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Compare the advances in technology, one would expect that with the advances in technology, we'd be working less and have more free time.

And in fact we do.

The Big Mac Index
http://www.economist.com/markets/bigmac/displaySto ry.cfm?story_id=5389856

The Economist uses it to keep track of prices around the world.

Oops, found that article after all. Here it is. It's a good one.

We won't be able to sustain civilization by allowing supply and demand forces to shift us to accepting a lifestyle on little oil. Hopefully, the prices for oil will increase at a slow rate, slow enough that economies manage to struggle along while the high price on oil increases the economic profit of developing alternative energy sources.

MOD THE PARENT UP!!

people just want to be concerned. in fact, the people in the know (http://economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=38 84716) are not worried at all.

we enjoy the hecktic armageddon discussions we have with friends over coffee. the worlds going to end, how exciting. but truth be told, the world is more stable than it has ever been. and it will keep getting more stable.

people will never stop stressing that the end is nigh.

They already are. There is a good write-up about some of the problems they are facing in this weeks Economist Self Doomed to failure

While lawsuits from 'green' organizations make plant construction more costly (due to delays), I seriously doubt they are a significant factor.

Also a large portion of the initial capital outlay for building a nuclear powerplant is the labor required.

Also since China is a large exporter of coal as well as consumer they're reduced export capacity due to local consumption also drives up foreign prices.

Chinese know the benefits of nuclear power, but have no Greenpeace-like organizations to obstruct them. One of the rare benefits of not being a Democracy...

Nuclear is currently used primarily for non transport energy so would have near zero impact on our oil

You need to include all costs for an accurate comparision, this site includes all costs

Now that Chinese (no more willing to depend on foreign fuel suppliers, than us) are about to build dozens of new nuclear plants (Toshiba's main motivation for this purchase), the world is suddenly reconsidering...

I'm not arguing why it worked. Plenty of third world countries are sitting on vast natural resources but are unable to use them because they don't have the technology to do so, or if they are using them, the money is going right in the pocket of the few ultra rich people who live there. The american dream happened because of who america was at the time, a lot driven people, a lot of well educated people. If the US as a collection of straw huts run by local war lords, then would the same thing have happened?

Folks other than the US and UK governments wonder about the Lancet's numbers.

http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm? story_id=3352814
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_war_casualties

The study's results has also been criticized for being inconsistent with other estimates, such as a statement by the Iraqi Ministry of Health, which estimated 3,853 civilian deaths between April and October based on hospital records. The Iraq Body Count project also gives a much lower figure for Iraqi deaths. A written Ministerial Statement (17 November 2004) by the UK government stated "the Government does not accept its [the study's] central conclusion" for these reasons, mentioning both of these studies

I saw this about three years ago, not sure it was Frontline, perhaps NOVA or something on the Science channel.

Googline for EEG lie detector finds it, "MERMER." Subject is wired to an EEG. There is a specific brain-wave pulse called "P300" when the mind recognizes something such as the scene in a photograph (such as wife, front door of one's home, the room where a murder occurred...). If it's not something the subject has seen before, there's no "recognition pulse." This method claims REMARKABLY high reliability: It is, he claims, 99.9% accurate at determining the veracity of certain sorts of statement. Discussion of this technique is near the end of this page:

http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory .cfm?Story_ID=2897134

Armed conflict is power of might over right. And minority over majority. It's , by nature, anti-democratic. And , as far as I can tell, a majority of Americans picked this administration - twice. So what you're basically saying is, if I don't agree with everyone else, I'll just have to kill them to get my way.

My point: There have been lots of bloody revolutions, most of which left things in worse shape than before. Oh, sure, they were one step to an eventual "better world", but I don't think you'd like to live in France during Robespierre, nor a businessman in Russia during the Bolshevik revolution. Speaking of that one, Russia arguably is still looking for that "better world"; I don't think it's a stretch to argue that particular revolution was for the worse.

My second point - lots of regimes have fallen in recent years due to non-violent resistance, which also seems to be very effective.

Truth be told, the average age of the Gamer is climbing, in fact, 70 years old isn't too old to be a Hardcore gamer. If games are just for kids, then shouldn't most modern pasttimes be for kids only?(ie. Hockey, Football, Basketball, Golf, Movies, etc)

MSN and Yahoo! behave much worse, from a do-no-evil POV. Consider this writeup in the Economist:

Google has not entirely capitulated in China. It has pared back the services it offers--no e-mail accounts, for example--so that it doesn't put itself in the position where it might have to violate users' privacy. It has also arranged to tell users when search results have been withheld--though the Chinese authorities could always reconsider the arrangement. At the same time, in America, Google has taken a healthy stand against the DoJ, refusing to give the government what it seeks.

