MachineMachine /stream - tagged with change http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron text@machinemachine.net Rereading Darwin http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.14345%2Cy.0%2Cno.%2Ccontent.true%2Cpage.1%2Ccss.print/issue.aspx/rereading-darwin-american-scientist The Dangers of Extrapolation (“Much light will be thrown on the origin of man.”) http://t.co/51DRe7oS #Darwin ]]> Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:06:23 -0700 http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.14345%2Cy.0%2Cno.%2Ccontent.true%2Cpage.1%2Ccss.print/issue.aspx/rereading-darwin-american-scientist What happens to a caterpillar's brain during metamorphosis? http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mpqu2/what_happens_to_a_caterpillars_brain_during Basically, three things can happen to any given neuron in the central nervous system. It's a really complex proccess! A) some neurons are born very early in the caterpillar's life (embryonically) but are quiescent until adulthood - during metamorphosis, these neurons put on their game face and start to do real work in adulthood. B) Some neurons are useful in larval life and not in adult life, and basically die during metamorphosis. C) Some neurons are useful in both larval and adult life, but do different things - so they basically retract their projections during metamorphosis and make new ones… ]]> Wed, 30 Nov 2011 12:50:03 -0700 http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mpqu2/what_happens_to_a_caterpillars_brain_during Threshold science http://aminotes.tumblr.com/post/12236448007/how-walking-through-a-doorway-increases/how-walking-through-a-doorway-increases-lapidarium-notes Threshold science: How walking through a doorway increases forgetting : http://t.co/npVLfW8H ]]> Wed, 02 Nov 2011 06:51:34 -0700 http://aminotes.tumblr.com/post/12236448007/how-walking-through-a-doorway-increases/how-walking-through-a-doorway-increases-lapidarium-notes Delusions of Peace http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/09/john-gray-steven-pinker-violence-review//untitled John Gray vs Steven Pinker : Evolutionary psychology is mere speculation http://t.co/tfJcvHD5 #fb ]]> Thu, 06 Oct 2011 02:37:06 -0700 http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/09/john-gray-steven-pinker-violence-review//untitled On Science Transfer http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/on_science_transfer/ “Faster.” Could any other word better capture the reigning paradox of our age? The world today—whether measured in technological or ecological terms—appears to be changing more rapidly than ever before. Our modern system for generating novelty and prosperity has stretched to encompass the entire planet, growing more complex and expansive, so that now it seems to groan and shudder beneath its own weight. In its service, some things are falling apart: Non-renewable resources are profligately consumed, ecosystems disrupted, and social traditions steadily relinquished. There seems no way to stop or slow these processes without causing immense, cascading catastrophe. The only… ]]> Thu, 29 Sep 2011 04:01:31 -0700 http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/on_science_transfer/ The Logic of Life by Francois Jacob http://www.librarything.com/work/book/77592602/the-logic-of-life-peregrine-books-by-francois-jacob

Penguin Books Ltd (1989), Edition: New Ed, Paperback, 448 pages

]]> Wed, 31 Aug 2011 07:31:52 -0700 http://www.librarything.com/work/book/77592602/the-logic-of-life-peregrine-books-by-francois-jacob New York - Empire of Evolution http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/science/26evolve.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all Dr. Munshi-South has joined the ranks of a small but growing number of field biologists who study urban evolution — not the rise and fall of skyscrapers and neighborhoods, but the biological changes that cities bring to the wildlife that inhabits them. For these scientists, the New York metropolitan region is one great laboratory. White-footed mice, stranded on isolated urban islands, are evolving to adapt to urban stress. Fish in the Hudson have evolved to cope with poisons in the water. Native ants find refuge in the median strips on Broadway. And more familiar urban organisms, like bedbugs, rats and… ]]> Tue, 26 Jul 2011 13:55:44 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/science/26evolve.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all What's human? What's animal? And what of the biology in between? http://guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/25/human-animal-trans-species-science?cat=commentisfree&type=article Friday's report by the Academy of Medical Sciences on the increasingly fuzzy boundaries between the human and the animal is the latest in a long series of policy reflections on how to keep pace with developments in the biosciences. It can justly be said that politics and regulation have not dealt well with our newfound capacities for muddying the boundaries between us and other species. And yet the last two decades have witnessed an unprecedented growth in bioscientific techniques that increasingly call into question what it means to be human. Take the human genome project: many of us may have… ]]> Mon, 25 Jul 2011 15:20:18 -0700 http://guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/25/human-animal-trans-species-science?cat=commentisfree&type=article The Neolithic Age is over! http://032c.com/2011/the-neolithic-age-is-over/ Michel Serres: We are in the middle of an extraordinary human and environmental transformation, without really being aware of it, one that can only perhaps be compared with the Renaissance, the fifth century BC, and even the Neolithic age. For example, if there are no more peasants today, when did peasantry ­begin? In the Neolithic age. We can now say that in the year 2000, the Neolithic age is over. But who announced this in the news­papers? We didn’t read in any paper that “the Neolithic age is over”!

