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Author Archives: Keith Brown
How to Record the Sound of Silence – Robinson Meyer – The Atlantic
“Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.” That’s the opening of “Future of Music: A Credo,” a 1937 speech by Cage. It … Continue reading
Winding Down Possibilities
For a technical scientific term, entropy is pretty popular. I mean, it was the title of an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, after all. Search the Internet for “entropy” quotes and you’ll find them by everybody from Anton Chekhov … Continue reading
Multiverse Controversy Heats Up – Scientific American
The multiverse is one of the most divisive topics in physics, and it just became more so. The major announcement last week of evidence for primordial ripples in spacetime has bolstered a cosmological theory called inflation, and with it, some … Continue reading
Palaeontology: Shovel face | The Economist
YUNNAN province, in China, is home to the Luoping formation, a trove of spectacularly preserved fossils of creatures that roamed the seas 240m years ago, during the Triassic period. The latest—and arguably most spectacular yet—is Atopodentatus unicus, described this week … Continue reading
The Dream of Intelligent Robot Friends – Carla Diana – The Atlantic
Karotz is an Internet-enabled console in the shape of an abstracted rabbit. One sits on my coffee table, continuously connected to WiFi, programmed to broadcast certain bits of live information such as Twitter messages, news headlines or weather reports by … Continue reading
Posted in Public Philosophizing, Science and technology ramifications
Tagged Karotz, robot, robotics, technophilia
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A World without Scarcity?
An intellectual property lawyer considers the philosophical and legal consequences of a world where anything can be printed and copied. …new technologies promise to do for a variety of physical goods and even services what the Internet has already done … Continue reading
The Overwhelm
Brigid Schulte, author of Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, talks with the Atlantic Monthly. Schulte scrutinizes this state of affairs: Why do we all feel so overworked? How is that feeling different for men … Continue reading
Posted in Philosophy & Politics, Public Pedagogy, Public Philosophizing
Tagged Brigid Schulte, labor, stress, the overwhelm
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New spin on zebra stripe origins › News in Science (ABC Science)
A weird zebra-stripe pattern discovered in Earth’s inner Van Allen radiation belt is generated by the planet’s rotation, according to new research. The study, reported in the journal Nature, changes science’s understanding of Earth’s radiation belts, and may provide new … Continue reading
What Would Plato Tweet? – NYTimes.com
…For the past few years I’d been obsessed with trying to figure out what lay behind the spectacular achievements that had occurred there. In a mere couple of centuries, Greek speakers went from anomie and illiteracy, lacking even an alphabet, … Continue reading
The Future of Brain Implants – WSJ.com
What would you give for a retinal chip that let you see in the dark or for a next-generation cochlear implant that let you hear any conversation in a noisy restaurant, no matter how loud? Or for a memory chip, … Continue reading
The Germ Theory of Democracy, Dictatorship, and Your Cherished Beliefs – Pacific Standard: The Science of Society
Anyone with a basic grasp of biology knows that all animals have immune systems that battle pathogens—be they viruses, bacteria, parasites, or fungi—on the cellular level. And it’s also fairly well understood that animals sometimes exhibit outward behaviors that serve … Continue reading
Posted in Basic News, Science and technology ramifications
Tagged democracy, germ theory, Randy Thornhill
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Elephants recognize the voices of their enemies : Nature News & Comment
Humans are among the very few animals that constitute a threat to elephants. Yet not all people are a danger — and elephants seem to know it. The giants have shown a remarkable ability to use sight and scent to … Continue reading
The Youngest Technorati – NYTimes.com
Ryan [Orbuch]… is among the many entrepreneurially minded, technologically skilled teenagers who are striving to do serious business. Their work is enabled by low-cost or free tools to make apps or to design games, and they are encouraged by tech … Continue reading
Posted in Public Pedagogy, Science and technology ramifications
Tagged apps, technocrati
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How Academia and Publishing are Destroying Scientific Innovation: A Conversation with Sydney Brenner | King’s Review – Magazine
