Culture & Society

Kevin Slavin argues that we’re living in a world designed for — and increasingly controlled by — algorithms. In this riveting talk from TEDGlobal, he shows how these complex computer programs determine: espionage tactics, stock prices, movie scripts, and architecture. “We’re writing things (…) that we can no longer read. And we’ve rendered something illegible, and we’ve lost the sense of what’s actually happening in this world that we’ve made. (…) “We’re running through the United States with dynamite and rock saws so that an algorithm can close the deal three microseconds faster, all for a communications framework that no human will ever know; that’s a kind of manifest destiny.” - Amira

“But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can’t tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you’ve just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you’ve let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you? // People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time. Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans. We ask teachers to teach to standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species’ bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good. Every instance of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous. // The same ambiguity that motivated dubious academic AI projects in the past has been repackaged as mass culture today. Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever? While it’s to be expected that the human perspective will be changed by encounters with profound new technologies, the exercise of treating machine intelligence as real requires people to reduce their mooring to reality.” — Jaron Lanier, You are Not a Gadget (2010) - Amira

if you’ve just lowered your own standards of intelligence - don't think so. We just over estimated how little it took to seem human. We can feel sorry for a very basic puppet with a vaguely human face, so it doesn't take much; Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans - not really, it was a scam so all they needed to do was bamboozle customers into thinking it was possible; Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever? - we know it doesn't know what we want and the results are simply better than we had before - Todd Hoff

Here is the thought experiment: Suppose we set up the worst-case scenario, one where cities have no recourse to reduce crime other than arranging where people live. And suppose a city was assigned a set number of high-risk (economically disadvantaged) places, a set number of low-risk (highly prosperous) places, and some in between. Now we ask, how should the city arrange those places to create the most safety and the least amount of crime? - Halil

The bottom line is, just as we cannot arrest our way out of crime problems, we also cannot economically segregate and isolate our way out either. That approach is self-destructive and has led to many of the problems our cities face today. Figuring out how to fix those mistakes is at the core of creating prosperous places. - Halil

I don't think gated communities help, many of the new private flats/homes being built in Haringey at least, are gated homes with CCTV, cutting themselves off from their poorer neighbours, implying that we are somehow not worthy of mixing with them! - Halil

"Rita Levi-Montalcini, a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist who began her seminal research on cell development while dodging bombs and fleeing Nazi persecution during World War II, died Dec. 30 at her home in Rome. She was 103. ...Dr. Levi-Montalcini was widely regarded as one of the most influential scientists of her generation, and her accomplishments were particularly notable because of the handicaps and obstacles faced in science by women throughout the world when she began her career.Her rise to the highest reaches of scientific achievement was made even more difficult because she embarked on her career under the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini, who expelled her and her fellow Jews from the Italian academic world. She shared the 1986 Nobel Prize in medicine for her discovery of a substance known as the nerve growth factor, a naturally occurring protein that helps spark the growth of nerve cells. She launched that groundbreaking research in a makeshift bedroom laboratory during the war and deepened it in the 1950s at Washington University in St. Louis, where she worked alongside her co-Nobelist, the American biochemist Stanley Cohen." - Lit

"In essence, Dr. Levi-Montalcini’s discovery helped explain how embryonic nerve cells grow into a fully developed nervous system and, more broadly, how a damaged nervous system might be repaired. Cohen was credited with the identification of the epidermal growth factor, a similar substance that helps regulate the growth of skin and other cells. Together, those advances “opened new fields of widespread importance to basic science,” the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute declared in awarding the prize to the two scientists. The nerve growth factor is considered a foundation for modern research into treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and has also influenced research on cancer, Parkinson’s disease and muscular dystrophy. Writing in the journal Science in 2000, Dr. Levi-Montalcini attributed her success to “the absence of psychological complexes, tenacity in following the path I reputed to be right, and the habit of underestimating obstacles.” Rita Levi-Montalcini was born April 22, 1909, in the northern Italian city of Turin. Her mother, Adele Montalcini, was a painter; her father, Adamo Levi, was an engineer and subscribed to the then-prevailing view that women were best suited to the domestic life. “It was he,” Dr. Levi-Montalcini wrote in an autobiography, “who had a decisive influence on the course of my life, both by transmitting to me a part of his genes and eliciting my admiration for his tenacity, energy and ingenuity; and, at the same time, by provoking my silent disapproval of other aspects of his personality and behavior.” She discovered her affinity for science in her early 20s and gravitated toward medical research because she had lost a beloved governess to cancer. Dr. Levi-Montalcini received a medical degree in 1936 from the University of Turin, where her classmates included the future Nobel laureates Salvador Luria and Renato Dulbecco." - Lit

