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• The Largest Land Mammal That Ever Lived

  Posted by Cat

  on Mar 17, 2010

  The largest land mammal ever to live at 25 feet in length, 17 feet tall and nearly weighing 18 tons.

  When I was traveling across the museum floor this morning, I saw four colossal legs splayed out. However many helping hands of the exhibit team were carefully placing those legs all under the canopy of a supporting crane. The area holding the legs was closed off and a sign stanchioned just outside read ?I?m pulling myself together: This model of an Indricotherium, the largest land mammal that ever lived on land, is being assembled for our Extreme Mammals exhibit.?

  With Extreme Mammals opening in less than a month, new boxes and displays are popping up every day. During NightLife, I got to meet a few members of the exhibit team from the American Museum of Natural History in New York who are overseeing the installment of Extreme Mammals at the Academy. And I was still in the building at 11pm, when a moving truck full of crates for the exhibit pulled into the loading dock.

  But the life size replica of the Indricotherium stands taller amongst the rest of specimens ? literally. As the largest land mammal ever to live at 25 feet in length, 17 feet tall and nearly weighing 18 tons; this replica dwarfs the T-Rex skeleton that used to take up its footprint but has since moved into the lobby. However, the blue whale still casts a mighty shadow over the Indricotherium. Weighing in at 180 tons, it would take 18 Indricotheriums to match the size of the largest mammal in the oceans today.

  The relative today of Indricotheriums are modern day Rhinos and horses. Why are they so tiny in size compared to their prehistoric relative? The Indricotherium lived during the late Oligocene Epoch. During that time the Earth?s topography consisted of dry, seasonal scrublands. The Indricotherium could reach the tops of trees, which was too high for most grazers giving it a food niche that added to its massive size. As well, Indricotherium was well suited to exploit this food source. Its large head was supported by a thick neck, one that was flexible enough to allow the head to point upwards in pursuit of hard to reach vegetation. The Indricotherium had tusk like teeth that could snap off vegetation and molars to then grind it down. Like Rhinos, the Indricotherium also had a prehensile upper lip that allowed it to strip vegetation.

  Due to its size, the Indricotherium had very little threat from predators. During the Oligocene, predators were smaller than the Indricotherium. Predators were similar in size to the modern day Rhino so the Indricotherium?s size kept them both in a plentiful food source and free from predation.

  Soon, I will be able to walk under the replica of the now extinct Indricotherium to compare my size to the largest living mammal that walked the Earth. I wonder if I will be tall enough to reach his kneecap? And with the blue whale being 18 times bigger, I wonder what my size will feel like in comparison?

  
  Tags: american natural history museum, california academy of sciences, extreme mammals, Indricotherium, mammals, Oligocene
  
  
  

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• Singularities Surround Us

  Posted by Dan Gillick

  on Mar 16, 2010

  Robotic domination in I, Robot

  Ray Kurzweil's book The Singularity is Near is becoming something of a cult sensation. The 672-page paperback version of the book is ranked 1,494th on Amazon (on par with The Great Gatsby). Recently, Kurzweil announced a Google-backed Singularity University ($25,000 for a 9 week summer program; $12,000 for a 3 day "Executive Program"), lending a touch of academic rigor to an idea that has lived mostly in science fiction. For the time and budget conscious, a rash of Singularity-themed documentaries is now on the horizon.

  The Singularity, as I understand it, is the point in time when computers will be smart enough to build even smarter computers, effectively removing humans from the design-build loop of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Kurzweil predicts 2050. That means I'll be 68 when the robots take over!

  Predicting the future is no walk in the park, but when it comes to Artificial Intelligence, everyone's packing a lunch. So while I won't try to argue that Kurzweil is wrong (I think he is), it's good to place his predictions in the cultural history of wildly inaccurate AI speculation.

  Consider these predictions, both made by outstanding computer scientists actively involved in AI research:

  • 1965, Herbert Simon: "machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do."
  • 1970, Marvin Minsky: "In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being."

  As it turned out, these claims were not even remotely true. In fact, the whole history of AI has been one of boom and bust cycles, the product of misplaced exuberant optimism.

