SCIENCE: Dominic Pettman on "Plant-Thinking"

From the LA Review of Books:

IN APRIL OF 2000, Michael Moore launched a campaign to help elect a ficus plant to the Congressional seat in New Jersey’s 11th District. The joke was that a ficus is more intelligent and dynamic than any of the highly partisan and corrupt official candidates. After reading Michael Marder’s new book Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life you may be convinced that plants are smarter than all of us. Theoretical work in the humanities has been branching out for several years now (if you’ll pardon the arborial pun), striving to go beyond the traditional human subject in order to account for other types of existence and experience, including animals and autonomous machines. A new field has emerged, loosely labeled “the posthumanities,” which attempts to fill in the millennia-long blind spots caused by our own narcissism. Such scholars are united in their efforts to expose or deconstruct ongoing “anthropocentrism.” The latest off-shoot of such thinking — known as Speculative Realism — goes so far as to consider objects like cameras, stones, pillows, cartoon characters, or electricity grids as “agents” in their own right. 

It is interesting then that plants have, on the whole, been ignored in this intellectual rush to lobby on behalf of non-human existence. And while Marder’s book is not the first to broach the subject (Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s recent edited collection Animal, Vegetable, Mineral [2012] is of special note, as is Francis Hallé’s In Praise of Plants [2011]), it is possibly the most sustained study yet to emerge from the rather esoteric world of Continental philosophy. Marder wants to forge an encounter with vegetal life, all the while respecting the alien ontology of floral ways of being. For while a shrub may not consciously “experience” the world in which it grows, this does not, for Marder, mean that it is not thinking and doing in profound philosophical, and even ethical, ways. 

INNOVATION: University of St Andrews scientists create 'fastest man-made spinning object'

From the BBC:

A team of researchers claims to have created the world's fastest spinning man-made object. 

They were able to levitate and spin a microscopic sphere at speeds of up to 600 million revolutions per minute. 

This spin speed is half a million times faster than a domestic washing machine and more than a thousand times faster than a dental drill. 

The work by the University of St Andrews scientists is published in Nature Communications.

TECHNOLOGY: LG puts buttons on back of G2 smartphone

Via the BBC:

LG is hoping to shake up smartphone design by placing the only physical buttons of its new flagship model on the rear of the handset. 

The firm says the G2 addresses the problem that mobiles become harder to control the bigger they get. 

The South Korean company recently reported its strongest ever mobile phone figures.

ECONOMICS: A philosopher's skepticism on Prospect Theory (and its refinements)

So, I sent an email to Tyler Cowen who was kind enough to offer an explanation of what he thinks might be going on with Prospect Theory. I am still extremely skeptical about Prospect Theory being much more than a descriptive theory of what may be going on. 

Now: One may not be able to prove in a give situation whether Prospect Theory is operating. This much is already known. What I am arguing here is different. I am arguing that it may never be possible to know if Prospect Theory is happening in a given situation. 

I am raising the following epistemological question related to Prospect Theory (and its refinements) : how do we know that Prospect Theory is a true theory in the sense that is falsifiable AND one with provable predictive power? All I am asking is for Prospect Theory to meet a few basic requirements. How do we know that Prospect Theory is a true theory of human behavior in markets if it does not meet even the basic requirements?

The easiest thing to do would be to start off with an example. Let us first ask ourselves the following question. Prospect Theory adherents claim that Prospect Theory can provide an explanation for the fact that riskier investments don't always have greater returns than less risky one. We need to answer the following questions first. Why is there a reason to believe that there should be an explanation for the fact that riskier investments don't always have greater returns than less risky investments? Why not a plethora of explanations? 

Let us think about companies a bit. With companies, people have only a partial idea of what is actually going on within companies, that is, they don't have perfect iformation. Their aggregate guesses could be off with some non-zero probability p. Now given this (and here is the logical leap where Kahneman screws up), you can apply any number of "bias"-based theories to explain the exact same phenomena that Prospect Theory claims to explain. The "overconfidence effect" is as good as any. The "anchoring bias" could be used to explain the exact same thing. In fact, in the place of Prospect Theory (and its refinements), you could substitute many different theories (Theory X1, X2, ..., Xn).

MISCELLANEOUS: Interview with Sean Carroll

Via 3AM magazine:

Sean Carroll is the uber-chillin’ philosophical physicist who investigates how the preposterous universe works at a deep level, who thinks spats between physics and philosophy are silly, who thinks a wise philosopher will always be willing to learn from discoveries of science, who asks how we are to live if there is no God, who is comfortable with naturalism and physicalism, who thinks emergentism central, that freewill is a crucial part of our best higher-level vocabulary, that there aren’t multiple levels of reality, which is quantum based not relativity based, is a cheerful realist, disagrees with Tim Maudlin about wave functions and Craig Callender about multiverses, worries about pseudo-scientific ideas and that the notion of ‘domains of applicability’ is lamentably under-appreciated. Stellar! 

3am: You’re a physicist with philosophical interests and skill. How did this begin? 

Sean Carroll: My own interests in physics and philosophy certainly stem from a common origin – I’m curious about how the world works at a deep level. I got interested in physics at a fairly young age, reading books from the local public library about relativity and particle physics. I didn’t discover philosophy in any serious way until I went to college. It was a good Catholic school (Villanova), at which every arts & sciences major was required to take three semesters of philosophy (as well as three semesters of religious studies, which could be fairly philosophical if you took the right courses). I really enjoyed it and ended up getting a philosophy minor. As a grad student in astrophysics at Harvard, I sat in on courses with John Rawls and Robert Nozick. Rawls in particular was a great person to talk to, although we almost never discussed philosophy because he had so many questions about physics and cosmology.

INNOVATION: Tycoon unveils 'Hyperloop' transit idea

Via the BBC:

US-based entrepreneur Elon Musk has unveiled his proposed supersonic "Hyperloop" transport concept to link Los Angeles and San Francisco. 

The SpaceX, Tesla and Paypal founder envisions using magnets and fans to shoot capsules floating on a cushion of air through a long tube. 

If it is ever built, a Hyperloop trip between the two California cities would last about 30 minutes, he said.

TECHNOLOGY: Cybersecurity Pros in High Demand, Highly Paid and Highly Selective

Via CIO.com:

Experts in cybersecurity are among the most sought-after professionals in the tech sector, with demand for workers in that field outpacing other IT jobs by a wide margin. 

A new survey by Semper Secure, a public-private partnership in Virginia formed to advance the cybersecurity profession, offers a fresh glimpse at what security workers earn, what they look for in an employer and where the hubs of innovation are located. 

Cybersecurity professionals report an average salary of $116,000, or approximately $55.77 per hour. That's nearly three times the national median income for full-time wage and salary workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

But it's more than just the money. Cybersecurity professionals say that they actively seek employers with strong reputations for integrity and those that are recognized as leaders in their field.