Mayur's Posterous http://agentm.posterous.com Most recent posts at Mayur's Posterous posterous.com Wed, 03 Aug 2011 04:02:00 -0700 Astronomers find Earth's first trojan asteroid http://agentm.posterous.com/astronomers-find-earths-first-trojan-asteroid http://agentm.posterous.com/astronomers-find-earths-first-trojan-asteroid

In a blow to school children and Disney fans everywhere, Pluto was demoted from a planet to a dwarf planet in 2006. The key argument against Pluto’s planet-hood was that other celestial bodies occupied its orbit, so Pluto was not the dominant gravitational object in that region.

The mere presence of other celestial bodies in Pluto’s orbit is only part of the story, though, because scientists have known for centuries that small objects called trojan asteroids can stably share an orbit with a larger celestial body. Astronomers have previously identified trojan asteroids in the orbits of Mars, Neptune, and Jupiter, but today astronomers from Athabasca University, UCLA, and University of Western Ontario are announcing the first direct observation of a trojan asteroid in Earth’s orbit.

Using Newton’s theory of gravitation, Joseph Louis Lagrange showed that there are five points, now known as Lagrangian points, in or near a planet’s orbit where a smaller object can orbit stably—the gravitational fields of the sun and the planet balance in these locations. The first two Lagrangian points (called L1 and L2) exist on either side of the planet on a line between the planet’s center and the center of the sun. L3 sits directly opposite the planet on the other side of the sun. L4 and L5 also sit in the planet's orbit, but in front of or behind it.

Each of these points are very important because they make excellent sites for space stations and observatories. For instance, the Solar and Heliocentric Observatory is located at Earth’s L1, and the James Webb Space Observatory is/was planned for L2. Langrangian points L3, L4, and L5 have been proposed as sites for future space stations and depots for the support of interplanetary missions. Similar Lagrangian points also exist in the orbit between the Earth and the Moon, and these could be exploited for lunar missions. There's a natural precedent for that, as small trojan moons have been identified in the orbits of some of Saturn’s moons.

Using Earth-based observations, it's easy to see whether objects occupy L1 or L2, because they are near Earth and sit either directly opposite the sun in the night sky or directly between the Earth and the Sun. We know that there are no trojan objects in these locations. From Earth, it's impossible to directly observe L3 because it is always on the opposite side of the sun from us. In principle, we should be able to observe objects at L4 and L5, but those observations are difficult because these points lie mostly in the daytime sky.

The authors of this study used archived data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer to identify possible trojan asteroids at Earth’s L4 point, and the data revealed two candidate objects that were several hundred meters in diameter. This data was then combined with direct observations of the objects made in April 2011 at the University of Hawaii, which refined knowledge of the objects’ orbit. With this data, the researchers were able to positively identify one of those objects, called 2010 TK7, as the first known trojan asteroid in Earth’s orbit.

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The orbital oscillations of 2010 TK7. Paul Wiegert, the University of Western Ontario

2010 TK7’s orbit is not quite as stable as Lagrange originally predicted. Measurements show that it doesn't actually occupy the Lagrangian point itself, but oscillates around it. It also doesn't sit still in a single Lagrangian point, but shuttles between L3 and L4 with a period of about 400 years, and it is currently located near L4 at one of its closest approaches to Earth. If the current orbital pattern holds, over the next 200 years, 2010 TK7 will accelerate ahead of Earth until it reaches L3, slows, and eventually returns to L4 over the second 200 years of its 400 year cycle.

Due to the gravitational influence of other planets and the significant contribution of chaos to an asteroid’s orbit, it is impossible to accurately predict 2010 TK7’s behavior over more than a 250 year span, so it may not continue the cycle described above. One likely way it could change its cycle would be to break its pattern at L3 and begin to oscillate between L3 and L5 rather than L3 and L4. Thus, it is unclear whether 2010 TK7 will remain a trojan or whether other forces will eventually throw it out of its stable oscillations.

Nature, 2011 DOI:10.1038/nature10233  (About DOIs)
Paul Wiegert, The University of Western Ontario

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Tue, 12 Jul 2011 10:23:00 -0700 In Robotics, Human-Style Perception and Motion Are Elusive http://agentm.posterous.com/in-robotics-human-style-perception-and-motion http://agentm.posterous.com/in-robotics-human-style-perception-and-motion

The task requires hardly any thought. But as Dr. Brooks points out, training a robot to do it is a vastly harder problem for artificial intelligence researchers than I.B.M.’s celebrated victory on “Jeopardy!” this year with a robot named Watson.

Although robots have made great strides in manufacturing, where tasks are repetitive, they are still no match for humans, who can grasp things and move about effortlessly in the physical world.

Designing a robot to mimic the basic capabilities of motion and perception would be revolutionary, researchers say, with applications stretching from care for the elderly to returning overseas manufacturing operations to the United States (albeit with fewer workers).

Yet the challenges remain immense, far higher than artificial intelligence hurdles like speaking and hearing.

“All these problems where you want to duplicate something biology does, such as perception, touch, planning or grasping, turn out to be hard in fundamental ways,” said Gary Bradski, a vision specialist at Willow Garage, a robot development company based here in Silicon Valley.

“It’s always surprising, because humans can do so much effortlessly.”

