Posted in Academic Life, Democracy, Extended, Science
December 28, 2009 at 6:05 pm
I don’t use traditional textbooks in most of my classes. I try really hard to be sensitive to the fact that textbooks are obscenely expensive, and work around it with chapters and journal articles compiled in various ways.
This semester, I’m teaching a really generic psychology course, with a $95 textbook. I really want to supplement it with a software package of experiments, which costs an additional $42. The software cannot be sold back at all (and in fact, you can buy a registration code and get all of the software and the documentation entirely online). This seems annoying expensive for something that I’m still not even sure how I’ll integrate into the course.
If anyone is still reading here, I’m interested in perspectives from both students and professors on how to deal with not only the cost of textbooks, but the software that cannot be resold. Do you use anything like this in your classroom? How do you feel about it? Is the hands-on learning worth the price of admission?
Posted in Academic Life, Democracy, Evolution, Extended, Philosophy, Science
November 12, 2009 at 4:56 pm
150 Years After Origin: Biological, Historical, and Philosophical Perspectives
Victoria College, University of Toronto, November 21-24, 2009
Darwin wrote in his autobiography, “In July [1837] I opened my first notebook for facts in relation to the Origin of Species, about which I had long reflected, and never ceased working for the next twenty years.” In 1842, he wrote a “very brief abstract” of his theory (35 pages), which in the summer of 1844 he expanded to 230 pages. Beginning in September 1858, after receiving an essay from Alfred Russel Wallace, “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type,” which outlined the central mechanism of evolution on which Darwin had been working, he began work on completing the manuscript of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. John Murray, the publisher, launched the book on November 24, 1859 by releasing 1,250 copies. The impact of The Origin of Species has equalled the impact of Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. It is the unifying theoretical framework for all modern biology.
November 24, 2009 marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin and The Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and the Department of Philosophy at University of Toronto are mounting a Gala Celebratory Conference. The conference will culminate in a gala dinner on November 24 at which participants will toast the tremendous achievement of Charles Robert Darwin.
Five multi-disciplinary symposia have been organized. For each symposium, the panel consists of a biologist, a historian of biology and a philosopher of biology.
The Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology is located on the elegant, historic Victoria University campus (one of the University of Toronto’s federated universities) and the conference will be held in that location.
Say hello if you’re in the area!
Posted in Digital Culture, Extended, Feminism, literature
October 13, 2009 at 9:33 am
This one is worthy of a post in the Big Important Column of Things You Really Ought to Take Notice Of.
Scalzi succinctly and beautifully suggests a course of action for the SF Boys Club folk:
At this late date, when one of these quailing wonders appears, stuttering petulantly that women are unfit to touch the genre he’s already claimed with his smudgy, sticky fingerprints, the thing to do is not to solemnly intone about how far science fiction has yet to go. Science fiction does have a distance to go, but these fellows aren’t interested in taking the journey, and I don’t want to have to rideshare with them anyway. So the thing to do is to point and laugh.
There are few things I love more than a wonderful writer who, when exposed on a day-to-day basis, continues to be brilliant. When I read columns or blogs by authors whose books I otherwise adored only to learn they’re backwards, close-minded fools, their books become tainted and unreadable. Scalzi’s books take on an aura of betterness when I read his blog.
Link to Whatever.
Posted in Extended, Philosophy, Science, literature
September 20, 2009 at 8:56 am
In news that is sure to annoy those “who needs the humanities or liberal arts” types, it unsurprisingly turns out that absurd literature does wonderful things to the brain.
Psychologists Travis Proulx of the University of California, Santa Barbara and Steven Heine of the University of British Columbia report our ability to find patterns is stimulated when we are faced with the task of making sense of an absurd tale. What’s more, this heightened capability carries over to unrelated tasks.
[...]
This suggests “the cognitive mechanisms responsible for implicitly learning statistical regularities” are enhanced when we struggle to find meaning in a fragmented narrative.
[...]
To Prolux and Heine, these finds suggest we have an innate tendency to impose order upon our experiences and create what they call “meaning frameworks.” Any threat to this process will “activate a meaning-maintenance motivation that may call upon any other available associations to restore a sense of meaning,” they write.
Of course, this “meaning frameworks” talk calls to mind Mark Johnson and George Lakoff’s work on conceptual schemas and metaphor theory for me, but this particular understanding of frames can be found in most disciplines within cognitive science. Claims about the existence of conceptual schemas seem relatively uncontroversial at this point, but the fact that non-sequiturs activate pattern-seeking schemas is, while completely reasonable as a hypothesis, new and exciting to see come through in the data.
