Have you been following the debate over religion & science? Whether you have or not, if you're interested, you should definitely check out Darwin's God, an article in Sunday's New York Times magazine. Robin Marantz Henig summarizes the debate on both sides in clear prose that is not (imho) inflammatory.
The main question is: "are we hard-wired to believe in God? And if we are, how and why did that happen?"
In this corner, we have ... Byproduct Theorists, who argue that religion is a "spandrel", which Henig describes thusly:
"Stephen Jay Gould, the famed evolutionary biologist at Harvard who died in 2002, and his colleague Richard Lewontin proposed 'spandrel' to describe a trait that has no adaptive value of its own. They borrowed the term from architecture, where it originally referred to the V-shaped structure formed between two rounded arches. The structure is not there for any purpose; it is there because that is what happens when arches align." (see the wikipedia definition of spandrel.)
The spandrel could be a result of one or more of these three cognitive tools: agent detection, causal reasoning, and/or theory of mind.
Spandrelists (great name) do not necessarily agree that religion or belief in God "offered an adaptive advantage to our ancestors."
Adaptionists, in the other corner, think that "even if a trait offers no survival advantage today, it might have had one long ago."
David Sloan Wilson, evolutionary biologist at SUNY Binghamton, "staked out the adaptationist view. 'Through countless generations of variation and selection, [organisms] acquire properties that enable them to survive and reproduce in their environments. My purpose is to see if human groups in general, and religious groups in particular, qualify as organismic in this sense' " in his 2002 book Darwin's cathedral : evolution, religion, and the nature of society.
(side note: How does this relate to me? I'm going to see him speak this afternoon at Hampshire College.)
Henig's article is important reading if you are interested in this topic!
March 09, 2007
is this a Spam Blog?
I have been notified that Blogger's "spam-prevention robots" have locked my blog.
Apparently my frequent links and "irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text" have suggested to Blogger's robots that this is a spam blog.
I'm waiting for them to unblock me, but as there is no way for me to publish posts, and no person for me to contact over in Blogger.land, there's nothing I can do.
They do apologize, however. "Because this system is automated there will necessarily be some false positives, though we're continually working on improving our algorithms to avoid these. If your blog is not a spam blog, then it was one of the false positives, and we apologize."
On my todo list: move blog over to Simmons.
---
and ... it's back. No apologies, no notification, just the removal of the nasty "your blog is a spam farm" notice. The good news? I don't have to do word verification if I want to post something.
Apparently my frequent links and "irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text" have suggested to Blogger's robots that this is a spam blog.
I'm waiting for them to unblock me, but as there is no way for me to publish posts, and no person for me to contact over in Blogger.land, there's nothing I can do.
They do apologize, however. "Because this system is automated there will necessarily be some false positives, though we're continually working on improving our algorithms to avoid these. If your blog is not a spam blog, then it was one of the false positives, and we apologize."
On my todo list: move blog over to Simmons.
---
and ... it's back. No apologies, no notification, just the removal of the nasty "your blog is a spam farm" notice. The good news? I don't have to do word verification if I want to post something.
February 26, 2007
You are in charge of your email!
Do you check your email first thing in the morning? Be honest! I confess to checking my email at least 2d or 3d thing, both at work and at home.
academic coach provides 5 tips on how to be more productive by spending less (but more concentrated) time with your email.
Starting the day with email is no good, says coach. Start by spending 30 minutes with your major work (she's coaching academics, so she suggests either your research or your dissertation, but this could easily be modified). Other suggestions include turning off the "You've Got Mail!" alerts (which I agree is more conducive to productivity) and closing email between sessions. This sounds very scary in my busy office ... I don't know if I can pull that one off. Then again, tip #4 "Decide on a reasonable number of times per day to check your messages" might be useful.
The ensuing discussion by Coach's readers is useful, too.
academic coach provides 5 tips on how to be more productive by spending less (but more concentrated) time with your email.
