The American anthropologist Edward Fischer, paraphrasing Aristotle, said that the good life is ‘a life worth living’, or a journey towards ‘a fulfilled life’. It has to do with happiness but is not limited to it; it’s often – perhaps counterintuitively – linked to commitment and sacrifice, to the work of becoming a particular person. The French philosopher Michel Foucault in 1982 described these practices as technologies of the self. According to Foucault, the self is ‘not given to us … we have to create ourselves as a work of art’. My informants on the streets of Paris were striving – in their own ways – towards being better selves. I came to understand the activities, processes and routines that they engaged in – begging, making a shelter, accessing temporary housing, etc – as practices of the self geared towards a better life, as practices of homemaking on the street, as practices of hope.
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Trump's NAFTA Deal Simply Can't Solve America's Manufacturing Problems | naked capitalism - 0 views
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"As early as the 1980s, this insight was presciently confirmed by the late scholar Seymour Melman. Melman was one of the first to state the perhaps not-so-obvious fact that the huge amount of Department of Defense (DoD) Research and Development (R&D) pumped into the economy has actually stifled American civilian industry innovation and competitiveness, most notably in the very manufacturing sector that Trump is seeking to revitalize with these "reformed" trade deals."
Anatomy of an AI System - 1 views
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"With each interaction, Alexa is training to hear better, to interpret more precisely, to trigger actions that map to the user's commands more accurately, and to build a more complete model of their preferences, habits and desires. What is required to make this possible? Put simply: each small moment of convenience - be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song - requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data. The scale of resources required is many magnitudes greater than the energy and labor it would take a human to operate a household appliance or flick a switch. A full accounting for these costs is almost impossible, but it is increasingly important that we grasp the scale and scope if we are to understand and govern the technical infrastructures that thread through our lives. III The Salar, the world's largest flat surface, is located in southwest Bolivia at an altitude of 3,656 meters above sea level. It is a high plateau, covered by a few meters of salt crust which are exceptionally rich in lithium, containing 50% to 70% of the world's lithium reserves. 4 The Salar, alongside the neighboring Atacama regions in Chile and Argentina, are major sites for lithium extraction. This soft, silvery metal is currently used to power mobile connected devices, as a crucial material used for the production of lithium-Ion batteries. It is known as 'grey gold.' Smartphone batteries, for example, usually have less than eight grams of this material. 5 Each Tesla car needs approximately seven kilograms of lithium for its battery pack. 6 All these batteries have a limited lifespan, and once consumed they are thrown away as waste. Amazon reminds users that they cannot open up and repair their Echo, because this will void the warranty. The Amazon Echo is wall-powered, and also has a mobile battery base. This also has a limited lifespan and then must be thrown away as waste. According to the Ay
Could science destroy the world? These scholars want to save us from a modern-day Frank... - 0 views
The Strange Case of the Missing Joyce Scholar - 0 views
The Scholar's Stage: History is Written by the Losers - 0 views
Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding | naked capitalism - 0 views
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" Fearless commentary on finance, economics, politics and power Follow yvessmith on Twitter Feedburner RSS Feed RSS Feed for Comments Subscribe via Email SUBSCRIBE Recent Items Links 3/11/17 - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith Deutsche Bank Tries to Stay Alive - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith John Helmer: Australian Government Trips Up Ukrainian Court Claim of MH17 as Terrorism - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith 2:00PM Water Cooler 3/10/2017 - 03/10/2017 - Lambert Strether Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Links 3/10/17 - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Why It Will Take a Lot More Than a Smartphone to Get the Sharing Economy Started - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith CalPERS' General Counsel Railroads Board on Fiduciary Counsel Selection - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Another Somalian Famine - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Trade now with TradeStation - Highest rated for frequent traders Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding Posted on March 10, 2017 by Yves Smith By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website Across the globe, a collective freak-out spanning the whole political system is picking up steam with every new "surprise" election, rush of tormented souls across borders, and tweet from the star of America's great unreality show, Donald Trump. But what exactly is the force that seems to be pushing us towards Armageddon? Is it capitalism gone wild? Globalization? Political corruption? Techno-nightmares? Rajani Kanth, a political economist, social thinker, and poet, goes beyond any of these explanations for the answer. In his view, what's throwing most of us off kilter - whether we think of ourselves as on the left or right, capitalist or socialist -was birthed 400 years ago during the period of the Enlightenment. It's a set of assumptions, a particular way of looking at the world that pushed out previous modes o
Ibram Kendi, one of the nation's leading scholars of racism, says education and love ar... - 0 views
The Scholar's Stage: Historians, Fear Not the Psychologists - 0 views
What does home mean if your bed is on the pavements of Paris? | Aeon Essays - 0 views
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Aside from François, others I met on the streets of Paris – such as Sabal from India, and Alex from Kosovo – talked about their engagement in such practices of hope. Following them through soup kitchens, drop-in centres, government institutions and homeless shelters, I observed two main ways in which they attempted to push for a better life. Both of them were connected to the idea of home: my informants in Paris were longing to find and go back to a homeland, often one from the past, while on a daily basis they were struggling to construct a home in order to survive. That was what a better life looked like for them.