Link to article. (H/T to Nuclear Dwight on twitter.)
Posted in Academic Life, Artificial Intelligence, Extended, Philosophy, Technology
July 27, 2009 at 11:04 am
This article in the NY times was sent to me by a colleague in the Computer Science department yesterday. It makes me want to pull my hair out and shove it down the throats of either the reporter, or maybe Ray Kurzweil.
It has a sensationalized headline “Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man” (I suppose us women are totally safe, although the article is silent on that matter…)
While trying to scare us into believing the Robot Apocalypse is RIGHT! AROUND! THE CORNER! the author also writes:
While the computer scientists agreed that we are a long way from Hal, the computer that took over the spaceship in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” they said there was legitimate concern that technological progress would transform the work force by destroying a widening range of jobs, as well as force humans to learn to live with machines that increasingly copy human behaviors.
Oh, gee, you think? Look, people have been saying this for centuries. This has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with automation. Samuel Butler, in 1863, wrote “Darwin Among the Machines” to basically argue that if you can’t imagine life without your automation right now, we’ve already lost, and are already on an inevitable slide into machine domination over humankind. This argument goes back further, but Butler gives a great “inevitable doomsday” reading of the situation.
Dr. Horvitz said he believed computer scientists must respond to the notions of superintelligent machines and artificial intelligence systems run amok.
So, the current president of AAAI, a professional organization I’ve belonged to for the last 11 years (although it’s possible my membership has lapsed since I haven’t gotten an AI Magazine to laugh at in the mail lately) is happily jumping on the singularity nonsense bandwagon. Depressing enough, but then we get:
“Something new has taken place in the past five to eight years,” Dr. Horvitz said. “Technologists are replacing religion, and their ideas are resonating in some ways with the same idea of the Rapture.”
So he isn’t ignorant of the fact that this is the age-old doomsday-cult business, but somehow he still thinks we need to take it seriously?
Members of my field (leading members, in title at least) need to take their collective heads out of their collective asses and get back to work. I’m way too young to be this disillusioned over my work and my passions already.
Link to the NY Times article, if you’ve got a stronger stomach or less stake in this academic community than I do.
Posted in Comics, Digital Culture, Extended
July 21, 2009 at 11:38 am
Ok, listen up, because I don’t say things like this lightly. Sometimes, people wonder what drives my love of Warren Ellis. I can’t always point to a single work of his that really illustrates why I love him. Sure, Transmetropolitan changed comics (for me, and almost certainly for others) at the time. Sure, he’s continued to write brilliant comics, including the on-going, weekly, free, online comic Freakangels. He’s also written quite a nice little book called Crooked Little Vein, that is more enjoyable if you already know the way Ellis’ head works (which isn’t something I recommend to those with weak constitutions).
But anyway, listen up.
Ellis has been writing a column (“Do Anything”) for a new comics site called Bleeding Cool recently. It’s been taking me awhile to read them all, because I can’t really read more than one a day (in theory. In reality, I’m getting through 1 every 3 or 4 days). I need to let the language roll around in my brain and choose which synapses to rest in. I decided at the end of the first one that these columns were activating the Hunter S. Thompson neural pathways in my brain, which have been atrophying since last I read HST’s ESPN columns (my only and ever ESPN experiences) and I still think that’s a fair description.
In other words? Warren Ellis is writing a column for Bleedingcool.com, and you should be reading it.
Posted in Extended, Philosophy, Science
July 17, 2009 at 5:30 pm
The wonderful Neurophilosophy Blog has a piece on Phineas Gage today. The interesting part? A newly discovered photo of Gage holding the spike that went through his head and made him history’s most famous jerk.
As mentioned over there, I think this is the only known photograph of Gage. There are many images floating around of his skull with the spike going through it, but as far as I know, they’re all recreations (although some were done during his life, I believe).
Posted in Extended, Site Admin
July 2, 2009 at 8:07 pm
I apologize for the strange slowness here lately (the site itself, not my usual snail-paced posting.) I’ve been planning an overhaul for a year, but I’m barely finding time to breathe, so let’s none of us hold our breath. Hopefully things won’t get any slower before I get around to fixing them.
Posted in Evolution, Extended, Philosophy, Science, Technology, ethics
June 26, 2009 at 10:34 am
I wish this study had been done 2 years earlier so I could’ve used it in my dissertation (shut up, Joshua):
Tools are ‘temporary body parts’
The brain represents tools as extensions to the body, according to researchers writing in Current Biology.
