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thinkahol *

Humanity Needs to Keep Pace with Technology (cont'd) | The Veracious Blog - 0 views

blog.veraciousentropy.com/...th-technology-cont%e2%80%99d-2

shared by thinkahol * on 21 May 10 - Cached
  • thinkahol * on 21 May 10
     
    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.
thinkahol *

Eric Schmidt: Every 2 Days We Create As Much Information As We Did Up To 2003 - 0 views

techcrunch.com/...schmidt-data

eric schmidt google information exabyte

shared by thinkahol * on 07 Aug 10 - Cached
  • thinkahol * on 07 Aug 10
     
    Today at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA, the first panel featured Google CEO Eric Schmidt. As moderator David Kirkpatrick was introducing him, he rattled off a massive stat. Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003, according to Schmidt. That's something like five exabytes of data, he says. Let me repeat that: we create as much information in two days now as we did from the dawn of man through 2003.
Todd Suomela

The Technium: The World Without Technology - 0 views

www.kk.org/...the_world_witho.php

technology technology-effects history anthropology language evolution culture archaeology

shared by Todd Suomela on 10 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Although strictly speaking simple tools are a type of technology made by one person, we tend to think of technology as something much more complicated. But in fact technology is anything designed by a mind. Technology includes not only nuclear reactors and genetically modified crops, but also bows and arrows, hide tanning techniques, fire starters, and domesticated crops. Technology also includes intangible inventions such as calendars, mathematics, software, law, and writing, as these too derive from our heads. But technology also must include birds' nests and beaver dams since these too are the work of brains. All technology, both the chimp's termite fishing spear and the human's fishing spear, the beaver's dam and the human's dam, the warbler's hanging basket and the human's hanging basket, the leafcutter ant's garden and the human's garden, are all fundamentally natural. We tend to isolate human-made technology from nature, even to the point of thinking of it as anti-nature, only because it has grown to rival the impact and power of its home. But in its origins and fundamentals a tool is as natural as our life.
  • The gravity of technology holds us where we are. We accept our attachment. But to really appreciate the effects of technology – both its virtues and costs -- we need to examine the world of humans before technology. What were our lives like without inventions? For that we need to peek back into the Paleolithic era when technology was scarce and humans lived primarily surrounded by things they did not make. We can also examine the remaining contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes still living close to nature to measure what, if anything, they gain from the small amount of technology they use.
  • Then about 50,000 years ago something amazing happened. While the bodies of early humans in Africa remained unchanged, their genes and minds shifted noticeably. For the first time hominins were full of ideas and innovation. These newly vitalized modern humans, which we now call Sapiens, charged into new regions beyond their ancestral homes in eastern Africa. They fanned out from the grasslands and in a relatively brief burst exploded from a few tens of thousands in Africa to an estimated 8 million worldwide just before the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • It should have been clear to Neanderthal, as it is now clear to us in the 21st century, that something new and big had appeared -- a new biological and geological force. A number of scientists (Richard Klein, Ian Tattersall, William Calvin, among many others) think that the "something" that happened 50,000 years ago was the invention of language. Up until this point, humanoids were smart. They could make crude tools in a hit or miss way and handle fire – perhaps like an exceedingly smart chimp. The African hominin's growing brain size and physical stature had leveled off its increase, but evolution continued inside the brain.  "What happened 50,000 years ago," says Klein, "was a change in the operating system of humans. Perhaps a point mutation effected the way the brain is wired that allowed languages, as we understand language today: rapidly produced, articulate speech."  Instead of acquiring a larger brain, as the Neanderthal and Erectus did, Sapien gained a rewired brain.  Language altered the Neanderthal-type mind, and allowed Sapien minds for the first time to invent with purpose and deliberation. Philosopher Daniel Dennet crows in elegant language: "There is no step more uplifting, more momentous in the history of mind design, than the invention of language. When Homo sapiens became the beneficiary of this invention, the species stepped into a slingshot that has launched it far beyond all other earthly species." The creation of language was the first singularity for humans. It changed everything. Life after language was unimaginable to those on the far side before it.
Todd Suomela

