Author Archives: fay707

‘The Sita Syndrome’ By Alia Chughtai

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This interesting article in ‘Dawn’ is about the modern girls facing stereotyping while trying to find a right suit for marriage.The author writes in concluding paragraph;

“And modern women, for all you boys-hoping-to-be-men-one-day, can just as much take care of home, build a family and give your children and your parents more well-rounded attention because she is more aware of herself and what she can do. So, the next time you let mommy pick a girl, rather than the one you’re dating because after all, if she can date you, or be with you intimately, what does that say of her character? But more importantly, what does that say of your character as a male who will give into his “adolescent desires” and exploit a girl? But alas, she should not give into desires, because she’s a Cyborg, wearing the Sri Devi outfit from Chandni.”

To read the complete article click on the link below;

http://dawn.com/2012/09/07/the-sita-syndrome/

 

HOW CULTURE DROVE HUMAN EVOLUTION

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A Conversation with Joseph Henrich

An interesting article on Human evolution in “Edge.”

JOSEPH HENRICH:] The main questions I’ve been asking myself over the last couple years are broadly about how culture drove human evolution. Think back to when humans first got the capacity for cumulative cultural evolution—and by this I mean the ability for ideas to accumulate over generations, to get an increasingly complex tool starting from something simple. One generation adds a few things to it, the next generation adds a few more things, and the next generation, until it’s so complex that no one in the first generation could have invented it. This was a really important line in human evolution, and we’ve begun to pursue this idea called the cultural brain hypothesis—this is the idea that the real driver in the expansion of human brains was this growing cumulative body of cultural information, so that what our brains increasingly got good at was the ability to acquire information, store, process and retransmit this non genetic body of information.

I’ve also been trying to think broadly, and some of the big questions are, exactly when did this body of cumulative cultural evolution get started? Lately I’ve been pursuing the idea that it may have started early: at the origins of the genus, 1.8 million years ago when Homo habilis or Homo erectus first begins to emerge in Africa. Typically, people thinking about human evolution have approached this as a two-part puzzle, as if there was a long period of genetic evolution until either 10,000 years ago or 40,000 years ago, depending on who you’re reading, and then only after that did culture matter, and often little or no consideration given to a long period of interaction between genes and culture.

Of course, the evidence available in the Paleolithic record is pretty sparse, so another possibility is that it emerged about 800,000 years ago. One theoretical reason to think that that might be an important time to emerge is that there’s theoretical models that show that culture, our ability to learn from others, is an adaptation to fluctuating environments. If you look at the paleo-climatic record, you can see that the environment starts to fluctuate a lot starting about 900,000 years ago and going to about six or five hundred thousand years ago.

To read the complete article click on the link below:

http://edge.org/conversation/how-culture-drove-human-evolution

REINVENTING SOCIETY IN THE WAKE OF BIG DATA

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Few weeks ago an article described how the cellular phones work as tracking devices and can tell a lot about the cellular phone user’s behaviour. The article below in “Edge” describes how the Big Data is changing the society.

“[SANDY PENTLAND:] Recently I seem to have become MIT’s Big Data guy, with people like Tim O’Reilly and “Forbes” calling me one of the seven most powerful data scientists in the world. I’m not sure what all of that means, but I have a distinctive view about Big Data, so maybe it is something that people want to hear.

I believe that the power of Big Data is that it is information about people’s behavior instead of information about their beliefs. It’s about the behavior of customers, employees, and prospects for your new business. It’s not about the things you post on Facebook, and it’s not about your searches on Google, which is what most people think about, and it’s not data from internal company processes and RFIDs. This sort of Big Data comes from things like location data off of your cell phone or credit card, it’s the little data breadcrumbs that you leave behind you as you move around in the world.

What those breadcrumbs tell is the story of your life. It tells what you’ve chosen to do. That’s very different than what you put on Facebook. What you put on Facebook is what you would like to tell people, edited according to the standards of the day. Who you actually are is determined by where you spend time, and which things you buy. Big data is increasingly about real behavior, and by analyzing this sort of data, scientists can tell an enormous amount about you. They can tell whether you are the sort of person who will pay back loans. They can tell you if you’re likely to get diabetes.”

To read the complete article click on the link below;

http://edge.org/conversation/reinventing-society-in-the-wake-of-big-data

 

Pakistan’ s First Televangelist-Aamir Liaquat Hussain

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In this interesting news article in NYT, the reporter describes the televangelist trend in Pakistan and Mr. Aamir Liaquat Hussian is emerging as a super star. The Geo television is portraying him as the anti-dote of General Zia’s policies. The reporter writes:

“It created a lot of noise,” said one, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Many of us wanted to know what he was coming back as.”

The answers were provided by the network’s chief executive, Mir Ibrahim Rahman, a 34-year-old Harvard graduate who argues that Pakistan needs people like Mr. Hussain, who hold water with Islamic conservatives, to incrementally change society.

“We are still recovering from the Zia years; we can’t move too fast,” Mr. Rahman said, referring to the excesses of the Islamist dictator Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq in the 1980s. “We need people like him to ease us down the mountain.”

This news article was shared by Tahir Mahmood.To read the complete article click on the link below.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/01/world/asia/a-star-televangelist-in-pakistan-divides-then-repents.html?pagewanted=1&emc=eta1