This is Xenakis’ graph of the opening glissandi in Metastasis (composed in 1953-4 for orchestra). A high resolution version of this image can be found at Xenakis: His Life in Music along with an audio exerpt. Xenakis’ scoring style used mathematical techniques to add to the grammars of formal composition. The graphic, pianoroll interface will be familiar to anyone who has used computer sequencing software.

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Scott Frey (Psychology, Uni Oregon and director of the Lewis Center for Neuroimaging) and research assistant Valerie Gerry published “Modulation of Neural Activity during Observational Learning of Actions and Their Sequential Orders” in the 20 Dec 2006 Journal of Neuroscience (reported in Science Daily). The research aims to throw light on the neurophysiological activity corresponding to learning from observation.

Their paper adds to the growing literature suggesting that the pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA) is the seat of intention. Amongst their conclusions, Frey & Gerry suggest that

Whereas the modulatory effects of attempting to learn observationally influence many regions, only activity within the IPS predicts the accuracy with which demonstrated sequences of component actions, or subgoals, are subsequently performed (p.13200).

We conclude that the rostral IPS plays a key role in observational learning of complex action sequences by forming representations of the temporal ordering of component actions that are available to guide subsequent performances of these goal-directed behaviours (p.13200).

Given the role of observational learning in explanations of imitation and social learning this work should make possible some interesting evolutionary explanations of cultural evolution and its precursors.

Frey, Scott H., Gerry, Valerie E. (2006) “Modulation of Neural Activity during Observational Learning of Actions and Their Sequential Orders”. The Journal of Neuroscience. 20 Dec 2006, 25(51) pp13194-13201, doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3914-06.2006 [Online] http://www.ebsco.com/ Accessed: 30 Dec 2006

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Space.com are currently collecting votes on the best space images of 2006. Amongst the highlights are: the transit of mercury across the sun; martian craters; any number of the composite images of nebulae and galaxies produced by combining the outputs of several telescopes.

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2006 saw the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) cutting back its funding of fundamental science in favour of product-based research of tactical and strategic significance for the US. University researchers have found themselves starved of funding for basic science and having to conform to war-footing security procedures for smaller scale projects. The focus on deliverables has led to funding being directed towards corporate and covert research programmes. The cumulative effect of IP legislation in the US has further eroded the openness of traditional academic methods.

According to David Patterson, president of the Association for Computing Machinery, DARPA funding has decreased [for universities] while National Science Foundation funding has been rising, although NSF funding tends to focus on very much smaller scale projects than was conventional for DARPA. It should be noted that the funding numbers referred to by Patterson are ‘excluding classified projects or those where the university functioned as a subcontractor’ ( IEEE Spectrum Online ). The New York Times reported on April 2nd that:

This week, in responding to a query from the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Darpa officials acknowledged for the first time a shift in focus. They revealed that within a relatively steady budget for computer science research that rose slightly from $546 million in 2001 to $583 million last year, the portion going to university researchers has fallen from $214 million to $123 million. [New York Times]

The Computing Research Association, an association of computer science academics from US universities, produced a report for the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee subcomittee on cybersecurity R&D criticising government policy for the near-sightedness of DARPA’s venture-capital firm approach to easily measurable progress in research; for the increased use of classification to hide research from the academic community; and for the pernicious influence of IP law in preventing open discourse about research.

According to the CRA report, under the stewardship of its director, Anthony Tether, DARPA has been transformed into an organization resembling a ‘high-tech venture capital firm’ focused on projects whose development schedules can be mapped onto 12/18 monthly milestones. Since there can be no guarantees in the development schedules of fundamental science these constraints place the emphasis of funding squarely on those projects having only to overcome implementation problems.

The CRA report also criticises the increased use of classification to render the results of research beyond the scrutiny and peer-review of the academic community. Clearly, research with a focus on deliverables of tactical and strategic importance is going result in classified research. However, where there is a redistribution of resources in favour of such projects there will be a dwindling amount of academic material available to contribute to the broader research community. Starving the academic community of cutting edge developments is hardly a recipe for expanding the pool of researchers and theories out of which future projects will emerge.

The growing proportion of DARPA funding for tactically relevant research brings with it inevitable security concerns. One consequence of this is the increase in classification of research and the associated extension of the state security apparatus to include the assessment of membership qualification for research programmes. The New York Times article reports that academics have discovered DARPA funding can entail tough constraints on the membership of research programmes. One academic, Dr. Kleinrock (UCLA) ‘said that he decided that he was not interested in the project when he learned that the agency was insisting that he employ only graduate assistants with American citizenship’ (New York Times). Needless to say, severing US research from the pool of international talent wanting to study in the US deprives science (and US science) of a tremendously powerful resource.

