Robot Brains Catch Humans in 25 Years, Then Speed Right On By

An android Repliee S1, produced by Japan's Osaka University professor Hiroshi Ishiguro, performing during a dress rehearsal of Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis." Phototographer: Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP via Getty Images

We’ve been wrong about these robots before.

Soon after modern computers evolved in the 1940s, futurists started predicting that in just a few decades machines would be as smart as humans. Every year, the prediction seems to get pushed back another year. The consensus now is that it’s going to happen in ... you guessed it, just a few more decades.

There’s more reason to believe the predictions today. After research that’s produced everything from self-driving cars to Jeopardy!-winning supercomputers, scientists have a much better understanding of what they’re up against. And, perhaps, what we’re up against.

Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, lays out the best predictions of the artificial intelligence (AI) research community in his new book, “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.” Here are the combined results of four surveys of AI researchers, including a poll of the most-cited scientists in the field, totalling 170 respondents.

Human-level machine intelligence is defined here as “one that can carry out most human professions at least as well as a typical human.”

By that definition, maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised about these predictions. Robots and algorithms are already squeezing the edges of our global workforce. Jobs with routine tasks are getting digitized: farmers, telemarketers, stock traders, loan officers, lawyers, journalists -- all of these professions have already felt the cold steel nudge of our new automated colleagues. 

Related: How to Keep Your Job When Your Boss Is a Robot

Replication of routine isn't the kind of intelligence Bostrom is interested in. He’s talking about an intelligence with intuition and logic, one that can learn, deal with uncertainty and sense the world around it. The most interesting thing about reaching human-level intelligence isn’t the achievement itself, says Bostrom; it’s what comes next. Once machines can reason and improve themselves, the skynet is the limit.

Computers are improving at an exponential rate. In many areas -- chess, for example -- machine skill is already superhuman. In others -- reason, emotional intelligence -- there’s still a long way to go. Whether human-level general intelligence is reached in 15 years or 150, it’s likely to be a little-observed mile marker on the road toward superintelligence.

Superintelligence: one that “greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest.”

Inventor and Tesla CEO Elon Musk warns that superintelligent machines are possibly the greatest existential threat to humanity. He says the investments he's made in artificial-intelligence companies are primarily to keep an eye on where the field is headed.

“Hope we’re not just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence,” Musk Tweeted in August. “Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable.”

There are lots of caveats before we prepare to hand the keys to our earthly kingdom over to robot offspring.

• First, humans have a terrible track record of predicting the future. 
• Second, people are notoriously optimistic when forecasting the future of their own industries. 
• Third, it’s not a given that technology will continue to advance along its current trajectory, or even with its current aims.

Still, the brightest minds devoted to this evolving technology are predicting the end of human intellectual supremacy by midcentury. That should be enough to give everyone pause. The direction of technology may be inevitable, but the care with which we approach it is not.

“Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history,” wrote theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, in an Independent column in May. “It might also be the last.”

ORIGINAL: Bloomberg

By Tom Randall 

Nov 10, 2014

Elon Musk: Artificial Intelligence Is 'Potentially More Dangerous Than Nukes'

Google Images

Back in June, Tesla CEO Elon Musk told CNBC that he'd invested in a company called Vicarious that is developing products and services based on artificial intelligence. But that wasn't why Musk got interested. His impetus for backing the firm was instead "to keep an eye on" unforeseen terrifying scenarios where the products began to threaten humanity.

He doesn't appear to have been exaggerating.

In a Tweet last night, Musk said this:

Worth reading Superintelligence by Bostrom. We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 3, 2014

Hope we're not just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 3, 2014

Bostrom is Nick Bostrom, the founder of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. That group recently partnered with a new group at Cambridge, the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, to study how things like nanotechnology, robotics, artificial intelligence and other innovations could someday wipe us all out, according to PCPro:

At [a] conference, Bostrom was asked if we should be scared by new technology. "Yes," he said, "but scared about the right things. There are huge existential threats, these are threats to the very survival of life on Earth, from machine intelligence – not the way it is today, but if we achieve this sort of super-intelligence in the future," Bostrom said.

"Superintelligence" is set to be published in English next month. In a blurb, Bostrom's colleague Martin Rees of Cambridge says of the work, "Those disposed to dismiss an 'AI takeover' as science fiction may think again after reading this original and well-argued book."

In our recent profile of Vicarious, the firm backed by Musk, we talked to Bruno Olshausen, a Berkeley professor and one of the firm's advisors. He said we are still way too far behind in our understanding of how the brain works to be able to create something that could turn heel.

"Absent a major paradigm shift - something unforeseeable at present - I would not say we are at the point where we should truly be worried about AI going out of control," he told us.

So at a minimum, it sounds like the robot takeover is not imminent.

But it seems like it's something all of us should "keep an eye on."

ORIGINAL: Business Insider

Rob Wile
Aug. 3, 2014

"Desarrollo a Escala Humana". Libro por Manfred Max-Neef

Por Manfred A. Max-Neef
con colaboraciones de:
Antonio Elizalde y Martín Hopenhayn

Conceptos, aplicaciones y algunas reflexiones

Este documento cristaliza un trabajo esencialmente transdisciplinario realizado por un equipo de investigadores de distintos paíse s de América Latina. El trabajo fue preparado a lo largo de un año y medio con la colaboración de profesionales provenientes de Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, Colombia, México, Brasil, Canadá y Suecia, dedicados a disciplinas tales como economía, sociología, psiquiatría, filosofía, ciencia política, geografía, antropología, periodismo, ingeniería y derecho. Los participantes constituyeron un grupo estable de reflexión e investigación colectiva que se reunió, en el curso de los dieciocho meses de trabajo, en tres seminarios - talleres, manteniendo contacto intelectual es trecho y permanente desde el comienzo hasta el término del proyecto.

