General Intelligence Factor, Scientific American

In November of last year, the cruise liner Seabourne Spirit was attacked by pirates off the East African coast. After being hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, the crew defended the liner with a sonic weapon, a Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD - not to be confused with the Lilac Rainbow Allience of the Deaf). The device has a diameter of 84cm (33in) and a weight of only 24kg (53lb), consisting of a dish that can generate a frequency of between 2100 and 3100htz at 150dbls, and focus the sound wave into a beam 15°-30°, effective for up to 300 metres (985ft). In addition to potentially damaging hearing, the intensity of the sound at such frequencies physically compels the target to get away. The LRAD was devised to protect American Navy vessels following the terrorist bombing of the USS Cole in 2000. Since then, it has been used in regions of Baghdad, Fallujah, and other parts of Iraq. It was also used against civilians in New York City, during the protests of the 2004 Republican National Convention.

But non-leathal sonic warfare does not stop there. In parts of Britain, some shops have Mosquitos. Developed by Compound Security Service, the Moscquito is a pretty simple device that produces a continuous high frequency tone. The frequency, however, is inaudible to most adults, who have already suffered some hearing loss by age 20. So, its primary use is to keep young people away, loiterers and troublemakers. The device also has a Pavlovian conditioning effect, in that people unwittingly exposed to the sound in a certain place will avoid going there again, possibly without knowing why. I wonder if it works on dogs too.

Louder, louder, louder! ForteanTimes.com

Forget individual artificial intelligence programs for a moment, because a whole artificial society has just opened up. New and Emergent World models Through Individual, Evolutionary, and Social Learning or the NEW TIES project is deveping an artificial computer simulated society composed of agent programs (adaptive, artificial beings that have independent behaviors). The aim is to create an artificial society capable of exploring and understanding its environment through cooperation and interaction. The agent programs are complex enough to develop a communication system and learn to work together.

At first, the world will be running across a grid of 60 computers and contain about 1,000 agents (one day to grow into the millions). Each agent will have its own characteristics (gender, life expectancy, fertility, size, and metabolism), some of which they will pass to their offspring. They will be able to learn from experience as well as from others. NEW TIES is the first to create such a complex large-scale artificial society. The results may have curious implications for evolutionary computing systems, artifical intelligence and linguistics.

New Ties Portal
Artificial Personalities to Populate Virtual World, ScienceaGoGo.com

Movie director legend David Lynch has been doing Transcendental Meditation for over 32 years. In a recent interview he discribes how the practice has changed his life:

Two weeks later my wife comes and says: What’s going on? I was quiet for a moment. Finally I asked: What do you mean? She said: This anger where did it go? Because I was taking it all out on her. It had just lifted. And that’s a very real thing. That is a very real thing. The anger was there and it just lifted away. The same way with depression and sorrow. And this fear, fear, fear… [fear of what?] The fear of the unknown that’s running through the world and manifests in all different ways. How is it all gonne fall? And you’re right in the middle of it and you don’t know and you blame other people for something that is really just you. The anxieties. They start lifting away. You become calm. It’s like going to the treasury every day. You go and just fill up those pockets, the energy for the day. It’s like money in the bank.

David Lynch on Meditation, BussinessPortal24.com
Official Transcendental Meditation Site

Ok, I’ve mentioned before how MIT has this OpenCourseWare program, whose goal it is "to make the courses materials that are used in the teaching of almost all the undergraduate and graduate subjects taught at MIT available on the Web, free of charge, to any user, anywhere in the world." Well, now they have video and audio files of lectures for a number of courses, including:

Animal Behavior
Electromagnetics and Applications
Nano-to-Macro Transport Processes

More audio/visual courses at MIT OpenCourseWare

BrainMaps.org is an interactive zoomable high-resolution digital brain atlas and virtual microscope that is based on more than 10 million megapixels of scanned images of serial sections of both primate and non-primate brains and that is integrated with a high-speed database for querying and retrieving data about brain structure and function over the internet. Currently, the species featured in the atlas include Macaca mulatta, Mus musculus, Felis catus, as well as us Homo sapiens. The site also includes a forum for discussing the brainscans, though it is not yet very active.

