Is AI Finally Acknowledging the Existence of Bio-Brains?

Randal Koene - Whole Brain Emulation from Raj Dye on Vimeo.
The above is a video from a conference on artificial general intelligence (AGI) held in Switzerland, last year. The speaker is a neuroscientist -- an outsider to the typical AI person who attends AI conferences. His appearance at the AGI conference indicates that the entire approach to AI is in a state of flux.

The attitude up until recently has been that intelligence does not rely upon any particular substrate, eg, a brain. AI researchers have boldly believed for several decades that intelligence could be built algorithmically inside machine architectures over a relatively short time span. "Sometime within 10 years . . ."

They have been saying the same thing -- "within 10 years" -- since the 1950s. Clearly not very much has happened in the way of significant breakthroughs since the 1950s. In fact, contemporary AI researchers themselves may well be growing less impressive, over time, than the pioneers of the field.

Hence the perceived need for possibly re-thinking the whole "substrate" approach. Another video in the series deals with the requirements of "cognitive architecture." An impressive phrase, although the reality is likely to prove far less impressive.  Another talk is entitled A General Intelligence Oriented Architecture for Embodied Natural Language Processing.   At least more thought is being devoted in the AI community toward the substrate of intelligence.   Late is better than never.

Adapted from Al Fin Potpourri

Smart Drugs? No, Just Quicker at Being Stupid

Update: A review of an array of "smart drugs" from a company that actually sells them.
A brief description of one instance of Provigil use from a Times reporter

Why Smart Drugs Don't Work Like NZT

What are smart drugs? Pills that are supposed to enhance a person's cognitive abilities in some way. Anything from Ritalin to Amphetamines to Provigil might qualify, as well as a wide range of lesser known "nootropics."

These pills are not only popular among university students, but also , truck drivers, and fast-paced professionals pushing every synapse to its limit. They can enhance attention, prolong attention span, help keep the mind on topic. All very important when facing a deadline for a research paper, a big work project, or when cramming for an exam.

In one sense, advanced societies run on smart drugs. Western societies embraced coffee, tea, and chocolate as quickly as they could -- and significant battles were fought over the rights to market these early smart drugs.

Fast forward to today, and the "stimulant smart drugs" are being pumped onto the markets -- both legal and illegal -- at prodigious rates. But newer, more advanced generations of smart drugs may be on the horizon.

This Al Fin posting from 2007 is still one of the best summaries of smart drug research I have found. Here is a more recent survey of the field from Gizmodo. Some of the newer drugs enhance attention, some enhance memory, some may enhance creativity.

But what about other approaches to getting smarter, besides drugs?

Instead of drugs, the first brain boosters to channel creativity could be electromagnetic devices designed to enhance cognitive skills. One fascinating proposal comes from Allan Snyder, director of the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney in Australia. He theorizes that autistic savants derive their skills from an ability to access “privileged, less processed sensory information normally inhibited from conscious awareness.” For normal people, tapping that sensory well might lead to deeply buried creative riches. To test the idea, Snyder and colleagues exposed subjects to low-frequency magnetic pulses (the technology is called transcranial magnetic brain stimulation, or TMS) that suppressed part of their brain function. The researchers found that the subjects acquired savantlike skills, including the ability to render more detailed, naturalistic art. _Discover

Electromagnetic stimulation of the brain probably has a great future ahead of it. But caution is always wise, when working in and around the brain.

All of these drugs -- past, present, and future generation -- are relative sledge-hammers compared to the intricate workings of the human brain. But the real reason smart drugs won't work like "NZT" (from the movie "Limitless") is because none of them can make the necessary changes in both function and structure, to turn mediocrity into brilliance.

But for some of us, not trying is not an option.

Building a Neo-Nano-Neuro-Brain from Scratch

Nanonerves
Human brains are amazing mental machines. As far as we know, there is nothing else quite like them in the universe. But we always wonder whether perhaps, we could build something just a bit better? Observe all the hoopla and expenditure over the past 60+ years in the field of "artificial intelligence." What a disappointment that has been so far.

It seems we may be taking the wrong approach to the problem. Why should we abandon the human brain -- the only working model of conscious intelligence that we know of -- and place all our hopes on digital silicon? Perhaps the human brain is not as intelligent as we thought -- at least human brains in academia, research, and research funding?

