Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
via Arts & Letters Daily 18 Sep 2010.
In online debates, we not only fail to cultivate charity and humility, we even think of them as vices: forms of weakness that compromise our advocacy… more
Numbers don’t lie, but are the best kind of facts we have. Oh, yeah? Charles Seife shows how numbers are being twisted to erode our democracy… more
The opening of the article states “Plenty of today’s scientific theories will one day be discredited. So should we be sceptical of science itself?”
This is an apt opening and a useful question which has to be asked every once in a while by all practicing scientists. Science is evidence based and it keeps changing and one must not become complacent about a certain theory is valid for all times…
Here is an interesting excerpt from the article:
”
No group of believers has more reason to be sure of its own good sense than today’s professional scientists. There is, or should be, no mystery about why it is always more rational to believe in science than in anything else, because this is true merely by definition. What makes a method of enquiry count as scientific is not that it employs microscopes, rats, computers or people in stained white coats, but that it seeks to test itself at every turn. If a method is as rigorous and cautious as it can be, it counts as good science; if it isn’t, it doesn’t. Yet this fact sets a puzzle. If science is careful scepticism writ large, shouldn’t a scientific cast of mind require one to be sceptical of science itself?
There is no full-blown logical paradox here. If a claim is ambitious, people should indeed tread warily around it, even if it comes from scientists; it does not follow that they should be sceptical of the scientific method itself. But there is an awkward public-relations challenge for any champion of hard-nosed science. When scientists confront the deniers of evolution, or the devotees of homeopathic medicine, or people who believe that childhood vaccinations cause autism—all of whom are as demonstrably mistaken as anyone can be—they understandably fight shy of revealing just how riddled with error and misleading information the everyday business of science actually is. When you paint yourself as a defender of the truth, it helps to keep quiet about how often you are wrong.”
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More of this here: [The Link]
Interesting discussions and pointers to various discussions on the new science of morality (from edge.org)
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/morality10/morality10_index.html
Contains videos and (downloadable) audio recordings of the talks from: Jonathan Haidt, Joshua Greene, Marc D Hauser, Sam Harris, Roy Baumeister, Paul Bloom, David Pizzaro, Elizabeth Phelps and Joshua Knobe.
Couple of interesting papers which is a must read in these issues, especially for putting results of psychology studies in context.
Here is an interesting article from Gaurdian about a research from a group in Univ of Chicago. Basically the claim is that the research is on to a method to analyze various published theories and stack them against experimental data to verify those theories, and more importantly, suggest new theories/hypothesis. This is certainly an interesting are of research I wish to keep an eye on. This also relates back to an earlier article that I found [Earlier Article from Edge.org] about a similar principle. Here is an excerpt from the article
“Computer programs increasingly are able to integrate published knowledge with experimental data, search for patterns and logical relations, and enable new hypotheses to emerge with little human intervention,” they write. “We predict that within a decade, even more powerful tools will enable automated, high-volume hypothesis generation to guide high-throughput experiments in biomedicine, chemistry, physics, and even the social sciences.”..
In interesting article in Boston.com about how people perceive facts and what those have on peoples opinion. Does it change their view or not..Interestingly it has very little effect, sometimes even has negative effect. Here are couple of excerpts from the article.
“…. In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?
Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.”
“Most of us like to believe that our opinions have been formed over time by careful, rational consideration of facts and ideas, and that the decisions based on those opinions, therefore, have the ring of soundness and intelligence. In reality, we often base our opinions on our beliefs, which can have an uneasy relationship with facts. And rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions. Worst of all, they can lead us to uncritically accept bad information just because it reinforces our beliefs. This reinforcement makes us more confident we’re right, and even less likely to listen to any new information. And then we vote….”
More of this here: [The Link]
here is an interesting article from NYTimes about impact of being hooked on devices/gadjets… Here are a couple of excerpts from the article:
“Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. They say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information. These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt — that researchers say can be addictive. In its absence, people feel bored.”
” While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress. And scientists are discovering that even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist. In other words, this is also your brain off computers.”
More of this here: [The Link]
Synthetic biology is a new field of biological engineering which aims to make biological engineering easier, by taking a more engineering approach – build’em and test’em.
A recent article in NYtimes explores this issue. Here is an excerpt:
“.. Scientists have been manipulating genes for decades; inserting, deleting, and changing them in various microbes has become a routine function in thousands of labs. Keasling and a rapidly growing number of colleagues around the world have something more radical in mind. By using gene-sequence information and synthetic DNA, they are attempting to reconfigure the metabolic pathways of cells to perform entirely new functions, such as manufacturing chemicals and drugs. Eventually, they intend to construct genes—and new forms of life—from scratch. Keasling and others are putting together a kind of foundry of biological components—BioBricks, as Tom Knight, a senior research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who helped invent the field, has named them. Each BioBrick part, made of standardized pieces of DNA, can be used interchangeably to create and modify living cells.”…
E. Coli are fascinating creatures. They live everywhere, even within our bodies. In addition to being part of our daily lives, they also play an amazing role as a scientific tool in biology. Read/hear more about this fascinating creatures in sciam’s podcasts.
Interesting videos about complex networks and degrees of seperation.
More about this here: [The Link]
In 2008, IEEE brought out a special issue on Singularity. Anybody who is interested in developments of technology will probably be familiar with the term (Technological) Singularity. Perhaps popularized by futurist Ray Kurzweil (author of “Singularity is Near”). Discussion about what is singularity, is this really happening, who are the players..etc – are collected in this IEEE portal.
More of this here: [IEEE Singularity Page]