Starting the day with email is no good, says coach. Start by spending 30 minutes with your major work (she's coaching academics, so she suggests either your research or your dissertation, but this could easily be modified). Other suggestions include turning off the "You've Got Mail!" alerts (which I agree is more conducive to productivity) and closing email between sessions. This sounds very scary in my busy office ... I don't know if I can pull that one off. Then again, tip #4 "Decide on a reasonable number of times per day to check your messages" might be useful.
The ensuing discussion by Coach's readers is useful, too.
February 22, 2007
Pigeon Clusters (PCs)
According to this Google press release, they use pigeon clusters (PCs) to "compute the relative value of web pages faster than human editors or machine-based algorithms."
This is called "Pigeon Rank", and here's how it works:
"When a search query is submitted to Google, it is routed to a data coop where monitors flash result pages at blazing speeds. When a relevant result is observed by one of the pigeons in the cluster, it strikes a rubber-coated steel bar with its beak, which assigns the page a PigeonRank value of one. For each peck, the PigeonRank increases. Those pages receiving the most pecks, are returned at the top of the user's results page with the other results displayed in pecking order."
Read the press release for more details. Google assures us that the pigeons are well treated in their data coops and have adequate beak rooms for their convenience.
Thanks to tp for the heads up on this technology; I believe he found it through this terrific 2 page Google cheat sheet (pdf version) from adelaider.com.
February 19, 2007
LITA's Top Tech Trends Podcasting
LITA's (ALA's Library & Information Technology Association) got some podcasts going over at the LITA Blog. Yay! Now if you didn't go to ALA's Midwinter Meeting, you can still hear various library thinkers talking about their Top Tech Trends.
They say: "There are seven segments in all for about an hour and forty-five minutes of trending goodness. For the sake of immediacy, this is pretty much the raw audio–not much editing or finessing." I'm especially eager to hear Clifford Lynch (13 min), Andrew Pace (5 min), and the General Discussion (28 minutes).
Some, but not all, of these are also available in iTunes.
They say: "There are seven segments in all for about an hour and forty-five minutes of trending goodness. For the sake of immediacy, this is pretty much the raw audio–not much editing or finessing." I'm especially eager to hear Clifford Lynch (13 min), Andrew Pace (5 min), and the General Discussion (28 minutes).
Some, but not all, of these are also available in iTunes.
February 18, 2007
Do Animals Predict Earthquakes?
Possibly, argues Matt Kaplan in the Feb. 17 issue of New Scientist magazine.
"The idea that animals can predict earthquakes has ancient origins. Way back in 373 BC the Greek historian Thucydides recorded descriptions of rats, dogs, snakes and weasels deserting the city of Helice in droves just days before an earthquake of catastrophic proportions hit. It was the first in a long line of such anecdotes. There is also no shortage of theories about what might be going on. What has been lacking, however, is any real scientific data linking strange animal behaviour with earthquakes."
He reports that an unsuccessful study by Stanley Coren, psychologist at the University of British Columbia of dogs & depression yielded instead some intriguing insight into how / if animals -- dogs -- can predict earthquakes.
Instead of noticing any difference in their affect due to the season, Coren did notice that almost half of the dogs were agitated and extra-active the day before an earthquake about 200 miles away. The increase in both activity and anxiety were well above chance and may have been due to the impending earthquake. Coren speculated that the dogs may have heard vibrations: this was supported by the fact that the hearing-impaired dogs didn't show signs of agitation, while dogs with small heads had higher levels of agitation than the average (dogs with small heads apparently are more sensitive to high frequency sounds than others).
Kaplan concludes the Coren analysis: "Taken together, Coren's results present an alluring hypothesis. He suggests that the kind of high-frequency sounds that many dogs can hear are emitted before an impending earthquake, perhaps from rocks scraping or breaking underground."
So. Not resounding evidence, but definitely intriguing.
