This is a really serious issue.
BONN, Germany (Reuters) - Climate change is turning the oceans more acid in a trend that could endanger everything from clams to coral and be irreversible for thousands of years, national science academies said on Monday.
Seventy academies from around the world urged governments meeting in Bonn for climate talks from June 1-12 to take more account of risks to the oceans in a new U.N. treaty for fighting global warming due to be agreed in Copenhagen in December.
"To avoid substantial damage to ocean ecosystems, deep and rapid reductions of carbon dioxide emissions of at least 50 percent (below 1990 levels) by 2050, and much more thereafter, are needed," the academies said in a joint statement.
The academies said rising amounts of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas emitted mainly by human use of fossil fuels, were being absorbed by the oceans and making it harder for creatures to build protective body parts.
The shift disrupts ocean chemistry and attacks the "building blocks needed by many marine organisms, such as corals and shellfish, to produce their skeletons, shells and other hard structures," it said.
On some projections, levels of acidification in 80 percent of Arctic seas would be corrosive to clams that are vital to the food web by 2060, it said.
And "coral reefs may be dissolving globally," it said, if atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide were to rise to 550 parts per million (ppm) from a current 387 ppm. Corals are home to many species of fish.
"These changes in ocean chemistry are irreversible for many thousands of years, and the biological consequences could last much longer," it said.
The warning was issued by the Inter-Academy Panel, representing science academies of countries from Albania to Zimbabwe and including those of Australia, Britain, France, Japan and the United States.
UNDERWATER CATASTROPHE
Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society, the British science academy, said there may be an "underwater catastrophe."
"The effects will be seen worldwide, threatening food security, reducing coastal protection and damaging the local economies that may be least able to tolerate it," he said.
The academies' statement said that, if current rates of carbon emissions continue until 2050, computer models indicate that "the oceans will be more acidic than they have been for tens of millions of years."
It also urged actions to reduce other pressures on the oceans, such as pollution and over-fishing.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
what's bugging you, earthman...is it that your next?
A giant flower beetle with implanted electrodes and a radio receiver on its back can be wirelessly controlled, according to research presented this week. Scientists at the University of California developed a tiny rig that receives control signals from a nearby computer. Electrical signals delivered via the electrodes command the insect to take off, turn left or right, or hover in midflight. The research, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), could one day be used for surveillance purposes or for search-and-rescue missions.
Beetles and other flying insects are masters of flight control, integrating sensory feedback from the visual system and other senses to navigate and maintain stable flight, all the while using little energy. Rather than trying to re-create these systems from scratch, Michel Maharbiz and his colleagues aim to take advantage of the beetle's natural abilities by melding insect and machine. His group has previously created cyborg beetles, including ones that have been implanted with electronic components as pupae. But the current research, presented at the IEEE MEMS in Italy, is the first demonstration of a wireless beetle system.
The beetle's payload consists of an off-the-shelf microprocessor, a radio receiver, and a battery attached to a custom-printed circuit board, along with six electrodes implanted into the animals' optic lobes and flight muscles. Flight commands are wirelessly sent to the beetle via a radio-frequency transmitter that's controlled by a nearby laptop. Oscillating electrical pulses delivered to the beetle's optic lobes trigger takeoff, while a single short pulse ceases flight. Signals sent to the left or right basilar flight muscles make the animal turn right or left, respectively.
Most previous research in controlling insect flight has focused on moths. But beetles have certain advantages. The giant flower beetle's size--it ranges in weight from four to ten grams and is four to eight centimeters long--means that it can carry relatively heavy payloads. To be used for search-and-rescue missions, for example, the insect would need to carry a small camera and heat sensor.
In addition, the beetle's flight can be controlled relatively simply. A single signal sent to the wing muscles triggers the action, and the beetle takes care of the rest. "That allows the normal function to control the flapping of the wings," says Jay Keasling, who was not involved in the beetle research but who collaborates with Maharbiz. Minimal signaling conserves the battery, extending the life of the implant. Moths, on the other hand, require a stream of electrical signals in order to keep flying.
The research has been driven in large part by advances in the microelectronics industry, with miniaturization of microprocessors and batteries.
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22039/?nlid=1733&a=f
Beetles and other flying insects are masters of flight control, integrating sensory feedback from the visual system and other senses to navigate and maintain stable flight, all the while using little energy. Rather than trying to re-create these systems from scratch, Michel Maharbiz and his colleagues aim to take advantage of the beetle's natural abilities by melding insect and machine. His group has previously created cyborg beetles, including ones that have been implanted with electronic components as pupae. But the current research, presented at the IEEE MEMS in Italy, is the first demonstration of a wireless beetle system.
The beetle's payload consists of an off-the-shelf microprocessor, a radio receiver, and a battery attached to a custom-printed circuit board, along with six electrodes implanted into the animals' optic lobes and flight muscles. Flight commands are wirelessly sent to the beetle via a radio-frequency transmitter that's controlled by a nearby laptop. Oscillating electrical pulses delivered to the beetle's optic lobes trigger takeoff, while a single short pulse ceases flight. Signals sent to the left or right basilar flight muscles make the animal turn right or left, respectively.
Most previous research in controlling insect flight has focused on moths. But beetles have certain advantages. The giant flower beetle's size--it ranges in weight from four to ten grams and is four to eight centimeters long--means that it can carry relatively heavy payloads. To be used for search-and-rescue missions, for example, the insect would need to carry a small camera and heat sensor.