The third of the CRA’s concerns was with the consequences of US intellectual property law for the dissemination of academic research:

[T]he “anti-circumvention provisions” of the DMCA interfere with many legal, non-infringing uses of digital computing and prevent scientists and technologists from circumventing access technologies to recognize shortcomings in security systems, to defend patents and copyrights, to discover and fix dangerous bugs in code, to analyze and stop malicious code (e.g., viruses), and to conduct forms of desired educational activities. In some instances, the threat of legal action under the DMCA has deterred scientists from publishing scholarly work or even publicly discussing their research, both fundamental tenets of scientific discourse.[CRA Report]

Whether your politics are left- or right-leaning, the issue at this point in history is whether anyone can afford to cut fundamental science in favour of covert military research when the operational constraints on covert research remove the mechanisms science has established to sustain the quality of its work. The place of the university at the heart of science is not metaphysically guaranteed role. Even if research increases the intensity of its migration into corporatate institutions the same principles of openness, peer-review and criticism are still its best guarentors of quality. The danger of the drift in emphasis towards deliverables and security in an age of almost permanent national emergency is that will see increasing political interference in matters of science and we will have removed the protections against a new breed of corporate Lysenkoism.

Ref:

Computing Research Association (2006) Testimony Of The Computing Research Association For The Pitac Cyber Security Subcommittee Town Hall Meeting On Cyber Security Research And Development. (Report) [Online] Internet: http://www.cra.org/ (Accessed 26 Dec 2006)

Kumagai, Jean (2006) “U.S. Defense Dollars for Computer Science Plunge”. IEEE Spectrum. 43 (2) [Online] Internet: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/feb06/2814 (Accessed: 26 Dec 2006 )

Markoff, John (2006) “Pentagon Redirects its Research Dollars”. The New York Times. 2 April 2006 [Online] Internet: http://www.nytimes.com/ (Accessed: 26 Dec 2006 )

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COROT is an satellite equipped for detailed measurement of fluctuations in the luminescence of stars. The transit of planets in front of stars will briefly attenuate the intensity of light picked up by COROT, allowing the planets to be identified.

The mission is run by CNES (the French Space Agency) with additional support by the European Space Agency (ESA), Austria, Belgium, Germany, Spain and Brazil. The launch is currently scheduled to take place from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazachstan at 14.23 GMT. ESA television will be providing live launch coverage on the internet.

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Science Daily have reported on new research advancing the thesis that gibbons use the syntax of their songs to communicate vital information about their environments to their conspecifics. Clarke, Reichard and Zuberbühler, commenting on their paper, “The Syntax and Meaning of Wild Gibbon Songs” remark that

This work is a really good indicator that non-human primates are able to use combinations of calls given in other contexts to relay new, and in this case, potentially life-saving information to one another. This type of referential communication is commonplace in human language, but has yet to be widely demonstrated in some of our closest living relatives - the apes. [Clarke, Reichard & Zuberbühler on Science Daily]

The principle reason it has proven difficult to demonstrate referential communication in non-human animals is that human examples of referntial information are most usually explained in terms of the semantics of language. Many theorists are still skeptical that it is possible to deploy fully referential communication without the semantics of fully articulated language. All evolutionists are, therefore, interested in behaviours which could throw light on the evolutionary precursors to- and relatives of- linguistic abilities.

There are not many audio examples of gibbon song to be found easily on the internet. These were the few I could find quickly:

Audio files emedded in Yoichi Inoue’s A preliminary report on wild gray gibbons (Hylobates muelleri) in Danum Valley, northern Borneo.

Captive gibbons on YouTube:

• Gilbert the Gibbon
• Gibbons
• Howling Gibbons

Ref:

Clarke, E., Reichard, U.H., Zuberbühler, K. (2006) ” The Syntax and Meaning of Wild Gibbon Songs “. PLoS ONE. 1 (1) : e73. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000073 [Online] Internet: http://www.plosone.org/ (Accessed: 26 Dec 2006)

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A recent Bloomberg.com article [via: slashdot] reports that police in Middlesbrough, UK have begun equipping CCTV cameras with loudhailers so council surveillance operatives can chastise wrongdoers caught in the act:

It’s Saturday night in Middlesbrough, England, and drunken university students are celebrating the start of the school year, known as Freshers’ Week.

One picks up a traffic cone and runs down the street. Suddenly, a disembodied voice booms out from above:

“You in the black jacket! Yes, you! Put it back!'’The confused student obeys as his friends look bewildered.

