Archive for the 'Health' Category

The Pace of Human Progress

Published
by
Jarred
on June 4, 2008
in Computing, Health, Humanism and Science
. 4 Comments

Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity

Man… that would be a great name for a band, wouldn’t it? Alas, Mr. Kurzweil - to my knowledge - is not sick nasty at the guitar. He did, however, invent “the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments.”

According to his biography, Ray Kurzweil “has been described as ‘the restless genius’ by the Wall Street Journal, and ‘the ultimate thinking machine’ by Forbes.” He’s part entrepreneur, part inventor, part futurist. He’s been receiving lots of press recently. Why? Because Mr. Kurzweil believes in the coming of the Singularity.

What is the Singularity? According to Kurzweil’s website, it’s:

an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today—the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity. In this new world, there will be no clear distinction between human and machine, real reality and virtual reality. We will be able to assume different bodies and take on a range of personae at will. In practical terms, human aging and illness will be reversed; pollution will be stopped; world hunger and poverty will be solved. Nanotechnology will make it possible to create virtually any physical product using inexpensive information processes and will ultimately turn even death into a soluble problem.

Before you dismiss Kurzweil as having watched The Matrix a few too many times, you should understand the logic behind his seemingly preposterous claims.

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Monday Links: May 19th, 2008

Published
by
Taylor
on May 19, 2008
in Business, Energy, Environment, Health and Monday Links
. 4 Comments

As always, your Monday Links (I’m off to a slow start this morning, so they’re a little late):

  • This article from the NY Times Technology section describes a really neat idea for an online marketplace that links inventors with corporate purchasers more efficiently:

The marketplace is an online registry that will have descriptions of inventions for browsing by prospective buyers. But it will have an unusual twist: before inventions are listed, the registry will provide in-person or online workshops to help inventors recast their often technical prose in jargon-free descriptions for the business and industrial customers that are expected to shop at the site

[...] Company software will [also] evaluate the invention’s probable cost to the buyer before the first sale as well as other business angles, and add the information to the capsule description.

How, [the article's author] asks, is this any different than steroids? Well, assuming we had the long term data, and could prove the safety conclusively, you could also ask how it’s different than college, or preschool. It’s something you pay for that makes you smarter and more cognitively efficient. If I felt sure that it would never harm me, I’d probably pop them like candy. Enough people doing that, of course, and you create a collective action problem in which everyone needs to use them to keep up. It could be a problem. Or, in the future, it could just be the norm.

Though the airships are small by blimp standards, only 20 m long, they can house about 120 square meters of CIGS solar cells, producing up to 125 kWh / day. That’s enough energy to power 25 shallow water pumps, providing clean water for up to 12,000 people. Or enough to power 400 medical refrigerators.

Habitual Thinking

Published
by
Jarred
on May 11, 2008
in Business, Culture, Education, Health and Science
. 2 Comments

I read an interesting article in The New York Times (our favorite source) about habits and their influence on human creativity and innovation. Janet Rae-Dupree writes that

brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks. Rather than dismissing ourselves as unchangeable creatures of habit, we can instead direct our own change by consciously developing new habits. In fact, the more new things we try — the more we step outside our comfort zone — the more inherently creative we become, both in the workplace and in our personal lives.

Rae-Dupree goes on to note that, in addition to today’s much emphasized powers of analysis and procedure, we’re born with equally strong innovative and collaborative problem-solving capabilities. Those two approaches, however, are known to go under biological and cultural attack throughout our younger years. Biologically, at puberty the brain often “throws out” innovation and collaboration because they go underutilized and are deemed less cognitively “valuable.” Culturally, the emphasis these days on analytic and systematic learning (especially in the face of standardized testing) fosters less development of the more creative mental faculties.

It turns out that “stretching” our minds into new ways of thinking can be beneficial in multiple arenas. Physically, learning to think in new ways keeps our brains and even our bodies healthy. One interviewee in the article notes that “researchers who asked folks to do something different every day — listen to a new radio station, for instance — found that they lost and kept off weight. No one is sure why, but scientists speculate that getting out of routines makes us more aware in general”.

