Bruno Unna

Me parece que sería de muy, muy buen gusto escribir correctamente el nombre del comisionado en el título de la transcripción de su discurso de toma de posesión.

That's what I call a stupid way to die! But perhaps it's only natural selection doing its job.

Tom Kelley

Managing Director, IDEO

Dr. Moira Gunn interviews Tom Kelley, author of "The Ten Faces of Innovation -- IDEO's Strategies for Beating the Devil's Advocate. Tom is the managing direcor of IDEO, that innovative design firm known worldwide for its originality.

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Norman Packard

Pop!Tech 2005: It's Alive!

Syhnthetic Biology

What makes something alive and where is the boundary between a machine and a life form? Can a system such as the internet be considered alive, since it is self-maintaining, self-reproducing and evolving? Can a cell that was created from whole cloth in the lab still be considered life?

These questions are aroused in this talk by Norman Packard of ProtoLife, who is creating "synthetic biology" - artificial living cells made of non-living material. ProtoLife is exploring the possibilities to create "designer" life, for example, cells that are programmed to create hydrogen. The goal is make tiny living machines that can be used for medical and other applications.

This talk was from the It's Alive! session at Pop!Tech. The other speaker in this session was Theo Jansen. The question and answer period can be heard at the end of Theo Jansen's talk.

Once again, Julio dragged my attention to something interesting. Thanks, Julio!

This time, it is a series of 6 tests to help a person find out whether his/her brain is male or female.

With some reserves, I find it interesting. My results:

Part 1

Angles

This task tested your ability to identify the angle of a line by matching it with its twin. This is a spatial task, which looks at how you picture space.
Your score: 10 out of 20
Average score for men: 15.1 out of 20
Average score for women: 13.3 out of 20

What does your result suggest?

If you scored 0 - 12: You have more of a female brain. Scientists believe that people with a female brain find it more difficult to judge the slope of a line because they're not wired for spatial tasks. In past studies, 65 per cent of people who scored in this range were women.

If you scored 13 - 17: You found this test neither hard nor easy. This suggests your brain has male and female traits when it comes to spatial ability.

If you scored 18 - 20: You have more of a male brain. On average, men outperform women in this task and those with more mathematical knowledge tend to score quite high as well. In past studies, 60 per cent of the people in this range were men.

Interestingly, men's testosterone levels fluctuate through the seasons and studies have shown that men's scores are lower in the spring, when their testosterone levels are at their lowest.

Do our cave dwelling ancestors offer us any clues about why men and women score differently on this task? Find out more.

Spot the difference

This task tested your ability to identify which objects changed position. You lost points, if you incorrectly identified objects.
Your score: 29%
Average score for men: 39%
Average score for women: 46%

What does your score suggest?

If you scored between 0 - 33%: You may have more of a male brain. Scientists say men tend to under perform in this task. The corpus callosum, the part of the brain that links the right and left hemispheres, is a fifth larger in women. This means women can process visual and other signals at the same time more easily than men. There is also a theory that oestrogen levels in women give them an added advantage in spatial memory.

If you scored between 34 - 66%: You may have a balanced female-male brain.

If you scored between 67 - 100%: Those with a female-type brain generally score in this range. Your ability to remember where objects are may serve as an advantage to you when you're trying to find your way around places. You're more capable of recalling landmarks to get from one place to another.

Part 2

Hands

You said your right thumb was on top when you clasped your hands together.

Right thumb on top: This suggests the left half of your brain is dominant. Many studies have tried to establish whether there is a relationship between handedness and brain dominance. Some scientists believe that if you are left brain dominant, you would be more verbal and analytical.

Left thumb on top: This suggests the right half of your brain is dominant. Some studies theorise that as a right brain dominant person, you may excel in visual, spatial and intuitive processes.

However, these theories are debatable and leave much to be said about the small percentage of people who are ambidextrous.

Part 3

Emotions and Systems

This task looked at whether you prefer to empathise or systemise.
Empathising

Your empathy score is: 7 out of 20
Average score for men: 7.9 out of 20
Average score for women: 10.6 out of 20

What does your result suggest?

