On today's Internet, algorithms rule. But a handful of startups are using large-scale human participation to offer online services that computers alone can't deliver. Can human judgment scale with the Web?

Chris Dannon in Fast Company:

The question of the next decade is: How can we find what we want — the perfect job, just the right pair of shoes, exactly the news that's important to us — amidst the maelstrom of information that's available on the Web? Google, of course, is the de facto answer, it's algorithms generating a ballpark guess at what we want when we type in a few search terms. But the burgeoning mass of data on the Internet is threatening to outmode such robotic tools. So a growing number of start-ups is putting forward another strategy for filtering the Web: Use human judgment first, computer power second.

Of course, human judgment is unreliable, inefficient, expensive and difficult to scale. It's also a relatively scarce resource compared to data, which grows online at an exponential rate. Here are four people-powered sites, and how they plan to keep their people-powered business models durable as the Web shifts and swells.

ThisNext is a “product discovery tool” that lets users take recommendations on products they didn't even know existed. Founded in 2006, the site attracts about 1.4 million users per month, many of whom know they want something new — a lamp, rug, table — but whose queries are too broad to return useful results on other comparison shopping sites.

More here.

Ruth Gledhill in the Times of London:

Religious belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today.

According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.

The study counters the view of believers that religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society.

It compares the social peformance of relatively secular countries, such as Britain, with the US, where the majority believes in a creator rather than the theory of evolution. Many conservative evangelicals in the US consider Darwinism to be a social evil, believing that it inspires atheism and amorality.

Many liberal Christians and believers of other faiths hold that religious belief is socially beneficial, believing that it helps to lower rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion. The benefits of religious belief to a society have been described as its “spiritual capital”. But the study claims that the devotion of many in the US may actually contribute to its ills.

More here.

Former 3QD columnist to head Science and Entertainment Exchange, a project of the U.S. Academy of Sciences. David Shiga in New Scientist:

Scientists may have less to cringe about when they go to the movies, if a new initiative designed to foster cooperation between scientists and the entertainment industry is successful.

The new effort, called the Science and Entertainment Exchange, is a project of the US National Academy of Sciences, and will be run by science writer Jennifer Ouellette, author of The Physics of the Buffyverse.

By bringing scientists together with Hollywood-types, the project aims to improve the scientific accuracy of what the entertainment industry produces and also help scientists communicate more effectively with the general public.

The project is “vitally important”, said Seth MacFarlane, creator of the television show Family Guy, at a press conference in Los Angeles on Wednesday. Other entertainment industry figures were also at the event, including Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote the screenplays for The Empire Strikes back and Return of the Jedi.

More here.

///
from A Coney Island of the Mind
Lawrence Ferlinghetti

10

………….I have not lain with beauty all my life
…………………..telling over to myself
…………………………………………………….its most rife charms
……..I have not lain with beauty all my life
…………………………………………………..and lied with it as well
……………………..telling over to myself
………………………………………….how beauty never dies
……………………….but lies apart
……………………………………..among the aboriginies
……………………………………………………………………….of art
…………………………and far above the battlefields
……………………………………………………………………..of love

………….It is above all that
………………………………………oh yes
…….It sits upon the choicest of
……………………………………………….Church seats
…..up there where art directors meet
to choose things for immortality
………………………………………………And they have lain with beauty
………………………….all their lives
…………………………………………..And they have fed on honeydew
……….and drunk the wines of paradise
……………………………………………………………so that they know exactly how
…………….a thing of beauty is a joy
……………………forever and forever
…………………………………………………..and how it never never
………………………..can quite fade
………………………………………………..into money-losing nothingness

…..Oh no I have not lain
……………………………………on Beauty Rests like this
………..afraid to rise at night
……………………………………..for fear that I might somehow miss
..some movement beauty might have made
…….Yet I have slept with beauty
………………………………………………..in my own weird way
and I have made a hungry scene or two
……………………………………………………………..with beauty in my bed
…..and so spilled out another poem or two
…………and so spilled out another poem or two
……………………………………………………………….upon the Bosch-like world

.///

Christopher Badcock in Edge:

What causes mental illnesses like schizophrenia and autism? We have long known that both tend to run in families and that if one of two identical twins has such a disorder, there is a much higher than average probability that the other will too. Autism is sometimes associated with genetic syndromes, such as Rett, Down, and Turner’s, Phenylketonuria, and Tuberous Sclerosis. The clearest single-gene cause of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is Fragile X syndrome, with a wide range of severity in symptoms and 25-47 per cent of affected males meeting the criteria for autism. But neither autism nor schizophrenia obeys classical Mendelian laws of inheritance in the way that Cystic Fibrosis or some types of colour blindness do.