The research seems to confirm a century-old hypothesis that the brain models tools as parts of the body.
“There is a great debate in neuroscience about the representation of the body and representation of space,” said Lucilla Cardinali of the National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm) in France.
“There are a lot of papers about the effects of tool use, but they all focus on space – none investigated the effect on our own body,” she told BBC News.
H/T to a recently-graduated student. Link to BBC article.
Posted in Academic Life, Extended, Philosophy
June 22, 2009 at 11:19 am
Who teaches from Rosenthal’s “The Nature of Mind” and who uses Chalmers’ “Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings” instead? Why do they have to be so similar without either one being complete? Textbook decisions are a royal pain.
Next entries »
“Vision of tomorrow! Vision of tomorrow!”
“Is there a verb for making your own echoes? It seems like there should be a verb for making your own echoes.”
-Dinosaur Comics at qwantz.com (This obviously works better with the comic! My layout disallows such things. I hope Ryan North intended this to be as critical of futurism as I’m reading it to be.)
Posted in Blurb, Comics, Digital Culture on/at 01/19/2010 at 7:49 am
A new Rasmussen poll suggests that the Tea Party movement is far and away more popular than the Republican Party it seeks to influence — so much so that if it were a full-fledged political party, it would overtake the GOP on the generic Congressional ballot. Link to terrifying analysis on TPM.
Posted in Atheism, Blurb, Critical Thinking?, Democracy, Feminism on/at 12/07/2009 at 8:44 am
In a paper in Nature, Bryan Gick and Donald Derrick of the University of British Columbia report that people can hear with their skin. Link to article in the NY Times.
Posted in Blurb, Evolution, Science on/at 11/30/2009 at 8:08 pm
Honeybees, which have been the focus of Chittka’s work, have tiny brains with fewer than a million neurons. Yet, the insects can classify shapes as symmetrical or asymmetrical. They can pick objects based on concepts like “same” or “different.” They can also learn to stop flying after a prescribed number of landmarks rather than after a certain distance. Read more at MSNBC and learn why computing power is not the hurdle to building AI.
Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Blurb, Evolution, Philosophy, Science, Technology on/at 11/21/2009 at 8:04 pm
d’Armond Speers spoke only Klingon to his child for the first three years of its life… “I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language,” Speers told the Minnesota Daily. “He was definitely starting to learn it.” Read more at citypages.com
Posted in Blurb, Philosophy, Science on/at 11/21/2009 at 9:23 am
Indian election authorities Thursday granted what they called an independent identity to intersex and transsexuals in the country’s voter lists. Before, members of these groups — loosely called eunuchs in Indian English — were referred to as male or female in the voter rolls. But now, they will have the choice to tick “O” — for others — when indicating their gender in voter forms, the Indian election commission said in a statement. Link to CNN article.
Posted in Blurb, Democracy, Evolution, Feminism, ethics on/at 11/16/2009 at 6:30 pm
“Our results fit a longstanding theory which says that the common ancestor of humans and apes communicated through meaningful gestures and, over time, the brain regions that processed gestures became adapted for using words,” Braun said. “If the theory is correct, our language areas may actually be the remnant of this ancient communication system, one that continues to process gesture as well as language in the human brain.” Link to article via Healthday News.
Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Blurb, Evolution, Philosophy, Science on/at 11/16/2009 at 9:24 am
Hey, Peter, Representative Stupak and your 64 Democratic supporters, Jim Wallis and other anti-choice “progressive” Christians, men: Why don’t you take one for the team for a change and see how you like it?
For example, budget hawks in Congress say they’ll vote against the bill because it’s too expensive. Maybe you could win them over if you volunteered to cut out funding for male-exclusive stuff, like prostate cancer, Viagra, male infertility, vasectomies, growth-hormone shots for short little boys, long-term care for macho guys who won’t wear motorcycle helmets and, I dunno, psychotherapy for pedophile priests. Men could always pay in advance for an insurance policy rider, as women are blithely told they can do if Stupak becomes part of the final bill.
Read more by Katha Pollitt at the Guardian.
Posted in Blurb, Democracy, Feminism, ethics on/at 11/13/2009 at 3:10 pm
The hard sciences are interpenetrating the social sciences. This isn’t dehumanizing. It shines attention on the things poets have traditionally cared about: the power of human attachments. It may even help policy wonks someday see people as they really are. Great (quick, short, shallow but interesting) Op-Ed at The NY Times.
