FREEHOLD, N.J. — Splashing through a shallow creek in suburban New Jersey, the paleontologists stepped back 65 million years to the time of the last mass extinction, the one notable for the demise of the dinosaurs.
The stream flows over sediment laid down toward the end of geology’s Cretaceous period. The clay at water level holds meaningful traces of iridium, the element more common in asteroids and other extraterrestrial objects than in the earth. No one could resist sticking a finger to the clay, treating it as a touchstone of their time travel.
Scientists associate the iridium anomaly with the asteroid impact or impacts thought to have set off the extinctions. The thin layer, which has been detected worldwide, is also considered the marker for the end of the Cretaceous and beginning of the Tertiary period, known as the K-T boundary.
At the time, sea levels were higher and New Jersey was warmer. The proto-Atlantic waters reached the center of the current boundaries of New Jersey, standing more than 60 feet deep here, where on a recent day the paleontologists were up to their ankles in a creek. They had their eyes on the sediments in the bank just above the iridium clay. They call this the Pinna layer.
On previous visits, they had found in the Pinna rock and soil a surprising number of marine fossils, including small clams, crabs and sea urchins. There was an abundance of ammonites, considered index organisms of the uppermost Cretaceous environment. Somehow, here at least, life appeared to have not only persisted but also flourished for tens, perhaps hundreds, of years after the putative asteroid impact.
“This is really putting New Jersey on the map of the K-T boundary,” said Neil H. Landman, an invertebrate paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History who is directing the new research in the Manasquan River basin.
The discovery of thriving communities of survivors at the end of the Cretaceous is giving some scientists second thoughts about the extinction’s causes and effects. Some question the conventional explanation of a single large impact that enveloped Earth in a cloud of dust and almost instantaneously brought on a deadly global winter. They contend that this may be an oversimplification, and that the real story behind the dinosaur-ending disaster is more complicated and as yet unclear.
“It is undeniable that the iridium spike at the base of the Pinna layer was produced by the impact,” Dr. Landman said. “That’s amazing and makes it hard to explain the ammonite abundances we find above the iridium anomaly.”
Gerta Keller, a paleontologist and professor of geosciences at Princeton University, said the research by Dr. Landman’s group “shows the complexity of this extinction event and the difficulty explaining it by the currently popular impact theory.”
Dr. Keller, who had no part in the New Jersey discovery, has investigated the K-T boundary in Brazil, Mexico and Texas, finding evidence that she says indicates multiple asteroid impacts occurring at the end of the Cretaceous. She reported that the one that gouged out the Chicxulub crater at the tip of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, which had been the prime suspect in the extinction, struck at least 300,000 years before the dinosaurs died out.
At a meeting of the Geological Society of America last week, Dr. Keller reported marine fossil evidence that she said linked the mass extinction to widespread volcanic eruptions that swept India at the end of the Cretaceous.
In other words, the world’s ecosystem was under widespread stress for an extended time. The extinctions might have had multiple causes, not the single asteroid impact and almost instant death as hypothesized in 1980 after the detection of the global iridium layer.
At first, the paleontologists treated the fossil discoveries in New Jersey with caution. Geologists who analyzed 37 samples of sediment from three sites at the creek and elsewhere in the basin concluded that they contained a telling concentration of iridium at the Pinna base. Still, Dr. Landman thought it possible that the iridium had shifted over time, confusing the chronology.
Dr. Landman said he had since become increasingly confident that the iridium layer at the creek remained where it was deposited. It is presumably a true marker of an asteroid impact with global repercussions, and this further complicates understanding of the mass extinction. Why is there no evidence at the creek for the almost immediate post-impact destruction, as assumed by the standard theory?
A construction project led scientists to the discovery. Excavations for a new bridge three years ago exposed a section of rock spanning the K-T boundary. In a report this year, Dr. Landman’s group wrote that the section contained “the most abundant and diverse invertebrate assemblage ever discovered from this interval in New Jersey.”
The first investigations, beginning with Ralph O. Johnson, a mostly self-educated but expert paleontologist who lives in West Long Branch, uncovered traces of the fossil-rich stratum reaching to the undisturbed outcrops along this creek. The stream has no name on maps, but the scientists, thinking of the prickling briars and entangling wild grape vines, call it Agony Creek.
“You don’t have to go to Mongolia to discover important fossils,” Mr. Johnson said. “These outcrops sit in the middle of the suburbs, two and a half miles from my home. How could they have been missed until now?”
