Wednesday, March 25. 2009
Via BLDBLOG and Storefront for Art and Architecture
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Postopolis! LA has been gathering pace over the past few weeks, despite the silence, so it seemed like high time for an update. Although we're still finalizing both the schedule and the list of speakers, it's looking amazing so far.
[Image: Logo by Joe Alterio].
The whole thing kicks off in less than two weeks, running from Tuesday, March 31, to Saturday, April 4, and from 5pm-11pm everyday.
The venue has finally been announced, as well: we'll be up in the sky, watching the sun set every evening from the rooftop pool, deck, and bar of the Standard Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. The event is free and open to everyone, with a cash bar and free wifi, so come on down for some landscape and architecture, bring your favorite wireless device, and wear your Speedo or bikini if you want to use the pool (it's more like a wading pool, FYI). And, of course, we'll be keeping our fingers crossed for no rain.
The list of speakers, as it now stands, includes unbelievably interesting people. Here's a glimpse:
—Ari Kletzky (Founder, Islands of LA)
—Austin Kelly (Principal, XTEN Architecture)
—Ava Bromberg (Artist, In the Field)
—Ben Cerveny (Strategic and Conceptual Advisor, Stamen Design)
—Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues (Architects and Founding Partners, Ball-Nogues Studio)
—Benjamin Bratton (Architect and Theorist)
—Bryan Boyer (Organizer, Helsinki Design Lab 2010)
—Christina Ulke (Artist, Co-Founder, C-Level, and Editor, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest)
—Christopher Hawthorne (Architecture Critic, Los Angeles Times)
—David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young (Founders, fallen fruit)
—David Gissen (Theorist and Historian, CCA)
—Dwayne Oyler (Architect and Principal, Oyler Wu Collaborative)
—Eric Rodenbeck (Founder, Stamen Design)
—Freya Bardell and Brian Howe (Principals, Greenmeme)
—Fritz Haeg (Artist and Writer)
—Gary Dauphin (Writer and Critic)
—Jeffrey Inaba (Architect and Principal, Inaba Projects)
—Ken Ehrlich (Artist and Writer)
—Mary-Ann Ray (Architect, Writer, and Principal, Studio Works Architects)
—Matthew Coolidge (Director, Center for Land Use Interpretation)
—Michael Dear (Professor of Geography, USC)
—Michael Downing (Deputy Chief of Counter Terrorism, Los Angeles Police Department)
—Mike the Poet (Poet and Writer)
—Orhan Ayyüce (Architect, Blogger, and Senior Editor, Archinect)
—Patrick Keller (Architect and Principal, Fabric)
—Paul Petrunia (Founder, Archinect)
—Robert Miles Kemp (Designer and Principal, Variate Labs)
—Sam Grawe (Editor-in-Chief, Dwell)
—Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee (Architects and Principals, Johnston MarkLee)
—Stephanie Smith (Founder, Ecoshack)
—Steve Roden (Musician and Artist)
—Ted Kane (Architect and Author, Polar Inertia)
—Whitney Sander (Architect and Principal, Sander Architects)
—Yo-Ichiro Hakomori (Architect and Principal, wHY Architecture)
—Zach Frechette (Editor-in-Chief, GOOD)
That's nowhere near the final list, though, as we've also got a handful of media panels planned for Saturday, April 4; these will include Matt Chaban from the Architect's Newspaper, Dakota Smith from Curbed LA, Greg J. Smith of Serial Consign & Vague Terrain, journalist Alissa Walker, a variety of Archinect school bloggers, and many, many more.
So stay tuned for more updates.
And, don't forget, Postopolis! LA will be hosted by BLDGBLOG, City of Sound, mudd up!, Plataforma Arquitectura/Arch Daily, Subtopia, and we make money not art, under the organization of the Storefront for Art and Architecture and the sponsorship of ForYourArt.
Hope to see you there!
Personal comment:
Names (including fabric | ch) at Postopolis!LA.