In addition, the beetle's flight can be controlled relatively simply. A single signal sent to the wing muscles triggers the action, and the beetle takes care of the rest. "That allows the normal function to control the flapping of the wings," says Jay Keasling, who was not involved in the beetle research but who collaborates with Maharbiz. Minimal signaling conserves the battery, extending the life of the implant. Moths, on the other hand, require a stream of electrical signals in order to keep flying.
The research has been driven in large part by advances in the microelectronics industry, with miniaturization of microprocessors and batteries.
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22039/?nlid=1733&a=f
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Americans think Climate change is *BS*.. right! No, thats completely wrong actually...
(Media-Newswire.com) - New Haven, Conn. — Americans fall into six distinct groups regarding their climate change beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors, according to a new report, “Global Warming’s Six Americas,” by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities. The researchers, who surveyed 2,129 adult Americans in the fall of 2008, found that these “six Americas” include:
The Alarmed, ( 18 percent of the population ) are most convinced that global warming is happening, caused by humans, and a serious and urgent threat.
The Concerned ( 33 percent ) believe global warming is a serious problem and support an active national response, but are less personally involved and have taken fewer actions than the Alarmed.
The Cautious ( 19 percent ) believe global warming is a problem, but are less certain it is happening. They neither view it as a personal threat nor feel a sense of urgency about it.
The Disengaged ( 12 percent ) do not know much about global warming or whether it is happening and have not thought much about the issue.
The Doubtful ( 11 percent ) are not sure whether global warming is happening, but believe that, if it is, it is caused by natural environmental changes and is a distant threat.
The Dismissive ( 7 percent ) are actively engaged in the issue, but believe that global warming is not happening and does not warrant a national response.
“When we talk about ‘the American public’ and its views on global warming, that’s a misnomer,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change and a co-author of the report. “There is no single American voice on this issue.”
However, the researchers found that the groups sometimes actually behave in similar ways, albeit for different reasons, said Leiserowitz. For instance, all six support actions that save them money, with the Dismissive just as likely to have made energy efficiency improvements to their homes as the Alarmed. Likewise, all six groups support rebates for the purchase of solar panels and fuel-efficient cars, including the Dismissive.
“Too many climate change education and awareness campaigns have been like throwing darts in a dark room,” said Leiserowitz. “Climate change is ultimately a human problem. If we want to constructively engage Americans in the solutions, we have to first know our audience.”
The full report can be found at http://environment.yale.edu/uploads/6Americas2009.pdf
The study was conducted by the Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. It was funded by the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy; the Betsy and Jesse Fink Foundation; the Surdna Foundation; the 11th Hour Project; the Pacific Foundation; and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
PRESS CONTACT: Suzanne Taylor Muzzin 203-432-8555
http://media-newswire.com/release_1091892.html
The Alarmed, ( 18 percent of the population ) are most convinced that global warming is happening, caused by humans, and a serious and urgent threat.
The Concerned ( 33 percent ) believe global warming is a serious problem and support an active national response, but are less personally involved and have taken fewer actions than the Alarmed.
The Cautious ( 19 percent ) believe global warming is a problem, but are less certain it is happening. They neither view it as a personal threat nor feel a sense of urgency about it.
The Disengaged ( 12 percent ) do not know much about global warming or whether it is happening and have not thought much about the issue.
The Doubtful ( 11 percent ) are not sure whether global warming is happening, but believe that, if it is, it is caused by natural environmental changes and is a distant threat.
The Dismissive ( 7 percent ) are actively engaged in the issue, but believe that global warming is not happening and does not warrant a national response.
“When we talk about ‘the American public’ and its views on global warming, that’s a misnomer,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change and a co-author of the report. “There is no single American voice on this issue.”
However, the researchers found that the groups sometimes actually behave in similar ways, albeit for different reasons, said Leiserowitz. For instance, all six support actions that save them money, with the Dismissive just as likely to have made energy efficiency improvements to their homes as the Alarmed. Likewise, all six groups support rebates for the purchase of solar panels and fuel-efficient cars, including the Dismissive.
“Too many climate change education and awareness campaigns have been like throwing darts in a dark room,” said Leiserowitz. “Climate change is ultimately a human problem. If we want to constructively engage Americans in the solutions, we have to first know our audience.”
The full report can be found at http://environment.yale.edu/uploads/6Americas2009.pdf
The study was conducted by the Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. It was funded by the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy; the Betsy and Jesse Fink Foundation; the Surdna Foundation; the 11th Hour Project; the Pacific Foundation; and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
PRESS CONTACT: Suzanne Taylor Muzzin 203-432-8555
http://media-newswire.com/release_1091892.html
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Civilization's Cost: The Decline and Fall of Human Health
Civilization's Cost: The Decline and Fall of Human Health
Ann Gibbons
AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGISTS, 31 MARCH-4 APRIL 2009, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
When humans were freed from searching for food from dawn to dusk, they finally had time to build cities, create art, and even muse about the gods. Agriculture and cities made human life better, right? Wrong, say archaeologists who presented stunning new evidence that most people's health deteriorated over the past 3000 years. "We document a general decline in health across Europe and the Mediterranean," says bioarchaeologist Clark Spencer Larsen of Ohio State University in Columbus. He's a coinvestigator of the European Global History of Health Project, an ambitious new effort to study the health of Europeans during the past 10,000 years.
