Notable: Culture and compressibility
Notable paper: Tamariz, Monica and Simon Kirby. 2015. Culture: Copying, Compression, and Conventionality. Cognitive Science 39:171-183. doi:10.1111/cogs.12144
All posts tagged with information
Mailbag: Cultural evolution
I just finished listening to your lectures of rise of humans and it was thoroughly a very nice and complete coverage of recent understandings of this matter....
Boas goes low
While researching another question, I have been reviewing some Franz Boas. In 1936, American Anthropologist ran a piece by Alfred Kroeber which reviewed some...
Jebel Faya and early-stage reduction
Simon Armitage and colleagues Armitage:2011 describe archaeological remains from Jebel Faya, in the United Arab Emirates. The assemblages come from a rock sh...
Bitwise consciousness
Carl Zimmer writes about theories of consciousness in today’s Science NY Times, and describes the work of my Wisconsin colleague, Giulio Tononi.
Book notes: Free, by Chris Anderson
I read Chris Anderson’s book because it was, well, “Free”. The book’s thesis is simple: Sometimes people profit by giving things away.
Data warehousing in genomics interview
Software publisher O’Reilly is running an interview with David Dooling, data chief of the Genome Sequencing Center at Washington University: “Sequencing a ge...
Learning, population size, and "modern human behavior"
I’m a big booster of the idea that human demographic expansion helped drive our recent evolution. So you might expect me to like the new paper by Adam Powell...
Will Wolfram make bioinformatics obsolete?
I was talking with a scientist last week who is in charge of a massive dataset. He told me he had heard complaints from many of his biologist friends that to...
A debate: information overload?
If you’re looking for a way to waste your time today, you might check out The Economist’s online debate, which focuses on the question of whether the world i...
Dating of Howieson's Poort and Still Bay industries
Zenobia Jacobs and colleagues have a paper in this week’s Science that provides age estimates for two of the MSA industries of Southern Africa: the Howieson’...
Information theory and mutual information between genetic loci
This is the second in a series on information theory and tests for recent selection. The first entry, "Information theory: a short introduction" reviewed the...
Information theory: a short introduction
I lectured this week in my Biology of Mind course about information theory, and in particular the concept of Shannon entropy. I’ve typed up a few notes...
Cognitive Daily reviews study on reputation-building
Dave Munger reviews a study of an experiment in reputation-building:
How much data in your genome
Daniel Macarthur, of Genetic Future, reviews the amount of information required to store genomic information. Naturally, you’d probably think it was around 1...
More on "gossip," damned lies, and statistical information
HOMER: But I'm just one man. What can I do?
Full frontal genomes
In Erika Check's Nature article on celebrity genomes, she includes a passage in which Francis Collins points out a problem with public access to private ge...
Why do dogs ape if apes don't ape?
Range, Viranyi and Huber (2007) found that dogs exhibit imititative learning:
Randomness
From a passage on the statistical behavior of aggregates and probability theory, p. 64-65 in Entropy for Biologists by Harold J. Morowitz, Academic Press, N...
Information measures
Pp. 66-67 in Entropy for Biologists by Harold J. Morowitz, Academic Press, New York, 1970 (emphasis added):
Origami chaine operatoire
The New Yorker has a nice profile of origami artist (and physicist) Robert J. Lang. My print edition of Discover had a profile of Lang earlier this year, wh...
High-pressure performance and learned action sequences
The "Mind Matters" feature on the Scientific American blog has a commentary up by psychologist Sian Beilock. The commentary reviews last year's research tha...
Waggle information
A nice post on bee dancing and the bee sensory system at Neurophilosophy. From an information perspective, here we have a good example of adapting a nervous...
Oyama taboo ontogeny
On the subject of taboos, Susan Oyama has a discussion of taboo in The Ontogeny of Information.
For all those fake papers you've written
From the New Scientist technology blog (via Slashdot):
Social vs. nonsocial information and Lower/Middle Paleolithic
On the basis of a couple of student questions, I think it's worthwhile to reflect a bit on where I am going with this (also possibly made more clear in this...
Art, style, and population density in the UP
That's "Upper Paleolithic", not "Upper Peninsula." Barton et al. (1994) discuss the interpretation of Paleolithic art in Western Europe. A good short summar...
Complex structure of whale song
An interesting story from Howard Hughes Medical Institute (via Science Blog) about the information content of whale song. They don't know what the whales ar...
Intelligence in the age of the internet
CNET is running a series of articles on the kind of intelligence required for the world of changing technology. The first installment starts thusly:
Money, status, and social cognition
Via Instapundit, a link to a review of the new book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. Looks like a very interesting bo...