the campaign's whole East Coast infrastructure. (...) The nerds shook up an ossifying Democratic tech structure and the politicos taught the nerds a thing or two about stress, small-p politics, and the meaning of life. (...) The genius of the campaign was that it learned to stop sending poor performers. (...) "There is the egoism of technologists. We do it because we can create. I can handle all of the parameters going into the machine and I know what is going to come out of it," Reed said. "In this, the control we all enjoyed about technology was gone." - Amira

What a nice assembly. :-) - Maitani

Thank you Maitani. :-) - Amira

"Since the days of the ancient Greeks, scientists have wondered why the ear prefers harmony. Now, scientists suggest that the reason may go deeper than an aversion to the way clashing notes abrade auditory nerves; instead, it may lie in the very structure of the ear and brain, which are designed to respond to the elegantly spaced structure of a harmonious sound. (...) If the chord is harmonic, or “consonant,” the notes are spaced neatly enough so that the individual fibers of the auditory nerve carry specific frequencies to the brain. By perceiving both the parts and the harmonious whole, the brain responds to what scientists call harmonicity. (...)" - Amira

“Beating is the textbook explanation for why people don’t like dissonance, so our study is the first real evidence that goes against this assumption” (...)“It suggests that consonance rests on the perception of harmonicity, and that, when questioning the innate nature of these preferences, one should study harmonicity and not beating.” (...) “Sensitivity to harmonicity is important in everyday life, not just in music,” he notes. For example, the ability to detect harmonic components of sound allows people to identify different vowel sounds, and to concentrate on one conversation in a noisy crowd." - Amira

See also: Listen: The Music of a Human Brain http://www.wired.com/wiredsc... - Amira

“The Algorithm's coming-of-age as the new language of science promises to be the most disruptive scientific development since quantum mechanics. (...) Computer is a storyteller and algorithms are its tales. (...) Computing is the meeting point of three powerful concepts: universality, duality, and self-reference. In the modern era, this triumvirate has bowed to the class-conscious influence of the tractability creed. The creed's incessant call to complexity class warfare has, in turn, led to the emergence of that ultimate class leveler: the Algorithm. Today, not only is this new “order” empowering the e-technology that stealthily rules our lives; it is also challenging what we mean by knowing, believing, trusting, persuading, and learning. No less. Some say the Algorithm is poised to become the new New Math, the idiom of modern science." - Amira

"Danish artist Peter Callesen creates these extraordinary papercraft sculptures from single sheets of white A4. Sez he: “By taking away all the information and starting from scratch using the blank white A4 paper sheet for my creations, I feel I have found a material that we are all able to relate to, and at the same time the A4 paper sheet is neutral and open to fill with different meaning. The thin white paper gives the paper sculptures a frailty that underlines the tragic and romantic theme of my works. The paper cut sculptures explore the probable and magical transformation of the flat sheet of paper into figures that expand into the space surrounding them. The negative and absent 2 dimensional space left by the cut, points out the contrast to the 3 dimensional reality it creates, even though the figures still stick to their origin without the possibility of escaping. In that sense there is also an aspect of something tragic in many of the cuts.” - Amira

"Brain Power: From Neurons to Networks is a 10-minute film and an accompanying TED Book. Based on new research on how to best nurture children’s brains from Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child and University of Washington’s I-LABS, the film explores the parallels between a child’s brain development and the development of the global brain of Internet, offering insights into the best ways to shape both. The film and TEDBook launched at the California Academy of Sciences on November 8, 2012." http://bit.ly/QCcAnn - Amira

"What is the genesis of Funes the Memorious, the Jorge Luis Borges story about a mnemonist that fascinates neuroscientists, and is as famed a fictional treatise on memory as anything but Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past? (...) Funes the Memorious” tells the vicissitudes of Ireneo Funes, a peasant from Fray Bentos, who after falling off a horse and hitting his head hard recovers consciousness with the incredible skill—or perhaps curse—of remembering absolutely everything. (...) Borges again plays with the infinite in a context no less fascinating: the vast labyrinths of memory and the consequences of having an unlimited capacity to remember. (...)" - Amira

"Borges argues that “Funes the Memorious” is a long metaphor of insomnia. In fact, toward the end of the story he mentions that Funes found sleeping difficult, because to sleep is to get distracted from the world. Borges gives more details on the way he conceived Funes during his own sleepless nights. (...) Imagine the most extreme example, a human being who does not possess the power to forget, who is damned to see becoming everywhere; such a human being would no longer believe in his own being, would no longer believe in himself, would see everything flow apart in turbulent particles, and would lose himself in this stream of becoming; like the true student of Heraclitus, in the end he would hardly even dare to lift a finger. All action requires forgetting, just as the existence of all organic things requires not only light, but darkness as well." - Amira