  Take, for example, the case of machine translation. During the Cold War, the problem of automatically translating intercepted Russian messages received considerable military funding. A 1954 Georgetown-IBM demonstration (translations of 49 chemistry-themed sentences with a 250-word vocabulary) captured public interest and spawned considerable investment, especially as the researchers claimed that the general translation problem would be solved in 3-5 years. When progress turned out to be much slower, funding was cut, and research all but stopped between 1965 and 1993.

  Translation research has seen a significant resurgence, especially since I've been in graduate school (for computer science), mostly due to statistical methods. Rather than frame the translation of Russian into English as a series of rules (translate word R3 into word E3; switch the order of words E2 and E4; etc.) written by expert bilingual humans, research consists of building models trained from many examples of translated sentences (word R3 translates to word E3 with probability 0.6; word E3 appears after E2 with probability 0.2; etc.) so that the translation of a Russian sentence is the sequence of English words with the largest total probability, according to the model. The statistical approach is less ambitious-today's models are too simple to capture all of language's nuances-but far more successful.

  Kurzweil's Singularity prediction is based on exponential growth. The idea is that because computers have been doubling in speed every two years or so (that's a factor of 1,000 in just 20 years; 1,000,000 in 40 years) huge paradigm shifts are actually quite close. But aside from the issue that computer chips have plateaued due to limits imposed by silicon's insulation ability and the speed of light (new computers have multiple CPUs), progress in automatic translation does not follow the law of exponential progress. Rather, there have been a few periods of dramatic improvement, followed by long periods of very gradual development. This is the trend for the majority of important AI problems.

  So, while speculating about the future is both interesting and important, I'd be wary of anyone trying to sell you $12,000 of it.

  
  Tags: artifical intelligence, future, kurzweil, robot, singularity
  
  
  

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• An Urban Layover for Birds: MLK Jr. Regional Shoreline

  Posted by Amy Gotliffe

  on Mar 15, 2010

  A Willet at the Martin Luther King Jr. Regional Shoreline park.

  Squeezed between the Oakland International Airport and the Coliseum lies one of the best kept secrets of the bay ? the Martin Luther King Jr. Regional Shoreline Park, a birding hot spot. I had no idea.

  Luckily, my eyes were opened this week on a guided hike with Golden Gate Audubon Society volunteer Cindy Margulis. What previously seemed like a pleasant marshy area to me was transformed into a beautiful and fascinating oasis for local wildlife.

  Most of the wildlife we saw were actually local visitors and participants in a marathon migration originating in the arctic! The San Francisco Bay is part of the Pacific Flyway and hosts these migrating shorebirds as they head to South and Central America. Flying halfway around the world takes immense energy, and it blew me away that they chose Oakland as a staging area. Protection of these mudflats and salt marshes is therefore critical to their survival and the Golden Gate Audubon Society has been a heroic player in the story of this bay.

  Before the building of highways, airports and venues, the 1800 acres of tidal marsh in the San Leandro bay was a paradise for wildlife. The construction that ensued resulted in only 72 remaining acres. Threatened with continued building and habitat loss, Golden Gate Audubon and other environmental groups led the litigation to have these acres protected and additional acres restored.

  The success of this endeavor was illuminated when a female Black Turnstone that was banded in western Alaska found her way to this exact restoration site. Pleased with all it could provide for her, she has returned for four winters in a row. The success of this shoreline is also exemplified in the abundance of shorebirds and ducks we saw on our short walk: Canvasbacks, Scaups, Brown Pelicans, Willets, Stilts, Avocets, Killdeers and California Least Terns, Common Golden Eye ducks, Ruddy Ducks, Buffleheads and Pintails, feeding and diving, floating and flying and glistening as we looked through our scopes.

  Golden Gate Audubon continues to protect this habitat through public educational opportunities. Their Field Trips program offers more than 100 guided field trips annually for birders of all levels and explores all the phenomenal birding areas in the area and beyond.

  According to Cindy, and I agree, this is shoreline is our great wilderness, our savannah or jungle, and our biodiversity hot spot to revere and protect.

  See you out there!

  
  Tags: birds, Golden Gate Audubon Society, Martin Luther King Jr. Regional Shoreline Park, pacific flyway
  
  
  

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