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Psychologist and Biologist, Harvard University: Author, Moral Minds
Science fiction writers traffic in a world that tries on possible worlds. What
if, as in the Hollywood blockbuster Minority Report, we could read people's
intentions before they act and thus preempt violence? An intentionality detector
would be a terrific device to have, but talk about ethical nightmares. If you
ever worried about big brother tapping your phone lines, how about tapping your
neural lines? What about aliens from another planet? What will they look
like? How do they reproduce? How do they solve problems? If you want to find
out, just go back and watch reruns of Star Trek, or get out the popcorn and
watch Men In Black, War of the Worlds, The Thing, Signs, and The Blob.
But here's the rub on science fiction: it's all basically the same stuff, one
gimmick with a small twist. Look at all the aliens in these movies. They are
always the same, a bit wispy, often with oversized heads, see through body
parts, and with awesome powers. And surprisingly, this is how it has been for
75 or so years of Hollywood, even though our technologies have greatly expanded
the range of special effects that are possible. Why the lack of creativity? Why
such a poverty of the imagination?
The answer is simple, and reveals a deep fact about our biology, and the
biology of all other organisms. The brain, as a physical device, evolved to
process information and make predictions about the future. Though the generative
capacity of the brain, especially the human brain, is spectacular — providing us with a system for massive creativity, it is also
highly constrained. The constraints arise from both the physics of brain
operation, as well as the requirements of learnability.
These constraints
establish what we, and other organisms have achieved — the actual — and what
they could, in the future and with the right conditions, potentially achieve — the possible. Where things get interesting is in thinking about the
unimaginable. Poof! But there is a
different way of thinking about this problem that takes advantage of exciting
new developments in molecular biology, evolutionary developmental biology,
morphology, neurobiology, and linguistics. In a nutshell, for
the first time we have a science that enables us to understand the actual, the
possible and the unimaginable, a landscape that will forever change our
understanding of what it means to be human, including how we arrived at our
current point in evolutionary theory, and where might end up in ten or
ten million years.
To illustrate, consider a simple example from the field of theoretical
morphology, a discipline that aims to map out the space of possible morphologies
and in so doing, reveal not only why some parts of this space were never
explored, but also why they never could be explored. The example concerns an
extinct group of animals called the ammonoids, swimming cephalopod mollusks with
a shell that spirals out from the center before opening up.
In looking at the
structure of their shells — the ones that actually evolved that is — there are
two relevant dimensions that account for the variation: the rate at which the
spiral spirals out and the distance between the center of this coil or spiral
and the opening. If you plot the actual ammonoid species on a graph that
includes spiral rate and distance to the opening, you see a density of animals
in a few areas, and then some gaps. The occupied spaces in this map show what
actually evolved, whereas the vacant spaces suggest either possible (not yet
evolved) or impossible morphologies.
Of great interest in this line of research
is the cause of the impossible. Why, that is, have certain species never taken
over a particular swath of morphological turf? What is it about this space that
leaves it vacant? Skipping many details, some of the causes are intrinsic to the
organisms (e.g., no genetic material or developmental programs for building
wheels instead of legs) and some extrinsic (e.g., circles represent an
impossible geometry or natural habitats would never support wheels).
What is
exciting about these ideas is that they have a family resemblance to those that
Noam Chomsky mapped out over 50 years ago in linguistics. That is, the biology
that allows us to acquire a range of possible languages, also puts constraints
on this system, leaving in its wake a space of impossible languages, those that
could never be acquired or if acquired, would never remain stable. And the same
moves can be translated into other domains of cultural expression, including
music, morality, and mathematics. Are there musical scores that no one, not even
John Cage, could dream up because the mind can't fathom certain frequencies and
temporal arrangements? Are there evolvable moral systems that we will never see
because our current social systems and environments make these toxic to our
moral sensibilities? Regardless of how these questions are resolved, they open
up new research opportunities, using methods that are only now being refined.
Here are some of my favorites, examples that reveal how we can extend the range
of the possible, invading into the terra incognita of the impossible. Thanks to
work by neuroscientists such as Evan Balaban, we now know that we can combine
the brain parts of different animals to create chimeras. For example, we can
take the a part of a quail's brain and pop it into a chicken and when the young
chick develops, it head bobs like a quail and crows like a chicken.
Functionally, we have allowed the chicken to invade an empty space of behavior,
something unimaginable, to a chicken that is. Now let your imagination run wild.
What would a chimpanzee do with the generative machinery that a human has when
it is running computations in language, mathematics and music? Could it imagine
the previously unimaginable? What if we gave a genius like Einstein the key
components that made Bach a different kind of genius? Could Einstein now imagine
different dimensions of musicality? These very same neural manipulations are now
even possible at the genetic level. Genetic engineering allows us to insert
genes from one species into another, or manipulate the expressive range of a
gene, jazzing it up or turning it off.
This revolutionary science is here, and it will forever change how we
think. It will change what is possible, potentially remove what is possible but
deleterious, and open our eyes to the previously impossible.
Roboticist, on leave from MIT, co-founder of iRobot, CTO and Chairman of Heartland Robotic, author, Flesh and Machines
I am very sure that in my lifetime we will have a definitive answer to one question that has been debated, with little data, for hundreds of years. The answer as to whether or not there is life on Mars will either be a null result if negative, or it will profoundly impact science (and perhaps philosophy and religion) if positive.
As 90's Administrator of NASA Dan Goldin rightly reasoned the biggest possible positive public relations coup for his agency, and therefore for its continued budget, would be if it discovered unambiguous evidence of life somewhere elsewhere in the Universe, besides on Earth.
One of the legacies we see today of that judgment is the almost weekly flow of new planets being discovered orbiting nearby stars. If life does exist outside of our solar system the easy bet is that it exists on planets, so we better find planets to look at for direct evidence of life. We have been able to infer the existence of very large planets by carefully measuring star wobbles, and more recently we have detected smaller planets by measuring their occultations, the way they dim a star as they cross between it and Earth. And just in the last months of 2008 we have our first direct images of planets orbiting other stars.
NASA has an ambitious program using the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes and the 2016 launch of the Terrestial Planet Finder to get higher and higher resolution images of extra-solar planets and look for tell-tale chemical signatures of large scale biochemical impact of Earth-like life on these planets. If we do indeed discover life elsewhere through these methods it will have an large impact on our views of the life, and will no doubt stimulate much creative thinking which will lead to new science about Earth-life. But it will take a long, long, time to infer many details about the nature of that distant life and the detailed levels of similarities and differences to our own versions of life.
The second of Goldin's legacies is about life much closer to home. NASA has a strong, but somewhat endangered at this moment, direct exploration program for the surface of Mars. We have not yet found direct evidence of life there, but neither have the options for its existence narrowed appreciably. And we are very rapidly learning much more about likely locations for life; again just in the last months of 2008 we have discovered vast water glaciers with just a shallow
covering of soil. We have many more exciting places to go look for life on Mars than we will be able to send probes over the next handful of years. If we do discover life on Mars (alive or extinct) one can be sure that there will be a flurry of missions to go and examine the living entities or the remnants in great detail.
There are a range of possible outcomes for what life might look like on Mars, and it may leave ambiguity of whether its creation was a spontaneous event independent of that on Earth or whether there has been cross contamination of our two planets with only one genesis for life.
At one extreme life on Mars could turn out to be DNA-based with exactly the same coding scheme for amino acids that all life on Earth uses. Or it could look like a precursor to Earth life, again sharing a compatible precursor encoding, perhaps an RNA-based life form, or even an PNA-based (Peptide Nucleic Acid) form. Any of these outcomes would help us immensely in our understanding of the development of life from non-life, whether it happened on Mars or Earth.
Another set of possibilities for what we might discover would be one of these same forms with a different or incompatible encoding for amino acids. That would be a far more radical outcome. It would tell us two things. Life arose twice, spontaneously and separately, on two adjacent planets in one particular little solar system. The Universe must in that case be absolutely teeming with life. But more than that it would say that the space of possible life biochemistries is probably rather narrow, so we will immediately know a lot about all those other life forms out there. And it will inform us about the probable spaces that we should be searching in our synthetic biology efforts to build new life forms.
The most mind expanding outcome would be if life on Mars is not at all based on a genetic coding scheme of long chains of purine bases that decode in triples to select an amino acid to be tacked on to a protein under construction. This would revolutionize our understanding of the possibilities for biology. It would provide us with a completely different form to study. It would open the possibilities for what must be invariant in biology and what can be manipulated and engineered. It would completely change our understanding of ourselves and our Universe.
Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy, Dartmouth
College; Author, The Prophet and the Astronomer: Apocalyptic Science and
the End of the World
There is no question more fundamental to us than our mortality. We die and we know it. It is a terrifying, inexorable truth, one of the few absolute truths we can count on. Other noteworthy absolute truths tend to be mathematical, such as in 2+2=4. Nothing horrified the French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal more than "the silence of infinitely open spaces," the nothingness that surrounds the end of time and our ignorance of it.
For death is the end of time, the end of experience. Even if you are religious and believe in an afterlife, things certainly are different then: either you exist in a timeless Paradise (or Hell), or as some reincarnate soul. If you are not religious, death is the end of consciousness. And with consciousness goes the end of tasting a good meal, reading a good book, watching a pretty sunset, having sex, loving someone. Pretty grim in either case.
We only exist while people remember us. I think of my great-grandparents in nineteenth-century Ukraine. Who were they? No writings, no photos, nothing. Just their genes remain, diluted, in our current generation.
What to do? We spread our genes, write books and essays, prove theorems, invent family recipes, compose poems and symphonies, paint and sculpt, anything to create some sort of permanence, something to defy oblivion. Can modern science do better? Can we contemplate a future when we control mortality? I know I am being way too optimistic considering this a possibility, but the temptation to speculate is far too great for me to pass on it. Maybe I'll live for 101 years like Irving Berlin, having still half of my life ahead of me.
I can think of two ways in which mortality can be tamed. One at the cellular level and the other through an integration of body with genetic, cognitive sciences, and cyber technology. I'm sure there are others. But first, let me make clear that at least according to current science, mortality could never be completely stopped. Speculations aside, modern physics forbids time travel to the past. Unfortunately, we can't just jump into a time machine to relive our youth over and over again. (Sounds a bit horrifying, actually.)
Causality is an unforgiving mistress. Also, unless you are a vampire (and there were times in my past when I wished I were one) and thus beyond submitting to the laws of physics, you can't really escape the second law of thermodynamics: even an open system like the human body, able to interact with its external environment and absorb nutrients and energy from it, will slowly deteriorate. In time, we burn too much oxygen. We live and we rust. Herein life's cruel compromise: we need to eat to stay alive. But by eating we slowly kill ourselves.
At the cellular level, the mitochondria are the little engines that convert food into energy. Starving cells live longer. Apparently, proteins from the sirtuin family contribute to this process, interfering with normal apoptosis, the cellular self-destruction program.
Could the right dose of sirtuin or something else be found to significantly slow down aging in humans? Maybe, in a few decades… Still at the cellular level, genetic action may also interfere with the usual mitochondrial respiration. Reduced expression of the mclk1 gene has been shown to slow down aging in mice. Something similar was shown to happen in C. Elegans worms. The results suggest that the same molecular mechanism for aging is shared throughout the animal kingdom.
We can speculate that, say, by 2040, a combination of these two mechanisms may have allowed scientists to unlock the secrets of cellular aging. It's not the elixir of life that alchemists have dreamt of, but the average life span could possibly be increased to 125 years or even longer, a significant jump from the current US average of about 75 years. Of course, this would create a terrible burden on social security. But retirement age by then would be around 100 or so.
A second possibility is more daring and probably much harder to become a reality within my next 50 or so years of life. Combine human cloning with a mechanism to store all our memories in a giant database. Inject the clone of a certain age with the corresponding memories. Voilà! Will this clone be you? No one really knows. Certainly, just the clone without the memories won't do. We are what we remember.
To keep on living with the same identity, we must keep on remembering. Unless, of course, you don't like yourself and want to forget the past. So, assuming such tremendous technological jump is even feasible, we could migrate to a new copy of ourselves when the current one gets old and rusty. Some colleagues are betting such technologies will become available within the century.
Although I'm an optimist by nature, I seriously doubt it. I probably will never know, and my colleagues won't either. However, there is no question that controlling death is the ultimate human dream, the one "thing that can change everything else." I leave the deeply transforming social and ethical upheaval this would cause to another essay. Meanwhile, I take advice from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Perhaps there are things we are truly unprepared for.
Philosopher, University of Oxford; Editor, Human
Intelligence is a big deal. Humanity owes its dominant position on Earth not to any special strength of our muscles, nor any unusual sharpness of our teeth, but to the unique ingenuity of our brains. It is our brains that are responsible for the complex social organization and the accumulation of technical, economic, and scientific advances that, for better and worse, undergird modern civilization.
All our technological inventions, philosophical ideas, and scientific theories have gone through the birth canal of the human intellect. Arguably, human brain power is the chief rate-limiting factor in the development of human civilization.
Unlike the speed of light or the mass of the electron, human brain power is not an eternally fixed constant. Brains can be enhanced. And, in principle, machines can be made to process information as efficiently as — or more efficiently than — biological nervous systems.
There are multiple paths to greater intelligence. By "intelligence" I here refer to the panoply of cognitive capacities, including not just book-smarts but also creativity, social intuition, wisdom, etc.
Let's look first at how we might enhance our biological brains. There are of course the traditional means: education and training, and development of better methodologies and conceptual frameworks. Also, neurological development can be improved through better infant nutrition, reduced pollution, adequate sleep and exercise, and prevention of diseases that affect the brain. We can use biotech to enhance cognitive capacity, by developing pharmaceuticals that improve memory, concentration, and mental energy; or we could achieve these ends with genetic selection and genetic engineering. We can invent external aids to boost our effective intelligence — notepads, spreadsheets, visualization software.
We can also improve our collective intelligence. We can do so via norms and conventions — such as the norm against using ad hominem arguments in scientific discussions — and by improving epistemic institutions such the scientific journal, anonymous peer review, and the patent system. We can increase humanity's joint problem-solving capacity by creating more people or by integrating a greater fraction of the world's existing population into productive endeavours, and we can develop better tools for communication and collaboration — various internet applications being recent examples.
Each of these ways of enhancing individual and collective human intelligence holds great promise. I think they ought to be vigorously pursued. Perhaps the smartest and wisest thing the human species could do would be to work on making itself smarter and wiser.
In the longer run, however, biological human brains might cease to be the predominant nexus of Earthly intelligence.
Machines will have several advantages: most obviously, faster processing speed — an artificial neuron can operate a million times faster than its biological counterpart. Machine intelligences may also have superior computational architectures and learning algorithms. These "qualitative" advantages, while harder to predict, may be even more important than the advantages in processing power and memory capacity. Furthermore, artificial intellects can be easily copied, and each new copy can — unlike humans — start life fully-fledged and endowed with all the knowledge accumulated by its predecessors. Given these considerations, it is possible that one day we may be able to create "superintelligence": a general intelligence that vastly outperforms the best human brains in every significant cognitive domain.
The spectrum of approaches to creating artificial (general) intelligence ranges from completely unnatural techniques, such as those used in good old-fashioned AI, to architectures modelled more closely on the human brain. The extreme of biological imitation is whole brain emulation, or "uploading". This approach would involve creating a very detailed 3d map of an actual brain — showing neurons, synaptic interconnections, and other relevant detail — by scanning slices of it and generating an image using computer software. Using computational models of how the basic elements operate, the whole brain could then be emulated on a sufficiently capacious computer.
The ultimate success of biology-inspired approaches seems more certain, since they can progress by piecemeal reverse-engineering of the one physical system already known to be capable of general intelligence, the brain. However, some unnatural or hybrid approach might well get there sooner.
It is difficult to predict how long it will take to develop human-level artificial general intelligence. The prospect does not seem imminent. But whether it will take a couple of decades, many decades, or centuries, is probably not something that we are currently in a position to know. We should acknowledge this uncertainty by assigning some non-trivial degree of credence to each of these possibilities.
However long it takes to get from here to roughly human-level machine intelligence, the step from there to superintelligence is likely to be much quicker. In one type of scenario, "the singularity hypothesis", some sufficiently advanced and easily modifiable machine intelligence (a "seed AI") applies its wits to create a smarter version of itself. This smarter version uses its greater intelligence to improve itself even further. The process is iterative, and each cycle is faster than its predecessor. The result is an intelligence explosion. Within some very short period of time — weeks, hours — radical superintelligence is attained.
Whether abrupt and singular, or more gradual and multi-polar, the transition from human-level to superintelligence would of pivotal significance. Superintelligence would be the last invention biological man would ever need to make, since, by definition, it would be much better at inventing than we are. All sorts of theoretically possible technologies could be developed quickly by superintelligence — advanced molecular manufacturing, medical nanotechnology, human enhancement technologies, uploading, weapons of all kinds, lifelike virtual realities, self-replicating space-colonizing robotic probes, and more. It would also be super-effective at creating plans and strategies, working out philosophical problems, persuading and manipulating, and much else beside.
