RTFA: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601102&si…

The seven social sins are:
1. “Bioethical’ violations such as birth control
2. “Morally dubious” experiments such as stem cell research
3. Drug abuse
4. Polluting the environment
5. Contributing to widening divide between rich and poor
6. Excessive wealth
7. Creating poverty

Hmmm… Morally dubious, indeed. I guess drug use (e.g. alcohol during a religious ceremony) is set apart from drug abuse. Don’t forget: you can ALWAYS be forgiven. In Catholicism (maybe in all of Christianity), there’s a sacrament involving being forgiven on your death-bed.

Well, on the topic of drugs, I use this as the basis for the demand to take the fluoride out of my municipal tap water! My toothpaste packaging tells me it’s a drug, and yet I get more fluoride with every glass of water I drink. I know my intake of fluoride is excessive, because on the basis of the poison recommendation on the toothpaste, I intake 8x the amount I use for brushing. Is this abuse? I’m beginning to think so…

On second glance, this looks like a pretty good list. I think the definition of the word “Sin” needs to be reworked.

After arguing for hours about the nature of social facilitation in cockroaches, we got to the nature of the cognitive representation of the presence of another living creature of the same species… Suffice to say that a lot of ground was covered, and that brings us to Whale songs. Yes. Somehow.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_song:

The songs follow a distinct hierarchical structure. The base units of the song (sometimes loosely called the “notes”) are single uninterrupted emissions of sound that last up to a few seconds. These sounds vary in frequency from 20 Hz to 10 kHz (the typical human range of hearing is 20 Hz to 20 kHz). The units may be frequency modulated (i.e., the pitch of the sound may go up, down, or stay the same during the note) or amplitude modulated (get louder or quieter). However the adjustment of bandwidth on a spectrogram representation of the song reveals the essentially pulsed nature of the FM sounds.

A collection of four or six units is known as a sub-phrase, lasting perhaps ten seconds (see also phrase (music)). A collection of two sub-phrases is a phrase. A whale will typically repeat the same phrase over and over for two to four minutes. This is known as a theme. A collection of themes is known as a song. The whale will repeat the same song, which last up to 30 or so minutes, over and over again over the course of hours or even days. This “Russian doll” hierarchy of sounds has captured the imagination of scientists.

All the whales in an area sing virtually the same song at any point in time and the song is constantly and slowly evolving over time. For example, over the course of a month a particular unit that started as an “upsweep” (increasing in frequency) may slowly flatten to become a constant note. Another unit may get steadily louder. The pace of evolution of a whale’s song also changes—some years the song may change quite rapidly, whereas in other years little variation may be recorded.

Whoah. That’s totally interesting. People have recorded lots of whale songs, and they’ve already written software to work with it. From the bird-researchers at Cornell:

Raven: Interactive Sound Analysis Software

Raven and Raven Lite are software applications for the acquisition, visualization, measurement, and analysis of acoustic signals. Raven has been developed by the Cornell Bioacoustics Research Program, with the support of the National Science Foundation, to provide a powerful, user-friendly research and teaching tool tailored to the needs of biologists working with acoustic signals. Both Raven and Raven Lite run on computers running Microsoft Windows operating systems and Mac OS X.

XBAT: Extensible Acoustic Analysis

XBAT is an open-source extensible sound analysis application and MATLAB platform for developing sound analysis tools. It has been developed through on-going interaction with conservation scientists and animal communication researchers at the Cornell Bioacoustics Research Program. XBAT was designed to satisfy the diverse sound analysis needs of scientists who deal with large-scale data sets from both marine and terrestrial environments.

…et cetera. So, we have hierarchical patterns that are present in the communication of another species of animal. We have algorithms for performing meaningful analysis of these songs. …and yet, the conclusion of it all is: inconclusive. …but cognitive scientists and language researchers want to hear more about this!

So, it’s obvious that a lots of people have put lots of time into this thing, and their work has really advanced human understanding about the communication of these other animals. Thanks! I just wanted to point out that the BOINC platform might be a good future direction for this work:

BOINC is designed to support applications that have large computation requirements, storage requirements, or both. The main requirement of the application is that it be divisible into a large number (thousands or millions) of jobs that can be done independently.