PLoS ONE: A Demonstration of the Transition from Ready-to-Hand to Unready-to-Hand - 1 views

www.plosone.org/...journal.pone.0009433

phenomenology philosophy experimental readiness-to-hand technology technology-effects experience sts

shared by Todd Suomela on 23 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • In Chapter III of Being and Time, Heidegger distinguishes three modes of experiencing the world. Most human activity, Heidegger argued, is absorbed, skillful engagement with entities in the world. When we are coping skillfully with the world, we experience entities around us as ready-to-hand.
  • Heidegger argues that skilled coping, when we engage with entities as ready-to-hand, is our primary way of engaging with the world. Sometimes, though, our skillful coping is temporarily disturbed. When this happens, we encounter entities as unready-to-hand. When we go from smoothly hammering to having difficulty, our experience of the previously ready-to-hand entities changes: we experience the hammer, nails and board as failing to serve their function appropriately.
  • Heidegger's third way of experiencing the world is as present-at-hand. The hammer is encountered as present-at-hand when we stop hammering and consider the hammer's shape or color or weight; when considered this way the hammer is no longer a useful tool but merely an object with various properties. Heidegger argued that readiness-to-hand is primary in two ways. First, the majority of our experience of the world is engaging with entities ready-to-hand. Second, readiness-to-hand is, from a phenomenological standpoint, ontologically primary while the other modes are derivative of it.
Todd Suomela

The BBC Trust Report on Science | through the looking glass - 0 views

alicerosebell.wordpress.com/...he-bbc-trust-report-on-science

science journalism media country(GreatBritain) expertise content-analysis

shared by Todd Suomela on 29 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Aside from questions over appropriateness of expertise being a rather slippery issue, there is very little information given about the expertise of a speaker. We found lot of reliance on phrases such as ‘scientists have found’ and ‘experts say’. Personally I think we need to address this issue before we can even get on to matters of whether experts are the right ones or not. Although expertise may be implied through editing, and TV in particular can flag up institutional association and title, we rarely saw a contributor’s disciplinary background specified. Especially significant I thought, in broadcast reports about new research we found little explicit reference to whether or not a particular contributor was involved in the research being reported (online reports often refer to someone as ‘lead author’ or ‘co-author’). This lack of definition makes it hard for audiences to judge a contributor’s independence, whether they are speaking on a topic they have studied in depth or if they are simply working from anecdote.
thinkahol *

Carl Sagan Day | Center for Inquiry - 2 views

centerforinquiry.net/carlsaganday

Carl Sagan Day | Center for Inquiry

shared by thinkahol * on 09 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 09 Nov 11
     
    Please join us this November as we honor Carl Sagan and celebrate the beauty and wonder of the cosmos he so eloquently described. Carl Sagan was a Professor of Astronomy and Space Science and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University, but most of us know him as a Pulitzer Prize winning author and the creator of COSMOS. That Emmy and Peabody award-winning PBS television series transformed educational television when it first aired in 1980, but now, thirty years later, it's gone on to affect the hearts and minds of over a billion people in sixty countries. No other scientist has been able to reach and teach so many nonscientists in such a meaningful way, and that is why we celebrate Dr. Sagan, remember his work, and revel in the cosmos he helped us understand.
thinkahol *

An illustrated guide to the latest climate science « Climate Progress - 0 views

climateprogress.org/...-to-the-latest-climate-science

illustrated guide to the latest climate science

shared by thinkahol * on 02 Sep 10 - Cached
  • thinkahol * on 02 Sep 10
     
    "In 2009, the scientific literature caught up with what top climate scientists have been saying privately for a few years now: * Many of the predicted impacts of human-caused climate change are occurring much faster than anybody expected - particularly ice melt, everywhere you look on the planet. * If we stay anywhere near our current emissions path, we are facing incalculable catastrophes by century's end, including rapid sea level rise, massive wildfires, widespread Dust-Bowlification, large oceanic dead zones, and 9°F warming - much of which could be all but irreversible for centuries. And that's not the worst-case scenario! * The consequences for human health and well being would be extreme. That's no surprise to anybody who has talked to leading climate scientists in recent years, read my book Hell and High Water (or a number of other books), or followed this blog. Still, it is a scientific reality that I don't think more than 2 people in 100 fully grasp, so I'm going to review here the past year in climate science. I'll focus primarily on the peer-reviewed literature, but also look at some major summary reports."
thinkahol *

FORA.tv - Steven Johnson and Kevin Kelly at the NYPL - 0 views

fora.tv/...on_and_Kevin_Kelly_at_the_NYPL

FORA.tv - Steven Johnson and Kevin Kelly at the NYPL

shared by thinkahol * on 22 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 22 Oct 10
     
