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"Intelligence – what does it really mean? In the 1800s, it meant that you were good at memorising things, and today intelligence is measured through IQ tests where the average score for humans is 100. Researchers at the Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, have created a computer programme that can score 150. IQ tests are based on two types of problems: progressive matrices, which test the ability to see patterns in pictures, and number sequences, which test the ability to see patterns in numbers. The most common math computer programmes score below 100 on IQ tests with number sequences. For Claes Strannegård, researcher at the Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science, this was a reason to try to design 'smarter' computer programmes. 'We're trying to make programmes that can discover the same types of patterns that humans can see,' he says. The research group, which consists of Claes Strannegård,... more... - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

latest sci-fi ultrashort from yours truly- this one concerns a different take on the future (possible and plausible) of copyright and file sharing. - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

I’ve been tweeting long enough (3 years) to know that there is no necessary correlation between the interest generated by a post (in terms of retweets, likes or comments) and the interestingness of that post. Interests are subjective, vague, ever-shifting and, aside from that, it’s easy to miss stuff in our fast-flowing cyber streams. Nevertheless, something I excerpted from and linked to on my tumblr a couple months ago has stayed with me, resurfacing in my thoughts like a childhood memory given a renewed light by the comment of someone who shared the experience with you from which the memory arose. When apes experience human-rearing and are exposed to a human language they begin to display the human patterns of self-awareness and self-reflection by 6 months of age. This is startling enough infomation though doubtless open to scientific debate. However it was what the author (Sue Savage-Rumbaugh) proceeded to say in the next paragraph that resonated with something that i had long... - Wildcat

musings on Adorno & Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment.; crossposted from Emergent by Design When I review these passages, my mind speaks back - "the machine is using us".The goal of the enlightenment was to free our minds, by favoring 'rationality' over myth and mysticism. Nature became something that was to be controlled by us, quantified, compartmentalized, labeled, manipulated. But, this new scientific way of looking at things changed the way we THINK... or perhaps limited our ability to think at all. Instead of looking for greater 'Truth' or deeper meaning in things, identifying the essence of a thing, giving it 'value', it becomes a mere definition. The framework of thoughts are based in a soul-deadening logic and mechanicality. Everything that can be named and described and explained away can be somehow controlled, and there's a power in that, but at the same time, something sacred is lost. The belief in positivism seems as irrational to me as mythology must have been for... - Wildcat

The digital settles in as background. We remember less and query more. Our identity play would be considered schizophrenic in the last century. We have more friends than ever before yet know new frontiers of isolation. The quantification of our experience haunts us in the form of a persistent history. And we are distracted more than we ever knew possible. These circumstances are paradoxically a description of the near future and a diagnosis of the current state of affairs. The truly timeless is redefined – it has transcended that which is classic; it has become that which is never finished. Timeless a video essay / design fiction by KS12 Directed and Edited by Gabriel Shalom Designed by Patrizia Kommerell Produced by KS12 Producer: Karen Cifarelli Commissioned by MU, Eindhoven Curated by Angelique Spaninks Production Assistant: Rob Versteeg Interviews (in order of appearance) Bernhard Herrmann Rafaël Rozendaal Bruce Sterling Peter Kirn Jorien Kemerink Markus Kayser Elske van der... - Wildcat

As we're building out human-centered next-gen profiles for the Collaboratory, we wanted an intimate and creative way for people to get to know each other. Enter: the Heartsong Project. (thanks lauren higgins for bringing up the term "heartsong" on our brainstorm call.) The idea is pretty simple and straightforward: Record a 1-3 minute video of you describing your heartsong. What's a Heartsong? This is your personal "tune." Who are you? What passion drives your actions? What makes your heart sing? Everyone has beautiful visions inside of themselves, and as we bring those to the surface and share them with each other, the likelihood of them becoming real amplifies. Let's manifest! The above is a sample I made this morning. It took me a few hours total. I'm on an iMac. I recorded in photobooth and edited in iMovie. I also purchased the domain "heartsongproject.cc" I'd like this to be the 2nd project of Open Foresight. (Open Foresight is a series of models and methodologies we're... - Wildcat

I've been having a lot of fun the past few weeks fleshing out our next-gen profiles for the Collaboratory. One of the things I think is critical for any sufficiently advanced social network is a way for us to actually express who we are as human beings - emotion, passion, intent, inherent gifts, and the like. The problem with Facebook and LinkedIn is they predefine the scope of what it means to be human. Either you're this or that. This religious affiliation, this political view, this relationship status, this sex, and so forth. And that's all fine for those who find comfort in the rigidity of those labels. But for those who wish to be untethered from that way of thinking, so that we can expand ourselves into expressing fuller human capacity, it's a bit constraining. So we're working on allowing people to show who they are and what they're about from a deeper, more meaningful level. To that end, I've been playing with the new hive to do mockups (disclaimer - the new hive is for... - Wildcat