However, there is also good evidence for social, environmental causes of mental illnesses. Studies of the Dutch wartime famine and of the Chinese famine of 1959–61 reported increased incidence of schizophrenia among children born just after the events. And a study of 2 million Swedish children born between 1963 and 1983 revealed a significant link between schizophrenia and poverty in childhood.

More here.

From Nature:

You are what you eat, and so are your progeny and, perhaps, your progeny's progeny — at least, if you're a mouse. According to research presented at the Society for Neuroscience's 38th annual meeting in Washington DC held from 15–19 November, mice fed on a high-fat diet throughout their pregnancies and suckling had offspring that were larger than normal — a trait that was also passed on to their offspring's offspring. It is the first time that a gestating mother's diet has been shown to confer this trait on to two consecutive generations.

The work is part of a larger study being conducted by neuroscientist Tracy Bale and her colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. “We wanted to know if the current increase in rates of obesity we are seeing all over the United States could have a longer-term impact,” says Bale. The mice descended from mothers on the high-fat diet were about 20% heavier than those descended from mothers kept on normal food. They were not much fatter, but they were significantly longer. They also tended to overeat, whether or not they themselves were on a high-fat or normal diet. And they were insulin-insensitive, a feature of diabetes that frequently leads to obesity. Their own offspring — the second generation after the mothers on a fatty diet — did not overeat, but were large and insulin-insensitive. These traits were not just inherited through the female line: male pups born to mothers on a high-fat diet also transmitted them to their own offspring.

More here.

A discussion (transcription and audio available) over at the NYPL:

From the discussion:

Paul Davidson offers some ideas:

A very harsh review, in New Left Review:

Perlstein’s larger historical focus, however, is near glaucoma. His narrative chugs through the late 60s and early 70s, offering scenes that are drearily familiar from the scores of contemporary accounts cited in his many pages of footnotes. The result is prolix, bland and humdrum. The style is indescribable. Here is a sample, from his account of Nixon’s response to a newspaper column by Roscoe Drummond suggesting that he needed to de-escalate in Vietnam, otherwise ‘popular opinion will roll over him as it did lbj’:

At which Nixon thundered upon his printed news summary . . . ‘Tell him that rn is less affected by press criticism and opinion than any Pres in recent memory’. Because he was the president most affected by press criticism and opinion of any president in recent memory. Which if known would make him look weak. And any escalatory bluff would be impossible. Which would keep him from credibility as a de-escalator; which would block his credibility as an escalator; which would stymie his ability to de-escalate; and then he couldn’t ‘win’ in Vietnam—which in his heart he didn’t believe was possible anyway. Through the looking glass with Richard Nixon: this stuff was better than lsd.

From October 9, 2007 talk at the Heyman Center for the Humanities, a video.

Barnett Rubin and Ahmed Rashid in Project Syndicate:

Afghanistan has been at war for three decades, and that war is spreading to Pakistan and beyond. A time-out needs to be called so that the players, including President-elect Barack Obama, can negotiate a new bargain for the region.

Securing Afghanistan and its region will require an international presence for many years. Building up Afghanistan’s security forces is at most a stopgap measure, as the country cannot sustain forces of the size that it now needs. Only a regional and global agreement to place Afghanistan’s stability above other objectives can make long-term stability possible by enabling Afghanistan to survive with security forces that it can afford. Such agreement, however, will require political and diplomatic initiatives both inside and outside of the country.

In an effort to lighten up dark days humans invented gallows humor. Gallows humor is a variation of whistling past the graveyard. Whistling past the graveyard is itself a reaction to looking for silver linings and finding none —not under bank vaults, in the recesses of broom closets in the US Treasury, nor among wisps of pocket lint in the suit of the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, nowhere. And looking for clouds with silver linings in the middle of a Class 5 typhoon is either a sign of rank desperation or a futile search for the last shred of the flag of hope straining horizontally in a fierce wind longing to be let loose and put out of its misery.