It is an open question whether the consequences would be for the better or the worse. The potential upside is clearly enormous; but the downside includes existential risk. Humanity's future might one day depend on the initial conditions we create, in particular on whether we successfully design the system (e.g., the seed AI's goal architecture) in such a way as to make it "human-friendly" — in the best possible interpretation of that term.
Neuroscientist, University of Washington School of
Medicine; Author, Global Fever
Climate will change our worldview. That each of us will die someday ranks up there with 2+2=4 as one of the great certainties of all time. But we are accustomed to think of our civilization as perpetual, despite all of the history and prehistory that tells us that societies are fragile. The junior-sized slices of society such as the church or the corporation, also assumed to outlive the participant, provide us with everyday reminders of bankruptcy. Climate change is starting to provide daily reminders, challenging us to devise ways to build in resiliency, an ability to bounce back when hit hard.
Climate may well force on us a major change in how science is distilled into major findings. There are many examples of the ponderous nature of big organizations and big projects. While I think that the IPCC deserves every bit of its hemi-Nobel, the emphasis on "certainty" and the time required for a thousand scientists and a hundred countries to reach unanimous agreement probably added up to a considerable delay in public awareness and political action.
Climate will change our ways of doing science, making some areas more like medicine with its combination of science and interventional activism, where delay to resolve uncertainties is often not an option. Few scientists are trained to think this way — and certainly not climate scientists, who are having to improvise as the window of interventional opportunity shrinks.
Climate will, at times, force a hiatus on doing science as usual, much like what happened during World War II when many academics laid aside their usual teaching and research interests to intensively focus on the war effort.
The big working models of fluid dynamics used to simulate ocean and atmospheric circulation will themselves be game-changing for other fields of dynamics, such as brain processing and decision making. They should be especially important as they are incorporated into economic research. Climate problems will cause economies to stagger and we have just seen how fragile they are. Unlike 1997 when currency troubles were forced by a big El Niño and its associated fires in southeast Asia, the events of 2008 show that, even without the boat being rocked by external events, our economy can partially crash just from internal instabilities, equivalent to trying to dance in a canoe. Many people will first notice climate change elsewhere via the economic collapse that announces it.
That something as local as a U.S. housing bubble could trigger a worldwide recession shows us just how much work we have to do in "earthquake retrofits" for our economy. Climate-proofing our financial flows will rely heavily on good models of economic dynamics, studies of how things can go badly wrong within a month. With such models, we can test candidates for economic crash barriers.
Finally, climate's challenges will change our perspective on the future. Long-term thinking can be dangerous if it causes us to neglect the short term hazards. A mid-century plan for emissions reduction will be worthless if the Amazon rain forest burns down during the next El Niño.
Curator, TED Conference
Today when we think of the world's teeming billions of humans, we tend to think: overpopulation, poverty, disease, instability, environmental destruction. They are the cause of most of the planet's problems.
What if that were to change? What if the average human were able to contribute more than consume? To add more than subtract? Think of the world as if each person drives a balance sheet. On the negative side are the resources they consume without replacing, on the positive side are the contributions they make to the planet in the form of the resources they produce, the lasting artifacts-of-value they build, and the ideas and technologies that might create a better future for their family, their community and for the planet as a whole. Our whole future hangs on whether the sum of those balance sheets can turn positive.
What might make that possible? One key reason for hope is that so far we have barely scraped the surface of human potential. Throughout history, the vast majority of humans have not been the people they could have been.
Take this simple thought experiment. Pick your favorite scientist, mathematician or cultural hero. Now imagine that instead of being born when and where they were, they had instead been born with the same in-built-but-unlocked abilities in a typical poverty-stricken village in, say, the France of 1200 or the Ethiopia of 1980. Would they have made the contribution they made? Of course not. They would never have received the education and encouragement it took to achieve what they did. Instead they would have simply lived out a life of poverty, with perhaps an occasional yearning that there must be a better way.
Conversely, an unknown but vast number of those grinding out a living today have the potential to be world-changers... if only we could find a way of unlocking that potential.
Two ingredients might be enough to do that. Knowledge and inspiration. If you learn of ideas that could transform your life, and you feel the inspiration necessary to act on that knowledge, there's a real chance your life will indeed be transformed.
There are many scary things about today's world. But one that is truly thrilling is that the means of spreading both knowledge and inspiration have never been greater. Five years ago, an amazing teacher or professor with the ability to truly catalyze the lives of his or her students could realistically hope to impact maybe 100 people each year. Today that same teacher can have their words spread on video to millions of eager students. There are already numerous examples of powerful talks that have spread virally to massive Internet audiences.
Driving this unexpected phenomenon is the fact that the physical cost of distributing a recorded talk or lecture anywhere in the world via the internet has fallen effectively to zero. This has happened with breathtaking speed and its implications are not yet widely understood. But it is surely capable of transforming global education.
For one thing, the realization that today's best teachers can become global celebrities is going to boost the caliber of those who teach. For the first time in many years it's possible to imagine ambitious, brilliant 18-year-olds putting 'teacher' at the top of their career choice list. Indeed the very definition of "great teacher" will expand, as numerous others outside the profession with the ability to communicate important ideas find a new incentive to make that talent available to the world. Additionally every existing teacher can greatly amplify their own abilities by inviting into their classroom, on video, the world's greatest scientists, visionaries and tutors. (Can a teacher inspire over video? Absolutely. We hear jaw-dropping stories of this every day.)
Now think about this from the pupils' perspective. In the past, everyone's success has depended on whether they were lucky enough to have a great mentor or teacher in their neighborhood. The vast majority have not been fortunate. But a young girl born in Africa today will probably have access in 10 years' time to a cell phone with a high-resolution screen, a web connection, and more power than the computer you own today. We can imagine her obtaining face-to-face insight and encouragement from her choice of the world's great teachers. She will get a chance to be what she can be. And she might just end up being the person who saves the planet for our grandchildren.
Independent Researcher; Author, Dinosaurs of the Air
Predicting what has the potential to change everything — really change everything — in this century is not difficult. What I cannot know is whether I will live to see it, the data needed to reliably calculate the span of my mind's
existence being insufficient.
According to the current norm I can expect to last another third of century. Perhaps more if I match my grandmother's life span — born in a Mormon frontier town the same year Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid and Etta Place sailed for Argentina, she happily celebrated her 100th birthday in 2001. But my existence may exceed the natural ceiling. Modern medicine has maximized life spans by merely inhibiting premature death. Sooner or later that will become passé as advancing technology renders death optional.
Evolution whether biological or technological has been speeding up over time as the ability to acquire, process and exploit information builds upon itself. Human minds adapted to comprehend arithmetic growth tend to underestimate exponential future progress. Born two years before the Wright's first flight, my young grandmother never imagined she would cross continents and oceans in near sonic flying machines. Even out of the box thinkers did not predict the hyperexpansion of computing power over the last half century. It looks like medicine is about to undergo a similar explosion. Extracellular matrix powder derived from pig bladders can regrow a chopped off finger with a brand new tip complete with nail. Why not regenerate entire human arms and legs, and organs?
DARPA funded researchers predict that we may soon be "replacing damaged and diseased body parts at will, perhaps indefinitely." Medical corporations foresee a gold mine in repairing and replacing defective organs using the cells from the victims' own body (avoiding the whole rejection problem). If assorted body parts ravaged by age can be reconstructed with tissues biologically as young and healthy as those of children, then those with the will and resources will reconstruct their entire bodies.
Even better is stopping and then reversing the very process of aging. Humans, like parrots, live exceptionally long lives because we are genetically endowed with unusually good cellular repair mechanisms for correcting the damage created by free radicals. Lured by the enormous market potential, drugs are being developed to tweak genes to further upgrade the human repair system. Other pharmaceuticals are expected to mimic the life extension that appears to stem from the body's protective reaction to suppressed caloric intake. It's quite possible, albeit not certain, that middle-aged humans will be able to utilize the above methods to extend their lives indefinitely. But keeping our obsolescing primate bodies and brains up and running for centuries and millennia will not be the Big Show.
The human brain and the mind it generates have not undergone a major upgrade since the Pleistocene. And they violate the basic safety rule of information processing — that it is necessary to back up the data. Something more sophisticated and redundant is required. With computing power doubling every year or two cheap personal computers should match the raw processing power of the human brain in a couple of decades, and then leave it in the dust.