‘Matter’ becomes soft. It is the softening of matter, of ourselves, of our genes, of our beliefs, the softening of our mindset and base-images, which is distributed all over as the voice and signal of the 21 century. It is the softening of ‘matter’, of the concreteness of our precincts and restrictions that allows us to choose our identity, to shape it as malleable substance. Fundamentalism, the historical mindset of fundamentalism is becoming obsolete. (From notes in black and white) Migration into the Soft When we speak of the “middle” in a hard medium, what we see is the center in a structure, an a-priori privileged location, a unique point of view, like the control tower in a panopticon, or like reason in rationality, like good in morality or the truth in validation. It is the center from which to behold the symmetry of architectural virtuosity. When matter becomes soft, ‘middle’ loses its structural image while sustaining the potency of relation. Where is the ‘middle’ of flowing... - Wildcat

my new sci-fi project, enjoy the ride - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

A meme to meditate about what it means to be in a tribe, to lead, to follow, or to get out of the way. Embrace the we among us. Let them thrive. By choice, you are part of the we. And if not you, someone is. Making you part of us. Click image to download Tribes Q&A (pdf) Context - Wildcat

Q: How do the Amish raise a barn without money? A: Community, and the social capital that weaves it together. In my husband’s Latvian community, they have a concept similar to barnraising called “talka,” which describes collective volunteer work for the good of society and environment. Several times a year we come together at our camp in the Catskill Mountains, and everybody chips in to maintain the property - clearing branches, building bridges, fixing roofs, painting, and whatever else needs to get done. No one gets paid for it (unless you count food, beer, and bonfires as payment), yet everyone helps. Why? Because we’re invested in ourselves and each other and are stakeholders in our community and believe that preserving and cultivating our culture matters. So. How does that ethic translate to online community, and can we show that we have one? **Let’s intentcast to bootstrap Creative Economy 3.0** What is intentcasting? I came across this concept on Seb Paquet’s blog, Emergent... - Wildcat

The Future of Occupy project is neither about predicting nor advising the future of the movement. No one can predict or advise the emergent qualities of a living system. What we do want to do is provide a useful service to Occupy, by curating the news and views related to its identity and strategy scattered in the Occupy media and on websites sympathizing with the movement. You can read the heading of this section both as: “Occupy Movement” Sense-making, and/or Occupy Movement Sense-making. As we read it the second way, we see the movement itself consciously engaging with the process of sensing and making meaning out of what is emerging in the world as a result of its actions. How could that happen? One of the possible ways was identified by a commenter on The Future of the Occupy Movement, by Jules Lobel: 1. OWS needs to develop a video and documentary record/ library of all major debates/decisions and its most valued (if not all) productions coming from Occupied encampments… This... - Wildcat

This mini-paper was given at the Escapologies symposium, at Goldsmiths University, on the 5th of December and posted at my blog, machinemachine.net Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe centres on the shipwreck and isolation of its protagonist. The life Crusoe knew beyond this shore was fashioned by Ships sent to conquer New Worlds and political wills built on slavery and imperial demands. In writing about his experiences, Crusoe orders his journal, not by the passing of time, but by the objects produced in his labour. A microcosm of the market hierarchies his seclusion removes him from: a tame herd of goats, a musket and gunpowder, sheafs of wheat he fashions into bread, and a shelter carved from rock with all the trappings of a King’s castle. Crusoe structures the tedium of the island by gathering and designing these items that exist solely for their use-value: “In a Word, The Nature and Experience of Things dictated to me upon just Reflection, That all the good Things of this... - Wildcat

With File Sharing is the New Meditation I had a fast little thought. Now someone has made a religion out of it. Kopimism. Why make a religion out of file-sharing? Why not just be an ordinary club without defining yourselves as being a religious community? Because we see ourselves as a religious group, a church seems like a good way of organising ourselves. As a secularist I feel like an alarmist on reading about the founding of a new religion. However, where is the hard evidence on an Intellectual Property (IP) free-for-all being a totally good thing? So why not make a neat new idea into a religion, after all it's a belief, it's not yet practiced certain knowledge, and perhaps the format of the religion in some societies is a safe way to package and test new ideas. Religions could be re-cycled as kindergartens for experimentation, rather than littering the world like the ruins of societies past. I think this is a good idea and worth exploring. There's no proof that free file-sharing... - Wildcat

