MITPressLog

Jerry Feldman Comments on His 15 Minutes of Blog Fame

Blogs are a different universe. Brad DeLong runs one of the better blogs, mainly economics, but branching widely. On August 22, he published a long and thoughtful review of my new MIT book, From Molecule to Metaphor: A Neural Theory of Language. Within two days there were over thirty responses, none from anyone who had even seen the book. We will give you the link to all this shortly, but I would like to add a few comments that should help you make sense of the wild and wonderful knowledge-free blog commentaries.

Most of this is from a commentary of my own, somewhere in the middle of the list, when it occurred to me that there were major misconstruals of the book in play:

Here are two more brief quotes from my book that might help.

p3. Language and culture are, of course, carried by the family and by the community. But each child has to rebuild it all in his or her own mind.

p.48 There is nothing unusual or exotic in maintaining several perspectives at the same time. Think of some of the many perspectives you have about your bicycle or your car. It is a mode of transportation, but also an investment, a source of pleasure, and possibly a status symbol. If it isn’t functioning properly, you might start thinking about the details of how it works or who could fix it for you.

A neural theory of language is not intended to replace historical, cultural, and other perspectives on language. On the contrary, we suggest that a better understanding of how people learn and use language is essential for such studies. This is best seen in the work of my NTL partner, George Lakoff.

An alternative subtitle for the book would be "Towards a Unified Cognitive Science". The claim is not that neuroscience will solve the problems of language and thought, but that:
1) we need to take all the evidence seriously
2) we have the tools to do this

Read DeLong's post and the comments here. 

Virtual games become reality

If you read our game studies books, then you probably already know about mixed-reality games such as "Can You See Me Now?" and "I Love Bees". In these games, players utilize both real and virtual space for their interactions.  An upcoming festival, Come Out And Play, includes these types of games, and celebrates what the organizers call 'street play':

"In the last few years, there has been an explosion of street play, from mixed-reality games that combine the virtual and real to big games that transform cities into gameboards to the time-honored traditions of stickball and scavenger hunts. Collectively, we call these big games or street games, games that transform public spaces, games that you play in the real-world."

This unusual gaming festival will take place in New York City from September 22 to 24, 2006.  Anyone can sign up to participate. 

Check out the game Cruel 2 B Kind, a game of "benevolent assassination" that will be played in the streets of New York with a partner and a mobile phone - it was co-designed by Ian Bogost, author of the MIT Press book Unit Operations. 

TURNING ONE

We at the PressLog are happy to celebrate having been around for our first 365 days, providing thoughtful, MITP-related content to intelligent, discriminating readers, as well as those unfortunate enough to be misdirected here by some devious search engine. We appreciate you all. To commemorate this milestone we offer you a pixilated birthday cake (left) and some of our favorite entries from the past year.

Like our inaugural post, on the evolutionary psychology debate. Or Tom Kochan’s editorial on jobs and rebuilding after Katrina, dovetailing with Yossi Sheffi's prescription on minimizing business disruption in the hurricane's wake. (The latter includes our favorite photo ever to run on this blog.)

We had rock-star theorists, too: Jean Baudrillard in the Big Apple and Slavoj Zizek on the big screen. Speaking of the movies, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown were celluloid-bound and so was Babylon Babies. There was drinking , driving, and, yes, even drugs . Not to mention sex. And at the end, afterall, there was cruellest fact of life of them all: taxes.

Let us know if we missed any of your favorites. And stick around for another year – maybe when we turn two we’ll have real cake. Maybe.

Science of the Sky

We’ve looked at the question that we’ve all wondered when looking up at the sky on a bright summer day here and here.  It’s a question that Peter Pesic tackles in his recent book, Sky in a Bottle and a question that NPR’s Robin Young spoke with him about on "Here and Now" earlier this week.   Listen here for Pesic’s views on the blue sky phenomenon and for theories from famous thinkers before him who got it wrong. 

Economics of Power

Is it better to be a dictator, a monarch, or a democratically elected official?  How do some political leaders manage to get in power and stay in power for such a long time?  Why do countries that need less foreign aid than others manage to receive more?  Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, author of The Logic of Political Survival, addresses these types of questions in an EconTalk podcast with Russ Roberts (author of the novel The Invisible Heart: An Economic Romance).  This fascinating conversation looks at examples throughout history, from King Leopold II of Belgium to Kim Jong-il of North Korea.