Empathisers are better at accurately judging other people's emotions and responding appropriately. If you scored 15 and above, you are very empathic and would be an ideal person to comfort people in a time of crisis. Women in general are better at empathising.

Systemising

Your systemising score is: 17 out of 20
Average score for men: 12.5 out of 20
Average score for women: 8.0 out of 20

What does your result suggest?

Systemisers prefer to investigate how systems work. A system can be a road map, flat pack furniture, or a mathematical equation – anything that follows a set of rules. A score of 15 and above suggests you're good at analysing or building systems. Men in general are better at systemising.

Scientists are keen to learn more about people who score high or low on both tests. They want to find out whether or not empathising and systemising are linked. Is a possible to make yourself more empathic?

Some scientists claim that our empathy and systemising abilities can be traced all the way back to prehistoric times. Find out more.

Eyes

This task tested your ability to judge people's emotions.
Your score: 8 out of 10
Average score for men: 6.6 out of 10
Average score for women: 6.6 out of 10

What does your result suggest?

If you scored 0 - 3: Do you think you're good at judging how another person is feeling? Your score suggests this doesn't come to you quite so naturally.

If you scored 4 - 6: Your result suggests you have a balanced female-male brain and find it neither easy nor difficult to judge people's emotions.

If you scored 7 - 10: Your result suggests you are a good empathiser, sensitive to other people's emotions. Women generally fall into this category.

Professor Baron-Cohen at the University of Cambridge says that people usually perform better than they expect to on this test.

Men often think a person's eyes are sending signals of desire when that's not the case at all.

Part 4

Fingers

We asked you to measure your ring and index fingers. Your ratios came to:
Right Hand: 0.98
Left Hand: 0.98

Average ratio for men: 0.982
Average ratio for women: 0.991

It's thought that your ratio is governed by the amount of testosterone you were exposed to in your mother's womb. The ratio of the length of your index finger to the length of your ring finger is set for life by as early as three months after conception. Even during puberty, when we experience intensive hormonal changes, the ratio stays the same.

Men generally have a ring finger that is longer than their index finger, which gives them a lower ratio than women, whose ring and index fingers are usually of equal length.

Studies have found that men and women with lots of brothers generally have more masculine finger ratios.

Part 5

Faces

This task looked at how you rate the attractiveness of a series of faces. The images you looked at were digitally altered to create slight differences in masculinity.

Your choices suggest you prefer more feminine faces.

Highly masculinised male faces possess more extreme testosterone markers such as a long, broad and lower jaw, as well as more pronounced brow ridges and cheekbones.

Interestingly, women's preferences are said to vary across the menstrual phase. A more masculine face is preferred during the 9 days prior to ovulation, when conception is most likely.

A typical 'attractive' female face possesses features such as a shorter, narrower, lower jaw, fuller lips and larger eyes than an average face.

Part 6

3D shapes

This task tested your ability to mentally rotate 3D shapes.

Your score: 11 out of 12
Average score for men: 8.2 out of 12
Average score for women: 7.1 out of 12

What does your result suggest?

If you scored 0 - 6: Do you find yourself having to physically rotate a map to point in the direction in which you're travelling? This might explain why you scored in the lower range in the 3D shapes test. Twice as many women as men score in this category. Previous studies suggest that those with a female-type brain or with an arts background fall into this range.

If you scored 7 - 9: In past studies, 50 per cent of the people who scored in this range were women and 50 per cent were men.

If you scored 10 - 12: Are you an engineer or do you have a science background? People with these skills tend to score in this range. Past studies have concluded that people in this range have a more male brain.

Nearly a third of men who took this test got full marks, whereas less than 10 per cent of women managed the same. Find out why.

Words

This task looked at your verbal fluency.

Your score: you associated 7 word(s) with grey and you named 7 word(s) that mean happy. We are assuming that all the words you entered are correct.
Average score for men: 11.4 words total
Average score for women: 12.4 words total

What does your result suggest?