Wading downstream, Dr. Landman, Mr. Johnson and Matthew P. Garb, a doctoral student in geology at Brooklyn College, came to a place that looked good for prospecting. Wet and dirty, they got to work — grown men squatting at the edge of a creek, making mud pies, or so it appeared.
In fact, they were cutting out wedges of the Pinna layer and, wielding picks, knives and brushes, were extracting and examining the remains of presumed survivors in the aftermath of the K-T mass extinction.
At least 110 species of near-shore marine organisms have been identified in the Pinna layer, Dr. Landman explained. This was a robust community that lived over a geologically short period of time, perhaps several tens of years. But the Pinna is truncated at the top, which the scientists said implied a still longer duration amounting to hundreds of years.
Later, back at his museum laboratory in Manhattan, Dr. Landman pulled out trays of ammonites, his scientific specialty. These organisms first appeared in the Devonian period, about 410 million years ago; there were 30 known species at the end of the Cretaceous, and after the extinctions, there were none. Their near-relative the nautilus survives, perhaps because it is a scavenger that will eat just about anything.
The trays held a collection of the creek specimens. Ten ammonite species were recovered from the presumably post-impact Pinna layer. One of them, Discoscaphites jerseyensis, is unique to New Jersey.
After the event producing the iridium residue, and the occurrence of any accompanying disasters, Dr. Landman said, the extinctions were not immediate everywhere, certainly not among marine organisms off New Jersey.
“This is what I imagine happening,” he said. “Storms of biblical proportions and a heavy discharge of river floods might have buried sediments rapidly. These marine communities may have flourished immediately afterward as a result of a lot of organic material, such as plankton, dying and settling to the depths for their consumption.”
A few other paleontologists have also cast doubt on the timing and single-impact suddenness of the mass extinction. The idea of a killer impact that became the standard theory was proposed in 1980 on the basis of iridium traces; it gained wide acceptance after the discovery in 1991 of the impact crater in Mexico. But in some places, the fossil record for dinosaurs seems to disappear a little before the iridium is deposited. Geologists have found several other crater remnants that could have been gouged out by asteroids and also the suspect volcanoes of India.
Dr. Landman said he was not sure how long the ammonites in New Jersey lived above the iridium marker, but they “could not possibly have survived 300,000 years,” as Dr. Heller of Princeton argues.
At the creek site, above the fossils of the Pinna layer, the Hornerstown Formation preserves a record of impoverished life, beginning a few hundred years after the extinction event or events. There were tiny oyster shells from a single species, and little else.
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
You Are What Your Name Says You Are: By ELISABETH VINCENTELLI
IN France, a person’s name can signify as little as a measure of what’s big on TV at any given time, or as much as an entire country’s nature.
The recent publication there of two annual guides charting the popularity of first names could only prompt more soul-searching in a nation already painfully struggling with how to define its character. The issue appears so urgent that President Nicolas Sarkozy felt the need to create a Ministry of Immigration and National Identity, and the government has passed a law authorizing DNA testing to establish family links among would-be immigrants.
The discussion of names is much lighter in tone. It turns out that names featuring “a” are hot for girls (Clara, Sarah, Léa), as are “o” ones for boys (Mathéo, Enzo, Hugo). Scratch a bit deeper, and race and class quickly rear their heads. After all, names can provide an immediate indication of someone’s background in a country that does not include ethnicity in its national statistics, and where salaries are rarely discussed in public.
In a recent article pegged to the publication of one of the guides, Joséphine Besnard’s “Index of First Names in 2008,” the newspaper Libération asked 15 people to talk about their own names, prompting a lively debate on its Web site. A few readers commented on some French assumptions. “What of the new first names — Binta, Jamila, Lin, Ahmed, etc. — of an increasing number of French people?” wrote one commentator at the Web site. “It would have been interesting to look into that issue and how society perceives people with those names, people who may be born here but whose parents almost certainly weren’t.”
But Guy Desplanques, a demographer, pointed out in 2002 that names like Ahmed and Jamila actually were on the wane, and that second-generation French men and women work toward integration by coming up with variations like Yanis or Rayan; the latter has become popular in some banlieues, evoking both the Maghreb and the relatively widespread Ryan.
Ms. Besnard’s father was the sociologist Philippe Besnard, who did extensive work on first names, establishing that until the 1970s the popularity of names trickled down from the upper classes. For instance, “Gilles” peaked in France’s high-society registry in 1942 and in the general population in 1960. That all changed in the 1980s, when the less wealthy and less educated turned into first-name innovators (perhaps caught up in fads spread by popular music and TV) while the rich rediscovered more traditional French-sounding names.