"Beastly powers; Surely it is too much to believe that animals can predict earthquakes when we haven't cracked it ourselves?" Matt Kaplan, New Scientist, February 17, 2007, pg. 34-37. Full-text not free online at the New Scientist web site, but you can get it from LexisNexis or Academic Search Premier (after a 1-month embargo)
"The idea that animals can predict earthquakes has ancient origins. Way back in 373 BC the Greek historian Thucydides recorded descriptions of rats, dogs, snakes and weasels deserting the city of Helice in droves just days before an earthquake of catastrophic proportions hit. It was the first in a long line of such anecdotes. There is also no shortage of theories about what might be going on. What has been lacking, however, is any real scientific data linking strange animal behaviour with earthquakes."
He reports that an unsuccessful study by Stanley Coren, psychologist at the University of British Columbia of dogs & depression yielded instead some intriguing insight into how / if animals -- dogs -- can predict earthquakes.
Instead of noticing any difference in their affect due to the season, Coren did notice that almost half of the dogs were agitated and extra-active the day before an earthquake about 200 miles away. The increase in both activity and anxiety were well above chance and may have been due to the impending earthquake. Coren speculated that the dogs may have heard vibrations: this was supported by the fact that the hearing-impaired dogs didn't show signs of agitation, while dogs with small heads had higher levels of agitation than the average (dogs with small heads apparently are more sensitive to high frequency sounds than others).
Kaplan concludes the Coren analysis: "Taken together, Coren's results present an alluring hypothesis. He suggests that the kind of high-frequency sounds that many dogs can hear are emitted before an impending earthquake, perhaps from rocks scraping or breaking underground."
So. Not resounding evidence, but definitely intriguing.
"Beastly powers; Surely it is too much to believe that animals can predict earthquakes when we haven't cracked it ourselves?" Matt Kaplan, New Scientist, February 17, 2007, pg. 34-37. Full-text not free online at the New Scientist web site, but you can get it from LexisNexis or Academic Search Premier (after a 1-month embargo)
February 17, 2007
Why I Love CogSci
The Feb. 12 issue of the New Yorker had an extensive article in Pat and Paul Churchland, philosophers of mind at UCSD. So much cool stuff!
I'll quote snippets of the article, but if you like this kind of thing, it's worth tracking down the whole article.
About marriage: "Paul sometimes thinks of Pat and himself as two hemispheres of the same brain-differentiated in certain functions but bound together by tissue and neuronal pathways worn in unique directions by shared incidents and habit."
About "truth": Paul (again) "... always remembers that, however certain he may be about something, however airtight an argument appears or however fundamental an intuition, there is always a chance that both are completely wrong, and that reality lies in some other place that he hasn't looked because he doesn't know it's there." (emphasis added)
and on to philosophy, sort of, and neuroscience.
About the study of the brain a few decades ago, quoting Paul but (I think) based on Pat's experience: " 'There were cases when a split-brain patient would be reading a newspaper, and, since it's only the left brain that processes language, the right brain gets bored as hell, and since the right brain controls the left arm the person would find that his left hand would suddenly grab the newspaper and throw it to the ground!' Paul says." Bingo! My right brain almost threw this article down many times, but my left brain was very engaged. Question for self: how to keep the right brain busy when working hard with the the left brain?
About Pat & Paul's notion of philosophy as it relates to science: "Philosophy could still play a role in science: it could examine the concepts that scientists were working with, testing them for coherence, and it could serve as science's speculative branch, imagining hypotheses that were too outlandish or too provisional for a working scientist to bother with but which might, in the future, yield unexpected fruit."