If the project is going to use volunteered resources, there are additional requirements:

Public appeal

An application must be viewed as interesting and worthwhile by the public in order to gain large numbers of participants. A project must have the resources and commitment to maintain this interest, typically by creating a compelling web site and by generating interesting graphics in the application.

Low data/compute ratio

Input and output data are sent through commercial Internet connections, which may be expensive and/or slow. As a rule of thumb, if your application produces or consumes more than a gigabyte of data per day of CPU time, then it may be cheaper to use in-house cluster computing rather than volunteer computing.
What resources are needed to create a BOINC project?

If you have an existing application, figure on about three man-months to create the project: one month of an experience sys admin, one month of a programmer, and one month of a web developer (these are very rough estimates). Once the project is running, budget a 50% FTE (mostly system admin) to maintain it. In terms of hardware, you’ll need a mid-range server computer (e.g. Dell Poweredge) plenty of memory and disk. Budget about $5,000 for this. You’ll also need a fast connection to the commercial Internet (T1 or faster).

It may be difficult for some scientists to provide these resources. In this case, it may be possible to create a BOINC project at a higher organizational level, to server the needs of multiple scientists. For example, such a project might be created at the university campus level. Several U.S. funding agencies (NSF, NIH) have programs that could support this.

What is the public appeal? Well, there’s certainly a lot of emotionality that humans project onto whales, since they’re mammals and they seem to communicate with each other in a meaningful way.

What problem would be solved by the availability of a distributed compute grid? Well, in the same way that SETI combs the noise for some sort of signal, the point would be to brute-force through whale songs for the higher order signal. Fortunately, in this case, the starting data is really clean: the signal to noise ratio of whale song recordings is probably quite good. I don’t know, but I expect it’s better than what the SETI folk deal with.

The challenge for computer scientists, who have relied on transactions, critical sections, atomic operations, etc… well, the problem is in making the algorithm parallel enough that it can be meaningfully scaled up 10^8% to take advantage of the abundance of donated compute time.

So why whale songs? It just seems like an inevitable next step… so inevitable that perhaps it’s already happening. Do it with bird songs, too. Yeah! …and then tell me what those whales talk about for 30 minutes at a time.

That’s the end of my armchair science rant.

RTFA: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic…

Black students at the local high school sat under a tree that everyone knew was a place where white students usually congregated. White students reacted by hanging three nooses in the tree. Racial tensions escalated from there, including fights in which both black and white students got roughed up, but no one was seriously injured. Local officials, who are white, handled the white offenders with a “boys will be boys” attitude — a few brief school suspensions, basically. Black offenders were expelled from school, arrested and charged as adults with felony offenses, including attempted murder.

Wild stuff. Also, why does the Washington Post make it so hard to excerpt from their site?

RTFA: http://www.maybelogic.org/rushkoffcrs.htm

This seminar will explore persuasion in a wide range of media. Our task will be to evaluate humanity’s ability to maintain agency in the face of the increasingly sophisticated influence techniques used against us.

Does the emergence of interactive media change the balance of power between the masses and their would-be controllers? Or does the Internet merely provide the illusion of independent thinking on yet another tightly controlled media landscape?

More importantly, what is the real relationship between people, media, technology, and power? How can we come to recognize the biases of the media that we use – especially before we have committed our society to their implementation?

OBEY

RTFA: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/03/AR2007090300933.html?hpid=moreheadlines

The psychological insights yielded by the research, which has been confirmed in a number of peer-reviewed laboratory experiments, have broad implications for public policy. The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.
This phenomenon may help explain why large numbers of Americans incorrectly think that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in planning the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and that most of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi. While these beliefs likely arose because Bush administration officials have repeatedly tried to connect Iraq with Sept. 11, the experiments suggest that intelligence reports and other efforts to debunk this account may in fact help keep it alive.
Similarly, many in the Arab world are convinced that the destruction of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 was not the work of Arab terrorists but was a controlled demolition; that 4,000 Jews working there had been warned to stay home that day; and that the Pentagon was struck by a missile rather than a plane.

Several layers of interest in this story. Approximately, denial helps to strengthen myths. Also, although 9/11 is a major event, a surprising amount of mis-information surrounds it.

Also worth noting: Washington Post makes it tricky to quote and cite them. It’s almost as if they don’t want other people to comment on their story.