http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2012/04/social-cell A single cell, such as a bacterium, is the simplest thing that can be alive. In addition to the materials from which it is constructed, it needs three features: a way of capturing energy (a metabolism), a way of reproducing (genes or something like genes) and a membrane that lets in what needs to come in and keeps out the rest. ]]> Mon, 30 Apr 2012 10:46:07 -0700 http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2012/04/social-cell http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/04/-emergence-of-the-human-superbrain-75000-years-ago-differences-between-humans-and-computers-could-bl.html "Humans obviously evolved a much wider range of communication tools to express their thoughts, the most important being language," said Hoffecker, a fellow at CU's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. "Individual human brains within social groups became integrated into a neurologic Internet of sorts, giving birth to the mind." ]]> Sun, 22 Apr 2012 16:15:46 -0700 http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/04/-emergence-of-the-human-superbrain-75000-years-ago-differences-between-humans-and-computers-could-bl.html http://dailymaverick.co.za/article/2010-11-16-building-smarter-machines-that-serve-humanity/daily-maverick-daphne-koller-when-machines-are-almost-human Daphne Koller: when machines are almost human - http://t.co/pYs9zvvH – Dan R.D. (Ddrrnt) http://twitter.com/Ddrrnt/status/187448712191152130 ]]> Wed, 04 Apr 2012 01:42:57 -0700 http://dailymaverick.co.za/article/2010-11-16-building-smarter-machines-that-serve-humanity/daily-maverick-daphne-koller-when-machines-are-almost-human http://nplusonemag.com/death-not-end Was theory a gigantic hoax? On the contrary. It was the only salvation, for a twenty year period, from two colossal abdications by American thinkers and writers. From about 1975 to 1995, through a historical accident, a lot of American thinking and mental living got done by people who were French, and by young Americans who followed the French. The two grand abdications: one occurred in academic philosophy departments, the other in American fiction. In philosophy, from the 1930s on, a revolutionary group had been fighting inside universities to overcome the “tradition.” This insurgency, at first called “logical positivism” or… ]]> Tue, 30 Aug 2011 09:08:16 -0700 http://nplusonemag.com/death-not-end http://nplusonemag.com/death-not-end Was theory a gigantic hoax? On the contrary. It was the only salvation, for a twenty year period, from two colossal abdications by American thinkers and writers. From about 1975 to 1995, through a historical accident, a lot of American thinking and mental living got done by people who were French, and by young Americans who followed the French.

The two grand abdications: one occurred in academic philosophy departments, the other in American fiction. In philosophy, from the 1930s on, a revolutionary group had been fighting inside universities to overcome the “tradition.” This insurgency, at first called… ]]> Thu, 18 Aug 2011 01:48:43 -0700 http://nplusonemag.com/death-not-end http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/07/mf_chainworld/all/1 How do you make a videogame that, in some sense, is a religion, especially if you’re an atheist? Rohrer began by defining the sort of spiritual practice that interested him, which had to do with the physical mysteries of everyday human experience. Rohrer spoke about his late grandfather, a colorful man who served as mayor of a small town in Ohio and left behind a legacy that soon turned into legends—the house he had built and the interstate whose path he had altered, forcing it to swerve around his town. (“It’s like my grandfather’s dogleg,” Rohrer said, putting up a… ]]> Sun, 24 Jul 2011 04:03:46 -0700 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/07/mf_chainworld/all/1 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-the-illusion-of-being-observed-can-make-you-better-person A group of scientists at Newcastle University, headed by Melissa Bateson and Daniel Nettle of the Center for Behavior and Evolution, conducted a field experiment demonstrating that merely hanging up posters of staring human eyes is enough to significantly change people’s behavior. Over the course of 32 days, the scientists spent many hours recording customer’s “littering behavior” in their university’s main cafeteria, counting the number of people that cleaned up after themselves after they had finished their meals. In their study, the researchers determined the effect of the eyes on individual behavior by controlling for several conditions (e.g. posters with… ]]> Wed, 11 May 2011 03:14:15 -0700 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-the-illusion-of-being-observed-can-make-you-better-person http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2011/04/gigantic-new-superorganism-with-social-intelligence-is-devouring-the-titanic-todays-most-popular.html In 2000, Roy Cullimore, a microbial ecologist and Charles Pellegrino, scientist and author of Ghosts of the Titanic discovered that the Titanic --which sank in the Atlantic Ocean 97 years ago -- was being devoured by a monster microbial industrial complex of extremophiles as alien we might expect to find on Jupiter's ocean-bound Europa. What they discovered is the largest, strangest cooperative microorganism on Earth.