Tuesday, March 24. 2009
The integrity of neural wiring is a big factor in determining intelligence. It's also inheritable.
By Emily Singer
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Pixilated brain: At the bottom, an MRI image shows a slice of the human brain. At the top is shown a magnified portion of this section, created using diffusion imaging. To create the image, scientists measured the direction of the water diffusion in brain tissue. The "flower petals" at each point show the directions of fastest diffusion. These are aligned along the neural pathways of the brain, because water diffuses directionally along the well-insulated neural wires that carry electrical signals. The different directions of diffusion are color-coded red, green, and blue. In this example, the bright red areas reveal the thick fiber tract, called the corpus callosum, which transfers information between the left and right sides of the brain.
Credit: David Shattuck, Arthur Toga, Paul Thompson/UCLA |
Multimedia
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New research suggests that the layer of insulation coating neural wiring in the brain plays a critical role in determining intelligence. In addition, the quality of this insulation appears to be largely genetically determined, providing further support for the idea that IQ is partly inherited.
The findings, which result from a detailed study of twins' brains, hint at how ever-improving brain-imaging technology could shed light on some of our most basic characteristics.
"The study answers some very fundamental questions about how the brain expresses intelligence," says Philip Shaw, a child psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health, in Bethesda, MD, who was not involved in the research.
The neural wires that transmit electrical messages from cell to cell in the brain are coated with a fatty layer called myelin. Much like the insulation on an electrical wire, myelin stops current from leaking out of the wire and boosts the speed with which messages travel through the brain--the higher quality the myelin, the faster the messages travel. These myelin-coated tracts make up the brain's white matter, while the bodies of neural cells are called grey matter.
White matter is invisible on most brain scans, but a recently developed variation of magnetic resonance imaging, called diffusion-tensor imaging (DTI), allows scientists to map the complex neural wiring in our brains by measuring the diffusion of water molecules through tissue. Thanks to the fatty myelin coating, water diffuses along the length of neural wires, while in other types of brain tissue it moves in all different directions. Researchers can calculate the direction of fastest diffusion at each point in the brain and then construct a picture of the brain's fiber tracts. A well-organized brain has well-functioning myelin, in which water can be seen clearly moving along specific paths. "Diffusion imaging gives a picture of how intact your brain connections are," says Paul Thompson, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who lead the study.
Thompson and his colleagues took DTI scans of 92 pairs of fraternal and identical twins. They found a strong correlation between the integrity of the white matter and performance on a standard IQ test. "Going forward, we are certainly going to think of white matter structure as an important contributor of intelligence," says Van Wedeen, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who was also not involved in the research. "It also changes how you think about what IQ is measuring," says Wedeen. The research was published last month in the Journal of Neuroscience.
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IQ inheritance: By comparing the brain scans of twins, scientists discovered that the quality of the fatty tissue that insulates neural wires is largely inherited. The parietal lobe, which is involved in logic and mathematics, is 85 percent genetically determined, whereas the visual cortex is about 76 percent, and the temporal lobe, which is involved in learning and memory, is only 45 percent genetically determined.
Credit: David Shattuck, Arthur Toga, Paul Thompson/UCLA |
If white matter is linked to both processing speed and IQ, this raises the question: is intelligence merely a function of how fast your brain works? Previous research has linked processing speed to IQ, but the tests used in the study are measures of general intelligence, including verbal skills, math, and logic. "Processing speed plays a big part in how intelligent you are, but it's not the only factor," says Shaw.
The new study is among the first to link a specific neural architecture to IQ in healthy individuals. "Most people have focused on grey matter," says Shaw. "This is good evidence we should be looking at white matter as well." Previous studies using DTI have linked white matter damage to Alzheimer's disease, chronic alcoholism, and traumatic brain injury.