If so, it should be possible to use alternative, technological means to produce conscious thought. Efforts are already underway to replace damaged brain parts such as the hippocampus with hypercomputer implants. If and when the initial medical imperative is met, elective implants will undoubtedly be used to upgrade normal brain operations. As the fast evolving devices improve they will begin to outperform the original brain, it will make less and less sense to continue to do one's thinking in the old biological clunker, and formerly human minds will become entirely artificial as they move into ultra sophisticated, dispersed robot systems.
Assuming that the above developments are practical, technological progress will not merely improve the human condition, it should replace it. The conceit that humans in anything like their present form will be able to compete in a world of immortal superminds with unlimited intellectual capacity is naïve; there simply will not be much for people to do. Do not for a minute imagine a society of crude Terminators, or Datas that crave to be as human as possible. Future robots will be devices of subtle sophistication and sensitivity that will expose humans as the big brained apes we truly are. The logic predicts that most humans will choose to become robotic.
Stopping the CyberRevolution is probably not possible, the growing knowledge base should make the production of superintelligent minds less difficult and much faster than is replicating, growing and educating human beings. Trying to ban the technology will work as well as the war on drugs. The replacement of humanity with a more advanced system will be yet another evolutionary event on the scale of the Cambrian revolution, the Permian and K/C extinctions that produced and killed off the nonavian dinosaurs, and the advent of humans and the industrial age.
The scenario herein is not radical or particularly speculative, it seems so only because it has not happened yet. If the robotic civilization comes to pass it will quickly become mundane to us. The ability of cognitive minds to adjust is endless.
Here's a pleasant secondary effect — supernaturalistic religion will evaporate as ordinary minds become as powerful as gods. What will the cybersociety be like? Hardly have a clue. How much of this will I live to see? I'll find out.
Science Historian; Author, Darwin Among the Machines
The detection of extraterrestrial life, extraterrestrial intelligence, or extraterrestrial technology (there's a difference) will change everything. The game could be changed completely by an extraterrestrial presence discovered (or perhaps not discovered) here on earth.
[email protected], our massively-distributed search for extraterrestrial communication, now links some five million terrestrial computers to a growing array of radio telescopes, delivering a collective 500 teraflops of fast Fourier transforms representing a cumulative two million years of individual processing time. Not a word (or even a picture) so far. However, as Marvin Minsky warned in 1970: "Instead of sending a picture of a cat, there is one area in which you can send the cat itself."
Life, assuming it exists elsewhere in the universe, will have had time to explore an unfathomable diversity of forms. Those best able to survive the passage of time, adapt to changing environments, and migrate unscathed across interstellar distances will become the most widespread. Life forms that assume digital representation, for all or part of their life cycle, will not only be able to send messages at the speed of light, they will be able to send themselves.
Digital organisms can be propagated economically even with extremely low probability of finding a host environment in which to germinate and grow. If the kernel is intercepted by a host that has discovered digital computing (whose ability to translate between sequence and structure, as Alan Turing and John von Neumann demonstrated, is as close to a universal common denominator as life and intelligence running on different platforms may be able to get) it has a chance. If we discovered such a kernel, we would immediately replicate it widely. Laboratories all over the planet would begin attempting to decode it, eventually compiling the coded sequence — intentionally or inadvertently — to utilize our local resources, the way a virus is allocated privileges within a host cell. The read-write privileges granted to digital organisms already include material technology, human minds, and, increasingly, biology itself. (What, exactly, are those screen savers doing at Dr. Venter's laboratory during the night?)
According to Edward Teller, Enrico Fermi asked "Where is everybody?" at Los Alamos in 1950, when the subject of extraterrestrial beings came up over lunch. The answer to Fermi's Paradox could be "We've arrived! Now help us unpack!" Fifty years later, over lunch at Stanford, I asked a 91-year-old Edward Teller (holding a wooden staff at his side like an Old Testament prophet) how Fermi's question was holding up.
"Let me ask you," Teller interjected in his thick Hungarian accent. "Are you uninterested in extraterrestrial intelligence? Obviously not. If you are interested, what would you look for?"
"There's all sorts of things you can look for," I answered. "But I think the thing not to look for is some intelligible signal... Any civilization that is doing useful communication, any efficient transmission of information will be encoded, so it won't be intelligible to us — it will look like noise."
"Where would you look for that?" asked Teller.
"I don't know..."
"I do!"
"Globular clusters!" answered Teller. "We cannot get in touch with anybody else because they choose to be so far away from us. In globular clusters, it is much easier for people at different places to get together. And if there is interstellar communication at all, it must be in the globular clusters."
"That seems reasonable," I agreed. "My own personal theory is that extraterrestrial life could be here already... and how would we necessarily know? If there is life in the universe, the form of life that will prove to be most successful at propagating itself will be digital life; it will adopt a form that is independent of the local chemistry, and migrate from one place to another as an electromagnetic signal, as long as there's a digital world — a civilization that has discovered the Universal Turing Machine — for it to colonize when it gets there. And that's why von Neumann and you other Martians got us to build all these computers, to create a home for this kind of life."
There was a long, drawn-out pause. "Look," Teller finally said, lowering his voice, "may I suggest that instead of explaining this, which would be hard... you write a science fiction book about it."
"Probably someone has," I said.
"Probably," answered Teller, "someone has not."
(the conversation with Edward Teller took place on 12 April 1999)
Publisher of Skeptic magazine, monthly columnist for Scientific American; Author, The Mind of the Market
It is January, named for the Roman God Janus (Latin for door), the doorway to the new year, and yet Janus-faced in looking to the past to forecast the future. This January, 2009, in particular, finds us at a crisis tipping point both economically and environmentally. If ever we needed to look to the past to save our future it is now. In particular, we need to do two things: (1) stop the implosion of the economy and enable markets to function once again both freely and fairly, and (2) make the transition from nonrenewable fossil fuels as the primary source of our energy to renewable energy sources that will allow us to flourish into the future. Failure to make these transformations will doom us to the endless tribal political machinations and economic conflicts that have plagued civilization for millennia. We need to make the transition to Civilization 1.0. Let me explain.
In a 1964 article on searching for extraterrestrial civilizations, the Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev suggested using radio telescopes to detect energy signals from other solar systems in which there might be civilizations of three levels of advancement: Type 1 can harness all of the energy of its home planet; Type 2 can harvest all of the power of its sun; and Type 3 can master the energy from its entire galaxy.
Based on our energy efficiency at the time, in 1973 the astronomer Carl Sagan estimated that Earth represented a Type 0.7 civilization on a Type 0 to Type 1 scale. (More current assessments put us at 0.72.) As the Kardashevian scale is logarithmic — where any increase in power consumption requires a huge leap in power production — fossil fuels won't get us there. Renewable sources such as solar, wind and geothermal are a good start, and coupled to nuclear power — perhaps even nuclear fusion (instead of the fission reactors we have now) could eventually get us to Civilization 1.0.
We are close. Taking our Janus-faced look to the past in order to see the future, let's quickly review the history of humanity on its climb to become a Civilization 1.0:
Type 0.1: Fluid groups of hominids living in Africa. Technology consists of primitive stone tools. Intra-group conflicts are resolved through dominance hierarchy, and between-group violence is common.
Type 0.2: Bands of roaming hunter-gatherers that form kinship groups, with a mostly horizontal political system and egalitarian economy.
Type 0.3: Tribes of individuals linked through kinship but with a more settled and agrarian lifestyle. The beginnings of a political hierarchy and a primitive economic division of labor.
Type 0.4: Chiefdoms consisting of a coalition of tribes into a single hierarchical political unit with a dominant leader at the top, and with the beginnings of significant economic inequalities and a division of labor in which lower-class members produce food and other products consumed by non-producing upper-class members.
Type 0.5: The state as a political coalition with jurisdiction over a well-defined geographical territory and its corresponding inhabitants, with a mercantile economy that seeks a favorable balance of trade in a win-lose game against other states.
Type 0.6: Empires extend their control over peoples who are not culturally, ethnically or geographically within their normal jurisdiction, with a goal of economic dominance over rival empires.
Type 0.7: Democracies that divide power over several institutions, which are run by elected officials voted for by some citizens. The beginnings of a market economy.
Type 0.8: Liberal democracies that give the vote to all citizens. Markets that begin to embrace a nonzero, win-win economic game through free trade with other states.
Type 0.9: Democratic capitalism, the blending of liberal democracy and free markets, now spreading across the globe through democratic movements in developing nations and broad trading blocs such as the European Union.
Type 1.0: Globalism that includes worldwide wireless Internet access with all knowledge digitized and available to everyone. A global economy with free markets in which anyone can trade with anyone else without interference from states or governments. A planet where all states are democracies in which everyone has the franchise.