Además del grupo estable, cuya continuidad permitió profundizar la reflexión colectiva en torno a problemáticas específicas del desarrollo, hubo invitados especiales en cada una de las reuniones. Los principales insumos para este trabajo lo constituyen los relatorios de cada uno de los Seminarios, Talleres y distintos documentos producidos por lo participantes. La redacción final estuvo a cargo del equipo del CEPAUR y apunta más a integrar de manera coherente la diversidad de los aportes que a reflejar la opinión particular de cada uno de los participantes. El documento producido sobre la base de los tres talleres, fue discutido en un seminario de evaluación final, en el centro Dag Hammarskjöld en Uppsala.1

Prefacio 
La propuesta que aquí se contiene constituye un aporte para una filosofía del desarrollo. Pretende por lo tanto, ser un aporte sugerente, susceptible de ahondarse en cualquiera de los múltiples ámbitos que aborda. El proyecto fue realizado de manera conjunta por el Centro de Alternativas de Desarrollo (CEPAUR) de Chile y por la Fundación Dag Hammarskjöld de Suecia. Nació de la necesidad de situar en el contexto latinoamericano (y a la luz de los cambios de escenario ocurridos durante el último decenio) la propuesta contenida en el Informe Dag Hammarskjöld de 1975 «Qué hacer: Otro Desarrollo». El texto resultante aspira a tener como interlocutores a agentes del desarrollo regional, planificadores y políticos, grupos de desarrollo local, académicos de diferentes disciplinas relevantes para el desarrollo, foros internacionales y profesionales e intelectuales dedicados a pensar caminos de humanización para un mundo en crisis.

La propuesta contenida en este trabajo es, pues, un esfuerzo por integrar líneas de reflexión, de investigación y de acción que puedan constituir un aporte sustancial para la construcción de un nuevo paradigma del desarrollo, menos mecanicista y más humano. La primera parte de este libro, fue publicada en 1986 como número especial de la revista Development Dialogue con el título Desarrollo a Escala Humana: una opción para el futuro. A esta edición, se ha sumado una nueva sección: «Notas sobre Metodología», así como dos nuevos capítulos que constituyen la Segunda Parte de este libro. De éstos, el primero es una versión ampliada del ensayo «La poda del lenguaje» que fue publicado en 1988 en Development , la revista de la Sociedad para el Desarrollo Internacional. El otro capítulo incorporado, es una versión corregida de la conferencia que el autor dio en el marco de la Conmemoración de Schumacher, octubre de 1989 en Bristol, Inglaterra. Estas dos adiciones al libro, representan, aunque no sean productos terminados, al menos, caminos hacia campos nuevos y de la XII Región. Chile, por su apoyo entusiasta y la eficaz realización de varios seminarios regionales llevados a cabo durante el período de ejecución de este proyecto. Sin el apoyo intelectual y material de estas instituciones, no hubiera sido posible la terminación exitosa de este proyecto. abiertos de investigación y reflexión. Subrayan el carácter elusivo e interminable de la búsqueda de respuestas finales para la cuestión del mejoramiento humano a través del desarrollo. El Centro de Alternativas de Desarrollo - CEPAUR - es una organización no gubernamental de espectro internacional, dedicada, a través de la investigación de naturaleza transdiciplinaria y proyectos de acción, a una reorientación del desarrollo, a través de la promoción de formas de autodependencia local que satisfa gan las necesidades fundamentales de los seres humanos, y de una manera má s gener al, a promover el desarrollo a escala humana.

Las oficinas de CEPAUR están en la Avenida Santa María 349, Apto 42 - B, Santiago, Chile, y la dirección postal es :

CEPAUR, Casilla 27001, 

Santiago 27, Chile. 

Manfred Max - Neef
Director Ejecutivo, CEPAUR

1 El equipo encargado de este proyecto desea expresar su agradecimiento a los funcionarios y acádemicos de la Universidad de La Serena en Chile, la Universidad Federal de Pernambuco, Brasil y la Fundación para el Desarrollo


ORIGINAL: Manfred Max-Neef (Enlace para descarga del libro)

Austin Kleon on 10 Things Every Creator Should Remember But We Often Forget

What T.S. Eliot has to do with genetics and the optimal investment theory for your intellectual life.

 

Much has been said about the secrets of creativity and where good ideas come from, but most of that wisdom can be lost on young minds just dipping their toes in the vast and tumultuous ocean of self-initiated creation. Some time ago, artist and writer Austin Kleon — one of my favorite thinkers, a keen observer of and participant in the creative economy of the digital age — was invited to give a talk to students, the backbone for which was a list of 10 things he wished he’d heard as a young creator:

So widely did the talk resonate that Kleon decided to deepen and enrich its message in Steal Like an Artist — an intelligent and articulate manifesto for the era of combinatorial creativity and remix culture that’s part 344 Questions, part Everything is a Remix, part The Gift, at once borrowed and entirely original.

(This piece of truth is available as a print from 20×200, one of the best places for affordable art.)

The book opens with a timeless T.S. Eliot endorsement of remix culture:

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”

Kleon goes on to delineate the qualities you’ll need to cultivate for the creative life — things like kindness, curiosity, “productive procrastination,” “a willingness to look stupid” — demonstrating that “creativity” isn’t some abstract phenomenon bestowed upon the fortunate few but, rather, a deliberate mindset and pragmatic ethos we can architect for ourselves. As he puts it, “you are a mashup of what you let into your life.”

Kleon writes in the introduction:


It’s one of my theories that when people give advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the past.

This book is me talking to a previous version of myself.

These are things I’ve learned over almost a decade of trying to figure out how to make art, but a funny thing happened when I started sharing them with others — I realized that they aren’t just for artists. They’re for everyone.

These ideas are for everyone who’s trying to inject some creativity into their life and their work. (That should describe all of us.)

On doing what you love, Kleon urges:

• Draw the art you want to see, 
• start the business you want to run, 
• play the music you want to hear, 
• write the books you want to read, 
• build the products you want to use — 
• do the work you want to see done.