Most bioarchaeology studies tend to tell the tale of illness and death of people from a single site, such as a burial pit for plague victims or an ancient cemetery. Larsen's project is one of the first—and the largest—to try to reveal broad trends by assembling standardized data from large samples. In a series of posters, the team presented the first analysis of data on 11,000 individuals who lived from 3000 years ago until 200 years ago throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. "This is a real tour de force," says bioarchaeologist George Armelagos of Emory University in Atlanta, after reviewing the posters.
The project has taken 8 years and $1.2 million to organize so far. The goal was to pool 72 researchers' data on standardized indicators of health from skeletal remains, including stature, dental health, degenerative joint disease, anemia, trauma, and the isotopic signatures of what they ate, says project leader Richard Steckel of Ohio State. They also gathered data on settlement size, latitude, and socioeconomic and subsistence patterns so that they could compare rich and poor, urban and rural, farmers and hunter-gatherers.
They found that the health of many Europeans began to worsen markedly about 3000 years ago, after agriculture became widely adopted in Europe and during the rise of the Greek and Roman civilizations. They document shrinking stature and growing numbers of skeletal lesions from leprosy and tuberculosis, caused by living close to livestock and other humans in settlements where waste accumulated. The numbers of dental hypoplasias and cavities also increased as people switched to a grain-based diet with fewer nutrients and more sugars.
The so-called Dark Ages were indeed grim for many people who suffered from more cavities, tooth loss, rickets, scurvy, and bone infections than had their ancestors living in hunter-gatherer cultures. People became shorter over time, with males shrinking from an average of 173 centimeters in 400 B.C.E., for example, to 166 centimeters in the 17th century—a sure sign that children who were not members of the elite were eating less nutritious food or suffering from disease.
Why would people want to settle in towns or cities if it made them sick? One answer is that settlers suffered less bone trauma than nomadic hunter-gatherers, suggesting to Steckel that they might have felt safer in villages and, later, towns where an emerging elite punished violent behavior—but also controlled access to food.
The social and political inequities in urban centers meant that for nonelites, moving into cities was "almost a death sentence" for centuries, notes Armelagos. In the Middle Ages, people in the countryside were generally taller than people in cities.
After a long, slow decline through the Middle Ages, health began to improve in the mid-19th century. Stature increased, probably because of several factors: The little Ice Age ended and food production rose, and better trade networks, sanitation, and medicine developed, says Steckel. But take heed: Overall health and stature in the United States has been declining slightly since the 1950s, possibly because obese Americans eat a poor-quality diet, not unlike early farmers whose diet was less diverse and nutritious than that of hunter-gatherers. By understanding how disease and malnutrition spread in the past, researchers hope to apply those lessons in the future. "Our goal is to understand the health context for what we have today," says Larsen.
Ann Gibbons
AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGISTS, 31 MARCH-4 APRIL 2009, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
When humans were freed from searching for food from dawn to dusk, they finally had time to build cities, create art, and even muse about the gods. Agriculture and cities made human life better, right? Wrong, say archaeologists who presented stunning new evidence that most people's health deteriorated over the past 3000 years. "We document a general decline in health across Europe and the Mediterranean," says bioarchaeologist Clark Spencer Larsen of Ohio State University in Columbus. He's a coinvestigator of the European Global History of Health Project, an ambitious new effort to study the health of Europeans during the past 10,000 years.
Most bioarchaeology studies tend to tell the tale of illness and death of people from a single site, such as a burial pit for plague victims or an ancient cemetery. Larsen's project is one of the first—and the largest—to try to reveal broad trends by assembling standardized data from large samples. In a series of posters, the team presented the first analysis of data on 11,000 individuals who lived from 3000 years ago until 200 years ago throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. "This is a real tour de force," says bioarchaeologist George Armelagos of Emory University in Atlanta, after reviewing the posters.
The project has taken 8 years and $1.2 million to organize so far. The goal was to pool 72 researchers' data on standardized indicators of health from skeletal remains, including stature, dental health, degenerative joint disease, anemia, trauma, and the isotopic signatures of what they ate, says project leader Richard Steckel of Ohio State. They also gathered data on settlement size, latitude, and socioeconomic and subsistence patterns so that they could compare rich and poor, urban and rural, farmers and hunter-gatherers.
They found that the health of many Europeans began to worsen markedly about 3000 years ago, after agriculture became widely adopted in Europe and during the rise of the Greek and Roman civilizations. They document shrinking stature and growing numbers of skeletal lesions from leprosy and tuberculosis, caused by living close to livestock and other humans in settlements where waste accumulated. The numbers of dental hypoplasias and cavities also increased as people switched to a grain-based diet with fewer nutrients and more sugars.
The so-called Dark Ages were indeed grim for many people who suffered from more cavities, tooth loss, rickets, scurvy, and bone infections than had their ancestors living in hunter-gatherer cultures. People became shorter over time, with males shrinking from an average of 173 centimeters in 400 B.C.E., for example, to 166 centimeters in the 17th century—a sure sign that children who were not members of the elite were eating less nutritious food or suffering from disease.
Why would people want to settle in towns or cities if it made them sick? One answer is that settlers suffered less bone trauma than nomadic hunter-gatherers, suggesting to Steckel that they might have felt safer in villages and, later, towns where an emerging elite punished violent behavior—but also controlled access to food.
The social and political inequities in urban centers meant that for nonelites, moving into cities was "almost a death sentence" for centuries, notes Armelagos. In the Middle Ages, people in the countryside were generally taller than people in cities.