... our children can only do as bad as we are doing, and this is the challenge we are facing - we have to go beyond it. — Gunter Pauli Click image for video Quoting more for context Forget about the fact that while we were doing in the past the right way is going to bring us to the future. It is not and this is one of the biggest lessons we have as parents, we want our kids to be better and here is a picture of my little baby and my two sons we always want it to be better but that means that we have to create the space of our children can invent, develop new pathways to the future Because if we are only teaching what we know our children can only do as bad as we are doing and this is the challenge we are facing we have to go beyond it. ... My quest today is to see how can we design a new competitive model a business model based on sustainability whereby we define sustainability as the capacity to respond to the needs of all with what we have and that's the way natural systems do it... - Wildcat

Minds might base cognition on 4d(space-time) representation. All conceivable things are located at a certain place, which can vary with time. Ex 1: Tools main function similarity can be measured by 3d distance at the same time. Ex 2:The same idea can be expressed with 2 different abstraction levels, their distances can be measured by the time that separates the 2 expressions from being in the same 3d coordinates in space. Ex 3: A feeling can be expressed by describing an emotional state, or by a metaphor that represent a similar emotional state trough the description of a scene from nature. Their distances can be measured by the time that separates the 2 expressions from being in the same 3d coordinates in space squared. Instead of thinking of math as the language of the mind, and metaphor as the language of the soul (By the way what is soul?). Why don’t we think in terms of a single and indivisible entity we can described as mind-intuition-awareness-feelings-thoughts-life-universe.... - Wildcat

Jeff Jonas wrote in General Purpose Sensemaking Systems and Information Colocation ... With information trapped in the tailored database schemas of systems of record, operational data stores, data warehouses and data marts, it is no wonder organizations continue to struggle to make sense of it all – despite decades of effort and innovation. Performing some kind of federated search over all these disparate data sets just has not ever delivered. In fact, federated search bites when it comes to sensemaking because the diverse data structures are incapable of supporting a sensemaking function. If you want to be smart, you will want to jam the available, diverse, observational space into the same data structure and in as close to the same physical space as possible. Data is data. When reference data, transactional data, and even user queries are colocated in the same data structures and is the same indexes as the extracted features from text, video, biometrics, and so on … something very... - Wildcat

"Science in 2011: Triumphs, disasters and climaxes – in pictures There were extraterrestrial shenanigans, female orgasms, sabre-toothed squirrels and sperm-spattered squid; there was meltdown at Fukushima, the last flight of the space shuttle and a possible glimpse of the Higgs boson. Relive the defining scientific stories of the past 12 months" - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

""We don't call it the 'God particle', it's just the media that do that," a senior U.S. scientist politely told an interviewer on a major European radio station on Tuesday. "Well, I am the from the media and I'm going to continue calling it that," said the journalist - and continued to do so. The exchange, as physicists at the CERN research centre near Geneva were preparing to announce the latest news from their long and frustrating search for the Higgs boson, illustrated sharply how science and the popular media are not always a good mix. "I hate that 'God particle' term," said Pauline Gagnon, a Canadian member of CERN's ATLAS team of so-called "Higgs hunters" - an epithet they do not reject." - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

fascinating post Sandeep, and a much needed view, btw, would you consider the terminology 'gives rise' as in the statement : "The prakriti gives rise to Mahat Tatva " as the Indian equivalent to what we commonly call emergence or emergent properties? - Wildcat

"Anyone admiring David Hume as I do finds much to cheer, but much to lament in the state of academic philosophy, as this year, the 300th anniversary of his birth, comes to a close. Hume was an anatomist of the mind, charting the ways we think and feel — a psychologist or cognitive scientist before his time. The cheering feature of the contemporary scene is that plenty of people are following in those footsteps. The nature versus nurture battle has declared an uneasy draw, but the human nature industry is in fine fettle, fed by many disciplines and eagerly consumed by the public." - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

What Aesthetics dictates is the political act of infiltrating the sign; to infiltrate and to reprogram the commonplace of language. (From notes in black & white) Noun, in function of a verb. ‘Apocalypse Now’ by Francis Ford Coppola took 16 months to shoot, “Fitzcarraldo” by Verner Herzog was shot in 4 years, and ‘Dau’, a movie by Ilya Khrzhanovsky, has been shooting for 5 (five) years and still in the process of making. “The set of Dau is an enclosed bubble called the Institute; Khrzhanovsky came up with the idea of the Institute not long after preproduction on Dau began in 2006. He wanted a space where he could elicit the needed emotions from his cast in controlled conditions, twenty-four hours a day. The institute is where thousands of actors have been living the lives of their characters 24 hours a day, ever since production began, using Soviet passports and money, in a world that is exactly as things were in the 1950s”. (Edited from an article by Michael Idov, rest of the article... - Wildcat

