IdeaFestival

Finding America in Main St.

In a post yesterday, IdeaFestival 2006 and 2007 participant Ethan Zuckerman blogged about a new media project, "Mapping Main Street," which is documenting a history of the United States using its 10,466 "main streets."

Of the many listed reasons for the project, this one appealed. Ethan:

[Harvard PhD student] James [Burns], trained as an economist, argues that a belief in causal relationships leads to a reductive understanding of data, data as a descriptor of cause. By playing with a data set 'that no sane economist would ever be interested in,' James hopes to understand data in a more complex, less reductive fashion.  

The group accepts submissions to its Main Street Flickr pool, according to Ethan. The collaboration was also featured on NPR's Weekend Edition in August.

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 

Richard Kogan: Mozart's Genius

Scheduled to play and discuss Tchaikovsky at the upcoming IdeaFestival in Louisville, Kentucky, distinguished concert pianist and psychiatrist Richard Kogan describes Mozart's genius in this IdeaFestival Conversation filmed in September, 2008.

Discounted All-Access Passes for the IdeaFestival are available through Sunday, after which full price all-access, day and individual event passes will be available. 

Wayne

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

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

Evidence: Ancient Mars may have had oceans

Saying the issue is how long, not whether, Mars had water, the Bad Astronomer himself, Phil Plait, goes on to suggest that the issue has relevance for our own planet:

It may have once been much more Earth-like, but then something went wrong. Maybe it was the formation of the giant volcanoes (indicated by the red arrows in the above image), or the loss of its magnetic field that exposed its atmosphere to erosion by the solar wind. As we study Mars more, we get closer to figuring this out. And make no mistake: knowing where Mars went wrong gives us great insight into our own planet. If you think we’re wasting money on researching Mars, then I suggest you take a cold, hard look at that cold, hard planet, then look out your window at our own home world.

The news is here. Seas, perhaps, in the areas of this picture where red and yellow predominate.

Image credit: University of Arizona

Wayne

Bloomberg: "Black Swan" principles save investors

[Cross-posted from iMedia Kentucky] In today's market, out-sized market moves can be devastating to the <throat clearing> average investor </throat clearing>. IdeaFestival speaker Nassim Nicholas Taleb was recently featured in a Bloomberg article, explaining how his ideas about the improbable have helped investors avoid - and profit from - the extreme market swings of late.

Bloomberg:

Taleb's book argues that history is littered with high-impact rare events known in quantitative finance as 'fat tails.' As the founder of New York-based Empirica LLC, a hedge- fund firm he ran for six years before closing it in 2004, Taleb built a strategy based on options trading to bullet-proof investors from market blowups while profiting from big rallies.

Mark Spitznagel, Taleb's former trading partner, opened Universa [where Taleb is an adviser] last year using some of the same strategies they'd run since 1999....

'The Black Swan Protection Protocol is designed to break even 90 to 95 percent of the time,' Spitznagel said. 'We happen to be in that other 5 to 10 percent environment.'

Interested readers may find Taleb's book, "The Black Swan," in the right sidebar of the blog.

Wayne

Wikipedia: quantitiative finance

A Biology of Altruism

Lee Dugatkin is a professor at the University of Louisville and the author of "The Altruism Equation," who has been researching the nature of goodness in people and animals alike for 20 years.

As an aside, he says he feels like a kid in the conceptual candy store (my paraphrase), saying "that everywhere he looks, there's an idea he likes." He urges the audience to tell everyone they know about what's happening in Louisville.

(Photo credit: Geoff Oliver Bugbee / www.geoffbugbee.com)

"In all good adventures, there is a mystery." In this case it's the question, "what is the nature of altruism?"

He'll be sharing one main idea from his field, evolutionary biology.

Showing a video of a squirrel alarming his neighbors to the predator nearby, he rhetorically asks why the squirrel exposes himself to danger for the benefit of other squirrels. If evolution is the tale of survival, why has this self-sacrificing behavior emerged?

Altruism is not restricted to mammals, he suggests. Even slime mold, single celled creatures, cluster together to form a slug in times of peril and move as one.

He shows a video of the production of "fruiting bodies" in slime mold in which other slime-mold "stalks" ladder themselves, which, crucially, will not allow themselves to reproduce, so that the rest of the might survive - even though there is no nervous system, no brain, it's an altruistic act.

In Darwin's Origin of Species, the problem of altruism is one of the problems Darwin struggled most with. Why, for example, does the Honey Bee sting kill the bee? How could evolution, Dugatkin asks, develop a trait that, "when expressed, you die?" The answer, he suggests is that the bee is protecting the hive, its "blood relatives."

The Rise and Fall of Hyperpowers by Amy Chua

Amy Chua, a Harvard-educated and Yale-employed author and professor, walked through the characteristics of the world's hyperpowers with a thesis that helps to identify the common threads that course through the most successful empires from antiquity to modern times. Her key hypothesis: tolerance and pluralism accelerate the rise; intolerance and xenophobia expedite the decline.

