prosthetic knowledge

Illustrations for New Scientist Magazine by Jimmy Turrell

Illustrations for The New Scientist about a new hearing device that helps the blind envisage imagery and another piece on good viruses.

More great work by Jimmy Turrell can be found at his site here

Revealed – The Capitalist Network That Runs The World - New Scientist

An interesting read (although the title is a little sensational-sounding). A study looks at the connectedness of some corporations, untangling the network to provide insightful, yet sober, understanding:

AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters’ worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.
The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York’s Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere. But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world’s transnational corporations (TNCs).

…

One thing won’t chime with some of the protesters’ claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. “Such structures are common in nature,” says Sugihara.

Read the whole article here

Project Nim: A chimp raised like a human via New Scientist

New documentary (from the makers of Man on Wire) on the story of raising a chimp in a human family environment and raised as a child, as an experiment to see if language was part of primate faculties, or something uniquely human:

Herbert Terrace, a psychologist at Columbia University in New York and one of the central figures in this film, believed in the continuity arguments. He started “Project Nim” to try and show that a chimp could learn language - in this case American Sign Language - and thereby tell us what he was thinking.

But Terrace’s project was a shambles. For a start, none of Nim’s surrogate family knew how to teach sign language. More seriously, no one had considered the consequences of raising a powerful wild animal in a human environment.

More here

AI programs do battle in Ms Pac-Man via New Scientist

Everyone loves a few rounds of a classic video game, but why should humans have all the fun? The Ms Pac-Man vs Ghost Team Competition serves to redress the balance by putting AI controllers in charge of video game characters in an effort to see which plays the game best.

Competitors could submit AI controllers for either the titular Ms Pac-Man or the team of four ghosts and each entrant faced off against the rest to determine a winner. The Ms Pac-Man AI had to maximise its score, while the ghost AI had to prevent Ms Pac-Man from scoring. The competition was organised by Philipp Rohlfshagen and Simon Lucas, two computer scientists at the University of Essex, with the results announced today at the Congress on Evolutionary Computation in New Orleans.

More here

Moody Men Are More Attractive Than Happy Men (via New Scientist)

A man walks into a bar, catches a girl’s eye, and immediately looks gloomy, moody and averts his eyes. The woman is overcome with sexual attraction. Not your usual love story but maybe a more realistic one. Turns out, a winning smile isn’t the way to a woman’s heart; men who swagger and look gloomy are more likely to set pulses raising.

That’s according to Jessica Tracy at the University of British Columbia, Canada, who asked more than 1,000 adults to rate the sexual attractiveness of hundreds of photos of the opposite sex.

The images showed men and women in various displays of happiness, with big smiles and puffed out chests or shameful glances, lowered heads and averted eyes.

In an interview with UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph, co-author Alec Beall, also at British Columbia said:

We did not ask participants if they thought these targets would make a good boyfriend or wife - we wanted their gut reactions on carnal, sexual attraction

The study found that women were not attracted to smiling, happy men, preferring those who looked proud and powerful or moody and ashamed.


  In an interview with Reuters, Tracy said:

To the extent that men think that smiling is a good thing to do if they want to be found sexually attractive our findings suggest that’s not the case

The researchers say that smiling has been linked with a lack of dominance. Tracey reckons moody guys show that they are flawed, but “know it and are tortured by it”.

More here

Rites of Love and Math

A film on mathematics and love, based on a story / film created by Yukio Mishima:

In Frenkel and Graves’ homage to Mishima, the soldier is replaced by a mathematician played by Frenkel. Having discovered the formula of love, and realised too late that in the wrong hands its power could turn to evil, he tattoos it onto his lover’s belly during their last meeting, so as to preserve its beauty beyond his own impending demise.

Set in the Japanese Noh theatre, like Mishima’s film, Rites is silent except for extracts from Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde and some electric guitar. It is beautiful to look at, even if the story does owe more to Dan Brown than to Mishima.

More here at New Scientist

How to move the brain with a Japanese line drawing via New Scientist

IN THE YouTube age it is easy to forget that artists rely on clever tricks to create a sense of motion in still images. Now brain scans show why one method of creating “implicit motion”, used by an 18th-century Japanese artist, works so well.

While admiring line drawings by Hokusai Katsushika, psychophysicist Naoyuki Osaka of Kyoto University, Japan, was struck by the vivid motion they convey. Instead of using blur to suggest movement, as much modern art has done since the advent of photography, Katsushika created motion by drawing bodies in highly unstable positions (see picture). This is thought to work because the brain “fills in” the effects of gravity pulling the bodies down.

Full article here (with slideshow)