Wendell Wallach, of Yale's Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, is quoted in an article in yesterday's New York Times, expressing fear about the moral hazards posed by weaponized robots. Wendell joined us last April for a discussion of his book on the topic, Moral Machines.
Caleb Cox, in an article in reghardware.com called "Speak geek: the world of made-up language," discusses invented languages and linguist Arika Okrent's recent book, The Land of Invented Languages. Mentioned in the article are languages such as Elvish, Klingon, John Wilkins' Analytical Language, James Cook Brown's Loglan, Esperanto, and Blissymbolics. GR, a friend of IS, says, "BTW, I have a soft spot for Wilkins; his is the only orthography based purely on semantics. Unfortunately the only fluent writer was Robert Hooke. News of his discovery of the universal joint was delayed for many years because he chose to write the original description in Wilkins' script!" Speaking of obscure languages, GR also suggests Complete Babylonian: A Teach Yourself Guide by Martin Worthington, saying "it is truly excellent and remarkably modern both in appearance and conception -- a must have for your bookshelf."
io9 reports on new ultra-flexible, waterproof LEDs that can be implanted under your skin. I await my glowworm future. ET phone home. I leave that rest for Simon to fill in.
In keeping with this month's IS Group science fiction reading, The Dervish House, by Ian McDonald, which features a children's toy that is a nanobot that reassembles into various forms, including a bird, a rat, and a snake, IEEE Spectrum on-line has a report called, "Japanese Snake Robot Goes Where Humans Can't." "Japanese robotics company HiBot has unveiled a nimble snake bot capable of moving inside air ducts and other narrow places where people can't, or don't want to, go." Not quite the snake of The Dervish House, but a good start. The IEEE website has a number of videos of the ACM family of robots in action.
"I don't believe in the singularity for the same reason I don't believe in Heaven." Thus begins Annalee Newitz's column in io9, a blog that focuses on futurism, science fiction, and technology. The article, called "Why the Singularity isn't going to happen," discusses the unpredictability of technology and its effects on us. Cory Doctorow discusses her objections in Boing Boing.
David Dobbs, in his blog Neuron Culture in Wired, comments in a piece called "How to Set the Bullshit Filter When the Bullshit is Thick" on an Atlantic profile by David H. Freedman of Dr. John Ioannidis, best known for his 2005 paper in PLoS Medicine, "Why most published research findings are false." In an earlier Times piece, Dobbs said "Ioannidis, an epidemiologist, recently concluded that most articles published by biomedical journals are flat-out wrong. The sources of error, he found, are numerous: the small size of many studies, for instance, often leads to mistakes, as does the fact that emerging disciplines, which lately abound, may employ standards and methods that are still evolving. Finally, there is bias, which Ioannidis says he believes to be ubiquitous." Dobbs provides a good overview and analysis of Ioannidis's work, its implications, and related articles. Freedman's profile of Ioannidis is called, "Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science."
Nick Enfield, of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, and Radboud University in Nijmegen, has a fascinating review of two recent books about language evolution in the 24 September 2010 issue of Science. The article, called "Without Social Context?", reviews The Evolution of Language by W. Tecumseh Fitch, and The Evolution of Human Language: Biolinguistic Perspectives, by Richard K. Larson, Viviane Déprez, and Hiroko Yamakido (eds.). In summary, Enfield says that "... an urgent prerequisite for this line of research ... is a comparative understanding of language in the dynamic context of social behavior."
The next IS Group meeting will take place on Saturday evening, 23 October 2010. The exact time and location will be posted a few days before the meeting. The theme is Modern Warfare, Crime, and Terrorism. The readings include John Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization; Ian McDonald, The Dervish House; and Misha Glenny, McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld. Additional information can be found on the IS Group website.