"A research by Brent Berlin, an anthropologist, and Paul Kay, a linguist. They made the first hypothesis about how color terms enter a language in a certain order. Later, I came across the World Color Survey, which was established in an effort to continue research into Berlin and Kay’s hypothesis. The WCS makes their data available to the public, and I found that this was exactly what I needed to help answer my many questions. The result of the WCS data exploration is below, where about 800,000 individual color chips are grouped by the terms used to describe them. (...) The WCS collected data from 2696 native speakers, representing 110 languages, asking each of them to identify 330 colors. With Processing, I wrote code to read the survey data and explore different ways to categorize and group it. These sketches developed into the final image, where results for each language are shown as a series of blocks that extend from the center, in order of the most frequently used term to the least. For instance, terms used for a greenish-blue color are most prevalent, followed by terms for what we might perceive as red, black, white, etc." - Amira

"The speakers of one language used only three color terms to describe the color spectrum, while others used over sixty. Organizing the languages by geographic location highlights regional similarities in the number of unique color terms. Languages are also grouped by family within each geographic location. (...) Color naming has been a useful tool for understanding the relativist and universalist views because it is ubiquitous. It has practical applications across languages because it can be used to identify food, objects, places, even feelings e.g. the blues. Cultures celebrate the world in many ways, but finding connections that might demonstrate how we see the world in similar ways is an exciting and worthwhile exploration." - Amira

See also: The crayola-fication of the world: How we gave colors names, and it messed with our brains http://ff.im/Z5LfD - Amira

"While it may be useful to reason about the averages, social phenomena are really made up of millions of small transactions between individuals. There are patterns in those individual transactions that are not just averages, they're the things that are responsible for the flash crash and the Arab spring. You need to get down into these new patterns, these micro-patterns, because they don't just average out to the classical way of understanding society. We're entering a new era of social physics, where it's the details of all the particles—the you and me—that actually determine the outcome. Reasoning about markets and classes may get you half of the way there, but it's this new capability of looking at the details, which is only possible through Big Data, that will give us the other 50 percent of the story. We can potentially design companies, organizations, and societies that are more fair, stable and efficient as we get to really understand human physics at this fine-grain scale. This new computational social science offers incredible possibilities." - Amira

"This is the first time in human history that we have the ability to see enough about ourselves that we can hope to actually build social systems that work qualitatively better than the systems we've always had. That's a remarkable change. It's like the phase transition that happened when writing was developed or when education became ubiquitous, or perhaps when people began being tied together via the Internet. The fact that we can now begin to actually look at the dynamics of social interactions and how they play out, and are not just limited to reasoning about averages like market indices is for me simply astonishing. To be able to see the details of variations in the market and the beginnings of political revolutions, to predict them, and even control them, is definitely a case of Promethean fire. Big Data can be used for good or bad, but either way it brings us to interesting times. We're going to reinvent what it means to have a human society." - Amira

"In 2005 Everett shot to international prominence with a paper http://goo.gl/KsoV3 claiming that he had identified features of the Pirahã language that challenged Noam Chomsky’s influential theory that human language is governed by "universal grammar," a genetically determined capacity that imposes the same fundamental shape on all the world’s tongues. That paper, published in the journal Current Anthropology, turned him into something of a popular hero, embraced in the press as a giant killer who had felled the mighty Chomsky -- but denounced by some fellow linguists as a fraud promoting dubious ideas about a powerless indigenous group while refusing to release his data to skeptics." Book reviewed http://www.nytimes.com/2012... - Adriano

Çatalhöyük was composed entirely of domestic buildings, with no obvious public buildings. While some of the larger ones have rather ornate murals, these rooms' purpose remains unclear.[6] The population of the eastern mound has been estimated at up to 10,000 people, but population likely varied over the community’s history. An average population of between 5,000 to 8,000 is a reasonable estimate. The inhabitants lived in mud-brick houses that were crammed together in an agglutinative manner. No footpaths or streets were used between the dwellings, which were clustered in a honeycomb-like maze. Most were accessed by holes in the ceiling, with doors reached by ladders and stairs. The rooftops were effectively streets. The ceiling openings also served as the only source of ventilation, allowing smoke from the houses' open hearths and ovens to escape. - Halil

Another reason to go back to Turkey! - Halil

“The first thing I look at each morning is a picture of Albert Einstein I keep on the table right beside my bed. The personal inscription reads “A person first starts to live when he can live outside of himself.” In other words, when he can have as much regard for his fellow man as he does for himself. I believe we are here to do good. It is the responsibility, of every human being to aspire to do something worthwhile, to make this world a better place than the one he found. Life is a gift, and if we agree to accept it, we must contribute in return. When we fail to contribute, we fail to adequately answer why we are here.” — Armand Hammer // “I find the question “Why are we here?” typically human. I’d suggest “Are we here?” would be the more logical choice.” — Leonard Nimoy - Amira

See also 'What is the meaning of life?' -- answers at Quora http://www.quora.com/The-Big... - Amira