Anyway, people like to laugh about disaster. Keeping to this tradition, and in this spirit, I've discovered some poetic responses to financial collapse I thought might be appropriate as the U.S. Congress spars with the President in a game of chicken regarding the bailout of the U.S. auto industry. You'll find these below.

(To all poetry purists out there: take a vacation; don't waste your breath on comments about aesthetics or the absence of excellence, or complain that this is not Shakespeare …I know, I know.)

…..The Sound of Wall Street', by Mary Levai, the editor of Bill Fleckenstein's daily Market Rap:

Raindrops on Wall Street and whiskers on nitwits
Bright copper futures and false affidavits
Brown paper stock options tied up with strings
These are a few of my favorite things.

Opaque financials as layered as strudels
Dead fish as upright as overcooked noodles
Net-income forecasts with phony ka-chings
These are a few of my favorite things.

Funds' window dressing in evergreen sashes
Flaky financials from lax lads and lasses
Fed easing summers, fall, winter and springs
These are a few of my favorite things.

When the Dow bites
When the Sox stings
When I'm feeling sad
I simply remember my favorite things
And then I don't feel so bad.

Bailouts for bumblers, and bankruptcy rumors
C-E-O car chiefs stripped down to bloomers
Twenty-five billion to rank ding-a-lings
These are a few of my favorite things

When all graphs slump
As all banks cling
When I'm far from glad
I simply remember my favorite things
Then I go stark, raving mad.

Leverage is… (Part 1), from Cassandra, of Cassandra Does Tokyo:

leverage is
as leverage does
increasing the fizz
as well as the buzz

it has no emotion
keeping no friends
its not magic potion
just what a bank lends

treat it with caution
do treat it with care
else abusing its fractions
might cause you to swear

'course when in a bull
it will certainly yield
buckets more full
wiv wotever you've stealed

but…if in a bear
be you levered and long
the loss that you'll wear
makes you ev'r more wrong

Or how about some verse with a little graphic punch? Here's Broker Joe (very Suessian). Check it out.

And from past busts (so as not to feel singled out by fate), Thomas Love Peacock, 1825:

Read more »

From The Guardian:

New excerpts from Darwin's letters and diaries, along with contemporary cartoons and photographs, show how his revolutionary On the Origin of Species was received.

From Harvard Magazine:

Barack Obama’s election represents the fulfillment of a dream that once seemed unfathomable, writes Fletcher University Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of Harvard’s W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research:

Given all of the racism to which black people were subjected following Reconstruction and throughout the first half of the 20th century, no one could actually envision a Negro becoming president—“not in our lifetimes,” as our ancestors used to say. When James Earl Jones became America’s first black fictional president in the 1972 film, The Man, I remember thinking, “Imagine that!” His character, Douglass Dilman, the president pro tempore of the Senate, ascends to the presidency after the president and the Speaker of the House are killed in a building collapse, and after the vice president declines the office due to advanced age and ill health. A fantasy if ever there was one, we thought.

Writing on theroot.com, Gates notes how much things have changed in his own lifetime:

It is astounding to think that many of us today—myself included—can remember when it was a huge deal for a black man or woman to enter the White House through the front door, and not through the servants’ entrance.

For much of our country’s history, African-Americans visited the White House to make a political statement; Gates outlines that tradition, from sea captain Paul Cuffe, who visited James Madison in 1812, through Frederick Douglass’s three visits to Abraham Lincoln, to the Civil Rights movement. Black visitors remained an anomaly in much more recent times, he writes:

During Bill Clinton's presidency, I attended a White House reception with so many black political, academic, and community leaders that it occurred to me that there hadn’t been as many black people in the Executive Mansion perhaps since slavery. Everyone laughed at the joke, because they knew, painfully, that it was true.

And Gates gives readers this prescient passage from a 1958 Esquire magazine essay by Senator Jacob Javits, the moderate Republican from New York:

What manner of man will this be, this possible Negro Presidential candidate of 2000? Undoubtedly, he will be well-educated. He will be well-traveled and have a keen grasp of his country’s role in the world and its relationships. He will be a dedicated internationalist with working comprehension of the intricacies of foreign aid, technical assistance and reciprocal trade. … Assuredly, though, despite his other characteristics, he will have developed the fortitude to withstand the vicious smear attacks that came his way as he fought to the top in government and politics … those in the vanguard may expect to be the targets for scurrilous attacks, as the hate mongers, in the last ditch efforts, spew their verbal and written poison.

