Why Facebook is Failing in Japan: a New Kind of Partnering

September 6th, 2008

TechCrunch had an insightful post Fear House dvdrip about why MySpace and Facebook are failing in Japan.

I had a glimmering of Facebook’s potential problems in Japan when I noticed that my son Ko was spending the great majority of his time online on Japanese social networking site Mixi

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The reason given in the post for Facebook’s failure is its lack of cultural sensitivity and late entry. But the broader reason is simply hubris, or more kindly, a poor analysis of its real strengths and how to leverage them in Japan. Read the rest of this entry »

Crime, Punishment, and the Singularity

May 28th, 2008
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Another interesting social issue related to the Singularity Ladyhawke buy is its effect on our penal system, especially the millions of folks we’ve got locked up right now. Take a prisoner with a 50-year sentence. If he has to serve his entire sentence he wouldn’t be out until 2050, but by that time we expect inconceivable advances in genetics, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence/robotics, all of which could have implications for his case. Read the rest of this entry »

The Singularity is Near

May 26th, 2008

Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near (Amazon

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) is one of those books that really changes the way you look at things.

For instance, when the Supreme Court rules on virtual child porn as it did recently (SCOTUS Wiki

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), you see that the real issue goes far beyond Photoshopping some kidpix. Read the rest of this entry »

Nearman's new translation of Shobogenzo

May 21st, 2008

Rev. Hubert Nearman, O.B.C. has put out an ambitious new translation of Shobogenzo, a 14-year labor of love, now available both online

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The Neural Buddhists: Neurotheology in the NYT

May 19th, 2008

The New York Times published a surprising article last week on the topic of meta-neurotheology: the context and evolution of the social discussion about neurotheology. Author David Brooks points out the huge impact that the neuroscience revolution is having and will have on our culture’s views of God, religion, and science. His main point: the direction we will take as the discussion unfolds is not towards atheism and pure materialism, but rather something he calls neural Buddhism: “new movements that emphasize self-transcendence”, based on beliefs in a dynamic self , shared morals, elevated experience, and a new concept of God

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Read the rest of this entry »

Epigenetic Enlightenment

May 19th, 2008
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“Life’s experiences add molecular switches to the genes that control our brain activity,” is the subhead on an article in a recent issue of SciAm Mind. The article presents the new field known as epigenetics

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, which holds that experience can cause chemical changes that boost or depress the expression of certain genes.

This is a rich potential mechanism for describing interaction of nature and nurture in general, but in particular the progress of spiritual development

associated with ongoing practices such as Zen meditation. Simply put, meditation practice could have chemical effects such as attaching methyl groups to genes, which quiets the gene by interfering with the ability of the RNA-based transcription mechanism. Or it could attach acetyl groups with the opposite effect, letting the genes express themselves more easily.

This is an intriguing supplement or alternative to other explanations of the long-term effects of meditation, such as neuroplasticity, but what is the gene, or genes, in question? Such a hypothesis will be a prerequisite for experimental design in this field.

Image of chromatin created by Nicolas Bouvier; courtesy of Genevieve Almouzni, Curie Institute, Paris, France.

Hofstadter and the Singularity

May 16th, 2008

I got a copy of Douglas Hofstadter’s “I Am a Strange Loop” (Amazon) for my birthday and spent the next month puzzling over why this inane book ever got written, other than to make a few bucks from aging technohippies with fond memories of Godel, Escher and Bach. It’s basically a random collection of unstructured jottings, boring personal stories, and contentless musings. Try as he might, Hofstadter never manages to convince us of the connection between Godel’s proof and some kind of loop that supposedly lies at the basis of our consciousness. Oddly, there’s almost no reference to any of the actual research in neuroscience or related fields which has started to cast light on the phenomenon of consciousness in recent years.

Hofstadter’s treatment of Zen in the book is emblematic of its problems. In a dialog between “Strange Loop #641″, a believer in the ideas of I Am a Strange Loop (such as they are), and “Strange Loop #642″, a doubter, he has them saying: Read the rest of this entry »

Music can cause your brain to grow

May 16th, 2008

Italian neuroscientists have reported Hans Christian Andersen trailer that bombarding mice with easy listening music increases levels of brain-derived neurotropic factor (Wikipedia

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), in their hypothalmus specifically. However, levels of another neurotropic factor, NGF (nerve growth factor), declined. The findings suggest, according to the authors, that physiological effects of music, such as lowered blood pressure and heart rate or mood improvements, “might in part be mediated by modulation of neurotrophins.”

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Representing branching sequences in XML

May 4th, 2008

Branching sequences

are common in real life. For instance, a recipe

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Carver rip Dorothy Mills hd Humpday dvd , of course, are the classic example of branching sequences, where branches handle the “could have/should have played there” comments. Branching sequences can even be used to handle linear text, with branches used for optional or alternate material.

If we have complete control over the programming environment we can implement branching sequences in any way we want, most of them quite obvious. But in today’s web-based world, there are good reasons to represent such structures using XML (for transformations, interoperability, or even storage in XML databases) and HTML (for display). What is the best way to do so?

Read the rest of this entry »

Sakiko's new blog

January 22nd, 2008
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Sakiko has started a blog at http://sakikokimura.blogspot.com The Good Son dvd . Expect lots of cat pictures.

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