Excelent post - mariana

"A multi-purpose optical chip which generates, manipulates and measures entanglement and mixture -- two quantum phenomena which are essential driving forces for tomorrow's quantum computers -- has been developed by researchers from the University of Bristol's Centre for Quantum Photonics. This work represents an important step forward in the race to develop a quantum computer." - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

Data by itself has no meaning. It fills databases. This data must be examined in order to become meaningful. Generating more data accomplishes little. Humans must interact with it. This is the first step whereby humans and their social networks become important. Information arises when humans examine the data. This provides a framework for understanding what the data represents. This information can be tacit, held inside our heads, or explicit, presented in a fashion that all can see (see Tacit and Explicit Information for details). Information only creates value when it interacts with information produced by others. Information that is held by an individual, which is never revealed or acted upon, has no value. The greatest medical discovery in the world does little good if it dies with the discoverer. Knowledge is the ability to take an action. It is created when information is transformed through human social interactions. A single individual cannot create knowledge de novo. They... - Wildcat

My Most Fundamental Principles by Ray Dalio In pursuing my goals I encountered realities, often in the form of problems, and I had to make decisions. I found that if I accepted the realities rather than wished that they didn’t exist and if I learned how to work with them rather than fight them, I could figure out how to get to my goals. It might take repeated tries, and seeking the input of others, but I could eventually get there. As a result, I have become someone who believes that we need to deeply understand, accept, and work with reality in order to get what we want out of life. Whether it is knowing how people really think and behave when dealing with them, or how things really work on a material level—so that if we do X then Y will happen—understanding reality gives us the power to get what we want out of life, or at least to dramatically improve our odds of success. In other words, I have become a “hyperrealist.” When I say I’m a hyperrealist, people sometimes think I don’t... - Wildcat

latest sci-fi ultrashort from yours truly.. - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"t is estimated that around 16% of university students in the UK are taking ‘smart drugs’, medication available on prescription for conditions such as Alzheimer’s, that are now being used by healthy people to enhance memory, concentration and other cognitive abilities. Neither is it just students who are popping the pills, but their lecturers and a swathe of professionals eager to achieve that extra edge. Smart drugs inspired this year’s Hollywood film Limitless, with the tagline, ‘One pill. Anything is possible’. The scale of their use has also caused the UK’s leading expert on ‘cosmeceutical’ brain treatments, Barbara Sahakian, to speculate that students might soon have to take part in pre-exam drug tests to prevent wide-spread ‘cheating’. Although some are now taking pills to cram more memories in, others are looking forward to a time when they can wipe them out. Investigations into the nature of post-traumatic stress disorder have discovered certain ‘amnesia’ drugs can block,... more... - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"Robot wardens are about to join the ranks of South Korea's prison service. A jail in the eastern city of Pohang plans to run a month-long trial with three of the automatons in March. The machines will monitor inmates for abnormal behaviour. Researchers say they will help reduce the workload for other guards. South Korea aims to be a world leaders in robotics. Business leaders believe the field has the potential to become a major export industry. The three 5ft-high (1.5m) robots involved in the prison trial have been developed by the Asian Forum for Corrections, a South Korean group of researchers who specialise in criminality and prison policies. It said the robots move on four wheels and are equipped with cameras and other sensors that allow them to detect risky behaviour such as violence and suicide." - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"Most caffeine addicts would tell you that coffee sharpens the mind. It turns out that in rodents, a single dose of caffeine does indeed strengthen brain cell connections in an underappreciated part of the brain, scientists report online November 20 in Nature Neuroscience. A clearer idea of caffeine’s effect on the brain could allow scientists to take advantage of its stimulating effects and perhaps even alleviate some symptoms of brain disorders. “Caffeine is something people are very interested in,” says neuroscientist Susan Masino of Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., who was not involved in the study. So far, most of caffeine’s effects have been illuminated by studies using doses much higher than an average person’s morning cup of joe, says study coauthor Serena Dudek of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Research Triangle Park, N.C." - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

The past month had the great pleasure to condense time and networks. Initially at Contactcon2011 with its important statement – the evolution will be social – where Polytopia was among the projects presented at the Bazaar; and then at the Metacurrency Collabathon weekend, where I was introduced to the brilliant work on re-conceptualization of value and currencies; the last days in New York could meet some of the participants in #OWS, and all the way through I enjoyed dearly the stimulating presence of polytopian fellows and friends. The reason I am mentioning this is because the sense of tangibility pushed to the front is one worth sharing. There is plenty of fresh, brilliant work going on in social re-engineering, emerging with technology and through people & technology. It is quite all over and resonating. I came back with a landscape of reflections which am trying to cohere here, under this title, together with questions aggregating for a while in the individual collective... - Wildcat