More here.

Earlier this year, a young novelist named Keith Gessen published his first book. Even more than most such debuts, All the Sad Young Literary Men was highly autobiographical: it had several narrators, but each were recognizable as versions of the writer, and the real-life originals of even minor characters could easily be identified. The novelist’s own ambition was the book’s major theme, and in a sense its writing was less important than its publication, which consummated the drive for recognition that was both its inspiration and its subject. Because of this self-reflexive quality, the book took on a kind of symbolic significance. It was an almost chemically pure example of the kind of literary ambition that has less to do with wanting to write well than with wanting to be known as a writer. The limitations of this kind of ambition could be seen in the book’s reception, not so much in the print reviews as on the Internet, where it became the target of extraordinarily virulent attacks. Attacks, not criticism, for in the discussion of All the Sad Young Literary Men on several blogs and one popular website, literary criticism in the ordinary sense played almost no role. Its detractors had little to say about its plot, characters, or prose style; more curiously, perhaps, neither did Gessen, when he took to the Internet to defend himself. Both writer and readers treated the book, properly, as an assertion of self, and the only question was whether that assertion ought to succeed—whether Gessen ought to become famous.

more from Poetry here.

On April 27, 1982, less than two months before his death from cancer, John Cheever appeared at Carnegie Hall to accept the National Medal for Literature. While his colleagues stood and cheered (“John had nothing but friends,” said Malcolm Cowley), Cheever hobbled across the stage with the help of his wife, Mary. Months of cancer treatment had left him bald and pitifully frail, shrunken, but his voice was firm as he spoke. In his journal he’d referred to this occasion as his “Exodus” and reminded himself that literature was “the salvation of the damned”—the lesson of his own life, surely, and the gist of what he said that day at Carnegie Hall. “A page of good prose,” he declared, “remains invincible.” Seven years before—his marriage on the rocks, most of his books out of print—Cheever had tried drinking himself to death. He was teaching at Boston University, beset by ghosts from his awful childhood in nearby Quincy: “There were whole areas of the city I couldn’t go into,” he said later. “I couldn’t, for example, go to Symphony Hall because my mother was there.” (His mother—resplendent in a coral-embroidered, homemade dress—used to attend concerts at Symphony Hall but refused to bring tickets: “Young man,” she’d say, “I am Mrs. F. Lincoln Cheever and my seats are number 14 and 15.”)

more from VQR here.

Who can ever tire of learning about the great discoveries in physics during the first forty years of the twentieth century, and about the men and women who were responsible? The benchmark texts are the surveys and biographies written by the late physicist and historian Abraham Pais, though all the essentials are gathered in a more condensed—and, to my taste, somewhat more digestible—form in the relevant chapters in William H. Cropper’s Great Physicists (2001). Now here is Gino Segrè with an original and worthwhile contribution to the field. Faust in Copenhagen is an exceptionally thorough account of the emergence of modern quantum mechanics over the years from 1925 to 1933, aimed at a general reader—which is to say, there are no equations. This is a difficult story to tell in any straightforward way. So many different and concurrent threads have to be woven together that a simply chronological narrative can’t be given. Some more subtle organizing principle is called for. Segrè has used the Copenhagen conference of April 1932 as his focus, returning repeatedly to it, and to its participants, as a way of keeping us oriented.

more from The New Atlantis here.

Elephants, like many of us, enjoy a good malted beverage when they can get it. At least twice in the past ten years, herds in India have stumbled upon barrels of rice beer, drained them with their trunks, and gone on drunken rampages. (The first time, they trampled four villagers; the second time they uprooted a pylon and electrocuted themselves.) Howler monkeys, too, have a taste for things fermented. In Panama, they’ve been seen consuming overripe palm fruit at the rate of ten stiff drinks in twenty minutes. Even flies have a nose for alcohol. They home in on its scent to lay their eggs in ripening fruit, insuring their larvae a pleasant buzz. Fruit-fly brains, much like ours, are wired for inebriation. The seductions of drink are wound deep within us. Which may explain why, two years ago, when John Gasparine was walking through a forest in southern Paraguay, his thoughts turned gradually to beer.

more from The New Yorker here.