Month: October 2011

"His way to achieve catharsis is to hurt somebody. And I think he feels he has a liberty and a license to do that. The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don't apply to him. Because of how very sensitive he is, he knows exactly how to efficiently and effectively hurt someone. And he does do that," – Jon Ive, Apple's head of design, on Steve Jobs.

The New York General Assembly is proposing a limit on OWS drumming to two hours a day. Money quote:

"They’re imposing a structure on the natural flow of music," said Seth Harper, an 18-year-old from Georgia. "The [General Assembly] decided to do it … they suppressed people’s opinions. I wanted to do introduce a different proposal, but a big black organizer chick with an Afro said I couldn’t."

Seems so.

A new Facebook app to lower your energy usage:

Social pressure is more powerful … when it’s attached to communities, not to abstract averages that describes greater slices of society. And distributing information throughout communities is exactly what Facebook excels at. … Most people don’t care what their utility company thinks and won’t change their behavior to save a couple bucks each month. But we do care what our friends think, and that could make this system work.

Rick Bookstaber believes it will:

With the iPhone users accessing Siri to find restaurants, make appointments, and ask trivia-level questions (and with more areas of interaction added down the road),  Apple's servers are going to amass the queries of millions of people many times every day.  And as Google has shown with Google Translate, if a computer has enough raw material, it can pretty much figure this sort of thing out.

So as this database grows by orders of magnitude and the logic is refined accordingly, if a Turing Test is fashioned to distinguish a computer from a person in the day-to-day tasks of working with a personal assistant – in one room is hidden an iPhone, in another room a person, you interact with them as you would an executive assistant over the course of the day, and then at the end of the day you choose which one you think is the person – it is only a matter of time before the iPhone becomes indistinguishable from the human. 

(Video: The Chinese Room and the Turing test via The Open University. Maria Popova features the rest of the series, exploring thought experiments in 60 seconds.)

The rise of divorce likely led to more women going to college:

Between 1935 and 1955, women tripled their presence at universities. Divorce rates also rose, which hurt women more than men, since it was the women who usually ended up with children, putting them under more financial and emotional stress. This heavier burden, the authors argue, also drove women to increased levels of education, to make themselves more robust candidates in the workforce.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has tracked volunteers living in public housing since 1998. One group was given vouchers that allowed them to live in middle-class neighborhoods, another received vouchers for rent but stayed put, and the third was a control group:

The health of people who received rent subsidies but did not move showed no significant improvement. But the people who moved to middle-class neighborhoods were about 5% less likely to be obese and show signs of diabetes than were people in the control group, the team reports today in The New England Journal of Medicine. "These are pretty big effects," Ludwig says, "comparable in size to the long-term effects on diabetes we see from targeted lifestyle interventions or from providing people with medication that can prevent the onset of diabetes."

(Image: "Cities" by Atelier Olschinsky)

You just haven’t practiced:

[E]ven adults show cortical plasticity after some simple muscle training. That is, piano practice caused the amount of brain devoted to voluntary muscular control grow. So although you may not currently be able to flex your ring finger or control your individual toes, there’s no reason that you can’t learn how! Amputees, for example, can learn to be quite dexterous with their toes.

You might want to ask if you're having an operation:

Researchers found that surgeons or residents who used to be avid video game players had significantly better laparoscopic skills than did those who'd never played. On average, the serious game players were 33 percent faster and made 37 percent fewer errors than their colleagues who didn't have prior video-game experience.

Michael Marder ponders it:

Laughing at ourselves, at the various crises in which we find ourselves, means laughing at our finitude, our irremediable weakness, the feeling of being overwhelmed and crushed by the future. This would suggest a straightforward interpretation, whereby the present laughs at the future, or, at any rate, at its own fear of what is to come. To make fun of the future is to put it under our control, if only for a brief instant of a shared explosive laughter, by mastering the fear it provokes.

(Chart by Ben Greenman)