“People are shocked when they hear the cameras talk, but when they see everyone else looking at them, they feel a twinge of conscience and comply,'’ said Mike Clark, a spokesman for Middlesbrough Council who recounted the incident. The city has placed speakers in its cameras, allowing operators to chastise miscreants who drop coffee cups, ride bicycles too fast or fight outside bars.[Bloomberg.com]

The article reminds us that in the UK ‘about 4.2 million spy cameras film each citizen 300 times a day, and police have built the world’s largest DNA database’. In an earlier article I linked to a story on spyblog referring to parliamentary revelations that that more than one million innocent people have their DNA held by the police in the UK.

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According to the Journal of Net-Centric Warfare:

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has awarded a collaboration of Next Wave Systems, of Pekin, Ind. and Purdue University with a grant to design a “Rosetta phone,” an application to run on commercial camera phones and portable computing devices to capture and translate foreign language text.

DARPA envisions such a tool used by soldiers in the field to decipher street signs, captured documents, or other materials, across a range of languages such as Cyrillic, Kanji, Hebrew, Greek, Korean han’gul or Chinese.

[via defensetech]

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Prompted by Slater et al’s paper, A Virtual Reprise of the Stanley Milgram Obedience Experiments, BBC radio4’s The Today Programme’s John Humphrys interviewed Mel Slater and Alex Haslam about the opportunities created by virtual worlds for psychologists to revisit ethically controversial , but hugely important, experiments. Slater et al found that, given sufficiently immersive environments, subjects would react normally to their scenarios (despite reminders of artificiality). The Neurophilosopher’s Weblog has a good summary of the Milgram experiments in the context of Slater at al’s work.

The Today Programme discussion focused on the potential for virtual worlds to reproduce the classic conformity and coercion experiments of the 1960s and 1970s. Ethical objections to these experiments (as a consequence of the damage that can be done to the subjects) have prevented social psychologists from building on this work for the last quarter of a century. Many social psychologists regard the discipline to have effectively stalled in the areas probed by these experiments, so much is at stake in these new methods.

There may only be a small window of opportunity for research of this type. The Guardian recently reported that lawmakers in the Bavaria and Lower Saxony are proposing stiff penalties for ‘cruel violence on humans or human-looking characters’. A Korean Times article reports that where virtual worlds are a central component of popular culture, the word, ‘hyon-P’ has been adopted to describe violence passing from virtual to actual space. The article remarks,

“It is not surprising that these situations occur in Korea,'’ said Choi Saet-byul, a professor of sociology at Ewha Womans University. She said that Koreans tend to relate online life with the real world. She said online community members’ gathering offline is an example of the two worlds merging. [source: Korean Times]

The cynical amongst us might think that as soon as virtual $ equates to $ then all other equivalences follow. An earlier article here describes the business enterprises of Ansche Chung in Second Life generating the first millionaire of virtual capitalism. Currencies of MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and Eve-Online have regularly exchanged for real $ on ebay. Clickable culture have recently reported that a corporation in Eve-Online has ‘gone public’ and is selling shares outside the game’s supported mechanics. Some recent comment has made clear that it is possible to ‘launder’ virtual currency via game time top-up cards in Eve-Online. Perhaps you have to be a new member of global capitalism to see through the peculiarly moral prejudices against the virtual: the Chinese courts have declared crimes against virtual property to be analagous in law to to those against physical property (China Daily).

The conclusion of all of this is that the ‘ethically questionable’ experiments that form the core of late twentieth century social psychology could well be reproduced and developed in virtual worlds. However, virtual contexts allow productive social psychological research precisely because they are real social spaces. Capitalism has already colonised these real social spaces and will rapidly be followed by corresponding property law. Property law will be followed by definitions of ‘crimes against the person’. Social psychology does not have very long to act before virtual domains are included in the same legal protections against abuse that apply elsewhere.

Ref:

Slater M, Antley A, Davison A, Swapp D, Guger C, et al. (2006) A Virtual Reprise of the Stanley Milgram Obedience Experiments. PLoS ONE 1(1): e39. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000039 [Online] http://www.plosone.org/ Accessed: 24 Dec 2006

The Today Programme (2006) BBC, Radio 4. 21 Dec 2006 [Online] Internet: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/ Accessed: 24 Dec 2006: 11.00

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I remember this house from the Time Life series volume on plastics in the early 1970s. There are parts of the world that will be seriously considering the pedestal design as a safety option at the moment.

The original design was part of a campaign by Monsanto to promote the uses of plastics in construction.

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