If you produced 1 - 5 words: You are more of the strong, silent type with a male brain. You probably find it easier to express yourself in non-verbal ways, preferring action rather than words.

If you produced 6 - 10 words: Most people in this range have a female-type brain.

Women are said to use both sides of the brain when doing verbal tasks while men mainly use their left side. Studies have shown that girls develop vocabulary faster than boys. This difference in brain power is caused by levels of pre-natal testosterone. Find out more .

Ultimatum

This task asked you how you would divide money.

If you had to split £50 with someone, you said you would demand £30

So far on the Sex ID test, men have demanded 51.6% (£25.80) of the pot and women have demanded 51.0% (£25.50), on average.

What does your response suggest?

Sex differences are small in this task. Demanding less than 60% of the pot (ie £30) is more typically female. Demanding more than 65% of the pot (ie £32.50) is more typically male.

Scientists believe that people with lower testosterone levels tend to take fewer risks so they are probably more willing to keep less for themselves. Those with higher testosterone levels tend to drive a harder bargain and are less compromising.

Men's testosterone levels fluctuate over the seasons and are at their lowest levels during the springtime. This is said to influence their bargaining power.

¡Mabela ya recuperó sus datos de usuario y contraseña para escribir en su «blog»! Espero ver muchos «posts» suyos muy pronto.

A trip by the subway. I'm trying to listen to some music, while concentrating on my Heidegger reading. But station after station, time after time, and even twice at a time, the fucking ambulant pirate CD sellers enter the wagon, with their nauseabund shouts and their estrident "music", coming out from portable amplifiers. And they shout and they pollute the entire wagon with their shit for the whole length of the trip between stations. It is evident I'm bothered, and they don't mind. They don't give a single piece of shit about me or what I think or feel. I start thinking I should hit one of them very hard in the nose, but I believe another seven or eight will come and do the corresponding to me. Fucking people, unevolved simians, uncivilized animals! Needless to say, I can barely concentrate on Heidegger, and I just can't listen to my music.


Surfacing from the subway, what I find is not any better than what I had below the surface. I don't know whether I'm in Mexico or in New Delhi. I'm walking among pigs. Huge crowds of pigs. That's the place I was born: a huge, immense crowd of pigs (someone with a better knowledge of english I will thank for hinting me a better way to say this), of extremely selfish, futureless, pigs.


I go dining with Sebastian and Juan, to KFC. What I find in there is as depressing as what I found at the subway. This time, however, the shit comes from the "ambient" loudspeakers. It is incredible how low can be the "quality" of the contemporary "music". I can't believe there is one single person, no matter how brain-damaged, who enjoys that kind of noise. Anyway, the problem is not that there exists such a shit, but that the KFC staff believes we, the consumers, must consume that noise as well. Fucking bastards! Unbelievable! Because of that, KFC is losing one more customer. A set of unexperienced, pity-worthy teenagers.


It almost make me cry the extremely sad state of this country. A country in which a large part of the population has completely lost the civic sense. Mexico is a country without mexicans, or with only a handful of them. And the rest, the selfish animals, are damaging even more what is left of this otherwise great country.


I wonder what does it take to correct the situation. Let's take an example: the ambulant pirate CD sellers at the subway. What does it take? Who do I have to bribe in order to have them expelled? Oh, yes: perhaps I don't have the whole picture, perhaps it would take more resources than those available to aprehend them and punish them (there is a reglament for the use of the subway). That would explain that there are still some of them, but... I have never seen one of them caught! Not one single seller caught! Come fucking on, it is not hard to find them. All you have to do is enter the subway and take a train for about... 10 seconds. Or perhaps I don't know that there are legal issues tying the hands of the law-enforcers. Oh well... how about changing the regulations, doing whatever it takes to solve the problem. All I've left to think is that authorities receive their share of the cake, in exchange for doing... nothing.