Google's rivals have been more accommodating. Yahoo! last year revealed the identity of a Chinese e-mail account-holder, who is now in prison for exposing information the government wanted kept secret. Microsoft's MSN service prohibits words such as "democracy" from being used as headlines on Chinese blogs. In America, AOL, MSN and Yahoo! all handed their data over to the justice department.

Yet western firms faced with engagement or isolation are right to think that being in China leads to greater openness than if they stayed away. Indeed, the very controversies that have cropped up about censorship and suppression are symptomatic of the ways in which free speech is greater now than in the past, thanks to the internet. And, so long as the DoJ's data is anonymous, privacy is not strictly in question.

Now don't get me wrong. I dislike Google; I think their products and services are in poor taste. But certainly, the company deserves better than the slamming it's getting here on Slashdot, and I don't doubt they're at least partially motivated by the hope that they're working to improve things in China. If it was purely about profit, after all, they'd have opened Gmail to Chinese citizens (or have they already, contrary to the article?).

Yeah, even if iTunes sells them cheaper by the album, the price of an album in Russia is about $3. The Russian download services reflect this. And the Russians also have obligatory licensing after publication, sorta like what we have for radio, so their catalogue is hypothetically unlimited.

With AllOfMp3 or the other Russian sites (mp3search.ru or musicmp3.ru), you can get tracks for something like 4 to 12 cents per song, ala carte or not, encoded in the format/bitrate you specify, with or without an artist's permission. ROMS (the Russian ASCAP) has routinely asserted the legality of these sites, and this legality has been supported by Russian legal authorities (the Moscow police, judges and Russian lawmakers have all attested to the legality here).

You can legally import them, in the US at least, just as if you went over to Russia and bought a physical album for $3 in a record store, as long as you intend it for personal use.

It's just price differentials, it's just like if you could buy your Big Macs in China and have them shipped instantly to your mouth for free. Welcome to the information age and the economic chaos/freedom it's bringing.

More importantly, the tracks from these services are completely DRM free.

The best version of this you can get outside of Russia is eMusic, which is subscription based, about 25 cents per song, completely DRM free. Their catalogue is mostly limited to smaller labels though.

So one big question is whether or not there will be meaningful price competition, the other big question for me is whether or not "Don't Be Evil" means "Don't Use DRM" or if it means "Buckle under the pressure of the RIAA, as if it were the hot new China."

people whose knowledge of history is taken entirely from recent propaganda speeches.

[...]works great with US population because most of Americans themselves are disgustingly racist, and can relate.

If anything can be said about Americans on this subject, the stupid American Left gave one of their own the Pulitzer Prize for either being totally duped by the Commies, or for deliberately helping them.

And yes, Russians suffered too. But this thread began with the reasons, Ukrainians want to escape Russia's influence and are happy to embrace that of America. America's clients tend to fare much better off -- South Korea, Chile, Taiwan, Japan, West Germany, whereas Russia's "area of influence" is that of gloom, poverty, and oppression -- Belarus, Cuba, North Korea.

And at the end it does not even matter, whether it is so by evil design or by sheer incompetence.

If we've got a problem with filesharing, wait until someone figures out a way to make a home-fabrication machine the size of a car that can produce anything a machinist can. ;)

These researchers are funded by public money. Their results need to be used for the public benefit, and shared publicly.

The law that changed this was the Bayh-Dole Act. It was controversial when it was passed and there are still people who argue against it. You need to need to realize, though, that a simple philosopical argument like the above has no chance of changing things. The reason is mainly that the most easily quantified measures of development (things like number of patents and number of patents licensed) increased dramatically after Bayh-Dole. The politicians love it because they can point to hard numbers that show the impact. The universities love it because now they can get revenue (and sometimes BIG bucks) out of "basic research". In 2002 the Economist credited the Act with keeping the US economy healthy and called it possibly the most inspired piece of legislation to be enacted in America over the past half-century. It is certainly true that good arguments can be made that there are costs and that the numbers that are trotted out don't tell the whole story. Even the Economist has published a more cautious piece. But the fact remains that arguing against Bayh-Dole is a very uphill battle.

http://economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?s tory_id=5323427&no_na_tran=1

Why the Japanese want their robots to act more like humans
...
So Japan will need workers, and it is learning how to make robots that can do many of their jobs. But the country's keen interest in robots may also reflect something else: it seems that plenty of Japanese really like dealing with robots.

Few Japanese have the fear of robots that seems to haunt westerners in seminars and Hollywood films. In western popular culture, robots are often a threat, either because they are manipulated by sinister forces or because something goes horribly wrong with them. By contrast, most Japanese view robots as friendly and benign. Robots like people, and can do good.

The Japanese are well aware of this cultural divide, and commentators devote lots of attention to explaining it. The two most favoured theories, which are assumed to reinforce each other, involve religion and popular culture.