On engineering creative and intellectual stimulation: 

There’s an economic theory out there that if you take the incomes of your five closest friends and average them, the resulting number will be pretty close to your own income.

I think the same thing is true of idea incomes. You’re only going to be as good as the stuff you surround yourself with.

And on that note, immersing yourself in Steal Like an Artist is as fine an investment in the life of your mind as you can hope to make.

ORIGINAL: Brain Pickings

by Maria Popova

More Than Human: Tim Flach’s Striking Portraits of Animals

Sentient beings like you’ve never seen them before.

Tim Fach. More Than Human

“Erasing the awe-inspiring variety of sentient life impoverishes all our lives,” historian Joanna Bourke wrote in her poignant meditation on what it means to be human. And yet our relationship with animals and our understanding of their inner lives remain inadequate at best.

In 2010, photographer Tim Flach gave us his extraordinary dog portraits. This year, he’s back with More Than Human (UK;public library) — a collection of striking, expressive portraits of our non-human fellow beings, captured with equal parts tenderness and aesthetic elegance.

Despite the sciency sterility of his words, perhaps Darwin was ultimately right in a broader philosophical sense when he reflected in The Descent of Man:

The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is certainly one of degree and not of kind. We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals.

See more of Flach’s breathtaking work on his site and treat yourself to the full glory of More Than Human, for the screen hardly does it justice.

ORIGINAL: Brain Pickings
by Maria Popova

"A Science Icon Died 17 Years Ago. In His Last Interview, He Made A Warning That Gives Me Goosebumps" (Rajiv Narayan)

Carl Sagan inspired a generation of scientists with his work in and out of the classroom. But he didn't always present science with cheer. In this clip, he passionately defends science with a grave warning. It's something we all need to hear. 

Carl Sagan's last interview with Charlie Rose (Full Interview)

"Let's look a little more deeply into that. What is faith. It is belief in the absence of evidence. Now, I do not propose to tell anybody what to believe. But for me, believing when there is no compelling evidence is a mistake. The idea is to withhold belief until there is compelling evidence. And if the universe does not comply with our predispositions, okay, then we have the wrenching obligation to accommodate to the way the universe really is." — Carl Sagan

ORIGINAL: UpWorthy
By Rajiv Narayan

Neural Networks and Deep Learning Book Project

A book that will teach you the core concepts of neural networks and deep learning

About the book
This book will teach you the core concepts of neural networks and deep learning. These are powerful machine learning techniques which have achieved outstanding results for problems in image recognition, speech recognition, and natural language processing. Neural networks and deep learning are now being adopted by many companies, including Google, Microsoft, and Facebook.

I'm writing this book to bridge the gap between popular accounts and the many technical papers on neural networks and deep learning. The book will make it easy and fun for people with programming and basic mathematical skills to come up to speed.

I love explaining complex technical subjects. I've written two previous books. The first book, "Quantum Computation and Quantum Information" (joint with Ike Chuang), is the standard text on quantum computing, and one of the ten most cited books in the history of physics. The second book, "Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science", is a book for a general audience about networked science. It was named one of the best books of 2011 by The Financial Times and the Boston Globe.

In addition to my books I've written many technical articles, including "Lisp as the Maxwell's equations of software", "How to crawl a quarter billion webpages in 40 hours", and "Why Bloom filters work the way they do", all of which made the top five posts on Hacker News.

You can see a draft of chapter 1 of the book at neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com.

The book will be made freely available online, under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial license.

As an independent writer and scientist, the reason I'm undertaking this Indiegogo campaign is to give me some partial support while I complete the book.

Draft table of contents

• Using neural nets to recognize handwritten digits: We get off to a flying start, creating a neural network that can solve a hard problem - recognizing handwritten digits.
• Using backpropagation to speed up learning: We'll master the ins-and-outs of the backpropagation algorithm, which is the fundamental algorithm used to learn in neural nets, and the basis for deep learning.
• Neural nets: the big picture: How do artificial neural nets compare to biological brains? Is there a simple universal algorithm for thinking? How can we use neural nets to solve problems in speech recognition and natural language processing? Can we use neural nets to compute an arbitrary function?
• Deep learning: What makes deep neural networks hard to train with conventional approaches? How can we overcome those challenges? We'll see how deep neural nets can be pre-trained, and how they can learn high-level representations of knowledge from complex data.
• Recent progress in image recognition: We'll dive into exciting recent work using deep learning to solve difficult problems in image recognition, including recognizing the images in ImageNet, and the Stanford-Google "cat neuron" paper.
• The future of neural nets: Will neural nets help lead to artificial intelligence? Can they be used to simulate a human brain?

ORIGINAL: Indiegogo

Innovación: Lección para Colciencias

ORIGINAL: El Mundo
Guillermo Maya Muñoz
23 de Septiembre de 2013

Add caption

Cuando se habla de innovación, por políticos y economistas, generalmente se argumenta que la innovación reside en las fuerzas del mercado, en el empresariado innovador con su capacidad para afrontar riesgos. El estado es lo opuesto de la innovación y el riesgo. El estado es lento, burocrático, y desperdicia recursos.

Sin embargo, la realidad de la innovación no parece ser así. La innovación no reside en el mercado sino en el estado, el gobierno. Los economistas neoliberales como publicistas de la iniciativa privada no estarán de acuerdo, protestarán y dirán que se equivocan quienes reclaman ese papel para el estado, que no hay nada superior al mercado.