Now, who is at the end of the day responsible for such a phenomena to happen? How many pirate CD sellers would it be, if nobody would buy the shit they sell? How many unhealthy taco stands would it be, occuppying 80-90% of the available pedestrian way, if people wouldn't eat them? By the way, how would that reduce the number of digestive-related illnesses? But my city and my country are the scenario of vicious circles. I've ranted previously about the kind of shit the drivers at this city have in their small skulls in order to completely ignore the red lights, the pedestrian pathways, the entrances, and every other kind of signaling. And the more the people ignores the existence of a city around them, the more likely is that the city gets ignored. If there was a god, I would hate it for bringing me to the world in this city.

Beyond the Blogs

Our panel of experts debates the next generation of applications and the unintended consequences that occur when you separate content from design using RSS or Atom: spam-proof mailing lists, personal-content gateways (your TiVo?), meta-feeds and the data mining services Technorati and Feedster.

• Joi Ito, Neoteny, Six Apart, Technorati
• Robert Scoble, Microsoft
• Bill Kearney, Syndic8
• Andrew Grumet, RSSTV
• Greg Reinacker, NewsGator
• Chris Pirillo, Lockergnome.com

On the last day of Supernova 2005, John Clippinger, Senior Fellow of The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, spoke about his work at Socialphysics.org. According to the website, "The goal of SocialPhysics is to help create a new commons, the 'social web.' The social web is a layer built on top of the Internet to provide a trusted way to link people, organizations, and concepts."

John approaches Social Physics from a multidisciplinary perspective drawing from theories of economics, philosophy, neurology and behavioral science. John discusses the role of trust in developing a social network. He suggests that centralized, authoritarian systems in networks are antithetical to non-hierarchical empathetic interaction on the Internet. Today, he says, individuals do not have the power to control their digital identity and what is needed are new roles to protect and empower those individuals on the edge, rather than at the center of networks. He suggests that by using systems of tagging (as a form of reputation) and empathy, people in networks are better able to meet those goals.

John says that markets are social networks; using tools like his open source software framework, Higgins, he and others are experimenting and creating new avenues for meta identity on the Internet.

I'm sure Sebastian and Juan will find (or have found) this podcast very thought provoking.

And he chose as his blogging tool Drupal. Interesting.

Perhaps I would have used a slightly softer set of terms, but I think Linus is basically right when expressing his position on the matter:

I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE.

This "users are idiots, and are confused by functionality" mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it. I don't use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long since reached the point where it simply doesn't do what I need it to do.

Please, just tell people to use KDE.

There has been a dispute between Mena Trott and Ben Metcalfe about "niceness".

The details of the dispute and the detailed way in which it settled down are not relevant (not to me, anyway). What is relevant is a question the former expressed in her blog:

Is it possible to have the sort of productive face-to-face connection or conversation that Ben M. and I had offline in an online world?

In my experience, this is a not an issue, for the following reasons:

1. Intelligent people carries out intelligent discussion, and usually ends up with a satisfactory escape from the clinch.



2. The aggresive people, the one which finds it difficult or useless to be nice, enjoys being rude. And if they find some equals to argue with in a rude manner, they will enjoy the situation. Why souldn't that occur?



3. Solutions to personal issues on-line are favoured by the fact of the impersonal nature of the on-line media. Distance facilitates forgiveness, let's say.

Anyway, I'm glad Mena and Ben are obviously both intelligent persons, flattened out the problem and provided the rest of us with some material to chew with the brain.

Guess what is the Word of the Year, according to the New Oxford American Dictionary?

Podcast!

Among the words that did not make it were two other terms popular in tech circles.

One was lifehack, which refers to a more efficient way of completing a everyday task.

The other was rootkit, defined as software installed on a computer by someone other than the owner, intended to conceal other programs or processes, files or system data.

What does Benjamin Franklin have to teach us about Web 2.0?

Josh Petersen (43 things) has a couple of ideas about that, and he shares with us some experiences he had while building his site.

It was a delighting podcast!