Sociologists like Mr. Besnard observed that first names were often quick markers of social and educational status. As another Libération reader, an elementary school teacher, pointed out: “I can often guess the ‘profile’ of a child thanks to the first name. A ‘Maxime,’ a ‘Louise,’ a ‘Kevin,’ a ‘Lolita.’ It’s sad, but that’s how it often works.” That is, Maxime and Louise probably have wealthy parents, while Kevin and Lolita are more likely to have a working- or lower-middle-class background.
Indeed, bourgeois French parents are unlikely to give their children “Anglo-Saxon” names; Jennifer was the most popular name for girls from 1984 to 1986, but it’s a safe bet few Jennifers came from well-educated families. (The craze is commonly explained by the success of the TV series “Hart to Hart” in France at that time — Jennifer Hart was one of the title characters — while “Beverly Hills, 90210,” featuring a popular character named Dylan McKay, is sometimes blamed for the explosion of Dylans a few years later.)
This quick profiling can hamper those looking for a job: Several studies have shown that all things being equal, applicants with “foreign”-sounding names are less likely to be hired. But that’s only one more hurdle to the work force’s integration: It is not rare in France to encounter job postings that request candidates to reveal their marital status and age, and to attach a photo to their résumés.
The recent publication there of two annual guides charting the popularity of first names could only prompt more soul-searching in a nation already painfully struggling with how to define its character. The issue appears so urgent that President Nicolas Sarkozy felt the need to create a Ministry of Immigration and National Identity, and the government has passed a law authorizing DNA testing to establish family links among would-be immigrants.
The discussion of names is much lighter in tone. It turns out that names featuring “a” are hot for girls (Clara, Sarah, Léa), as are “o” ones for boys (Mathéo, Enzo, Hugo). Scratch a bit deeper, and race and class quickly rear their heads. After all, names can provide an immediate indication of someone’s background in a country that does not include ethnicity in its national statistics, and where salaries are rarely discussed in public.
In a recent article pegged to the publication of one of the guides, Joséphine Besnard’s “Index of First Names in 2008,” the newspaper Libération asked 15 people to talk about their own names, prompting a lively debate on its Web site. A few readers commented on some French assumptions. “What of the new first names — Binta, Jamila, Lin, Ahmed, etc. — of an increasing number of French people?” wrote one commentator at the Web site. “It would have been interesting to look into that issue and how society perceives people with those names, people who may be born here but whose parents almost certainly weren’t.”
But Guy Desplanques, a demographer, pointed out in 2002 that names like Ahmed and Jamila actually were on the wane, and that second-generation French men and women work toward integration by coming up with variations like Yanis or Rayan; the latter has become popular in some banlieues, evoking both the Maghreb and the relatively widespread Ryan.
Ms. Besnard’s father was the sociologist Philippe Besnard, who did extensive work on first names, establishing that until the 1970s the popularity of names trickled down from the upper classes. For instance, “Gilles” peaked in France’s high-society registry in 1942 and in the general population in 1960. That all changed in the 1980s, when the less wealthy and less educated turned into first-name innovators (perhaps caught up in fads spread by popular music and TV) while the rich rediscovered more traditional French-sounding names.
Sociologists like Mr. Besnard observed that first names were often quick markers of social and educational status. As another Libération reader, an elementary school teacher, pointed out: “I can often guess the ‘profile’ of a child thanks to the first name. A ‘Maxime,’ a ‘Louise,’ a ‘Kevin,’ a ‘Lolita.’ It’s sad, but that’s how it often works.” That is, Maxime and Louise probably have wealthy parents, while Kevin and Lolita are more likely to have a working- or lower-middle-class background.
Indeed, bourgeois French parents are unlikely to give their children “Anglo-Saxon” names; Jennifer was the most popular name for girls from 1984 to 1986, but it’s a safe bet few Jennifers came from well-educated families. (The craze is commonly explained by the success of the TV series “Hart to Hart” in France at that time — Jennifer Hart was one of the title characters — while “Beverly Hills, 90210,” featuring a popular character named Dylan McKay, is sometimes blamed for the explosion of Dylans a few years later.)
