Welcome to the SMN Blog
If you are a member of the SMN, you can become a contributor to the blog. To be added to the list of official blog contributors, contact Dr Olly Robinson on: olly@scimednet.org
Currently the blog contains 149 entries.
Jeremy Rifkin - The Empathic Civilization
This fascinating and erudite talk by Jeremy Rifkin for Google explores how "empathetic consciousness" restructures the ways people organize their personal lives, approach knowledge, pursue science and technology, conduct commerce and governance, and orchestrate civil society. Rifkin presents the idea that major changes in human consciousness occur when new communication and energy technologies allow a greater empathic embrace with other human beings. It is a fact-packed and mind-stretching presentation that is 57 mins long, but well worth watching in full.
Jeremy Rifkin is president of the Foundation on Economic Trends and the author of seventeen bestselling books on the impact of scientific and technological changes on the economy, the workforce, society, and the environment, such as The European Dream, The Hydrogen Economy, The Age of Access, The Biotech Century, and The End of Work.
Is CBT looting ancient philosophy?
Julian Baggini, editor of The Philosophers' Magazine, has written two articles raising scepticism about our society's obsession with happiness, and particularly with its current enthusiasm for positive psychology.
Homeopathy and placebo
The placebo effect is often dismissed as an annoying source of error in medical trials, when it is of course an amazing phenomenon. It shows how beliefs have an effect on our physical state, so much so that they can reduce pain and heal wounds. Perhaps medicine should be trying to harness the placebo effect, rather than trying to get rid of it.
Of Computers and Visual Perception
The vision researcher, Steven Lehar, challenges the computer/artificial intelligence view of the brain. He describes the problems that computers have with visual perception. Computers can detect edges in objects, and this is accepted as being one of the first steps in processing visual input into the brain. However, computers have difficulty in turning this data into useful information, because they detect too many features indiscriminately. They do not just detect relevant edges, but also much less important data referring to textures etc., without the ability of biological vision to determine the relative importance of different edges.
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