William Ayliffe: Why We See What We Do

Posted on July 15, 2011 by RichardPrins

William Ayliffe (Gresh College) Via Gresham College/Fora.tv:

The visual system has developed to allow us to navigate in a complex and dangerous world in order to find food and to avoid danger.

This survival system works by building a complex three-dimensional model based on two-dimensional data from the retina.

This model is tested against “reality” and checked with information from other senses and updated if needed. The brain suppresses the complexity of this processing and we believe that vision is instantaneous, real and effortless.

But is seeing just an illusion?

This is a part of Professor William Ayliffe‘s 2010/2011 series of lectures as Gresham Professor of Physics. The other lectures in this series include:

Fun with Visual Illusions

Correction of Optical Defects: From Spectacles to Lasers

Diabetes, Hypertension and Vasular Diseases of the Eye

Blindness in Children: The Global Perspective

Colour

Use the first link in this post to get a transcript or slideshow of the video below, or to download the video or an audio-only version instead.

Length: ~55 minutes.

Also check out the BBC Horizon episode Is Seeing Believing? on YouTube.

Drew Berry: Astonishing Molecular Machines

Posted on July 6, 2011 by RichardPrins

Via ABC/TEDx:

Molecules are really, really tiny … so small no-one can show them to you. That’s where Drew Berry comes in. He’s what’s known as a “biomedical animator”. His job is to build scientifically-accurate and aesthetically-rich computer graphics which reveal the microscopic world inside our bodies.

Berry brings a rigorous scientific approach to each project, immersing himself in relevant research to ensure current data are accurately represented. His animated renderings of key concepts such as cell death, tumour growth and DNA packaging show molecular shape, scale, behaviour, and spatio-temporal dynamics in action.

Berry’s animations, made to enlighten both scientists and the scientifically curious, have been exhibited at prestige venues like the Guggenheim and MOMA in New York and have won him an award for being a ‘Genius’. His illuminating TEDx Sydney show-and-tell includes wild graphics of DNA moving through the body and malaria infiltrating a baby’s vital organs after a mosquito bite.

Drew Berry trained as a cell biologist and microscopist, and has worked as a biomedical animator since 1995, most recently at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne. Drew received his BSc and MSc degrees from the University of Melbourne. His animations have appeared in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Royal Institute of Great Britain, and the University of Geneva. In 2010, he was named a MacArthur Fellow.

Refridgerator Mothers

Posted on July 1, 2011 by RichardPrins

It is America of the 1950s and 1960s, when a woman’s most important contribution to society is generally considered to be her ability to raise happy, well-adjusted children.

But for the mother whose child is diagnosed with autism, her life’s purpose will soon become a twisted nightmare. Looking for help and support, she encounters instead a medical establishment that pins the blame for her child’s bizarre behaviors on her supposedly frigid and detached mothering. Along with a heartbreaking label for her child, she receives a devastating label of her own. She is a “refrigerator mother”.

Refrigerator Mothers paints an intimate portrait of an entire generation of mothers, already laden with the challenge of raising profoundly disordered children, who lived for years under the dehumanizing shadow of professionally promoted “mother blame.”

Once isolated and unheard, these mothers have emerged with strong, resilient voices to share the details of their personal journeys. Through their poignant stories, Refrigerator Mothers puts a human face on what can happen when authority goes unquestioned and humanity is removed from the search for scientific answers.

Preview below, with a link to watch the rest:

Niall Ferguson: Civilization: Is The West History?

Posted on June 22, 2011 by RichardPrins

A 6-part documentary series from the UK’s Channel Four in which Niall Ferguson asks why it was that Western civilization, from inauspicious roots in the 15th century, came to dominate the rest of the world; and if the West is about to be overtaken by the rest. It accompanies his book Civilization: The West and the Rest.

Ferguson reveals the killer apps of the West’s success – competition, science, the property owning democracy, modern medicine, the consumer society and the Protestant work ethic – the real explanation of how, for five centuries, a clear minority of mankind managed to secure the lion’s share of the earth’s resources.