Type 0.1: Fluid groups of hominids living in Africa. Technology consists of primitive stone tools. Intra-group conflicts are resolved through dominance hierarchy, and between-group violence is common.
Type 0.2: Bands of roaming hunter-gatherers that form kinship groups, with a mostly horizontal political system and egalitarian economy.
Type 0.3: Tribes of individuals linked through kinship but with a more settled and agrarian lifestyle. The beginnings of a political hierarchy and a primitive economic division of labor.
Type 0.4: Chiefdoms consisting of a coalition of tribes into a single hierarchical political unit with a dominant leader at the top, and with the beginnings of significant economic inequalities and a division of labor in which lower-class members produce food and other products consumed by non-producing upper-class members.
Type 0.5: The state as a political coalition with jurisdiction over a well-defined geographical territory and its corresponding inhabitants, with a mercantile economy that seeks a favorable balance of trade in a win-lose game against other states.
Type 0.6: Empires extend their control over peoples who are not culturally, ethnically or geographically within their normal jurisdiction, with a goal of economic dominance over rival empires.
Type 0.7: Democracies that divide power over several institutions, which are run by elected officials voted for by some citizens. The beginnings of a market economy.
Type 0.8: Liberal democracies that give the vote to all citizens. Markets that begin to embrace a nonzero, win-win economic game through free trade with other states.
Type 0.9: Democratic capitalism, the blending of liberal democracy and free markets, now spreading across the globe through democratic movements in developing nations and broad trading blocs such as the European Union.
Type 1.0: Globalism that includes worldwide wireless Internet access with all knowledge digitized and available to everyone. A global economy with free markets in which anyone can trade with anyone else without interference from states or governments. A planet where all states are democracies in which everyone has the franchise.
Looking from this past toward the future, we can see that the forces at work that could prevent us from reaching Civilization 1.0 are primarily political and economic, not technological. The resistance by non democratic states to turning power over to the people is considerable, especially in theocracies whose leaders would prefer we all revert to Type 0.4 chiefdoms. The opposition toward a global economy is substantial, even in the industrialized West, where economic tribalism still dominates the thinking of most people.
The game-changing scientific idea is the combination of energy and economics — the development of renewable energy sources made cheap and available to everyone everywhere on the planet by allowing anyone to trade in these game-changing technologies with anyone else. That will change everything.
Chair of Languages, Literatures, & Cultures, Professor of Linguistics and Anthropology, Illinois State University; Author, Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes
"We should really not be studying sentences; we should not be studying language — we should be studying people" Victor Yngve
Communication is the key to cooperation. Although cross-cultural communication for the masses requires translation techniques that exceed our current capabilities, the groundwork of this technology has already been laid and many of us will live to see a revolution in automatic translation that will change everything about cooperation and communication across the world.
This goal was conceived in the late 1940s in a famous memorandum by Rockefeller Foundation scientist, Warren Weaver, in which he suggested the possibility of machine translation and tied its likelihood to four proposals, still controversial today: that there was a common logic to languages; that there were likely to be language universals; that immediate context could be understood and linked to translation of individual sentences; and that cryptographic methods developed in World War II would apply to language translation. Weaver's proposals got off the ground financially in the early 1950s as the US military invested heavily in linguistics and machine translation across the US, with particular emphasis on the research of the team of Victor Yngve at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Research Laboratory of Electronics (a team that included the young Noam Chomsky).
Yngve, like Weaver, wanted to contribute to international understanding by applying the methods of the then incipient field that he helped found, computational linguistics, to communication, especially machine translation. Early innovators in this area also included Claude Shannon at Bell Labs and Yehoshua Bar-Hillel who preceded Yngve at MIT before returning to Israel. Shannon was arguably the inventor of the concept of information as an entity that could be scientifically studied and Bar-Hillel was the first person to work full-time on machine translation, beginning the program that Yngve inherited at MIT.
This project was challenged early on, however, by the work of Chomsky, from within Yngve's own lab. Chomsky's conclusions about different grammar types and their relative generative power convinced people that grammars of natural languages were not amenable to machine translation efforts as they were practiced at the time, leading to a slowdown in and reduction of enthusiasm for computationally-based translation.
As we have subsequently learned, however, the principal problem faced in machine-translation is not the formalization of grammar per se, but the inability of any formalization known, including Chomsky's, to integrate context and culture (semantics and pragmatics in particular) into a model of language appropriate for translation. Without this integration, mechanical translation from one language to another is not possible.
Still, mechanical procedures able to translate most contents from any source language into accurate, idiomatically natural constructions of any target language seem less utopian to us now because of major breakthroughs that have led to several programs in machine translation (e.g. the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University). I believe that we will see within our lifetime the convergence of developments in artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, statistical grammar theories, and an emerging field — computational anthropology (informatic-based analysis and modeling of cultural values) — that will facilitate powerful new forms of machine translation to match the dreams of early pioneers of computation.
The conceptual breakthroughs necessary for universal machine translation will also require contributions from Construction Grammars, which view language as a set of conventional signs (varieties of the idea that the building blocks of grammar are not rules or formal constraints, but conventional phrase and word forms that combine cultural values and grammatical principles), rather than a list of formal properties. They will have to look at differences in the encoding of language and culture across communities, rather than trying to find a 'universal grammar' that unites all languages.
At least some of the steps are easy enough to imagine. First, we come up with a standard format for writing statistically-based Construction Grammars of any language, a format that displays the connections between constructions, culture, and local context (such as the other likely words in the sentence or other likely sentences in the paragraph in which the construction appears). This format might be as simple as a flowchart or a list. Second, we develop a method for encoding context and values. For example, what are the values associated with words; what are the values associated with certain idioms; what are the values associated with the ways in which ideas are expressed? The latter can be seen in the notion of sentence complexity, for example, as in the Pirahã of the Amazon's (among others) rejection of recursive structures in syntax because they violate principles of information rate and new vs. old information in utterances that are very important in Pirahã culture. Third, we establish lists of cultural values and most common contexts and how these link to individual constructions. Automating the procedure for discovering or enumerating these links will take us to the threshold of automatic translation in the original sense.
Information and its exchange form the soul of human cultures. So just imagine the possible change in our perceptions of 'others' when we able to type in a story and have it automatically and idiomatically translated with 100% accuracy into any language for which we have a grammar of constructions. Imagine speaking into a microphone and having your words come out in the language of your audience, heard and understood naturally. Imagine anyone being able to take a course in any language from any university in the world over the internet or in person, without having to first learn the language of the instructor.
These will always be unreachable goals to some degree. It seems unlikely, for example, that all grammars and cultures are even capable of expressing everything from all languages. However, we are developing tools that will dramatically narrow the gaps and help us decide where and how we can communicate particular ideas cross-culturally. Success at machine translation might not end all the world's sociocultural or political tensions, but it won't hurt. One struggles to think of a greater contribution to world cooperation than progress to universal communication, enabling all and sundry to communicate with nearly all and sundry. Babel means 'the gate of god'. In the Bible it is about the origin of world competition and suspicion. As humans approached the entrance to divine power by means of their universal cooperation via universal communication, so the biblical story goes, language diversity was introduced to destroy our unity and deprive us of our full potential.
But automated, near-universal translation is coming. And it will change everything.
John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant
contact: [email protected]
Copyright © 2009 by Edge Foundation, Inc
All Rights Reserved.


text:
Drugs, gun found in Orange apartment
A 22-year-old Orange man was arrested Saturday after officers reported finding drugs and a gun in his apartment, according to information from the Orange Police Department.
Codey Dwayne Janice was charged with possession of a controlled substance.
The department reports that on April 25 a search warrant was executed in the 3800 block of Meeks Drive, resulting in the discovery of two grams of crack cocaine, one Hydroconodone pill, two vials of anabolic steroids and a .45 caliber pistol.

subset: commoncrawl


text: It has been a while since my last post but I recently came a cross a house that I just had to share. This 1959 mid century by Richard Dorman has been meticulously renovated and looks almost original. The house is in Sherman Oaks California and on the market. Dare I say this house is as close to perfect as perfect could be, that is my opinion anyway. The house is part of the prestigious Sherman Oaks Estates and sits on a cul-de-sac occupying almost an acre. The terrazzo floors make such an amazing statement, they really set the time of construction. I also have to commend the owners and listing agent for leaving the owners furniture in for the house photos. I cringe when you see a house like this then they just fill it full of generic contemporary furniture.