"The nature of beauty is one of the most enduring and controversial themes in Western philosophy, and is—with the nature of art—one of the two fundamental issues in philosophical aesthetics. Beauty has traditionally been counted among the ultimate values, with goodness, truth, and justice. It is a primary theme among ancient Greek, Hellenistic, and medieval philosophers, and was central to 18th and 19th-century thought, as represented in treatments by such thinkers as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, Burke, Kant; Hegel, Schopenhauer, Hanslick, and Santayana. By the beginning of the twentieth century, beauty was in decline as a subject of philosophical inquiry, and also as a primary goal of the arts. However, the last decade has seen a revival of interest in the subject. This article will begin with a sketch of the debate over whether beauty is objective or subjective, which is perhaps the single most-prosecuted disagreement in the literature. It will proceed to set out some of the major approaches to or theories of beauty developed within Western philosophical and artistic traditions." - Amira

"Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others." -- David Hume - Amira

"Beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing. … Beauty is a value, that is, it is not a perception of a matter of fact or of a relation: it is an emotion, an affection of our volitional and appreciative nature. An object cannot be beautiful if it can give pleasure to nobody: a beauty to which all men were forever indifferent is a contradiction in terms. … Beauty is therefore a positive value that is intrinsic; it is a pleasure." -- Santayana (1896) - Amira

"A Tennessee man searching through his attic several months ago discovered a piece of American history: An audio reel of an unreleased interview with Dr. Martin Luther King conducted by his father for a book project that was never finished. (...) In clear audio, King discusses the importance of the civil rights movement, his definition of nonviolence and how a recent trip of his to Africa informed his views. (...) One historian said the newly discovered interview is unusual because there’s little audio of King discussing his activities in Africa. (...) During part of the interview, King defines nonviolence and justifies its practice. “I would … say that it is a method which seeks to secure a moral end through moral means,” he said. “And it grows out of the whole concept of love, because if one is truly nonviolent that person has a loving spirit, he refuses to inflict injury upon the opponent because he loves the opponent.” - Amira

"The interview was made four years before the Civil Rights Act became law, three years before King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, and eight years before his assassination. At one point in the interview, King predicts the impact of the civil rights movement. “I am convinced that when the history books are written in future years, historians will have to record this movement as one of the greatest epics of our heritage,” he said." http://www.jacksonsun.com/viewart... - Amira

"If you got separated from a friend at an event, you might simply never hear from them again until you were both home and called each other. At home, most phones weren't even cordless. You had to stand within 6 feet of the wall. A popular item was super long phone cords. (...) When I was a much younger man, I spent five months backpacking around east Africa. (...) They had no idea I was coming back, and I can still remember the look on my stepdad's face when he opened the door shortly after dawn to see me standing there, probably the worse for wear, but the better for the experiences I had had. I remember him yelling up the stairs "He's home!!" and my Mom charging down in her bathrobe to greet me and hear about my adventures. (...) No kid today is ever going to have that experience. (...) // Actually, it was utopia. You could actually walk out the door and not be bothered by your boss, your spouse, your attorney, your kids, your parents, your siblings, your bill collectors... (...)" - Amira

Those still are the days. Just quit doing everything with a phone on all the time. - m9m, Crone of FriendFeed

"When conflict breaks out in social groups, individuals make strategic decisions about how to behave based on their understanding of alliances and feuds in the group. (...) In a new study, scientists at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery (WID) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison develop a computational approach to determine whether individuals behave predictably. With data from previous fights, the team looked at how much memory individuals in the group would need to make predictions themselves. The analysis proposes a novel estimate of "cognitive burden," or the minimal amount of information an organism needs to remember to make a prediction. The research draws from a concept called "sparse coding," or the brain's tendency to use fewer visual details and a small number of neurons to stow an image or scene. Previous studies support the idea that neurons in the brain react to a few large details such as the lines, edges and orientations within images rather than many smaller details. (...)" - Amira

"What is the trade-off? What's the minimum amount of 'stuff' an individual has to remember to make good inferences about future events?" (...) By recording individuals' involvement -- or lack thereof -- in fights, the group created models that mapped the likelihood any number of individuals would engage in conflict in hypothetical situations. (...) Since the statistical modeling and computation frameworks can be applied to different natural datasets, the research has the potential to influence other fields of study, including behavioral science, cognition, computation, game theory and machine learning. Such models might also be useful in studying collective behaviors in other complex systems, ranging from neurons to bird flocks. Future research will seek to find out how individuals' knowledge of alliances and feuds fine-tunes their own decisions and change the groups' collective pattern of conflict." - Amira