Here is an interesting twist on the conundrum: Why not design a neuronal scaffolding out of nanotubes made of germanium and silicon, then allow neurons to grow within the scaffolding? The neurons will naturally make networked connections with each other along the scaffold, but an added bonus may be the ability to interface the neurons with the silicon-germanium substrate of the scaffold itself.

Graduate students at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, led by Minrui Yu, have published an ACS Nano paper, "Semiconductor Nanomembrane Tubes: Three-Dimensional Confinement for Controlled Neurite Outgrowth," in which they show that they have been able to successfully coax nerve cell tendrils to grow through tiny tubes made of the semi-conductor materials silicon and germanium. While this ground-breaking research may not portend cyborgs or even human brains enmeshed with computer parts, it does open the door to the possibility of regenerating nerve cells damaged due to disease or injury.

Yu and his team, led by Justin Williams, a biomedical engineer, created tubes of varying sizes and shapes, small enough for a nerve cell to glam on to, but not so big that it could fit all the way inside. The tubes were then coated with nerve cells from mice and then watched to see how they would react. Instead of sitting idly, the nerve cells began to send tendrils through the tunnels, as if searching for a path to something or somewhere else. In some instances they actually followed the contours of the tubes, which means, in theory, that the nerves could be grown into structures. _PO

Indeed. The nerves could be grown into structures along prescribed pathways. But the possibility of a functional and powerful brain-machine interface is also being considered.

The hope of course, in this type of research, is that a way can be found to connect a computer of some sort to a group of nerve cells to reestablish communication that has been disrupted. The computer in this case could serve as a relay of sorts, allowing those who can no longer walk, for example, due to spinal injury or disease, regain their former abilities. In that regard, this particular research is even more revealing than it might at first seem, due to the fact that the tiny tubes that have been created, very closely resemble myelin, the outer insulating sheath that covers parts of normal nerve cells. _PO

This is the actual goal of the researchers in Wisconsin: to grow a nerve:computer interface. But emergent phenomena are likely to grow from the humble beginnings of such an approach. If one can design a scaffolding according to the most advanced brain imaging, seed it with the appropriate proto-cells, and nourish it into an intricate, functioning, autopoietic neural:nano hybrid network, what fascinating phenomena may manifest themselves along the way?

Cyborg or Grobyc? You be the judge.

Overlapping Climate Cycles Lead to Natural Climate Chaos

Earth's climate is driven by multiple ongoing cycles on many levels. When natural resonant cycles overlap -- at whatever level -- they can contribute to a chaotic pattern.

When the overlap starts, many higher-order resonances are also involved so fairly large areas of phase space have their tori destroyed and the ensuing chaos is "widespread" since trajectories are now free to wander between regions that previously were separated by nonresonant tori. _Wolfram

We begin with a pictorial overview of the natural components of climate -- sun, ocean, land, atmosphere, volcanoes, ice & snow, living organisms -- all of which appear to be subject to periodic cycling of various types, with potentially chaotic overlap.

Volcanoes can exert very strong influences on climate. It appears as if volcanic activity can occur at widely separated locations almost simultaneously, due to underlying geologic activity. Whether or not such tectonic movements occur "cyclically," the impact of such large scale volcanic activity can easily contribute to a naturally chaotic climate.

Natural ocean oscillations are thought to be driven by periodic solar variation, pictured below. These ocean oscillations such as El Nino (PDF) drive cycles of atmospheric heating and cooling, cycles of ice & snow, and strongly influence populations of living organisms worldwide.

Solar variation influences the size of the heliosphere, and determine the extent of galactic cosmic ray infiltration into the solar system and Earth's climatic system. This cyclic variation of cosmic ray bombardment on Earth's atsmosphere is thought to influence the amount of cloud formation in the atmosphere, which influences planetary ensolation and radiative heat balance.

The Milankovich orbital cycles occur with different periodicity in the tens of thousands of years, creating overlapping resonances with potential chaotic results on climate.

