Links of Interest

Space is awesome, reason 122359:
Most of us have seen astronaut Chris Hadfield doing his David Bowie, but there's also this awesomeness of what it's like to wring out a wet washcloth in low gravity.  Speaking of his Bowie performance, The Economist discusses copyright in space.

Better late...
In 1949, The New York Times asked Norbert Wiener, one of the most innovative 20th century thinkers about technology and its impact, to write an essay about the future. They finally published (some of) it this week.

Digital Humanities:
From Sample Reality, an interesting overview of "non-consumptive reading," the use of analytical algorithms on large amounts of texts.

More Digital Humanities:
A very well done review of two classics in digital literature, Galatea and Photopia.

Science in the Media:
Tips for Scientists on How to Talk to Journalists.  The comments after are interesting as well, especially in revealing how scientists and science journalists view each other and their relationship to the public.

Who's your state's highest paid public employee?
If you're in the US, you can find out on this map from deadspin.com, which includes this quote: "You may have heard that the highest-paid employee in each state is usually the football coach at the largest state school. This is actually a gross mischaracterization: Sometimes it is the basketball coach."Read his comments here.  Other earners tend to be in medicine and academia; is this a good thing or a bad thing?


Many people have weighed in on the new fanfiction-for-profit project from Amazon: scholars, fans, and others.
Among the more interesting is the response at fuck yeah copyright law on tumblr, which deserves a mention not least because of the way they fully and amusingly embrace tumblr culture with that name:  http://fyeahcopyright.tumblr.com/post/51070772955/its-kindle-worlds-were-just-living-in-it


Pronunciation in the world of the (digitally) written word:
From Nerd Approved: Are we all pronouncing "gif" wrong?

In Twitter Research:
From Open Culture, Twitter trends being used to study almost everything.

Transmedia and Television:
From Confessions of an Aca-Fan: "Is This the End of Television as We Know It?"

Ancient Art/Technology:
Modern Artists Show How the Ancient Greeks & Romans Made Coins, Vases & Artisanal Glass

Science is Art:
Ed Yong at National Geographic rhapsodizes (convincingly!)  about the sculptural craft and wonder of a better flu vaccine. Fascinating discussion.

Posthuman Brains:
From io9, Humans With Amplified Intelligence Could Be More Powerful Than AI.  While the possibilities discussed here might evoke many reactions -- excitement, fear, premature plans for one's future as a supergenius who rules the world, etc. -- the conversation shares a serious absence that most conversations about AI share. The concept of "intelligence" is relatively new and hardly universal; while most cultures (in my limited knowledge) have conceptions of cleverness and wisdom, "intelligence" and "smartness" is a fraught concept with radically different meanings in different contexts. Historically, intelligence has often been defined in hegemonic terms, terms that take society's assumptions of human difference as biological fact (phrenology, for example, was used among other things to determine intellect). But to what extent do we mean creativity and to what extent do we mean, say, spatial reasoning, pattern recognition, social intelligence, etc.?  If intelligence testing is designed to be as "universal" as possible, doesn't that diminish the importance of, say, context-specific intelligence? In general, "intelligence" is not a neutral concept nor a particularly well-defined one, particularly in debates such as the one in this article.  When applying a culturally contested concept like "intelligence" to projects that alter neurochemistry, a little more analysis might be in order.

It might also be amusing for some readers that the author speculates that enhanced intelligence might lead to unassailable power; the correlation between intelligence and political power is, well... to answer this question, it might be better to just watch a Daily Show re-run.

Links of Interest

Chart Girl on the The Great SOCIAL MEDIA IMPLOSION of 2013

From the New York Times, Is the guide that psychiatrists use not really based on science?  This one is also interesting in that it shows the work that experts do in trying to define the boundary between science and not-science. This debate is a great example of how defining legitimacy relies on complex relationships among academic, corporate, and professional institutions, and our conceptions of categorization, rigor, and public trust.

And lots of fun stuff from LiveScience (Mostly new, a few older ones I found by failing to resist the allure of clicking on the Related Stories):

Intelligent Robots Will Overtake Humans by 2100, Experts Say

In anti-pseudoscience news: Busting myths about men's and women's 'bedroom' behavior

Big surprise: super moralistic people are more likely to think it's okay for THEM to cheat

Another big surprise: the lone wolf warrior caveman who somehow secured the evolutionary future of humanity by busting heads? Big ol' myth. (Mostly)

Robots learn to lie. (Awesome. In a mildly scary, Skynet kind of way. But still awesome.)

