Zack Lynch, also at Corante (Brain Waves), has an interesting post on behavioral economics. Which points to more great content on the biology of love, humor, and emotions.
Reading further on I found links to the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics and the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Science.
Via Dana Blankenhorn’s Corante weblog, Moore’s Lore, comes this interesting article on simulating evolution with computers: Breeding Computer Code. Links to the computer program Avida can be found at The Digital Life Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology.
Assorted links:
TomPaine.com on Media Consolidation Science, risk and the price of precaution by Sandy Starr at Spiked-Online Vilified weapons inspectors may have got it right at Sydney Morning Herald
I watched a Nova documentary on Rosalind Franklin and the discovery of DNA tonight, I recorded last week. It covered a lot of ground I was already familiar with: the x-ray diffraction work she had done that enabled Watson and Crick to back-up their theoretical model of the double helix, and the conflicts she had working with the major figures involved in the discovery. Most of my information came from another dramatic popularization, The Race for the Double Helix, a TV movie made by the BBC in 1987.
Brad Templeton has an essay on the 25th anniversary of spam that deserves some attention, especially his observations on the conflicts involved in calling for its censorship via blacklists and the like. via BoingBoing
Spam pushes people who would proudly (and correctly) trumpet how we shouldn’t blame ISPs for offensive web sites, copyright violations and/or MP3 trading done by downstream customers to suddenly call for blacklisting of all the innocent users at an ISP if a spammer is to be found among them.
Some interesting links about the evolution of the web, which I have yet to read or absorb completely.
Trends in the Evolution of the Public Web by Edward T. O’Neil, et. al., from D-lib magazine, pathinfo: via Sitelines - Ideas about Web Searching, a new weblog by Rita Vine, via LibraryStuff, a weblog by Steven M. Cohen The Invisible Dogma at the Ratcliffe blog, pathinfo: via Frank Patrick’s Focused Performance weblog.
A patchwork of items on Iraq:
Paul Kennedy, The Perils of Empire
This brings us to the broadest question of all, that of defining America’s position in the world over the years to come. The clear victor of the Cold War, it no longer feels constrained from intervening in sensitive areas like the Middle East or Central Asia, should national security interests demand it. The United States is unchallenged militarily and sees no rival Great Power in sight.
CNN and the rest of the cable news networks have dropped the war in Iraq like a hot potato and are running overflow coverage of Laci Peterson murder stories, which seems as likely to have a long term impact on America as the Gary Condit story did before 9-11.
Watching the weekend news on ABC I realized that one of the things that makes cable news so unbearable is the comlpete lack of storytelling structure and narrative.
In “The Shape of Things to Come” Daniel H. Pink argues that the bell curve or normal distribution discovered during the 19th century statsitcal renaissance is losing its validity. More and more parts of the statistical world are distributing themselves as ‘well curves’, high on the ends and low in the middle. For examples he gives wage distribution in the U.S. (growing at the top and the bottom), consumer electronics (miniturization of screens and the gigantism of home theaters), and business (mega-corporations and the single entrepreneur).
Sheldon Pacotti, writing in Salon, makes some connections between languages, education, freedom, surveillance, and new technologies that is worth reading by those who haven’t noticed the connections already. This paragraph really caught my attention:
As the computer becomes the central tool for research and development, scientific knowledge takes on a new character. Like software, it becomes primarily functional rather than descriptive. During the age of the printing press – which brought with it dictionaries, encyclopedias, tables, journals, proofs, and the modern community of scientists – the project of science appeared to be the “understanding” or “description” of the natural world, which was conceived of as a clockwork set in motion by God.