IdeaFestival

Depression changes how we see the world

Sufferers from depression are more likely to focus on the big picture:

People who have suffered from major depression are significantly better than other people at seeing a metaphorical forest, while the non-depressed are more alert to the trees, according to this study published a few months back in The Journal of Neuroscience... The paper suggests that depression isn't just a disease of emotion and thought--that it also alters perception.

Full post at the Big Think is here.

Wayne

"Sketch furniture," or performance manufacturing

When an action as simple as tracing an object in the air can result in a manufactured piece of furniture, the wall separating virtual and physical reality becomes a little less relevant. The words "thinkering" and "performance manufacturing" leap to mind.

Or for any Trek fans out there, how about "Earl Grey, hot"?

Wayne

Chess intelligence, a 1,000 year song and the "Calculus of Friendship"

Links from my feed reader today:

• Former world champion, Garry Kasperov describes what kind of intelligence it takes to master chess.
• What might your speech intonations be telling the listener? Empathy is like music to the ears.
• "An infinite piece repeating every thousand years," the 1,000 year song by Longplayer has now been making music for over 10 years. You can listen here.
• TierneyLab discusses how monkeys and humans tend to rationalize their choices.
• Inferred only over large cosmological distances, could dark energy be detected in the lab?
• Two of the most supple thinkers about information and networking, Ethan Zuckerman and David Weinberger, blog Georgetown law professor Julie Cohen's recent presentation to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The video is here.
• It takes "quite a lot of phonological awareness to turn 'l8r' into 'homework' or 'hmwrk'". How does texting affect learning?
• Hunkering down for the planet's winter, has the Martian rover Spirit become a lander after five years?
• The secret to happiness could be an hourly wage.
• What do physicists dream - and worry - about?
• SEED writes about the poignant relationship between math teacher and pupil documented in the new book, "The Calculus of Friendship." You can listen to one exchange in this recording.
• The image above taken by the robotic explorer Cassini is of the Saturn moon Tethys appearing behind Titan. The atmosphere of a very hydrologically active Titan can clearly be seen. Click to enlarge.

Wayne

Image credit: Cassini Imaging Team, ISS, JPL, ESA, NASA

Civilization survival tool

Is the "speculative fiction" found in Sci-Fi a civilization survival tool?

Wayne

Congressional legislation an avalanche

How is Congressional legislation like an avalanche? There are some obvious differences between thinking, reflective members of Congress and a non-thinking physical system (I know, it's a stretch), but a pair of researchers have modeled how legislation gains co-sponsors, and it turns out that it "can be accurately simulated by the avalanches that occur when grains of sand are dropped onto each other to form a pile."

At least for the legislation being studied, the pattern is similar to the Devil's staircase.

As suggested by the physics arXiv blog at Technology Review, the next step might be to replace members with actual grains of sand.

Wayne

Tidying up conversation

Johnnie Moore connects the art of Jackson Pollock to his practice of facilitation, which reminded me of this very, very funny video of Ursus Wehrli "tidying up art" (and having his own Jackson Pollock moment) so that it's understandable. Straightening up messy art as well as honest conversation can be no improvement at all.

Wayne

Writing Eden's music to a wall

Similar in concept if not execution to the Allosphere, the light sculpture in front of the Niels Bohr Institute takes live data from the work being done at the Large Hadron Collider and writes it to the side of a building. Think allegory.

According to the English language version of the "Colliderscope" page,

What you see on the front face of the Institute is a transmission of particle collision as they are seen by one of the accelerator's four detectors. The signal is reproduced with a broad spectrum of tones and varied impact strength as if the accelerator was a kind of giant musical instrument. Maybe you can see the work as a kind of visual translation of the music that sounded at the birth of the Universe.

"A kind of visual translation of the music that sounded at the birth of the Universe?" I like that. For a fuller description of the sculpture and the how data is being passed to it, see this page. Hat tip: Symmetry Magazine

Wayne

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

Depression changes how we see the world. Can the arts change that?

If depression changes - literally - how we see the world, could visual training help its sufferers? Just as dance did what physical therapy could not, one wonders how the visual and performing arts might contribute to healing.

Wayne

Going rogue, the physics of finance

Can economic systems also act like natural systems? The interdisciplinary practice of econophysics looks for the parallels between the two, and like the recently uncovered fact that rogue light bursts can occur in optical fiber, or the confirmation of towering, unpredicted ocean waves, recent research that suggests the equity markets may also exhibit similar characteristics, the kind of unexpected and devastating events Nassim Nicholas Taleb called "Black Swans" at the 2008 IdeaFestival. Put one way, they are the infrequent but inevitable consequence of open non-linear systems.

Put another, life is unpredictable.

Wayne