Category: ideas

“What has protest done for us lately? Smartphones and social media are supposed to have made organizing easier, and activists today speak more about numbers and reach than about lasting results. Is protest a productive use of our political attention? Or is it just a bit of social theatre we perform to make ourselves feel virtuous, useful, and in the right?”

“Rather than diffusing controversy and polarisation, it seems as if statistics are actually stoking them. Antipathy to statistics has become one of the hallmarks of the populist right, with statisticians and economists chief among the various “experts” that were ostensibly rejected by voters in 2016. Not only are statistics viewed by many as untrustworthy, there appears to be something almost insulting or arrogant about them. Reducing social and economic issues to numerical aggregates and averages seems to violate some people’s sense of political decency.”

Just an idea: Don’t get to close to the hippos. They get grumpy during total eclipses. (Seriously.)

The story is bigger than a one-off about how “toxic” Twitter has become for some people. “The challenges that the YA community is experiencing are deeply connected to — and reflective of — the challenges Americans face as a nation. Questions of class, culture, and race erupt in the news and on our streets every day, and the white supremacist terrorism on display in Charlottesville is just one small battle in a war that’s sure to claim many casualties.”

For Santiago Ramón y Cajal the brain was a beautiful, inconceivably complex, and self-regulating ecosystem, and he set out to write the field guide to its flora and fauna: “Like the entomologist in pursuit of brightly colored butterflies, my attention hunted, in the flower garden of the gray matter, cells with delicate and elegant forms, the mysterious butterflies of the soul, the beating of whose wings may someday—who knows?—clarify the secret of mental life.”

“As biochemists concoct new life-extending medications, calls to Poison Control after swallowing the wrong pills or the wrong number of the right pills have recently doubled. We put a smartphone in every hand, and now more than 1,000 distraction-related crashes happen on our roads every day (also steadily rising). Kids and pets succumb to heatstroke inside cars that are more environmentally sealed than ever—we’re on track to set a new record for hot car deaths in 2017. Falling off of ladders? Even those numbers are climbing, and if you’re wondering how that could possibly be related to technology, well, read on.”

“Today’s AI inhabits the realm of minimalist or abstract art, with Amazon Echo as a sort of Brancusian monolith. There’s even a new robot you can have sex with, meant not just as an object of lust-satisfaction, but also a companion. It’s the ancient story of Pygmalion, the sculptor who falls in love with his work, Galatea, only for it to come to life. AI is art: man-made approximations of nature, whatever the look of their skin.”

“It was Claude Shannon who made the final synthesis, who defined the concept of information and effectively solved the problem of noise. It was Shannon who was credited with gathering the threads into a new science. But he had important predecessors at Bell Labs, two engineers who had shaped his thinking since he discovered their work as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, who were the first to consider how information might be put on a scientific footing, and whom Shannon’s landmark paper singled out as pioneers.”

“There are a lot of sweeping statements about the idea that having robots available could mitigate human trafficking, or exploitation of children by pedophiles. … But how do you prove it? How are you going to run tests, which heads of child trafficking operations are we going to have fill in a questionnaire for us on whether or not use of a robot would help them?” Aimee van Wynsberghe, co-founder of the Foundation for Responsible Robotics, talks with Quartz.