Social Robots Engaged in Collective Construction

Submitted by stefano on Sun, 2011-09-11 12:51.
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This is an interesting video. Notice how they break it down:

  • Locomotion
  • Locomotion on structures
  • Autonomous navigation
  • Manipulation

Evidence Based Decision-making (Not)

Submitted by stefano on Fri, 2011-09-09 12:40.
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Dilbert.com

Evaluating the Narrative: One Way Of Distinguishing Between Truth and Fiction

Submitted by stefano on Fri, 2011-04-08 12:49.
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If CSI investigators thought like politicians and the voters who sent them to Washington, this is what criminal investigation would look like. Sigh...

Dilbert.com

Scott Adams "Debunks" Science

Submitted by stefano on Sun, 2011-03-20 16:21.
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When personal experience seems to contradict scientific findings, it's obvious that the science has to be wrong. Right?

Dilbert.com

Change in our System of Public Education

Submitted by stefano on Sat, 2011-02-26 18:24.
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I've often heard repeated the following comparison to describe the inertia of our public education system and its resistance to change. And it's probably even true. It's said that business has changed so much in the past 50 years, that if were possible to transplant a business executive, a secretary (what's that?) or an engineer from 1961 to 2011, they would not be productive in a modern corporation or small business for many, many months, if ever.

And yet, it is also said, a teacher from 1861 would probably do just fine in a modern classroom.

NASA's Research on Arsenic in Microbial DNA Criticized in Science Media

Submitted by stefano on Sun, 2010-12-19 16:43.
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This Washington Post article describes what it calls a "torrent of criticism in the blogosphere" in response to an article published in the December 2nd issue of Science entitled "A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus". In fact, the online response to the article is rather interesting and an example of what real science is like. It illustrates the differences between a scientific argument we might overhear in a laboratory between colleagues and a "dialogue" we might find in the popular press about science. And a lot of it sounds like arguments we may have heard in the editor's office at Science, between accepting or rejecting the submitted article, or at NASA, between doing more research or publishing what they had. Through this "torrent" of criticism, we can more critically process a broad spectrum of science media and understand how the Internet is changing it before our very eyes.

Wasteful Science Spending? Let Congress and "The People" Decide!

Submitted by stefano on Wed, 2010-12-08 14:33.

Check out this post at Wired:

Under the auspices of keeping federal spending under control, Republican congressmen have launched yet another attack on the basic scientific research that could lead to useful, potentially job-creating discoveries.

More on Dutton: Evolution As a 'Cause' of Human Aesthetic Behavior?

Submitted by stefano on Sun, 2010-11-21 23:56.

Patti O'Brien just sent me this great TED talk by Dennis Dutton, a Philosophy Professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Dutton figures, since Humans have a Natural History, why shouldn't we ask the somewhat speculative but interesting question: How might our evolutionary history have helped shape our sense of aesthetics as a species? His talk identifies a number of these likely forces.

Dennis Dutton on Human Aesthetics: A Natural History of Beauty?

Submitted by stefano on Thu, 2010-11-18 13:54.
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Patti O'Brien just sent me this great TED talk by Dennis Dutton, a Philosophy Professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. It's an awesome talk. Awesome. He figures, since Humans have a Natural History, why shouldn't we ask the somewhat speculative but interesting question: How might our evolutionary history have helped shape the phenomenon of aesthetics in Human Beings? His talk identifies a number of these forces.

Drosophila: A Geometric Mean

Submitted by stefano on Sat, 2010-09-25 14:17.
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I'm reading Time, Love, Memory by Jonathan Weiner. It's a history of biologist Seymour Benzer's study of the relationship between genes and behavior.

Weiner points out that in each of the dimensions illustrated in the following table, the fruit fly is the geometric mean between bacteria and human beings. I've not yet really understood how this "geometric mean" works but after studying it for a while it seems that this is a measure of ratios and proportionality in a world of compounding growth rates. Comments are welcome below if you want to explain this to us better than the Wikipedia article.
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