Most Japanese take an eclectic approach to religious beliefs, and the native religion, Shintoism, is infused with animism: it does not make clear distinctions between inanimate things and organic beings. A popular Japanese theory about robots, therefore, is that there is no need to explain why Japanese are fond of them: what needs explaining, rather, is why westerners allow their Christian hang-ups to get in the way of a good technology. When Honda started making real progress with its humanoid-robot project, it consulted the Vatican on whether westerners would object to a robot made in man's image.
...
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Rent:

economic rent, is a measure of MARKET POWER: the difference between what a FACTOR OF PRODUCTION is paid and how much it would need to be paid to remain in its current use. A soccer star may be paid $50,000 a week to play for his team when he would be willing to turn out for only $10,000, so his economic rent is $40,000 a week. In PERFECT COMPETITION, there are no economic rents, as new FIRMS enter a market and compete until PRICES fall and all rent is eliminated. Reducing rent does not change production decisions, so economic rent can be taxed without any adverse impact on the real economy, assuming that it really is rent.

Real-estate rents are a form of economic rent, and there's a similar argument that landlords will, ceteris paribus, extract the additional income-earning potential of a given location. Google's feat is nothing particularly new, though it's something to think about.

Asia? Well, sure, if you exclude everything but Japan and South Korea. And regarding the former, this Economist article once again seems relevant: "Better than people: Why the Japanese want their robots to act more like humans." It's one (intelligent) journalist's take on why Japan seems so open to new technology while Western culture is more ready to view it with suspicion.

Psychology

Bayes rules
Jan 5th 2006
From The Economist print edition

A once-neglected statistical technique may help to explain how the mind works

[IMAGE]

SCIENCE, being a human activity, is not immune to fashion. For example, one of the first mathematicians to study the subject of probability theory was an English clergyman called Thomas Bayes, who was born in 1702 and died in 1761. His ideas about the prediction of future events from one or two examples were popular for a while, and have never been fundamentally challenged. But they were eventually overwhelmed by those of the “frequentist” school, which developed the methods based on sampling from a large population that now dominate the field and are used to predict things as diverse as the outcomes of elections and preferences for chocolate bars.

Recently, however, Bayes's ideas have made a comeback among computer scientists trying to design software with human-like intelligence. Bayesian reasoning now lies at the heart of leading internet search engines and automated “help wizards”. That has prompted some psychologists to ask if the human brain itself might be a Bayesian-reasoning machine. They suggest that the Bayesian capacity to draw strong inferences from sparse data could be crucial to the way the mind perceives the world, plans actions, comprehends and learns language, reasons from correlation to causation, and even understands the goals and beliefs of other minds.

These researchers have conducted laboratory experiments that convince them they are on the right track, but only recently have they begun to look at whether the brain copes with everyday judgments in the real world in a Bayesian manner. In research to be published later this year in Psychological Science, Thomas Griffiths of Brown University in Rhode Island and Joshua Tenenbaum of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology put the idea of a Bayesian brain to a quotidian test. They found that it passes with flying colours.

Prior assumptions

The key to successful Bayesian reasoning is not in having an extensive, unbiased sample, which is the eternal worry of frequentists, but rather in having an appropriate “prior”, as it is known to the cognoscenti. This prior is an assumption about the way the world works--in essence, a hypothesis about reality--that can be expressed as a mathematical probability distribution of the frequency with which events of a particular magnitude happen.

The best known of these probability distributions is the “normal”, or Gaussian distribution. This has a curve similar to the cross-section of a bell, with events of middling magnitude being common, and those of small and large magnitude rare, so it is sometimes known by a third name, the bell-curve distribution. But there are also the Poisson distribution, the Erlang distribution, the power-law distribution and many even weirder ones that are not the consequence of simple mathematical equations (or, at least, of equations that mathematicians regard as simple).

With the correct prior, even a single piece of data can be used to make meaningful Bayesian predictions. By contrast frequentists, though they deal with the same probability distributions as Bayesians, make fewer prior assumptions about the distribution that applies in any particular situation. Frequentism is thus a more robust approach, but one that is not well suited to making decisions on the basis of limited information--which is something that people have to do all the time.