Now the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, the Pentagon office that helped jump-start the first generation of artificial intelligence research in the 1960s, is underwriting three competing efforts to develop robotic arms and hands one-tenth as expensive as today’s systems, which often cost $100,000 or more.

Last month President Obama traveled to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to unveil a $500 million effort to create advanced robotic technologies needed to help bring manufacturing back to the United States. But lower-cost computer-controlled mechanical arms and hands are only the first step.

There is still significant debate about how even to begin to design a machine that might be flexible enough to do many of the things humans do: fold laundry, cook or wash dishes. That will require a breakthrough in software that mimics perception.

Today’s robots can often do one such task in limited circumstances, but researchers describe their skills as “brittle.” They fail if the tiniest change is introduced. Moreover, they must be reprogrammed in a cumbersome fashion to do something else.

Many robotics researchers are pursuing a bottom-up approach, hoping that by training robots on one task at a time, they can build a library of tasks that will ultimately make it possible for robots to begin to mimic humans.

Others are skeptical, saying that truly useful machines await an artificial intelligence breakthrough that yields vastly more flexible perception.

The limits of today’s most sophisticated robots can be seen in a towel-folding demonstration that a group of students at the University of California, Berkeley, posted on the Internet last year: In spooky, anthropomorphic fashion, a robot deftly folds a series of towels, eyeing the corners, smoothing out wrinkles and neatly stacking them in a pile.

It is only when the viewer learns that the video is shown at 50 times normal speed that the meager extent of the robot’s capabilities becomes apparent. (The students acknowledged this spring that they were only now beginning to tackle the further challenges of folding shirts and socks.)

Even the most ambitious and expensive robot arm research has not yet yielded impressive results.

In February, for example, Robonaut 2, a dexterous robot developed in a partnership between NASA and General Motors, was carried aboard a space shuttle mission to be installed on the International Space Station. The developers acknowledged that the software required by the system, which is humanoid-shaped from the torso up, was unfinished and that the robot was sent up then only because a rare launching window was available.

“We’re in a funny chicken-and-egg situation,” Dr. Brooks said. “No one really knows what sensors or perceptual algorithms to use because we don’t have a working hand, and because we don’t have a grasping strategy nobody can figure out what kind of hand to design.”

Dr. Brooks is also tackling the problem: In 2008 he founded Heartland Robotics, a Boston-based company that is intent on building a generation of low-cost robots.

And the three competing efforts to develop robotic arms and hands with Darpa financing — at SRI International, Sandia National Laboratories and iRobot — offer some reasons for optimism.

Recently at an SRI laboratory here, two Stanford University graduate students, John Ulmen and Dan Aukes, put the finishing touches on a significant step toward human capabilities: a four-finger hand that will grasp with a human’s precise sense of touch.

Each three-jointed finger is made in a single manufacturing step by a three-dimensional printer and is then covered with “skin” derived from the same material used to make the touch-sensitive displays on smartphones.

“Part of what we’re riding on is there has been a very strong push for tactile displays because of smartphones,” said Pablo Garcia, an SRI robot designer who is leading the design of the project, along with Robert Bolles, an artificial intelligence researcher.

“We’ve taken advantage of these technologies,” Mr. Garcia went on, “and we’re banking on the fact they will continue to evolve and be made even cheaper.”

Still lacking is a generation of software that is powerful and flexible enough to do tasks that humans do effortlessly. That will require a breakthrough in machines’ perception.

“I would say this is more difficult than what the Watson machine had to do,” said Gill Pratt, the computer scientist who is the program manager in charge of Darpa’s Autonomous Robot Manipulation project, called ARM.

“The world is composed of continuous objects that have various shapes” that can obscure one another, he said. “A perception system needs to figure this out, and it needs the common sense of a child to do that.”

At Willow Garage, Dr. Bradski and a group of artificial intelligence researchers and roboticists have focused on “hackathons,” in which the company’s PR2 robot has been programmed to do tasks like fetching beer from a refrigerator, playing pool and packing groceries.

In May, with support from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Dr. Bradski helped organize the first Solutions in Perception Challenge. A prize of $10,000 is offered for the first team to design a robot that is able to recognize 100 items commonly found on the shelves of supermarkets and drugstores. Part of the prize will be given to the first team whose robot can recognize 80 percent of the items.

At the contest, held during a robotics conference in Shanghai, none of the contestants reached the 80 percent goal. The team that did best was the laundry-folding team from Berkeley, which has named its robot Brett, for Berkeley Robot for the Elimination of Tedious Tasks.

Brett was able to recognize 68 percent of a smaller group of 50 objects. And the team has made progress in its quest to build a machine to do the laundry; it recently posted a new video showing how much it has sped up the robot.

“Our end goal right now is to do an entire laundry cycle,” said Pieter Abbeel, a Berkeley computer scientist who leads the group, “from dirty laundry in a basket to everything stacked away after it’s been washed and dried.”