"There was little serious investigation of the psychological structure or neurological and biological underpinnings of religious belief that determine how religion actually causes behavior. And that’s a problem if science aims to produce knowledge that improves the human condition, including a lessening of cultural conflict and war. (...) Time and again, countries go to war without understanding the transcendent drives and dreams of adversaries who see a very different world. (...) Although this sacralization of initially secular issues confounds standard “business-like” negotiation tactics, my work with political scientist Robert Axelrod interviewing political leaders in the Middle East and elsewhere indicates that strong symbolic gestures (sincere apologies, demonstrating respect for the other’s values) generate surprising flexibility, even among militants, and may enable subsequent material negotiations. Thus, we find that Palestinian leaders and their supporting populations are generally willing to accept Israeli offers of economic improvement only after issues of recognition are addressed. (...) This is particularly promising because symbolic gestures tied to religious notions that are open to interpretation might potentially be reframed without compromising their absolute “truth.” (...)" - Amira

People are bad enough at telling you why they do what they actually do. Asking them why they might do something in a hypothetical situation is hopeless. In contrast, Robert Pape's research examines what people actually did and crunches numbers. Surveying people only collects their pretenses, not their real motives. - Bruce Lewis

"David Christian discusses the chronometric revolution, and how this has lead to a single historical continuum stretching all the way back to the big bang, allowing for what he calls, Grand Unified Stories. Murray Gell-Mann discusses the nature of empirical regularities, and their relationship to measures of complexity. Gell-Mann illustrates how apparently complex histories and patterns can sometimes be organized using simple models of growth and scaling. Fred Spier, speaking as an historian, explores how big history might be brought within a reductive framework of physics, using the concept of free energy rate density, as a means of organizing major transitions, from the abiotic to the biotic and cultural domains. Peter Turchin explores the value of general quantitative theory in areas where prediction is limited, and comparative data and retrodiction need to be explored. Geoffrey West argues that is unlikely that we shall discern common patterns at the level of individuals, but if we allow ourselves to study collective phenomena, such as urban systems, then we might make surprising new discoveries." - Adriano

"To Peter Turchin, who studies population dynamics at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, the appearance of three peaks of political instability at roughly 50-year intervals is not a coincidence. For the past 15 years, Turchin has been taking the mathematical techniques that once allowed him to track predator–prey cycles in forest ecosystems, and applying them to human history. He has analysed historical records on economic activity, demographic trends and outbursts of violence in the United States, and has come to the conclusion that a new wave of internal strife is already on its way. (...) Turchin's approach — which he calls cliodynamics after Clio, the ancient Greek muse of history — is part of a groundswell of efforts to apply scientific methods to history by identifying and modelling the broad social forces that Turchin and his colleagues say shape all human societies. It is an attempt to show that “history is not 'just one damn thing after another'”, says Turchin, paraphrasing a saying often attributed to the late British historian Arnold Toynbee. (...)" - Amira

"Turchin and his allies contend that the time is ripe to revisit general laws, thanks to tools such as nonlinear mathematics, simulations that can model the interactions of thousands or millions of individuals at once, and informatics technologies for gathering and analysing huge databases of historical information. (...) Turchin and his colleagues are systematically collecting historical data that span centuries or even millennia — and the mathematical analysis of how the variables interact. (...) The researchers found that two trends dominate the data on political instability. The first, which they call the secular cycle, extends over two to three centuries. It starts with a relatively egalitarian society, in which supply and demand for labour roughly balance out. In time, the population grows, labour supply outstrips demand, elites form and the living standards of the poorest fall. At a certain point, the society becomes top-heavy with elites, who start fighting for power. Political instability ensues and leads to collapse, and the cycle begins again. (...) " - Amira

"We find that there is a consistent pattern of higher frequencies at low magnitudes, and lower frequencies at high magnitudes, that follows a precise mathematical formula.” But when it comes to predicting unique events such as the Industrial Revolution, or the biography of a specific individual such as Benjamin Franklin, he says, the conventional historian's approach of assembling a narrative based on evidence is still best." - Amira

also see the special issue of Cliodynamics, the Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History (2011, v2(1)) http://ff.im/1241lV - Adriano

“Here is 1,400 years of human culture, all the texts that survive from one of the greatest civilizations human beings have ever built—and it can all fit in a bookcase or two. To capture all the fugitive texts of the ancient world, some of which survived the Dark Ages in just a single moldering copy in some monastic library, and turn them into affordable, clear, sturdy accurate books, is one of the greatest accomplishments of modern scholarship—and one of the most democratic.” http://www.hup.harvard.edu/collect... - Amira

“There’s a new kind of socio-inspired technology coming up, now. Society has many wonderful self-organization mechanisms that we can learn from, such as trust, reputation, culture. If we can learn how to implement that in our technological system, that is worth a lot of money; billions of dollars, actually. We think this is the next step after bio-inspired technology. (…) If those computers interact with each other, it’s creating an artificial social system in some sense. (…) That tells us something that we need to change our perspective regarding these systems. Those complex systems are not characterized anymore by the properties of their components. But they’re characterized by what is the outcome of the interactions between those components. As a result of those interactions, self-organization is going on in these systems. New emergent properties come up. They can be very surprising, actually, and that means we cannot understand those systems anymore, based on what we see, which is the components. (…) We need to have new instruments and tools to understand these kinds of systems. (…)" - Amira