Dr Griffiths and Dr Tenenbaum conducted their experiment by giving individual nuggets of information to each of the participants in their study (of which they had, in an ironically frequentist way of doing things, a total of 350), and asking them to draw a general conclusion. For example, many of the participants were told the amount of money that a film had supposedly earn

Your taxes help support the CGIAR and the sustain the gene banks of the world's most important food crops to the tune of $500m a year. It would be a shame if the billions invested were to be lost. About half of the world's population eats rice; 2 in 3 in Asia get most of their calories from rice. Half of the rice grown today was bred using materials from the rice gene bank of the International Rice Research Institute. If the gene bank of a major food crop was lost the loss to humanity would be incalculable, and the potential future consequences could include widespread famine, political unrest, large scale human migration and environmental destruction. For an insight into the economic importance of the CGIAR see the article on wheat in the recent issue of the Economist (Story of Man on the cover, or click here http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm? story_id=5323362&no_na_tran=1/). Norman Borlaug, featured in that article, works at the CGIAR's wheat and maize institute, still, in his 90s.

As a recent profile of Gurdev Khush, a rice scientist, put it: his name may not have passed your lips but his work certainly has.

The CGIAR doesn't have any gene banks for oak trees, though it does have two forestry institutes. Oak is a temperate climate tree found in Northern latitudes not known for political instability. The future of the world's climate, the security of its food supply, biodiversity and any prospects of world peace are largely in the hands of the world's poor living in developing countries. People who don't have enough to eat today don't worry about tomorrow. Lucky for us all the Norwegians are enlightened people. Likewise other supporters of Global Crop Diversity Trust.

Two minutes here is all you'll need to understand why it matters http://www.croptrust.org/items/homepage.php/.

This is an interesting topic for me. I'm not so much of a gamer as I am a gamer cultural analyst. I hear all the time from teachers that gaming is destroying our youth, blah blah blah. Same arguments probably could be heard about TV long ago. Anyway don't fight the inevitable but roll with it and use the medium to work for you. good economist article on morality and gaming: http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id =4246109 Eric Jones http://www.gamedaily.com/

I disagree with the term police state - although levels of trust in the UK police are falling within the country, it's still regarded as the best police force in the world for good reason, as this article in the Economist illustrates admirably. You won't like this but my attitude is literally "more power to them".

Thanks for introducing me to http://www.writetothem.com/ - if there really is a groundswell of opinion against giving the security services and police greater powers, I think we both agree the voters should be able to decide.

Eg, Microbiologists raising doubts? It must be a cover-up

There are times when it's just great to be alive: you're running through the archives, the wind's in your hair, suddenly you stumble on a gem from last year's Sunday Mirror and it just makes you bless the day you decided to become a sarcastic and hateful campaigning science journalist.

How many microbiologists does it take to change a tabloid story?

The Economist is also worth noting. It not infrequently gets things wrong, but it's less of a joke than most of the U.S. media.

Guardian, Independent, Times.
And Google News.

Regardless of overall quality, non-US press can be a useful supplement for US readers, as their set of unsayable/unshowable things is different than that of the US press. Eg, avoiding the "breakfast rule" for photos (can't have appetite-disturbing photos... even of war), or the Independent's story today

Lobbying is Washington's grubby secret. Some say lobbying is part of the democratic process. Others claim it is legalised bribery, even corruption. But love it or loathe it, it is the way Washington works. ... The trade-off is simple. Corporate and other donors provide cash in a bid to secure the legislation they want.

The blog First Draft by Tim Porter is an insider's exploration of the press' problems.

The grandparent's experience is one I've seen a lot. You notice a direct correlation between how much you know about a domain, and how badly the press are bungling it. When one experiences this in several diverse domains... well, the temptation is to generalize.

Paul Graham's recent The Submarine discusses one source of intentional bogosity.

then you're saying that federal spending, as it approaches infinity, is sending us all to hell?

In a way, yes. The net present value of U.S. Government indebtedness (promises to pay - future taxes - national debt today) is over $50 trillion.

Another huge change, says Mr Bach, is that the original Xbox was built from off-the-shelf parts. This reduced time-to-marketthe Xbox took 18 months to design and launchbut prevented Microsoft from reducing the cost of the console during its lifetime. With no loss of performance Sony, for example, has gradually reduced the number of chips inside the PlayStation 2, cutting costs and enabling it to sell the consoles at a profit. Microsoft's use of multiple chips from different suppliers (such as Intel and Nvidia) made such integration impossible. But the Xbox 360 is based on a new, custom design that should give Microsoft the flexibility to integrate components in future. As a result, says Mr Bach, the company will break even on the hardware over the console cycle. Since software sales will be profitable, the Xbox 360 should actually make Microsoft money.

HER name is MARIE, and her impressive set of skills comes in handy in a nursing home. MARIE can walk around under her own power. She can distinguish among similar-looking objects, such as different bottles of medicine, and has a delicate enough touch to work with frail patients. MARIE can interpret a range of facial expressions and gestures, and respond in ways that suggest compassion. Although her language skills are not ideal, she can recognise speech and respond clearly. Above all, she is inexpensive. Unfortunately for MARIE, however, she has one glaring trait that makes it hard for Japanese patients to accept her: she is a flesh-and-blood human being from the Philippines. If only she were a robot instead.

