What does your brain see here?

We mentioned Dali in class last week. Here is an explanation of Dali´s hallucigenic Toreador. As a surrealist artist, he used to embed images within images.

Can you see the Toreador´s face, his tie, the bull, the flies ? The boat in a beach?

Kevin recommends this site for a sample of audio illusions.

How about this stereogram? Can you see what´s inside? Could a robot see it too? If you can´t get it, try this one.

Estefanía (TEFA) sent this link if you are a stereogram addict and would like to figure out more.

Info. about 2nd departmental exam and make-up

Can you see the movement of the coffee beans in this picture? Cool, eh?

Our Departmental exam is on week 11, Friday July 3 at 11:30 (except students who will have a Math 1 exam that same day at 9:30). Our room is the same as the first (MEU 007)
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Students of Math I will take the exam at 1.30 - 3.30 p.m. in AUL 113 (sections 1-15) and AUL 114 (sections 16-30).

Bring you student ID, know your section number and my name (Bertha Leiva).
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Make up exam is on week 12, Friday at 11:30 in the language lab (EGE, 2nd floor). Be sure to have permission from the First-Year Coordination, Decanato EEGG.

José Mauricio sent this link for more optical illusions. There are 16.

Basic information on second life.
Samples of Delicious tags on AI, a Blog on AI, a chat bot and a wiki.

Here is a longggggg but worth watching video where the editor of Wired Magazine, Kevin Kelly, discusses his ideas about how the Internet is similar to our brain and what Web 3.0 is all about ... the web is like a black hole sucking up everything, he says.

Video on computers

The video is a bit long (more than 9 minutes) and the narrator is British, so you may have difficulties understanding him. It´s interesting, though. It starts with the idea of Turing and how certain conversations "seem" intelligent and then goes on to present several initiatives on A.I. in different universities and institutions and how the farthest we have got is to the intelligence of an insect, or at least that´s what I understood.

Here you can find the summary of the movie I, robot, and this is an image of all the human functions A.I. would have to imitate. Futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts machines will match man by the year 2029. Finally, artificial skin for robots, can you believe it?

Video recommended by Marielis:

How good are you at remembering faces?

I found this page that I think is rather interesting. It has a game where you have to remember 10 features in a face. Let´s see how many you get right. Would a computer get a perfect 10 score? What do you think?

The Human Brain and A.I.

We read about two paradigms in human intelligence in class this week. We mentioned it is believed each side of our brain processes information in a different way. The line of reasoning sometimes seems more approximate than precise, something apparently needed to work in a kind of parallel mode, instead of the traditional sequential approach. In this link you will find more about what AI researchers would like intelligent machines to have.

Please look at this cartoon and comment on its meaning.

Are you right-brained or left-brained? Here is an unusual way to find that out. Is the dancer going clockwise or anti-clockwise? Can you make her change direction?

How about multiple intelligences? How many have been identified so far? How about the marshmallow experiment and emotional intelligence?
Watch this slideshow to find more about M.I. Which are you good at?

Some ? about A.I.

Here you will find many questions about Artificial Intelligence answered by Prof. John McCarthy who is one of the Fathers of A.I., developed the LISP language and teaches computer science at Stanford University.

Browse through the questions and select the one that called your attention the most. What did you learn from it?

Now, look at the branches of artificial intelligence and choose the one you will do research on if you were a computer scientist.

Here is a list of biographies of main researchers in the area:
Marvin Minsky Alan Turing Norbert Wiener

Book Reviews

On pages 43-46, you will find two research tools that are most useful in science and technology, besides Internet. These are: abstracts and book reviews.

If you had to read one book about the universe, evolution or artificial intelligence, which one would you choose and why?

Open the blue links and browse through the lists. Select the book that calls your attention the most and read the review.
Which one would you like to read then? Give specific reasons and details to justify your answer.

So long evolution ... potpourri blog post ;-)

This will probably be our last post on evolution, a topic we have learned a lot about but I am sure you must agree we are ready to move on to Artificial Intelligence soon.

This video is about Lucy. It is only 2 minutes and a half long. Check it out. Did she have a heart attack or what?

I also found this one aboutabout Homo Sapiens and Neanderthal that lasts 5 minutes.

And links keep coming ...
this site where you will find the Genographic Project which is a kind of atlas of when and where ancient humans moved around the world. It is from National Geographic.
Here is the hominid timeline and another one with some cartoons.

Arianna recommends this video about Darwin and the tree of life.

Finally, in order to wrap up this theme, I wonder if there are any "evolution songs" you can think of. The only one that makes me remember our ancestors roaming through Africa and Europe is again by Metallica. Here you can find the lyrics and here the video. Is there a connection between the lyrics of this song and some ideas on the evolution of man?

Missing link found?

Scientists unveil stunning fossil: Scientists have unveiled a 47-million-year-old skeleton of a monkey-like female creature called IDA which they say provides a missing link in man's evolution. Read more details in this article from May 19, 2009. Sorry Adriana Gil, the video you posted is not working :-(

Quiz # 2

We will have our 15% quiz on evolution week 8. It will be on Neanderthals and Cro-magnons and the readings are not found in the Internet, unfortunately, but you can read more and practice by goggling to find other sites to read. I found a related topic in this site and one about the hyoid bone too.

As to vocabulary, almost all the words appear in the list for the second vocabulary exam (see sidebar). Remember you can use the English-English or the English-Spanish dictionary for this quiz (not for the Departmental exam). The more words you know, however, the higher the chances you´ll understand written texts.

There will be two articles again and some questions may ask you to compare and contrast them. There are 12 multiple choice questions (9 points) and 4 open ended questions (6 points) to be answered either in Spanish or English.

Big bang theory of human evolution???

Read more about it in this link. What do they refer to as "Big Bang" here?

Now, what exactly is mDNA? and who is Eve? Why was she called that way? Read more about the subject here.

Did you find anything similar or completely different in both articles? Does the information in one complement the other or are there ideas in one that contradict or are against the information in the other?

If you had to select a topic from this site, which one would it be and why? (By the way, BTW, I found a typo in this last page, which one is it?)