Another multi-thousand year orbital cycle which could easily influence global climate, is the slightly varying angle of Earth's solar orbit to the ecliptic. As the planet falls slightly below the plane and risis slightly above the plane of the ecliptic -- over tens of thousands of years -- the thickness of intervening dust between Earth and Sun varies. This periodically alters the ensolation of the Earth's system. Such cycles may have subtle effects, but in combination with other overlapping resonances, these overlapping effects may push the system into a chaotic result.

The image above illustrates the heliosphere, which can expand and contract according to the Sun's periodic activity. The fluctuating heliosphere is an important line of defense against galactic cosmic rays -- which are very likely to influence Earth's climate.

The Solar system is passing through an enormous interstellar cloud, which may or may not have an influence on climate. But it is a rather fascinating topic all the same.

Understanding natural chaos in climate is a crucial matter for policy-makers, who must determine the fate of US$trillions of future spending of tax dollars.

For science to provide the greatest benefit to those who fund it, it must focus upon genuine problems which need to be solved. As long as scientists have open, sceptical minds, they are more able to look at problems from varying perspectives -- from the close-in small picture, to the far-out big picture.

The last thing that tax-paying humans need is for their tax-paid scientists to fly off on a narrow tangent which ignores the larger picture. That would be a very wasteful tragedy.

Taken from an earlier article published at Al Fin

Brian Wang Hit by a Firestorm of Uninformed Criticism

In a recent NextBigFuture article, Brian Wang takes a cautious look at the IQ of nations and possible relationship between a nation's wealth and its average population IQ. Brian's modest observations were greeted by a veritable firestorm of politically correct monkeys lobbing handfuls of shite in comments. This is par for the course, whenever contemporary university "educated" people are confronted with uncomfortable observations.

The facts, of course, remain the same, regardless of wounded sensibilities or ideological indignation. The problem for society is that their brightest youth are increasingly unable to deal with minimally digested data. Instead, these "brightest lights" must have their data thoroughly processed and filtered, and slanted in the correct orientation. Given the convergence of significant problems facing the youth of today and tomorrow, this trend toward an Idiocracy -- even among the brightest humans -- is becoming a serious problem.

If not for their "Smart Fraction," most nations would be in much more difficulty than at present.

For example, in Brazil, it is the Japanese who are the highest-achieving group. They were brought in as indentured labourers to work the plantations after slavery was abolished in 1888. Yet, today, the Japanese outscore Whites on IQ tests, earn more, and are over-represented in university places. Although they are less than one percent of the total population, they comprise 17 percent of the students at the elite University of Sao Paulo.

In Caribbean countries such as Cuba, Trinidad, and Guyana, it was the Chinese and South Asians who were brought in after the end of slavery. Subsequently, they too began to do well, with the Chinese excelling and the South Asians placing intermediate to Whites and Blacks.

...seven studies of Jews in Britain yield a median IQ of 110. In educational achievement, East Asians in Britain also outperform the indigenous Whites.

Similarly in Australia, East Asians (mostly Chinese and Vietnamese) average higher than Whites in IQ, educational achievement, and earnings. Lynn describes pockets of ethnic Chinese elsewhere in the world such as in Mexico, Argentina, and especially Hawaii, where they also do well.

In Canada too, there is an IQ hierarchy: Jews (109), East Asians (101), Whites (100), Amerindians (89), and Blacks (84).

These results are remarkably consistent over time, place, and situation, irrespective of the original status of the people, or the language, history, and political organization of the country concerned. _Global Bell Curve Review

Racial stratification of multiethnic and multicultural societies is a well-known -- if generally left unsaid -- fact of everyday life. The smarter groups are the "smart fraction" who typically run the high tech and most demanding segments of society. The political "inside group", on the other hand, tends to occupy most civil service positions and other "placeholder" or "feather-bedding" jobs.

In other words, the smart fraction gets things done, while favoured groups receive a free ride. But since the obvious truth is uncomfortable to favoured groups and politically correct insiders, no one ever comes out and expresses it -- at least not in polite company.

Brian Wang provides a rare and valuable service on the internet, by exposing a general audience to much of the cutting edge of technology and science -- in easily understood language. His website has become quite popular for its considerable value. But well-indoctrinated quasi-zombies of the psychologically neotenous and academically lobotomised variety, do not take well to having their deepest prejudices contradicted. The empire of indoctrination fights back in comments.