After a long, slow decline through the Middle Ages, health began to improve in the mid-19th century. Stature increased, probably because of several factors: The little Ice Age ended and food production rose, and better trade networks, sanitation, and medicine developed, says Steckel. But take heed: Overall health and stature in the United States has been declining slightly since the 1950s, possibly because obese Americans eat a poor-quality diet, not unlike early farmers whose diet was less diverse and nutritious than that of hunter-gatherers. By understanding how disease and malnutrition spread in the past, researchers hope to apply those lessons in the future. "Our goal is to understand the health context for what we have today," says Larsen.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Shooting civilisation in the head ~ The clathrate gun hypothesis
The clathrate gun hypothesis suggests that the mass release of methane from methane clathrates on the ocean floor may have triggered catastrophic global warming, in turn causing mass extinction, at least once in the Earth's ancient past. Methane clathrates refer to methane gas trapped within water ice, discovered deep underneath ocean sediments worldwide. Methane clathrate is sometimes also referred to as methane hydrate or methane ice. The majority of it is thought to have been formed by microbes reducing (deoxidizing) carbon dioxide, converting it to methane.
Methane clathrates are not found all over the ocean floor — only on the continental shelves, the primary area of the ocean hospitable to life, and even there, found only in low concentrations, about 1% by volume. However, compressed in a cage of ice, the methane has a relatively high density. One liter of methane clathrate can contain about 168 liters of methane gas. Furthermore, methane gas is a greenhouse gas about 62 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. The clathrate gun hypothesis depends on the extremity of this warming effect.
The clathrate gun hypothesis begins with some external trigger, like the creation of a large igneous province or initial warming caused by sulfides released in a supervolcano eruption. The former is believed to have initiated the Permian-Triassic extinction, the greatest mass extinction in history, which killed off 99% of all species on Earth. As approximately a million cubic kilometers of lava was released over the course of a million years, from a massive volcano complex near the North Pole, huge amounts of lava crept out from the volcano and onto the continental shelves, melting the methane clathrates and releasing methane.
Although the methane only hangs around in the Earth's atmosphere for about 12 years, its release would have started a feedback effect, warming the Earth and making it more likely for further methane clathrates to melt. Under normal conditions, ice melts at 0 °C (32 °F), but the methane clathrates, some buried under more than a kilometer of ocean sediment, is under enough pressure to stay solid at temperatures up to 18 °C (64 °F). But if the temperature exceeds 18 °C, the methane clathrates are released — possibly in gigaton quantities. This would be devastating to all life on the planet.
The "gun" part of the clathrate gun hypothesis refers to both the fact that once it gets going, it can't be stopped, and its lethal effects. Once the planet starts warming, circulation in the oceans would decrease, causing large areas of ocean to turn anoxic, killing off life in huge numbers. Substantial data from the Permian-Triassic boundary has been found to synch well with the clathrate gun hypothesis, and now it is the foremost explanation for the cause of the Permian-Triassic mass extinction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_methane_release
Methane clathrates are not found all over the ocean floor — only on the continental shelves, the primary area of the ocean hospitable to life, and even there, found only in low concentrations, about 1% by volume. However, compressed in a cage of ice, the methane has a relatively high density. One liter of methane clathrate can contain about 168 liters of methane gas. Furthermore, methane gas is a greenhouse gas about 62 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. The clathrate gun hypothesis depends on the extremity of this warming effect.
The clathrate gun hypothesis begins with some external trigger, like the creation of a large igneous province or initial warming caused by sulfides released in a supervolcano eruption. The former is believed to have initiated the Permian-Triassic extinction, the greatest mass extinction in history, which killed off 99% of all species on Earth. As approximately a million cubic kilometers of lava was released over the course of a million years, from a massive volcano complex near the North Pole, huge amounts of lava crept out from the volcano and onto the continental shelves, melting the methane clathrates and releasing methane.
Although the methane only hangs around in the Earth's atmosphere for about 12 years, its release would have started a feedback effect, warming the Earth and making it more likely for further methane clathrates to melt. Under normal conditions, ice melts at 0 °C (32 °F), but the methane clathrates, some buried under more than a kilometer of ocean sediment, is under enough pressure to stay solid at temperatures up to 18 °C (64 °F). But if the temperature exceeds 18 °C, the methane clathrates are released — possibly in gigaton quantities. This would be devastating to all life on the planet.
The "gun" part of the clathrate gun hypothesis refers to both the fact that once it gets going, it can't be stopped, and its lethal effects. Once the planet starts warming, circulation in the oceans would decrease, causing large areas of ocean to turn anoxic, killing off life in huge numbers. Substantial data from the Permian-Triassic boundary has been found to synch well with the clathrate gun hypothesis, and now it is the foremost explanation for the cause of the Permian-Triassic mass extinction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_methane_release
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Why people beleive Rubbish!
Souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, intelligent designers, government conspirators, and all manner of invisible agents with power and intention are believed to haunt our world and control our lives. Why?
The answer has two parts, starting with the concept of “patternicity,” which I defined in my December 2008 column as the human tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. Consider the face on Mars, the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich, satanic messages in rock music. Of course, some patterns are real. Finding predictive patterns
in changing weather, fruiting trees, migrating prey animals and hungry predators was central to the survival of Paleolithic hominids.
