Monthly Archives: June 2009

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The mind re-maps the body: learning to live with your cybernetic centaur legs

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Good news for wannabe cyborgs and transhumans! New Scientist reports on another manifestation of plasticity in the human mind; it turns out that tool use results in a remapping of the mind’s perception of the body, which in turn suggests that adapting to artificial prosthetics or cyborg bolt-ons is within the capability of our baseline brains.

The brain maintains a physical map of the body, with different areas in charge of different body parts. Researchers have suggested that when we use tools, our brains incorporate them into this map.

To test the idea, Alessandro Farné of the University of Claude Bernard in Lyon, France, and colleagues attached a mechanical grabber to the arms of 14 volunteers. The modified subjects then used the grabber to pick up out-of-reach objects.

Shortly afterwards, the volunteers perceived touches on their elbow and fingertip as further apart than they really were, and took longer to point to or grasp objects with their hand than prior to using the tool.

The explanation, say the team, is that their brains had adjusted the brain areas that normally control the arm to account for the tool and not yet adjusted back to normal.

“This is the first evidence that tool use alters the body [map],” says Farné.

Farné says the same kind of brain “plasticity” might be involved in regaining control of a transplanted hand or a prosthetic limb when the original has been lost. The brain might also readily incorporate cyborg additions – a cyborg arm or other body part – into its body schema, says Farné, “and possibly new body parts differing in shape and/or number, for example four arms.”

So, good news should you decide that you want to become a permanent cyber-centaur by wearing these things:

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Shakespeare: almost certainly a plagiarist

Lego ShakespeareRemember me raising the spectre of plagiarism last week with regard to J K Rowling? Well, here’s a neat counterpoint via TechDirt; the people at GrokLaw have sat down and tried to work out how many lawsuits Shakespeare’s King Lear would garner were it published under the same system of copyright law as exists in the US today:

How many lawsuits do you see? At least a half dozen? I even see some methods and concepts claims, if we view it with modern copyright owner eyes. Remember J.K. Rowling’s litigation over methods and concepts that Darl McBride and Chris Sontag cited? I suppose he could have raised a transformational fair use claim. But what if he accessed the prior works in digital format? Does fair use exist there? Or maybe they’d have been DRM’d. He’d maybe then never have read them.

Of course, what really would have happened is there never would have been a King Lear written. It would have been too legally risky. You can go to jail for copyright infringement, after all, even if you are noncommercial, if you distribute a DVD, and if we are imagining, let’s imagine Shakespeare did that. Shakespeare wasn’t even noncommercial. And there are criminal sanctions under regular Copyright Law, too.

If Shakespeare had plenty of money, he could have contacted all the copyright owners and paid them whatever they asked, but if he didn’t have enough money, the result would have been he would have been unable to afford to write King Lear. Do we want a world where Shakespeare can only write King Lear if he has money? If you think I exaggerate, remember what happened to internet radio? And if one song is worth $80,000, is the sky not the limit, if you are a copyright owner and hold all the legal cards and can get Congress to keep upping the ante to suit you?

As the last paragraph suggests, the full piece is a partial response to the Jammie Thomas/RIAA case, but it highlights the same risks I mentioned last week as regards plagiarism suits against authors. [image by ryanrocketship]

As a supplement to that, via The Valve comes an essay at Harpers by Jonathan Lethem, which I guess I must have missed last time round. It’s a lengthy, beautifully written and eloquent defence of plagiarism in a postmodern media world, in which he points out that almost every big media company who fights against perceived plagiarism actually owes their success to it. You should go and read it.

In a courtroom scene from The Simpsons that has since entered into the television canon, an argument over the ownership of the animated characters Itchy and Scratchy rapidly escalates into an existential debate on the very nature of cartoons. “Animation is built on plagiarism!” declares the show’s hot-tempered cartoon-producer-within-a-cartoon, Roger Meyers Jr. “You take away our right to steal ideas, where are they going to come from?” If nostalgic cartoonists had never borrowed from Fritz the Cat, there would be no Ren & Stimpy Show; without the Rankin/Bass and Charlie Brown Christmas specials, there would be no South Park; and without The Flintstones—more or less The Honeymooners in cartoon loincloths—The Simpsons would cease to exist. If those don’t strike you as essential losses, then consider the remarkable series of “plagiarisms” that links Ovid’s “Pyramus and Thisbe” with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, or Shakespeare’s description of Cleopatra, copied nearly verbatim from Plutarch’s life of Mark Antony and also later nicked by T. S. Eliot for The Waste Land. If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism.

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The War Book: details of post-apocalyptic UK

bunker_officeWriting of post-WWIII alternate histories, the UK government have declassified the War Book – detailed plans of how Britain would cope in the aftermath of a nuclear attack:

Although some of the plans have been revealed before – including earlier this year the scripts that would have been broadcast by the BBC in the event of a nuclear war, instructing the public not to panic – governments of the period left nothing to chance, including the censoring of private mail.
…
The country would have been divided into 12 regions, each governed by cabinet ministers with wide powers, aided by senior military officers, chief constables and judges and based in bunkers. Other senior figures would have retreated to a central government shelter under the Cotswolds.