“We have interconnected everything. In some sense, we have created unstable systems. (…) Just take financial trading today, it’s done by the most powerful computers. These computers are creating a view of the environment; in this case the financial world. They’re making projections into the future. They’re communicating with each other. They have really many features of humans. And that basically establishes an artificial society, which means also we may have all the problems that we are facing in society if we don’t design these systems well. (…) Their interaction is creating a completely new world, and it is very important to recognize that it’s not just a gradual change of our world; there is a sudden transition in the behavior of those systems, as the coupling strength exceeds a certain threshold. (…)" - Amira

"What will be very important in order to make sense of the complexity of our information society is to overcome the disciplinary silos of science. (…) Big Data is not a solution per se. Even the most powerful machine learning algorithm will not be sufficient to make sense of our world, to understand the principles according to which our world is working. This is important to recognize. The great challenge is to marry data with theories, with models. (…) Information society will transform our society fundamentally and we shouldn’t just let it happen. We want to understand how that will change our society, and what are the different pathes that our society may take, and decide for the one that we want it to take. (…) In the future, [this sea of data] will probably be a cheap resource, or even a free resource to a certain extent, if we learn how to deal with openness of data. The expensive thing will be what we do with the data. That means the algorithms, the models, and theories that allow us to make sense of the data.” - Amira

Silphium (also known as silphion or laser) was a plant that was used in classical antiquity as a rich seasoning and as a medicine. Silphium was an important species in prehistory, as evidenced by the Egyptians and Knossos Minoans developing a specific glyph to represent the silphium plant. It was used widely by most ancient Mediterranean cultures; the Romans considered it "worth its weight in denarii" (silver coins). Legend said that it was a gift from the god Apollo. The exact identity of silphium is unclear. It is commonly believed to be a now-extinct plant of the genus Ferula, perhaps a variety of "giant fennel". The still-extant plant Ferula tingitana has been suggested as another possibility. - Halil

I've read the odd blog about this, and as you know you have to be weary of blogs because anyone can say anything, and most don't post source links to back-up their story, but it seems that over-harvesting may have been the purpose of this plants extinction, unless of course it's a case of mistaken ID and it still exists? - Halil

“Morality is not the product of a mythical pure reason divorced from natural selection and the neural wiring that motivates the animal to sociability. It emerges from the human brain and its responses to real human needs, desires, and social experience; it depends on innate emotional responses, on reward circuitry that allows pleasure and fear to be associated with certain conditions, on cortical networks, hormones and neuropeptides. Its cognitive underpinnings owe more to case-based reasoning than to conformity to rules. (...) Hardware and software are intertwined to such an extent that all philosophy must be “neurophilosophy.” There’s no other way. (...) Morality turns out to be not a quest for overarching principles but rather a process and practice not very different from negotiating our way through day-to-day social life. Brain scans, she points out, show little to no difference between how the brain works when solving social problems and how it works when solving ethical dilemmas. (…)" - Amira

"[Churchland] thinks, with Aristotle’s argument that morality is not about rule-making but instead about the cultivation of moral sentiment through experience, training, and the following of role models. The biological story also confirms, she thinks, David Hume’s assertion that reason and the emotions cannot be disentangled. (...) Churchland describes this process of moral decision-making as being driven by “constraint satisfaction.” (...) roughly speaking it involves various factors with various weights and probabilities interacting so as to produce a suitable solution to a question.” (...) Morality doesn’t become any different than deciding what kind of bridge to build across a river. (...)" - Amira

"Our intuitions about how to get along with other people may have been shaped by our interactions within small groups (and between small groups). But we don’t live in small groups anymore, so we need some procedures through which we leverage our social skills into uncharted areas—and that is what the traditional academic philosophers, whom Churchland mostly rejects, work on. What are our obligations to future generations (concerning climate change, say)? What do we owe poor people on the other side of the globe (whom we might never have heard of, in our evolutionary past)? (...) Several universal “foundations” of moral thought: (...) That strikes her as a nice list, but no more—a random collection of moral qualities that isn’t at all rooted in biology." - Amira

how far to should neurochemistry be taken? cf. Churchland's favorite oxytocin driving emotions -- but surely logic is not exempt from neurochemical influences :-) So the question becomes: which moral imperatives are not biologically driven, and why would they be sustained in society? cf. Churchland v. Haidt. - Adriano