The problem is that we did not evolve a baloney-detection device in our brains to discriminate between true and false patterns. So we make two types of errors: a type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it is not; a type II error, or false negative, is not believing a pattern is real when it is. If you believe that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is just the wind (a type I error), you are more likely to survive than if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind when it is a dangerous predator (a type II error). Because the cost of making a type I error is less than the cost of making a type II error and because there is no time for careful deliberation between patternicities in the split-second world of predator-prey interactions, natural selection would have favored those animals most likely to assume that all patterns are real.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=skeptic-agenticity
The answer has two parts, starting with the concept of “patternicity,” which I defined in my December 2008 column as the human tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. Consider the face on Mars, the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich, satanic messages in rock music. Of course, some patterns are real. Finding predictive patterns
in changing weather, fruiting trees, migrating prey animals and hungry predators was central to the survival of Paleolithic hominids.
The problem is that we did not evolve a baloney-detection device in our brains to discriminate between true and false patterns. So we make two types of errors: a type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it is not; a type II error, or false negative, is not believing a pattern is real when it is. If you believe that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is just the wind (a type I error), you are more likely to survive than if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind when it is a dangerous predator (a type II error). Because the cost of making a type I error is less than the cost of making a type II error and because there is no time for careful deliberation between patternicities in the split-second world of predator-prey interactions, natural selection would have favored those animals most likely to assume that all patterns are real.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=skeptic-agenticity
Saturday, May 9, 2009
The next big web thingy ~ Wolfram Alpha
A web tool that "could be as important as Google", according to some experts, has been shown off to the public.
Wolfram Alpha is the brainchild of British-born physicist Stephen Wolfram.
The free program aims to answer questions directly, rather than display web pages in response to a query like a search engine.
The "computational knowledge engine", as the technology is known, will be available to the public from the middle of May this year.
"Our goal is to make expert knowledge accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime," said Dr Wolfram at the demonstration at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
The tool computes many of the answers "on the fly" by grabbing raw data from public and licensed databases, along with live feeds such as share prices and weather information.
People can use the system to look up simple facts - such as the height of Mount Everest - or crunch several data sets together to produce new results, such as a country's GDP.
Other functions solve complex mathematical equations, plot scientific figures or chart natural events.
"Like interacting with an expert, it will understand what you're talking about, do the computation, and then present you with the results," said Dr Wolfram.
As a result, much of the data is scientific, although there is also limited cultural information about pop stars and films.
Dr Wolfram said the "trillions of pieces of data" were chosen and managed by a team of "experts" at Wolfram Research, who also massage the information to make sure it can be read and displayed by the system.
Nova Spivak, founder of the web tool Twine, has described Alpha as having the potential to be as important to the web as Google.
Developers say Wolfram Alpha can simplify language to remove 'linguistic fluff'
"Wolfram Alpha is like plugging into a vast electronic brain," he wrote earlier this year. "It computes answers - it doesn't merely look them up in a big database."
Learning language
The new tool uses a technique known as natural language processing to return answers.
This allows users to ask questions of the tool using normal, spoken language rather than specific search terms.
For example, a relatively simple search, such as "who was the president of Brazil in 1923?", will return the answer "Artur da Silva Bernardes".
This technique has long been the holy grail of computer scientists who aim to allow people to interact with computers in an instinctive way.
Dr Wolfram said that Alpha has solved many of the problems of interpreting people's questions.
"We thought there would be a huge amount of ambiguity in search terms, but it turns out not to be the case," he said.
In addition, he said, the system had got "pretty good at removing linguistic fluff", the kinds of words that are not necessary for the system to find and compute the relevant data.
Searching for 'Blair Bush' could give a different result...
Simple text
However, he said, most users tend to stop using structured sentences fairly quickly.
"Pretty soon they get lazy, and they say 'I don't need all those extra words'."
Instead they tended to use "concepts" similar to how most people use search engines today.
But Dr Boris Katz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a natural language expert, said he was "disappointed" by Dr Wolfram's "dismissal of English syntax as 'fluff'''.
For example, he said, suppose someone asks ''When did Barack Obama visit Nicolas Sarkozy?"
"Here, understanding the sentence structure is important if you want to be able to distinguish cases where it was Barack Obama who visited Nicolas from cases where it was Nicolas Sarkozy who visited Barack Obama," he said.
...than searching for 'Bush Blair'
"I believe he is misguided in treating language as a nuisance instead of trying to understand the way it organises concepts into structures that require understanding and harnessing."
Dr Katz is the head of the Start project, a natural language processing tool that claims to be "the world's first web-based question answering system". It has been on the web since December 1993.
Like Alpha, the system searches a series of organised databases to return relevant answers to search queries. However, it only uses public databases and runs on a much smaller scale than Alpha.
Dr Katz said it answers "millions of questions from hundreds of thousands of users from around the world" on topics as diverse as places, movies, people and dictionary definitions.
It is also able to compute answers from several sources in a similar way to Alpha.
Web companies have also harnessed natural language processing.
For example, Powerset uses technology developed at the Palo Alto Research Center, the former research laboratories of Xerox.
The company is attempting to build a similar search engine "that reads and understands every sentence on the Web".
In May 2008, the company released a tool that allowed people to search parts of Wikipedia. Two months later, it was acquired by Microsoft.
Dr Wolfram said he has been working on Alpha for several years. However, he imagines that it will continue to evolve.
"In a sense we are at the beginning," he said.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8026331.stm
Wolfram Alpha is the brainchild of British-born physicist Stephen Wolfram.
The free program aims to answer questions directly, rather than display web pages in response to a query like a search engine.
The "computational knowledge engine", as the technology is known, will be available to the public from the middle of May this year.
