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."