As was pointed out in this article on Soviet invasions of the rest of the world far from the state collapsing in the event of a nuclear attack, the people would presumably become more dependent on whatever state remains. The War Book emphasises this point.

[from the Guardian][image from EverJean on flickr]

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Jamitons – the math of phantom traffic jams

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traffic jamHave you ever wondered what causes those seemingly cause-less traffic jams the occur pretty much anywhere with a reasonable density of motor vehicles? Sure you have – but you probably didn’t have the mathematical chops to investigate further, unlike the geeks at MIT:

The mathematics of such traffic jams are strikingly similar to the equations that describe detonation waves produced by explosions, said Aslan Kasimov, a lecturer in MIT’s Department of Mathematics. Realizing this allowed the reseachers to solve traffic jam equations that were first theorized in the 1950s. The MIT researchers even came up with a name for this kind of gridlock – “jamiton.” It’s a riff on “soliton,” a term used in math and physics to desribe a self-sustaining wave that maintains its shape while moving.

The equations MIT came up with are similar to those used to describe fluid mechanics, and they model traffic jams as a self-sustaining wave.

“We wanted to describe this using a mathematical model similar to that of fluid flow,” Kasimov said.

The researchers hit upon the equation after an experiment by Japanese researchers demonstrated the formation of jamitrons on a circular road. In that experiment, drivers were instructed to travel 30 kilometers an hour (18.6 mph) while maintaining a constant distance between cars. It didn’t take long before disruptions occurred and phantom jams formed. Denser traffic brought quicker jams.

The MIT team found speed, traffic density and other factors can determine conditions that will lead to a jamiton and how quickly it will spread. Once the jam forms, the researchers say, drivers have no choice but to wait for it to clear. The new model could lead to roads designed with sufficient capacity to keep traffic density below the point at which a jamiton can form.

Now, after reading that article I found myself thinking “wouldn’t some sort of peer-to-peer traffic management system be better than building bigger roads?” So imagine how smug I felt when this article turned up a few days later:

The hope, of course, is that by understanding traffic jams we can learn to prevent them. Tom Vanderbilt, in his authoritative book Traffic, describes a simple experiment performed by the Washington Department of Transportation that involved a liter of rice, a plastic funnel, and a glass beaker. When the rice was poured into the beaker all at once, it took 40 seconds for the funnel to empty; the density of jostling grains impeded the flow. However, when the grains were poured in a gradual stream, it took only 27 seconds for the rice to pass through. What seemed slower actually turned out to be 30 percent faster. This helps explain why traffic engineers are so eager to install red lights on highway onramps: By slowing traffic before it enters the concrete funnel, they hope to prevent the road from exceeding its critical density.

I’d be willing to go out on a limb here and suggest that while vehicles are still driven manually by fallible and inherently selfish human beings, traffic jams are inevitable. The only way to truly control the side-effects of human behaviour are to take them out of the picture entirely – and while there are very few situations where I’d advocate such a thing, road traffic is one of them. [image by timsnell]

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The end of science?

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science in action?Over at The Guardian, Ehsan Mahsood wonders whether the culture of modern science is stifling the radical thinking and new discoveries that have always been science’s hallmark and driving force:

Revolutions in scientific thinking are always difficult – but perhaps one reason why we may see fewer of them in the future is because of the highly professional way in which modern science is organised. It takes a lot of courage to challenge conventionally accepted views, and it needs a certain amount of stamina to constantly battle those who want to protect the status quo. Mavericks do not do well in large organisations, which is what some scientific fields have become.

Progress in science needs researchers who are not afraid – or who are encouraged and rewarded – to ask awkward and difficult questions of theory and of new data. It is easier to question mainstream views if you are independently wealthy, as many scientists in previous ages tended to be. But I wonder how many of us would do so if we were employed by the state and our career progression depended on the validation of our peers?

Mahsood has a point here; you only have to look at the computer industry to see that the bigger a corporation gets the less likely it is to do something genuinely innovative. But it strikes me he’s overlooking the potential for unaffiliated independent scientists to work together in ways that wouldn’t be funded by cautious or conservative governments or foundations – what about all the DIY biohackers, for example?

Sure, there’s only so much they can do alone, but the internet means they have all the tools they need to network with their fellow enthusiasts, share information, collaborate… so maybe we’re not seeing the end of science as Mahsood would have it, but the end of state-funded science (at least for non-military applications). You could argue that clades of unaffiliated ‘rogue’ scientists would introduce a large element of danger, especially with regard to genetic or viral research… but then state-funded establishments have made their fair share of screw-ups, too, despite (or perhaps because of) the baroque architecture of procedural regulations. [image by neys]

But hey, let’s think positive here: at least science is opening up new channels for international diplomacy.