"Our goal is to make expert knowledge accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime," said Dr Wolfram at the demonstration at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
The tool computes many of the answers "on the fly" by grabbing raw data from public and licensed databases, along with live feeds such as share prices and weather information.
People can use the system to look up simple facts - such as the height of Mount Everest - or crunch several data sets together to produce new results, such as a country's GDP.
Other functions solve complex mathematical equations, plot scientific figures or chart natural events.
"Like interacting with an expert, it will understand what you're talking about, do the computation, and then present you with the results," said Dr Wolfram.
As a result, much of the data is scientific, although there is also limited cultural information about pop stars and films.
Dr Wolfram said the "trillions of pieces of data" were chosen and managed by a team of "experts" at Wolfram Research, who also massage the information to make sure it can be read and displayed by the system.
Nova Spivak, founder of the web tool Twine, has described Alpha as having the potential to be as important to the web as Google.
Developers say Wolfram Alpha can simplify language to remove 'linguistic fluff'
"Wolfram Alpha is like plugging into a vast electronic brain," he wrote earlier this year. "It computes answers - it doesn't merely look them up in a big database."
Learning language
The new tool uses a technique known as natural language processing to return answers.
This allows users to ask questions of the tool using normal, spoken language rather than specific search terms.
For example, a relatively simple search, such as "who was the president of Brazil in 1923?", will return the answer "Artur da Silva Bernardes".
This technique has long been the holy grail of computer scientists who aim to allow people to interact with computers in an instinctive way.
Dr Wolfram said that Alpha has solved many of the problems of interpreting people's questions.
"We thought there would be a huge amount of ambiguity in search terms, but it turns out not to be the case," he said.
In addition, he said, the system had got "pretty good at removing linguistic fluff", the kinds of words that are not necessary for the system to find and compute the relevant data.
Searching for 'Blair Bush' could give a different result...
Simple text
However, he said, most users tend to stop using structured sentences fairly quickly.
"Pretty soon they get lazy, and they say 'I don't need all those extra words'."
Instead they tended to use "concepts" similar to how most people use search engines today.
But Dr Boris Katz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a natural language expert, said he was "disappointed" by Dr Wolfram's "dismissal of English syntax as 'fluff'''.
For example, he said, suppose someone asks ''When did Barack Obama visit Nicolas Sarkozy?"
"Here, understanding the sentence structure is important if you want to be able to distinguish cases where it was Barack Obama who visited Nicolas from cases where it was Nicolas Sarkozy who visited Barack Obama," he said.
...than searching for 'Bush Blair'
"I believe he is misguided in treating language as a nuisance instead of trying to understand the way it organises concepts into structures that require understanding and harnessing."
Dr Katz is the head of the Start project, a natural language processing tool that claims to be "the world's first web-based question answering system". It has been on the web since December 1993.
Like Alpha, the system searches a series of organised databases to return relevant answers to search queries. However, it only uses public databases and runs on a much smaller scale than Alpha.
Dr Katz said it answers "millions of questions from hundreds of thousands of users from around the world" on topics as diverse as places, movies, people and dictionary definitions.
It is also able to compute answers from several sources in a similar way to Alpha.
Web companies have also harnessed natural language processing.
For example, Powerset uses technology developed at the Palo Alto Research Center, the former research laboratories of Xerox.
The company is attempting to build a similar search engine "that reads and understands every sentence on the Web".
In May 2008, the company released a tool that allowed people to search parts of Wikipedia. Two months later, it was acquired by Microsoft.
Dr Wolfram said he has been working on Alpha for several years. However, he imagines that it will continue to evolve.
"In a sense we are at the beginning," he said.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8026331.stm
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
The Buddha and the laser beam: the science of attention
Imagine that you have ditched your laptop and turned off your smartphone. You are beyond the reach of YouTube, Facebook, e-mail, text messages. You are in a Twitter-free zone, sitting in a taxicab with a copy of “Rapt,” a guide by Winifred Gallagher to the science of paying attention.
The book’s theme, which Ms. Gallagher chose after she learned she had an especially nasty form of cancer, is borrowed from the psychologist William James: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” You can lead a miserable life by obsessing on problems. You can drive yourself crazy trying to multitask and answer every e-mail message instantly.
Or you can recognize your brain’s finite capacity for processing information, accentuate the positive and achieve the satisfactions of what Ms. Gallagher calls the focused life. It can sound wonderfully appealing, except that as you sit in the cab reading about the science of paying attention, you realize that ... you’re not paying attention to a word on the page.
The taxi’s television, which can’t be turned off, is showing a commercial of a guy in a taxi working on a laptop — and as long as he’s jabbering about how his new wireless card has made him so productive during his cab ride, you can’t do anything productive during yours.
Why can’t you concentrate on anything except your desire to shut him up? And even if you flee the cab, is there any realistic refuge anymore from the Age of Distraction?
I put these questions to Ms. Gallagher and to one of the experts in her book, Robert Desimone, a neuroscientist at M.I.T. who has been doing experiments somewhat similar to my taxicab TV experience. He has been tracking the brain waves of macaque monkeys and humans as they stare at video screens looking for certain flashing patterns.
When something bright or novel flashes, it tends to automatically win the competition for the brain’s attention, but that involuntary bottom-up impulse can be voluntarily overridden through a top-down process that Dr. Desimone calls “biased competition.” He and colleagues have found that neurons in the prefrontal cortex — the brain’s planning center — start oscillating in unison and send signals directing the visual cortex to heed something else.
