IdeaFestival

Lee Alan Dugatkin, Altruism and the Giant Moose

Dr. Lee Alan Dugatkin, a professor of Biology at the University of Louisville, has been doing research on the evolution of goodness in humans and non-humans for the last twenty years. As he points out here and in his 2008 IdeaFestival presentation, altruistic behavior can be found throughout the animal kingdom. His forthcoming book, "Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose" is a tale of both natural and American history and will be the subject of talk planned for IF'09.

Wayne

The economics of trust

Like the biology of happiness and perspective-taking, the economics of trust is another of those cross-over studies with an important human dimension. How important? Quoting from a Tim Harford column in Forbes, Jonah Lehrer blogs that trust could be "responsible for the difference between the richest countries and the poorest".

Recalling a study that recorded the brain activity of subjects playing an economic game that rewarded trust, Lehrer points out that based on the results of the game, trust is also an observed mental calculation, "an expectation of reward" rooted in areas of the brain that, not coincidentally, play a role in addiction and the anticipation of pleasure. The bottom line: it's rewards, not glib economic or policy promises, that build trust.

And this: past performance is no guarantee of future results.   

Wayne

Jonah Lehrer

The Future of Money

Stowe Boyd has begun a new series on the future of money that interviews a variety of people about what makes for an effective currency. Dull? Hardly. The lineup of interview subjects looks perfectly normal - if you've ever attended an IdeaFestival. Boyd:

I am launching a new interview series examining the future of money. I plan to be talking with all sorts of people: artists (like today's Christian Nold), futurists (like Jamais Cascio), writers (Bruce Sterling interview later this week, and Steven Berlin Johnson in the near future), economists, philanthropists, and all sorts of other people interested in where this is headed.

Having grown from about 100 to over 4,000, "complimentary currencies" could be one future.

Boyd also interviews Christian Nold, an artist, who, like former IdeaFestival speaker and physicist Dirk Brockmann, experiments with money-as-media. To demonstrate our social and emotional connection to it, Nold tracks our biological and emotional responses to create an "emotional cartography".

Check out the series if you get the chance.

Hat tip: Putting People First

Wayne

currency , money, Stowe Boyd

Street Farmer, Will Allen

Recipient of a MacArthur Foundation genius grant, "street farmer" and IdeaFestival participant this year, Will Allen was recently featured in New York Times. Check this out:

Like others in the so-called good-food movement, Allen, who is 60, asserts that our industrial food system is depleting soil, poisoning water, gobbling fossil fuels and stuffing us with bad calories. Like others, he advocates eating locally grown food. But to Allen, local doesn’t mean a rolling pasture or even a suburban garden: it means 14 greenhouses crammed onto two acres in a working-class neighborhood on Milwaukee’s northwest side, less than half a mile from the city’s largest public-housing project.

And this is why Allen is so fond of his worms. When you’re producing a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of food in such a small space, soil fertility is everything. Without microbe- and nutrient-rich worm castings (poop, that is), Allen’s Growing Power farm couldn’t provide healthful food to 10,000 urbanites — through his on-farm retail store, in schools and restaurants, at farmers’ markets and in low-cost market baskets delivered to neighborhood pickup points. He couldn’t employ scores of people, some from the nearby housing project; continually train farmers in intensive polyculture; or convert millions of pounds of food waste into a version of black gold.

Discounted All-Access passes are on sale now for IdeaFestival '09. The first 85 to purchase them will get the chance to meet with another food critic, Anthony Bourdain.

Wayne

Will Allen

"What's very dangerous is not to evolve"

In touting his new hit product, Kindle, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos may indeed be channeling his inner Steve Jobs. The device could do for text what the iPod has done for music. But there's a much bigger lesson to be learned, according to Fast Company, which offers a description of the future of books that pits the two biggest media titans against each other in an ever-evolving digital landscape. Except for consumers there are no winners - yet. It may even be early in the game. But "what's very dangerous," Bezos concludes, "is not to evolve."