This quick profiling can hamper those looking for a job: Several studies have shown that all things being equal, applicants with “foreign”-sounding names are less likely to be hired. But that’s only one more hurdle to the work force’s integration: It is not rare in France to encounter job postings that request candidates to reveal their marital status and age, and to attach a photo to their résumés.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Karma Power:What Makes a Monk Mad By SETH MYDANS
BANGKOK
AS they marched through the streets of Myanmar’s cities last week leading the biggest antigovernment protests in two decades, some barefoot monks held their begging bowls before them. But instead of asking for their daily donations of food, they held the bowls upside down, the black lacquer surfaces reflecting the light.
It was a shocking image in the devoutly Buddhist nation. The monks were refusing to receive alms from the military rulers and their families — effectively excommunicating them from the religion that is at the core of Burmese culture.
That gesture is a key to understanding the power of the rebellion that shook Myanmar last week.
The country — the former Burma — has roughly as many monks as soldiers. The military rules by force, but the monks retain ultimate moral authority. The lowliest soldier depends on them for spiritual approval, and even the highest generals have felt a need to honor the clerical establishment. They claim to rule in its name.
Begging is a ritual that expresses a profound bond between the ordinary Buddhist and the monk. “The people are feeding the monks and the monks are helping the people make merit,” said Josef Silverstein, an expert on Myanmar at Rutgers University. “When you refuse to accept, you have broken the bond that has tied them for centuries together.”
Instead, the monks drew on a different and more fundamental bond with Myanmar’s population, leading huge demonstrations after the government tried to repress protests that began a month ago over a rise in fuel prices.
By last week, the country’s two largest and most established institutions were confronting each other, the monkhood and the military, both about 400,000 strong, both made up of young men, mostly from the poorer classes, who could well be brothers. Rejected by both its spiritual and popular bases, the junta that has ruled for 19 years had little to fall back on but force.
It unleashed its troops to shoot, beat, arrest and humiliate the men in brick-red robes, definitively alienating itself from the clergy whose support gives it legitimacy. Soldiers surrounded monasteries, preventing monks from leading further demonstrations — or from making their morning rounds to collect the alms that feed them.
In Myanmar and other Buddhist nations, many join the monkhood as a lifelong vocation, but many other young men become monks for shorter periods, ranging from a few months to a few years. These young monks remain closer to the lives and concerns of the people whose alms they receive.
Burmese monks have taken part in protests in the past, against British colonial rule and against a half-century of rule by military dictatorship. The most notable recent occasion was in 1990.
Their militant resistance to the British produced the most prominent political martyr of Burmese Buddhism, U Wisara, who died in prison in 1929 after a 166-day hunger strike.
His statue stands near the tall, golden Shwedagon Pagoda, the country’s holiest shrine, which was a rallying point for the recent demonstrations and the scene of the first violence against the monks last week.
That attack came as a shock to people who said the military would not turn violently against the monks, and it had the predictable effect of arousing the fury of a devout population.
But monks have not always been in the political front lines. It was students, for example, who led the mass demonstrations of 1988 that brought the current junta to power in a military massacre.
The monks’ power comes instead from their role in bestowing legitimacy on the rulers.
“Legitimacy in Burma is not about regime performance, it’s not about human rights like the West,” said Ingrid Jordt, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and an expert on Burmese Buddhism. “It is something that comes from the potency and karma bestowed by the monks. That’s why the sangha is so important to the government,” she said, referring to the Buddhist hierarchy and the spiritual status that its monks can convey. “They are actually the source of power.”
The junta has gone to great lengths to identify itself with Buddhism. Like their predecessors through the centuries, the generals have been busy building temples, supporting monasteries and carrying out religiously symbolic acts. In 1999, they regilded the spire of the Shwedagon Pagoda, which now glitters with 53 tons of gold and 4,341 diamonds on the crowning orb.
The gilding of the spire was a high-risk ploy for an unpopular regime, an act permitted only to kings and legitimate rulers. When the two-ton, seven-tier finial was added and the spire was complete, the nation held its breath, waiting for the earth to send a signal of disapproval through lightning or thunder or floods, Ms. Jordt said. But nature remained indifferent.
“Aung pyi!” the generals shouted. “We won!”
But their grip on power has never been secure. They have ruled through a security service that keeps order through intimidation. They have arrested thousands of political prisoners and have held the pro-democracy leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, under house arrest for 12 of the last 18 years.
In that context, the huge street demonstrations were an act of courage and catharsis.
They started tentatively on Aug. 19 after a fuel price increase raised the costs of transportation and basic goods. Veterans of the student demonstrations of 1988 staged small protests, but most were quickly arrested or driven into hiding. The unrest was fading when security officers beat monks and fired shots into the air during a confrontation in the city of Pakokku on Sept. 5.