BrainMaps.org

Sins of forgetting
Transience: gradual loss of information from short and long-term memory as a result of time.
Absent-mindedness: failure of attention during retrieval or encoding.
Blocking: inability to retrieve previously stored information, "tip of the toungue" phenomenon.

Sins of distortion
Misattribution: failure of source memory, when incorrect source is identified and when it is not.
Suggestibility: influence that things like question phrasing can have on memory. Manifestation of misinformation.
Bias: largely the consistency bias, in which people overestimate the similarity between their current and previous attitudes, allowing their present state alter past memories.

Sin of intrusion
Persistence: inability to forget the things we most want to. Cause of problems like post-traumatic stress disorder.

Daniel L. Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers (Paperback), Amazon.com

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sent a letter to President Bush last monday. A copy of the letter came from the French newspaper Le Monde and White House officials have confirmed the CNN version to be an exact English translation, even though there is a typo on the first page. It’s an interesting read, as Ahmadinejad asks questions that are on many people’s minds, though he also questions the historicity of the holocaust and hints and the complicity of US intelligence agencies in 9/11. Iranian Vice President for Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Ahmad Moussavi was quoted as saying May 15: "If Bush gives a fair and reasoned reply to Ahmadinejad’s letter, we will welcome it and regard it as a step in diplomacy and forging of understanding." Still, it does not seem like Bush is planning to respond.

Ahmadinejad’s official site
Ahmadinejad’s letter to Bush, CNN.com
An Iranian offer that America must heed, Payvand.com
Bush’s reply to Ahmadinejad letter (Satire), Deadbrain.co.uk

It’s no secret that most of our media is owned by a handful of huge diversified companies or conglomerates. Though these giants come and go, their presence influences the integrity of journalism and the free exchange of information. Here are the Big Ten, their revenues and media interests.

AOL/Time Warner: $36.2 billion (Time, Life and People magazines; Atlantic, Elektra and Rhino Records music labels; HBO, Cinimax, CNN, Cartoon Network)
AT&T Corporation: $66 billion (Largest cable provider; New Line Cinema)
General Electric: $129.9 billion (NBC; Aircraft engines; 14 communication satellites)
News Corporation: $11.6 billion (Fox, National Geographics, +26 TV stations; HarperCollins; NY Post, UK’s Sun, Times; 20th Century Fox; NY Knicks, NY Rangers, Madison Square Garden)
Viavom, Inc: $20 billion (CBS, UPN, MTV, VH1, Showtime, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, +39 TV stations; Paramount Pictures, Blockbuster; 184 Infinity radio stations)
Bertelsmann: $16.5 billion (Publishes 80 magazine worldwide; Random House, Knopf, Bantam Doubleday books; Arista, BMG, RCA record labels)
Walt Disney Company: $25.4 billion (ABC, ESPN, A&E, History and Biography channels; 50 radio stations; Mighty Ducks, Anaheim Angels teams; Beuna Vista, Touchstone picture companies; Hyperion books)
Vivendi Universal: $37.2 billion (USA Network, Sci-Fi Channel; Universal Studios, StudioCanal, Gramercy Pictures; Houghton Mifflin publisher; 27% US music sales, Interscope, Geffen, Island, Def Jam, MCA, Mercury)
Liberty Media Corporation: $42 billion (Ticketmaster; 21 US and 49 Canadia radio stations; 14 TV stations; largest cable provide in Japan)
Sony: $53.8 (Columbia Pictures; Playstation)