It might be a bit on the expensive side, but it seems to be stable and comfortable.

[EDITORS: IMPROVED VERSION! CLICK THE LINKS! Possibly the most inspired post ever ...] There's a history of pranks and hacks in the year-end issue of the Economist, including MIT hacks, the Bonsai Kitten, and the Pentagon hack by my favorite, Abbie Hoffman. They end with an invitation: "... we invite readers to nominate their contender for the finest prank in history, explaining in 750 words why it deserves the title." Slashdot readers, can you hack the contest?

Interesting. For reference, here is the original text and links (from before the article "went live", as seen by subscribers):

Luther Blissett writes "There's a history of pranks and hacks in the year-end issue of the Economist, including MIT hacks, the Bonsai Kitten, and the Pentagon hack by my favorite, Abbie Hoffman." From the article: "At Harvard's neighbour, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 'hacks', as the MIT crowd calls them, are more serious. So serious, in fact, that in 2003 the institute's best hacks were assembled in a 178-page book, 'Nightwork'. The pranks at MIT tend to be feats of engineering. They are positively encouraged, because they teach students to work in teams, solve complex problems and, sometimes, get a message across. Mr Peterson's book includes an 11-point code for pranksters: leave no damage, do not steal, do not drop things off a building without a ground crew, and so on. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, at least, student pranks have become an establishment activity."

SURVEY: HUMAN EVOLUTION

If this is a man
Dec 20th 2005
From The Economist print edition

Why it pays to be brainy

[Image]

THANKS to Dr Cann and her successors, the story of how Homo sapiens spread throughout the world is getting clearer by the day. But why did it happen? What was it that gave the species its edge, and where did it come from? Here, the picture blurs.

Until recently, it was common to speak of an Upper Palaeolithic revolution in human affairs--what Jared Diamond, of the University of California at Los Angeles, called the Great Leap Forward. Around 40,000 years ago, so the argument ran, humanity underwent a mental step-change. The main evidence for this was the luxuriant cave art that appeared in Europe shortly after this time. Palaeopsychologists see this art as evidence that the artists could manipulate abstract mental symbols--and so they surely could. But it is a false conclusion (though it was widely drawn before Dr Cann's work) that this mental power actually evolved in Europe. Since all humans can paint (some, admittedly, better than others), the mental ability to do so, if not the actual technique, must have emerged in Africa before the first emigrants left. Indeed, evidence of early artistic leanings in that continent has now turned up in the form of drilled beads made of shells and coral, and--more controversially--of stones that have abstract patterns scratched on to them and bear traces of pigment.

That certainly pushes the revolution back a few tens of millennia. The oldest beads seem to date from 75,000 years ago, and an inspired piece of lateral thinking suggests that clothing appeared at about the same time. Mark Stoneking and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, applied the molecular-clock technique to human lice. They showed that head lice and body lice diverged 75,000 years ago. Since body lice live in clothing, and most other species of mammal support only one species of louse, the inference is that body lice evolved at the same time as clothes.

That is an interesting coincidence, and some think it doubly interesting that it coincides with the eruption of Toba. It may be evidence of a shift of thought patterns of the sort that the Upper Palaeolithic revolutionaries propose. On the other hand, there are also signs of intellectual shifts predating this period. Sally McBrearty, of the University of Connecticut, and Alison Brooks, of George Washington University, have identified 14 traits, from making stone blades to painting images, which they think represent important conceptual advances. Ten of them, including fishing, mining, engaging in long-distance trade and making bone tools, as well as painting and making beads, seem to be unique to modern Homo sapiens. However, four, including grinding pigments (for what purpose remains unknown, but probably body painting), stretch back into the debatable past of Homo helmei.

Given the fragmentary nature of the evidence from Africa, which has not been explored with the same sort of archaeological fine-tooth comb as Europe, the speed of the emergence of modern behaviour is still debatable. One thing, however, that clearly played no part in distinguishing Homo sapiens from his hominid contemporaries was a bigger brain.

Modern people do, indeed, have exceedingly large brains, measuring about 1,300 cm. Other mammals that weigh roughly the same as human beings--sheep, for example--have brains with an average volume of 180cm. In general, there is a well-established relationship between body size and brain size that people very much do not fit. But as Dr Oppenheimer shows (see chart 2), most of this brain expansion happened early in human evolutionary history, in Homo habilis and Homo erectus. The brains of modern people are only about 6% larger than those of their immediate African

SURVEY: HUMAN EVOLUTION

The proper study of mankind
Dec 20th 2005
From The Economist print edition

New theories and techniques have revolutionised our understanding of humanity's past and present, says Geoffrey Carr (interviewed here)

[Image]

SEVEN hundred and forty centuries ago, give or take a few, the skies darkened and the Earth caught a cold. Toba, a volcano in Sumatra, had exploded with the sort of eruptive force that convulses the planet only once every few million years. The skies stayed dark for six years, so much dust did the eruption throw into the atmosphere. It was a dismal time to be alive and, if Stanley Ambrose of the University of Illinois is right, the chances were you would be dead soon. In particular, the population of one species, known to modern science as Homo sapiens, plummeted to perhaps 2,000 individuals.