Los trabajos de la investigadora y economista Mariana Mazzucato, egresada de la New School for Social Research University (NY) -también mi Alma Máter-, y profesora en la universidad de Sussex, Inglaterra, señalan al estado como el factor más importante para generar innovación tecnológica. Su reciente libro el Estado Empresarial: Derribando los Mitos Sector Público vs Sector Privado (The Entrepreneurial State, 2013) discurre sobre esta hipótesis, al igual que su libro previo (2011). La presentación del libro en su sitio web www.marianamazzucato.com se puede resumir así:

El "Estado Empresarial" echa por tierra el mito del Estado como una organización burocrática grande que puede en el mejor de los casos facilitar la innovación creativa que sucede en el dinámico sector privado. En el análisis de varios estudios de casos sobre el crecimiento impulsado por la innovación, el libro describe la situación opuesta, señalando que el sector privado sólo se atreve a invertir después de que el Estado ha realizado las inversiones de alto riesgo. Este libro sostiene que en la historia del capitalismo moderno, el Estado ha generado actividad económica que de otro modo no habría sucedido, y ha abierto activamente nuevas tecnologías y mercados en los que los inversores privados más adelante pueden entrar. Lejos de las críticas a menudo escuchadas al Estado de que potencialmente “desplaza” las inversiones privadas, el Estado hace que sucedan, formando y creando mercados, no sólo “corrigiendo” sus fallas. Ignorar esta realidad sólo sirve a fines ideológicos, y perjudica a la formulación de políticas eficaces.

Este libro examina estudios de casos que van desde el advenimiento de Internet al surgimiento de las industrias de la biotecnología y la nanotecnología. En particular, el volumen desmiente el mito de que Silicon Valley ha sido creado por el capital de riesgo privado. Un capítulo importante se centra en inversiones del estado detrás del éxito de Apple, y revela que todas las principales tecnologías que sustentan el desarrollo del iPhone deben su origen a los fondos públicos. Mientras las personas emprendedoras como Steve Jobs son necesarias, su éxito es casi imposible sin su habilidad para subirse a la ola de inversiones del Estado. Y si Europa quiere sus propios Googles, necesita más acción del Estado, no menos.

Dos de los capítulos del libro se centran en el examen de la próxima gran área de innovación después de internet: la “revolución verde”. Tanto la energía solar y la tecnología eólica actualmente están siendo guiados por el gasto del Estado, ya sea a través del programa ARPA-E (EE.UU) o por los bancos de inversión de los estados chino y brasileño. La discusión refrescante se mueve más allá de la habitual división entre los partidarios de la austeridad frente a los defensores de los estímulos fiscales. Argumenta que las inversiones del estado no sólo ayudan a disparar el crecimiento durante los períodos de recesión, sino que además, incluso en períodos de auge, conducen a inversiones productivas en nuevas tecnologías radicales que luego promueven décadas de crecimiento.

El libro termina con una pregunta fundamental: si el Estado es tan importante para las inversiones en innovación de alto riesgo, ¿por qué captura tan poco en el retorno directo de las inversiones? Sin embargo, Google y Apple por ejemplo, deberían devolver más a la sociedad, y los ciudadanos que financiaron sus innovaciones con impuestos.

¿Dónde estaría hoy Google sin las inversiones financiadas por el estado en el desarrollo de internet, y sin las subvenciones con que la Fundación Nacional de Ciencias de EE.UU (NSF) financió el descubrimiento de su propio algoritmo? ¿El iPad sería tan exitoso sin las innovaciones financiadas por el estado de las tecnologías de comunicación, GPS y pantalla táctil?

No se trata de que el estado corrija las fallas del mercado, o que la política industrial escoja a los “ganadores”, o que el gasto público estimule la demanda insuficiente, se trata de que el estado tome el papel líder en la innovación. El estado funciona, en términos de Mazzucato, en el papel de asumir los riesgos, abriendo el camino a nuevas tecnologías, antes de que el sector privado entre a rentabilizarlas en aplicaciones industriales.

En conclusión, para la realidad colombiana, la transformación de Colciencias, como instrumento institucional del gobierno para el desarrollo de la ciencia, la tecnología y la innovación, es una necesidad apremiante, a la luz de las experiencias de los países desarrollados, como las descritas y analizadas por Mazzucato. Es necesario un estado, y un sector privado, más comprometido con la ciencia y la investigación, sin dejar de lado el desarrollo experimental y la innovación. Sin embargo, Colciencias retrocede, y el gobierno la entrega a los políticos, de acuerdo a Moisés Wasserman, ex rector de la UN.

(Energy) Harvest Festival

ORIGINAL: Traffic Technology International
August/September 2013

Illustration courtesy of Patrick George

The energy produced by vehicles driving on our roadways is a potentially huge source of untapped electricity. Louise Smyth meets the people who will have cause to celebrate if the concept sparks into life

Although the ideas of piezoelectric generation and embedding functionality into roads are not new, the notion of merging the two is novel. We've long embedded technologies in roadways, a case in point being the much-maligned loop detector Meanwhile, we've used piezoelectric materials for numerous applications over the years. So when considering a marriage between the two, a simple question to ask is, can any of the power created by vehicles driving over our roads be harnessed? Answering how this could be achieved is rather more complicated.

Simple thingsA piezoelectric energy harvesting system for roads is relatively straightforward. Vehicles drive over the surface, their tires place pressure on piezoelectric crystals embedded in the road, wíuch subsequently produce a small amount of energy. Multiply that scenario over a stretch of road with many vehicles traveling over the top and thousands of embedded crystals and you can almost envision a day when the lights of the Golden Gate Bridge could be powered by the vehicles driving over it We're not there yet We're at the academic and research stages, although some commercial outfits are taking the tentative steps to forming a compelling business case, as well as selling energy-harvesting equipment designed for roads. The potential would seem to be enormous, but fulfilling it is not without major challenges - something that anyone who's worked in the área can testify. John Gambatese, professor in the School of Civil and Construction Engineering at Oregon State University, is festival one of those researchers. Hot on the heels of Oregon’s successful solar highway deployment, he submitted his Research Problem Statement on energy harvesting for roadways to Oregon DOT at the end of 2012. 

“We leave a lot of energy on the road in different ways,” he says. “Whether it’s the vibration on a bridge or roadway, or the wind produced by the traffic, there’s energy there that can be harvested. It might only be a small amount at each location but when you add it up, it could help to power our traffic infrastructure, our streetlighting, or other electrical requirements we may have.”

