HENRY

Writer, poet, journalist, boxer, chauvinist,  and beat generation lynch pin, Norman Mailer, died yesterday of renal failure.

Norman Mailer, the combative, controversial and often outspoken novelist who loomed over American letters longer and larger than any writer of his generation, died today in Manhattan. He was 84. (more from the NY Times)

Judith Kleinfeld’s written a wonderfully skeptical overview of the “small world”/seven degrees of separation myth:

The idea that people are connected through just “six degrees of separation,” based on Stanley Milgram’s “small world study,” has become part of the intellectual furniture of educated people. New evidence discovered in the Milgram papers in the Yale archives, together with a review of the literature on the “small world problem,” reveals that this widely-accepted idea rests on scanty evidence. Indeed, the empirical evidence suggests that we actually live in a world deeply divided by social barriers such as race and class. An explosion of interest is occurring in the small world problem because mathematicians have developed computer models of how the small world phenomenon could logically work. But mathematical modeling is not a substitute for empirical evidence. At the core of the small world problem are fascinating psychological mysteries.

Continue reading “Could it be a big world after all? The ’six degrees of separation’ myth”…

Michelle points me towards a handy list of Latin phrases. Some of these will be very useful -

Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
    - I have a catapult. Give me all your money, or I will fling an enormous rock at your head.

Happy birthday to the most gorgeous Helvetica!

…designer Mark Simonson explains why Arial is a poor imitation of Helvetica, calling it a “parasite.”

Simonson also includes a guide to spotting the differences between the two typefaces, detailing Arial’s flaws like a judge on Next Top Model. Arial might be guilty of minor ocular transgressions, but there are far worse offenders, such as Comic Sans, a typeface that bestows one’s writing with all the verve and elegance of Porky Pig.

They’re after our children now: Socialization between toddlers and robots at an early childhood education center:

A state-of-the-art social robot was immersed in a classroom of toddlers for >5 months. The quality of the interaction between children and robots improved steadily for 27 sessions, quickly deteriorated for 15 sessions when the robot was reprogrammed to behave in a predictable manner, and improved in the last three sessions when the robot displayed again its full behavioral repertoire. Initially, the children treated the robot very differently than the way they treated each other. By the last sessions, 5 months later, they treated the robot as a peer rather than as a toy. Results indicate that current robot technology is surprisingly close to achieving autonomous bonding and socialization with human toddlers for sustained periods of time and that it could have great potential in educational settings assisting teachers and enriching the classroom environment.

More details of the impending takeover at ScienceNow… Watch out! -

Intelligent Design is not science, and shouldn’t be classified in the evolution section. Go and sign the petition to fix that here.

 I noticed that there were a lot of these intelligent design books in the evolution section,” says Shaw, who’s researching the evolution of sloths, anteaters, and armadillos as she works on her Ph.D. “I took one of each, and it was about a three-foot stack. I thought, this is wrong.“

Fagundes et al on the statistical evaluation of alternative models of human evolution (doi):

An appropriate model of recent human evolution is not only important to understand our own history, but it is necessary to disentangle the effects of demography and selection on genome diversity. Although most genetic data support the view that our species originated recently in Africa, it is still unclear if it completely replaced former members of the Homo genus, or if some interbreeding occurred during its range expansion. Several scenarios of modern human evolution have been proposed on the basis of molecular and paleontological data, but their likelihood has never been statistically assessed.

Using DNA data from 50 nuclear loci sequenced in African, Asian and Native American samples, we show here by extensive simulations that a simple African replacement model with exponential growth has a higher probability (78%) as compared with alternative multiregional evolution or assimilation scenarios. A Bayesian analysis of the data under this best supported model points to an origin of our species ~141 thousand years ago (Kya), an exit out-of-Africa ~51 Kya, and a recent colonization of the Americas ~10.5 Kya.

We also find that the African replacement model explains not only the shallow ancestry of mtDNA or Y-chromosomes but also the occurrence of deep lineages at some autosomal loci, which has been formerly interpreted as a sign of interbreeding with Homo erectus.