The proverbial Martian, looking at that darkened Earth, would probably have given long odds against these peculiar apes making much impact on the future. True, they had mastered the art of tool-making, but so had several of their contemporaries. True, too, their curious grunts allowed them to collaborate in surprisingly sophisticated ways. But those advantages came at a huge price, for their brains were voracious consumers of energy--a mere 2% of the body's tissue absorbing 20% of its food intake. An interesting evolutionary experiment, then, but surely a blind alley.

This survey will attempt to explain why that mythical Martian would have been wrong. It will ask how these apes not only survived but prospered, until the time came when one of them could weave together strands of evidence from fields as disparate as geology and genetics, and conclude that his ancestors had gone through a genetic bottleneck caused by a geological catastrophe.

Not all of his contemporaries agree with Dr Ambrose about Toba's effect on humanity. The eruption certainly happened, but there is less consensus about his suggestion that it helped form the basis for what are now known as humanity's racial divisions, by breaking Homo sapiens into small groups whose random physical quirks were preserved in different places. The idea is not, however, absurd. It is based on a piece of evolutionary theory called the founder effect, which shows how the isolation of small populations from larger ones can accelerate evolutionary change, because a small population's average characteristics are likely to differ from those of the larger group from which it is drawn. Like much evolutionary theory, this is just applied common sense. But only recently has such common sense been applied systematically to areas of anthropology that have traditionally ignored it and sometimes resisted it. The result, when combined with new techniques of genetic analysis, has been a revolution in the understanding of humanity's past.

And anthropology is not the only human science to have been infused with evolutionary theory. Psychology, too, is undergoing a makeover and the result is a second revolution, this time in the understanding of humanity's present. Such understanding has been of two types, which often get confused. One is the realisation that many human activities, not all of them savoury, happen for exactly the same reasons as in other species. For example, altruistic behaviour towards relatives, infidelity, rape and murder are all widespread in the animal kingdom. All have their own evolutionary logic. No one argues that they are anything other than evolutionarily driven in species other than man. Yet it would be extraordinary if they were not so driven in man, because it would mean that natural selection had somehow contrived to wipe out their genetic underpinnings, only for them to re-emerge as culturally determined phenomena.

Understanding this shared evolutionary history with other s

SURVEY: HUMAN EVOLUTION

The proper study of mankind
Dec 20th 2005
From The Economist print edition

New theories and techniques have revolutionised our understanding of humanity's past and present, says Geoffrey Carr (interviewed here)

[Image]

SEVEN hundred and forty centuries ago, give or take a few, the skies darkened and the Earth caught a cold. Toba, a volcano in Sumatra, had exploded with the sort of eruptive force that convulses the planet only once every few million years. The skies stayed dark for six years, so much dust did the eruption throw into the atmosphere. It was a dismal time to be alive and, if Stanley Ambrose of the University of Illinois is right, the chances were you would be dead soon. In particular, the population of one species, known to modern science as Homo sapiens, plummeted to perhaps 2,000 individuals.

The proverbial Martian, looking at that darkened Earth, would probably have given long odds against these peculiar apes making much impact on the future. True, they had mastered the art of tool-making, but so had several of their contemporaries. True, too, their curious grunts allowed them to collaborate in surprisingly sophisticated ways. But those advantages came at a huge price, for their brains were voracious consumers of energy--a mere 2% of the body's tissue absorbing 20% of its food intake. An interesting evolutionary experiment, then, but surely a blind alley.

This survey will attempt to explain why that mythical Martian would have been wrong. It will ask how these apes not only survived but prospered, until the time came when one of them could weave together strands of evidence from fields as disparate as geology and genetics, and conclude that his ancestors had gone through a genetic bottleneck caused by a geological catastrophe.

Not all of his contemporaries agree with Dr Ambrose about Toba's effect on humanity. The eruption certainly happened, but there is less consensus about his suggestion that it helped form the basis for what are now known as humanity's racial divisions, by breaking Homo sapiens into small groups whose random physical quirks were preserved in different places. The idea is not, however, absurd. It is based on a piece of evolutionary theory called the founder effect, which shows how the isolation of small populations from larger ones can accelerate evolutionary change, because a small population's average characteristics are likely to differ from those of the larger group from which it is drawn. Like much evolutionary theory, this is just applied common sense. But only recently has such common sense been applied systematically to areas of anthropology that have traditionally ignored it and sometimes resisted it. The result, when combined with new techniques of genetic analysis, has been a revolution in the understanding of humanity's past.

