All posts by Tom James

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IQ and Poverty

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One of the big taboo ideas in political discourse is the idea that some people are poverty-stricken not because of the way they are brought up but because they just are not very clever.

Deborah Orr has written a shocking and interesting article in The Independent about this:

fiveI think that you would be churlish indeed to assert that whoever set the ball rolling, and whoever dribbled it to the here and now, the 30 years we have just spent “managing the transition to a skills-based economy” have not resulted in happy and universal inclusivity. The bare fact is that not everybody is intellectually equipped to make for themselves a place in such an economy.

…

If they are not looked after by their family, then the less bright, it is surely safe to assume, are often excluded from society because of their inability to make intelligent choices. Our refusal to look sympathetically on lack of intelligence as a real encumbrance in the modern world – or sometimes even to admit that it exists – is unfair on those who labour under that disadvantage.

Yes – it is in itself very stupid to claim that stupidity is the only cause of social blights and it is seemingly impossible to write about intelligence without coming across as an arrogant twit – but lack of intelligence is something that is almost never mentioned, because discussing it inevitably comes across as patronising, rude, and pointless.

Orr includes all the usual hedges about the dangers of generalisation, but what she is saying is genuinely important. The big problem is that intellectual disadvantage, either through genes or upbringing, is supposedly an intractable problem. Some are smarter than others.

Transhumanism then, is the ultimate expression of freeing the individual from tyranny. Throughout the Enlightenment new ideas challenged old dogmas. Superstition gave way to rationalism and empircism. Tyranny gave way to democracy.

And now Ray Kurzweil is challenging the greatest of all the inequalities: the skills and propensities we are born with.

[story via The Independent][image from woodleywonderworks on flickr]

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The future of social networking

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Where is social networking going exactly? Will Facebook still exist in a recognisable form in 100 years? (I’d say certainly not). Some people are of the opinion that “social networking” is a con designed to persuade people to part with marketable information:

Perhaps [people will] realise that web 2.0 is not there to “connect you with the people around you” and not about some pseudo-academic “social graph”. That’s the bait. The switch is the big data centre pumping adverts based on your age, where you live, who you’re friends with, what you like doing for fun, your politics and your grandmother’s shoe size.

This leads to many interesting debates about who owns the data held on social networking websites, and how much the whole shebang is worth.

My social networkThe problem with exponential growth and constant change is that you can’t tell if something is a flash in the pan or a long term trend.

It seems likely that people will continue to use communication networks to socialise, but that they will become less tied to a particular social networking website, given the systems produced by companies like Plaxo, which (if their guff is to be believed ) allows you to integrate stuff belonging to you and your friend’s from other social networks into one area.

[stories from Technology Review and The Register][image from luce legay on flickr]

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Another step forward: mapping the brain

There has been another development in the ongoing effort to map the human brain. Using a new technique called diffusion tensor imaging, scientists at Indiana University have created the first high resolution map of the human cortical network:

Diffusion imaging is a new twist on MRI that uses magnetic resonance signals to track the movement of water molecules in the brain. In gray matter, water tends to diffuse multidirectionally. But in white matter, it diffuses along the length of neural wires, called axons, and scientists can use these diffusion measurements to map the fibers.

Inside The Ear - Another Edited Anatomy Chart ScanAn intriguing discovery is that of a “core” area – so called by cognitive neuroscientist Olaf Sporns – of highly interconnected neurons near the back of the head:

The node lies on the shortest path between many different parts of the neural network. “It’s highly connected amongst itself, but also highly central with respect to the rest of the brain,” says Sporns. “Network studies in other fields, from the Internet to protein interaction networks, suggest that these kinds of highly connected nodes tend to be very important for determining what the network does as a whole.”

It’s interesting how research in diverse areas of science can inform each other: such that studies of the behaviour of networks, or waves, or mathematical ratios, can crop up again and again.

[story via Technology Review][image from Mikey G Ottowa on flickr]

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Gallium getting rarer

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Here are some interesting musings from SF grandee Robert Silverburg at Asimov’s Science Fiction on the possibility of certain rare earths running out, as well as the mineworthy science fictional material therein.

Metals (technically “poor metals”) like gallium are used as doping agents in semiconductors used in integrated circuits and LEDs and as such are in great demand – but German prof Armin Reller suggests we may be in danger of gallium, and fellow rare-earth indium, running out.

As it happens, we are building a lot of flat-screen TV sets and computer monitors these days. Gallium is thought to make up 0.0015 percent of the Earth’s crust and there are no concentrated supplies of it. We get it by extracting it from zinc or aluminum ore or by smelting the dust of furnace flues. Dr. Reller says that by 2017 or so there’ll be none left to use.

How very, very depressing. Still, I have every confidence in human ingenuity to discover a solution to this kind of problem.

[story via Slashdot]

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Germans putting CO2 underground

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Carbon sequestration or carbon capture and storage (CCS) is an enticing possibility for those who like their global CO2 levels below 390 ppm but aren’t too keen on nuclear power.

sa-megetThe basic idea is to carry on burning fossil fuels for energy, but instead of venting the waste CO2 into the atmosphere, bury it underground. Now CO2SINK, a European research project, have created the first underground carbon dioxide storage site at Ketzin, near Berlin:

It will pump up 60,000 tonnes of the greenhouse gas into porous, salt water-filled rock at depths of more than 600 metres (656 yards) over the next two years, the centre said.

This obviously won’t solve all the problems. After all it is probable that our fossil fuels will run out at some point. “Clean” fossil fuels might provide a useful stopgap before we decide on our long term energy mix.

[story via PhysOrg][image from Jacob Botter on flickr]