IdeaFestival

Dirk Brockmann on "money circulation science" - IF Conversations

How might the spread of human influenza be modeled? By tracking the movement of dollar bills in the United States, of course! In this IF Conversation, Dirk Brockmann, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Germany talks briefly about “Money-Circulation Science.”

Like the study of the spread of infection diseases, the application of physics concepts to biology and biological systems is the focus of wide inquiry. One book written for a mass audience that touches on biophysical concepts - as well as quite a number of others - is Robert Frenay's, Pulse.

See this clip and other brief video of IdeaFestival participants at IFTV.

Wayne

Spying on Eden

Herschel, a space-borne telescope that will use the far infrared wavelength to observe some of the deepest objects in the universe, has been assembled.

With its imaging equipment cooled to near absolute zero, the craft will be to detect the most distant and faintest heat from the origins of the universe. It will be launched along with Planck sometime later this year, and the two observation platforms, posted and operating independently at L2, will comprehensively look at cosmic microwave background radiation, observe galaxy formation and determine what theories about the origins of the universe might be correct.

So other than spying Eden, the mission pretty low key.

Wayne

Credits: ESA (Image by AOES Medialab)

Food Play is No Flash in the Pan

Okay, I might have been wearing a blindfold at the Idea Festival's Lights Out Dinner last week, but I wasn't blind to the possibilities it and those to come provide for parody or outright dismissal--dilettantes dining on delectables in the dark while the real world grapples with issues like the UN's warning of a coming "silent tsunami" of hunger. Worse, they open the Idea Festival up to charges of staging events that are about little more than the novelty they offer.

What, really, is the point of playing with our food?

Measuring innovation takes faith-based failure

Freakonomics recently asked several individuals to provide their take on on innovation - as in, how can a company measure innovation? On Friday, it published a number of their responses.

I was intrigued by one suggestion in particular.

Using the example of the digital camera, one contributor suggested that since truly innovative products are often worse at a launch than competing products, perhaps the key metric is failure. The key then is to fail fast, recognize and embrace risk taking - to fail forward, some failures align with the company vision and some do not - and to identify where new ideas originate. Are they coming from all levels of the organization?

Since truly innovative outcomes aren't generally known until well after the fact, that made some sense. But succeeding at failure during the interim takes another key attribute, faith.

Wayne

What are the digital literacies?

Initial results from one of the largest ethnographic studies of kids in their native, digital environment are now available. Could the cheap availability of media be creating a new generation of creatives?

Sure, kids have long been attracted to extracurricular activities like dance or sports. But researchers say digital media is bringing up a new generation who are creators of media rather than just passive consumers of it. Within these digital environments among peers, kids who create and evaluate media are deriving a sense of competence, autonomy, self-determination and connectedness, researchers say.

The case studies discussed last Wednesday are part of a $50 million long-range MacArthur Foundation initiative, the digital media and learning project, to study whether - and how - digital media might be changing kids. Full results will be available later in the year.

More on the results of this study can be found on C|NET.

Wayne

Podcast: Why fashion matters

IF continues to release great audio from the 2007 IdeaFestival.

The very latest podcast features New Zealand fashion designer Karen Walker discussing her creative process, design style and the meaning of fashion. Podcasts may be obtained directly via RSS or from iTunes.

Wayne

A science of consciousness? I doubt it.

If like me you really, truly, unhealthily enjoy reasoning about consciousness, the biennial Tucson Science of Consciousness get together has posted abstracts of presentations from its just-concluded conference. It was that conference and my discovery of David Chalmers' description of the "hard problem" of consciousness that got me interested in philosophy of mind in the first place, and I've since written about it here many, many times. If it's any consolation, I suffer just as much as you do.

At any rate, this ought to keep you busy for the next 24 months.

On Splintered Mind Eric Schwitzgebel describes his '08 Tuscon presentation and his doubts about the whole we'll-figure-it-out consciousness enterprise. If I understand his position correctly, brain science might eventually provide a truthful account of phenomenal experience, but subjective report is ultimately needed and those reports can be shown to be unreliable, as he has demonstrated through some experimentation.

Schwitzgebel offers a succinct explanation of this line of thought elsewhere on his blog.

Unlike natural and symbolic languages, which hold descriptive and predictive powers, your consciousness and mine is in direct contact the world, constantly editing reality so that it's intelligible and at some level, comprehensible. And unlike language, there are no one-to-one equivalences to be deployed in the conquest of matter, no clever formulas or stirring poetry to keep what's real at a manageable distance. Consciousness seeks meaning in a confrontation with everything, all at once.

This should boggle us. I'm not surprised that the mechanism itself should incomprehensible. And I too tend to think it will remain so.

Like I said, I enjoy this stuff.

Reading these words on your computer screen, you're probably aware of a certain phenomenal experience of your own. Something like 'wow!" And by "wow!" you're thinking that "Wayne has just had another one of his crap-tasm's!"

Says you.

I wouldn't know what you mean.

Wayne

Playground architecture teaches "leaps and boundaries"

Not that my two children need any encouragement to swing on the Jungle Jim, but designing playgrounds to encourage that extra leap and to make failure a part of play certainly expand this parent's perspective about what's happening amid the giggles and shouts. Playgrounds teach life lessons.

Wayne

Missed opportunities: venture capitalist lists "anti-portfolio"

How many successful companies were initially turned away by venture capitalists who at the time couldn't quite see the business case? Displaying good humor about its mistakes, Bessemer Venture Partners lists its "anti-portfolio," companies like Apple and Google on which it took a pass.   

Hat tip: Freakonomics blog

Wayne

Hawking: unintelligent life likely

Participating in NASA's celebration of 50 years of space exploration, famed physicist Stephen Hawking suggested that life in the universe might be common. Intelligent life? Not so much. 

Given the organic stew brewing in places elsewhere in our own solar system, the possibility that bacteria and other primitive life forms have managed to gain a foothold in hostile environments doesn't seem at all far-fetched. The expoplanet count, now 200+ strong, continues to expand; there is no reason to believe that ongoing refinements in discovery techniques won't quickly send the number of new planets much, much higher.

Surely there is another rocky world orbiting a distant sun in the Goldilocks zone.

And we also know that so-called "extromophiles" with no access to sunlight have managed to make a home near very hot sulphuric vents in the deepest parts of the Atlantic. Opportunistic, life would appear to have both means and opportunity - on Earth and off.

Wayne

Wikipedia: extremophile, exoplanetololgy