Group items tagged

Speculative connections between electric lighting, sleep deficits, and health.

I wonder if the driving force behind the sleep deficit is in fact more pervasive, and indeed global in nature: the triumph of light.

Do we remain one species, or diverge into many? Do we remain of many minds, or merge into one?

on faculty at University of Virginia

Apomediation is a new scholarly socio-technological term that characterizes the process of disintermediation (intermediaries are middlemen or "gatekeeper", e.g. health professionals giving "relevant" information to a patient, and disintermediation means to bypass them), whereby the former intermediaries are functionally replaced by apomediaries, i.e. network/group/collaborative filtering processes [Eysenbach, 2008 [WebCite] and 2007b]. The difference between an intermediary and an apomediary is that an intermediary stands "in between" (latin: inter- means "in between") the consumer and information/service, i.e. is absolutely necessary to get a specific information/service. In contrast, apomediation means that there are agents (people, tools) which "stand by" (latin: apo- means separate, detached, away from) to guide a consumer to high quality information/services/experiences, without being a prerequisite to obtain that information/service in the first place. The switch from an intermediation model to an apomediation model has broadimplications for example for the way people judge credibility, as hypothesized and elaborated in more detail elsewhere [

at Madison

When we talk about participation, we have to be a bit more specific. On the publishing side, there's clearly more participation than we've ever seen in the past. But in order for this tidal wave of information to be useful, we need to be able to separate fact from fiction. We need to encourage participation on the receiving end. What we need is evaluating participation. With the breadth of niche information and sources we have the ability to get at the best of what is known on a myriad of topics and contexts. Every niche has its experts and its hacks, its enthusiasts and detractors. But for the remaining 95% of us who are not subject matter experts, deriving the accurate or useful information from the sea of what is available can be complicated, time-consuming and simply unverifiable. We need a way to quantify the value of information, or more specifically, the veracity of information.

To know what the most important virtue of our age is we need to have at least a basic understanding of our age. Our era is becoming increasingly characterized by uncertainty. Fortunately or unfortunately, more than a cursory elucidation of our situation is beyond the scope of this essay. There are geopolitical, economic, technological and environmental trends worth mentioning. When the more philosophical portion of this  discourse arrives I will argue that the virtue of wisdom underlies the meaningfulness and efficacy of all other virtues, and this in broad strokes is primarily due to (1) the aforementioned instability in our surroundings ; (2) the relationship between the deontological and virtue; and (3) the nature of agency itself.  Whether uncertainty itself can provide an ethical foundation for us to elaborate on will be a separate question, and finally I speculate on where wisdom leads us in the context of a philosophy that is politically active and not doomed to irrelevance to and by the larger population.

Expect a wave of new appliances in the home.

The important debate on global warming under UN auspices provides but a partial picture of climate change; in addition to the devastating impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on the ozone layer, the World's climate can now be modified as part of a new generation of sophisticated "non-lethal weapons." Both the Americans and the Russians have developed capabilities to manipulate the World's climate. In the US, the technology is being perfected under the High-frequency Active Aural Research Program (HAARP) as part of the ("Star Wars") Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI). Recent scientific evidence suggests that HAARP is fully operational and has the ability of potentially triggering floods, droughts, hurricanes and earthquakes.

Catch a first-time glimpse at smart technology that will put android helpers in the home, network commuters and entire cities to the Web, and bring us entertainment systems that can virtually make dreams come true. Advances in artificial intelligence are creating machines with near human-like mental agility. Intelligence will be embedded everywhere - even in our clothing, thanks to smaller, more powerful computers. Soon, we will be able to build computers with artificial intelligence and processing power that rivals the human brain. Intelligence will be everywhere, in our clothing, our vehicles and homes. Intelligent robots will serve us - until they don't feel like doing so anymore. And what happens then…?