"Like pyramid-building itself, the work of the humanities is to create the vessels that store our culture. In this sense, the digitization of archives and collections holds the promise of a grand conclusion: nothing less than the unification of the human cultural record online, representing, in theory, an unprecedented democratization of access to human knowledge. Equally profound is the way that technology could change the way knowledge is created in the humanities. These fields, encompassing the study of languages, literature, history, jurisprudence, philosophy, archaeology, religion, ethics, the arts, and arguably the social sciences, are entering an experimental period of inventiveness and imagination that involves the creation of new kinds of vessels—be they databases, books, exhibits, or works of art—to gather, store, interpret, and transmit culture. Pioneering scholars are engaged in knowledge design and new modes of research and expression, as well as fresh reflection and innovation in more traditional modes of scholarly communication: for example, works in print that are in dialogue with online resources." - Amira

"The ability to analyze a vast body of texts also implies a dramatic expansion of the field of questions humanities scholars can ask. (...) “Most literary historians work on a small corpus of texts where their expertise is manifest through the finesse with which they can demonstrate certain features of that corpus. Those noble skill sets are not about to disappear with a wave of the digital magic wand. On the other hand,” he explains, “there are really exciting research questions on the scale of, ‘How does the socioeconomic history of publishing as an industry relate to the production of certain literary genres?’ And when you start to operate on that scale, of course your data set has suddenly expanded: no human being can possibly read the one million books on the shelf that might document that history.” The use of computational and statistical methods becomes mandatory." - Amira

"“Where does that put us?” he asks. “Well, it puts us at a place where the boundary line between what we have traditionally called the humanities and what we have traditionally called the social sciences becomes awfully porous. For me that’s an expansion and enhancement of the humanities of the most creative and best sort.” (...) “I think the quality of scholarship that can be produced, working with vastly expanded cultural corpora, and speaking in contemporary language to expanded audiences, represents one of the great promises of our era. So for me, this is a uniquely exciting moment for the humanities, comparable to the Copernican revolution or the discovery of the New World.” - Amira

"Music is perhaps the art that presents the most philosophical puzzles. Unlike painting, its works often have multiple instances, none of which can be identified with the work itself. Thus, the question of what exactly the work is is initially more puzzling than the same question about works of painting, which appear (at least initially) to be simple physical objects. Unlike much literature, the instances of a work are performances, which offer interpretations of the work, yet the work can also be interpreted independently of any performance, and performances themselves can be interpreted. This talk of ‘interpretation’ points to the fact that we find music an art steeped with meaning, and yet, unlike drama, pure instrumental music has no obvious semantic content. This quickly raises the question of why we should find music so valuable. Central to many philosophers' thinking on these subjects has been music's apparent ability to express emotions while remaining an abstract art in some sense." - Amira

See also: "Music, Philosophy and Modernity" by Andrew Bowie | Cambridge: "Modern philosophers generally assume that music is a problem to which philosophy ought to offer an answer. Andrew Bowie's Music, Philosophy, and Modernity suggests, in contrast, that music might offer ways of responding to some central questions in modern philosophy. Bowie looks at key philosophical approaches to music ranging from Kant, through the German Romantics and Wagner, to Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Adorno. He uses music to re-examine many ideas about language, subjectivity, metaphysics, truth and ethics, and he suggests that music can show how the predominant images of language, communication, and meaning in contemporary philosophy may be lacking in essential ways. His book will be of interest to philosophers, musicologists, and all who are interested in the relation between music and philosophy." (pdf) http://wxy.seu.edu.cn/humanit... - Amira

Music "pushed to the edge of existence": Adorno, Listening, and the Question of Hope by R. Leppert (pdf) https://wiki.umn.edu/pub... // Music and Language: A Fragment by T. W. Adorno (pdf) http://ada.evergreen.edu/~arunc... - Amira

"In Athens in the fifth century BC, it was very much a social activity – although one mainly confined to the upper classes. Pythagoras, the first person to use the term “philosopher”, lived in a commune with his followers, as did Epicurus. The Stoics gathered in one corner of the Athenian market place, the Cynics in another. The Greeks understood that, if you want to know yourself and change yourself, it’s easier to do it with others. Fast-forward to the Enlightenment, and public forums played a central role in the spread of new ideas. By the 18th century there were some 3,000 coffeehouses where people – typically, affluent men – debated ideas. By the early 19th century the movement included women and working-class men who met in pubs across the country to discuss Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, which was itself written in the Angel pub in Islington, north London. This period was perhaps the high point of grassroots philosophy – it had noble ideals, a clear goal in the attainment of universal suffrage, and its meetings and rallies could attract thousands of people willing to brave government spies and cavalry charges." - Amira