So if that goes according to plan, what about selling the surplus back into the grid? 

“For now we’re just trying to develop the technology so we can start collecting energy,” Gambatese says. “Once we do that, we can monitor how much we obtain and then there’s a chance we can optimize the technologies with the goal being to feed electricity back into the grid. Whether or not we’ll have that capability in the next five to 10 years, though, I’m not so sure.”

From research to reality?
The FHWA is funding work on energy harvesting for roads, indicating that it sees some future potential in the concept. The Administration’s Eric Weaver reveals how the testing is being conducted and what the initial results have shown

The Virginia in Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI) presence is a notable in the testing of piezoelectric energy harvesting for roads and is currently involved in a US$1M FHWA-funded project.  The stated aim isn’t to assess commercially available systems but to put a VTTI-developed system through its paces. The research is being overseen by Eric Weaver, a research civil engineer in the FHWA’s Office of Infrastructure, R&D, and an expert in this sector. “We are currently exploring the potential," says a cautiously optimistic Weaver about the technology. “Our initial research indicates that the amount of energy harvested might be modest but could theoretically offset some utility costs or provide power in areas that  are currently inaccessible to the grid.”

Like many people in the field, Weaver foresees any power generated being used only where it is harvested, for th short term at least. "It's meant to provide energy within the energy right-of-way to be used for transportation infrastructure demands,” he continues. “However, depending on the application and the infrastructure demand, excess energy could potentially be transferred back to the grid, provided that the electric grid infrastructure is updated to enable this.

 “Our work has involved a significant amount of analytical modeling, as well as laboratory trial and error with different  geometric configurations of piezoelectric generators and the materials that encase them. Virginia Tech researchers have installed some sensors at two locations in the state, one of which is at a truck weigh station and the other at a full-scale test road called the VA Smart Road."

Interestingly, for comparison purposes, researchers also installed sensors from the Israeli company Innowattech in at least one of those locations.

Although Weaver reveals that the results so far are perhaps not as encouraging as vendors or proponents of the technology might hope, the work is helping to identify teething problems that likey be overcome. “So far in our research, low power output is observed with each axle load application. Part of the reason for this is that the wheel load doesn’t always pass directly over the generator, because they’re centered in the wheel path, where the wheels don’t onsistently track. To mitigate this problem, researchers are exploring other generator geometries that provide more spatial coverage.”

“The sensors have been rugged enough so far to hold up to the traffic loading they have received,” Weaver continues. “A further benefit is that the data from this project has been used to support another study performed for the California Energy Commission to evaluate the feasibility of all piezoelectric generation technologies currently on the market.”

Complete Text: Traffic Technology International August/September 2013 

"Depending on the application and the infrastructure demand, excess energy could potentially be transferred back to the grid"

www.TrafficTechnologyToday.com

A New Way of Seeing

ORIGINAL: The Scientist
By M. Joan Dawson

September 1, 2013

Inspiration and controversy attended the birth of magnetic resonance imaging, a diagnostic technology that changed the course of human medicine.

MIT PRESS, AUGUST 2013

Thomas Huxley, in his presidential address to the Royal Society in 1885, observed: “What an enormous revolution would be made in biology if physics or chemistry could supply the physiologist with a means of making out the molecular structure of living tissues comparable to that which the spectroscope affords to the inquirer into the nature of heavenly bodies.”

Andrew Huxley, a grandson of Thomas, noted in his own inaugural address in 1980 that his grandfather’s wishes came true with the invention of zeugmatography—better known today as magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI—by Paul Lauterbur in 1971. MRI would change the course of medicine. It became a leading diagnostic tool because it images the soft tissues of the body anatomically, biochemically, and functionally. It is noninvasive and safe, and unlike X-rays or CAT scans, uses no ionizing radiation. My recently published book, Paul Lauterbur and the Invention of MRI, is the story of the man, who was my husband, and his invention.

One day in 1971 Paul happened to observe some nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) measurements on normal and malignant tissues and saw that the signals differed markedly. But the tissue samples were being cut out of rats, and Paul thought such measurements could never be very useful in research or medicine. “It didn’t seem right to kill the patient to diagnose the illness,” he wryly said to me. “It was a bloody messy affair, not the sort of thing chemists are used to seeing. As a naïve chemist, I couldn’t imagine cutting people up to see if they were sick or not.”

He felt there had to be a better way. If he could find a way to localize the NMR signals to specific places in a patient without using harmful invasive procedures, well, that would be a different matter altogether. Physicians could then peer into any part of the body remotely to discern what the problem was, and the patient would be unaffected by the analysis.

That same evening he figured it out. He had taken a fast-food dinner break from work with a friend. “On the second bite of a Big Boy hamburger,” just as he was explaining that the physics of NMR precluded imaging, in midsentence, he arrived at the principle of MRI. “I realized that inhomogeneous magnetic fields labeled signals according to their spatial coordinates, and made a leap of faith to the conclusion that the information could be recovered in the form of images.” Paul ran out to buy a notebook at a nearby drugstore. He spent much of the night refining his thoughts and convincing himself that he was not just on a wild-goose chase. By morning the book was bursting with ideas. This notebook not only describes the fundamentals of MRI but also predicts a great deal of its development during the following 25 years, and into the future.

The early days of MRI were fraught with obstacles. The first and rather blurry images, published in a 1973 issue of Nature, were of two tubes filled with deuterium oxide (D2O). Those images—created with what Paul named zeugmatography after the Greek zeugma, “that which is used for joining”—did not conjure up visions of modern medical diagnosis in anyone’s mind. As the technique developed it was met both with derision (“It violates the Heisenberg uncertainty principle!” said some detractors) and with claims by others to have invented it. SUNY Downstate Medical Center professor Raymond Damadian famously published an ad in major newspapers around the world showing the Nobel Prize printed upside down when he was not included in the award for MRI in 2003. Paul Lauterbur and the Invention of MRI chronicles the life and work of Paul in MRI and other fields, as well as early work of other MRI researchers, including Damadian and Peter Mansfield, Paul’s Nobel corecipient. The story of the basic science behind MRI’s birth has already been told in the literature. My book looks deeper to tell the tale of the technology’s rocky journey to clinical utility.