Book Review - Oldies but Goodies

Once in a while, I’ll cover some of my favorite books on the connections among science, technology and culture – sometimes I’ll do this even if the book isn’t brand new, in my attempt to feature Oldies but Goodies.  Today it’s (the not particularly old):

 

Title: Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning

Author: Karen Barad

What You’ll Find in This Book  
Barad’s “philosophy-physics” is part of a long and sometimes contentious debate about whether philosophy and theories prevalent in the humanities (think Michel Foucault and Judith Butler) have something to offer our understanding of what science is. From C.P. Snow first declaring that the sciences and humanities are “two cultures,” to the distrust and mockery displayed in the Sokal hoax, someone who’s not paying attention might think the conversation goes something like this:

Scientist: We use observation and rigorous testing to establish facts about the universe. You   humanists think that there’s no such thing as truth. For you, e equals m c squared is equally valid as e equals MC Lyte.  If science worked the way you think it does, we’d never find out anything.

Humanist: You may be good at science but you have no idea what science actually is. Knowledge isn’t the process of objectively culling pure truth from the universe. There is no access to reality that isn’t by language, culture, and the mind; the history of science shows this again and again.

(You may have noticed that for the sake of dramatic interest, I’ve made both characters prone to self-righteous rants. I've also made the scientist a fan of old school rap. Just because.)


Barad, however, is interested in how we might be able to account for cultural, historical, and ethical realities as well as creating “faithful” stories about how the universe works; in other words, she wants a philosophy of science that doesn’t ignore all that the humanities have learned about how knowledge relates to culture and power, and to use these ideas to make scientists understand their own work well enough to make their own science more rigorous.

Barad is a physicist and also a feminist theorist, a combination you don’t find every day. As someone with political convictions, she rejects the kind of relativism that says that knowledge is always unstable and uncertain, and so there’s no way to know the moral value of something. Instead, she develops a framework called “agential realism.” This framework is based on the interconnectedness of all matter in the universe; there is no interaction among separate objects, only “intra-action” of selected pieces of a connected whole. In this view, you can be aware of how many cultural factors shape scientific inquiry, but still believe that it is possible to create better or worse (more or less scientifically accurate) accounts of how things intra-act. She even relies on Niels Bohr's thoughts on the fraught nature of scientific observation to explain this!

One of the most provocative insights in this book is that the scientific apparatus isn’t what we think it is. If you want to talk about everything that contributes to an experiment – her definition of “apparatus,” you also have to include the histories that led up to this experiment, the researchers’ conceptions, the ethical ramifications of the scientific work, etc. So if a scientist’s job is, in part, to understand and to note the apparatus used to get a particular result, then the scientist also has to understand the cultural, political, and ethical dimensions of her or his work.  In this view, cultural and ethical issues are therefore classified as scientific issues – as knowledge that is necessary to produce more rigorous scientific methodology.  

So let's get back to our fictional scientist and humanist (you know, the self righteous ones). If Barad is taking the best of both humanists' and scientists' thoughts, does that mean that now the scientist and humanist get along? Are they cuddling on the couch now, whispering passages from Tom Stoppard in each other's ear?

No. Barad definitely wants to make it clear that she's not aiming for the spirit of compromise. She doesn't want to reconcile realism and constructivism by watering down each; she wants to create a new hybrid by radicalizing each.

Overall, the book explains agential realism but also provides a series of fascinating applications of this framework, from looking at working conditions to examining Michael Frayn’s play, Copenhagen. And most of it, believe it or not, is pretty easy to read and understand (a couple of chapters are a little dense, but nobody says you have to read the chapters in order, last I checked).  Overall, this is one of the most creative and interdisciplinary books on science and culture I’ve read.

Other Reasons This Book Is Badass:  Barad smacks down close-minded interpretations of science and philosophy from many different sources, and she creates a totally new framework to think about what science is.  She’s equally adept at talking about Heisenberg as she is about Donna Haraway and Michel Foucault. The book also includes discussion of her own original research in physics; I’ve heard her explain at a lecture that she did this in part so that physicists would have to buy a feminist theory book, which is pretty hilarious.

Also: You can read the wikipedia entry for more info (Full disclosure: I wrote about half of it.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Barad

Links of Interest

From Wired: Using a 3-D printer to make an ear that can hear: "Nanotechnology engineers from Princeton have 3-D printed an ear from calf cells and silver nanoparticles that picks up radio signals at frequencies beyond human capacity. The creation is part of their greater plan to one day build spare parts for human cyborgs."

Also from Wired: The Coolest and Most Terrifying Biomimetic Robots. Besides the fascinating robots, we also get a continuation of the long, increasingly boring tradition of finding 'human-like-ness' to be terrifying, disturbing, etc. This article is interesting in that it seems to admit that the "cool" and the terrifying seem be gaining more and more overlap; it's debatable if that's a good thing, but I admit that some of the technological innovations that I personally find the "coolest" are also, on more reflection, some of the most concerning. Whether biomimetic robots or bioengineered ears, the boundaries of how we define human-ness are becoming a rather chaotic border.

A blogger suggests that men and women both should submit their scientific research with their initials only to get rid of sexist bias in publishing.

Nerdapproved features Gritty Reboots' PBS Avengers: Carl Sagan, Bill Nye, and others assemble to save the world from the evils of non-PBS television (in other words, to promote scientific literacy).