essays and ideas from Eliza Sarobhasa
cf. Director Prof Andy Miah gives an overview of the future of genetics, focusing on the use of genetic information and the possibilities of tests for lifestyle characteristics.
cf. Director Prof Andy Miah gives an overview of the future of genetics, focusing on the use of genetic information and the possibilities of tests for lifestyle characteristics.
via Future Shorts: Genetics on Vimeo. Continue reading “Future Shorts: Genetics on Vimeo”
Warren Sturgis McCulloch – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Warren Sturgis McCulloch (November 16, 1898 – September 24, 1969) was an American neurophysiologist and cybernetician, known for his work on the foundation for certain brain theories and his contribution to the cybernetics movement.
In the 1943 paper they attempted to demonstrate that a Turing machine program could be implemented in a finite network of formal neurons, (in the event, the Turing Machine contains their model of the brain, but the converse is not true[3]) that the neuron was the base logic unit of the brain. In the 1947 paper they offered approaches to designing “nervous nets” to recognize visual inputs despite changes in orientation or size.
From 1952 he worked at the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT, working primarily on neural network modelling. His team examined the visual system of the frog in consideration of McCulloch’s 1947 paper, discovering that the eye provides the brain with information that is already, to a degree, organized and interpreted, instead of simply transmitting an image.
McCulloch also posited the concept of “poker chip” reticular formations as to how the brain deals with contradictory information in a democratic, somatotopical neural network. His principle of “Redundancy of Potential Command”[4] was developed by von Forster and Pask in their study of Self-organization.
One of the audio sources Lipsett sampled for 21-87 was a conversation between artificial intelligence pioneer Warren S. McCulloch and Roman Kroitor, a cinematographer who went on to develop IMAX.
In the face of McCulloch’s arguments that living beings are nothing but highly complex machines, Kroitor insists that there is something more: “Many people feel that in the contemplation of nature and in communication with other living things, they become aware of some kind of force, or something, behind this apparent mask which we see in front of us.
Noam Chomsky at Occupy Boston | Open Culture.
Noam Chomsky joined the faculty of MIT in 1955, and, soon enough established himself as “the father of modern linguistics.” (Watch him debate Michel Foucault in 1971.) During the 60s, he also firmly positioned himself as a leading public intellectual taking aim at American foreign policy and global capitalism, and we regularly saw him engaging with figures like William F. Buckley.
All of these years later, it’s quite fitting that Chomsky, now 82 years old, would pay a visit to Occupy Boston and deliver a talk in the Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture Series. Why has our political system become more responsive to corporations than citizens? How has wealth become increasingly concentrated in the hands of an ever smaller elite — a plutocracy, to put it simply? And why do billionaire hedge fund managers enjoy a lower tax rate than maligned school teachers and pretty much everyone else? Chomsky explains how we got to this point, and what’s to be done about it. Find his talk in three parts: Part 1 (above), Part 2 and Part 3. via Dangerous Minds.
The Singularity Is Near – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology is a 2005 update of Raymond Kurzweil‘s 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines and his 1990 book The Age of Intelligent Machines. In it, as in the two previous versions, Kurzweil attempts to give a glimpse of what awaits us in the near future. He proposes a coming technological singularity, and how we would thus be able to augment our bodies and minds with technology.
…
He describes the singularity as resulting from a combination of three important technologies of the 21st century: genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (including artificial intelligence).
Four central postulates of the book are as follows:
Kurzweil’s speculative reasoning and selective use of growth indicators has been heavily debated and challenged. (See criticisms at Technological Singularity) In response to this, in the last chapter he gives responses to some of the criticisms he has received.
The Architecture of Language by Noam Chomsky:
Mainstream audiences tend to think of Noam Chomsky as a sharp political commentator, but scholars know him as the heavily influential MIT linguist.
His “generative enterprise” strategy for approaching the subject blended cognitive science with language studies. In The Architecture of Language, Chomsky traces its history, tenets and the way it shape the field forever.
via The 20 Best Books for Language Lovers | Online College Tips – Online Colleges.
Turkle also explores the psychological and societal impact of such “relational artifacts” as sociable robots, and how these and other technologies are changing attitudes about human life and concepts about what it means for something to be alive.