And yet, where else are readers going to find such a wealth of high quality early exposure to important advances? A conundrum for the politically correct: learning from the real world -- as opposed to indoctrination centers -- is painful and difficult. What to do, what to do?

One Reason Why "Peak Oil Doom" Is No Cause for Panic

The Group's technology makes viable the distributed production of fuels from gas biomass, coal and waste. Microchannel processing is emerging at a time of the discovery and development of vast shale gas reserves in North America, increasing focus on the utilization of stranded and associated gas and the emergence of biomass-to-liquids (BTL) and waste-to-liquids (WTL) as a viable option for the sustainable supply of transportation fuel in the decades ahead. In addition, the growing political, geological and environmental complexity of oil exploration and production has focussed attention on the monetization of associated and stranded gas reserves and cessation of flaring, for which distributed GTL is suited, the company says. _GCC

What you see in the image above is a Velocys / Oxford Catalysts microchannel gas to liquids technology. It is an award-winning technology which promises to turn at least 1 billion boe worth of wasted flared natural gas into valuable liquid fuels, each year. Probably considerably more.

The same technology can turn biomass, coal, or any carbonaceous material or waste into valuable liquid fuels. Better yet, Oxford Catalysts is making progress in turning itself from a research group into a commercial company.

The Oxford Catalysts Group has raised £21 million (US$34 million) before expenses from the conditional placing of 26,250,000 new shares, which will be used to accelerate its ongoing transition from a research and development organization to a commercial product company. In particular, additional staff will be hired to support its commercial and manufacturing operation, the Group’s supply chain capabilities will be bolstered and investments will made in development and testing infrastructure.

This is the latest step in the Oxford Catalysts Group’s drive to commercialize its technology for the production of synthetic fuels from conventional fossil fuels and renewable sources such as biowaste, primarily through its microchannel process technology platform which is able to accelerate chemical reactions by 10- to 1000-fold. As a result, microchannel Fischer Tropsch (FT) processes can operate economically when producing just 500 barrels per day of oil equivalent (boe) from a wide variety of carbon-containing wastes, while achieving greater productivities than for conventional FT reactors (earlier post). _GCC

An extra billion boe per year from otherwise-flared natural gas is nothing to sneeze at. Neither is the potential for on-site gtl, btl, and ctl which small portable microchannel-FT units would provide. The rules for fuels are about to change. Peak oil panic will then go the way of the dinosaurs and Y2K willies.

Massive Entitlement Spending Growth Prevents a Better Future

Images via MJPerry

The US government is stuck in the entitlement racket -- the "votes for cash" scam. By channeling more and more private sector income through government redistribution channels, more private citizens are becoming dependent upon government incomes -- and forgetting how to take care of themselves.

This wholesale shift to government dependency might be okay if it were sustainable. But as anyone who follows international and national economic news should know by now, the entire pyramid scheme is not sustainable. But it is very addictive.

The end result of this massive, exponential growth in government entitlement spending, will be very ugly. Try not to get engulfed by the growing clash between an ever more grasping government, and the people who have to pay the bills and do the productive work. If you get caught in the middle, you may not survive the aftermath.

Images via MJPerry

Survival Rations Part I: Puffed Grain Cakes

Sniffing Out Ancient and Future Oil

ImageSource
Most crude oil comes from ancient marine organisms which bloomed, died, sank, and were covered by sediment to transform under conditions of heat and pressure into petroleum. The organisms required sunshine, CO2, and nutrients -- plus sedimentary cover. These conditions were best met in tropical seas which received nutrient-rich outflows from either rivers or rich sea currents and upwellings.

But rivers supply both nutrients and sediment, so it makes sense to look to areas which were offshore from ancient river deltas. Above, you can see the main rivers of the modern world.

ImageSource
But the continents of the Earth were not always in their current relationship to each other. 250 mya the continents were situated close together in a formation now referred to as Pangaea. The geology of the landmasses of that time were somewhat different, meaning that different rivers flowed into different seas.

This movement of the continents in relation to each other is caused by plate tectonics, a dynamic phenomenon which is largely controlled by actions at the bottom of the seas.

