Category Archives: Popular Press

Inferring simple rules from complex structures: Radhika Nagpal

Posted on by

Video

http://www.seas.harvard.edu/news-events/publications/faculty-profiles/radhika-nagpal

Source: Harvard Gazette

From Science: “Complex systems are characterized by many independent components whose low-level actions produce collective high-level results. Predicting high-level results given low-level rules is a key open challenge; the inverse problem, finding low-level rules that give specific outcomes, is in general less understood. We present a multi-agent construction system inspired by mound-building termites, solving such an inverse problem. “

From Harvard Gazette: “The key inspiration we took from termites is the idea that you can do something really complicated as a group, without a supervisor, and, secondly, that you can do it without everybody discussing explicitly what’s going on, but just by modifying the environment.”

Carl Zimmer on the brain in National Geographic

Posted on by

A walk in the brain with Carl Zimmer

“Over the past year, I’ve spent a lot of time around brains. I’ve held slices of human brains preserved on glass slides. I’ve gazed through transparent mouse brains that look like marbles. I’ve spent a very uncomfortable hour having my own brain scanned … I’ve interviewed a woman about what it was like for her to be able to control a robot arm with an electrode implanted in her brain. I’ve talked to neuroscientists about the ideas they’ve used their own brains to generate to explain how the brain works.”

Interview with Jeff LIchtman

Paul Bloom: The pleasures of imagination

Posted on by

The Pleasures of Imagination

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

“Developmental psychologists have long been interested in children’s appreciation of the distinction between pretense and reality. We know that children who have reached their fourth birthday tend to have a relatively sophisticated understanding, because when we ask them straight out about what is real and what is pretend, they tend to get it right. What about younger children? Two-year-olds pretend to be animals and airplanes, and they can understand when other people do the same thing. A child sees her father roaring and prowling like a lion, and might run away, but she doesn’t act as though she thinks her father is actually a lion. If she believed that, she would be terrified. The pleasure children get from such activities would be impossible to explain if they didn’t have a reasonably sophisticated understanding that the pretend is not real.”

Elizabeth Spelke: Language is the secret ingredient

Posted on by

From the New York Times: Insights from the youngest minds

“Dr. Spelke has proposed that human language is the secret ingredient, the cognitive catalyst that allows our numeric, architectonic and social modules to join forces, swap ideas and take us to far horizons. “What’s special about language is its productive combinatorial power,” she said. “We can use it to combine anything with anything.” … She points out that children start integrating what they know about the shape of the environment, their navigational sense, with what they know about its landmarks — object recognition — at just the age when they begin to master spatial language and words like “left” and “right.” Yet, she acknowledges, her ideas about language as the central consolidator of human intelligence remain unproved and contentious.”

What semantic idea is ready for retirement?

Posted on by

The Guardian reports on this year’s Edge question: What scientific idea is ready for retirement?

Dan Sperber’s answer: The standard approach to meaning is ready for retirement.

“What is meaning? There are dozens of theories. I suspect however that little would be lost if most of them were retired and the others quarantined until we have had a serious conversation as to why we need a theory of meaning in the first place. Today I am nominating for retirement just the standard approach to meaning found in the study of language and communication.”