I was somewhat disappointed by the latest Accelerating Change Conference, which might have been great for people who have never been to that kind of conference before, but didn’t manage enough novelty to be terribly valuable to those who attended the first one. Here are a few disorganized tidbits I got from it.
Bruno Olshausen described our understanding of the neuron as pre-newtonian, and said a neuron might be as complex as a pentium.
Joichi Ito convinced me that Wikipedia has a wider range of uses than my stereotype of it as a dictionary/encyclopedia suggested. For example, its entry on Katrina seems to be a better summary of the news than what I can get via the traditional news media.
Cory Ondrejka pointed out the negative correlation between the availability of violent video games and some broad measure of U.S. crime. He hinted this might say something about causation, but reminded people of the appropriate skepticism by noting the correlation between the decline in pirates and global warming.
Someone reported that Second Life is growing at an impressive pace. I’ve tried it a little over a somewhat flaky wireless connection and wasn’t too excited; I’ll try to get my iBook connected to my dsl line and see if a more reliable connection makes it nicer.
Tom Malone talked about how declining communications costs first enabled the creation of large companies with centralized hierarchies and are now decentralizing companies. His view of Ebay was interesting – he pointed out that it could be considered a retailer with one of the largest number of employees, except that it has outsourced most of its employees (i.e. the people who make a living selling through Ebay). He also mentioned that Intel has some internal markets for resources such as manufacturing capacity.
Daniel Amen criticized modern psychiatry for failing to look at the brain for signs of physical damage. He provided strong anecdotal evidence that the brain imaging services he sell can sometimes tell people how to fix mental problems that standard psychiatry can’t diagnose, but left plenty of doubt as to whether his successes are frequent enough to justify his fees.
T. Colin Campbell described some evidence that eating animal protein is unhealthy. He didn’t convince me that he was a very reliable source of information, but his evidence against casein (a milk protein) sounded fairly strong.
One odd comment from Robin Raskin (amidst an annoying amount of thoughtless sensationalism) was that kids don’t use email anymore. They send about two emails per day [i.e. they’ve switch to IM]. The idea that sending two emails per day amounts to abandoning email makes me wonder to what extent I’m out of touch with modern communication habits.
An amusing joke, attributed to Eric Drexler:
Q: Why did Douglas Hofstadter cross the road?
A: To make this joke possible.