[Video] The Divided Brain

Renowned psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist explains how the 'divided brain' has profoundly altered human behaviour, culture and society.

I was directed to this excellent video via David Marsden in a thoughtful discussion over at the OAC: Anthropology, society and the unconscious mind.

I am especially a fan of how the animation condenses McGilchrist's brilliant lecture into a 10-minute educational cartoon. Check out the RSA Animates on YouTube for more of this creative and innovative series.

Tweet

Open Anthropology Cooperative

Several anthropologists have encouraged the formation of an Open Anthropology Cooperative to engage in anthropological discussion and collaboration away from the restrictions of formal academic management. It looks as if all of the tools which have (relatively) long been at our disposal - wikis, blogs, interactive social networking platforms - will be put to the excellent task of opening up the discipline to students, faculty and non-academics alike. I look forward to the next stage of development which will be the implementation and organization of a web platform upon which the Cooperative can grow.

I'd like to see the OAC become a comfortable channel for discussion which does not intimidate amateurs or first-year undergraduates, yet remains useful for doctoral students, fieldworkers, lecturers and specialists in all fields. Broad is good. I also hope that it will become truly international (and multilingual) and incorporate students and departments thus far not so evident in the anthropology blogosphere and consequently missing out on some outstanding knowledge dissemination. Above all, I'm interested in furthering digital anthropology, which I am pleased will have a strong base in this cooperative effort.

In my opinion, there is no reason for an invented divide that reduces web-based academic content to a second-rate substitute for formal (read: expensive, elaborate, bureaucratic) channels. Why not overlap "open" and "official" academia until they are one and the same? If the technology and demand can sustain it - which I believe they can - making anthropological and ethnographic knowledge freely available should be a priority. This can reflect back heavily upon the academic method itself, both in theory and in practice.

How about an online/offline seminar series, bridging the gap with web-based multimedia, in-person meet-ups, etc? Crossing over from the lecture hall to the web, sharing teaching and learning materials, creating new bodies for peer revision and publication are all possible and positive outcomes. Breaking down the publishing barrier and enabling actual feedback with established anthropologists can only help to aid in the development of better research and analysis.

The key to success, as always, will be participation. Visit the (temporary) forum on Keith Hart's The Memory Bank website to learn more, to follow the progress of the OAC and, of course, to contribute.

Tweet

A Nation of Bloggers

So often, researchers of the social web insist that blogging, microblogging, lifestreaming, social neworking, etc., have revolutionized the way that we (as people, citizens, netizens) live our lives and communicate. The means are simple. Text-, photo- or video-based online diaries act as lenses through which a worldwide audience can peer at us - and, better still - comment and react in real time. Perhaps their allure isn't even in their reflexivity, but stems ultimately from the access to a virtual soapbox to let loose at the world. Regardless, the end-products are far more varied, from the mundane to the powerful. Sometimes it is difficult for me conceptually to accept the leap from "blogging" to the qualitative changes that are often ascribed to it - greater freedom, social revolution, personal liberation.

Then there are some worthy examples. I like this "infographic" from the Vancouver Film School entitled Iran: A Nation of Bloggers, which details a burgeoning community of young Iranian bloggers. While short, the video is concise and profound as it contrasts oppression, hope, and revolution in Iran as a nation with the social significance of blogging as a conduit for change. The imagery is appropriate and smart, yet engaging and fluid, too. A great piece of student work.

"Iranian blogs," it suggests, "are the true voice of the next generation. They are nothing less than a revolution within the revolution".








Add to del.icio.us

Tweet

WiTricity

Why is this taking so long to achieve?

Wireless energy promise powers up
A clean-cut vision of a future freed from the rat's nest of cables needed to power today's electronic gadgets has come one step closer to reality. US researchers have successfully tested an experimental system to deliver power to devices without the need for wires. The setup, reported in the journal Science, made a 60W light bulb glow from a distance of 2m (7ft).

WiTricity, as it is called, exploits simple physics and could be adapted to charge other devices such as laptops. "There is nothing in this that would have prevented them inventing this 10 or even 20 years ago," commented Professor Sir John Pendry of Imperial College London who has seen the experiments. "But I think there is an issue of time. In the last few years we have seen an exponential growth of mobile devices that need power. The power cable is the last wire to be cut in a wireless connection." Professor Moti Segev of the Israel Institute of Technology described the work as "truly pioneering".

Energy gap
The researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who carried out the work outlined a similar theoretical setup in 2006, but this is the first time that it has been shown to work. "We had a strong faith in our theory but experiments are the ultimate test," said team member Assistant Professor Marin Soljacic. "So we went ahead and sure enough we were successful, the experiments behave very much like the theory."
...
"These results are encouraging. The numbers are not far from where you would want for this to be useful," said Professor Soljacic. The system exploits "resonance", a phenomenon that causes an object to vibrate when energy of a certain frequency is applied. When two objects have the same resonance they exchange energy strongly without having an effect on other surrounding objects. ... Instead of using acoustic resonance, WiTricity exploits the resonance of low frequency electromagnetic waves.

HOW WIRELESS POWER COULD WORK
1) Power from mains to antenna, which is made of copper
2) Antenna resonates at a frequency of about 10MHz, producing electromagnetic waves
3) 'Tails' of energy from antenna 'tunnel' up to 2m (6.5ft)
4) Electricity picked up by laptop's antenna, which must also be resonating at 10MHz. Energy used to re-charge device
5) Energy not transferred to laptop re-absorbed by source antenna. People/other objects not affected as not resonating at 10MHz [source]


.
Add to del.icio.us

Tweet

Artificial Intelligence

I know that this is well out of date by now, but it has re-appeared on my list of things to discuss with my first year undergraduate students. For an upcoming examination revision session, I will be explicating the relevance of AI to anthropology and computing. The Guardian recently reported that the Engineering Department at Essex University are building 60 mini-robots to act as surrogate humans with the intention of discovering "the processes and mechanisms of the emergence of culture and cultural behaviour" [source]. Will this research tell us anything that conventional evolutionary anthropology can't or hasn't? Will it have any correlation with human society?

"Winfield is quick to throw in a caveat. 'The behaviours that emerge and evolve will not be human but decidedly robotic. We do not expect these artificial memes to have any meaning in a human cultural context - they will only be meaningful within the closed context of this artificial society. One of our key challenges in this research will be to identify and interpret these patterns of behaviour as evidence for an emerging robot culture and to see whether this new understanding may shed some light on how culture emerges and whether this has any implications for human, animal or artificial societies. In a sense we will be using robots like a microscope to study the evolution of culture.'"

.

Add to del.icio.us

Tweet