These oscillations, called gamma waves, are created by neurons’ firing on and off at the same time — a feat of neural coordination a bit like getting strangers in one section of a stadium to start clapping in unison, thereby sending a signal that induces people on the other side of the stadium to clap along. But these signals can have trouble getting through in a noisy environment.
“It takes a lot of your prefrontal brain power to force yourself not to process a strong input like a television commercial,” said Dr. Desimone, the director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at M.I.T. “If you’re trying to read a book at the same time, you may not have the resources left to focus on the words.”
Now that neuroscientists have identified the brain’s synchronizing mechanism, they’ve started work on therapies to strengthen attention. In the current issue of Nature, researchers from M.I.T., Penn and Stanford report that they directly induced gamma waves in mice by shining pulses of laser light through tiny optical fibers onto genetically engineered neurons. In the current issue of Neuron, Dr. Desimone and colleagues report progress in using this “optogenetic” technique in monkeys.
Ultimately, Dr. Desimone said, it may be possible to improve your attention by using pulses of light to directly synchronize your neurons, a form of direct therapy that could help people with schizophrenia and attention-deficit problems (and might have fewer side effects than drugs). If it could be done with low-wavelength light that penetrates the skull, you could simply put on (or take off) a tiny wirelessly controlled device that would be a bit like a hearing aid.
In the nearer future, neuroscientists might also help you focus by observing your brain activity and providing biofeedback as you practice strengthening your concentration. Researchers have already observed higher levels of synchrony in the brains of people who regularly meditate.
Ms. Gallagher advocates meditation to increase your focus, but she says there are also simpler ways to put the lessons of attention researchers to use. Once she learned how hard it was for the brain to avoid paying attention to sounds, particularly other people’s voices, she began carrying ear plugs with her. When you’re trapped in a noisy subway car or a taxi with a TV that won’t turn off, she says you have to build your own “stimulus shelter.”
She recommends starting your work day concentrating on your most important task for 90 minutes. At that point your prefrontal cortex probably needs a rest, and you can answer e-mail, return phone calls and sip caffeine (which does help attention) before focusing again. But until that first break, don’t get distracted by anything else, because it can take the brain 20 minutes to do the equivalent of rebooting after an interruption. (For more advice, go to nytimes.com/tierneylab.)
“Multitasking is a myth,” Ms. Gallagher said. “You cannot do two things at once. The mechanism of attention is selection: it’s either this or it’s that.” She points to calculations that the typical person’s brain can process 173 billion bits of information over the course of a lifetime.
“People don’t understand that attention is a finite resource, like money,” she said. “Do you want to invest your cognitive cash on endless Twittering or Net surfing or couch potatoing? You’re constantly making choices, and your choices determine your experience, just as William James said.”
During her cancer treatment several years ago, Ms. Gallagher said, she managed to remain relatively cheerful by keeping in mind James’s mantra as well as a line from Milton: “The mind is its own place, and in itself/ Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n.”
“When I woke up in the morning,” Ms. Gallagher said, “I’d ask myself: Do you want to lie here paying attention to the very good chance you’ll die and leave your children motherless, or do you want to get up and wash your face and pay attention to your work and your family and your friends? Hell or heaven — it’s your choice.”
The book’s theme, which Ms. Gallagher chose after she learned she had an especially nasty form of cancer, is borrowed from the psychologist William James: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” You can lead a miserable life by obsessing on problems. You can drive yourself crazy trying to multitask and answer every e-mail message instantly.
Or you can recognize your brain’s finite capacity for processing information, accentuate the positive and achieve the satisfactions of what Ms. Gallagher calls the focused life. It can sound wonderfully appealing, except that as you sit in the cab reading about the science of paying attention, you realize that ... you’re not paying attention to a word on the page.
The taxi’s television, which can’t be turned off, is showing a commercial of a guy in a taxi working on a laptop — and as long as he’s jabbering about how his new wireless card has made him so productive during his cab ride, you can’t do anything productive during yours.
Why can’t you concentrate on anything except your desire to shut him up? And even if you flee the cab, is there any realistic refuge anymore from the Age of Distraction?
I put these questions to Ms. Gallagher and to one of the experts in her book, Robert Desimone, a neuroscientist at M.I.T. who has been doing experiments somewhat similar to my taxicab TV experience. He has been tracking the brain waves of macaque monkeys and humans as they stare at video screens looking for certain flashing patterns.
When something bright or novel flashes, it tends to automatically win the competition for the brain’s attention, but that involuntary bottom-up impulse can be voluntarily overridden through a top-down process that Dr. Desimone calls “biased competition.” He and colleagues have found that neurons in the prefrontal cortex — the brain’s planning center — start oscillating in unison and send signals directing the visual cortex to heed something else.
These oscillations, called gamma waves, are created by neurons’ firing on and off at the same time — a feat of neural coordination a bit like getting strangers in one section of a stadium to start clapping in unison, thereby sending a signal that induces people on the other side of the stadium to clap along. But these signals can have trouble getting through in a noisy environment.
“It takes a lot of your prefrontal brain power to force yourself not to process a strong input like a television commercial,” said Dr. Desimone, the director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at M.I.T. “If you’re trying to read a book at the same time, you may not have the resources left to focus on the words.”
Now that neuroscientists have identified the brain’s synchronizing mechanism, they’ve started work on therapies to strengthen attention. In the current issue of Nature, researchers from M.I.T., Penn and Stanford report that they directly induced gamma waves in mice by shining pulses of laser light through tiny optical fibers onto genetically engineered neurons. In the current issue of Neuron, Dr. Desimone and colleagues report progress in using this “optogenetic” technique in monkeys.
