randform

Sheril Kirschenbaum and Chris Mooney of the blog the intersection and coorganizers and committee members of science debate, which is

A concerned citizens initiative now cosponsored by the AAAS, the Council on Competitiveness, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine, and signed by over 100 leading American universities and other organizations.

announced yesterday the official invitation date and location (see also NY times article) of the sciencedebate 2008.

The initiative invited the US american presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, and Barack Obama to join in for a debate on science & economy.

From the science debate website:

Given the many urgent scientific and technological challenges facing America and the rest of the world, the increasing need for accurate scientific information in political decision making, and the vital role scientific innovation plays in spurring economic growth and competitiveness, we call for a public debate in which the U.S. presidential candidates share their views on the issues of The Environment, Health and Medicine, and Science and Technology Policy.

The science debate is a great initiative and I hope that they will get all candidates to discuss the future of (US) science and in particular its societal role, although I fear a bit that given the current republican policy on budget cuts in science the candidates John McCain and Mike Huckabee may prefer to stay away. ??? (I hope not!)

In 3 earlier blog posts (please see first here -together with the comment section then here and then here) I tried to explain that “the increasing need for accurate scientific and economic information in political decision making” could be partially met by an organisatorial framework which comes from the global science community. I envisioned an university organized internet platform (which I called “consciencement”) . On this platform scientific questions could be globally discussed by experts and could be put under science poll in order to provide a definite (however not final, and possibly ranked) “science answer” to certain questions, so that politicians would have an orientation on “the” scientific opinion about an issue.

There is an interesting conference called Science in the 21st Century coming up this year in which questions of science, society and the exchange and management of information will be discussed. Among others (from the conference website):

Information exchange and management, the scientific community, and the society as a whole can be thought of as a triangle of relationships, the mutual interactions in which are becoming increasingly important.

The conference is organized by Michael Nielsen who is writing a book on the future of science but who also proved to be an expert in quantum information theory (blog) and Sabine Hossenfelder at the Perimeter Institute in Canada, who is a theoretical physicist, who is in particular interested in black holes.

Sabine Hossenfelder actually commented on my proposition of the internet platform.

via Asymptotia

The following post is an answer to a reply by bee on the randform post before last.

(more…)

Just a link to an upcoming event (April 14 – May 9, 2008) by the Max-Planck-Institut for complex system on Bio-inspired Complex Networks in Science and Technology, From Topology to Structure and Dynamics

(more…)

The main topic of the last issue of the magazine of the Deutsche Hochschulverband was “trust” or “confidence” (in german “Vertrauen”) Various authors were discussing multiple manifestations of trust. The lesson was inspiring and made me think about it the issue and in particular the role of trust in connection to robots. My sister said that this blog post sounds like the thought of the day. So you have been warned if you read further.

(more…)

“no-clohning” artwork by On von Nomann

THE ETHICS OF PROGRESS
theatre + science by TANGLE – UNLIMITED THEATRE

A mind-melting, jargon-free, whistlestop tour of leading edge Quantum Physics.

a co-production with Oxford Playhouse
and Leeds Met Studio Theatre

” Mind-blowing stuff ” The Scotsman
” Unexpectedly gripping and improbably pleasurable ” The Guardian

via artscatalyst.org

According to world-nuclear-news.org today -on French President Nicholas Sarkozy`s state visit to China- a deal was signed which ensures that

France’s national nuclear champion Areva will build two power reactors at Taishan, China and undertake a feasibility study for a used nuclear fuel reprocessing plant as part of an Eur8 billion deal ($12 billion).

Areva are also to provide “all the materials and services required to operate” the forthcoming 1600 MWe EPR units, to be sited at Taishan, 100 km southwest of Guangzhou and 150 km west of Hong Kong in Guangdong province.

(more…)

After about 10 years, the STIX fonts project published their fonts for beta testing today. Their goal

is the preparation of a comprehensive set of fonts that serve the scientific and engineering community in the process from manuscript creation through final publication, both in electronic and print formats.

The fonts will be provided under a royality free license.

If we move around in space-time we can obtain much more information about the surrounding space-time than by just watching it. For example swimming is very different in a curved than in a noncurved space (-> here a website where observations are made how swimmers move around in various environments).

However linking sensoric information with motoric information, like in computer science applications is a very difficult task. The library on the website of David Philipona of the Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception has a good collection of links, like for example to the Max-Planck-Institut for Biological cybernetics with its famous virtual treadmill project cyberwalk.

The group at the Laboratoire did some works in order to find a mathematical formulation of how to gain information about the surrounding space via sensoric/motoric information, like e.g. in their paper
Perception of the structure of the physical world using unknown multimodal sensors and effectors

(more…)

From his last conference in spain Tim brought back the typical conference presents, like notepads and informations about the region of Castro Urdiales. Well I am not so interested in settling down in Castro-Urdiales so I flipped only briefly through the infos about the real estate developments of the region. However what caught my attention was the above paper strip. It is an explanation of how to use a spanish fan (there was also a plastic fan among the presents) (Warning: I had never been to spain so my astonishment about the fan may appear ridiculous to some spain experts).

(more…)