That became a spark that grew into a broad-based challenge to the government, culminating last week in the breach between those who hold moral authority and those who have the guns.
“This was not an accidental uprising,” said Zin Linn, a former editor and political prisoner who is now information minister for the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma, an exile opposition group based in Washington. The transition in leadership in the protests — from militant former students to activist monks — was well planned, he said, through secret meetings among young men sharing similar grievances and aspirations for their country. For the most part, it was not the elders who backed the protests. Over the years, the junta has worked to co-opt the Buddhist hierarchy, placing chosen men in key positions just as they have done in every other institution, angering and alienating the younger monks.
After the military clampdown on the monasteries last week, the streets of Yangon were mostly empty of monks. But their gesture of rejection of the junta, and the junta’s violent response, had changed the dynamics of Burmese society in ways that had only begun to play out.
The junta’s action “shows how desperate they are,” Ms. Jordt said. “It shows that they are willing to do anything at this point in terms of violence. Once you’ve thrown your lot in against the monks, I think it will be impossible for the regime to go back to normal daily legitimacy.”
AS they marched through the streets of Myanmar’s cities last week leading the biggest antigovernment protests in two decades, some barefoot monks held their begging bowls before them. But instead of asking for their daily donations of food, they held the bowls upside down, the black lacquer surfaces reflecting the light.
It was a shocking image in the devoutly Buddhist nation. The monks were refusing to receive alms from the military rulers and their families — effectively excommunicating them from the religion that is at the core of Burmese culture.
That gesture is a key to understanding the power of the rebellion that shook Myanmar last week.
The country — the former Burma — has roughly as many monks as soldiers. The military rules by force, but the monks retain ultimate moral authority. The lowliest soldier depends on them for spiritual approval, and even the highest generals have felt a need to honor the clerical establishment. They claim to rule in its name.
Begging is a ritual that expresses a profound bond between the ordinary Buddhist and the monk. “The people are feeding the monks and the monks are helping the people make merit,” said Josef Silverstein, an expert on Myanmar at Rutgers University. “When you refuse to accept, you have broken the bond that has tied them for centuries together.”
Instead, the monks drew on a different and more fundamental bond with Myanmar’s population, leading huge demonstrations after the government tried to repress protests that began a month ago over a rise in fuel prices.
By last week, the country’s two largest and most established institutions were confronting each other, the monkhood and the military, both about 400,000 strong, both made up of young men, mostly from the poorer classes, who could well be brothers. Rejected by both its spiritual and popular bases, the junta that has ruled for 19 years had little to fall back on but force.
It unleashed its troops to shoot, beat, arrest and humiliate the men in brick-red robes, definitively alienating itself from the clergy whose support gives it legitimacy. Soldiers surrounded monasteries, preventing monks from leading further demonstrations — or from making their morning rounds to collect the alms that feed them.
In Myanmar and other Buddhist nations, many join the monkhood as a lifelong vocation, but many other young men become monks for shorter periods, ranging from a few months to a few years. These young monks remain closer to the lives and concerns of the people whose alms they receive.
Burmese monks have taken part in protests in the past, against British colonial rule and against a half-century of rule by military dictatorship. The most notable recent occasion was in 1990.
Their militant resistance to the British produced the most prominent political martyr of Burmese Buddhism, U Wisara, who died in prison in 1929 after a 166-day hunger strike.
His statue stands near the tall, golden Shwedagon Pagoda, the country’s holiest shrine, which was a rallying point for the recent demonstrations and the scene of the first violence against the monks last week.
That attack came as a shock to people who said the military would not turn violently against the monks, and it had the predictable effect of arousing the fury of a devout population.
But monks have not always been in the political front lines. It was students, for example, who led the mass demonstrations of 1988 that brought the current junta to power in a military massacre.
The monks’ power comes instead from their role in bestowing legitimacy on the rulers.
“Legitimacy in Burma is not about regime performance, it’s not about human rights like the West,” said Ingrid Jordt, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and an expert on Burmese Buddhism. “It is something that comes from the potency and karma bestowed by the monks. That’s why the sangha is so important to the government,” she said, referring to the Buddhist hierarchy and the spiritual status that its monks can convey. “They are actually the source of power.”
