August 6, 2012
Girls’ games and toys are a large yet difficult market for the children’s toy industry. Nancy Zwiers, an industry consultant and former head of worldwide marketing for Mattel’s Barbie doll line, has pointed out the male-centred bias that makes development of girls’ toys difficult: ‘When I tour different company showrooms and look at what they’re doing, many times it’s a bunch of guys making decisions about what girls would like, and they miss the mark.’
‘Age compression’ is a toy industry term that describes the modern trend of children moving through play stages faster than they did in the past. Children have a desire to progress to more complex toys at a faster pace, girls in particular. Barbie dolls, for example, were once marketed to girls around 8 years old, but have been found to be more popular in recent years with girls around 3 years old. The packaging for the dolls labels them appropriate for ages 3 and up.
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August 6, 2012
Robochrist Industries is a robotic performance art troupe most notably recognized for its performances in and around Los Angeles during the years 1997 – 2005. The performances feature large radio-controlled robots moving among and eventually destroying props and set-pieces intended to convey specific theatrical narratives. The troupe is a direct offshoot of Survival Research Laboratories (SRL), a pioneer in machine performance art.
Ristow worked on several SRL performances, contributing not only props but also, particularly in the years 1996 and 1997, robots that he had constructed. During this period Ristow also participated in several collaborative performances with another San Francisco based performance group, The Seemen, including the often cited ‘Hellco’ performance at the 1996 Burning Man festival.
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August 6, 2012
Survival Research Laboratories (SRL) is a machine performance art group credited for pioneering the genre of large-scale machine performance. After about 30 years in San Francisco, SRL spent most of 2008 moving 40 miles north to Petaluma. Since its inception in 1978 SRL has operated as an organization of creative technicians and technical creatives dedicated to redirecting the techniques, tools, and tenets of industry, science, and the military away from their typical manifestations in practicality, product or warfare.
Since 1979, SRL has staged over 45 mechanized presentations in the United States and Europe. Each performance consists of a unique set of ritualized interactions between machines, robots, and special-effects devices, employed in developing themes of socio-political satire. Humans are present only as audience or operators.
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August 6, 2012
The Curiosity rover is a nuclear-powered exploration vehicle that is part of NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission. The MSL spacecraft was launched in late 2011 and successfully landed on Aeolis Palus in Gale Crater in the summer of 2012. The approximately 2 billion-year-old impact crater is hypothesized to have gradually been filled in, first by water-deposited, and then by wind-deposited sediments, possibly until it was completely covered, before wind erosion scoured out the sediments, leaving an isolated 5.5 km (3.4 mile) high mountain, Aeolis Mons, at the center of the 154 km (96 mi) wide crater.
Thus, it is believed that the rover may have the opportunity to study two billion years of Martian history in the sediments exposed in the mountain. Additionally, its landing site should be on or near an alluvial fan, which is hypothesized to be the result of a flow of ground water, either before the deposition of the eroded sediments or else in relatively recent geologic history.
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August 6, 2012
The Two Cultures is the title of an influential 1959 Rede Lecture by British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow. Its thesis was that ‘the intellectual life of the whole of western society’ was split into the titular two cultures — namely the sciences and the humanities — and that this was a major hindrance to solving the world’s problems. Snow’s Rede Lecture condemned the British educational system as having, since the Victorian period, over-rewarded the humanities (especially Latin and Greek) at the expense of scientific and engineering education, despite such achievements having been so decisive in winning the Second World War for the Allies.
This in practice deprived British elites (in politics, administration, and industry) of adequate preparation to manage the modern scientific world. By contrast, Snow said, German and American schools sought to prepare their citizens equally in the sciences and humanities, and better scientific teaching enabled these countries’ rulers to compete more effectively in a scientific age. Later discussion of ‘The Two Cultures’ tended to obscure Snow’s initial focus on differences between British systems (of both schooling and social class) and those of competing countries.
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August 6, 2012
In science and history, consilience [kun-sil-ee-ehns] (also convergence of evidence or concordance of evidence) refers to the principle that evidence from independent, unrelated sources can ‘converge’ to strong conclusions. That is, when multiple sources of evidence are in agreement, the conclusion can be very strong even when none of the individual sources of evidence are very strong on their own. Most established scientific knowledge is supported by a convergence of evidence: if not, the evidence is comparatively weak, and there will not likely be a strong scientific consensus.
The principle is based on the unity of knowledge (a thesis in philosophy of science that says that all the sciences form a unified whole); measuring the same result by several different methods should lead to the same answer. For example, it should not matter whether one measures the distance between the Great Pyramids of Giza by laser rangefinding, by satellite imaging, or with a meter stick – in all three cases, the answer should be approximately the same. For the same reason, different dating methods in geochronology should concur, a result in chemistry should not contradict a result in geology, etc.
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August 6, 2012
‘Consilience [kun-sil-ee-ehns]: The Unity of Knowledge’ is a 1998 book by biologist E. O. Wilson on the unification of scientific fields of inquiry and the potential unification of hard and soft sciences (humanities). Wilson uses the term to describe the synthesis of knowledge from different specialized fields of human endeavor.
He defines it as: ‘Literally a ‘jumping together’ of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation.’ Examples include the unification of Darwin’s theory of evolution with genetics; the unification of forces in modern physics; Einstein’s work unifying Brownian motion with atomic theory; Rene Descartes’ unification of geometry and algebra; and Newton’s universal gravitation, which unified the laws of falling bodies with the laws of planetary motion.
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August 6, 2012
The Wilson Quarterly is a magazine published by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. The magazine was founded in 1976 by journalist Peter Braestrup and James H. Billington, the thirteenth Librarian of the United States Congress. The ‘Quarterly’ is noted for its nonpartisan, nonideological approach to current issues, with articles written from various perspectives.
Designed to make the research and debates of scholars and intellectuals accessible to a general audience, it covers a wide range of topics, from science policy and literature to foreign affairs. In 2012, the ‘Quarterly’ changed to a digital-only publishing model.
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August 6, 2012
‘Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World’ is a 2006 book by law professors Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu that offers an assessment of the struggle to control the Internet. Starting with a discussion of the early vision of a borderless global community, the authors present some of the most prominent individuals, ideas, and movements that have played key roles in developing the Internet.
The book asserts the important role of government in maintaining Internet law and order while debunking the claims of techno-utopianism that have been espoused by theorists such as Thomas Friedman. In the 1990s the Internet was greeted as the ‘New New Thing’: It would erase national borders, give rise to communal societies that invented their own rules, undermine the power of governments. Goldsmith and Wu explain why these early assumptions were mostly wrong. The Internet turns out to illustrate the enduring importance of Old Old Things, such as law and national power and business logic.
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