Bbenzon
Description
Humankind got its start on the African savannas some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years ago. At various times in our cultural history we’ve moved to distinctly new cultural ground, as it were. And so we are moving now, and have been for the past half century. This blog is how I see that move. Intellectually, I'm broadly interested in culture and the brain. Within that compass, anything could show up here. Literature and films (including animation), certainly, music as well, and graffiti. But, other things may show up as well. It's a blog, don't you know, it moves.
MY BLOGS
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New Savanna
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/
Humankind got its start on the African savannas some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years ago. At various times in our cultural history we’ve moved to distinctly new cultural ground, as it were. And so we are moving now, and have been for the past half century. This blog is how I see that move. I'm broadly interested in culture and the brain. Within that compass, anything could show up here. Literature and films (including animation), certainly, music as well, and graffiti. But, other things may show up as well. It's a blog, don't you know, it moves.
LATEST ARTICLES ( 7356 )
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Description, Interpretation, Explanation, and Evaluation as Rhetorical Roles in...
I’ve been thinking seriously about description for some time now, and in distinguishing it from interpretation and/or explanation. Read more
Posted on 09 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Scale and Context in Computational Criticism [#DH #DH2017 Special]
I no longer remember just who started it off, if I ever knew, but the Twitter convo went on and on and branched here and there and covered a lot of territory. Read more
Posted on 08 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Diffusion of Folktales
Eugenio Bortolinia, Luca Paganid, Enrico R. Crema, Stefania Sarno, Chiara Barbieri, Alessio Boattini, Marco Sazzini, Sara Graça da Silva, Gessica Martini, Mait... Read more
Posted on 08 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Only Game in Town: Digital Criticism Comes of Age [#DH, #DH2017 Special]
I orignally published this in 3 Quarks Daily, May 4, 2014. With Digital Humanities 2017 now happening in Montreal I thought I'd repost it here. Read more
Posted on 07 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Problematics of Identity in America
Gabrielle Bellot reviews Danzy Senna's New People in The Los Angeles Review of Books. From the review: The problem of the 21st century in the United States is... Read more
Posted on 07 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Coupled Dynamics in Human Interaction
Uri Hasson and Chris D. Frith. Mirroring and beyond: coupled dynamics as a generalized framework for modelling social interactions. Philosophical Transactions o... Read more
Posted on 05 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
NCIS, Popular in Trump Country
For some reason I’m rather fond of NCIS, the wildly popular TV series. I watched it on and off back in the days when I had a television, and before there was... Read more
Posted on 05 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Linguistics, Then (1960s) and Now
I first became interested in linguistics during my undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins University. They didn’t have a linguistics department, nor anyone who... Read more
Posted on 04 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Major Transitions in Cultural Evolution
Identifying major transitions in human cultural evolution https://t.co/Yg8K8ryjmg — Bill Benzon (@bbenzon) July 30, 2017 The original research article is HERE. Read more
Posted on 30 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Gary Marcus is Skeptical of AI, However...we Need a New Funding Paradigm
Writing in the NYTimes: Artificial Intelligence is colossally hyped these days, but the dirty little secret is that it still has a long, long way to go. Sure,... Read more
Posted on 29 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Neuromorphic AI
Demis Hassabis, Demis Hassabis, Dharshan Kumaran, Christopher Summerfield, Matthew Botvinick. Neuroscience-Inspired Artificial Intelligence. Neuron, Volume 95,... Read more
Posted on 28 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Chaos in the Movie Biz: A Review of Hollywood Economics [#DH]
I'm bumping this to the top of the queue for my friends in computational criticism (aka distant reading). When the analyze a corpus, they tread all books in... Read more
Posted on 27 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Origins?
Posted on 27 July 2017
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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The Physics of Life's Origins(?)
Natalie Wolchover in Quanta: The biophysicist Jeremy England made waves in 2013 with a new theory that cast the origin of life as an inevitable outcome of... Read more
Posted on 27 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
More Synch: Firewalking (performers and Spectators), Romantic Partners (& Empath...
Pavel Goldstein, Irit Weissman-Fogel, Simone G. Shamay-Tsoory. The role of touch in regulating inter-partner physiological coupling during empathy for pain.... Read more
Posted on 24 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Computational Psychiatry?
From MIT Technology Review: Psychiatry, the study and prevention of mental disorders, is currently undergoing a quiet revolution. For decades, even centuries,... Read more
Posted on 23 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Language Boundaries & Surface Tension
Andrew D. M. Smith in Physics: In his new study, Burridge presents a deliberately minimal model of language change, which focuses on explaining dialect... Read more
Posted on 18 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Where is the Never Ending (medieval) Text? [#DH]
I checked in at Academia.edu today and found another article by medievalist Stephen Nichols. I've not finished it, but wanted to blog a passage or two anyhow.... Read more
Posted on 17 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Early History of Digital Creativity (James Ryan)
I am currently excavating the forgotten early history of computer story generation. More info here: https://t.co/drKKyMlmE7. pic.twitter. Read more
Posted on 17 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Luxury Real Estate & Trump: International Networks of Power Crossing Public and...
Bloggingheads.tv – Published on Jul 14, 2017 00:26 Alex’s book Dictators Without Borders 04:29 Oligarchs and autocrats and kleptocrats, oh my! Read more
Posted on 16 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