Posted in Academic Life, Blurb, Science on/at 10/13/2009 at 12:44 pm
Accusations of sexism have been levelled at the horror fiction industry after a new collection of interviews with 16 horror writers failed to include a single woman. Link: British Fantasy Society admits ‘lazy sexism’ over male-only horror book
Posted in Blurb, Feminism, literature on/at 09/23/2009 at 6:28 pm
“The Prime Minister has released a statement on the Second World War code-breaker, Alan Turing, recognising the “appalling” way he was treated for being gay… So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.” Link to the Office of the Prime Minster’s Website.
Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Blurb, Democracy, Digital Culture, Philosophy, Technology, ethics on/at 09/10/2009 at 5:35 pm
“I can’t help but think neurodiveristy is an area in which science fiction and fantasy fans are a long, long ways ahead of society in general.” Ponderings by Jason Henninger at Tor.com
Posted in Blurb, Digital Culture, Science, literature on/at 08/31/2009 at 9:56 pm
A CAMPAIGN has been launched to win a posthumous apology for computer pioneer Alan Turing over his conviction for homosexuality. Read more here. Sign the petition here if you’re British. Please.
Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Blurb, Digital Culture, Technology, ethics on/at 08/17/2009 at 8:28 pm
Newly minted brides should do more than vow to love their hubbies for a lifetime, say the majority of Americans. Some 70 percent of the respondents in a new study feel they should also take their spouse’s surname – and 50 percent say that it should be a legal requirement for a woman to take her spouse’s last name… When the respondents were asked why they felt women should change their name after the wedding, Hamilton says, “They told us that women should lose their own identity when they marry and become a part of the man and his family. This was a reason given by many.” Read more and weep at the Daily News.
Posted in Blurb, Democracy, Feminism on/at 08/13/2009 at 7:46 pm
Next entries »
Posted in Atheism, Books, Media
January 6, 2010 at 9:36 am
The Patrician took a sip of his beer. ‘I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect I never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I’m sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.’ Terry Pratchett at Powells.com
Posted in Books, Media
August 10, 2009 at 10:10 am
The pirates reluctantly slunk out from behind various barrels and piles of old fish. Several of them held their hands over their faces in the mistaken belief that if they couldn’t see Cutlass Liz then she couldn’t see them.
‘You know I once ate twenty babies?’ said Cutlass Liz, looking them up and down. The crew all nodded fearfully.
‘I’m sure babies taste a lot better than pirates,’ said the albino pirate. ‘Because they’d be fresher. And not as salty.’
Gideon Defoe at Powells.com
Posted in Books, Comics, Media
August 10, 2009 at 9:58 am
“After punching god in the brain, I smuggled the vicious little bastard back to E.M.P.I.R.E. I have no idea what they’ll do with a hostage god, but the mind reels. And I hope it hurts.” Matt Fraction and Gabriel Ba at Powells.com
Posted in Books, Democracy, Digital Culture, Media, Technology, literature
July 22, 2009 at 10:56 am
“You can’t get anything done by doing nothing. It’s our country. They’ve taken it from us. The terrorists who attack us are still free–but we’re not. I can’t go underground for a year, ten years, my whole life, waiting for freedom to be handed to me. Freedom is something you have to take for yourself.” – Cory Doctorow at Amazon.com
Posted in Books, Media, Philosophy, literature
July 7, 2009 at 11:44 am
“Ok, look,” Wilson said. “You noted it yourself – without the brain, the pattern of consciousness usually collapses. That’s because the consciousness is wholly dependent on the physical structure of the brain. And not just any brain; it’s dependent on the brain in which it arose. Every pattern of consciousness is like a fingerprint. It’s specific to that person and it’s specific right down to the genes.” John Scalzi on Amazon.com
Posted in Books, Media
May 18, 2009 at 3:49 pm
And while we were standing on this spot, the spot where Mao stood when he proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the music we were having played at us by the public address system was first “Viva Espana” and then the “Theme from Hawaii Five-O.” It was hard to avoid the feeling that somebody, somewhere, was missing the point I couldn’ve even be sure that it wasn’t me… Douglas Adams at Powells.com
Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Books, Media, Philosophy, literature
April 9, 2009 at 3:05 pm
“Man did not feel inches or meters, pounds or gallons. He felt heat, He felt cold; He felt heaviness and lightness. He knew hatred and love, pride and despair. You cannot measure these things. You cannot know them. You can only know the things that He did not need to know: dimensions, weights temperatures, gravities. There is no formula for a feeling. There is no conversion factor for an emotion.”
