Introducing brainSCANr
The Brain Systems, Connections, Associations, and Network Relationships (a phrase with more words than strictly necessary in order to bootstrap a good acronym) assumes that somewhere in all the chaos and noise of the more than 20 million papers on PubMed, there must be some order and rationality.
To that end, we have created a dictionary of hundreds of brain region names, cognitive and behavioral functions, and diseases (and their synonyms!) to find how often any two phrases co-occur in the scientific literature. We assume that the more often two terms occur together (at the exclusion of those words by themselves, without each other), the more likely they are to be associated.
Are there problems with this assumption? Yes, but we think you'll like the results anyway. Obviously the database is limited to the words and phrases with which we have populated it. We also assume that when words co-occur in a paper, that relationship is a positive one (i.e., brain areas A and B are connected, as opposed to not connected). Luckily, there is a positive publication bias in the peer-reviewed biomedical sciences that we can leverage to our benefit (hooray biases)! Furthermore, we cannot dissociate English homographs; thus, a search for the phrase "rhythm" (to ascertain the brain regions associated with musical rhythm) gives the strongest association with the suprachiasmatic nucleus (that is, for circadian rhythms!)
Despite these limitations, we believe we have created a powerful visualization tool that will speed research and education, and hopefully allow for the discovery of new, previously unforeseen connections between brain, behavior, and disease.
Genius! By the talented Bradley and Jessica Voytek.
Improved Ray Kurzweil Singularity Summit 2010 Talk, This Time Without Freezing
Ray Kurzweil: The Mind and How to Build One from Singularity Institute on Vimeo.
Good Description of Ringworld/Orbital
From here. This space blog seems pretty good, and has nice images. The author is a student from Singapore.
Singularity Summit 2009 Featured in Carl Zimmer Article in Scientific American
Carl Zimmer wrote this: "Can You Live Forever? Maybe Not -- But You Can Have Fun Trying". This is a very positive, yet slightly skeptical look at the Singularity movement. This article is a follow-up to Zimmer's earlier article in Playboy, which came out this January. This year, there have been articles on the Singularity Summit and Singularity Institute in Playboy, GQ, the UK Independent, and Scientific American. Here's a funny bit from the current article:
After the meeting I decided to visit to researchers working on the type of technology that people such as Kurzweil consider the steppingstones to the Singularity. Not one of them takes Kurzweil's own vision of the future seriously. We will not have some sort of cybernetic immortality in the next few decades. The human brain is far too mysterious and computers far too crude for such a union anytime soon, if ever. In fact some scientists regard all this talk of the Singularity as a reckless promise of false hope to the afflicted.
But when I asked these skeptics about the future, even their most conservative visions were unsettling: a future in which people boost their brains with enhancing drugs, for example, or have sophisticated computers implanted in their skulls for life. While we may never be able to upload our minds into a computer, we may still be able to build computers based on the layout of the human brain. I can report I have not drunk the Singularity Kool-Aid, but I have taken a sip.
Taking a sip is a subset of drinking.
Ramez Naam at Singularity Summit 2010: “The Digital Biome”
Ramez Naam: The Digital Biome from Singularity Institute on Vimeo.
Abstract:
Exponential technologies offer the promise not only of changing the human condition, but of radically altering the face of the planet on which we dwell. Within the next 20 years we will have sequenced the genome of every known species on the earth and tremendously advanced our understanding of how to utilize those genes and reprogram those organisms to alter the biosphere. Biosphere engineering will play a major role in overcoming current environmental and resource challenges, including finite reserves of fossil fuels and looming changes to the earth’s climate. That is just the beginning. An understanding of the complete biome genome will bring tremendous agility in combating future infectious disease outbreaks, in creating new sensors and manufacturing capabilities, and in revolutionizing food. Biosphere engineering and its underlying technologies will allow us to dramatically raise the population carrying capacity of the planet to tens of billions of individuals at least. With effective technology to sculpt the planetary biome, the limits of the number of humans that can live on the planet, and the quality of life of each, at tremendously higher than they appear to be today. This talk will explore some of the lower bounds of what's possible with control of the biome.
Open Ecology Video
Global Village Construction Set in 2 Minutes from Marcin Jakubowski on Vimeo.
Teen Girl Gets New Bionic Hand
Singularity Summit 2010 Videos: Jose Cordeiro on the Future of Energy
Jose Cordeiro: The Future of Energy and the Energy of the Future from Singularity Institute on Vimeo.
Andrew Keen on Anonymous
I love this guy:
The fundamental difference between Anonymous and the lunch counter sit-ins lies in their anonymity. In Greensboro, the activists were citizens called Blair, Richmond, McNeil and McCain; in Anonymous, they are science fictional characters called Moryath, Tux and Coldblood.
The two movements have in common their call for corporations to take responsibility for their own actions. But while the American civil rights activists took responsibility for their own actions and thus openly risked jail and violence for standing up for their beliefs, the shadowy members of Anonymous are not willing to reveal their real identities.
For all their fetishization of the supposed accountability, openness and transparency realized through digital technology, Anonymous is a quintessentially oblique organization rooted in hiding behind the very technology that is supposed to be making the world a more open place.
So why won't Anonymous take responsibility for their actions? The difference lies in their politics -- or, more accurately, their lack of politics. While the civil rights activists in Greensboro wanted Woolworth to change their whites-only lunch counter policy (rather than simply burn down the store), Anonymous has no political goals beyond destroying or disabling the websites of its enemies.