The graphic above is meant to illustrate possible sites for "abiotic oil" deposits, but if you look carefully at the oceans, you can find seafloor ridges which are ground zero for the motion of the continents. New seafloor -- as molten lava which cools and solidifies in contact with seawater -- is pushed upward from beneath the ocean crust, causing a spreading of the ocean crust outward. Eventually the ocean crust is pushed into contact with thicker continental crust, where it subducts -- dives downward into the mantle. This subduction is associated with volcano formation, and other geologic changes, such as slow movement of the continental plates.

ImageSource
This "dance of the continents" is likely to bring the land masses together again in the future, over and over again in different formations. This is important in relation to where very old oil deposits are likely to be found, and where large future deposits of oil are likely to be formed in their turn.

For example, why is oil often found in deserts and arctic wastes?

Oil and gas result mostly from the rapid burial of dead microorganisms in environments where oxygen is so scarce that they do not decompose. This lack of oxygen enables them to maintain their hydrogen-carbon bonds, a necessary ingredient for the production of oil and gas. Newly developing ocean basins, formed by plate tectonics and continental rifting, provide just the right conditions for rapid burial in anoxic waters. Rivers rapidly fill these basins with sediments carrying abundant organic remains. Because the basins have constricted water circulation, they also have lower oxygen levels than the open ocean. For instance, the Gulf of California, an ocean basin in development, is making new oil and gas in real time today. The Gulf of Mexico is also a great example of new oil and gas formation in a restricted circulation environment (see image at right above).

The same plate tectonics that provides the locations and conditions for anoxic burial is also responsible for the geologic paths that these sedimentary basins subsequently take. Continental drift, subduction and collision with other continents provide the movement from swamps, river deltas and mild climates--where most organics are deposited--to the poles and deserts, where they have ended up today by coincidence. In fact, the Libyan Sahara Desert contains unmistakable glacial scars and Antarctica has extensive coal deposits--and very likely abundant oil and gas--that establish that their plates were once at the other ends of the earth (see image at right). _SciAm

Similar detective work may lead prospectors to rich petroleum deposits lying between Norway, Iceland, and Greenland. By the same logic applied to more recent timelines, oil and gas in the South China Sea is likely to be discovered.

As the SciAm article above explains, when a river flows into a limited basin -- such as the Gulf of Mexico -- oil and gas formation are most likely to occur due to rapid sedimentation. But thanks to plate tectonics and shifting continents and river-beds, many areas where rivers once flowed into limited basins have become something completely different, today.

It is no challenge to find oil where crude is already seeping to the surface. That was the case in the early days of oil discovery in the US, the Persian Gulf, and Central Asia. But to find the oil of ancient seas -- that is a challenge. Particularly since that is where most of the world's oil awaits.

The Final Frontiersman of ANWR: A Week in the Life

Heimo Korth is "The Final Frontiersman." He and his wife Edna are the last legal full time residents of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. They move between three cabins every year, so as not to deplete the game as they trap and hunt for a living.

The book linked above is quite good, written by a cousin of Heimo's who lived with the family for several months and dug deeply into the couple's lives, and those of their daughters.

Living in the Arctic is not for the weak of heart, or for faux environmentalists such as those who occupy highly-paid lobbying positions for Greenpeace, Sierra Club, and the rest of the dieoff.orgy gang.

Living in such a rugged environment is proof of a residual toughness living in at least a portion of western men. In case of catastrophe, most westerners could not cope without their supermarkets, convenience stores, and ATMs.

If you are curious what a north country pioneer's life might be like, check out the 52 minute video about the Korths above.

Lifehacker's Top 10 Tips and Tricks to Supercharge Your Brain

Lifehacker Top 10 is a service of Lifehacker.com for people who are in a hurry and want to jump to the heart of the matter quickly. Today's Lifehacker Top 10 deals with ways of building your brainpower.

Some methods seem like common sense -- good nutrition and exercise -- but others are less obvious. Make Lifehacker a regular stop on your daily internet tour.
Here is the link to the original Lifehacker article excerpted below:
While we're always using our brains, we're not necessarily doing much to keep them in good shape. Here are the top ten sites and tools to train your brain and exercise your mental muscles.