Ultimately, Dr. Desimone said, it may be possible to improve your attention by using pulses of light to directly synchronize your neurons, a form of direct therapy that could help people with schizophrenia and attention-deficit problems (and might have fewer side effects than drugs). If it could be done with low-wavelength light that penetrates the skull, you could simply put on (or take off) a tiny wirelessly controlled device that would be a bit like a hearing aid.
In the nearer future, neuroscientists might also help you focus by observing your brain activity and providing biofeedback as you practice strengthening your concentration. Researchers have already observed higher levels of synchrony in the brains of people who regularly meditate.
Ms. Gallagher advocates meditation to increase your focus, but she says there are also simpler ways to put the lessons of attention researchers to use. Once she learned how hard it was for the brain to avoid paying attention to sounds, particularly other people’s voices, she began carrying ear plugs with her. When you’re trapped in a noisy subway car or a taxi with a TV that won’t turn off, she says you have to build your own “stimulus shelter.”
She recommends starting your work day concentrating on your most important task for 90 minutes. At that point your prefrontal cortex probably needs a rest, and you can answer e-mail, return phone calls and sip caffeine (which does help attention) before focusing again. But until that first break, don’t get distracted by anything else, because it can take the brain 20 minutes to do the equivalent of rebooting after an interruption. (For more advice, go to nytimes.com/tierneylab.)
“Multitasking is a myth,” Ms. Gallagher said. “You cannot do two things at once. The mechanism of attention is selection: it’s either this or it’s that.” She points to calculations that the typical person’s brain can process 173 billion bits of information over the course of a lifetime.
“People don’t understand that attention is a finite resource, like money,” she said. “Do you want to invest your cognitive cash on endless Twittering or Net surfing or couch potatoing? You’re constantly making choices, and your choices determine your experience, just as William James said.”
During her cancer treatment several years ago, Ms. Gallagher said, she managed to remain relatively cheerful by keeping in mind James’s mantra as well as a line from Milton: “The mind is its own place, and in itself/ Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n.”
“When I woke up in the morning,” Ms. Gallagher said, “I’d ask myself: Do you want to lie here paying attention to the very good chance you’ll die and leave your children motherless, or do you want to get up and wash your face and pay attention to your work and your family and your friends? Hell or heaven — it’s your choice.”
Swine flu broke out in California: CDC
The US disease prevention center claims the newly-spread potentially-fatal strain of swine flu virus may have originated from California.
The Centers for Disease Control and Protection (CDC) said on Saturday that the state preceded Mexico, the alleged source of the virus, in reporting cases of the affliction.
"As we do our investigations here in the US, we may find that there were cases earlier," CDC spokesman, Scott Bryan was quoted by AFP as saying.
As early as March, patients were diagnosed in California with a new type of viral infection resulting from the A(H1N1) -- the new strain of the swine flu virus, H1N1 which is apt to affect humans and pigs and resist antiviral treatment.
The patients had neither been to Mexico nor had they come into contact with pigs.
San Diego County and California County were the first to report sufferers in late March, The Wall Street Journal reported.
12 suspects had also tested positive for a strange strain from December 2005 to January 2009, Bryan added.
About 160 lab-confirmed cases have been reported in 21 US states with one leading to death. Two-thirds of the patients had not had any contact with Mexico.
As the disease crawls along in Europe and Asia after the Americas, Mexican health authorities claim they have been partially successful in stemming the contagion.
Ireland is the latest to report a case of swine flu. Infection with the virus has also been confirmed in Canada (51), Spain (15), Britain (13), Germany (6), New Zealand (4), Israel (3), Costa Rica (2), France (2), Austria (1), Benin (1), Denmark (1), Hong Kong (1), Netherlands (1), South Korea (1) and Switzerland (1).
The World Heath Organization (WHO) is considering raising the pandemic alert level to phase 6 -- the highest level and an indication of a global outbreak of the swine flu.
The Centers for Disease Control and Protection (CDC) said on Saturday that the state preceded Mexico, the alleged source of the virus, in reporting cases of the affliction.
"As we do our investigations here in the US, we may find that there were cases earlier," CDC spokesman, Scott Bryan was quoted by AFP as saying.
As early as March, patients were diagnosed in California with a new type of viral infection resulting from the A(H1N1) -- the new strain of the swine flu virus, H1N1 which is apt to affect humans and pigs and resist antiviral treatment.
The patients had neither been to Mexico nor had they come into contact with pigs.
San Diego County and California County were the first to report sufferers in late March, The Wall Street Journal reported.
12 suspects had also tested positive for a strange strain from December 2005 to January 2009, Bryan added.
About 160 lab-confirmed cases have been reported in 21 US states with one leading to death. Two-thirds of the patients had not had any contact with Mexico.
As the disease crawls along in Europe and Asia after the Americas, Mexican health authorities claim they have been partially successful in stemming the contagion.
Ireland is the latest to report a case of swine flu. Infection with the virus has also been confirmed in Canada (51), Spain (15), Britain (13), Germany (6), New Zealand (4), Israel (3), Costa Rica (2), France (2), Austria (1), Benin (1), Denmark (1), Hong Kong (1), Netherlands (1), South Korea (1) and Switzerland (1).
The World Heath Organization (WHO) is considering raising the pandemic alert level to phase 6 -- the highest level and an indication of a global outbreak of the swine flu.
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