The 2010 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony & Lectures webcast is scheduled to take place on Thursday, September 30, at 7:30 pm. The live webcast will begin at 7:15 pm on YouTube. Thanks to Marc Abrahams for passing on this information. Be sure to check out his Improbable Research website ("Research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK"), the magazine: Annals of Improbable Research, and the newsletter: mini-AIR.
Check out Mapping Stereotypes, illustrations based on the geography of prejudice, on alphadesigner, the website of visual artist, graphic designer, and illustrator Yanko Tsvetkov. Thanks and a hit tip to Robert Remez.
Voice Recognition Elevator is a wonderful video on haha.nu, the lifestyle blog. This clip is from Burnistoun, a comedy show from BBC Scotland, season 1, episode 1. Hysterical! Thanks and a hat tip to RER. (P.S. Load time for the haha.nu website can be long, but it is worth the wait.) (Note: A faster loading version can be found on YouTube.)
Now that I have returned from my summer journey to Russia, and have also dealt with some urgent work-related matters, I have a little time for IS Group blogging. Instead of writing, I have been reading other science-related blogs. There are lots out there, and many are a lot of fun. There has been a lot of Hausermania and science v. religion discussion of late, but there are also other fascinating topics to read about. 
Jaron Lanier is one of those people who always make me ask "What exactly does this guy do for a living" while also making me think, "Man, this guy really knows what he's talking about!" So I was delighted to see his response at the top of the list in the "What's the Big Idea?" piece in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education Review. In a nutshell: Lanier sees through all the hype surrounding "transformative" technologies like Facebook and Twitter, and he shows the overall negative effect they have on the quality of our lives as human beings.
A couple months ago I gave a talk at Haskins about Vector Symbolic Architectures, a new approach to knowledge representation and computing that is very robust to even large amounts of noise. This blog post describes how a classical (von Neumann) computing architecture can fail from the random flipping of even a single bit. Whatever organizing principles the mind/brain is using, they can't be anything like this!
Best smackdown review yet of a disappointing movie that I couldn't even make it through.
Meara O'Reilly is a sound designer, instrument builder, and singer who is guest blogging at Boing Boing. On March 16, 2010 she had a nice article called "Whistling Speech" that describes some of the work over the years at Haskins Laboratories and Columbia University by Philip Rubin, Robert Remez, Jennifer Pardo, and others, on sinewave speech.
An article by Antonio Espingardeiro, called "When Will We Become Cyborgs?", in IEEE Spectrum online ponders our cyborg future. Check it out.
Autistici, a UK-based composer and sound designer, is releasing a new commercial CD on March 22, 2010, called Detached Metal Voice - Early Works (Vol. I). Modisti, an interactive virtual environment for new music, describes it as "A collection of tracks exploring the raw extrusion of the human condition. Bringing together early works, Detached Metal Voice is characterized by abstract narrative exploring the anxiety of disconnected elements striving to find connection in a world digital communication. ... There is an homage to voice synthesis including excerpts taken from many of the early laboratory attempts to produce the human voice through the mode of synthesis, including work pioneered by Philip Rubin from the Haskins Laboratories, Tom Baer, and Paul Mermelstein. This synthesizer, know as ASY, was based on vocal tract models developed at Bell Laboratories in the 1960s and 1970s by Paul Mermelstein, Cecil Coker, and colleagues. In tracks such as “Babyman” Autistici illustrates a fascination in hearing machines talking about emotive subjects, emulating emotive tonal changes and yet having no real connection to the subjective emotional experience."
Wall Art: The Photography of Philip RubinThe next art exhibit at Atticus Bookstore/Café, 1082 Chapel St., New Haven, CT, will be Wall Art, a collection of photographs created by local artist Philip Rubin. The exhibit will run from January 11 until February 21, 2010, and is viewable in the cafe during business hours.
Come join us for the reception on January 21 at 6:30pm: meet the artist, discuss the works, and enjoy wine and appetizers.
All profits from sale of photographs in this exhibit will be donated to IRIS: Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services, in New Haven, Connecticut (www.irisct.org).