Competition: The first programme in the series begins in 1420 when Ming China had a credible claim to be the most advanced civilization in the world: ‘All Under Heaven’. England on the eve of the Wars of the Roses would have seemed quite primitive by contrast.

Science: In 1683 the Ottoman army laid siege to Vienna, the capital of Europe’s most powerful empire. Domination of West by East was an alarmingly plausible scenario. But Islam was defeated: not so much by firepower as by science.

Property: Professor Ferguson asks why North America succeeded while South America for so many centuries lagged behind. The two had much in common (not least the subjugation of indigenous peoples and the use of slavery by European immigrants), but they differed profoundly on individual property rights, the rule of law and representative government.

Medicine: The French Empire consciously set out to civilize West Africa by improving public health as well as building a modern infrastructure. Yet in other European empires – notably Germany’s in southwest Africa – colonial rule led to genocide. What was the link from medical science to racial pseudo-science?

Consumerism: Today the world is becoming more homogenous and, with increasingly few exceptions, big-name brands dominate main streets, high streets and shopping malls all over the globe.

Work: The sixth element that enabled the West to dominate the rest was the work ethic. Max Weber famously linked it to Protestantism, but the reality is that any culture, regardless of religion, is capable of embracing the spirit of capitalism by working hard, saving, and accumulating capital.

You can also watch his lecture Empires on the Edge of Chaos on fora.tv (from ABC’s Big Ideas) or The Ascent of money: An evolutionary approach to financial history from Gresham College.

Another thematically related lecture: Ian Morris: Why the West Rules – For Now

Update: Does Islam Stand Against Science? (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

Steve Jones: Nature, Nurture… or Neither?

Posted on June 13, 2011 by RichardPrins

Another lecture via ABC:

Many people see their fate as rather like a cake, which can be sliced into a piece called Nature – what you are born with: your DNA – and another known as Nurture – the way you live. Life – genetics – alas, is not so simple; to separate those ingredients one would have to unbake the cake, which is impossible.

The UK’s Professor Steve Jones is keenly interested in understanding diversity, the role of natural selection and the nature of genetic differences between species. His research has led him to study the ecological genetics of snails, fruit flies and humans. In more recent years however, with information on the genetics of human populations expanding, Jones’ interests have moved more towards human genetics.

In this talk, the award-winning science writer discusses everything from the genetics of the royal family and the Siamese cat to what happens to those who eat too much cake and whether genes might indeed influence our chance of becoming obese.

The Sir David Rivett Memorial Lecture is in honour of an Australian chemist and Chief Executive Officer of CSIR (1927-1945). He died in 1961. The lectures are delivered by distinguished scientists on current and significant new research, with the first David Rivett Lecture delivered in Melbourne in 1963 by Lord Florey on the topic ‘The Development of Modern Science’.

Professor Steve Jones is Emeritus Professor of Human Genetics at the University College London. He has written a number of popular books on genetics and evolution, including “The Language of the Genes”, “Y: The Descent of Men” and “Darwin’s island”. Jones has won the Rhone-Poulenc book prize and the Yorkshire Post first book prize in 1994; and the BP Natural World Book Prize in 1999. He was awarded the Royal Society Faraday Medal for public understanding of science in 1997 and the Institute of Biology Charter medal in 2003. More recently, he won the 2009 Zoological Society of London/Thomson Reuters Award for Communicating Zoology, for his book – “Coral: A Pessimist in Paradise”. In 2011, he was elected President of the UK Association for Science Education.

Watch the lecture below (43m 30s, 164MB):

Update 20110619: Genetic Basis for Crime: A New Look (New York Times)

EteRNA

Posted on January 14, 2011 by RichardPrins

EteRNA, developed by Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford University is a Flash-based folding game, like Fold It, that enlists users to fold RNA for optimized versions, which can then be tested in the lab. Citizen science!

You can participate by signing up directly at the site or linking through facebook (and setting your profile on the EteRNA site).