 

 

 

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Tue, 12 Apr 2011 03:39:00 -0700 David Christian: Big history http://agentm.posterous.com/david-christian-big-history http://agentm.posterous.com/david-christian-big-history

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Sat, 27 Nov 2010 15:02:00 -0800 Large Hadron Collider detects 'Big Bang' matter http://agentm.posterous.com/cbc-news-technology-science-hadron-collider-d http://agentm.posterous.com/cbc-news-technology-science-hadron-collider-d

Hadron Collider detects 'Big Bang' matter

By Emily Chung CBC News
This image shows beams of lead ions colliding, scattering particles. Their signals are measured by the cylindrical ATLAS detector. 
This image shows beams of lead ions colliding, scattering particles. Their signals are measured by the cylindrical ATLAS detector. (CERN)

A phase of matter created moments after the Big Bang is thought to have been detected at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

"Striking" evidence of a quark-gluon plasma has been observed by a team of researchers, including Canadians, at the facility near Geneva, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced Friday.

What is quark-gluon plasma?

Quarks and gluons are very tiny particles that combine into larger particles called protons. Those in turn combine with electrons to form atoms in the world we know today. However, during the initial moments of the Big Bang, this hadn't yet happened. The temperature was likely 100,000 to a million times what it was at the centre of the sun, and quarks moved freely in a "soup" called a plasma. Physicists hypothesize that as the universe cooled, small groups of quarks separated into individual protons, and as it cooled further, small groups of protons combined with electrons to form individual atoms.

"People have been searching for evidence of this for decades," Canadian physicist Richard Teuscher said Friday from CERN's laboratory. "What's exciting is if this is really true … [it's] the first unambiguous measurement of this condition of the early universe."

The results of the experiment by an international collaboration called ATLAS were accepted Friday morning for publication in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters, less than 24 hours after it was submitted, said Teuscher, a research scientist at the Canadian Institute for Particle Physics and a physics professor at the University of Toronto.

Normally, the peer review process takes weeks or months, added Teuscher, a member of ATLAS who did some of the data analysis for the experiment.

Physicists theorize that a few hundred millionths of a second after the Big Bang (about 14 billion years ago), the universe was made of a quark-gluon plasma — an extremely hot soup of very tiny subatomic particles.

Canadian physicist Richard Teuscher, shown inside the tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider during construction a few years ago, said people have been searching for evidence of quark-gluon plasma for decades. Canadian physicist Richard Teuscher, shown inside the tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider during construction a few years ago, said people have been searching for evidence of quark-gluon plasma for decades. (Matthias Haase/CERN)The Large Hadron Collider produces extremely high-energy collisions of larger particles, mimicking the Big Bang and potentially reproducing the types of matter that existed during the early moments of the universe.

In this case, researchers spent three weeks smashing lead ions into one another and measuring the resulting signals. Ions are particles produced by adding or removing electrons from atoms. They are charged and can therefore be propelled by an electromagnetic field inside a particle accelerator or collider.

Teuscher likened the colliding ions to two bean bags crashing at extremely high speed, causing their contents to spray out.

"But it doesn't just spray out randomly all over the place," he added.

Instead, two cones or "jets" of particles spray out in opposite directions.

Plasma fireball

The lead ions are so massive and the energy of their collision is so high that it is expected to produce a "fireball" of quark-gluon plasma — "something like the fireball produced at the time of the Big Bang."

Canadian content

Canadians make up more than 150 of the researchers involved in ATLAS. They have mainly been involved with designing, building and operating detectors called liquid argon calorimeters, including the forward calorimeter, under projects funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council. Team members include physicists from the University of Alberta, Carleton University, McGill University, University of Montreal, Simon Fraser University, University of Regina, University of Toronto, University of British Columbia, University of Victoria, York University and TRIUMF, Canada's national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics.

One of the jets of particles must pass through the fireball to get out the other side, melting in the process.

As predicted, the data shows that in half the collisions, only one of the two jets can be observed, Teuscher said: "The other jet has been blown to smithereens."

The researchers used two different methods to confirm their results. Teuscher added that another experiment called CMS, which uses different detectors, is reporting similar results, although those haven't yet been published.

Peter Krieger, an associate professor of physics at the University of Toronto, said a detector called the forward calorimeter built in Canada by researchers at the University of Toronto and at Carleton University in Ottawa was a key component in the recent discovery.

It helped confirm that the evidence was the result of a certain type of ion collision, where the two ions strike each other head on instead of grazing each other. The head-on collision releases more energy, and is therefore the type that is predicted to produce a quark-gluon plasma.

Next, ATLAS researchers will be collecting more data and poring through it for different kinds of evidence of quark-gluon plasma.

A cross-section of the cylindrical ATLAS experimental setup is shown on the left. The lines in the centre are tracks left by the jets of particles produced during the collision. The lighter green and red rings are the detectors, while the dark red and green bars (and the graphs at centre and right) represent the signals they detect. Normally, a collision will generate two signal peaks representing two jets, one on either side of the cylinder. However, in this case, one disappears.  

A cross-section of the cylindrical ATLAS experimental setup is shown on the left. The lines in the centre are tracks left by the jets of particles produced during the collision. The lighter green and red rings are the detectors, while the dark red and green bars (and the graphs at centre and right) represent the signals they detect. Normally, a collision will generate two signal peaks representing two jets, one on either side of the cylinder. However, in this case, one disappears. (ATLAS experiment/CERN)

via cbc.ca

 

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Sat, 20 Nov 2010 15:58:00 -0800 For The First Time, Genetically Engineered Mosquitoes Are Released Into The Wild | Popular Science http://agentm.posterous.com/for-the-first-time-genetically-engineered-mos http://agentm.posterous.com/for-the-first-time-genetically-engineered-mos
The transgenic animals are designed to help stamp out dengue fever in the Cayman Islands

Mosquito Germán Meyer

An Oxford-based research firm has announced the results of a release of genetically modified male mosquitoes in the Cayman Islands, the first experiment with GM mosquitoes to take place in the wild.

