PROSOPAGNOSIA, or face-blindness, affects 2.5% of the population. Those afflicted cannot recognise faces, even ones they have seen before and know well. They must learn to rely on other cues such as gait, spectacles and manner of dress. Oliver Sacks, a neurologist and writer, is himself face-blind. He has also been living with ocular cancer. In his latest book, "The Mind's Eye", he considers six cases of people who have had to adjust to big changes in their vision, including himself. The stories, some previously published in the New Yorker, are heartbreaking: a writer who loses the ability to read, a pianist who can no longer read music, Dr Sacks's own face blindness and loss of stereo vision as a result of cancer. His stories humanise his subjects and give shape to conditions that seem otherwise impossible and unliveable. Yet these are hardly sob stories. Rather, Dr Sacks offers up many examples of the plasticity of the human brain, which can adapt to almost anything.

More Intelligent Life spoke to Dr Sacks over the phone about face-blindness, the line between biology and biography, and what it was like for him to become one of his own subjects.

When was the first time you realised you were face blind, and when did you start thinking of it as a real condition?

Probably the first time was in ‘85 when I visited my brother in Australia, whom I had had no personal contact with since the 1950s. He had difficulties recognising faces and places in the same way I have and we both had a sudden feeling that this was a family thing, though my other siblings don’t have it. This was the first time I consciously thought that way. And then after my "hat" book [" The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat"] was published, I received letters [about conditions] that were confined to faces. Neurologists started to wonder whether there was a congenital form which had been under-reported. It turns out face recognition is a pre-attentive process, and should be instant.

via The Economist.

Undaunted by their current travails, WikiLeaks has released 140,000 emails written by Apple’s enigmatic leader. While Scoopertino is only beginning to dig into this treasure trove, a richer picture of Steve Jobs is already beginning to emerge. Overall, the emails reinforce the image of Steve as a man of few words. A cursory review of this massive email dump reveals that 88% of his messages contain three or fewer words, with 84% of those offering only one: “No.”

He did get a bit wordier in an exchange with North Korean bad boy Kim Jong Il. Kim, aching to get a pre-release iPod touch for his son back in August, wrote to Steve requesting “a favor from one dictator to another.” In this case, Steve doubled the syllable count with a quick “Hell no.”

via Scoopertino.

Susan Maus, an online-marketing consultant, arrived at the rendezvous at an Apple store in Minneapolis at 8:30 a.m. on Oct. 13. Guests including Maus were escorted across the empty sales floor, down a hallway, up an unmarked elevator and into a conference room. For 90 minutes, Apple representatives talked with Maus and a dozen other consultants and shop owners about how the company's computing products could improve their businesses. The attendees played with iPads to check out various business applications, including one that runs presentations on a plasma screen.

"It was pretty slick," Maus said. "They're really reaching out to businesses now."

The hush-hush strategy reflects a recent shift for Apple Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs, who has said no company can focus on consumers and corporate customers at the same time. Jobs stumbled in efforts before to target businesses, including with the Lisa PC in the early 1980s and the NeXT computer he developed in the early 1990s during his time away from Apple.

But with more business people attracted to iPads and iPhones, Cupertino's Apple has been able to grab a share of corporate information-technology budgets

via SFGate.

Back in April, we looked at an ambitious European plan to simulate the entire planet. The idea is to exploit the huge amounts of data generated by financial markets, health records, social media and climate monitoring to model the planet's climate, societies and economy. The vision is that a system like this can help to understand and predict crises before they occur so that governments can take appropriate measures in advance. There are numerous challenges here. Nobody yet has the computing power necessary for such a task, neither are there models that will can accurately model even much smaller systems. But before any of that is possible, researchers must gather the economic, social and technological data needed to feed this machine.

Today, we get a grand tour of this challenge from Dirk Helbing and Stefano Balietti at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Helbing is the driving force behind this project and the man who will lead it if he gets the EUR 1 billion he needs from the European Commission.

It turns out that there are already numerous sources of data that could provide the necessary fuel to power Helbing's Earth Simulator. "In the past, collecting data of human activity has been largely obstructed by fifinancial, technological and ethical issues," say Helbing and Balietti. That is no longer the case.

While good data from social sciences experiments has been hard to come by in the past, researchers are currently swamped by it thanks to a new generation of lab experiments, web experiments and the study of massive multi-player on-line games.

These and other pursuits are now producing massive amounts of data, many of which are freely available on the web.

Of course, one of the dangers from such an approach is that any ethical issues are likely to be swamped by this tidal wave of numbers. This needs to be urgently addressed. While Helbing and colleagues write persuasively about the potential benefits of an Earth Simulator, it's hard to believe they've given the same amount of thought to the potential risks.

So in the interests of stimulating this debate, I'm reproducing here Helbing's list of websites that are potential sources of data for an Earth Simulator. It makes for fascinating, if unnerving, reading:

via Technology Review.