The junta has gone to great lengths to identify itself with Buddhism. Like their predecessors through the centuries, the generals have been busy building temples, supporting monasteries and carrying out religiously symbolic acts. In 1999, they regilded the spire of the Shwedagon Pagoda, which now glitters with 53 tons of gold and 4,341 diamonds on the crowning orb.
The gilding of the spire was a high-risk ploy for an unpopular regime, an act permitted only to kings and legitimate rulers. When the two-ton, seven-tier finial was added and the spire was complete, the nation held its breath, waiting for the earth to send a signal of disapproval through lightning or thunder or floods, Ms. Jordt said. But nature remained indifferent.
“Aung pyi!” the generals shouted. “We won!”
But their grip on power has never been secure. They have ruled through a security service that keeps order through intimidation. They have arrested thousands of political prisoners and have held the pro-democracy leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, under house arrest for 12 of the last 18 years.
In that context, the huge street demonstrations were an act of courage and catharsis.
They started tentatively on Aug. 19 after a fuel price increase raised the costs of transportation and basic goods. Veterans of the student demonstrations of 1988 staged small protests, but most were quickly arrested or driven into hiding. The unrest was fading when security officers beat monks and fired shots into the air during a confrontation in the city of Pakokku on Sept. 5.
That became a spark that grew into a broad-based challenge to the government, culminating last week in the breach between those who hold moral authority and those who have the guns.
“This was not an accidental uprising,” said Zin Linn, a former editor and political prisoner who is now information minister for the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma, an exile opposition group based in Washington. The transition in leadership in the protests — from militant former students to activist monks — was well planned, he said, through secret meetings among young men sharing similar grievances and aspirations for their country. For the most part, it was not the elders who backed the protests. Over the years, the junta has worked to co-opt the Buddhist hierarchy, placing chosen men in key positions just as they have done in every other institution, angering and alienating the younger monks.
After the military clampdown on the monasteries last week, the streets of Yangon were mostly empty of monks. But their gesture of rejection of the junta, and the junta’s violent response, had changed the dynamics of Burmese society in ways that had only begun to play out.
The junta’s action “shows how desperate they are,” Ms. Jordt said. “It shows that they are willing to do anything at this point in terms of violence. Once you’ve thrown your lot in against the monks, I think it will be impossible for the regime to go back to normal daily legitimacy.”
Monday, September 24, 2007
King Algorithm:An Oracle for Our Time, Part Man, Part Machine By GEORGE JOHNSON September 23, 2007
IN the 12th century A.D., when the Arabic treatise “On the Hindu Art of Reckoning” was translated into Latin, the modern decimal system was bestowed on the Western world — an advance that can best be appreciated by trying to do long division with Roman numerals. The name of the author, the Baghdad scholar Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, was Latinized as Algoritmi, which mutated somehow into algorismus and, in English, algorithm — meaning nothing more than a recipe for solving problems step by step.
It was the Internet that stripped the word of its innocence. Algorithms, as closely guarded as state secrets, buy and sell stocks and mortgage-backed securities, sometimes with a dispassionate zeal that crashes markets. Algorithms promise to find the news that fits you, and even your perfect mate. You can’t visit Amazon.com without being confronted with a list of books and other products that the Great Algoritmi recommends.
Its intuitions, of course, are just calculations — given enough time they could be carried out with stones. But when so much data is processed so rapidly, the effect is oracular and almost opaque. Even with a peek at the cybernetic trade secrets, you probably couldn’t unwind the computations. As you sit with your eHarmony spouse watching the movies Netflix prescribes, you might as well be an avatar in Second Life. You have been absorbed into the operating system.
Last week, when executives at MySpace told of new algorithms that will mine the information on users’ personal pages and summon targeted ads, the news hardly caused a stir. The idea of automating what used to be called judgment has gone from radical to commonplace.
What is spreading through the Web is not exactly artificial intelligence. For all the research that has gone into cognitive and computer science, the brain’s most formidable algorithms — those used to recognize images or sounds or understand language — have eluded simulation. The alternative has been to incorporate people, with their special skills, as components of the Net.
Go to Google Image Labeler (images.google.com/imagelabeler) and you are randomly matched with another bored Web surfer — in Korea, maybe, or Omaha — who has agreed to play a game. Google shows you both a series of pictures peeled from the Web — the sun setting over the ocean or a comet streaking through space — and you earn points by typing as many descriptive words as you can. The results are stored and analyzed, and through this human-machine symbiosis, Google’s image-searching algorithms are incrementally refined.
