Skeptical of Skeptics

I'm a pretty regular listener to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe podcast. Hosted by Yale Medical School professor Steven Novella, it is a solid source for science news. The show is loosely associated with The Skeptics' Society, whose mission is "to serve as an educational tool for those seeking clarification and viewpoints on controversial ideas and claims." The SGU podcast seeks to debunk the claims of anti-vaccinators, UFO abductees, acupuncturists, and anyone or anything they deem unscientific. Occasionally, however, the tone they strike when criticizing non-skeptics leaves me skeptical.

Maybe I'm just spoiled because I'm surrounded by critical thinkers who don't need me to explain to them why evolution is a solid theory, why getting vaccinated is important, or that seances don't really channel dead people. While I understand the need to educate the masses about the need for vaccines, I'm not at all bothered by people who believe in ghosts, or UFOs, or alternative medicine. I'm not even bothered by people who don't believe in evolution, as long as they aren't biologists or biology teachers.

Mostly, I am skeptical of crusades. The minute you stop listening and start preaching is the moment you cease to be a skeptic. To be a true skeptic, you must be open to the possibility that you are wrong. If you are going to preach, you have to choose your battles carefully. If someone feels better after seeing an acupuncturist, is it harming anyone? Do people that claim to have been abducted by aliens really pose a threat to society?

Skeptics, for the most part, have their heart in the right place. But they must recognize that the best way to change someone's mind is to first understand what's in their mind - and you can't do that without understanding their belief system. Instead of focusing on why others are wrong, skeptics should explore where these incorrect beliefs come from, and then try to have a dialogue with those they disagree with instead of preaching to them.

I Got Semanticized At The New York Semantic Web Meet-Up

I first heard of The Semantic Web about a month ago in Mountain View, California at the Computer History Museum. I met someone named Joseph Pally, an inventor and entrepreneur with a company called Z-Cubes. He told me that the web is evolving to become more and more intelligent, and that some day it will achieve a level of knowledge called wisdom. This reminded me of the "Oracle" character in the movie Code 46; an omniscient machine that knows better than humans what is best for them.

It turns out the Semantic Web is not all science fiction. Back in New York City, I found a Meet-Up Group of Semantic Web enthusiasts. I got "semanticized" at one of their meetings last night near Manhattan's Madison Square Park.

Berliner turned New Yorker Marco Neumann has successfully semanticized almost 1200 members since he started the group in 2005. More than "just another Technology Meet-Up," he seeks to bring together people who have problems that could be solved by Semantic Web technology.

The types of problems that the Semantic Web can solve relate to how information is connected.

Practical RDF in a Publishing Environment - Barbara McGlamery:

When speaker Barbara McGlamery, an ontologist, worked at Time, Inc., her specific problem was how to connect content from every story they published. The Semantic Web helped her to answer one of society's most important questions: Who has Brad Pitt been in a relationship with? This is a surprisingly difficult question for a machine to understand, and through semantic technology web developers are actively exploring the best way to represent this question so a computer can process it.

RDA and the Open Metadata Registry - John Phipps:

Humanity has been struggling with how best to organize information since ancient times. More recently, we've relied on the card catalog system to keep human knowledge ordered. Today, the card catalog has been replaced by the Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC). John Phipps of MetaData Management described his efforts to bring all of the world's databases together to make them more freely accessible with the Semantic Web. This task faces both technical and political challenges as all of the organizations, or "silos," as Phipps calls them, struggle to communicate and agree on a standard.

Fellow NYU student Kate Ray is making a documentary about the Semantic Web. Check out her blog.

The Singularity Summit

Computers that think for themselves, humans achieving immortality, and nanorobots made from DNA? Last weekend nothing was too futuristic for The Singularity Summit, a conference based around the notion that technologies envisioned in Star Trek may be here sooner than you think.

It's all because of the vision of Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near, an inventor who takes ideas normally relegated to science fiction movies seriously. During the two day conference at the historic 92nd Street YMCA in Manhattan, casual reference to the fictional self-aware computer system "Skynet" from The Terminator movies was common. The group of intellectuals, scientists, entrepreneurs and wealthy eccentrics that came together to ponder Kurzweil's concept of "The Singularity" felt at home amongst fellow futurists.

It was something of a safe environment to discuss the notion that soon humans and computers will merge as technological progress increases exponentially. But what, exactly, is The Singularity? Kurzweil gave a talk the first day with over a hundred slides with charts and graphs describing various exponentially increasing phenomenon. One of his classic charts shows how human progress, as determined by emergence of significant inventions such as the printing press or computer, is exponentially increasing. He believes that we will reach a point, a singularity, when progress will increase so fast we will cease to be able to control it as machines with superintelligences take over.

The hope is that these superintelligent beings will be friendly, forming an interdependent and mutually beneficial bond with humans, rather than enslaving them.

I was impressed with the mixture of perspectives offered by the speakers. While there were some that seemed purely Kurzweilian, supporting the idea that The Singularity is indeed approaching, others felt that we are safely far in time from the moment of non-biological consciousness. I ran into one speaker Nadrian Seeman, an NYU chemist who makes DNA nano-robots, on my way to the conference. He confided that he wasn't even sure why they invited him, that he hadn't really heard of The Singularity and didn't know how his research related to it. A couple of other speakers who don't completely buy in to Kurzweil's "law of accelerating returns" publicly declared so, eyeing humanity's future rate of technological progress more conservatively.

There was definitely an economic slant (plea?) to some of the talks, perhaps in research areas that have failed to find more mainstream funding sources. Peter Thiel, billionaire on the board of directors of Facebook, discussed the need to invest in Singularity-esque technologies during a panel on venture capitalism. There was even a pitch toward the end of the conference from a "friend" of The Singularity Institute to audience members to support Singularity research financially.

Whether the Singularity Is Near or not, Kurzweil's ideas are definitely here to stay. Let's just hope that if computers do become conscious, they aren't like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Wolfram's Favorite Example of Information in Nature - The Mollusk Shell

A Conversation with Stephen Wolfram at The Singularity Summit

"Mining the computational universe"

Information is cheap. The challenge is to organize it, mine it, match it up to human needs.

Biology is the new physics!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgUXAogL3To

Laser Roundup: Presenting Laser Fest!

What could be better than an entire year devoted to the celebration of the laser? 2010 marks the 50^th anniversary of the invention of the laser, and there is a wealth of activities planned all around the country. There will be debates, symposia, a traveling lecture series, and a traveling road show all dedicated to this most revolutionary invention. It’s sponsored by the American Physical Society, the Optical Society of America and SPIE , with an advisory committee of laser technology super stars planning a very exciting year of laser celebrations.

In case you’re wondering what those crazy laser scientists are doing with these magical beams of light lately, here is a quick review of lasers in the news:

• Green lasers continue to be a menace to pilots
• They’re on the space station
• They’re being used for propulsion
• They’re making them from diamonds and quantum dots
• They’re even starting to put things in better focus than is supposed to be theoretically possible

Perhaps in 2010 even the Airborne Laser will celebrate Laser Fest by finally shooting down that elusive missile they promised to almost a decade ago:

In the year of the laser, anything is possible. With lasers, that is.