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WHAT cows do quite naturally does not come so easily for humans. Termites and ruminants such as cows digest cellulose—the main component of woody material in plants—with the aid of gut microorganisms, but scientists struggle to efficiently perform the same task for biofuel production. Researchers want to exploit cellulose, the most abundant organic material on Earth, from wood, grasses, or plant waste materials to create fuels to power our cars and cities. The crucial step in the biofuel production process is efficiently breaking down the long chains of sugars that comprise cellulose into simple sugars. This process has proved both challenging and expensive because of the complex structure of cellulose-yielding plants. Zinnia elegans is an annual plant with exuberant flowers and lacy leaves—not anyone's idea of a green waste material. But the garden-variety zinnia's lacy leaves have been put under the microscope in an effort to visualize plant cell structure and eventually develop more efficient ways to extract the raw ingredients for biofuels.
A team led by Livermore scientist Michael Thelen, in collaboration with scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), uses a novel combination of imaging techniques to view the supportive structure of zinnia leaf cells at several length scales and to observe changes during the deconstruction of cellulose-yielding cells. The structure of supportive cellular elements in plants is rather poorly known, so this work has applications both to basic plant science and to biofuel production. According to Thelen, "We look at the heart of what makes up the woody materials in plants for use in biofuels." While other research groups also study how to break down cellulose in plant tissues, this work differs because it uses single plant cells to fundamentally understand the initial stages of deconstruction.
Targeting Transformed Cells
Mesophyll cells that transdifferentiate into xylem, or woody, cells have created a highly supportive secondary cell wall consisting mostly of cellulose, in organized patterns of hoops, spirals, or reticulated networks. Near the end of this process, lignin deposits form, and then the cells undergo a programmed death, leaving behind only their shells. In plants, these "functional corpses," as they are sometimes known, are linked end to end to form the sturdy, water-transporting veins that link the roots to the leaves of plants. "Those hollow shells made of cellulose and the lignin that sheaths it are the crucial part of the plant we are studying," says Thelen. "They contain 70 percent of the lignocellulose in plants potentially available for biofuels processing."
After isolating leaf cells and inducing secondary cell-wall formation, Thelen's team applied a combination of imaging techniques to both primary and secondary cell walls to characterize their structure and their chemical composition. The structure of plant cells varies both by plant and cell type, so the team chose a single type of zinnia cell as a model system. According to Catherine Lacayo, a Livermore postdoctoral researcher who performed much of the hands-on work, this particular zinnia cell is known to perform the synchronized transdifferentiation process in culture. It is also easy to isolate and can produce large amounts of cellulose for its size. Lacayo notes that the team's work can be considered a starting point for industry-oriented biofuels research. "Zinnia is not practical for use beyond a research setting," she says. "The results will be applied to study other plant types—those plants known as feedstocks for biofuels."
A goal of this study was to gain a better understanding of how lignin and cellulose interact chemically and structurally within the secondary cell wall. Both primary and secondary cell walls contain a crystalline mesh of cellulose fibers that strengthen and support the cell and the overall plant. The secondary cell wall contains more cellulose but also lignin, a complex aromatic polymer. Lignin is an obstacle for biofuels scientists because the polymer makes it difficult to access and separate the cellulose targeted for biofuel production. "Lignin is linked to the cellulose fibers through chemical bonding," says Lacayo. Not only are lignin and cellulose chemically bonded, but lignin also is highly hydrophobic and resistant to breakage. Both are essential properties for a substance that lines the water-carrying veins of plants but pose challenges for deconstruction.
Zooming in for a Better Look
Lacayo used fluorescence microscopy to peer inside the cells at the broadest scale. Ideally, for this imaging technique, the secondary walls in these cells will be highly autofluorescent because of their lignin content, making the hoops and swirls of the secondary cell wall easily discernable. To enhance visibility, Lacayo added to individual cells an NREL-engineered fluorescent protein that binds to cellulose. The cellulose-binding protein worked better when the cells were exposed to hot, acidified chlorite—a chemical treatment used to remove lignin and sugars from the wall. Lacayo explains, "We found that when lignin and some sugars are removed from the cell wall, cellulose becomes more accessible, which was confirmed using atomic force microscopy."
The Livermore team used atomic force microscopy (AFM) to study the cell-wall surface and structures in finer detail. Funding for developing this capability was provided by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program. AFM is an imaging and measuring technique, where information is gathered by "feeling" the surface with a mechanical probe. The researchers determined that a granular material with structures a few tens of nanometers thick covers the outer surface of the cells. Drilling down a bit deeper, cells treated with hot, acidified chlorite and imaged with AFM revealed a networked structure of cellulose fibrils comprising the primary cell wall. By breaking the cells apart, they obtained fragments of the secondary cell wall to image as well. These fragments consisted of granular deposits of lignin within cellulose fibrils arranged in parallel. The fibrils were observed to sometimes form thicker groupings up to 100 nanometers wide. These direct observations allowed Thelen's group to develop a model of the zinnia cell-wall architecture. According to Alexander Malkin, a Livermore scientist who lent his AFM expertise to the project, "This is the first time that high-resolution imaging has been done of several structural layers of a cell wall."
Imaging at the most minute scale was performed for the project by Lawrence Berkeley scientist Hoi-Ying Holman. Using synchrotron radiation Fourier-transform infrared (SR-FTIR) spectromicroscopy, Holman looked at the chemical composition of individual cells. Spectromicroscopy identifies and measures substances through the spectrum those substances emit or absorb. Once the cells were treated with chemicals to remove components from the cell walls, SR-FTIR was used to image cell composition. In recorded changes in the relevant absorbance spectra, SR-FTIR imaging showed that the cellulose remaining in each cell was more accessible after lignin was removed with the acidified chlorite treatment.
Platform for Research Growth
The Department of Energy (DOE) Genome Science Program and the DOE Joint BioEnergy Institute (a six-institution partnership led by Lawrence Berkeley in which Thelen is also involved) have supported this work as part of a larger research effort to turn biomass into fuels using microbial enzymes. For Thelen's group, research continues. Building on what they have learned, the Livermore scientists are now working on imaging the deconstruction of zinnia cell walls using various enzymes extracted from microbes. "Our goal is to systematically break down the plant cell wall and to monitor that process using high-resolution imaging in real time," Lacayo says. The next step will likely be to select microbes with desirable characteristics, such as adaptability to high temperatures, and study how effectively each particular microbe's enzymes break down cellulose and other sugars.
The successful characterization of the zinnia cell-wall structures has provided a more comprehensive understanding of the supportive structures comprising zinnia leaf veins and how decomposition of complex sugars occurs in these regions. But perhaps most importantly, Thelen's group has discovered a winning combination of techniques to peer deep within a cell, a research platform that will likely prove useful to many other plant scientists. Biofuels scientists, too, may benefit from the brilliantly hued zinnia plant, which is helping to unlock the secrets to plant cell-wall construction and deconstruction.
—Rose Hansen
Key Words: atomic force microscopy (AFM), biofuel, cellulose, fluorescence microscopy, Joint BioEnergy Institute, lignin, lignocellulose, mesophyll, synchrotron radiation Fourier-transform infrared (SR-FTIR) spectromicroscopy, xylem.
For further information contact Michael Thelen (925) 422-6547 (firstname.lastname@example.com).
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text:
State agencies and universities are constantly looking to work with businesses certified as Historically Underutilized Business (HUB). The goal of this good-faith effort is to actively involve HUBs in the Texas procurement process and ensure they receive a fair share of state business.
View a list of HUB status codes and ethnicity codes.
*Vendors may also receive HUB certification by way of a certification memorandum of agreement the Statewide HUB Program has entered into with other local governments or nonprofit organizations. View more about HUB Certification Agreements
IMPORTANT: It is vital to be truthful in all documents provided for HUB certification. It is a state jail felony under Texas Penal Code §37.10 to knowingly provide false information in an application for HUB certification. It is a third degree felony under Texas Government Code §2161.231 to apply for a state contract as a HUB vendor knowing you are not actually a HUB.
If the felony conduct prohibited under Texas Government Code §2161.231 results in the awarding of a state contract, then the act of knowingly acquiring funds derived from that felony conduct may be prosecuted under Texas Penal Code §34.02. An offense under this section is punishable as a felony regardless of the amount of funds derived from the illegal conduct. First degree felony punishment applicable if the value of the funds is $200,000 or more.
In 2015, the Texas Legislature passed House Bill 855, which requires state agencies to publish a list of the three most commonly used Web browsers on their websites. The Texas Comptroller's most commonly used Web browsers are Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Apple Safari.