The game comes with a tutorial to get you familiar with the building blocks of RNA and how to manipulate them to get the desired folding shape. After the tutorial one can try to solve a number of increasingly difficult puzzles.

Scores are kept and displayed in a leaderboard. The game auto-saves the progress on the latest puzzle you might have been working on.

For more expert knowledge on how to solve the puzzles, a number of strategy guides can be found through the community which help in solving and further optimizing the RNA folds.

Scoring 10,000 points or more, by solving the tutorials and a bunch of the challenges, gives you access to the RNA Lab where a real version of some version of RNA can be designed and proposed, which after voting, will then be tested in the real lab.

You can get an idea of what it looks like through an embedded version, as below:

For more detailed info on how the folding of RNA is used, see their information page.

Some media links:
RNA Game Lets Players Help Find a Biological Prize (NY Times)
Online game helps predict how RNA folds (New Scientist)
New video game makes game players Stanford professor’s virtual lab assistants (Stanford)

And finally a short video from Carnegie Mellon that explains EteRNA:

EDGE: Richard Thaler’s Question on overturned beliefs/science

Posted on November 25, 2010 by RichardPrins

Richard Thaler Richard H. Thaler, Director of the Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, is the father of Behavioral Economics. In preparation for a new book he asked EDGE contributors to answer this question:

The flat earth and geocentric world are examples of wrong scientific beliefs that were held for long periods. Can you name your favorite example and for extra credit why it was believed to be true?

As of today, there are 61 responses which make for fascinating reading on how science has corrected itself and our views of nature.

The contributors include Neil Shubin, Garrett Lisi, Peter Schwartz, David Deutsch, Haim Harari, Alun Anderson, Irene Pepperberg, John Holland, Derek Lowe, Charles Simonyi, Nathan Myhrvold, Lawrence Krauss, Steven Strogatz, Cesar Hidalgo, Eric Topol, Christian Keysers, Simona Morini, Ross Anderson, James Croak, Rob Kurzban, Lewis Wolpert, Howard Gardner, Ed Regis, Robert Trivers, Frank Tipler, Joan Chaio, Jeremy Bernstein, Matthew Ritchie, Clay Shirky, Roger Schank, Gary Klein, Gregory Cochran, Eric Weinstein , Geoffrey Carr, James O’Donnell, Lane Greene, Jonathan Haidt, Juan Enriquez, Scott Atran, Rupert Sheldrake, Emanuel Derman, Charles Seife, Milford H. Wolpoff, Robert Shapiro, Judith Harris, Jordan Pollack, Sue Blackmore, Nicholas G. Carr, Lee Smolin, Marti Hearst, Gino Segre, Carl Zimmer, Gregory Paul, Alison Gopnik, George Dyson, Mark Pagel, Timothy Taylor, David Berreby, Zenon Pylyshyn, Michael Shermer, and George Lakoff.

Topics (with comments on both bad and correct science or beliefs) include: plate tectonics, cosmic inflation, prions, quantum entanglement, the force of gravity, the great chain of being, bird intelligence, the four humours of human physiology, luminiferous aether, bad air disease theory, Peripatetic Mechanics of Aristotle, stress theory of ulcers, intelligent design/creationism, the age of the Earth, cell regeneration, spontaneous generation of life, vitalism, unifunctional components of the brain, security by obscurity, whales as fishes, group selection, unilinear cultural evolution, static universe, Lamarckism, nature/nurture, the existence of a vacuum, the human brain vs. the heart, and more…

Bonus: Thaler on his field Behavioural Economics:

TED: Hans Rosling on global population growth, HIV, Asia, poverty

Posted on July 9, 2010 by RichardPrins

Via TED, a new talk by statistics wizard Hans Rosling:

The world’s population will grow to 9 billion over the next 50 years — and only by raising the living standards of the poorest can we check population growth. This is the paradoxical answer that Hans Rosling unveils at TED@Cannes using colorful new data display technology (you’ll see).

Other entertaining TED Talks by Rosling:

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Richard Prins' collection of pseudorandom perceptions

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