“There must be,” said Frost. “If a thing exists, it is knowable.”
“You are speaking again of measurement. I am talking about a quality of experience. A machine is a Man turned inside-out, because it can describe all the details of a process which a Man cannot, but it cannot experience that process itself as a Man can.”
-Roger Zelazny at Amazon.com
Posted in Books, Evolution, Media, Science
February 16, 2009 at 12:21 pm
“Bumblebees detect the polarization of sunlight, invisible to uninstrumented humans; pit vipers sense infrared radiation and detect temperature differences of 0.01degree Centigrade at a distance of half a meter; many insects can see ultraviolet light; some African freshwater fish generate a static electric field around themselves and sense intruders by slight perturbations induced in the field; dogs, sharks, and cicadas detect sounds wholly inaudible to humans; ordinary scorpions have microseismometers on their legs so they can detect in pitch darkness the footsteps of a small insect a meter away…” Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan at Amazon.com
Posted in Books, Comics, Media
February 9, 2009 at 3:34 pm
“What’s it like in space?”
“It sings.”
“The vibrations from the spin of the drive arms, sir, and the motion of the heat through the casements to space, which is very cold. The whole ship sings quietly, like a gently struck tuning fork.”
Warren Ellis at Amazon.com
Posted in Books, Comics, Media
January 8, 2009 at 2:57 pm
“You’re not here. You’re not even the real Kathy. The Doctor explained it to me, once he’d examined the computer.” – Corner of the Eye, by Steven Moffat. (Early version of the story that became the Doctor Who episode “Blink.”)
Posted in Books, Media
December 21, 2008 at 7:17 am
“Time,” said Kerry Westerfield, “is curved. Eventually, it gets back to the same place where it started. That’s duplication.” He put his feet up on a conveniently outjutting rock of the chimney and stretched luxuriously. From the kitchen Martha made clinking noises with bottles and glasses.
“Yesterday at this time I had a Martini,” Kerry said. “The time curve indicates that I should have another one now. Are you listening, angel?”
“I’m pouring,” said the angel distantly.
“You get my point, then. Here’s another. Time describes a spiral instead of a circle. If you call the first cycle ‘a’, the second one’s ‘a plus 1′–see? Which means a double Martini tonight.” … Henry Kuttner at Amazon.com
Posted in Books, Comics, Media
December 21, 2008 at 7:09 am
“But most importantly, the biggest pile of amps and speakers they could afford in one corner. And a DJ who played records that came out last week rather than last decade in the other. Indie as inclusive exhibitionism. Triumphalism rather than introversion. Charms rather than wards. Realising that selling out was actually the one thing left to do with ‘independent guitar music.’ So let’s piss away everything our predecessors strove for. Sell out. Just make sure the price is high enough to buy a pair of fancy new shoes.” Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie at Amazon.com
Posted in Books, Comics, Media, Science
November 18, 2008 at 12:45 pm
Once again the day is saved by SCIENCE! Once again our CITY is saved by science! Nikola Tesla makes a HERO of science! Science makes a HERO of Nikola Tesla! Sleep soundly, New York City! Science has made you safe again! Ask yourselves — Why hasn’t your GOVERNMENT done the same? Matt Fraction at Powells.com
Posted in Books, Media
November 18, 2008 at 12:39 pm
I sigh, depressed, and grind my teeth. I toy with shouting some tidbit more-some terrifying, unthinkable threat, some blackly fuliginous irddling hex-but my heart’s not in it. “Missed me!” I say with a coy little jerk and a leer, to keep my spirits up. Then, with a sigh, a kind of moan, I start very carefully down the cliffs that lead to the fens and moors and Hrothgar’s hall… John Gardner at Powells.com
Posted in Books, Feminism, Media
October 21, 2008 at 2:10 pm
“In the crowd over there, that one gaping at her gods. One rotten girl in the city of the future (That’s what i said.) Watch. She’s jammed among bodies, craning and peering with her soul yearning out of her eyeballs. Love! Ooooh, love them! Her gods are coming out of a store called Body East. Three youngbloods, larking along loverly. Dressed like simple street-people but… smashing. See their great eyes swivel above their nose-filters, their hands lift shyly, their inhumanly tender lips melt? The crowd moans. Love! This whole boiling megacity, this whole fun future world loves its gods.” James Tiptree, Jr. at Amazon.com
Next entries »