10. Sudoku

By now you're probably familiar with Sudoku, but just in case it's a number puzzle game with the objective of filling up a grid of numbers. Check out these instructions to learn how to play. Most people find Sudoku a fun and addictive game, plus it can help improve your problem-solving skills (just not your overall brain health). You can play online, on your iOS device, on Facebook, Android, and pretty much any other platform you can think of.

9. Wikipedia:Random

Wikipedia:Random is simply a means of randomly stumbling on a Wikipedia article. Why is this good for your brain? You can use it to find a new topic to learn about every day. Qwiki, a visually rich, mini Wikipedia that reads to you, is another good starting point. Learning something new every day can keep your brain healthy, so grab a random article and make it a new way to start your morning.

Wikpedia:Random

8. Practice Simple Math Every Day

Perhaps you remember the Mad Math Minute from grade school, where you'd need to solve as many math problems as possible in 60 seconds. While it may have seemed annoying then, it was excellent practice that you can still make use of now. While it's easy enough to create your own Mad Math Minute worksheets, since you're basically just writing out a bunch of simple math problems on a piece of paper, I found a Mad Math Minute generator for Mrs. Boguski's 5th grade class. It probably wasn't intended for mass consumption on the web, so here are some alternative printable worksheets. The bottom line is this: a minute of simple math can help get your brain in shape and make you far less reliant on a calculator.

7. Write Instead of Type (More Often)

We love our keyboards. They're much more efficient at getting words on the page than your hand, a pencil, and a notebook. Nonetheless, you can learn more effectively by writing longhand and so you may want to ditch the laptop when you're acquiring new knowledge. This happens because your brain's filtering system (the reticular activating system, or RAS) processes what you're actively focusing on at the moment. Writing triggers the RAS and lets your brain know it's time to pay attention.

6. Act Like You're Teaching

You can utilize the skills you already have more effectively by acting like you're teaching. Rather than just recalling the steps needing to complete the task at hand, pretend as though you're teaching yourself how to do it. This will help you recall the necessary information better and avoid making stupid mistakes.
Photo by Renato Ganoza

5. Tell Yourself Stories

Storytelling cane be a good way to exercise your brain. First of all, it makes things easier to remember because it puts what you want to remember in a more compelling framework. It gives you a chance to focus on important details and associate emotion with what you're trying to remember. Even if you're not telling yourself a story to help retain the information, you'll still improve your memory just by telling stories in general. Storytelling has been used as a treatment for Alzheimer's disease. If storytelling can help an Alzeheimer's patient improve their memory, chances are it can help you.
Photo by Stacy Z

4. Lumosity

Lumosity is a webapp that provides specialized brain-training activities. You can use it for free, but premium accounts (which you can try free for five days) have a wider range of training options. All the exercises are pretty simple to understand and are fun to play. All of my initial exercises had to do with memory, likely because I selected better memory as one of my goals when I signed up. That's to say that Lumosity's exercises may vary for you based on the information you provide. When you're done, you get a rating and your goal is simply to improve with each day you practice.

Lumosity

3. Meditate

Nothing kills your ability to use your brain effectively, as well as your brain's overall health, like too much stress. What's a great way to reduce your stress levels? Meditation—and you don't need to do it with incense and yoga pants. Check out our guide on meditation for the rest of us for some simple ways to get started.
Photo by Cornelia Kopp

2. Learn About Your Brain's Faults and Account for Them

In a previous top ten we've taken a look at ways your brain is sabotaging you and how to beat it. We've also looked at how to avoid burnout from addictive technology, how you can become a lot smarter by realizing you're not that great, how to use your natural inclination towards quitting to your advantage, how imagining eating more can lead to eating less, why it's okay that you and everyone else is an asshole, and many more. Basically, your brain does a lot of things very, very well but sucks at plenty of others. You may not be able to fix the things your brain is bad at in all cases, but at least being aware of your inherent faults can make sure you're taking advantage of your brain's full potential.

1. Exercise and Eat Well

While probably a little obvious (and something we've previously noted), I'd bet that the number of people who believe this is common knowledge is very close to the number of people who don't follow that common knowledge. If you're not exercising and eating right simply because you don't know how, well, check out this 15-minute daily workout from 1904 and structure your daily diet like a pyramid. If you're worried about spending too much money to eat healthy, there are plenty of great reader suggestions for eating health on the cheap. Anything you do to keep your brain sharp can be easily thwarted if you don't keep your body healthy. A little physical activity and a smart diet will make it much easier for you to your brain in top shape.
Photo by Lululemon Athletica

You have only one brain this time around. Make good use of it.

