I love the Edge's yearly questions. They are always, and often the answers even more, thought provoking. This year's question is an upbeat one: What are you optimistic about?
Clay Shirky is hopeful about Evidence:
Evidence will continue to improve society, but slowly — this is long-view optimism. The use of evidence dragged the curious mind from the confusion of alchemy into the precision of chemistry in the historical blink of an eye, but its progress past the hard sciences has been considerably slower ...
It is only in the last hundred years that evidence has even begun spreading from the hard sciences into other parts of human life. Previous platitudes about the unpredictability or universal plasticity of human behavior are giving way to areas of inquiry with names like Sociobiology, Evolutionary Psychology, and Behavioral Economics.
Hurray. In celebration of the evidence based approach I am so happy that we have Joe Quirk presenting at the Future Salon this Friday the 19th the research that lead to his very funny book: Sperm are from Men, Eggs are from Women
More details in my last post. Please Please RSVP (http://tinyurl.com/y5gpx5)
The last 15 minutes of the Future Salon we want to spend on discussing what can and should be done to further that information alter our approach of what we learned from Joe. I have created a Sociobiology Future Salon Wiki page to capture these ideas as well as any links that or information that are mentioned during the session. Please create a user and put your ideas there. We will have free Wifi in the room, so bring your computer to do these updates right there and then.
General Logistics: A Future Salon has the following structure: 6-7 networking with light refreshments proudly sponsored by SAP. From 7-9+ pm presentation and discussion. SAP Labs North America, Building D, Room Southern Cross or Cafeteria depending on your Please RSVP (http://tinyurl.com/y5gpx5), 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94304 [map] As always free and open to the public, spread the news.
If you can't join in person we will Webcast the event: Point your Quicktime viewer to the following address: rtsp://207.105.30.90/salon.sdp
IRC chat as always use the server: irc.freenode.net and the Channel: #futuresalon
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