From May to October of this year, Oxitec released male mosquitoes three times a week in a 40-acre area. The mosquitoes had been genetically modified to be sterile, so that when they mated with the indigenous female mosquitoes there would be no offspring, and the population would shrink.

Mosquito numbers in the region had dropped 80 percent by August, which the researchers expect would result in fewer dengue cases.

Since it’s only females who bite humans and transmit diseases like the untreatable dengue fever this study examined, British biologists suspected that introducing males sterilized by a genetic mutation into the gene pool could dramatically decrease their numbers over time.

While many scientists and environmentalists object to killing off mosquitoes entirely for fear it would harm dependent species, Oxitec asserts that, since the sterilizing gene could not be passed on to subsequent generations, this method will have no permanent ecological impact.

Rather, GM males function like an insecticide, temporarily reducing numbers without the negative effects of using chemical toxins. They can also be more effective against insects that had developed resistance to certain commonly-used pesticides. In regions where booming mosquito populations are have caused epidemic outbreaks of dengue fever, yellow fever and malaria, dramatically reducing the population temporarily could reduce the death toll, and provide valuable lead time to vaccinate and treat hard-hit populations.

As the death toll caused by disease-carrying mosquitoes rises (over 2 million of the 700 million people infected by mosquitoes die annually), science has proposed a wide range of possible solutions to lessen the damage, from lasers to chemicals. But the release of transgenic animals into the wild is a very bold new step.

[AP]

Now all we have to wait for is a zombie apocalypse.

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Mon, 30 Aug 2010 19:45:00 -0700 Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium - Telegraph http://agentm.posterous.com/obama-could-kill-fossil-fuels-overnight-with http://agentm.posterous.com/obama-could-kill-fossil-fuels-overnight-with

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There is no certain bet in nuclear physics but work by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) on the use of thorium as a cheap, clean and safe alternative to uranium in reactors may be the magic bullet we have all been hoping for, though we have barely begun to crack the potential of solar power.

Dr Rubbia says a tonne of the silvery metal – named after the Norse god of thunder, who also gave us Thor’s day or Thursday - produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal. A mere fistful would light London for a week.

Thorium eats its own hazardous waste. It can even scavenge the plutonium left by uranium reactors, acting as an eco-cleaner. "It’s the Big One," said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA rocket engineer and now chief nuclear technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering.

"Once you start looking more closely, it blows your mind away. You can run civilisation on thorium for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s essentially free. You don’t have to deal with uranium cartels," he said.

Thorium is so common that miners treat it as a nuisance, a radioactive by-product if they try to dig up rare earth metals. The US and Australia are full of the stuff. So are the granite rocks of Cornwall. You do not need much: all is potentially usable as fuel, compared to just 0.7pc for uranium.

After the Manhattan Project, US physicists in the late 1940s were tempted by thorium for use in civil reactors. It has a higher neutron yield per neutron absorbed. It does not require isotope separation, a big cost saving. But by then America needed the plutonium residue from uranium to build bombs.

"They were really going after the weapons," said Professor Egil Lillestol, a world authority on the thorium fuel-cycle at CERN. "It is almost impossible make nuclear weapons out of thorium because it is too difficult to handle. It wouldn’t be worth trying." It emits too many high gamma rays.

You might have thought that thorium reactors were the answer to every dream but when CERN went to the European Commission for development funds in 1999-2000, they were rebuffed.

Brussels turned to its technical experts, who happened to be French because the French dominate the EU’s nuclear industry. "They didn’t want competition because they had made a huge investment in the old technology," he said.

Another decade was lost. It was a sad triumph of vested interests over scientific progress. "We have very little time to waste because the world is running out of fossil fuels. Renewables can’t replace them. Nuclear fusion is not going work for a century, if ever," he said.

The Norwegian group Aker Solutions has bought Dr Rubbia’s patent for the thorium fuel-cycle, and is working on his design for a proton accelerator at its UK operation.

Victoria Ashley, the project manager, said it could lead to a network of pint-sized 600MW reactors that are lodged underground, can supply small grids, and do not require a safety citadel. It will take £2bn to build the first one, and Aker needs £100mn for the next test phase.

The UK has shown little appetite for what it regards as a "huge paradigm shift to a new technology". Too much work and sunk cost has already gone into the next generation of reactors, which have another 60 years of life.

So Aker is looking for tie-ups with the US, Russia, or China. The Indians have their own projects - none yet built - dating from days when they switched to thorium because their weapons programme prompted a uranium ban.

America should have fewer inhibitions than Europe in creating a leapfrog technology. The US allowed its nuclear industry to stagnate after Three Mile Island in 1979.

Anti-nuclear neorosis is at last ebbing. The White House has approved $8bn in loan guarantees for new reactors, yet America has been strangely passive. Where is the superb confidence that put a man on the moon?