Wayne

Coding deception

If chess is the measure of the mind, what's an artificially intelligent machine have to do to be considered a human equal? After all, in 1997 machine defeated former grandmaster Garry Kasparov using brute computation, and AI has since conquered draughts, Othello, backgammon and Scrabble according to the Financial Times article, "Machines that can outwit the smartest brains." Though the mind doesn't, obviously and thankfully, use strict logic, coding rules-based actions has become sufficiently advanced that the best human players of tactical board and card games have fallen prey to cleverly coded synthetic intelligence. Only the human play at the ancient game of Go remains unconquered.

AI is clearly making progress.

Ever since HAL was sonorously creeping out everyone in the theater, we've had this tendency to move the goalposts to avoid the idea that an artificial intelligence might someday match our wetware. "It is," the main organic character in the FT piece says, "whatever computers can't do yet."

If that's the case, then I wonder if coding deception might be the last synthetic frontier.

Wayne

Buying the footnotes

Holding out while newspapers are suffering major financial hardship, books, in terms of people willing to pay for ink-on-paper, have so far bucked the digital tide. But any concern for their future would be better spent on the future of reading, according to Clive Thompson. He makes this point in Wired:

Books have a centuries-old tradition of annotation and commentary, ranging from the Talmud and scholarly criticism to book clubs and marginalia. [Alan] Stein believes that if books were set free digitally, it could produce a class of 'professional readers'—people so insightful that you'd pay to download their footnotes. Sound unlikely? It already exists in the real world: Microsoft researcher Cathy Marshall has found that university students carefully study used textbooks before buying them, because they want to acquire the smartest notes.

Hat tip: Putting People First

Wayne

SEED: Did cooking make us human?

By making more calories available for digestion, did cooking make us human? A new book speculates that the practice of heating food resulted in some pretty grim anthropological consequences - like marriage.

Wayne

Sensual science in the AlloSphere

There are some numbers that can only be known by experiencing them. Mentioned here a few weeks ago, visualcomplexity points out the the conceptual scale of the AlloSphere, a visual simulator the size of a large building designed for projects that overwhelm traditional computing environments. And therein lies the key difference: You don't just watch processes on screen, you engage them from the inside. Visualcomplexity:

Scientifically, it is an instrument for gaining insight and developing bodily intuition about environments into which the body cannot venture: abstract, higher-dimensional information spaces, the worlds of the very small or very large, and the realms of the very fast or very slow, in fields ranging from nanotechnology to theoretical physics, from proteomics to cosmology, from neurophysiology to the spaces of consciousness, and from new materials to new media.

A TED video on the ambitious project is here. What, one of its creators asks, might be discovered if a team of physicists could stand inside the atom?

Wayne

Allosphere

For idealists, a Memorial weekend cookout

Warning: some of these ideas may need to be chewed thoroughly. Have a great Memorial Day weekend!

• Musicians remember better.
• I wouldn't mind working here: Alex Soojung-Kim Pang blogs an evening at experimental media and marketing firm Obscura Digital.
• The difference between explained and explained away is important to how we feel about the subject at hand, and is the subject of this post at The Splintered Mind.
• Cosmic Log provides an update on retrocausality experiment Washington physicist John Cramer has been trying to pull off in support of his transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics.
• Not to be maudlin, but when it comes to the best ideas we complete each other. It's true.
• From Freakonomics, this sounds like a parody: "Search giant, search thyself"
• Fantastic crews-eye view of the release of the Hubble after repair - in HD, no less!
• When it comes to global climate change, will science alone save us? Where are the anthropologists and sociologists?
• "Edge economist" Umair Haque: Is this the end of business as we know it?
• Two rival teams are locked in race to discover other Earth-like worlds. SEED has the story.
• Here's a question I'm sure you'll ask this weekend: Is the basis for reality grounded in information or quantum mechanics?
• Numbers that matter: Swivel graphs the amount of 1Q money spent by industry associations lobbying legislators on health care legislation.
• And finally, does recess improve classroom behavior?

Wayne