"The term “privacy” is used frequently in ordinary language as well as in philosophical, political and legal discussions, yet there is no single definition or analysis or meaning of the term. The concept of privacy has broad historical roots in sociological and anthropological discussions about how extensively it is valued and preserved in various cultures. Moreover, the concept has historical origins in well known philosophical discussions, most notably Aristotle's distinction between the public sphere of political activity and the private sphere associated with family and domestic life. Yet historical use of the term is not uniform, and there remains confusion over the meaning, value and scope of the concept of privacy. Early treatises on privacy appeared with the development of privacy protection in American law from the 1890's onward, and privacy protection was justified largely on moral grounds. This literature helps distinguish descriptive accounts of privacy, describing what is in fact protected as private, from normative accounts of privacy defending its value and the extent to which it should be protected. In these discussions some treat privacy as an interest with moral value, while others refer to it as a moral or legal right that ought to be protected by society or the law. " - Amira

"This essay will discuss all of these topics, namely, (1) the historical roots of the concept of privacy, including the development of privacy protection in tort and constitutional law, and the philosophical responses that privacy is merely reducible to other interests or is a coherent concept with fundamental value, (2) the critiques of privacy as a right, (3) the wide array of philosophical definitions or defenses of privacy as a concept, providing alternative views on the meaning and value of privacy (and whether or not it is culturally relative), as well as (4) the challenges to privacy posed in an age of technological advance." - Amira

"One reason that Eurasian civilizations dominated the globe is because they came from a continent that was broader in an east–west direction than north–south (...) a modelling study has found evidence to support this 'continental axis theory'. Continents that span narrower bands of latitude have less variation in climate, which means a set of plants and animals that are adapted to more similar conditions. That is an advantage, says Diamond, because it means that agricultural innovations are able to diffuse more easily, with culture and ideas following suit. As a result, Diamond's hypothesis predicts, along lines of latitude there will be more cultural homogeneity than along lines of longitude. (...)" - Amira

"The researchers found that if a country had a greater east–west axis than a north–south one, the less likely it was for its indigenous languages to persist. The relationship isn't straightforward, but the model suggests that Mongolia, which is about twice as wide as it is tall, would have 5% fewer indigenous languages than Angola, which is roughly square. Meanwhile, Peru — about twice as tall as it is wide — would be predicted to have 5% more persistent languages than Angola. (...) Greater cultural diversity is also known to be associated with outcomes such as lower levels of economic growth and higher probabilities of violence. (...) [The study] further supports the idea that human history and cultural evolution are governed by general ecological and biogeographical rules." - Amira

Dance of Death, also variously called Danse Macabre (French), Danza de la Muerte (Spanish), Dansa de la Mort (Catalan), Danza Macabra (Italian), Dança da Morte (Portuguese), Totentanz (German), Dodendans (Dutch), Surmatants (Estonian), is an artistic genre of late-medieval allegory on the universality of death: no matter one's station in life, the Dance of Death unites all. The Danse Macabre consists of the dead or personified Death summoning representatives from all walks of life to dance along to the grave, typically with a pope, emperor, king, child, and labourer. They were produced to remind people of the fragility of their lives and how vain were the glories of earthly life.[1] Its origins are postulated from illustrated sermon texts; the earliest recorded visual scheme was a now lost mural in the Saints Innocents Cemetery in Paris dating from 1424-25. - Halil

http://www.youtube.com/watch... :) - grizabella

"Some of the world's first musicians may have been flautists. Archaeologists reanalyzing artifacts from a cave in southern Germany have determined that two prehistoric flutes — one fashioned from bird bone, the other mammoth ivory — are somewhere between 42,000 and 43,000 years old. (...) "Modern humans during [this] period were in central Europe at least 2,000-3,000 years before this climatic deterioration, when huge icebergs calved from ice sheets in the northern Atlantic and temperatures plummeted," explains Higham." http://io9.com/5913322... "The bone flutes push back the date researchers think human creativity evolved. (...) The flutes are the earliest record of technological and artistic innovations that are characteristic of the Aurignacian period. This culture also created the oldest known example of art meant to represent a person, found in the same cave system in 2008 (that statue seems to be about 35,000 years old). The musical instruments indicate that these early humans were sharing songs and showing artistic creativity even earlier than previously thought." http://www.mnn.com/lifesty... - Amira

"Manuel Lima is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Senior UX Design Lead at Microsoft Bing and founder of VisualComplexity.com - A visual exploration on mapping complex networks." See also: The Story of Networks http://aminotes.tumblr.com/post... - Amira

"During the previous generation or so, elites across Europe had moved their clocks forward by several hours. No longer a time reserved for sleep, the night time was now the right time for all manner of recreational and representational purposes. This is what Craig Koslofsky calls “nocturnalisation”, defined as “the ongoing expansion of the legitimate social and symbolic uses of the night”, a development to which he awards the status of “a revolution in early modern Europe”. (...) The shift from street to court and from day to night represented “the sharpest break in the history of celebrations in the West”. (...) By the time of Louis XIV, all the major events – ballets de cour, operas, balls, masquerades, firework displays – took place at night. (...) The kings, courtiers – and those who sought to emulate them – adjusted their daily timetable accordingly. Unlike Steele’s friend, they rose and went to bed later and later. Henry III of France, who was assassinated in 1589, usually had his last meal at 6 pm and was tucked up in bed by 8. Louis XIV’s day began with a lever at 9 and ended (officially) at around midnight. (...) As with so much else at Versailles, this was a development that served to distance the topmost elite from the rest of the population. (...)" - Amira