A few US pioneers are exploring a truly radical shift to a liquid fuel based on molten-fluoride salts, an idea once pursued by US physicist Alvin Weinberg at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee in the 1960s. The original documents were retrieved by Mr Sorensen.

Moving away from solid fuel may overcome some of thorium’s "idiosyncracies". "You have to use the right machine. You don’t use diesel in a petrol car: you build a diesel engine," said Mr Sorensen.

Thorium-fluoride reactors can operate at atmospheric temperature. "The plants would be much smaller and less expensive. You wouldn’t need those huge containment domes because there’s no pressurized water in the reactor. It’s close-fitting," he said.

Nuclear power could become routine and unthreatening. But first there is the barrier of establishment prejudice.

When Hungarian scientists led by Leo Szilard tried to alert Washington in late 1939 that the Nazis were working on an atomic bomb, they were brushed off with disbelief. Albert Einstein interceded through the Belgian queen mother, eventually getting a personal envoy into the Oval Office.

Roosevelt initially fobbed him off. He listened more closely at a second meeting over breakfast the next day, then made up his mind within minutes. "This needs action," he told his military aide. It was the birth of the Manhattan Project. As a result, the US had an atomic weapon early enough to deter Stalin from going too far in Europe.

The global energy crunch needs equal "action". If it works, Manhattan II could restore American optimism and strategic leadership at a stroke: if not, it is a boost for US science and surely a more fruitful way to pull the US out of perma-slump than scattershot stimulus.

Even better, team up with China and do it together, for all our sakes.

 

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Sun, 29 Aug 2010 10:13:40 -0700 Does Your Language Shape How You Think? http://agentm.posterous.com/does-your-language-shape-how-you-think http://agentm.posterous.com/does-your-language-shape-how-you-think
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Fri, 27 Aug 2010 07:07:06 -0700 Do-gooders get voted off island first: People don't really like unselfish colleagues, psychologists find http://agentm.posterous.com/do-gooders-get-voted-off-island-first-people http://agentm.posterous.com/do-gooders-get-voted-off-island-first-people

ScienceDaily (Aug. 23, 2010) — You know those goody-two-shoes who volunteer for every task and thanklessly take on the annoying details nobody else wants to deal with?

That's right: Other people really can't stand them.

Four separate studies led by a Washington State University social psychologist have found that unselfish workers who are the first to throw their hat in the ring are also among those that coworkers most want to, in effect, vote off the island.

"It's not hard to find examples but we were the first to show this happens and have explanations for why," said Craig Parks, lead author of "The Desire to Expel Unselfish Members from the Group" in the current Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The phenomenon has implications for business work groups, volunteer organizations, non-profit projects, military units, and environmental efforts, an interest of Parks' coauthor and former PhD student, Asako Stone.

Parks and Stone found that unselfish colleagues come to be resented because they "raise the bar" for what is expected of everyone. As a result, workers feel the new standard will make everyone else look bad.

It doesn't matter that the overall welfare of the group or the task at hand is better served by someone's unselfish behavior, Parks said.

"What is objectively good, you see as subjectively bad," he said.

The do-gooders are also seen as deviant rule breakers. It's as if they're giving away Monopoly money so someone can stay in the game, irking other players to no end.

The studies gave participants -- introductory psychology students -- pools of points that they could keep or give up for an immediate reward of meal service vouchers. Participants were also told that giving up points would improve the group's chance of receiving a monetary reward.

In reality, the participants were playing in fake groups of five. Most of the fictitious four would make seemingly fair swaps of one point for each voucher, but one of the four would often make lopsided exchanges -- greedily giving up no points and taking a lot of vouchers, or unselfishly giving up a lot of points and taking few vouchers.

Most participants later said they would not want to work with the greedy colleague again -- an expected result seen in previous studies.

But a majority of participants also said they would not want to work with the unselfish colleague again. They frequently said, "the person is making me look bad" or is breaking the rules. Occasionally, they would suspect the person had ulterior motives.

Parks said he would now like to look at how the do-gooders themselves react to being rejected. While some may indeed have ulterior motives, he said it's more likely they actually are working for the good of an organization.

Excluded from the group, they may say, "enough already" and simply give up.

"But it's also possible," he said, "that they may actually try even harder."

 

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Wed, 11 Aug 2010 12:44:57 -0700 Rethinking Einstein: The end of space-time - New Scientist http://agentm.posterous.com/rethinking-einstein-the-end-of-space-time-new http://agentm.posterous.com/rethinking-einstein-the-end-of-space-time-new
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Tue, 10 Aug 2010 06:53:29 -0700 Robot to explore mysterious tunnels in Great Pyramid - The Independent http://agentm.posterous.com/robot-to-explore-mysterious-tunnels-in-great http://agentm.posterous.com/robot-to-explore-mysterious-tunnels-in-great
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Mon, 09 Aug 2010 07:57:45 -0700 IEEE Spectrum: Nuclear Reactor Renaissance http://agentm.posterous.com/ieee-spectrum-nuclear-reactor-renaissance http://agentm.posterous.com/ieee-spectrum-nuclear-reactor-renaissance
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Mon, 09 Aug 2010 07:48:13 -0700 Monstrous Wildlife - Graboids http://agentm.posterous.com/monstrous-wildlife-graboids http://agentm.posterous.com/monstrous-wildlife-graboids

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Mon, 26 Jul 2010 07:56:41 -0700 Does language influence culture? -WSJ http://agentm.posterous.com/does-language-influence-culture-wsj http://agentm.posterous.com/does-language-influence-culture-wsj

By LERA BORODITSKY

[W3Feature1] The Gallery Collection/Corbis

The Tower of Babel' by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1563.

Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? Do they merely express thoughts, or do the structures in languages (without our knowledge or consent) shape the very thoughts we wish to express?

Take "Humpty Dumpty sat on a..." Even this snippet of a nursery rhyme reveals how much languages can differ from one another. In English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we say "sat" rather than "sit." In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can't) change the verb to mark tense.

In Russian, you would have to mark tense and also gender, changing the verb if Mrs. Dumpty did the sitting. You would also have to decide if the sitting event was completed or not. If our ovoid hero sat on the wall for the entire time he was meant to, it would be a different form of the verb than if, say, he had a great fall.

In Turkish, you would have to include in the verb how you acquired this information. For example, if you saw the chubby fellow on the wall with your own eyes, you'd use one form of the verb, but if you had simply read or heard about it, you'd use a different form.

Do English, Indonesian, Russian and Turkish speakers end up attending to, understanding, and remembering their experiences differently simply because they speak different languages?

These questions touch on all the major controversies in the study of mind, with important implications for politics, law and religion. Yet very little empirical work had been done on these questions until recently. The idea that language might shape thought was for a long time considered untestable at best and more often simply crazy and wrong. Now, a flurry of new cognitive science research is showing that in fact, language does profoundly influence how we see the world.

The question of whether languages shape the way we think goes back centuries; Charlemagne proclaimed that "to have a second language is to have a second soul." But the idea went out of favor with scientists when Noam Chomsky's theories of language gained popularity in the 1960s and '70s. Dr. Chomsky proposed that there is a universal grammar for all human languages—essentially, that languages don't really differ from one another in significant ways. And because languages didn't differ from one another, the theory went, it made no sense to ask whether linguistic differences led to differences in thinking.

Use Your Words

Some findings on how language can affect thinking.

  • Russian speakers, who have more words for light and dark blues, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue.
  • Some indigenous tribes say north, south, east and west, rather than left and right, and as a consequence have great spatial orientation.
  • The Piraha, whose language eschews number words in favor of terms like few and many, are not able to keep track of exact quantities.
  • In one study, Spanish and Japanese speakers couldn't remember the agents of accidental events as adeptly as English speakers could. Why? In Spanish and Japanese, the agent of causality is dropped: "The vase broke itself," rather than "John broke the vase."

The search for linguistic universals yielded interesting data on languages, but after decades of work, not a single proposed universal has withstood scrutiny. Instead, as linguists probed deeper into the world's languages (7,000 or so, only a fraction of them analyzed), innumerable unpredictable differences emerged.

Of course, just because people talk differently doesn't necessarily mean they think differently. In the past decade, cognitive scientists have begun to measure not just how people talk, but also how they think, asking whether our understanding of even such fundamental domains of experience as space, time and causality could be constructed by language.

For example, in Pormpuraaw, a remote Aboriginal community in Australia, the indigenous languages don't use terms like "left" and "right." Instead, everything is talked about in terms of absolute cardinal directions (north, south, east, west), which means you say things like, "There's an ant on your southwest leg." To say hello in Pormpuraaw, one asks, "Where are you going?", and an appropriate response might be, "A long way to the south-southwest. How about you?" If you don't know which way is which, you literally can't get past hello.

About a third of the world's languages (spoken in all kinds of physical environments) rely on absolute directions for space. As a result of this constant linguistic training, speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes. They perform navigational feats scientists once thought were beyond human capabilities. This is a big difference, a fundamentally different way of conceptualizing space, trained by language.

Differences in how people think about space don't end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build many other more complex or abstract representations including time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality and emotions. So if Pormpuraawans think differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time?

To find out, my colleague Alice Gaby and I traveled to Australia and gave Pormpuraawans sets of pictures that showed temporal progressions (for example, pictures of a man at different ages, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. When asked to do this, English speakers arrange time from left to right. Hebrew speakers do it from right to left (because Hebrew is written from right to left).

Pormpuraawans, we found, arranged time from east to west. That is, seated facing south, time went left to right. When facing north, right to left. When facing east, toward the body, and so on. Of course, we never told any of our participants which direction they faced. The Pormpuraawans not only knew that already, but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time. And many other ways to organize time exist in the world's languages. In Mandarin, the future can be below and the past above. In Aymara, spoken in South America, the future is behind and the past in front.

In addition to space and time, languages also shape how we understand causality. For example, English likes to describe events in terms of agents doing things. English speakers tend to say things like "John broke the vase" even for accidents. Speakers of Spanish or Japanese would be more likely to say "the vase broke itself." Such differences between languages have profound consequences for how their speakers understand events, construct notions of causality and agency, what they remember as eyewitnesses and how much they blame and punish others.