We support:


text: adidas Basketball is proud to announce today their acquisition of Joakim Noah. The man was a bit of an oddball case in the NBA in terms of sneakers prior to this partnership, having been the sole player in the league sponsored by Le Coq Sportif. The switch strengthens adidas' foothold in Chicago, bringing the number of current Bulls players rocking with adidas up to seven (The rest are Jimmy Butler, Taj Gibson, Marquis Teague, Tony Snell, Erik Murphy, and of course Derrick Rose). Let us know if you're excited to see where the partnership takes Noah and stay tuned to see which sneakers he'll be hitting the court in when the season starts up.


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Bundu Gas & Oil Exploration (Pty) Ltd ("Bundu")
Bundu is 95% owned by Challenger Energy Limited, and 5% by its Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) partner, Donald Ncube via the Nkululeko Trust.
Mr Ncube is the Executive Chairman of Badimo Gas, a Director of Gold Fields and Vula Mining Supplies as well as the Chairman of Chiporo Rail. He was the former Chairman of South African Airways, the Atomic Energy Corporation, Real Africa Holdings, Oceana and Sun International. Mr Ncube pioneered the establishment of numerous business initiatives in financial services, manufacturing and mining and is a supporter of non-governmental institutions committed to uplifting and improving the quality of life in informal settlements.
Bundu has lodged an application for the Cranemere project, a significant shale gas prospect located in the Eastern Cape Province. The application covers 3,500km2 (870,000 acres) centred on the 1968 discovery well.


text:
Arch for Arch is a commissioned architectural structure that...
Arch for Arch is a commissioned architectural structure that commemorates the work and life of one of South Africa's most celebrated figures, Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
The wooden arches were bent by Croatian boat builder Dario Farcic in Johannesburg. Each strand of wood bears a single line from the South African Constitution's preamble, signifying the founding principles on which the country is built.
A version of the Arch for Arch structure has been installed near St. George's Cathedral in Cape Town and launched on 7 October 2017 to coincide with Tutu's 86th birthday.
Another will be installed at Constitution Hill in Johannesburg on 10 December 2017 to coincide with the 21st anniversary of the South African Constitution. The Arch for Arch project was completed with the generous help of Design Indaba sponsor Liberty.
Originally published here.
See photos of the unveiling. (All photos by Daniel Ruthland Manners)
What section of the Constitution has had the most impact on your life? Share your thoughts with us by uploading them here or say something on social media using the hashtag #ArchForArch or Whatsapp us on 078 293 2059.


text:
The South Beach sound is filling dance floors across the country. Acts like Jennifer Lopez, Shakira, and Marc Anthony are dominating the charts with their infectious dance mixes flavored with salsa and meringue beats.
Latin Express was specifically created to capture this excitement. This dynamic 10 member band features 3 hot young front singers, 2 horns, percussion, and a rock solid 4-piece rhythm section. In addition to today's hottest top40 latin songs, Latin Express adds some traditional Latin music (salsa, merengue) and a moderate amount of top 40 favorites from the 70's, 80's, and 90's, giving you the versatility you won't find in any traditional Latin band!


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Shanghai cathedral undergoes major renovation
SHANGHAI —"Empire of the Sun," J.G. Ballard's atmospheric novel about his coming of age in China, opens on the eve of Pearl Harbor. Shanghai Cathedral choir boys are being marched to the crypt to watch newsreels of Royal Air Force fighter planes falling in flames in the English countryside.
The cathedral's actual name was Holy Trinity, and Ballard, the son of expatriate Britons, attended the cathedral's prestigious boys school.
Built in a Victorian Gothic style in the 1860s, Holy Trinity served for nearly eight decades as the spiritual home for colonialists who flocked to Shanghai after Britain's victory in the Opium Wars opened the port to trade. With its stout pews, stained-glass windows and 2,500-pipe organ, the red-brick Anglican church provided a cloistered haven in an exotic, untamed place.
Along with the men-only Shanghai Club and racehorse owners' Shanghai Race Club, "the cathedral was a central feature of British life in a faraway land," said Peter Hibbard, a British expat and president of the Royal Asiatic Society China in Shanghai. Here in the Red Church, as many called it, babies were baptized, couples were married and parishioners were laid to rest in a homey refuge complete with manicured lawn, gargoyles and spire.
Now, after decades in the control of local politicians, during which it was revamped as a theater and meeting hall and later left to deteriorate, the cathedral is nearing the end of a painstaking renovation by a Chinese Protestant organization. Later this year, this historic church will reopen to what is expected to be a crush of worshipers once dozens of faux stained-glass plastic windows have been replaced with the real thing.
Under the Red Church's watch, this tumultuous city has come full circle — from anything-goes capitalism to the birth of communism to war with Japan to the religion-crushing Cultural Revolution to, once again, unfettered commercialism and even a robust revival of Christianity.
Jonathan Yardley's jaw dropped when he entered Holy Trinity in February 2005. "What the hell have they done?" the conservation architect recalls wondering.
Instead of immaculate tile and marble, Yardley found a sloping ground floor made of 7 inches of reinforced concrete and a "floating" second floor above the building's interior arches. Turquoise fans and modern chandeliers hung from the superimposed ceiling. Red-brick walls had been plastered over and painted. The altar had been turned into a stage, and hundreds of raked theater seats had been squeezed in where parishioners in sturdy wooden pews had once recited the Lord's Prayer.
Yardley was a consultant with Commonwealth Historic Resource Management, a firm in Vancouver, Canada, that had been hired to study the cathedral's history and devise a conservation plan. He saw immediately that many bricks would have to be replaced. Interior alterations would have to be carefully dismantled to restore the church to its appearance in 1930, considered its spiritual and physical peak.
"There is quite a significant religious revival in China," said Richard Madsen, a sociology professor at the University of California-San Diego with expertise in Chinese culture. The government still attempts to restrict religious practice to registered places of worship, Madsen added, but untold numbers of Chinese practice on their own in non-approved "house churches."
In 1863, church trustees commissioned George Gilbert Scott to draw plans for "a model of modern ecclesiastical architecture" for 800 worshipers at the considerable cost of 60,000 taels, a part of the Chinese system of weights and currency at the time. The devout son of a clergyman, Scott "was the architectural superstar of England," said Harold D. Kalman, a principal with Commonwealth Historic Resource Management.
Yet Scott "let them down terribly," Kalman said, by proposing a building that was far costlier and had far fewer seats than specified.
It fell to William Kidner, a British architect working in Shanghai, to modify the drawings. Kidner lengthened and widened the building and dispensed with the clerestory so that walls could be thinner. He substituted a wooden roof for a vaulted brick roof.
Scott approved the changes, and in May 1866 members of masonic lodges staged a procession and ceremony to lay the foundation stone as crowds of Chinese lined the streets to watch.
Holy Trinity Church officially opened Aug. 1, 1869. In 1876, it became the cathedral of the Diocese of North China.
By about 1930, Shanghai and the cathedral had reached their zeniths, but the glory days were numbered. In 1937, the Japanese Imperial Army invaded the city and surrounded the international settlement. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese occupied the settlement, evicting residents from their homes and effectively ending Anglo-American influence.
Greg Leck, author of the 2006 book "Captives of Empire," said some expats briefly lived under the cathedral's blue-painted wooden beams, which were adorned with gold-leaf flowers and stars. The Japanese soon moved these expats and the Allied population at large into squalid internment camps, as Ballard relates in "Empire of the Sun."
From then on, Holy Trinity went largely unmaintained.
To date, the renovation has cost about $3 million, a pittance by U.S. standards. The Three-Self Patriotic Movement is attempting to raise nearly $800,000 more to buy and install dozens of stained-glass windows, the final step, Hou said. After that, the Red Church will welcome worshipers.
A theologian who saw the cathedral as the renovation was under way said the project speaks to the dramatic changes occurring within China.
"While there are many flourishing churches in China, this cathedral has a special significance," Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., said in an e-mail. "The very fact that it is reopening... is yet another manifestation of the marvelous resurgence of faith in China."


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Campaigning in Iowa, Hillary Clinton employed a typical dodge in discussing her email server scandal:
[T]here are disputes going on, among agencies, about what shoulda, coulda, woulda, been done back four years, five, six years ago….
Ah, yes, the endless second-guessing to which poor Hillary is subjected! And it's about ancient history, too, when she was Secretary of State. Who can remember back that far?
Well, for starters, Hillary shoulda, coulda, woulda obeyed the law, specifically 18 USC § 1924, which makes it a crime, punishable by up to one year in prison, to "remove[] [documents or materials containing classified information] without authority and with the intent to retain such documents or materials at an unauthorized location."
Hillary also shoulda, coulda, woulda obeyed State Department policy, which required official email correspondence to be conducted using the Department's accounts on the Department's servers.