One may not think of the slash-and-burn Mongols or the you-will-be assimilated Romans as the most 'tolerant' civilizations in history, so Chua points out that tolerance in its philosophical essence means simply: a sense of openness with respect to integrating the best innovations, ideas and socio-ethnic intricacies in an effort to be at the forefront of technological, military and economic frontiers.

The world's most valuable human capital is and never will be relegated to a single ethnic, social or geographic group: tolerance brings the best and brightest together. The colonial British - another example cited in Chua's thesis - and their affinity for marginalizing other cultures they encountered in India and Africa seem to be the antithesis of tolerance.  Chua points out, however, that the British were wise to let many types of people live, work and contribute to society even if the sphere of influence of British rule remained largely subjugatory.

Welcoming multiple and various ideas, tactics, customs from the far reaches of a civilization's populace make tolerance a strategic imperative in building an empire.

While we learned much more about the interesting characteristics of her example civilizations, the audience's curiosity seemed to turn quickly toward the parallels observed between the United States and her comparisons of other successful hyperpowers.  What made the U.S. such a hotbed for innovation, economic and military might?

In short, the constitutional mandates of freedom, self-expression, and laisez-faire enterprise.

Despite some notable hypocrisy, the United States has long benefited from the contributions of a large immigrant pool from which the world's best doers and dreamers blended their religious, cultural, technical and creative ingredients. The U.S. only came to be a hyperpower, as defined by Chua, after World War II when true freedoms and tolerance were granted. Some might argue we still have more to do.

The United States in the 21st century faces the fundamental problem as all other hyperpowers have in the past: find ways to create the 'glue' or common identity between disparate segments. Rome could assimilate defeated peoples into Roman citizens and thereby grant the accompanying privileges. Vastly different peoples could be Romanized without suffering too greatly. 

The U.S., however, is governed as democracy, so it does not subjugate the foreign constituents into  our sphere of influence. From Nicaragua to Iraq, many millions of people live in the shadow of the U.S. foreign policy or influence, but the U.S. does not assimilate them into democratic system.

The million dollar question to prevent the decline of our hyperpower status: Can the US assign or create a singular identity across all these elements of influence?

Chua leaves us with a poignant quip: The United States can remain a hyperpower when it stops trying so hard to be one. 

Will the E.U. or China become the next hyperpower?  Chua opines that they will both continue to grow, expand, and develop economically, but they may not become hyperpowers themselves due to the current inability to welcome the world's best and brightest talent like the U.S. with the rigid religious and societal constraints. 

If you'd like to learn more about the the rise and fall of hyperpowers and where emerging cultures and nations might fit into the mold, I'd encourage you to check out her book: Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance - and Why They Fall

- nick huhn

All Doped up and Thinking ahead

SEED editor Jonah Lehrer, who will be at the IdeaFestival in September, has written often and thoughtfully about the wonders of the human brain in his blog, Frontal Cortex, and in particular - my favorite topic - about how we as sense-making beings can - or cannot - know.

In his latest full length article, "New State of Mind," Lehrer again connects knowing to biology, describing research linking dopamine to pleasure and to a host of social behaviors that result, from simple disappointment to stock market bubbles.

Connecting pleasure to understanding is one reason play in general, and game design in particular, has emerged as a valuable economic and intellectual pursuit. He should really sit down at IF and have a long discussion with alternative reality game designer Jane McGonigal, who will also attend.

Read Montague is director of the Human Neuroimaging Lab at Baylor College of Medicine, and collaborates with Peter Dayan of the Salk Institute. More than discovering the link between pleasure and understanding, current neurology goes further and demonstrates how we use the resulting that data to extend that understanding.

Lehrer:

The crucial feature of these dopamine neurons, say Montague and Dayan, is that they are more concerned with predicting rewards than with the rewards themselves. Once the cells memorize the simple pattern — a loud tone predicts the arrival of juice — they become exquisitely sensitive to variations on the pattern. If the cellular predictions proved correct and the primates experienced a surge of dopamine, the prediction was reinforced. However, if the pattern was violated — if the tone sounded but the juice never arrived — then the monkey’s dopamine neurons abruptly decreased their firing rate. This is known as the “prediction error signal.” The monkey got upset because its predictions of juice were wrong.

What’s interesting about this system is that it’s all about expectation. Dopamine neurons constantly generate patterns based upon experience: If this, then that. The cacophony of reality is distilled into models of correlation.

"Models of correlation" are only a couple of sentences away from something else. On this reading, story takes those correlative values and arranges them in a meaningful way. 

Story is the human-readable data we pull around our shoulders on a cold winter night when things haven't gone as expected. When the doctor has bad news. Or when we watch a loved one slipping toward the unknown.

Alternatively, it can map how we might overcome impossible odds to reach previously unattainable goals, or, thoughtfully conceived, take us to places and people that thrill and make life worth the living. Story can get the past wrong. But it can also get the future oh so right.

Wayne