M. Joan Dawson is Associate Professor Emerita in the School of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She studies function and metabolism of living tissues using NMR spectroscopy and spectroscopic imaging. She was married to Paul Lauterbur from 1984 until his death in 2007. Read an excerpt of Paul Lauterbur and the Invention of MRI.

Troy Hicks: A Conversation About Digital Writing

ORIGINAL: Edutopia
July 26, 2013

Troy Hicks Hickstro.org

"There is not a writer in our classrooms today who will not be producing something with a digital writing tool in her or his lifetime." -- Troy Hicks

Troy Hicks frequently uses the words "intentional" and "deliberate" to highlight the need for writers to conscientiously think through composing digital texts. Those two words could just as easily describe the author's thoughtful affect on Paul Allison's Teachers Teaching Teachers or the degree to which his new book, Crafting Digital Writing: Composing Texts Across Media and Genres, methodically articulates how 4th-12th grade instructors can introduce technology tools, mentor texts, composing practices, and heuristics for helping students write.

"We have all these devices and technologies available to us. How are we being intentional? How are we being thoughtful -- taking time to craft writing with these digital tools?"

A professor of English Education at Central Michigan University and Director of the Chippewa Writing Project, Dr. Hicks published The Digital Writing Workshop in 2009. His YouTube summary of this book describes five writers' workshop principles that remain, regardless of available technology. To help stakeholders understand and support schools' digital writing initiatives, he coauthored Because Digital Writing Matters: Improving Student Writing in Online and Multimedia Environments in 2010 with Danielle Nicole DeVoss and Elyse Eidman-Aadahl.

 

 Why Teach Students to Craft Digital Writing?

Throughout Crafting Digital Writing are counter-arguments to those who might resist teaching students to compose digital texts on the grounds that:
Standardized tests reward mastery of traditional writing genres.

Hicks: "[We] can no longer cling to the idea that producing good test-takers will yield the types of writers who will succeed in college, career, and life." Besides, crafting digital writing corresponds with the Common Core's CCR Anchor Standards and Habits of Mind set forth by the Council of Writing Program Administrators among other authorities.

Students need intensive help with writing, not technology.

Hicks (extending on a quote by Lucy Calkins): "Teach the writer, then the writing, then the technology."

Students inserting txting language into formal essays confirms that technology is harming students' ability to write.

Hicks: "No formal study has shown that 'txting' ruins student writing." When txting pops up in essays, "Teach students to code switch back and forth between formal and informal discourses."

Crafting Digital Writing

Crafting Digital Writing capitalizes on Troy Hicks' MAPS heuristic --

• mode (genre), 
• media, 
• audience, 
• purpose, 
• situation -- 

that helps writers understand the contexts in which they compose and reach their writing goals. Each chapter describes how to craft different digital texts: 

• web, 
• presentations, 
• audio, 
• video and 
• social media. 

For each genre, Hicks 

• analyzes a representative mentor text using MAPS, 
• discusses genre conventions and composing obstacles, 
• makes curriculum connections, 
• introduces a range of tools, 
• summarizes the composing process specific to each genre, 
• presents rubrics, and 
• provides multiple student examples or links to projects on the web. 

In short, Hicks economically lays out the fundamental resources teachers need in order to help students successfully negotiate multiple forms of digital writing.
To compliment Crafting Digital Writing, the book's companion wiki contains abundant links and resources associated with each of the chapters. A Websites and Apps page offers even more tools; members are invited to contribute resources to help keep the space up to date. QR codes appear throughout the book to relieve readers of typing out long hyperlinks. When asked during a recent presentation why his latest text was not published as an e-book, Hicks sighs, "The ironies abound."

Exchanging knowledge through conversation with students or colleagues is a theme that runs through Troy Hicks' writing. This ethos is also modeled in the author's conference workshops and webinars, articles, blog posts, Twitter exchanges, and through interactions with Crafting Digital Writing's Google+ community. It was in this latter space that Dr. Hicks answered a couple questions about his book.

Intention and Innovation

Edutopia: Crafting Digital Writing offers multiple examples of successful digital texts, Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek by John Branch, for example. RSA Animate and The Story of Stuff Project host several of my favorites. What is the one piece of digital writing that resonates with you most? Why?

Troy Hicks: The one piece of digital writing that continues to resonate for me, even though I don't mention it in the book, is Michael Wesch's The Machine Is Us/Using Us. I think that he released that in 2008 or so, and at that time I thought his innovative manner of screen casting combined with zooming and refocusing was amazing. Plus, he uses the computer as a key actor in the text, but it is all controlled by him. The last part, where he types that we will need to "rethink a few things" still resonates for me. I sometimes still show that video in professional development sessions, and I admire the time he took to plan, record and edit that piece.

Edutopia: You write, "It is time to give up on the idea that we are doing students a service by limiting the range of writing experiences we offer." Would you agree that teaching has become more complex with the advent of digital tools? What advice do you give to new teachers who are apprehensive about the complexity of teaching composition in the digital age?

Troy Hicks: I don't know that teaching has become more complex, per se. The best writing teachers have always invited their students to compose in a range of genres for a variety of audiences and purposes. I would say that digital writing "generatively complicates" the art of teaching writing, but that we shouldn't let the variety of new technologies overwhelm us. Instead, we need to refocus on what we know to be true about teaching individual writers -- with choice, time and response -- as well as how to teach specific kinds of writing -- with models, scaffolding and practice. The digital tools offer students new opportunities, no doubt, but they still need to be intentional in the way that they craft their pieces of digital writing. To that end, even a young teacher still has more experience as a reader and writer (both traditionally and digitally) than his or her students, and if a technology is confusing then it provides him or her the opportunity to model the thinking and writing process. So, my advice, in short -- keep the bigger picture in mind, give yourself and your students permission to play (and fail) with the tools, and then work intentionally as you model the digital writing process.