Scientists believe that this strange super-organism is using a common microbial language that could be either chemical or electrical -a phenomenon called "quorum sensing" by which whole communities "sense" each other's presence… ]]> Sun, 24 Apr 2011 02:53:34 -0700 http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2011/04/gigantic-new-superorganism-with-social-intelligence-is-devouring-the-titanic-todays-most-popular.html http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/issue/view/23 The field of the digital humanities embraces various scholarly activities in the humanities that involve writing about digital media and technology as well as being engaged in digital media production. Perhaps most notably, in what some are describing as a ‘computational turn’, it has seen techniques and methods drawn from computer science being used to produce new ways of understanding and approaching humanities texts. But just as interesting as what computer science has to offer the humanities is the question of what the humanities have to offer computer science. Do the humanities really need to draw so heavily on computer… ]]> Wed, 02 Mar 2011 07:36:29 -0700 http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/issue/view/23 http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html (Michel Foucault, 1967)

The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world. The nineteenth century found its essential mythological resources in the second principle of thermaldynamics- The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of… ]]> Wed, 19 Jan 2011 05:32:41 -0700 http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/on_resilience/ A key feature of complex adaptive systems is their ability to self-organize along a number of different pathways with possible sudden shifts between states: A lake, for example, can exist in either an oxygenated, clear state or an algae-dominated, murky one. A financial market can float on a housing bubble or settle into a basin of recession. Conventionally, we’ve tended to view the transition between such states as gradual. But there is increasing evidence that systems often don’t respond to change in a smooth way: The clear lake seems hardly affected by fertilizer runoff until a critical threshold is passed,… ]]> Thu, 16 Dec 2010 04:09:00 -0700 http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/on_resilience/ http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-wiki-culture-20100606,0,7851757.story It used to be so simple. A book had an author; a film, a screenwriter and director; a piece of music, a composer and performer; a painting or sculpture, an artist; a play, a playwright. You could assume that the work actually erupted more or less full-blown from these folks. In addition, the book, film, musical composition, painting or play was a discrete object or event that existed in time and space. You could hold it in your hands or watch or listen to it in a theater or your living room. It didn't really change over time unless the… ]]> Sun, 18 Jul 2010 05:20:00 -0700 http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-wiki-culture-20100606,0,7851757.story http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/should-this-be-the-last-generation/ Have you ever thought about whether to have a child? If so, what factors entered into your decision? Was it whether having children would be good for you, your partner and others close to the possible child, such as children you may already have, or perhaps your parents? For most people contemplating reproduction, those are the dominant questions. Some may also think about the desirability of adding to the strain that the nearly seven billion people already here are putting on our planet’s environment. But very few ask whether coming into existence is a good thing for the child itself.… ]]> Thu, 10 Jun 2010 02:45:00 -0700 http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/should-this-be-the-last-generation/ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703691804575254533386933138.html Human evolution presents a puzzle. Nothing seems to explain the sudden takeoff of the last 45,000 years—the conversion of just another rare predatory ape into a planet dominator with rapidly progressing technologies. Once "progress" started to produce new tools, different ways of life and burgeoning populations, it accelerated all over the world, culminating in agriculture, cities, literacy and all the rest. Yet all the ingredients of human success—tool making, big brains, culture, fire, even language—seem to have been in place half a million years before and nothing happened. Tools were made to the same monotonous design for hundreds of thousands… ]]> Tue, 01 Jun 2010 02:53:00 -0700 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703691804575254533386933138.html http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/delanda/pages/opensource.htm by Manuel DeLanda The plan of the essay is as follows. I will begin with a few definitions of technical terms ("source code", "compiler", "operating system") which are necessary to follow the rest of the paper. I will then discuss a few of the ideas put forward by open-source philosophers (Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond) focusing not on their weaknesses but on their practical consequences. In particular, Stallman's achievements go beyond the creation of programs and involve the design of a contract (the GNU General Public License, or GPL) which has been arguably as crucial to the success of the movement… ]]> Fri, 19 Feb 2010 07:37:00 -0700 http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/delanda/pages/opensource.htm http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUgjlJ5hEbw&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Fri, 30 Oct 2009 04:45:00 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUgjlJ5hEbw&feature=youtube_gdata http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/aug/12/wikipedia-deletionist-inclusionist Yet again, Wikipedia is about to break new ground. The website that has become one of the biggest open repositories of knowledge is due – within the next week or so – to hit the mark of 3m articles in English. It's all a very long way from January 2001, when Wikipedia launched. Its first million articles took five years to put together, but the second was achieved by 2007. It was not just the number of articles that grew, but also the number of people involved in creating them. During Wikipedia's first burst of activity between 2004 and 2007,… ]]> Mon, 28 Sep 2009 09:10:00 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/aug/12/wikipedia-deletionist-inclusionist http://www.peterme.com/archives/000073.html How architectural and design choices are mediated and ultimately over-ruled by user choice, reflexion, repetition and desire. ]]> Mon, 25 May 2009 12:21:00 -0700 http://www.peterme.com/archives/000073.html