An interview with molecular biologist Sydney Brenner… In most places in the world, you live your social life and your ordinary life in the lab. You don’t know anybody else. Sometimes you don’t even know other people in the same … Continue reading
Posted in Broader Impacts, Future of the University, Graduate Studies, Interdisciplinarity, Peer Review, Public Philosophizing, Science and technology ramifications, STEM Policy, Transdisciplinarity
Tagged Cambridge University, Kings College, molecular biology, Sydney Brenner, UK Research Council, UK research policy
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Graduate Student Research Symposium – TWU Federation of North Texas Area Universities – Texas Woman’s University
The Federation of North Texas Area Universities is pleased to sponsor its fifth annual Graduate Student Research Symposium on April 25, 2014, at Texas Woman’s University (Symposium Location & Directions). At the Symposium, graduate students from Federation disciplines across the three universities–Texas A&M-Commerce, … Continue reading
Public Books — Stop Defending the Humanities
Those who matter most to the humanities fall, I think, into two classes. The most important is that relatively small group of 18-year-olds (disproportionately few from poorer families) who are inclined to study the humanities. Our immediate future rests primarily … Continue reading
Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers : Nature News & Comment
The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense. Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in … Continue reading
Posted in Basic News, Future of the University, Peer Review
Tagged Cyril Labbé, MIT, SCIgen, Springer Verlag
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Scientist proposes revolutionary naming system for all life on Earth
A Virginia Tech researcher has developed a new way to classify and name organisms based on their genome sequence and in doing so created a universal language that scientists can use to communicate with unprecedented specificity about all life on … Continue reading
College Applicants Sweat The SATs. Perhaps They Shouldn’t : NPR
[William] Hiss’ study, “Defining Promise: Optional Standardized Testing Policies in American College and University Admissions,” examined data from nearly three-dozen “test-optional” U.S. schools, ranging from small liberal arts schools to large public universities, over several years. Hiss found that there … Continue reading
A simple exercise to increase your happiness and lower depression, the greatest maps of imaginary places, David Foster Wallace on leadership, and more
Celebrated Italian novelist, philosopher, essayist, literary critic, and list-lover Umberto Eco has had a long fascination with the symbolic and the metaphorical, extending all the way back to his vintage semiotic children’s books. Half a century later, he revisits the … Continue reading
1 In 4 Americans Thinks The Sun Goes Around The Earth, Survey Says : The Two-Way : NPR
A quarter of Americans surveyed could not correctly answer that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around, according to a report out Friday from the National Science Foundation. The survey of 2,200 people in the … Continue reading
Where does the Amazon start?
The Amazon is believed to be the world’s largest river. A tough question has been where that river actually begins. Naming its source has evidently been difficult as centuries of efforts indicate. With technology and scholarship on hand why should … Continue reading
Study on evolution of flu viruses may change textbooks, history books
The study, published in the journal Nature, provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of the evolutionary relationships of influenza virus across different host species over time. In addition to dissecting how the virus evolves at different rates in different … Continue reading
What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun? | David Graeber | The Baffler
My friend June Thunderstorm and I once spent a half an hour sitting in a meadow by a mountain lake, watching an inchworm dangle from the top of a stalk of grass, twist about in every possible direction, and then … Continue reading
Posted in Field Philosophy, Interdisciplinarity, Public Philosophizing
Tagged ethology, play, playfulness
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Scientists reading fewer papers for first time in 35 years : Nature News & Comment
A survey of the reading habits of US university researchers saw a drop in the traditional, paper-based consumption of information. A 35-year trend of researchers reading ever more scholarly papers seems to have halted. In 2012, US scientists and social … Continue reading
Posted in Basic News, Broader Impacts, Future of the University, Open Access, Peer Review, Public Pedagogy
Tagged broader impacts, research
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