In studies conducted by Caitlin Fausey at Stanford, speakers of English, Spanish and Japanese watched videos of two people popping balloons, breaking eggs and spilling drinks either intentionally or accidentally. Later everyone got a surprise memory test: For each event, can you remember who did it? She discovered a striking cross-linguistic difference in eyewitness memory. Spanish and Japanese speakers did not remember the agents of accidental events as well as did English speakers. Mind you, they remembered the agents of intentional events (for which their language would mention the agent) just fine. But for accidental events, when one wouldn't normally mention the agent in Spanish or Japanese, they didn't encode or remember the agent as well.

In another study, English speakers watched the video of Janet Jackson's infamous "wardrobe malfunction" (a wonderful nonagentive coinage introduced into the English language by Justin Timberlake), accompanied by one of two written reports. The reports were identical except in the last sentence where one used the agentive phrase "ripped the costume" while the other said "the costume ripped." Even though everyone watched the same video and witnessed the ripping with their own eyes, language mattered. Not only did people who read "ripped the costume" blame Justin Timberlake more, they also levied a whopping 53% more in fines.

Beyond space, time and causality, patterns in language have been shown to shape many other domains of thought. Russian speakers, who make an extra distinction between light and dark blues in their language, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue. The Piraha, a tribe in the Amazon in Brazil, whose language eschews number words in favor of terms like few and many, are not able to keep track of exact quantities. And Shakespeare, it turns out, was wrong about roses: Roses by many other names (as told to blindfolded subjects) do not smell as sweet.

Patterns in language offer a window on a culture's dispositions and priorities. For example, English sentence structures focus on agents, and in our criminal-justice system, justice has been done when we've found the transgressor and punished him or her accordingly (rather than finding the victims and restituting appropriately, an alternative approach to justice). So does the language shape cultural values, or does the influence go the other way, or both?

Languages, of course, are human creations, tools we invent and hone to suit our needs. Simply showing that speakers of different languages think differently doesn't tell us whether it's language that shapes thought or the other way around. To demonstrate the causal role of language, what's needed are studies that directly manipulate language and look for effects in cognition.

One of the key advances in recent years has been the demonstration of precisely this causal link. It turns out that if you change how people talk, that changes how they think. If people learn another language, they inadvertently also learn a new way of looking at the world. When bilingual people switch from one language to another, they start thinking differently, too. And if you take away people's ability to use language in what should be a simple nonlinguistic task, their performance can change dramatically, sometimes making them look no smarter than rats or infants. (For example, in recent studies, MIT students were shown dots on a screen and asked to say how many there were. If they were allowed to count normally, they did great. If they simultaneously did a nonlinguistic task—like banging out rhythms—they still did great. But if they did a verbal task when shown the dots—like repeating the words spoken in a news report—their counting fell apart. In other words, they needed their language skills to count.)

All this new research shows us that the languages we speak not only reflect or express our thoughts, but also shape the very thoughts we wish to express. The structures that exist in our languages profoundly shape how we construct reality, and help make us as smart and sophisticated as we are.

Language is a uniquely human gift. When we study language, we are uncovering in part what makes us human, getting a peek at the very nature of human nature. As we uncover how languages and their speakers differ from one another, we discover that human natures too can differ dramatically, depending on the languages we speak. The next steps are to understand the mechanisms through which languages help us construct the incredibly complex knowledge systems we have. Understanding how knowledge is built will allow us to create ideas that go beyond the currently thinkable. This research cuts right to the fundamental questions we all ask about ourselves. How do we come to be the way we are? Why do we think the way we do? An important part of the answer, it turns out, is in the languages we speak.

—Lera Boroditsky is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and editor in chief of Frontiers in Cultural Psychology.

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Sun, 27 Jun 2010 12:17:04 -0700 I Think You're Fat - Esquire http://agentm.posterous.com/i-think-youre-fat-esquire-19 http://agentm.posterous.com/i-think-youre-fat-esquire-19
Brutal Honesty

Dan Winters

Brutal Honesty

Here's the truth about why I'm writing this article:

I want to fulfill my contract with my boss. I want to avoid getting fired. I want all the attractive women I knew in high school and college to read it. I want them to be amazed and impressed and feel a vague regret over their decision not to have sex with me, and maybe if I get divorced or become a widower, I can have sex with them someday at a reunion. I want Hollywood to buy my article and turn it into a movie, even though they kind of already made the movie ten years ago with Jim Carrey. I want to get congratulatory e-mails and job offers that I can politely decline. Or accept if they're really good. Then get a generous counteroffer from my boss.

To be totally honest, I was sorry I mentioned this idea to my boss about three seconds after I opened my mouth. Because I knew the article would be a pain in the ass to pull off. Dammit. I should have let my colleague Tom Chiarella write it. But I didn't want to seem lazy.

What I mentioned to my boss was this: a movement called Radical Honesty.

The movement was founded by a sixty-six-year-old Virginia-based psychotherapist named Brad Blanton. He says everybody would be happier if we just stopped lying. Tell the truth, all the time. This would be radical enough -- a world without fibs -- but Blanton goes further. He says we should toss out the filters between our brains and our mouths. If you think it, say it. Confess to your boss your secret plans to start your own company. If you're having fantasies about your wife's sister, Blanton says to tell your wife and tell her sister. It's the only path to authentic relationships. It's the only way to smash through modernity's soul-deadening alienation. Oversharing? No such thing.