David Fogel

CEO, Natural Selection

Accelerating Problem Solving

The Turing Test is often seen as an accurate indication of machine intelligence. David Fogel refutes this by quoting Alan Turing himself and by showing how current internet use undermines the traditional application of the test's results. In place of this flawed definition, Fogel suggests one of his own; namely, that intelligence may be viewed as the ability to adapt behavior to meet goals in a range of environments

Experiments in artificial intelligence have focused traditionally on replicating human behaviors in software. Although this approach has achieved some notable successes, including the Deep Blue chess machine that defeated Garry Kasparov in May, 1997, they are limited to addressing problems for which people already have the answers. An alternative approach, using computational intelligence methods such as evolutionary computing, can provide a computer with the ability to learn how to solve complex problems without relying on human expertise.

According to Fogel, what works best is the synergistic effect obtained by combining simulated evolutionary learning with human learning. As an example of this latter approach he tells the story of Blondie24, a checkers program supplied with only minimal information that was able to reach high levels of expertise thanks to the application of genetic algorithms. Fogel looks at other real-world applications in industry, medicine, and defense, as well as speculating on the future capabilities offered by these combined learning mechanisms.

Nothing new he said, but an interesting way to explain the old techniques.

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Esther Dyson

CNET, Release 1.0

The Accountable Net

Few aspects of life anywhere on the planet offer as much freedom as the internet. The internet allows people freely to choose the information they wish to see and it offers the freedom to display any information. Therefore, there is an unprecedented amount of choice available to users, but at the cost of a lack of certainty about the source of information.

Regulating the Internet is a controversial subject, but Esther Dyson wades headlong into the fray with her opinions in this talk from Accelerating Change 2005. She argues that the best way to regulate systems characterized by freedom is to cede control to the users, and to give them tools to regulate the community; examples of these systems include wikipedia, flickr and vizu. There also needs to be a balance between the ability to authenticate identity and protect the possibility of anonymity.

Since the knowledge base of its users varies so much, rules for internet communities need to be carefully designed. More than one system needs to be employed in order to offer security to new users while maintaining robust opportunities for people with advanced knowledge. Regulation of the internet should be, in Esther Dyson's words, a way to empower people to do things without giving them power over each other.

This one I didn't like, at all. Mrs. Dyson may have a lot of first-hand knowledge, but she gets as nervous as hell, even aggressive IMHO. And she didn't say anything new.

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Creativity: the straight story

David Lynch gives his very personal view of where he gets his ideas for cinema, why he so enjoys film-making, and how to increase creativity. From a private interview, September 2005.

I always find it fascinating when some intelligent persons reveals his/her personal intelligence processes.

En otro arranque de genialidad, el cardenal Norberto Rivera Carrera, arzobispo primado de la ciudad de México, dijo a los voceadores (hablando de la libertad de expresión y del derecho a conocer la verdad):

eso es lo que nos libera como seres humanos; es decir, nos hace libres

Ya no tengo palabras para alabar su imponente inteligencia.

Rivera descartó que con la publicación del documento del Vaticano al respecto, la jerarquía católica critique la homosexualidad. Claro, la homosexualidad puede «contradecir absolutamente la antropología humana», pero eso no significa que la iglesia la critique, ¿verdad?

Dice el genial cardenal Norberto Rivera Carrera que la prohibición de homosexuales a las filas de la iglesia católica no es una discriminación:

es simplemente decir cuáles son las normas para entrar

Creo que tengo que ir corriendo por un diccionario...

Bien, aquí está. La Real Academia Española de la Lengua (en línea) dice:

discriminar.
(Del lat. discrimināre).
1. tr. Seleccionar excluyendo.
2. tr. Dar trato de inferioridad a una persona o colectividad por motivos raciales, religiosos, políticos, etc.

O el señor cardenal se da una vueltecita por el diccionario, o construye mejor sus geniales ideas antes de abrir la boquita, o está más cerca de su dios de lo que yo creía y los criterios y juicios humanos le vienen guangos.

43Folders.com – “Multi-taskers” are really just splitting their time and attention into smaller slices than you; no one can really do more than one thing at a time.