There’s an element of enigma in our relations with animals, even the most familiar. The diamond-collared pug being toted in a Louis Vuitton bag is still, in the end, a beast, as inscrutable to humans as a giant squid. Yet a human takes that pug into her home, feeds him, perhaps lets him sleep in her bed. He will never unfold the secrets of his heart; he will die, in some sense, a mystery. That mystery trumps every anthropomorphizing human accessory, every impulse to interpret or explain. It locks us out.

That may be their highest use, in the end. The pug’s diminutive size and bugged-out, injury-prone eyes are signs of years of human tampering, his plaid coat and booties tokens of the human drive to humanize everything. But the love heaped—even lavished in commodity form—on his warm animal body suggests a human attitude toward the nonhuman world that, for once, is not about mastery. Even in its consumerist drift, it short-circuits market logic by giving without a guaranteed return. There must be some real value in that.

What’s the Use of Pets?

"Dual reality" is the concept of maintaining two worlds, one virtual and one real, that reflect, influence, and merge into each other by means of deeply embedded sensor/actuator networks. Both the real and virtual components of a dual reality are complete unto themselves, but are enriched by their mutual interaction. The dual reality Media Lab is an example of such a dual reality, as enabled the Plug sensor/actuator network that links our actual lab space to a virtual lab space in the Second Life online virtual world.

Dual Reality Lab

Famed geneticist J. Craig Venter, who mapped the human genome and now heads a global effort to create "designer microbes" to address some of the world's most vexing global environmental and health problems, will keynote a symposium on the subject.

Venter's talk will be followed by a panel discussion on the far-reaching implications of synthetic biology, in which the tools of genetics are used to modify living organisms or even create new ones. Potential applications include new energy sources, improved pharmaceuticals and innovative ways to fight global warming by sequestering carbon.

Synthetic Biology's Implications for Science, Society, and Mass Media

When news of The Al Qaeda Reader leaked to the press in 2005, some on the left questioned whether the book would be a pseudoscholarly attempt to demonize Muslims. Others on the right worried that unfiltered exposure to the radical beliefs and propaganda of bin Laden and his cohorts might unintentionally lead to more converts or sympathizers.

My reply is simply this: Whatever one's position in regard to the "war on terror," understanding the ideas of our enemy is both a practical necessity in wartime and a fundamental liberal value. It is my hope that both sides in this bitter debate will profit from a deeper acquaintance with these works. In any case, it simply will not do to dismiss Al Qaeda as an irrational movement without ideas.

The Two Faces of Al Qaeda

In industrial countries cell phone usage offers access to patterns of human dynamics and mobility at a level and detail unimaginable before. The purpose of this talk is to quantify the main features of human activity and travel patterns that can be discovered from this data. We start out by testing the standard hypothesis that human activity is fundamentally random in space (travel patterns) and time (inter-event times). We find significant deviations from the random expectation. For the timing of the events the measurements indicate that human activity has a bursty character with well-defined mathematical characteristics, a property shared by a wide range of data, from mobile phone usage to library visitation and emails. In contrast, we find that human travel is far more regular than diffusion models would predict, described mathematically on many spatiotemporal scales a centrally biased random walk. We discuss the implications of these findings on the nature of time and space experienced by humans.

For a review:

... a fascinating paper (abstract PDF) on "Time and Motion in Mobile Communication", in which he described a project that uses large datasets of mobile phone subscribers to describe analyze how people move about cities. As his abstract states "cell phone usage offers access to patterns of human dynamics and mobility at a level and detail unimaginable before.

Barabasi set out to study human activity using a huge dataset that recorded the time of mobile phone calls and the cell site ID - which allowed them to geolocate the callers to approximately the neighborhood level. They can then create metrics for each individual that describe their movement patterns in space and time - essentially a mobility signature for each person. Then you can look at the overall patterns, and as it turns out, there are significant differences between how different people move.

This kind of analysis has many applications, but on of the most interesting he raised is using it during an epidemic to look at real-time flux of people across parts of a city.

This paper caught my attention because there are a number of interesting research projects that are starting to leverage the mobile as a real-time sensor, to create some very interesting pictures of emergent social phenomena. ... Interestingly enough, it seems that Boston is emerging as the global epicenter for this new research niche.

Time and Networks in Mobile Communication

From the Internet to the iPod, technology is bringing rapid advances in memory. What society needs now are new ways to forget.

The advantages of amnesia

The authors use data from the World Values Survey to assess similarities and differences in core political, religious, social, and economic values of the United States and Iran. They find Americans and Iranians place high importance on family, religion, and work, but that politics and political organizations have relatively little importance for them. Both peoples value economic growth above other national goals. Americans are more trusting of some features of capitalism as well as of democratic organizations. Conceivably, the American and Iranian governments could turn to these shared values should Washington and Tehran decide to normalize relations.

American and Iranian Public Opinion: The Quest for Common Grounds | RAND

On Saturday John Coatsworth, acting dean of Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, made the remark that "if Hitler were in the United States and . . . if he were willing to engage in a debate and a discussion to be challenged by Columbia students and faculty, we would certainly invite him." This was by way of defending the university's decision to host a speech yesterday by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

An old rule of thumb in debate tournaments is that the first one to say "Hitler" loses. But say what you will about Mr. Coatsworth's comment, it is, at bottom, a philosophical claim: about the purposes of education; about the uses of dialogue; about the obligations of academia; about the boundaries (or absence of boundaries) of modern liberalism and about its conceits. So rather than dismiss the claim out of hand, let's address it in the same philosophical spirit in which it was offered.

Columbia's Conceit

Abstract
Normal design practice is to decouple the design of applications using a network from the design of the network itself. Designers optimize network performance by only focusing on network transport layer mechanisms for robustness (connectivity), efficiency (throughput), and speed of service (latency). Applications offer loads to the network and rely on the QoS function in the network to prioritize the traffic flows. By contrast, network centric operations focus on application layer features like situation awareness and synchronization to enhance force effectiveness. Therefore, in contrast to enterprise networks in which QoS processes messages based on fixed priorities by data type, in mission orientated MANET, QoS must be a cooperative function between application and network resource management that uses dynamic priority allocations derived from task priorities established by commanders within the echelon hierarchies.

QoS in Mission Orientated Ad-hoc Networks

The launching of Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957, was a life-changing event — one that ignited imaginations, dictated the course of careers, and changed the way people thought about science, education and global politics. The New York Times asked scientists and others who lived through it (and a few who were yet to be born) to reflect on what Sputnik meant to them.

Voices: 10/4/57 | Sputnik - Recollections - New York Times