Blending the Senses

Richard E. Cytowic is best known for rediscovering synesthesia in 1980 and returning it to the scientific mainstream where it is now seen as crucial to basic theories of how the brain works.   Sharing a root with anesthesia (“no sensation”), synethesia means “joined sensation,” whereby a voice, for example, is not only heard but also seen felt, or tasted.  The trait is involuntary, hereditary, and fairly common.  It stayed a scientific mystery for two centuries until Cytowic’s original experiments led to a neurological explanation—and to a new concept of brain organization that accentuates emotion over reason.

Last night, Dr. Cytowic spoke with Chris Cuomo for a special ABC News segment called Medical Mysteries.  A clip of the program can be seen here. 

For more information about synesthesia and how it illuminates a wide swath of mental life and leads to a new view of what it mean to be human, check out The Man Who Tasted Shapes. 

World Policy Journal

We're pleased to welcome World Policy Journal to The MIT Press beginning with Volume 23, Issue 2 (Summer 2006).

World Policy is edited by Karl E. Meyer, and is published in partnership with the World Policy Institute at the New School. It is a respected and widely-cited forum on international relations, and joins International Security and The Washington Quarterly to shape our growing list of current affairs titles. 

Access to the entire Summer 2006 issue is available here.

The PC and IBM

Over the weekend, IBM marked the 25th anniversary of the announcement of the first personal computer—which altered the way we think about computing.  The BBC reported that the first PC cost $1,565.00 and had just 16K of memory.  IBM's model was not the first attempt to popularize computing but it would soon help define the global standard and inspired many of the advances we have seen with our computers since. 

In The History of Modern Computing, Paul E. Ceruzzi looks at modern computing—from the first digital computer to the dot-com crash.  Now in it's second edition, Ceruzzi traces the story of individuals, institutions, and the forces that led to the computer's dramatic transformations.  Here is a bit about what he says about IBM's first PC:

The Personal Computer was IBM’s second foray into this market, after the 5100—it even had the designation 5150 in some product literature. Neither IBM nor anyone else foresaw how successful it would be, or that others would copy its architecture to make it the standard for the next decade and beyond. In keeping with a long tradition in the computer industry, IBM grossly underestimated sales: it estimated a total of 250,000 units; ‘‘[a]s it turned out, there were some months when we built and sold nearly that many systems. MS-DOS transformed Microsoft from a company that mainly sold BASIC to one that dominated the small systems industry in operating systems. IBM found itself with an enormously successful product made up of parts designed by others, using ASCII instead of EBCDIC, and with an operating system it did not have complete rights to. It was said that if IBM’s Personal Computer division were a separate company, it would have been ranked #3 in the industry in 1984, after the rest of IBM and Digital Equipment Corporation. Within ten years there were over fifty million computers installed that were variants of the original PC architecture and ran advanced versions of MS-DOS.

The Better is the Enemy of the Good

The evolution of technological artifacts is often compared to the evolution by natural selection of living things. There are many parallels, including the way selective forces of the marketplace affect the survival of a technology. There are differences, too: living things inherit their characteristics from their parents—at most two—but an inventor can borrow things from any number of existing devices. Nor does nature have the privilege that Seymour Cray had, namely, to start with a clean sheet of paper when embarking on a new computer design. The history of personal computing shows that these differences are perhaps less than imagined. The IBM PC’s microprocessor descended from a chip designed for a terminal, although Datapoint never used it for that. Its operating system descended from a ‘‘quick and dirty’’ operating system that began as a temporary expedient. The PC had a limit of 640 K of directly addressable memory. That, too, was unplanned and had nothing to do with the inherent limits of the Intel microprocessor.  640 K was thought to be far more than adequate; within a few years that limit became a millstone around the necks of programmers and users alike. The IBM PC and its clones allowed commercial software to come to the fore, as long as it could run on that computer or machines that were 100 percent compatible with it. Those visionaries who had predicted and longed for this moment now had mixed feelings. This was what they wanted, but they had not anticipated the price to be paid, namely, being trapped in the architecture of the IBM PC and its operating system.

Computers and Thought

We’re pleased to announce that Peter Stone has won the 2007 IJCAI Computers and Thought award.  The award is presented by the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence to an outstanding young scientist in artificial intelligence.  Stone, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas, Austin, is recognized for his contributions to machine learning in multi-agent systems, particularly in collaborative and adversarial dynamic environments.  He is the author of Layered Learning in Multiagent Systems: A Winning Approach to Robotic Soccer and is currently working on another book about autonomous bidding agents which should come out next year.