And anthropology is not the only human science to have been infused with evolutionary theory. Psychology, too, is undergoing a makeover and the result is a second revolution, this time in the understanding of humanity's present. Such understanding has been of two types, which often get confused. One is the realisation that many human activities, not all of them savoury, happen for exactly the same reasons as in other species. For example, altruistic behaviour towards relatives, infidelity, rape and murder are all widespread in the animal kingdom. All have their own evolutionary logic. No one argues that they are anything other than evolutionarily driven in species other than man. Yet it would be extraordinary if they were not so driven in man, because it would mean that natural selection had somehow contrived to wipe out their genetic underpinnings, only for them to re-emerge as culturally determined phenomena.

Understanding this shared evolutionary history with other s

It's suspicious, sure, but there actually have been a number of recent developments in the study of evolution that might merit its declaration as the scientific advancement of the year. This week's Economist actually includes a well-written, comprehensive survey of discoveries and new theories in human evolution (a.k.a. anthropology). Stuff about understanding the importance of evolution in fields like psychology, sociology, and even literature. Well worth the read if you have the time.

Some of the articles therein may be subscription only. Maybe the Economist Troll will stop by to give us the full contents, no? Maybe too much to hope for this holiday season?

Suffice to say that just like the "Democrats" aren't the US's party about Democracy and the "Republicans" aren't all about a Republic the Canadian "Liberal" party isn't necessarily a species of the overly-broad term "Liberal". Indeed the term "Liberal" doesn't even match up terribly well between the two countries, and not with Canada being invariably the more 'liberal' of the two meanings.

My advice is if you're truly interested in getting a non-US view of the US & the world then consider spending a week or so watching the news from any Canadian (or other) network. CBC is quite good, it's peer CTV is also. After a week or two of viewing you'll start to become aware of the subtly different assumptions made, notice the implicit values are different, the sub-texts & code words don't match up to your US ones. It's also tremendously edifying to compare & contrast the same stories from both sides of the border, what leads the news and what doesn't, what points are expounded upon, etc.

Suffice to say that just like the "Democrats" aren't the US's party about Democracy and the "Republicans" aren't all about a Republic the Canadian "Liberal" party isn't necessarily a species of the overly-broad term "Liberal". Indeed the term "Liberal" doesn't even match up terribly well between the two countries, and not with Canada being invariably the more 'liberal' of the two meanings.

My advice is if you're truly interested in getting a non-US view of the US & the world then consider spending a week or so watching the news from any Canadian (or other) network. CBC is quite good, it's peer CTV is also. After a week or two of viewing you'll start to become aware of the subtly different assumptions made, notice the implicit values are different, the sub-texts & code words don't match up to your US ones. It's also tremendously edifying to compare & contrast the same stories from both sides of the border, what leads the news and what doesn't, what points are expounded upon, etc.

Reject that idea as you wish, but IP is not a real thing. Property is a physical asset that can be seen, bought, and traded.

That the US is allowing patents on concept is ridiculous; ideas were never supposed to be patentable, only the implementation.

I suspect, you are just confused. You heard somewhere, that US is allowing patents on "business methods" (like Amazon's "1-click"), and are now trying to pull the criticism of that here by its ears.

Paying inventors is fine and dandy. For one thing, it would mean that someone actually invented something. However, NTP invented nothing; they have no product, no prototype, nothing of value.

NTP did not invent anything, true, but it paid the inventor. Without the concept of the intellectual property, the inventors will have to hide their ideas until they manage to manufacture and sell things based on them. This will be worse than whatever your grievances are now. First, as I pointed out already, talents for inventions and for entrepreneurship rarely meet in the same head.

Second, even a talented entrepreneur would find it very difficult (or just impossible) to obtain financing, find partners, etc. without exposing the idea to the prospects. And -- without the concept of intellectual property -- what is to hold the prospected financiers, partners, etc. from saying: "Not interested," -- and deciding to do it themselves?

Ethics? Maybe... But what is to prevent the already established companies from snatching up the idea of a start-up, before the start-up signs up the 1000th customer? Not even ethics -- they learned about the idea in the market place... Currently, they can try to license it and compete, or wait for the patent to expire, thus giving the patent holder time to get off the ground.

This is a very real concern. I heard and saw venture capitalists interrogating founders of startups about their intellectual property -- without patented (or patent-pending) ideas, they often would not give even the seed money.

NTP is completely at fault for their intentional abuse of the patent system with the goal of profiting from it. They have no product, no design, and absolutely no use.