Hillary has no defense with regard to Department policy, but she is trying to avoid indictment–don't laugh, Gen. David Petraeus and former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger were convicted of crimes for what appear to be far lesser violations–with this claim:
I am repeating the facts, and the facts are, I did not send, nor did I receive, material marked classified.
This is the point that Hillary insists on, over and over: her email messages were not "marked classified." In other words, the information in them may have been secret, but if the word "classified" wasn't stamped on them, she didn't commit a crime.
It is easy to see why her lawyers have tried to erect this firewall. 18 USC § 1924 refers to "classified information of the United States." What is that? Section 1924(c) defines the term:
In this section, the term "classified information of the United States" means information originated, owned, or possessed by the United States Government concerning the national defense or foreign relations of the United States that has been determined pursuant to law or Executive order to require protection against unauthorized disclosure in the interests of national security.
Hillary's position evidently will be that a document hasn't "been determined pursuant to law or Executive order to require protection" unless it is stamped "classified." Will this theory work? It certainly shouldn't. Hillary, as Secretary of State, was authorized to classify documents and was charged with knowledge of what should be kept secret. It would be ridiculous to say that she can store and disseminate secret information, as long as she doesn't stamp it "classified" first.
There probably are multiple executive orders relating to classification of documents, but Executive Order 13526, promulgated on December 29, 2009, is a basic one that covered Hillary's tenure as Secretary of State. It sets forth a "uniform system for classifying, safeguarding, and declassifying national security information."
Executive Order 13526 defines three levels of classification: top secret, secret and confidential. All constitute "classified information of the United States" within the meaning of 18 USC § 1924. Left unresolved by that statute and the executive order, as far as I can see, is whether information that should be classified because the information it contains is secret and its dissemination could be damaging to the United States, but isn't marked "classified," can be kept in an unauthorized location. Again, this would be a silly interpretation when applied to someone like a Secretary of State who has the authority to classify and is charged with knowing what should be classified. There likely are other statutory provisions, orders or case law that would shed light on this question.
The claim that Hillary never sent or received classified information–not even confidential information–during her four years as Secretary of State seems ludicrous. One would think that just about everything a Secretary of State sees is confidential. If the State Department makes a practice of not stamping anything "classified," which of course no one has alleged, does that absolve the Secretary and others from following the normal rules relating to protection of secrets? One would think not.
As I understand the case against General Petraeus, the principal classified documents that he kept at his home were his own war journals from Iraq and Afghanistan. There may have been other documents as well, but I haven't seen news accounts that make this clear. Were those journals stamped "classified"? I haven't seen anything that answers that question, although the bill of information against Petraeus does not say that they were.
Additional research may answer the question definitively, but for now it appears clear that Hillary is standing on a very narrow, and not very sensible, legal theory: it doesn't matter how secret the information she handled may have been, as long as neither she nor someone else stamped a particular document "classified." It would be interesting to compare that theory with the State Department's practice in responding to Freedom of Information Act requests over the last six years. I am quite certain that the Department has not taken the position that every document that the Secretary of State has seen or created via email can be freely provided to FOIA requesters, since nothing the Secretary sees or does is secret or confidential.
Then, of course, there is the issue that Paul wrote about on Thursday: Hillary's team may have scrubbed classification markings from the electronic copies of documents that were on her server. Such removal would itself be a felony, and it doesn't make sense to me that anyone would do it, since other copies of the documents located elsewhere in the State Department system would show classification markings. So I would think such an effort would be both futile and self-incriminating.
The legal issues surrounding Hillary's defiance of common sense, State Department rules and, very likely, federal statutes and executive orders relating to handling of secret information, will continue to percolate for months to come.


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Just like Modern Warfare, World at War on both consoles maintains its high frame-rate by reducing the actual amount of resolution displayed in any given frame. So that'll be a base framebuffer of 1024x600, which is then scaled upwards to 720p, before stuff like the HUD and text is added. Anti-aliasing is used to smooth off unsightly edges and helps the resizing effect look more attractive (see The Darkness on PS3 for an example of how zero AA resized can look pretty grim).
World at War had two potential problems as far as I could see it. Firstly, Treyarch used somebody else's engine for this game; realistically we should prepare oursleves for lesser performance bearing in mind they're using tech courtesy of another, arguably better developer. Secondly, the new game pushes the engine with environments far more complex than those seen in Modern Warfare. My initial expectations were that the 360 game would perform much like PS3 Modern Warfare - diminished performance, but mostly undetectable perceptually. As for the PS3 version of the new game, that would be anyone's guess.
Those gut instincts were half-right, but the reality is actually more interesting, and more reassuring for PS3 gamers. It's clear that there's been a very serious attempt at optimisation on both platforms; corners have been cut in both versions but the work has been done intelligently, with practically zero detriment to the overall product. In fact, the most blatant example of paring down in the whole game can be seen here:
It's one of the most graphically challenging areas of the game, and while minor environmental objects are sometimes missing on the PS3 version, this is probably the only really noticeable section. Frame-rate on the more detail-packed 360 game collapses to an average of 41.59fps across the whole scene. PS3's reduction in detail makes it the only clip in the tests that I ran that actually runs marginally smoother than the equivalent 360 video: 42.13fps. That said, over a 39-second clip, 360's improved environments came at a cost of just 19 more dropped frames.
My PC struggled with a dire 29.49fps result, but more on the disappointments of that particular version later.
Scrutinising the captured video from both versions of World at War highlights an array of tiny changes here and there, but the most obvious differences concern texture quality and shadowing. The PlayStation 3 version of the game (like Modern Warfare before it) has better definition in its shadows, whereas the 360's are a touch more blurred in comparison. PlayStation 3 also seems to show what appear to be higher resolutions on items such as soldier uniforms, when viewed close-up.
The reflective textures are far more pronounced than they are on Xbox 360. We saw in the Fallout 3 comparison how the sheen/polish effect was almost totally absent in the 360 version of the game, making some objects appear flat in comparison to its sibling releases. Here it appears to have been used far more sparingly than on the PlayStation 3 version of the game, which in turn appears to be closer to the PC version.
There are plenty of examples of lower texture resolution on PS3 though - the soldier's boot in the video being a clear example. In short, both versions are nipped and tucked here and there in terms of visual quality, with neither having an overall advantage.


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Mailing Address:
Artists' Guild of Columbia County
Box 533
Evans, Georgia 30809
Artists' Guild of Columbia County
Box 533
Evans, Georgia 30809
The Guild meets monthly, alternating second Tuesdays at the Evans Library and Saturdays at Church of Our Savior, 4227 Columbia Road.
Saturday January 12 – 10:30
Tuesday February 12 – 7pm
Saturday March 9 – 10:30
Tuesday April 9 – 7pm
Saturday May 11 - 1030
Tuesday August 13 – 7pm
Saturday Sept 14 - 1030
Tuesday Oct 8 – 7pm
Saturday Nov 9 – 1030
Now, whenever you buy things at Amazon, you can donate to the Guild via the Amazon Smile program.
Artists' Guild of Columbia County is now a member of Amazon Smile Foundation. 0.5% of the purchase price of eligible products goes to charitable organizations selected by their customers.
For those of you who already shop Amazon, this change will be insignificant to you but very significant to the Guild. For those of you who have yet to shop Amazon, now is a good reason to give it a try.


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To get started using Passage your first step is to create a venue. Sign into your account at http://app.gopassage.com, and select "Admin" from the "Account" drop down menu to reach your dashboard. Click the "Venue" link atop the page, then the "Add Venue" button in the left column to create your first venue. You can create as many venues as you like. When setting up an event you will be asked to select which venue it is belongs to.
The first set of fields are basic info: Venue name, address and location info, phone number and your website to help customers find you. "Capacity" should be set to the number of people you think you can get through your attraction in one night.


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Culberson apologizes for calling NASA waste of funds, Houston Chronicle
"U.S. Rep. John Culberson of Houston apologized Tuesday night for condemning NASA last week as a failure and a waste of federal money. "Every agency wastes money but NASA itself is not a waste," the Republican lawmaker said during a video conference with constituents. "These fine people, the scientists and engineers there at NASA, I certainly owe these folks an apology because that is not what I meant to say."
Culberson weighing legislation for NASA overhaul, Houston Chronicle
"There's a lot of wonderful people working there," said Culberson, "but NASA wastes a vast amount of money."
Editor's note: Gee, Culbertson was so resolute in his stance just a week ago. There was little doubt what he "meant". What caused him to back track and change his mind? Did he not mean what he said before? Does he mean what he says now? How can we tell?