Solve for equilibrium …
Why are ethnographers so gullible and so easily fooled? For example, just as Margaret Mead was duped by several Samoan girls on the island of Ta’u when she wrote her classic book Coming of Age in Samoa, it appears that Alice Goffman (author of On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City) was likewise duped by a small group of drug-dealing youths in Philadelphia, a group she romanticizes in her book. As one commentator has noted: “Spend time in the ghetto and you quickly learn that criminals are not victims. The corner boys in West Baltimore are not heading off to college once drugs are legal. They will find new scams. They like crime and the drug game is their version of the self-actualizing career. Take that away and they find a new way to terrorize their communities. There are good arguments against the drug war, but romanticizing these people is naive.”
Don’t be so gullible next time around!
Alan Turing’s simple machine intelligence test has been in the news lately. It is worth noting that there are many possible versions of Turing’s test. One version of the test, for example, is currently the subject of a $20,000 bet between Ray Kurzweil and Mitch Kapor. In their version of the Turing test, the test must take place over three hours and two out of three judges must be convinced that the computer is a human. You can read the detailed terms of this $20,000 bet between Kurzweil and Kapor here. (Could IBM’s Watson computer pass this test?)
Hey, does Ray need to pay up, or not yet?
That is the title of our review of Nature’s Oracle, Ullica Segerstrale’s recent biography of the life and work of W.D. “Bill” Hamilton.
Please enjoy responsibly …
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, H. Teplitz and M. Rafelski (IPAC/Caltech), A. Koekemoer (STScI), R. Windhorst (Arizona State University), and Z. Levay (STScI).
Photo Credit: Stuart Franklin
These maps by the website BDistricting show two ways of dividing the Garden State into Congressional voting districts with roughly equal population. (Under Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution, each State is apportioned a number of federal representatives which approximately corresponds to its share of the aggregate population of the 50 States, although every State is constitutionally guaranteed at least one House seat.) The map on the left shows the work of a computer algorithm designed to draw the Congressional voting districts in New Jersey in a logical and “optimally-compact” way. The map on the right, by contrast, shows the State’s current Congressional districts, which are drawn by flesh-and-blood people with vested political interests in “gaming the system,” in deciding how voters are apportioned. Look up your State’s voting map here.
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By the way, who do you trust more to draw up fair voting districts: computers or humans? … That’s what we thought!
(Hat tip (again) to the amazing Max Ehrenfreund.)
A very 21st century swearing in: Suzi LeVine becomes the 1st U.S. Ambassador to take the oath over an electronic device. pic.twitter.com/5E4bjIRQ2xFrom today’s NY Times: “The lone American prisoner of war from the Afghan conflict, captured by [the Taliban] nearly five years ago, has been released to American forces in exchange for five Taliban detainees held at [the US military prison in] Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Obama administration officials said Saturday.” According to some sources, the released POW, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, had “allegedly abandoned his post after growing disillusioned with America’s wars and the potentially illegal deal struck by the White House to free him.” [Temporal typo, anyone?] By the way, how would you model the top-secret negotiations between the US Government and the Taliban? As a Game of Chicken, a Prisoner’s Dilemma, or a Coordination Game?
The perfect gift for … the Taliban!
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