Because Anonymous regards large companies like Mastercard or Visa as necessarily corrupt, its tactics and strategy are inevitably destructive. The Anons have no interest in compromise, discussion or engagement with their opponents. Thus, as the Anon fellow-traveler Coldblood told the BBC, Anonymous is in a "state of war" against all opponents of WikiLeaks.
"The first serious infowar is now engaged, The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops," co-founder of the EFF John Perry Barlow (http://twitter.com/JPBARLOW) tweeted last week. Barlow might be right to suggest that Anonymous has a mission -- metaphorically, at least.
So, the EFF has no respect for state secrets? We pay tens of billions in tax dollars to gather intelligence and keep it secret, and the citizens cheer when our secrecy fails? State secrets can mean more than military hardware. The developed world has had relative security for so long that we forget the natural state of international relations -- frequent war.
The demand for everyone and everything to be transparent is nothing but selfishness. "I'm curious, so tell me." Over the next couple decades, we'll see the downside of this dynamic. Plans for powerful weapons will be made "transparent", and small actors will begin using them against each other and the police. A world where everyone can have any information will lead to a world where anyone can build any weapon, anyone can challenge anyone else, and the result could very well be anarchy. Indeed, that seems to be what many of these people want. They demand accountability of their leaders, but hide their identities behind the herd. That's what I call cowards.
At Least Some Security Experts Do Understand the Low Risk — My Bad
It looks like I actually jumped the gun... I've been seeing articles over the past few days exaggerating the meaning of the WikiLeaks "cyberwar", but the CNN article I linked actually gets it right (should have read the whole thing):
Security researchers said the tactics of cyber warfare have been deployed in the WikiLeaks saga, but they're by far not the most drastic measures a hacker would take if he or she really wanted to cause real damage.
Schneier compared the pro-WikiLeaks attacks on MasterCard and Visa to a bunch of protesters standing in front of an office building, refusing to let workers in. It's annoying, but it didn't shut down the operation. And it didn't start a war.
Cyber attacks start to become war-like when they purposefully attack real-world targets, causing actual damage to property or death, Hypponen said.
That had never been shown to be possible until this year, when the Stuxnet worm showed that it could attack factory systems and alter mechanical processes, he said. That kind of virus could, in theory, be used to shut down power grids, halt public transportation or blow up factories, he said.
My apologies to Mr. Schneier and other security experts quoted in the article. Reading the first seven or eight paragraphs of the article gave me the impression that CNN was portraying this as legitimate cyber-warfare.
Still, there definitely are security experts out there who don't understand the nature of what's going on, and resort to making general comments on cyber warfare. I was also misled by looking at Schneier's blog and seeing general comments on cyber warfare, as if this were an example of such.
WikiLeaks “Cyberwar” Nonsense from “Security Experts” Who Don’t Understand 4chan or Anonymous
I find it funny how the mainstream security community takes Anonymous so seriously because it doesn't understand it. See this recent CNN article, for instance.
Anonymous did not only "start" with 4chan, Anonymous still easily can be regarded as the cyber army of 4chan and its immediate network. Its not as shadowy, distributed, or effective as it's always made out to be. It really is mostly a bunch of children, and though a bunch of children should not be underestimated, their greatest power is quantity, not quality. The group is easily distracted and needs plenty of morale to keep going. Ideologically, it is fragile. It is more dependent on the directions of central figures than commonly thought. For instance, "moot" could halt 90% of the intensity of the attack overnight by issuing a statement. Moot, meanwhile, is already in the process of selling out and becoming part of the establishment.
The security experts being asked for commentary (Bruce Schneier, again and again) do not understand the group. Because he is relatively clueless about it, he just makes general comments on cyberwar which are only tangentially relevant to the current conflict. How can someone make comments on a war knowing so little about the army? Infiltrating the "army" to its core is not at all hard, but it requires days of messing around with the 4chan community, which adults that have day jobs don't have the time to do. There are probably 13 year-olds far more qualified to comment on this "cyber war" than Mr. Schneier, and they are probably laughing at him and similar "experts" right now.
To even ask the United States if it has been involved in "cyberwar", as CNN did, is somewhat stupid, because the only reported-on effects of the "army" (bunch of distractable children and adults with momentary time on their hands) have been simple DDoS attacks that operate based on quantity, not quality, and that any idiot (or bot) can participate in. This is in contrast to hackers that attack based on nationalist leanings (Russian and Chinese hackers), funded and led by the state -- much more effective. A cyber army that would die if 4chan and Encyclopedia Dramatica were shut down, or if moot made a statement, is only a momentary nuisance, not anything serious.
You can predict the rough effects of any Anonymous "cyber war" by looking at past cases, such as the attack on Scientology. The attack is somewhat of a nuisance while it occurs, but as soon as the community loses interest, everything goes back to normal, and the financial damage is not significant because the "hackers" lack the social engineering skills to do any real damage or get any personal information. They can only harass with faxes, prank calls, protests, DDoS, and the like. In fact, the flood of amateur hacking only causes the targets to reinforce themselves and attain immunity from the possibility of more serious attacks. True "cyber warfare" will involve small groups of highly skilled attackers simultaneously taking actions that individually cause great damage before the target can respond.