Encouraging unique thought processes can also benefit businesses, non-profits, and government. More and more, I hear about job interviews where people are asked something like: “How many golf balls does it take to fill up a school bus.” They don’t know the answer, and don’t really care what number the candidate comes up with. Smart companies are investigating and investing not in what potential hires know, but in how they think.

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Mapping Our Memories

Published
by
Jarred
on April 14, 2008
in Computing, Google, Health, Humanism and Science
. 4 Comments

We’ve discussed augmented reality a little bit before, but this week’s New York Times Magazine featured an article that got me thinking about a similar concept: human augmentation, which I suppose can be loosely defined as improving human performance through the addition of synthetic or otherwise “unhuman” components.

Of course there are lots of spokes in this wheel: we could easily talk about steroids, for example, and how chemical enhancements are changing athletics. However, Gary Marcus, a psychology professor at NYU, focuses in “Total Recall” on research being done into human memory: how it works, how it compares to computer memory, and how the latter can inform and perhaps improve the former.

As Marcus explains, computer storage is orderly and logical: information is stored in specific locations, and there is an accompanying index or “map” that allows quick and accurate retrieval. When you command your computer to find information, it consults the map, finds the information, and displays it. Nice and simple.  On the other hand, information in the human brain — as far as we know — isn’t mapped to discrete locations. Our memories ebb and flow, often disappear, and sometimes change. When we “search” for information in our brains, it can be a slower and much less accurate or consistent affair as compared to computers. Marcus calls this a “kluge”, the term engineers use for systems that are “clumsy and inelegant but a lot better than nothing.”

With this discrepancy in storage methods in mind, Marcus wonders if one day it will be possible to embed a memory mapping and tracking system in our brains. He predicts the creation of “a system modeled on Google, which combines cue-driven promptings similar to human memory with the location-addressability of computers.” Suggesting that “there’s no reason in principle why a future generation of neural prostheticists couldn’t pick up where nature left off”, he maintains that such a procedure would not turn humans into machines because it would only augment, and not alter, existing abilities. The quality or quantity of our memories would not change, only our ability to find them again.

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Pork Across the Pond and Here at Home

Published
by
Taylor
on April 10, 2008
in Agriculture, Animals, Business, Cooking, Environment, Health and Sustainability
. 12 Comments

hogsLast night’s winner on Top Chef served grilled shrimp with a pickled chili salad and miso smoked bacon.  The dish looked delicious, and who can blame the judges for going with the clear winner: bacon.  What self-respecting meat eater doesn’t love the salty, crispy stuff?  On a recent episode of Iron Chef America, Cat Cora referred to maple and brown sugar bacon as “pig candy,” which I find both hilarious and a little disgusting.  Regardless, one thing is clear: many of us freaking love bacon.

Here’s the bad news: Smithfield Farms, the world’s largest hog producer (based, regrettably, in my home state of North Carolina) is responsible for true environmental injustice in rural communities in NC and IA…and now they’re expanding to Europe.  Grist reports (emphasis mine):

In the 1990s, Smithfield perfected the meat industry’s infamous “vertical integration” strategy that it’s now unveiling in Eastern Europe. In an old-school meat market, packers bought livestock from independent farmers. But starting in the early ’90s in the United States, dominant meat packers began to raise vast numbers of their own animals, stuffing them into concentrated animal feedlot operations (CAFOs).

In doing so, they put independent farmers in direct competition with [Smithfield's] own livestock operations — a game that the meat packer usually wins. Farms go out of business in droves, unable to sustain themselves on the low prices offered by the packers; survivors scale up, mimicking the packers’ intensive techniques. That is, they CAFOize, using debt to erect large confinement buildings into which they stuff thousands of hogs. Most of them essentially cede their independence, working under contracts wherein the packers supply the feed and the hogs.

The trends now playing out in Poland has already flattened small farmers in Iowa and North Carolina. When Smithfield first bulled its way into Poland in 1999, after buying an old state-run processing plant, it declared its intention to make Poland “the Iowa of Europe.”

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