In India, there is only 1 psychiatrist for every 400,000 people, according to the Indian government. The Lancet study involved about 2,600 people in the state of Goa with common mental illnesses such as anxiety or depression. About half were assigned case managers that had taken a two-month training course in mental health counseling. All of the patients in the study got whatever routine care was provided by private doctors or public clinics. And half of them had 6 to 12 meetings with the lay therapists. The therapists talked with them about their illnesses and problems, taught them coping mechanisms such as breathing exercises, and in some cases offered psychotherapy.

In the public health clinics, 66 percent of the people who talked to the lay therapists recovered after six months, compared to 43 percent of people who got the standard care. The researchers call this "modest evidence of a beneficial effect" of using lay counselors.

via NPR.

via Discovery News.

Chinese archaeologists believe they have discovered a 2,400-year-old pot of soup, sealed in a bronze cooking vessel and dug up near the ancient capital of Xian, state press said Monday.

"It's the first discovery of bone soup in Chinese archaeological history," the Global Times quoted Liu Daiyun of the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology as saying.

"The discovery will play an important role in studying the eating habits and culture of the Warring States Period (475-221 BC)."

The soup and bones were discovered in a small, sealed bronze vessel in a tomb being excavated to make way for the extension of the airport in Xian, home to the country's famed ancient terracotta warriors, the report said.

The liquid and bones in the vessel had turned green...

Unlike France, America and Britain don’t tend to encourage public intellectuals. But if they did, Richard Posner would be their standard-bearer. Posner’s day job is as an appeals-court judge in Chicago—a career founded upon his reputation as America’s pre-eminent thinker on anti-trust law. But Posner is not just a lawyer. In his spare time he has written on sex, security, politics, Hegel, Homeric society, medieval Iceland and a whole lot more. The Wall Street Journal once called him a “one-man think-tank”. Posner thinks like a polymath. “I’m impatient and I’m restless,” he says, in a matter-of-fact way. “After I graduated from law school, I worked first in government for six years. I enjoyed it but I didn’t really want to make a career of that. I went into teaching without any great sense of commitment, but I couldn’t think of anything else. But gradually I lost int erest, as the 1970s wore on, I became involved in consulting. So when the judgeship came along in 1981—quite out of the blue—I was happy to take that. I just kind of slid into law. It is sort of the default career choice in the United States.”

Posner first made his name as a monomath. “I had a very big intellectual commitment for many years to anti-trust law. I wrote a lot about that.” Eventually, though, the polymath rose to the surface and he put anti-trust behind him. “I just got bored with it, I think the field slowed down—it happens with fields,” he says. These days most people cling to their expertise; Posner talks about it as if he were trading in an old car.

After he became immersed in the intellectual life of the University of Chicago, Posner started to apply insights from economics to a broad range of subjects. In his book “Sex and Reason”, written in 1990, he used economics to explain a part of life that specialist lawyers and economists had tended to think was beyond their reach. To take a simple example, the AIDS epidemic made gay sex unavoidably more costly, either because of the risk of disease or of switching to safe sex. It therefore reduced the amount of gay sex—and, by the same mechanism, cut the number of illegitimate births and inc reased the number of legitimate ones.

The book was a success because Posner had the field pretty much to himself. “Sometimes one goes into a new area and there hasn’t been much done in it and then you are a little ahead of the curve,” he says. Even then, the monomaths were in hot pursuit. “After a while there is so much in it that you don’t know what you’re going to do. Since 1990 the field has become extremely crowded because of specialisation and not very attractive.” Time to move on.

The monomaths do not only swarm over a specialism, they also play dirty. In each new area that Posner picks—policy or science—the experts start to erect barricades. “Even in relatively soft fields, specialists tend to develop a specialised vocabulary which creates barriers to entry,” Posner says with his economic hat pulled down over his head. “Specialists want to fend off the generalists. They may also want to convince themselves that what they are doing is really very difficult and challenging. One of the ways they do that is to develop what they regard a rigorous methodology—often mathematical.

“The specialist will always be able to nail the generalists by pointing out that they don’t use the vocabulary quite right and they make mistakes that an insider would never make. It’s a defence mechanism. They don’t like people invading their turf, especially outsiders criticising insiders. So if I make mistakes about this economic situation, it doesn’t really bother me tremendously. It’s not my field. I can make mistakes. On the other hand for me to be criticising someone whose whole career is committed to a particular outlook and method and so on, that is very painful.”

For a polymath, the charge of dabbling never lies far below the surface. “With the amount of information that’s around, if you really want to understand your topic thoroughly then, yes, you have to specialise,” says Chris Leek, the chairman of British Mensa, a club for people who score well on IQ tests. “And if you want to speak with authority, then it’s important to be seen to specialise.”

That is why modern institutions tend to exclude polymaths, he says. “It’s very hard to show yourself as a polymath in the current academic climate. If you’ve got someone interested in going across departments, spending part of the time in physics and part of the time elsewhere, their colleagues are going to kick them out. They’re not contributing fully to any single department. OK, every so often you’re going to get a huge benefit, but from day to day, where the universities are making appointments, they want the focus in one field.”

via More Intelligent Life.