The project is still experimental. But the concept is not so different from what happens routinely during a Google search. The network of computers answering your query pays attention to which results you choose to read. You’re gathering data from the network while the network is gathering data about you. The result is a statistical accretion of what people — those beings who clack away at the keys — are looking for, a rough sense of what their language means.
In the 1950s William Ross Ashby, a British psychiatrist and cyberneticist, anticipated something like this merger when he wrote about intelligence amplification — human thinking leveraged by machines. But it is both kinds of intelligence, biological and electronic, that are being amplified. Unlike the grinning cyborgs envisioned by science fiction, the splicing is not between hardware and wetware but between software running on two different platforms.
Several years ago, SETI@home became a vehicle for computer owners to donate their spare processing cycles for the intense number-crunching needed to sift radio-telescope data for signs of extraterrestrial life. Now a site run by Amazon.com, the Mechanical Turk (www.mturk.com), asks you to lend your brain. Named for an 18th-century chess-playing automaton that turned out to have a human hidden inside, the Mechanical Turk offers volunteers a chance to search for the missing aviator Steve Fossett by examining satellite photos. Or you can earn a few pennies at a time by performing other chores that flummox computers: categorizing Web sites (“sexually explicit, “arts and entertainment,” “automotive”), identifying objects in video frames, summarizing or paraphrasing snippets of text, transcribing audio recordings — specialties at which neural algorithms excel.
(Not all of these Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs, as Amazon calls them, involve serving as a chip in some entrepreneur’s machine. Hoping to draw more traffic to their sites, bloggers are using the Mechanical Turk to solicit comments for their online postings. In some cases you get precisely 2 cents for your opinion.)
In his 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Alan Turing foresaw a day when it would be hard to tell the difference between the responses of a computer and a human being. What he may not have envisioned is how thoroughly the boundary would blur.
How do you categorize Wikipedia, a constantly buzzing mechanism with replaceable human parts? Submit an article or change one and a swarm of warm- and sometimes hot-blooded proofreading routines go to work making corrections and corrections to the corrections.
Or maybe the mercurial encyclopedia is more like an organism with an immune system of human leukocytes guarding its integrity. (Biology too is algorithmic, beginning with the genetic code.) When the objectivity of Wikipedia was threatened by tweaking from special interests — a kind of autoimmune disease — another level of protection evolved: a Web site called WikiScanner that reports the Internet address of the offender. Someone at PepsiCo, for example, removed references about the health effects of its flagship soft drink. With enough computing power the monitoring could be semiautomated — scanning the database constantly and flagging suspicious edits for humans to inspect.
No one but a utopian would have predicted how readily people will work for free. We’re cheaper than hardware — a good thing considering how hard we are to duplicate.
It was the Internet that stripped the word of its innocence. Algorithms, as closely guarded as state secrets, buy and sell stocks and mortgage-backed securities, sometimes with a dispassionate zeal that crashes markets. Algorithms promise to find the news that fits you, and even your perfect mate. You can’t visit Amazon.com without being confronted with a list of books and other products that the Great Algoritmi recommends.
Its intuitions, of course, are just calculations — given enough time they could be carried out with stones. But when so much data is processed so rapidly, the effect is oracular and almost opaque. Even with a peek at the cybernetic trade secrets, you probably couldn’t unwind the computations. As you sit with your eHarmony spouse watching the movies Netflix prescribes, you might as well be an avatar in Second Life. You have been absorbed into the operating system.
Last week, when executives at MySpace told of new algorithms that will mine the information on users’ personal pages and summon targeted ads, the news hardly caused a stir. The idea of automating what used to be called judgment has gone from radical to commonplace.
What is spreading through the Web is not exactly artificial intelligence. For all the research that has gone into cognitive and computer science, the brain’s most formidable algorithms — those used to recognize images or sounds or understand language — have eluded simulation. The alternative has been to incorporate people, with their special skills, as components of the Net.
Go to Google Image Labeler (images.google.com/imagelabeler) and you are randomly matched with another bored Web surfer — in Korea, maybe, or Omaha — who has agreed to play a game. Google shows you both a series of pictures peeled from the Web — the sun setting over the ocean or a comet streaking through space — and you earn points by typing as many descriptive words as you can. The results are stored and analyzed, and through this human-machine symbiosis, Google’s image-searching algorithms are incrementally refined.
The project is still experimental. But the concept is not so different from what happens routinely during a Google search. The network of computers answering your query pays attention to which results you choose to read. You’re gathering data from the network while the network is gathering data about you. The result is a statistical accretion of what people — those beings who clack away at the keys — are looking for, a rough sense of what their language means.