There’s that word again.

La magnitud ambiental del parque Los Nevados sigue sobreviviendo

ORIGINAL: ElTiempo

Por: REDACCIÓN EL TIEMPO

22 de Febrero del 2013

Los cojines de los pantanos del Quindío son de los escenarios más impactantes del parque.Foto: ARCHIVO PARTICULAR

Primer libro de gran formato sobre parque Los Nevados realza maravillas ecológicas de este lugar.

La predicción es lúgubre. Según mediciones de científicos colombianos asociados a la Organización de Naciones Unidas (ONU) y las realizadas por los meteorólogos menos pesimistas del Instituto de Hidrología, Meteorología y Estudios Ambientales (Ideam), las nieves perpetuas del Ruiz, Santa Isabel y Tolima, los anfitriones del parque nacional natural Los Nevados, podrían derretirse del todo antes del 2040.

El cambio climático, que ha logrado que las temperaturas sean cada vez más altas, llevará a estos gigantes a convertirse en montañas de roca. Y sin hielo y con mucha menos agua disponible, será cada vez más alto el riesgo que amenaza la supervivencia de los pára mos que rodean a estas cumbres, que se encargan de regular el caudal de los ríos de la región.

A pesar de estos vaticinios, aún es posible ver el vaso medio lleno. Al fin y al cabo, faltan más de tres décadas para que la calamidad se instale allí definitivamente.

"El parque sigue imprimiendo su aroma, sus amaneceres, y quienes vivimos en sus faldas vamos a estar siempre marcados por su huella." Ricardo Gómez Giraldo, rector de la Universidad de Caldas, describe así las 58.300 hectáreas de este territorio único y dedicado a la conservación, que se extiende a lo largo de ese departamento y que también toca terrenos de Risaralda, Quindío y Tolima.

La frase es una de las primeras líneas de una especie de bitácora en la que se ha convertido 'La ruta del cóndor', el primer libro de gran formato que se hace en Colombia sobre esta área de reserva incrustada en plena región Andina, y que esa institución editó (con textos en español e inglés) en equipo con la Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano.

Cuatro fotógrafos, un agrónomo, una productora y los escritores Carlos Augusto Jaramillo Parra y Gonzalo Fajardo realizaron siete viajes, uno de ellos extendido por 13 días, para mostrar pesadumbres y bondades de una de las maravillas paisajísticas y ecológicas del país.

Hogar de mariposas pardas, avispas, cucarrones y otras especies sin huesos que están por estudiar y por eso todavía no tienen nombre. Y de mirlas negras, ranas, salamandras, venados, pumas, dantas, colibríes y el cóndor, el ave voladora más grande del mundo, en crítico estado y del que, según la investigación, solo quedan 14 ejemplares dentro del parque nacional -de los 250 que aproximadamente hay en todo el país-. Algunos de ellos fueron liberados en 1997, pero, para verlos en pleno vuelo, con sus tres metros de alas estiradas, es necesario subir a más de 3.000 metros sobre el nivel del mar. Muchos han muerto por la destrucción de su hábitat, uno de los graves problemas de Los Nevados.

Así lo reconoce Wálter Machete, uno de los personajes de esta historia y habitante de la vereda El Bosque, situada en el área de Los Nevados, y quien, al lado de su familia, vive del turismo, los cultivos de pancoger y la ganadería. Machete -dice el texto- condena de alguna forma, por ejemplo, los sembrados de papa y otros avances agrícolas que están afectando la zona de reserva, pero es igualmente franco al decir que esas actividades son la única opción de los pobladores para conseguir el sustento. Aquí la consigna es vivir al pie de la nieve o morir lejos de ella. Las montañas son su casa, los cobija la neblina y los arrulla el viento. Los niños montan a caballo desde los 4 años y caminan sin agitarse grandes distancias para ir a la escuela.

Y aunque no es razonable que un ecosistema tan sensible pueda mantenerse intacto frente a la influencia humana, "sin políticas que promuevan incentivos para cambiar cultivos por especies nativas, que se unan a alternativas de ingresos que puedan beneficiar a la comunidad, será muy difícil ver cambios benéficos para el entorno natural a mediano plazo", concluye la investigación.

A pesar de todo, la magnitud ambiental del parque Los Nevados sigue sobreviviendo. Aún hay tiempo para recorrerlo. Porque, como dice Cecilia María Vélez, rectora de la Tadeo Lozano, "allí todavía podemos extasiarnos y comprobar la magnificencia del país, pero desde más allá de los 5.000 metros".

Sex and the Primordial Ooze

ORIGINAL: The Scientist

By John Long

January 1, 2013

The rise of copulation as a vertebrate reproductive strategy may have driven crucial evolutionary change and explosive species radiation.

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

OCTOBER 2012 Reproduction is without a doubt one of the most delightful parts of being a vertebrate. Unlike arthropods, whose mating rituals can range from seemingly perverse acts culminating in the death of the male (think praying mantises and certain spiders) to traumatic rape and insemination (think bed bugs), for us more civilized backboned animals, mating is mostly an act of great pleasure following courtship and foreplay. Without sex and the subsequent mingling of two individuals’ genetic material, gene pool transformation would not occur. Sex is therefore central to evolutionary change.

The rise of this most pleasurable and evolutionarily productive of all vertebrate behaviors is the focus of my latest book, The Dawn of the Deed.

There are many strange and interesting ways in which living vertebrates reproduce. The oldest and likely most primitive method is displayed by fishes, which typically spawn gametes into water: females lay eggs and males fertilize them by shedding sperm over them.

