IdeaFestival

Breaking: The Internet is good for something

As it turns out, everybody holds a piece to the puzzle.

Building a platform that loosely organized the successful hunt for ten hidden balloons across the United States, Riley Crane recently appeared on Colbert to describe how collective intelligence won a prize offered by DARPA. The agency - no doubt feeling sheepish about its role in bringing the Internet to life - wanted to know forty years later how the Web might be used to solve real problems.

It took eight hours to find all of the balloons.

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Hat tip: MacArthur Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning

Wayne

"Every breakthrough seems impossible - until it happens"

Louisville's Keith Robbins filmed this panel featuring philosopher Sandy Goldberg, architect Emiliano Gandolfi, game designer Jane McGonigal and the artistic director for Diavolo, Jacques Heim at the 2008 IdeaFestival discussing breakthroughs, the importance of failure and their sources of creativity. In addition to some great conversation, this ten minute video features a favorite quote of mine.

Wayne

Fishing for extremophiles

In contrast to the mesophiles - that would be you and me! - that live in the temperate climes that prevail over most of our world, what life forms may lie in the dark hidden lakes of the Antarctic? Nature:

Over the past 40 years, radar imagery has revealed around 150 freshwater lakes of various sizes and ages beneath the massive Antarctic ice sheet. Some have been isolated from the outside world for millions of years, raising the possibility that they hold unique life forms. The dark, nutrient-deprived environment of the lakes could resemble conditions on Jupiter's moon Europa, which is assumed to hold a large ocean beneath its frozen surface.

Three projects designed to carefully sample the lakes, at least one of which is as large as Lake Ontario, will happen beginning next year. Hat tip: Alan Boyle

Wayne

Wikipedia: extremophile

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/30685567@N03/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Dry Moon, barren idea: "Millions of tons" of water ice discovered

The Moon is dry, barren place of little consequence.

Not so fast.

Finding "more than 40 small craters with water ice," a NASA radar, Mini-SAR, that flew aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft has confirmed the presence of substantial water ice deposits, perhaps as much as 600 million metric tons, enough to sustain a moon base or, if the oxygen were converted to fuel, to power rockets for thousands of years.

Those permanently shadowed crater walls haven't seen sunlight in billions of years and are as cold as the surface of Pluto.

'The emerging picture from the multiple measurements and resulting data of the instruments on lunar missions indicates that water creation, migration, deposition and retention are occurring on the moon,' said Paul Spudis, principal investigator of the Mini-SAR experiment at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. 'The new discoveries show the moon is an even more interesting and attractive scientific, exploration and operational destination than people had previously thought.'

The NASA news release is here.

These results follow the work of a mission late last year that crashed a rocket hull into a cold, dark crater. Orbiting craft analyzed the ejected plume of material, which strongly suggested the presence of water ice on the moon’s surface.

Wayne

Image source: NASA

"There are endless ways to be irrational"

What would highways look like if they were designed by economists?

First of all, there would be no shoulder at the side of the road, because why would you ever pave something where nobody is supposed to drive anyway? And those raised ‘bubble lines’ that indicate to a driver that he is leaving his lane? Why would you need those either, because people know they are supposed to drive within the lines. Indeed, we might not have any lanes or speed limits, because why restrict people like that? What I am describing is a situation in which you assume that people are perfectly rational beings who know what they are doing, so you build-in no room for error. While this is an extreme example, this is the basic idea of perfect economic rationality.

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, author of the book, Predictably Irrational, contrasts the role of rationality in economic theory with real-world decision-making in the Forbes India piece linked above.

Hat tip: Putting People First.

Wayne

Louisville to host Star Stryder

Noted astronomer Pamela Gay will be in Louisville on Friday, April 2 to talk about the discovery of hundreds of new worlds, the possibility of finding life as well as another Earth, and the emergence of "citizen scientists," a bottom-up movement of people contributing their time and clock cycles to advancing the science in fields as diverse as ornithology, particle physics and, through projects like Galaxy Zoo, astronomy.

Pamela Gay is well known and very active in the astronomical and science community, and blogs under the pseudonym "Star Stryder," where the IdeaFestival first encountered her. You may also follow Pamela @starstryder on Twitter.

She also answered "Five Questions" in a 2008 email interview posted elsewhere on the IdeaFestival blog that you might find interesting.

More information about her April appearance will be forthcoming, so mark that date on your calendar. And for the very latest, follow us @ideafestival on Twitter.

Wayne

Video: E.O. Wilson on Human Nature

Famed biologist, entomologist and colleague of 2009 presenter and behavioral biologist Bert Hölldobler, E. O. Wilson is featured in this video from SEED. In it, he offers a definition of behavioral biology, a subject addressed as well at the 2008 IdeaFestival by University of Louisville professor and author of the "Altruism Equation" and, more recently, "Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose," Lee Dugatkin.

"There is such a thing," as he says, as "human nature."

This seemingly common sense idea idea was in direct opposition to much 20th century thinking (that sounds so long ago!) that the human mind was a blank slate, or the view that humans are born without any built in mental content, that all knowledge came from an individual's experience of the world. Of course, "human nature" is an old idea idea to followers of the monotheistic faiths, but, as described by Wilson, the serious study of its biological roots has contributed - in fact, made possible - subsequent studies in behavioral economics.

It's a moving portrait of one of the towering figure in the recent history of science.

Wayne

How much, or little, would a second Earth look like ours?

[Cross-posted from Kentucky Space] In this video Sixty Symbols explains the technique Kepler is using to look for evidence of second Earth's transiting their host stars in the Milky Way, and the clever way in which the radius of our own was calculated. Given the reference to the "Nerf" planet recently pinpointed by Kepler, the video has only recently been filmed.

In the 15 years since the discovery of the first extrasolar planet, 424 have been discovered, and current and planned observatories are adding to that list at a rapid pace.

Wayne

Richard Florida: Creativity, the fundamental business force

Describing how he arrived at the idea of a "creative class" and placing it in economic and historical context, Richard Florida talks about the fundamental economic force reshaping modern economies today - an ability to innovate, or to add creative value based, in part, on mental alacrity and a certain social IQ, but more importantly, in a larger willingness to view people as a potential to be maximized instead of costs to be minimized. Put another way, while it's certainly true that many agricultural or industrial activities can and will continue to provide jobs, today it's human creativity that is adding wealth.

A link to a text summary may be found here.
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