Pat, Francis Crick, and consciousness: " 'He [Francis Crick] thought the strategy of looking for the neural correlates of consciousness was likely to be fruitful, but I became very skeptical of it. It seemed to me more likely that we were going to need to know about attention, about memory, about perception, about emotions - that we were going to have to solve many of the problems about the way the brain works before we were going to understand consciousness, and then it would sort of just fall out.' " (emphasis added)
On language, "... both [Paul] and Pat like to speculate about a day when whole chunks of English, especially the bits that constitute folk psychology, are replaced by scientific words that call a thing by its proper name rather than some outworn metaphor. Surely this will happen, they think, and as people learn to speak differently they will learn to experience differently, and sooner or later even their most private introspections will be affected. ... The new words, far from being reductive or dry, have enhanced his sensations, he feels, as an oenophile's complex vocabulary enhances the taste of wine." Not sure how I feel about that, but it's interesting to contemplate, and the article gives examples of how it could be useful.
I'm skipping over the more substantive philosophy / neuroscience bits - largely because they are over my head! - and I also skipped the ethical issues they are addressing at UCSD with respect to legal aspects of neuroscience. Tell your right brain to shut up and read this article with your left brain fully engaged.
Larissa MacFarquhar, "TWO HEADS; A marriage devoted to the mind-body problem." the New Yorker, February 12, 2007, v 82 i 49, p58-69. The article isn't online for free, but you can read it in Academic Search Premier (AN 23916441) or LexisNexis.
I'll quote snippets of the article, but if you like this kind of thing, it's worth tracking down the whole article.
About marriage: "Paul sometimes thinks of Pat and himself as two hemispheres of the same brain-differentiated in certain functions but bound together by tissue and neuronal pathways worn in unique directions by shared incidents and habit."
About "truth": Paul (again) "... always remembers that, however certain he may be about something, however airtight an argument appears or however fundamental an intuition, there is always a chance that both are completely wrong, and that reality lies in some other place that he hasn't looked because he doesn't know it's there." (emphasis added)
and on to philosophy, sort of, and neuroscience.
About the study of the brain a few decades ago, quoting Paul but (I think) based on Pat's experience: " 'There were cases when a split-brain patient would be reading a newspaper, and, since it's only the left brain that processes language, the right brain gets bored as hell, and since the right brain controls the left arm the person would find that his left hand would suddenly grab the newspaper and throw it to the ground!' Paul says." Bingo! My right brain almost threw this article down many times, but my left brain was very engaged. Question for self: how to keep the right brain busy when working hard with the the left brain?
About Pat & Paul's notion of philosophy as it relates to science: "Philosophy could still play a role in science: it could examine the concepts that scientists were working with, testing them for coherence, and it could serve as science's speculative branch, imagining hypotheses that were too outlandish or too provisional for a working scientist to bother with but which might, in the future, yield unexpected fruit."
Pat, Francis Crick, and consciousness: " 'He [Francis Crick] thought the strategy of looking for the neural correlates of consciousness was likely to be fruitful, but I became very skeptical of it. It seemed to me more likely that we were going to need to know about attention, about memory, about perception, about emotions - that we were going to have to solve many of the problems about the way the brain works before we were going to understand consciousness, and then it would sort of just fall out.' " (emphasis added)
On language, "... both [Paul] and Pat like to speculate about a day when whole chunks of English, especially the bits that constitute folk psychology, are replaced by scientific words that call a thing by its proper name rather than some outworn metaphor. Surely this will happen, they think, and as people learn to speak differently they will learn to experience differently, and sooner or later even their most private introspections will be affected. ... The new words, far from being reductive or dry, have enhanced his sensations, he feels, as an oenophile's complex vocabulary enhances the taste of wine." Not sure how I feel about that, but it's interesting to contemplate, and the article gives examples of how it could be useful.
I'm skipping over the more substantive philosophy / neuroscience bits - largely because they are over my head! - and I also skipped the ethical issues they are addressing at UCSD with respect to legal aspects of neuroscience. Tell your right brain to shut up and read this article with your left brain fully engaged.