But some fishes—in particular sharks, rays, and their kin (called chondrichthyans)—perform a kind of copulation, which is necessarily preceded by mating behaviors such as ritual courtship. In some species of whaler sharks (Carcharhinus sp.) the males bite the females’ pectoral fins to prepare the females for mating and to properly position themselves for the act of copulation. Following their courtship rituals, chondrichthyan males insert erectile claspers derived from the pelvic fin skeleton into females’ cloacal openings to transfer sperm, usually bundled in discrete packages.

The origins of vertebrate copulation have for years been an enigma to paleontologists, as little fossil evidence existed to show how the oldest-known fishes mated. One group of extinct fishes, the armor–plated placoderms, which flourished 410–359 million years ago during the Devonian Period, provide the first insights into early vertebrate sexual behavior. One group of placoderms, the ptyctodontids, showed variation in their pelvic fins, leading English paleontologist D.M.S. Watson to suggest in the 1930s that they showed sexual dimorphism—major male-female differences in reproductive or other structures.

Recently my colleagues and I made a major discovery confirming that these ancient fishes did in fact copulate. In the Gogo Formation of Western Australia we found an unborn embryo inside a mother fish, perfectly fossilized in 3-D, and still attached by a mineralized umbilical cord. It was a new species, so naturally we named it Mater-piscis, meaning mother fish.

Our findings strongly suggested that copulation in vertebrates first arose within this group, widely acknowledged as the most basal of all jawed vertebrates. Internal fertilization in vertebrates thus turns out to be coincident with the origins of jaws and teeth themselves.

This raises a very interesting but radical idea. Did jaws evolve mainly for feeding, as most scientists would surmise? Or did jaws and teeth evolve primarily to facilitate copulation, as seen in the courtships of those extant sharks who bite their mates’ pectoral fins to hold on while inserting their claspers?

An even broader question arises from our discoveries: Could a reproductive strategy have served as a potential driver of explosive evolutionary radiations? The placoderms underwent the first great species explosion for all vertebrates, with some species clades containing more than 50–100 closely related taxa distributed around the globe within a relatively short span of geological time. Such problems show why the study of early vertebrate anatomy and the pursuit of new fossil evidence from the field is still highly relevant for the study of evolutionary biology.

John Long is a paleontologist at the School of Biological Sciences, Flinders University, South Australia. He previously served as Vice President of Research and Collections at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Read an excerpt of The Dawn of the Deed: The Prehistoric Origins of Sex.

E.O. Wilson’s Advice to Young Scientists

ORIGINAL: Brain Pickings  / The Atlantic

by Maria Popova

“What is crucial is not that technical ability, but it is imagination in all of its applications.”

E.O. Wilson

In his recent TEDMED talk, legendary Harvard sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, regarded as one of the greatest scientists alive, offers a taste of his forthcoming book, Letters to a Young Scientist. (A play, of course, on Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.) Wilson touches on a number of points previously explored as essential in science and other creative and intellectual endeavors — the benefits of:

• balancing expertise with broad, cross-disciplinary curiosity, 
• the importance of embracing failure and the unknown, 
• the role of intuition and the imagination, 
• the idea that we’re wired for science.

"The world needs you, badly," begins celebrated biologist E.O. Wilson in his letter to a young scientist. Previewing his upcoming book, he gives advice collected from a lifetime of experience -- reminding us that wonder and creativity are the center of the scientific life. (Filmed at TEDMED.)

---

E.O. Wilson's Five Principles for Budding Scientists
26APR 12 2012, 1:07 PM ET 1

The Harvard researcher and author holds court on breadth, getting help with math, and stepping away from the blackboard.

Flickr/ragesoss

E.O. Wilson, the famed biologist, thinks humanity is on the cusp of a new golden age in scientific discovery. Current trends in science and technology predict the doubling of progress every 15 years, Wilson told audiences at TEDMED, a three-day conference on health and medicine in Washington, D.C.

"So swift is the velocity of the technoscientific revolution," said Wilson, "so startling in its twists and turns, that no one can predict its outcome, even a decade from its present moment."

He's no stranger to big thinking. Wilson was the subject of an Atlantic profile late last year headlined, "E.O. Wilson's Theory of Everything."

At a time when demand for scientists is at an all-time high, Wilson has a handful of ideas to encourage people to join the quest for knowledge. Here are his five principles for budding scientists.

Breadth is as important as depth. Study widely.

Keep your eyes lifted and your eyes turning. The thirst for knowledge is in our genes. It was put there by our distant ancestors who spread across the world, and it is never going to be quenched. To understand and use it -- sanely -- as a part of the civilization yet to evolve requires a vastly larger population of trained people in education, medicine, law, diplomacy, government, business, and media.

March away from the guns. "You may have heard the military dictum for the gathering of armies: 'march to the sound of the guns.' In science the exact opposite is the case: march away from the sound of the guns! March away from the sounds of the guns. Observe from a distance, but do not join the fray. Make a fray of your own. Once you have settled on a specialty and a profession you can love, and you've secured opportunity, your potential to succeed will be greatly enhanced if you study enough to become an expert."

There's an ideal organism to study for every interesting problem."For every problem in every discipline of science there exists a species or entity or phenomenon ideal for its solving. And conversely ... there exist important problems, the solution of which are ideally suited. Find out what they are. ... It's up to you to have found an interesting question -- a problem, perhaps, that others have toyed with but you focus on and then ... to select the ideal organism for its solution."

Step away from the blackboard."In science and all its applications, what is crucial is not technical ability, but it is imagination -- the ability to form concepts with images of entities and processes pictured by intuition. I found out that advances in science rarely come upstream, from an ability to stand at a blackboard and conjure images from unfolding mathematical propositions and equations. They are instead the product of downstream imagination leading to hard work, during which mathematical reasoning may or may not prove to be relevant."

If you need math, help will come."It is far easier for scientists, including medical researchers, to acquire the needed collaboration in mathematics and statistics than it is for mathematicians and statisticians to find scientists able to make use of their equations. It is important in choosing the direction you take in science to find the subject at your level of competence that interests you deeply and focus on that."