Creative New

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Via theatlantic

 Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

More:Nicholas Carr- The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google

nicholasgcarr

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Making Waves

Quantum Unique Ergodicity (QUE) Conjecture Proven

Via aimath.org

In a seminar co-organized by Stanford University and the American Institute of Mathematics, Soundararajan announced that he and Roman Holowinsky have proven a significant version of the quantum unique ergodicity (QUE) conjecture. “This is one of the best theorems of the year,” said Peter Sarnak, a mathematician from Princeton who along with Zeev Rudnick from the University of Tel Aviv formulated the conjecture fifteen years ago in an effort to understand the connections between classical and quantum physics.

The problems of quantum chaos can be understood in terms of billiards. On a standard rectangular billiard table the motion of the balls is predictable and easy to describe. Things get more interesting if the table has curved edges, known as a “stadium.” Then it turns out most paths are chaotic and over time fill out the billiard table, a result proven by the mathematical physicist Leonid Bunimovich.

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Via ACS\’ Crystal Growth & Design

The scientific community paid little attention to a visionary paper, in which Szent-Györgyi predicted that crystalline interfacial water layers would play a fundamental role in biology and evolution. It was 1971, and the proof of the existence of crystalline interfacial water layers at room temperature was virtually lacking in the literature. Recently, we provided experimental evidence for their existence on hydrogenated nanocrystalline diamond at room temperature. Crystallinity resulted from a decrease in conductance in response to an increase in humidity, associated with a decrease in the order of the interfacial water molecules implicated in proton conductivity. The correlation between conductance and humidity is not exclusive to synthetic diamond: It prevails on hydrogenated natural diamonds. Hydrogenation in nature is plausible: Volcanoes emit various hot gases including hydrogen. The capacity of interfacial water layers to impose order was exposed in the process of formation of supercubane carbon nanocrystals. It is important that the order imposed to molecules landing on hydrogenated diamond is more durable and superior to that realizable on any other origin of life platform, for instance, graphite. Hydrogenated diamond advances to the best of all possible origin of life platforms.

Andrei P. Sommer,*† Dan Zhu,† and Hans-Joerg Fecht†‡

Institute of Micro and Nanomaterials, University of Ulm, 89081 Ulm, Germany, and Institute for Nanotechnology, Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, 76021 Karlsruhe, Germany

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Via sciencedaily.com

“It is still a mystery, really,” says UBC computer science professor Prof. Dinesh Pai. “No one has ever completely mapped out the processes at the level of specific neurons, muscles and tendons.”

Pai is part of a UBC team leading an international initiative to do just that. “Essentially, we are reverse engineering the brain to produce the first working computational model of the complex interplay between our minds and our bodies.”

The project could produce great leaps forward in many areas, including medicine, industry and robotics. Although the project is just ramping up, the team’s mapping and modeling expedition is already producing some of the world’s most realistic computer simulations of the human body.

“Current robots have as much in common with human movements as helicopters do with seagulls,” Pai adds. “The challenges are similar, but they use completely different solutions.”

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Generalized Voice-Leading Spaces

Via music.princeton.edu

Western musicians traditionally classify pitch sequences by disregarding the effects of five musical transformations: octave shift, permutation, transposition, inversion, and cardinality change. We model this process mathematically, showing that it produces 32 equivalence relations on chords, 243 equivalence relations on chord sequences, and 32 families of geometrical quotient spaces, in which both chords and chord sequences are represented. This model reveals connections between music-theoretical concepts, yields new analytical tools, unifies existing geometrical representations, and suggests a way to understand similarity between chord types.

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Via technology.newscientist.com

Next time you are lost in an unfamiliar city, console yourself with the knowledge that the layout of its roads are probably much the same as in any other.

French and US physicists have shown that the road networks in cities evolve driven by a simple universal mechanism despite significant cultural and historical differences. The resulting patterns are much like the veins of a leaf.

Marc Barthélemy of the French Atomic Energy Commission in Bruyères-le-Châtel and Alessandro Flammini of Indiana University, US, analysed street pattern data from roughly 300 cities, including Brasilia, Cairo, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Venice.

They found that cities’ road patterns have a lot in common mathematically, as well as looking similar to the eye.

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