In the 1950s William Ross Ashby, a British psychiatrist and cyberneticist, anticipated something like this merger when he wrote about intelligence amplification — human thinking leveraged by machines. But it is both kinds of intelligence, biological and electronic, that are being amplified. Unlike the grinning cyborgs envisioned by science fiction, the splicing is not between hardware and wetware but between software running on two different platforms.
Several years ago, SETI@home became a vehicle for computer owners to donate their spare processing cycles for the intense number-crunching needed to sift radio-telescope data for signs of extraterrestrial life. Now a site run by Amazon.com, the Mechanical Turk (www.mturk.com), asks you to lend your brain. Named for an 18th-century chess-playing automaton that turned out to have a human hidden inside, the Mechanical Turk offers volunteers a chance to search for the missing aviator Steve Fossett by examining satellite photos. Or you can earn a few pennies at a time by performing other chores that flummox computers: categorizing Web sites (“sexually explicit, “arts and entertainment,” “automotive”), identifying objects in video frames, summarizing or paraphrasing snippets of text, transcribing audio recordings — specialties at which neural algorithms excel.
(Not all of these Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs, as Amazon calls them, involve serving as a chip in some entrepreneur’s machine. Hoping to draw more traffic to their sites, bloggers are using the Mechanical Turk to solicit comments for their online postings. In some cases you get precisely 2 cents for your opinion.)
In his 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Alan Turing foresaw a day when it would be hard to tell the difference between the responses of a computer and a human being. What he may not have envisioned is how thoroughly the boundary would blur.
How do you categorize Wikipedia, a constantly buzzing mechanism with replaceable human parts? Submit an article or change one and a swarm of warm- and sometimes hot-blooded proofreading routines go to work making corrections and corrections to the corrections.
Or maybe the mercurial encyclopedia is more like an organism with an immune system of human leukocytes guarding its integrity. (Biology too is algorithmic, beginning with the genetic code.) When the objectivity of Wikipedia was threatened by tweaking from special interests — a kind of autoimmune disease — another level of protection evolved: a Web site called WikiScanner that reports the Internet address of the offender. Someone at PepsiCo, for example, removed references about the health effects of its flagship soft drink. With enough computing power the monitoring could be semiautomated — scanning the database constantly and flagging suspicious edits for humans to inspect.
No one but a utopian would have predicted how readily people will work for free. We’re cheaper than hardware — a good thing considering how hard we are to duplicate.
Monday, September 17, 2007
When the Limits Push Back by WILLIAM YARDLEY
William Yardley explores the lives of various risk-takers and what makes them tick. C. Robert Cloninger, a professor of psychiatry and genetics at Washington University in St. Louis, states that "the need for heroic transformation is very deep in the human psyche." People take risks to make this transformation, when according to Cloninger "really the lesson that is needed is self-acceptance."
In this article Yardley uses the example of Timothy Treadwell, "Grizzly Man", who lived with grizzly bears in Alaska for many summers. Trying to find this "self-acceptance" Treadwell was killed and eaten by a bear in 2003.
This is an interesting article. It really makes you think about whats going on inside some people's head and where the line can be drawn between risk-taker and lunatic.
In this article Yardley uses the example of Timothy Treadwell, "Grizzly Man", who lived with grizzly bears in Alaska for many summers. Trying to find this "self-acceptance" Treadwell was killed and eaten by a bear in 2003.
This is an interesting article. It really makes you think about whats going on inside some people's head and where the line can be drawn between risk-taker and lunatic.
Monday, September 10, 2007
NY Times Week in Review 9/11; The Art of Mapping on the Run
New York Time's journalist Andrew Revkin discusses in the article, The Art of Mapping on the Run, that the human impact on the Earth's landscape and environment is present today more than ever. This problem is not the concern of any government or environmentalist group at the moment but of the cartographers who have to constantly update maps of the Earth's landscape and other physical features.
In this article Revkin uses interviews and analysis from experts in this field to back up his point that human impact on the Earth is cause for concern in the future.
It is very startling to find out the degree to which humans can change the landscape of a planet the size of Earth. This is almost certainly the beginning of a bad trend to which we will all one day regret.
In this article Revkin uses interviews and analysis from experts in this field to back up his point that human impact on the Earth is cause for concern in the future.
It is very startling to find out the degree to which humans can change the landscape of a planet the size of Earth. This is almost certainly the beginning of a bad trend to which we will all one day regret.
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