For a more comprehensive list: Big Ten

In May 2005, the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, bought a multimillion-dollar IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer for a two-year project in which they hope to create a 3D blueprint of the human brain to further cognition research. So far, the group has simulated the firing of 10,000 neurons in a single column (a column typically contains 100,000 neurons) of the neocortex, the part of the brain responsible for higher-level thought and action. The current simulation produces a terabyte of data and is but a small fraction of what it takes to map the brain’s billions of neurons. With enough money, current technology could compute all those neurons, which is why the project is trying to get more funding from the Swiss government to buy two more Blue Genes (hehe, jeans). The supercomputer is running Phil Goodman’s MPI-based Neocortical Simulator (NCS) software, to be combined with Michael Hines’ NEURON, and has a media center to display the 3D simulations, which is apparently like sitting inside the brain. According to Henry Markram, head of the Brain and Mind Institute at EPFL, it "immediately allows us to assess the value of the data to discern: Is this something we want to save and analyze later? It’s also a lot of fun."

Blueprinting the human brain, ZDnet.com
Brain Mind Institute - Blue Brain Project, EPFL.ch

Sexual harassement is a problem females of many species face. A research team from the University of Leeds, led by Darren Croft (U. of Wales), has found that guppies, a popular aquarium fish, sometimes risk their lives to avoid the courtship of males. "Male guppies spend most of their time displaying to females. But if their courtship displays don’t impress the females, males will attempt to sneak mating with them when they aren’t looking," says Croft. Consequently, female guppies sometimes opt to swim in places that contain few males, but many predators. While females are a dull brown color, the males are brightly colored so as to attract attention, making them hesitant to follow the opposite sex into dangerous waters. "Understanding why and how [sexual segregation] occurs is essential if we are going to conserve and protect species and habitats," explains Croft. "In many ecosystems, predators are the first to go extinct, and our work shows that this may have many, perhaps unexpected, effects. In this case, females may suffer more sexual harassment."

Female guppies risk their lives to avoid too much male attention, EurekAlert.org

In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.
The cut worm forgives the plow.
Dip him in the river who loves water.
A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.
Eternity is in love with the productions of time.
The busy bee has no time for sorrow.
The hours of folly are measur’d by the clock, but of wisdom: no clock can measure.
No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.
The most sublime act is to set another before you.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God.
Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.
Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth.
The bird a nest, the spider a web, woman friendship.
What is now proved was once only imagin’d.
The cistern contains: the fountain overflows.
One thought fills immensity.
Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.
Every thing possible to be believ’d is an image of truth.
The eagle never lost so much time, as when he submitted to learn of the crow.
The fox provides for himself. but God provides for the lion.
Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.
The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
Expect poison from the standing water.
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.
The weak in courage is strong in cunning.
The best wine is the oldest, the best water the newest.
The crow wish’d every thing was black, the owl, that every thing was white.
Exuberance is Beauty.
Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ’d.
Enough! or Too much.

Selected from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Levity.com

So it’s Rorschach and Prozac and everything is groovy.
"The Curse of Millhaven," Nick Cave

Back when parlor games were popular, there was one going around Europe called Klexographie. It involved spilling ink on a piece of paper and folding it in half. The sheet was then passed around among people, with each one telling a story based on what they saw in the image. In the early 1920’s, Swiss psychiatrist and proponent of psychoanalysis Hermann Rorschach was the first to apply the same concept to psychology. The Rorschach test was originally meant to test "perception and apperception" - form, perceived movement, color -  rather than imagination. However, its applications soon included using it to probe the subconscious of patients, by seing what kind of images they project on a random splash of color. There are ten official inkblots: five are black ink on white, two are black and red ink on white, three are multicolored, and while the Rorschach Society claims the blots are copyrighted, they should be in the public domain based on when they were first created and how long the creator has been dead. Now, it’s possible to give yourself this classic test in the form of the Klexographie Inkblot Oracle, which works similar to divination by reading tea leaves, coffee grounds, fireplace ashes, or candle wax. Just think of a question and the patterns/symbols in the image should help you with the answer. If there is still something unclear, try another blot. It’s interesting how you can see completely different things in the same image on different days.

