IdeaFestival

When the world maps us

Referencing a Wired UK article on "ultra mapping,"  Nokia's head of interface design, Adam Greenfield, stakes a claim to some pretty rich epistemological territory. Maps that dynamically pinpoint us render more than another coordinate or elevation. No, they are much more illustrious:

[A]ll those routinely gorgeous renderings of subway ridership or crime or air quality imply something very different when you can either find yourself within their ambit or cannot. At its rawest, the suggestion is this: either these issues affect me, or they do not. And this is true even if what is being mapped is a purely historical event. The implication is there, however faint.

Wayne

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/collectivenouns/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

"Skinput"

Based on a method of registering internal acoustics, watch what happens when human skin becomes the input device.

Our minds are of course always processing environmental data and coming up with disproportionate responses - the coo of a swaddled baby often triggers those feelings and that sheltering embrace - so this method of taking external information and calculating a logical response is, to me, not unnatural. We've had a very, very long time to come to terms with environmental signals, and given the enormous flood of new data being created every day, the instinctive surface of our skin is as a good a place as any for appointing those previously hidden cues.

Some have referred to it as a sixth sense.

Wayne

Wikipedia: prosthesis

Build a quantum computer to understand a quantum system

Wryly suggesting that "physicists have a problem," a team from the University of Queensland and Harvard have worked together to build a working quantum computer, which has successfully calculated the precise energy of molecular hydrogen. The achievement opens up a range of practical applications in fields such as computing (of course), cryptography and materials science. "If it is computationally too complex to simulate a quantum system using a classical computer, why not simulate quantum systems with another quantum system?" one of the researchers suggested. Well since you put it that way.

More on this achievement may be found at the University of Queensland and Harvard.

Wayne

Wikipedia: Quantum chemistry

Turning away the Search People

The suggestion by Rupert Murdoch that he may prevent Google from indexing his news properties, including the Wall Street Journal, has lately been newsworthy. While the old model of charging for content may be irretrievably broken, it's far from clear what might replace that lost income since news retailers have struggled to profit from the time and expense of journaling. On the other hand, Google has certainly profited, leaving Murdoch to wonder if the money is under new ownership and what he might do about it. The Big Think mulls it over:

But, as Murdoch realizes, the content they produce is worth something, and they do have some leverage. While the traffic that search engines like Google generate for websites is valuable, Murdoch is right to point out that 'search people' —people who come to websites by way of a search engine—are not as valuable as regular subscribers because they spend relatively little time on the sites they visit. At the same time the right to index those sites is worth something to the search engines, whose ads sales depend on them having comprehensive and useful results. It's certainly worth something to Bing, the search engine Microsoft hopes will rival Google, to have exclusive access to the content News Corp. can provide. And since News Corp. is making so little money off the revenue generated by search-engine traffic, Murdoch can, as Jarvis Coffin argues, plausibly say they will do without it, instead focusing on higher-value regular users. Unless, that is, the search engines are willing to share some of their revenues with him.

Wayne

Taking off the Starshades

Writing in SEED Lee Billings (@LeeBillings on Twitter) points out how we might directly image planets in other solar systems. Although more than 400 have been discovered in the only the past fifteen years through a variety of techniques - and Kepler promises to turn up Earth-size worlds in the next couple of years - direct imaging of other bodies that might support life hasn't yet happened. Technology that would filter out the starlight that hides the accompanying bodies we know are there is, however, available and could be used in the next decade. It brings up this question.

How would direct imaging of a terrestrial world in a water-friendly orbit around its star affect those of us on this world?

Wayne

Marjorie Garber - The Shakespeare Moment

Marjorie Garber takes the stage to speak to the relevance of Shakespeare to modern culture. Her latest book, she says, is a deeply personal book, and she connects his plays to contemporary thought in the past 150 years or so in rapid fire. 

Fortunately, there will not be an exam following this lecture. 

Great works are never static, and the spinoffs many. "Shakespeare makes modern culture, and modern culture makes Shakespeare." It's this crossing between the two halves that sums up for her the whole of her comments today. 

His plays are not timeless, but "are always adapted to the current moment and its concerns." 

In one of many, many specific examples that follow, she points out that Macbeth was Abraham Lincoln's favorite play; it was the work he read on his entrance, figuratively and literally, into Washington, the place that would eventually take his life. 

She notes broadly that theatre-about-theatre has extends beyond the film of Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, for example. This meta-narrative is correlative to a pervasive modern feeling by many that we are stuck in a play from which there is no exit. 

Using the character of Shylock and many others, she illustrates how we all too often read back into Shakespeare what we would have him say. The retelling of the tragedies, for example, are politically advantageous, not historically accurate.

"We have a cultural compulsion to repeat" what captures the moment.

Leadership institutes and business books now use his plays as veritable case studies, to which she responds rhetorically, "how can something be simultaneously a case study and a singular example?"   

She also recounts how the young schoolboy Shakespeare profited from a moment in English history that was rediscovering classic texts, and he could, thanks to the press, get his hands on those texts - as well as the Bible - for reading. 

It's perhaps appropriate then that in responding to a question about the authorship question, she does not dwell on who else might have been the author, but on the intense fascination with question itself. But no matter, she concludes. It is the plays themselves that are ultimately the thing. They are not injured.

Wayne 

There's an app for THAT?

Wired: Coming to the aid of archeologists and linguists, a computational tool used to map dynamic systems may have cracked one of the mysteries behind 4,000 year old symbols some believed were merely pictures from a long lost Indus Valley civilization.

The software may uncovered a previously unknown spoken language.

Wayne

Economic ivory tower badly cracked

Having completely failed to anticipate the global economic meltdown, academic macro-economists have run headlong into "intellectual insolvency", according to Justin Wolfers at Freakonomics.

For far too long, they've relied on elegant theory instead of empirically grounded data. He is, however, hopeful that economists will be able to exit a bankruptcy of their own.  

As a whole, the economics profession has become more empirically grounded. New large datasets offer the prospect of truly understanding individual behavior in a way that paying lip service to “micro-founded models” doesn’t. Many are engaged in the tricky business of writing more psychologically grounded models that are closely tied to real human behavior. Computational advances allow us now to take differences in people, and how they respond, far more seriously. The absence of available data doesn’t necessarily require more complex theory; we are also learning how better to measure the objects we model.

Wayne

Kentucky to fly spacecraft

Put your glasses down. You read that right. National Public Radio's local affiliate, WEKU, devoted some radio time yesterday to a piece on Kentucky Space. Click here to stream it.

A spacecraft designed and built by a public, private consortium in the commonwealth has been selected for a NASA mission in June, 2009. It will mark the first time the agency has flown university built satellites to orbit.

Wayne