    In a world of rapidly accelerating change, from iPads to eBooks to genetic mapping to MagLev trains, we can't help but wonder if technology is our servant or our master, and whether it is taking us in a healthy direction as a society.* What forces drive the steady march of innovation?* How can we build environments in our schools, our businesses, and in our private lives that encourage the creation of new ideas--ideas that build on the new technology platforms in socially responsible ways?Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson look at where technology is taking us. One of the co-founders of Wired Magazine, Kelly's new book, What Technology Wants, makes the argument that technology as a whole is not a jumble of wires and metal but a living, evolving organism that has its own unconscious needs and tendencies. Johnson's new book, Where Good Ideas Come From, explains why certain spaces, from 18th-century coffeehouses to the World Wide Web, have an uncanny talent for encouraging innovative thinking.
Todd Suomela

Rationally Speaking: The very foundations of science - 0 views

rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/...ry-foundations-of-science.html

sts philosophy induction about(DavidHume) science probability

shared by Todd Suomela on 08 Mar 09 - Cached
  • The first way to think about probability is as a measure of the frequency of an event: if I say that the probability of a coin to land heads up is 50% I may mean that, if I flip the coin say 100 times, on average I will get heads 50 times. This is not going to get us out of Hume’s problem, because probabilities interpreted as frequencies of events are, again, a form of induction
  • Secondly, we can think of probabilities as reflecting subjective judgment. If I say that it is probable that the coin will land heads up, I might simply be trying to express my feeling that this will be the case. You might have a different feeling, and respond that you don’t think it's probable that the coin will lend heads up. This is certainly not a viable solution to the problem of induction, because subjective probabilities are, well, subjective, and hence reflect opinions, not degrees of truth.
  • Lastly, one can adopt what Okasha calls the logical interpretation of probabilities, according to which there is a probability X that an event will occur means that we have objective reasons to believe (or not) that X will occur (for instance, because we understand the physics of the solar system, the mechanics of cars, or the physics of coin flipping). This doesn’t mean that we will always be correct, but it does offer a promising way out of Hume’s dilemma, since it seems to ground our judgments on a more solid foundation. Indeed, this is the option adopted by many philosophers, and would be the one probably preferred by scientists, if they ever gave this sort of thing a moment’s thought.
  • Todd Suomela on 08 Mar 09
     
    short summary of some probabilistic responses to the problem of induction
Todd Suomela

The Technium: Many Species, One Mind - 0 views

www.kk.org/...many_species_on.php

technology evolution future mind species technology-effects

shared by Todd Suomela on 19 Feb 09 - Cached
  • Todd Suomela on 19 Feb 09
     
    Do we remain one species, or diverge into many? Do we remain of many minds, or merge into one?
thinkahol *

What we learned from 5 million books | Video on TED.com - 0 views

www.ted.com/...rned_from_5_million_books.html

What we learned from 5 million books | Video on TED.com

shared by thinkahol * on 22 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 22 Sep 11
     
    Have you played with Google Labs' NGram Viewer? It's an addicting tool that lets you search for words and ideas in a database of 5 million books from across centuries. Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel show us how it works, and a few of the surprising things we can learn from 500 billion words.
thinkahol *

Decentralize the web with Diaspora - YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

Decentralize the web with Diaspora - YouTube

shared by thinkahol * on 22 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 22 Sep 11
     
    We are four talented young programmers from NYUs Courant Institute trying to raise money so we can spend the summer building Diaspora; an open source personal web server that will put individuals in control of their data.
thinkahol *

YouTube - We Have a Plan: Other Aspects of a Resource Based Economy - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

YouTube - We Have a Plan: Other Aspects of Resource Based Economy

shared by thinkahol * on 20 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 20 Apr 11
     
    It's Time to Change...And We Have a Plan Get Informed: www.thezeitgeistmovement.com www.thevenusproject.com www.zeitgeistportugal.org www.futuragora.pt Music: Eat Raw Meat = Blood Drool by Editors
veera90

Pharmacovigilance Services | Pharmacovigilance Professionals | ACL Digital Life Science... - 0 views

www.acldigital.com/...pharmacovigilance

Lifesciences Clinical Pharma medical ACLDigital

shared by veera90 on 26 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • veera90 on 26 Jun 22
     
    From proof-of-concept to post-marketing surveillance services, you can depend on our PV experts to efficiently work through the entire scope of Pharmacovigilance activities. We offer a high level of expertise and assist in meeting the highest standards of applicable national and global regulations. The experts at ACL Digital can easily customize safety monitoring services to suit your specific business requirements. Most biopharmaceutical companies have distinct and demanding clinical safety requirements as per the directions of regulatory agencies. You can depend on our PV specialists who plan safety and pharmacovigilance services accordingly that fit the needs of both your product and study - we adhere and adapt to your processes and are flexible enough to do it the right way.
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