I saw your notification on Goodreads when I did the same today, now we are two! :-) - Amira

"Knowledge qua knowledge, Weinberger claims, is increasingly enmeshed in webs of discourse: culture-dependent and theory-free. (...) The existence of hyperlinks is enough to convince even the most stubborn positivist that there is always another side to the story. And on the web, fringe believers can always find each other and marinate in their own illusions. The “web world” is too big to ever know. There is always another link. In the era of the Internet, Weinberger argues, facts are not bricks. They are networks. (…) Human beings (or rather “Dasein,” “being-in-the-world”) are always thrown into a particular context, existing within already existing language structures and pre-determined meanings. In other words, the world is like the web, and we, Dasein, live inside the links. (…)" - Amira

"If knowledge has always been networked knowledge, than facts have never had stable containers. Most of the time, though, we more or less act as if they do. (...) Black boxes emerge out of actually-existing knowledge networks, stabilize for a time, and unravel, and our goal as thinkers and scholars ought to be understanding how these nodes emerge and disappear. (...) Done well, digital realism can sensitize us to the fact that all networked knowledge systems eventually become brick walls, that these brick walls are maintained through technological, political, cultural, economic, and organizational forms of power. (...) Our job is to understand how the wall gets built, and how we might try to build it differently." - Amira

David Weinberger: "I think the Net generation is beginning to see knowledge in a way that is closer to the truth about knowledge. (...) Knowing looks less like capturing truths in books than engaging in never-settled networks of discussion and argument. (...) This new topology of knowledge reflects the topology of the Net. The Net (and especially the Web) is constructed quite literally out of links, each of which expresses some human interest. (...) And that’s the sense in which I think networked knowledge is more “natural.” (…) To make a smart room — a knowledge network — you have to have just enough diversity. (...) There is no longer an imperative to squeeze the world into small, self-contained boxes. Hyperlinks remove the limitations that objectivity was invented to address. " - Amira

"Hegel and Marx believed that the evolution of human societies was not open-ended, but would end when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings. Both thinkers posited an "end of history": for Hegel this was the liberal state, while for Marx it was a communist society. This did not mean that the natural cycle of birth, life, and death would end, or that important events would no longer happen. It meant that there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled. [But] does not the satisfaction of certain human beings depend on recognition that is inherently unequal? ... even to the point of becoming bestial "first men" engaged in bloody prestige battles, this time with modern weapons? [W]e ask whether there is such a thing as progress, and whether we can construct a coherent and directional Universal History of mankind." - Adriano

in terms of dynamic systems, Fukuyama is asking whether History has a limit point -- or does it follow a trajectory like a predator/prey ecosystem similar to the dialectical relationship between Hegel's master/slave. - Adriano

"The US and Europe are committing suicide in different ways. In Europe it’s austerity in the midst of recession and that’s guaranteed to be a disaster. And there’s an dangerous growth of ultra xenophobia which is pretty threatening to any one who remembers the history of Europe... and an attack on the remnants of the welfare state. It’s hard to interpret the austerity-in-the-midst-of-recession policy as anything other than attack on the social contract. \\ In the US, it’s essentially off-shoring production and financialization and getting rid of superfluous population through incarceration. The US electoral system has been almost totally shredded. For a long time it’s been pretty much run by private concentrated spending but now it’s over the top. Elections increasingly over the years have been [PR] extravaganzas. It was understood by the ad industry in 2008 -- they gave Barack Obama their marketing award of the year. This year it’s barely a pretense." - Adriano

"Right now we’re living in what Carl Sagan correctly termed a demon-haunted world. We have created a Star Wars civilization but we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. That’s dangerous. (…) Constant turmoil occurs in modern human societies and what I’m suggesting is that turmoil is endemic in the way human advanced social behavior originated in the first place. It’s by group selection that occurred favoring altruism versus individual level selection, which by and large, not exclusively, favor individual and selfish behavior. We’re hung in the balance. We’ll never reach either one extreme or the other. (...) I’ve also felt very strongly that we needed a much better understanding of who we are and where we came from. We need answers to those questions in order to get our bearings toward a successful long-term future, that means a future for ourselves, our species and for the rest of life. (...) We have a kind of resistance toward honest self-understanding as a species and I think that resistance is due in part to our genetic history. And now, can we overcome it? I think so.” - Amira

“There was this American physiologist who was asked if Mary’s bodily ascent from Earth to Heaven was possible. He said,“I wasn’t there; therefore, I’m not positive that it happened or didn’t happen; but of one thing I’m certain: She passed out at 10,000 meters.” - Amira