Paul Ehrlich has an exciting story on the SEED magazine (which I find worthwhile to follow) detailing past and recent progresses on the field of cultural evolutionism.

It is enlightening to follow Paul's journey through the parallels which can be made on the way our culture and our genes evolve as a response to our environment. Even more interesting, however, is his discussion on the differences between these phenomenons and his experiments investigating these differences using canoe-building techniques as a case study. His final remarks do a good job in summing up it all:

We directly tested a theory of cultural evolution. Our work has helped to uncover a piece of the larger, more complex process of culture change and has shown that it is reasonable to think of that change as evolution. Natural selection can operate in cultural evolution as well as in genetic evolution. Though canoe features may not be related to the genetic attributes of people who construct and use them, nor is natural selection likely the central force in cultural evolution, a comprehensive view of cultural evolution does now seem possible. And despite the daunting complexity, I believe we will one day understand how cultures evolve, and that it will help us all to survive.

Lan-houses -- small establishments which provide paid access to the Internet and to some software (like text editors and games)--, are huge in Brazil, specially among the low-income population. The Brazilian Internet Committee estimates 30% of the Internet access in Brazil is done through lan-houses [pt] and it as been reported Rocinha [en] alone has over 100 lan-houses.

Furthermore, being attended by so many people on a regular basis, lan-houses have become community-gathering spaces. Ronaldo Lemos [pt] reports how, for example, children birthdays are commonly celebrated in lan-houses these days. Both him and Antônio Carvalho Cabral, both which participate in a project examining in detail the universe of lan-houses, have been active voices on defending these small enterprises and their potential for social inclusion.

So, after reading an article on SciDev about podcasting on poor regions and thinking a bit on what could Brazil and its lan-houses learn from that, I've come up with a project idea and thought it'd worth writing it down to register it.

The idea is simple: what if we could enable lan-houses as media-producing centers where the population could very easily record podcasts or videos with local news or art. Now sum to that a simple system (maybe based on YouTube) through which people could vote for the most interesting media available on that community. Then maybe CD-RWs or DVD-RWs could easily be used to have selections of this media circulate periodically in the community, giving the community frequent access to its own voice and maybe strengthening its cultural identity.

We move reasonably differently from albatrosses and monkeys. An impressive work on Nature this month uses a trace of a very large number (6 million) of cell phone users to model patterns in the mobility of human beings. The following is an excerpt from the abstract of it("Understanding individual human mobility patterns", by Golzález, Hidalgo and Barabási) and to the side is a link to one of their graphs just because it looks cool:

We find that, in contrast with the random trajectories predicted by the prevailing Lévy flight and random walk models7, human trajectories show a high degree of temporal and spatial regularity, each individual being characterized by a time-independent characteristic travel distance and a significant probability to return to a few highly frequented locations. After correcting for differences in travel distances and the inherent anisotropy of each trajectory, the individual travel patterns collapse into a single spatial probability distribution, indicating that, despite the diversity of their travel history, humans follow simple reproducible patterns. This inherent similarity in travel patterns could impact all phenomena driven by human mobility, from epidemic prevention to emergency response, urban planning and agent-based modelling.

Most interesting, Nature published on the same issue an editorial which, although praises this paper, discusses an interesting aspect of the modelling approach it takes:

To some extent this 'physicalization' of the social sciences is healthy for the field; it has already brought in many new ideas and perspectives. But it also needs to be regarded with some caution.

As many social scientists have pointed out, the goal of their discipline is not simply to understand how people behave in large groups, but to understand what motivates individuals to behave the way they do. The field cannot lose focus on that — even as it moves to exploit the power of these new technological tools, and the mathematical regularities they reveal. Comprehending capricious and uncertain human events at every level remains one of the most challenging questions in science.

A recently launched effort called scientists without borders is trying to ease networking between scientists in poor countries and their fellows worldwide.

This certainly has the interesting potential of peering scientists in developing countries with people in the centers of excellence in their fields around the world. Nevertheless, I think there are exciting possibilities also in easing developing-world researchers to discover each other. At least in computer science, it happens often that most research we have access to is that which is legitimated in US conferences, where US-made research prevails.

I believe increasing acknowledgment of research being done in countries which have similar issues can allow new initiatives and approaches which have a genuinely developing world perspective.