Robotics Scientists Meet to Discuss Ethics

In October a group of leading robotics scientists and engineers met to discuss the ethical implications of their work.  Until recently a vast majority of industrial robots have been confined to cages where they work and humans are unwelcome.  Increasingly, however, we find robotic applications in our human world.  They are "aware" of us, sensing our presence, our identities, our activity and inferring from those data our intentions and goals.  And these robots act in our world too, based on their own objectives and what they can sense from their surroundings, including present human beings.

Memory: The Relationship Between Brain and the Experience of 'Self'

Interesting article in Time Magazine about a woman named Lonni Sue Johnson who was a very successful artist, violinist and pilot until she suffered an attack of encephalitis in 2007 at the age of 57.  Studying patients like Johnson, scientists are learning about the relationship between the physical brain and experiences and even the nature of 'self'.

With the help of the hardware and Johnson's willingness to sit still for so much study, science may be able to answer one other, more abstract question: What is it like to have lost so many memories about your life and the world? If who you are is an amalgamation, at least in part, of the things you've experienced--the people you've loved, the places you've lived, the tragedies you've endured--are you actually you at all when those things are wiped away? The self is ineffable, but it's also material, the product of neurochemicals sparking their way through living tissue. How we draw the line between those two dimensions--the biological and the experiential, the brain and the far less knowable mind--has kept philosophers awake for millennia.

More Asteroid Strikes in Our Future?

The Times today reported that we are likely to encounter more astroid strikes than we thought.  "That's interesting," I thought, "But how do we know?"  And "What changed?"

Turns out that they are using a new measurement that begins with empirical observations of collisions instead of predicting the number of likely collisions based on estimates of how many asteroids there are in orbit around the Sun and what their orbits are.

Disruptive Change; Creative Destruction

Today the neighborhood video chain Blockbuster closed its doors, apparently "outdone by Netflix."

But the dynamic between these companies looked very different at different stages in their histories. Initially, both Blockbuster and Netflix rented DVD's.  Blockbuster had the initial, first mover advantage and at its peak consisted of a network of over 9,000 stores.  To compete, Netflix made no investment in physical stores, instead using the post office to deliver its disks in its iconic red envelopes.

Moving Old HDWK Blog to BlogSpot

I am in the process of re-hosting my original "How Do We Know" blog to Google's BlogSpot service.  It may take some time.  But that can be a good thing too.  It's a chance to re-read all my old posts and experience again my study of Science and Society in 2006-7.

Technorati Profile

Change in our System of Public Education

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.

Being Thankful for Natalie Angiers and Oxytocin

I am being thankful this year for Natalie Angiers and the peptide hormone oxytocin.

In her post today in the New York Times she wrote:

In a series of papers that appeared in Nature, Neuron and elsewhere, Ernst Fehr, director of the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics at the University of Zurich, and his colleagues showed that the hormone had a remarkable effect on the willingness of people to trust strangers with their money. In the Nature study, 58 healthy male students were given a single nasal squirt of either oxytocin or a placebo solution and, 50 minutes later, were instructed to start playing rounds of the Trust Game with each other, using monetary units they could either invest or withhold.

The researchers found that the oxytocin-enhanced subjects were significantly more likely than the placebo players to trust their financial partners: whereas 45 percent of the oxytocin group agreed to invest the maximum amount of money possible, just 21 percent of the control group proved so amenable.

She truly has the give for making this stuff accessible. It's rare to read something of hers that fails to make you laugh out loud, marvel at her ability to choose and arrange words, and also to ponder and savor the mysteries of life.

Read whatever she writes, this being a perfect example. It will not disappoint.

Thank you, Natalie.