Klexographie Inkblot Oracle

For those who still don’t buy my weed apologia, here’s an excerpt from last month’s issue of The Economist:

IF CANNABIS were unknown, and bioprospectors were suddenly to find it in some remote mountain crevice, its discovery would no doubt be hailed as a medical breakthrough. Scientists would praise its potential for treating everything from pain to cancer, and marvel at its rich pharmacopoeia—many of whose chemicals mimic vital molecules in the human body. In reality, cannabis has been with humanity for thousands of years and is considered by many governments (notably America’s) to be a dangerous drug without utility. Any suggestion that the plant might be medically useful is politically controversial, whatever the science says. It is in this context that, on April 20th, America’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a statement saying that smoked marijuana has no accepted medical use in treatment in the United States…

Today, cannabis is used all over the world, despite its illegality, to relieve pain and anxiety, to aid sleep, and to prevent seizures and muscle spasms. For example, two of its long-advocated benefits are that it suppresses vomiting and enhances appetite—qualities that AIDS patients and those on anti-cancer chemotherapy find useful. So useful, in fact, that the FDA has licensed a drug called Marinol, a synthetic version of one of the active ingredients of marijuana—delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Unfortunately, many users of Marinol complain that it gets them high (which isn’t what they actually want) and is not nearly as effective, nor cheap, as the real weed itself.

Reefer Madness, Economist.com

Coventry University has started a two-year Masters of Science program in Parapsychology, which aims to examine the middle ground between science and religion through a study of the paranormal. Among the things the first 15 graduate students will do in the Fall will be investigating haunted houses, experimenting with extra-sensory perception and researching the mystery of life after death. Students will also use yoga and meditation to extend and enhance their personal development. At last, a program for aspiring ghost-busters.

Ghostly syllabus for new degree, BBC.co.uk
Coventry University

Scientists at the University of Akron, Ohio U. and Clemson U. have created and captured the largest man-made nanoscale fractal molecule (about 12 nanometers wide). They used molecular self-assembly techniques to synthesize the molecule in a lab; bound with ions of iron and ruthenium, it forms a hexagonal gasket. To photograph the molecules, they sprayed them on a piece of gold, chilled to -449 degrees Fahrenheit to keep them stable, and focused with a scanning tunneling microscope. "Blending mathematics, art and science, these nanoscopic hexagonal-shaped materials can be self-assembled and resemble a fine bead necklace. These precise polymers - the first example of a molecule possessing a ‘Star of David’ motif - may provide an entrée into novel new types of photoelectric cells, molecular batteries and energy storage," said George R. Newkome, lead author and dean of the Graduate School at the University of Akron.

Scientists Create the First Synthetic Nanoscale Fractal Molecule, OhioU.edu

Washington Post and ABC News conducted a survey of 502 randomly selected adults to see how Americans feel about the National Security Agency (NSA) tapping their phone conversations.

63% were for phone surveillance as an acceptable means to investigate terrorism, with 44% strongly supporting it
35% opposed it, with 24% strongly against it
65% believed that investigation of potential terrorism outweighed privacy concerns, while 31% that intrusion on privacy was unwarranted
51% approved how Bush was handling privacy matters

President Bush defended his administration’s counter-terrorist efforts to White House reporters and criticized public disclosure of secret intelligence operations. Though, he did not acknowledge the existence of the NSA records-gathering program or answer reporters’ questions about it.