"Together at last", reads a headline from the Economist in July of this year. Britain and the U.S. have made it clear of late that India is their boy in the East and, no doubt, trade and military agreements will follow to insure India's economic and military position becomes, as much as possible, preemminent.

The offshoring of IT to India is just a drop in the barrel compared to what will follow in a show of hegemonic, power politics.

Google turned up a few marginal, but interesting sites that suggest an Anglosphere spin on the spate of recent announcements. I don't doubt that India's success as a rising star in the aftermath of the British Empire will serve it well.

Now compare that to NTP. They provide *no value add*. No work, no service, no accessibility, no publishing. If on the other hand, they make the ideas accessible to those who would like to license them, *that* would be a value add.

But you are wrong. NTP and entities like it certainly make our lives better by paying inventors for their ideas. This allows inventors to make a living inventing.

They waited until RIM had invested *big money* in their infrastructure, not knowing about the virtual landmine.

It's worth noting that patent language is so impenetrable, and the numbers of patents so massive, that it (the patent system as it stands today) probably can no longer serve its original purpose.

Here is an article on the subject -- my other post with a link to it gets slowly down-modded by dimmer mods.

Distressed BlackBerry users argue that too many of the world's workers rely on the device for the service to be shut down. But many of their jobs depend on the principle at stake in this case -- that the courts should protect intellectual property because it rewards inventors by conferring a real title to an intangible asset. Business requires confidence that intellectual property will be respected and infringers brought to justice, regardless of whether the litigant is using the patent or not. Only with that security will firms patent and license their inventions, thus allowing others to use their ideas.

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm? story_id=5300835

for a more recent opinion from that journal.

What is with this Slashdot-Economist lovefest? Is this a fad or the definitive "hey, I'm an intellectual" mark on Slashdot? Will I get downmodded because I question this?

Normally, I'd agree with you, however, on this topic you're off the mark. The Economist is written for Economists, and you'd expect Economists to be able to comment on the damage that patents cause to society with some degree of authority.

The fact that the Economist said this in 1851 tells says a lot in my opinion. It tells me that there has never been a consensus on patents. In fact, it tells me that there was a large body of opposition to patents since inception.

It also tells us that Slashdot is hopelessly ill-equiped to turn the tide against patents. If the Economist (and by extension it's readership) was unable to hold enough sway to overturn patents then slashdot has a snow-flake's in hell chance of achieving the same goal.

We over estimate our self-importance.

Simon

Yeah, tell me about this so called mainstream free press in the USA. Fox News, right?

Plus there are tonns of non-"mainstream" publications, radio stations, etc., none of whom need to worry about, for example, a sudden surge of interest from the tax authorities, when they criticize the government.

Having courts in the corporation's pocket is somehow better, I suppose?

I hate to break it to you, but we (as the silent majority) don't really give a lot of shit about parties. We've just been screwed too much by communist crooks or democrate crooks or whatever other crooks.

You have your terrorist ghosts in the middle east, we have ours in the Caucasia.

In any case, my point was, a Middle Eastern-looking man can walk far freer in New York or Los Angeles, than a Chechen-looking one in Moscow or St. Petersburg.

Oh, come on. You make it sound like asian looking people are being shot on sight here. There are stupid nazist fucks everywhere, it's no reason to spread sensationalistic nonsense.

And just in case - I'm white russian living in Saint-Petersburg.

I'm guessing for the same reason that bat's with big brains have small balls.

I am of course willing to do some experimentation to help prove the theory.

People behave on behalf of the company. People do things in the name of doing their job that they wouldn't consider doing in a purely personal relationship. People at several removes make policy decisions, the policy permeates the corporation, people implement the policy and blame the corporation. Yes those people are cowardly, OTOH if they spoke out against the wrong policies, they would be hungry, because someone less brave would implement a policy on them.

The behaviour of a corporation would be considered properly psychopathic if it was displayed by an individual. Have a read of this article :

that's right... he isnt.

managers are just jackasses and dont have a grip on reality.

The reason being that the vast majority of corporations would be classified as criminal psychopaths if they were human beings. There is even a big documentary/movie on this point.

The Economist recently reported a University of Utah study that suggested Ashkenazi Jews as an ethinic/genetic group have a similar gene.

The leaders of those two states, are often made fun of by most of the public, lalo prasad yadav usually gets elected by buying votes. Whose most famous quote I think is "putting a dam on the river will take the life out of the water." The Communist parties are nothing to worry about. The leaders really are the best part of the government right now, the economist who has written text books, and a physicist. The bureaucracy and corruption is time consuming, but mainly, I think, because there are a billion people to be served. Provide better government salaries and most of that can be solved. http://www.economist.com/countries/India/ almost every article there is worth a read. bihar votes for change, and the india china comparision is good too.