And we are equipped in our thinking for this… ]]> Tue, 12 Jul 2011 01:36:11 -0700 http://032c.com/2011/the-neolithic-age-is-over/ Perfection Is Not A Useful Concept http://theeuropean-magazine.com/282-bostrom-nick/283-perfection-is-not-a-useful-concept Interview with Nick Bostrom

Our long track record of survival–humans have been around for about 100,000 years–gives us some assurance that the natural risks have been rather small.

If they have not ended human history until now, they are unlikely to have that effect in the near future. So the risks we should really worry about come from new developments. They introduce new factors with a lot of statistical uncertainty, and we cannot be confident that their risks are manageable. The potential of human action to do good and evil is larger than it… ]]> Mon, 20 Jun 2011 09:21:17 -0700 http://theeuropean-magazine.com/282-bostrom-nick/283-perfection-is-not-a-useful-concept Human influence comes of age http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110511/full/473133a.html?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+yahoo%2FqUaz+%28Nature+news%29&utm_content=Twitter Humanity's profound impact on this planet is hard to deny, but is it big enough to merit its own geological epoch? This is the question facing geoscientists gathered in London this week to debate the validity and definition of the 'Anthropocene', a proposed new epoch characterized by human effects on the geological record.

"We are in the process of formalizing it," says Michael Ellis, head of the climate-change programme of the British Geological Survey in Nottingham, who coordinated the 11 May meeting. He and others hope that adopting the term will shift the thinking of policy-makers. "It… ]]> Wed, 11 May 2011 11:27:47 -0700 http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110511/full/473133a.html?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+yahoo%2FqUaz+%28Nature+news%29&utm_content=Twitter Capitalism's Dismal Future http://chronicle.com/article/Capitalisms-Dismal-Future/126659/ A remarkable feature of the commentary on today's economic troubles is that, despite constant reference to the Great Depression of the 1930s, as well as to the many downturns since World War II, there has been little mention of the fact that business depressions have been a recurrent feature of the capitalist economy since the Industrial Revolution. But even the briefest attention to history makes recent events appear far from unusual. From the early 1800s to the late 1930s, in fact, capitalism spent between a third and a half of its history in depressions (depending on how they are dated… ]]> Wed, 30 Mar 2011 02:30:54 -0700 http://chronicle.com/article/Capitalisms-Dismal-Future/126659/ The Men Who Stole the World http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/printout/0,29239,2032304_2032746_2032903,00.html A decade ago, four young men changed the way the world works. They did this not with laws or guns or money but with software: they had radical, disruptive ideas, which they turned into code, which they released on the Internet for free. These four men, not one of whom finished college, laid the foundations for much of the digital-media environment we currently inhabit. Then, for all intents and purposes, they vanished.

In 1999 a Northeastern University freshman named Shawn Fanning wrote Napster, thereby pioneering peer-to-peer file sharing and a new paradigm for consuming media without the… ]]> Wed, 01 Dec 2010 05:22:00 -0700 http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/printout/0,29239,2032304_2032746_2032903,00.html Reclaiming the Imagination http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/reclaiming-the-imagination/ Imagine being a slave in ancient Rome. Now remember being one. The second task, unlike the first, is crazy. If, as I’m guessing, you never were a slave in ancient Rome, it follows that you can’t remember being one — but you can still let your imagination rip. With a bit of effort one can even imagine the impossible, such as discovering that Dick Cheney and Madonna are really the same person. It sounds like a platitude that fiction is the realm of imagination, fact the realm of knowledge.