The UCLA researchers took the study a step further by comparing the white matter architecture of identical twins, who share almost all their DNA, and fraternal twins, who share only half. Results showed that the quality of the white matter is highly genetically determined, although the influence of genetics varies by brain area. According to the findings, about 85 percent of the variation in white matter in the parietal lobe, which is involved in mathematics, logic, and visual-spatial skills, can be attributed to genetics. But only about 45 percent of the variation in the temporal lobe, which plays a central role in learning and memory, appears to be inherited.
Thompson and his collaborators also analyzed the twins' DNA, and they are now looking for specific genetic variations that are linked to the quality of the brain's white matter. The researchers have already found a candidate--the gene for a protein called BDNF, which promotes cell growth. "People with one variation have more intact fibers," says Thompson.
The search for the genetic and neuroanatomical basis of intelligence has been controversial, largely because opponents fear it will spawn a deterministic view of abilities and education. "People worry that if something is genetic, they have no power to influence it," says Thompson. "But that's not true at all." For example, both an average runner and a genetically gifted one can benefit from training.
But the debate may be moot since, as Wedeen points out, it is unlikely that an individual brain scan could predict a person's IQ. "The report described aggregate data over number of individuals," he says. "That's not the same as saying we can do a scan and determine a person's intelligence. That may be in the offing, but we don't know that yet."
Copyright Technology Review 2009.
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Via MIT Technology Review
Monday, March 23. 2009
You should already know one can stitch geographical itineraries on postcards, but one can also stitch the historical Down Jones graph as embroidery on a handkerchief. The well-chosen "It's OK to cry" [designglut.bigcartel.com] makes it suitable for the current worldwide economic situation and can be yours for $28.
Via Swiss Miss.
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Via Information Aesthetics
A summary of what those of us who are thinking, writing and speaking about networked urbanism seem to be seeing: fourteen essential transformations that, between them, constitute a rough map of the terrain to be discovered.
Not sure, in every case, I’ve got the phrasing just right, and will in any event expand on this shortly. Nevertheless:
1. From latent to explicit;
2. From browse to search;
3. From held to shared;
4. From expiring to persistent;
5. From deferred to real-time;
6. From passive to interactive;
7. From component to resource;
8. From constant to variable;
9. From wayfinding to wayshowing;
10. From object to service;
11. From vehicle to mobility;
12. From community to social network;
13. From ownership to use;
14. From consumer to constituent.
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Via Adam Greenfield's Speedbird
Wish you had been Jay Leno last night — able to ask the President of the United States a question? You can, at a new online forum for citizens launched yesterday. Called Ask the President, the project is a forum for citizens to submit and vote on questions for the President to answer at formal press conferences.
SmartMobs.com is proud to be part of the broad coalition backing the forum, of both traditional and new media, including the nonpartisan Personal Democracy Forum, The Nation magazine and The Washington Times. Here is how it works:
The forum enables national, transparent voting through www.communitycounts.com, a nonpartisan, open-source website that successfully gathered and submitted questions to presidential candidates during the 2008 primary. (Barack Obama, among other candidates, answered one popular question in November 2007, in the Ten Questions project backed by Personal Democracy Forum and the New York Times editorial board). Visitors can submit questions in writing or on video; vote other people’s questions up or down, with one vote per person; and directly inspect the code behind the portal.
Ask The President will send a credentialed journalist to the next presidential press conference with a list of the most popular questions selected by the public. Backed by the coalition and citizens across the country, the journalist will appeal to the Obama administration to continue fulfilling its promise to provide the most open, interactive government in history by taking the first citizen-generated question at a presidential press conference. This initiative is already engaging Obama administration staff, in the spirit of cooperation and innovation, to build potential support and participation within the administration.
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Via Smart Mobs
Personal comment:
Il peut y avoir un côté un peu démagogique là derrière: une fausse illusion de participation. Malgré tout, on peut saluer l'effort de l'administration Obama pour tester de nouveau outils "participatifs" au niveau de la vie politique et publique. Il ne faut pas oublier qu'Obama est le candidat qui a massivement (bien) utilisé les réseaux sociaux et le web viral pour sa campagne.
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