Yes. I know. One of the most idiotic ideas ever, right up there with Vanilla Coke and giving Phil Spector a gun permit. Deceit makes our world go round. Without lies, marriages would crumble, workers would be fired, egos would be shattered, governments would collapse.

And yet...maybe there's something to it. Especially for me. I have a lying problem. Mine aren't big lies. They aren't lies like "I cannot recall that crucial meeting from two months ago, Senator." Mine are little lies. White lies. Half-truths. The kind we all tell. But I tell dozens of them every day. "Yes, let's definitely get together soon." "I'd love to, but I have a touch of the stomach flu." "No, we can't buy a toy today -- the toy store is closed." It's bad. Maybe a couple of weeks of truth-immersion therapy would do me good.

I e-mail Blanton to ask if I can come down to Virginia and get some pointers before embarking on my Radical Honesty experiment. He writes back: "I appreciate you for apparently having a real interest and hope you're not just doing a cutesy little superficial dipshit job like most journalists."

I'm already nervous. I better start off with a clean slate. I confess I lied to him in my first e-mail -- that I haven't ordered all his books on Amazon yet. I was just trying to impress upon him that I was serious about his work. He writes back: "Thanks for your honesty in attempting to guess what your manipulative and self-protective motive must have been."

Blanton lives in a house he built himself, perched on a hill in the town of Stanley, Virginia, population 1,331. We're sitting on white chairs in a room with enormous windows and a crackling fireplace. He's swirling a glass of Maker's Mark bourbon and water and telling me why it's important to live with no lies.

"You'll have really bad times, you'll have really great times, but you'll contribute to other people because you haven't been dancing on eggshells your whole fucking life. It's a better life."

"Do you think it's ever okay to lie?" I ask.

"I advocate never lying in personal relationships. But if you have Anne Frank in your attic and a Nazi knocks on the door, lie....I lie to any government official." (Blanton's politics are just this side of Noam Chomsky's.) "I lie to the IRS. I always take more deductions than are justified. I lie in golf. And in poker."

Blanton adjusts his crotch. I expected him to be a bully. Or maybe a new-age huckster with a bead necklace who sits cross-legged on the floor. He's neither. He's a former Texan with a big belly and a big laugh and a big voice. He's got a bushy head of gray hair and a twang that makes his bye sound like bah. He calls himself "white trash with a Ph.D." If you mixed DNA from Lyndon Johnson, Ken Kesey, and threw in the nonannoying parts of Dr. Phil, you might get Blanton.

He ran for Congress twice, with the novel promise that he'd be an honest politician. In 2004, he got a surprising 25 percent of the vote in his Virginia district as an independent. In 2006, the Democrats considered endorsing him but got skittish about his weeklong workshops, which involve a day of total nudity. They also weren't crazy that he's been married five times (currently to a Swedish flight attendant twenty-six years his junior). He ran again but withdrew when it became clear he was going to be crushed.

My interview with Blanton is unlike any other I've had in fifteen years as a journalist. Usually, there's a fair amount of ass kissing and diplomacy. You approach the controversial stuff on tippy toes (the way Barbara Walters once asked Richard Gere about that terrible, terrible rumor). With Blanton, I can say anything that pops into my mind. In fact, it would be rude not to say it. I'd be insulting his life's work. It's my first taste of Radical Honesty, and it's liberating, exhilarating.


Esquire Editor-at-Large A.J. Jacobs is the author of A Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, published by Simon & Schuster.

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Fri, 28 May 2010 23:49:00 -0700 Ten amazing facts about your brain - Times Online http://agentm.posterous.com/ten-amazing-facts-about-your-brain-times-onli http://agentm.posterous.com/ten-amazing-facts-about-your-brain-times-onli

Ten amazing facts about your brain - Times Online.

From the article:

Yawns wake up the brain

Although we associate yawning with sleepiness and boredom, its function appears to be to wake us up. Yawning expands our pharynx and larynx, allowing large amounts of air to pass into our lungs; oxygen then enters our blood, making us more alert. Many vertebrates do it, including all mammals and perhaps birds. It also has been observed in human foetuses after just 12 weeks of gestation. In non human primates, it is associated with tense situations and potential threats.

Think of yawns as your body's attempt to reach full alertness in situations that require it. They are contagious, as anyone who has attempted to teach a roomful of bored students knows. No one is sure why, though it might be advantageous to allow individuals quickly to transmit to one another a need for increased arousal. They are not contagious in non primate mammals, but the ability to recognise a yawn may be fairly general: dogs yawn in response to stressful situations and are thought to use yawning to calm others. You can even sometimes calm your dog by yawning.

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Fri, 28 May 2010 16:38:00 -0700 Autonomous quadrocopter precision flying. http://agentm.posterous.com/autonomous-quadrocopter-precision-flying http://agentm.posterous.com/autonomous-quadrocopter-precision-flying

Autonomous quadrocopter flies through windows, straight into our hearts video -- Engadget.

 

 

I'll take one, (PRETTY)PLEASE!

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Tue, 04 May 2010 21:56:56 -0700 Figuring Physics http://agentm.posterous.com/figuring-physics http://agentm.posterous.com/figuring-physics Figuring Physics, a column in The Physics Teacher by Paul Hewitt I really enjoyed solving these!

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