Wikimedia: Dumbing Down the Idiocracy?

NYT
Several areas of commerce, enterprise, and science remain the province of mainly-male participation. Physics, mathematics, advanced computer science, technical engineering, math-intensive sciences, aircraft test pilots and combat pilots, commercial sea captains, and so on. Most informed people understand that research is dominated by males, but few people realise that technical information intensive areas -- such as highly demanding reference information providers -- are also dominated by males. A lot of politically involved feminists would like to change that situation, but is there a danger in moving too forcefully from the top down when changes may adversely affect critically important services?

...surveys suggest that less than 15 percent of [Wikipedia's] hundreds of thousands of contributors are women.

About a year ago, the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia, collaborated on a study of Wikipedia’s contributor base and discovered that it was barely 13 percent women; the average age of a contributor was in the mid-20s, according to the study by a joint center of the United Nations University and Maastricht University.

...The notion that a collaborative, written project open to all is so skewed to men may be surprising. After all, there is no male-dominated executive team favoring men over women, as there can be in the corporate world; Wikipedia is not a software project, but more a writing experiment — an “exquisite corpse,” or game where each player adds to a larger work.

...The public is increasingly going to Wikipedia as a research source: According to a recent Pew survey, the percentage of all American adults who use the site to look for information increased to 42 percent in May 2010, from 25 percent in February 2007. This translates to 53 percent of adults who regularly use the Internet.

Jane Margolis, co-author of a book on sexism in computer science, “Unlocking the Clubhouse,” argues that Wikipedia is experiencing the same problems of the offline world, where women are less willing to assert their opinions in public. “In almost every space, who are the authorities, the politicians, writers for op-ed pages?” said Ms. Margolis, a senior researcher at the Institute for Democracy, Education and Access at the University of California, Los Angeles.

...Ms. Gardner said that for now she was trying to use subtle persuasion and outreach through her foundation to welcome all newcomers to Wikipedia, rather than advocate for women-specific remedies like recruitment or quotas.

“Gender is a huge hot-button issue for lots of people who feel strongly about it,” she said. “I am not interested in triggering those strong feelings.”

Kat Walsh, a policy analyst and longtime Wikipedia contributor who was elected to the Wikimedia board, agreed that indirect initiatives would cause less unease in the Wikipedia community than more overt efforts.

But she acknowledged the hurdles: “The big problem is that the current Wikipedia community is what came about by letting things develop naturally — trying to influence it in another direction is no longer the easiest path, and requires conscious effort to change.” _NYT

The Wikipedia world is indeed a rough and tumble world of competitive edits and re-writes. If a person cannot withstand criticism and competition, they will not likely last long in that world.

The male hormone testosterone shapes the human brain in multiple ways not yet fully comprehended by science or society at large. Much of what science has learned about the influence of hormones such as testosterone on the gender differences so prevalent in society, is considered not politically correct -- and thus essentially unmentionable in left-leaning tabloids such as the New York Times, quoted above. Testosterone makes males more interested in objects than people, more competitive, have generally superior spatial and higher math skills, physically larger and stronger with greater stamina, tending to greater independence, and generally more logically determined and less emotional in the face of distractions.

Charles Murray's fascinating book, Human Accomplishment, provides a historical reflection of the phenomenon that Wikimedia's executives and critics are struggling with. Males have tended to achieve the lion's share of discoveries, inventions, and masterpieces of art, music, and literature as far back as history can tell.

A population shrinkage is occurring among the more intelligent people of the world -- Europeans and Northeast Asians -- while an explosive growth of population is occurring among the less intelligent people of the world. The average intelligence of the human population is inexorably dropping from near 90 points of IQ, downward -- close to the mid-80s and below. That qualifies as an Idiocracy.

In order to dumb down the Idiocracy, one must institute foolish rules of arbitrary and counter-productive governance, while educating the populace to accept dumbed-down groupthink rather than to think for themselves. It is easier than you might think. What Wikimedia is contemplating -- and what many western governments have done, and called affirmative action -- is an excellent example.