Washington Post-ABC News Poll May 11, 2006
Poll: Most Americans Support NSA’s Efforts, WashingtonPost.com

McbrCrtn

Vannevar Bush (1890-1974), unrelated to W., was an American engineer, science administrator, and advisor to President F. D. Roosevelt, mostly known for his role in the creation of the atomic bomb. In the 1930’s he developed the concept of what he called the memex (portmanteau of "memory extender"), a microfilm-based "device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility… It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory." The memex is considered by many to be the precursor of the internet, hypertext and general intellect augmenting computer systems. He understood the difficulty involved in predicting the technology of the future, in the July 1945 article in the Atlantic Monthly ‘As We May Think’ Bush wrote: "It is a far cry from the abacus to the modern keyboard accounting machine, it will be an equal step to the arithmetical machine of the future." There, he also predicted Wikipedia, saying that "wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified." Moreover, he foretold the development of speech-recognition in the same article. Despite this, Bush earned an unfair eponym: a vannevar is a bogus technological prediction or a foredoomed engineering concept. This may have been largely because of his strong opposition to sending people into space, which he considered too expensive and risky. When the Apollo Program and the two before went off without problem, Bush was labelled a bad prophet, and by the time of the Shuttle Challenger and Shuttle Columbia disasters, his warning have been forgotten. Note also that NASA has long since realized it is far more frugal to send robots into space.

As We May Think, TheAtlantic.com
Vannevar Bush, Wikipedia.org
MemexSim, SourceForge.net

The second annual Art of Science exchibit opened recently in the Friend Center of Princeton University. The juried show features paintings, sculptures, videos and poetry, a total of 55 works produced in the course of scientific research. The top three winners were:

1) Jennifer Rea, "Mitosis," which depicts cell division superimposed on a floral fabric
2) Melissa Green, "Isolated Hairpin," a computer simulation of turbulent air flow
3) Qiangfei Xia, "Easter Bonnet," a photograph taken with an electron scanning microscope of a tiny piece of metal melted by a laser onto a silicon chip

Admission is free and open to the public from 9 am to 6 pm, Monday through Friday.

Art of Science Competition, Princeton.edu

A new study by Michael A. Cant, University of Cambridge, UK, and others suggests that differences in aggressive behavior in cooperative insect societies are related to "inheritence rank", the chance of successful mating, which increases with higher placement within the social hierarchy. Everyone has to work their way up and can reach the top only when those ahead in rank have died, thereby inheriting from them the right to reproduce. By testing colonies of paper wasps Polistes dominulus, recording aggression and repeatedly removing dominant wasps, they "found that rates of both aggressive ‘displays’ (aimed at individuals of lower rank) and aggressive ‘tests’ (aimed at individuals of higher rank) decreased down the hierarchy." The inheritence rank is the hidden variable that may explain the difference in aggression among seemingly equal individuals. So, even in wasps, the essence of the desire to work up the social ladder is really just a need to get laid. No real surprise there.

The higher the hierarch, the greater the aggression, EurekAlert.org

Researchers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, have engineered blood-compatible nanoscale materials using an anticoagulant called heparin, a therapeutic used to maintain blood flow and prevent clotting during medical procedures. Robert Linhardt and co. have shown that a composite heparin membrane with nanopores can work as a dialyzer, an artificial kidney, filtering the flood and maintaining blood flow. Furthermore, now that nanotech is hemo-compatible, it opens the door for nerve and tissue repair, as well as nanomed cancer treatments. Just imagine, a swarm of nanobots swimming around your bloodstream, fighting bad cholestarol, cleaning up carcinogens, unclogging capillaries, improving circulation, and easing stress on the heart. Stick them in my vein.

Blood-compatible nanoscale materials possible using heparin, EurekAlert.org

Mexico’s President Vincente Fox decided that he will not sign the bill legalizing limited drug possession, whiic was passed by Congress five days earlier, because of pressure from the United States. The main concern is that the ambiguities in the wording of the bill would make Mexico a new Amsterdam, a vacation spot for drug tourism, thereby boosting the drug market for the country’s drug cartels. Fox’s administration argued that the law was misunderstood, that individual Mexican states could impose their own laws on drug possession, thereby making it the job of state and local police to make small drug arrests, currently done by the federales. The bill could be amended in September, when Congress gets back to work, giving Fox, who has been pushing for the bill since 2001, three months to sign it before he ends his six-year term in December.

Fox Decides Not to Sign Drug Legalization Bill, LATimes.com