Larissa MacFarquhar, "TWO HEADS; A marriage devoted to the mind-body problem." the New Yorker, February 12, 2007, v 82 i 49, p58-69. The article isn't online for free, but you can read it in Academic Search Premier (AN 23916441) or LexisNexis.
February 16, 2007
Meet the Databases!
Leslie Porter, one of my former students, has created some innovative podcasts at Fairfield University. She started with a series called Meet the Databases, in which she interviews databases like Google Scholar (a surfer dude) and JStor (a soft-spoken gardener). 
You can see their avatars and hear the podcasts through Fairfield's iTunes U account in iTunes at www.fairfield.edu/itunesu (click on DiMenna-Nyselius Library & then on "Meet the Databases").
She's doing this as a Web Companion for English 12 at Fairfield, and she has also interviewed various faculty to get their perspectives on what makes a good thesis statement. She talks to folks from the English department, of course, and also folks from history, biology, and more. You can listen to these in either RealAudio or iTunes.
Pretty interesting stuff!
You can see their avatars and hear the podcasts through Fairfield's iTunes U account in iTunes at www.fairfield.edu/itunesu (click on DiMenna-Nyselius Library & then on "Meet the Databases").She's doing this as a Web Companion for English 12 at Fairfield, and she has also interviewed various faculty to get their perspectives on what makes a good thesis statement. She talks to folks from the English department, of course, and also folks from history, biology, and more. You can listen to these in either RealAudio or iTunes.
Pretty interesting stuff!
February 14, 2007
Seeing Red
An article from last week's New York Times describes the importance of the color red, just in time for Valentine's Day. In How Do We See Red? Count the Ways Natalie Angier talks about various meanings of the color red, including "shades of life, death, fury, shame, courage, anguish, pride", and not only for humans: 
"Red is the premier signaling color in the natural world, variously showcasing a fruitful bounty, warning of a fatal poison or boasting of a sturdy constitution and the genes to match."
Angier quotes Dr. Nicholas Humphrey, a philosopher at the London School of Economics and the author of Seeing red : a study in consciousness: "Our visual system was shaped by colors already in use among many plants and animals, and red in particular stands out against the green backdrop of nature," he said. "If you want to make a point, you make it in red."
Happy Valentine's Day!
"Red is the premier signaling color in the natural world, variously showcasing a fruitful bounty, warning of a fatal poison or boasting of a sturdy constitution and the genes to match."
Angier quotes Dr. Nicholas Humphrey, a philosopher at the London School of Economics and the author of Seeing red : a study in consciousness: "Our visual system was shaped by colors already in use among many plants and animals, and red in particular stands out against the green backdrop of nature," he said. "If you want to make a point, you make it in red."
Happy Valentine's Day!
February 13, 2007
MyMusic on myspace
Ok, I'll out myself on myspace. Want to be my friend? Ha!
Anyway, I've decided to use my myspace to list the musical groups I like, plus a few librarians / libraries. :-)
So if you want to know what I'm listening to, head on over to http://myspace.com/cogscilibrarian and look at my "friends". You'll see some of my favorite groups, and if you click on one, you'll get to hear some of that band's songs.
Current favorites include Camera Obscura and The Bird and the Bee. Both are delightful, quirky, female vocalist, indie pop bands. You will hear "Again & Again" from The Bird and the Bee if you go to myspace.
Other myspace favorites include Jim Noir and my niece Rachel Austin.
Enjoy!
Anyway, I've decided to use my myspace to list the musical groups I like, plus a few librarians / libraries. :-)
So if you want to know what I'm listening to, head on over to http://myspace.com/cogscilibrarian and look at my "friends". You'll see some of my favorite groups, and if you click on one, you'll get to hear some of that band's songs.
Current favorites include Camera Obscura and The Bird and the Bee. Both are delightful, quirky, female vocalist, indie pop bands. You will hear "Again & Again" from The Bird and the Bee if you go to myspace.
Other myspace favorites include Jim Noir and my niece Rachel Austin.
Enjoy!
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