Suggested readings week 45/2022
Science and human rights
This guideline published and enforced by Nature was recently discussed and criticized by other journals and influential people. Research papers publishers are private companies extracting value from the need for researchers to be visible and discussed among the communities. But there's no ways for being scrutinizied and selected in a race for publications and citations, other that submitting to these private publishers.
So this is indeed an important topic, effectively left to the initiatives of publishers. How much can a researcher be considered neutral with respect to the social consequences of her publications?
Although academic freedom is fundamental, it is not unbounded.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01443-2?utm_source=pocket_mylist
Blum
One third of the Blum Family already makes an amount of innovation in mathematics and cryptography. The list of PhD students supervised by Manuel Blum includes Lenoard Adleman of RSA.
Two Blum Family members talk and write here about AI and Consciousness.
The quest to understand consciousness, once the purview of philosophers and theologians, is now actively pursued by scientists of many stripes. We examine consciousness from the perspective of theoretical computer science.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?utm_source=pocket_mylist&v=q7A2M4dauzk
https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.13704?utm_source=pocket_mylist
Programma 101
An italian calculator designed by people at Olivetti was one of the success factors for US winning the race to land on the moon.
Eventually things went wrong for Olivetti.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-calculator-that-helped-land-men-on-the-moon?utm_source=pocket_mylist
Will you hear about COP27?
200 countries will come together in Egypt at the start of November for anothera Conference of the Parties, or COP27:
On every climate front, the only solution is decisive action in solidarity. COP27 is the place for all countries […] to show they are in this fight and in it together.
This might not work as expected.