Why did humans evolve the capacity to imagine… ]]> Wed, 18 Aug 2010 02:12:00 -0700 http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/reclaiming-the-imagination/ Awe and the Machine http://incharacter.org/observation/1awe-and-the-machine/ By the twentieth century, some cynicism had crept into descriptions of the newest machines. Writing about the impact of radio on his rural Maine community, E. B. White observed, "One of the chief pretenders to the throne of God is radio itself, which has acquired a sort of omniscience." In the lives of the people in his town, the radio exerted a "pervading and somewhat godlike presence." But it was also something to which they turned daily for advice and instruction. As White wryly noted, "The church merely holds out the remote promise of salvation: the radio tells you if… ]]> Mon, 02 Aug 2010 04:03:00 -0700 http://incharacter.org/observation/1awe-and-the-machine/ The Smart List: 12 Shocking Ideas That Could Change the World http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-10/ff_smartlist Warning: The ideas expressed here may be dangerous. For this year's list, we walked right past the usual suspects and went looking for trouble. We wanted radicals, heretics, agitators—big thinkers with controversial, game-changing propositions. We found a prison reformer who wants to empty jails, an economist who thinks foreign aid hurts more than it helps, and a military theorist who believes the US should launch preemptive cyberattacks, right now. Then there's secretary of defense robert gates, who wants to win wars, not just prep for them. Risky? Sure. But this is no time to play it safe. ]]> Sun, 06 Jun 2010 03:54:00 -0700 http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-10/ff_smartlist The Smart List: 12 Shocking Ideas That Could Change the World http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-10/ff_smartlist Warning: The ideas expressed here may be dangerous. For this year's list, we walked right past the usual suspects and went looking for trouble. We wanted radicals, heretics, agitators—big thinkers with controversial, game-changing propositions. We found a prison reformer who wants to empty jails, an economist who thinks foreign aid hurts more than it helps, and a military theorist who believes the US should launch preemptive cyberattacks, right now. Then there's secretary of defense robert gates, who wants to win wars, not just prep for them. Risky? Sure. But this is no time to play it safe. ]]> Sun, 06 Jun 2010 03:54:00 -0700 http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-10/ff_smartlist If Odysseus Had GPS http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704576204574529850203449642.html When Robinson Crusoe was stranded on a tropical island he did pretty well for himself, all things considered. But to the rest of the world he was as good as dead. Daniel Defoe's novel, masquerading as a memoir, came out in 1719, a time when voyages were dangerous and people could easily be lost to one another with no way to get in touch or even determine if the other party was living. Indeed, when Crusoe finally gets back home he finds himself disinherited by a father who had assumed, sensibly enough, that his son was deceased.

… ]]> Sun, 21 Mar 2010 12:54:00 -0700 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704576204574529850203449642.html Positions in Flux - Panel 3: Open Source - A scheme for art production and curating? http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2009/05/positions-in-flux-panel-3-open.php The open source movement is driven by the idea of collective, process-based, sustainable production and improvement. In software development this strategy has already proven to be valid; however can this model be applied to other products such as artworks or even exhibitions? In how far does the open source model differ from other forms of artistic collaboration? Is there a new role model for both the artist and the curator in the future? Which (economic) value and impact has expertise in open source production? How could institutions and organisations respond to this trend? How could institutions and organisations respond to… ]]> Wed, 20 May 2009 09:25:00 -0700 http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2009/05/positions-in-flux-panel-3-open.php Positions in Flux - Panel 2: New territories and cultures of the digital http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2009/05/positions-in-flux-panel-2-new.php The panel New territories and cultures of the digital looked at the geographical shift that media culture currently undergoes. Europe, North America and Japan used to be at the forefront of digital production, design, art and technological research. Now that technologies become available at lower prices and spread more widely on the globe, new initiatives and bottom-up organisations are burgeoning in East Europe, the Middle East, Africa and South America. ]]> Wed, 20 May 2009 09:24:00 -0700 http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2009/05/positions-in-flux-panel-2-new.php