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Home, according to the Australian social scientist Shelley Mallett, is always suspended between the ideal and the real. It relates to ‘the activity performed by, with or in person’s things and places. Home is lived in the tension between the given and the chosen, then and now.’ While Sabal’s India was part of the ideal, what Alex was dealing with was closer to the ‘real’ side of this distinction. His home-making efforts were a continuous process of daily activities.
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Universal Basic Assets: A Smarter Fix Than Universal Basic Income? | Fast Forward | OZY - 0 views
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For 40 years, Robert E. Friedman and his Washington-based nonprofit Prosperity Now have helped millions of people from economically vulnerable communities gain financial security and stability. Income disparity, however, has only grown across the United States. Now, the 69-year-old Friedman is arguing for a macroeconomic fix — and it doesn’t involve the government just doling out cash. Instead, he advocates giving everyone assets like savings, education and homeownership, instituting a system of universal basic assets (UBA). And Friedman isn’t alone.
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As cities and countries across the world experiment with the currently in-vogue idea of universal basic income (UBI), a small but growing number of scholars, nonprofits and researchers are beginning to argue for an alternative framework for prosperity. At its heart, they’re pushing for a 21st-century version of the age-old proverb that it’s better to teach a man how to fish than to simply give him fish. Just four years ago, UBA as a modern concept was unknown. Today, it’s emerging as a challenger to UBI as a means to the same goal: less income disparity and greater opportunities for all.
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It’s an idea that has appeal on both sides of the political aisle. Liberals are drawn to UBA’s “provide for everyone” ethos, while libertarians see it as a reason to cut the “safety net” of government subsidies like welfare and unemployment, says Friedman. The bipartisan appeal comes from the notion that asset-building gives people more options, says C. Eugene Steuerle, former deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury for Tax Analysis under President Ronald Reagan and co-founder of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. ”UBA is a middle-of-the-road policy,” he says. “It’s an ideal compromise between left and right because it promotes mobility and opportunity, and less dependence on government.”
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New AI system will help us discover the most effective behaviour change strategies - 0 views
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hanging people’s behaviour is key to tackling the world’s health, social and environmental problems, such as obesity, sustainable living and cybersecurity. To change behaviour, though, we need to know what works, for whom, where and how. But research is generated far faster than humans can access and use it. A search on Google Scholar for “behaviour change” produced over 60,000 hits for the first six months of 2018. Evidence on behaviour change interventions is also messy. Different terms are often used to describe similar things – “physical activity” and “exercise”, for example. This means different people can often mean different things when discussing or researching behaviour change. This lack of shared vocabulary limits our progress in discovering what interventions work best.
Let's resist the temptation to solve problems - Semantic Scholar - 0 views
Gamification has a dark side - 0 views
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Gamification is the application of game elements into nongame spaces. It is the permeation of ideas and values from the sphere of play and leisure to other social spaces. It’s premised on a seductive idea: if you layer elements of games, such as rules, feedback systems, rewards and videogame-like user interfaces over reality, it will make any activity motivating, fair and (potentially) fun. ‘We are starving and games are feeding us,’ writes Jane McGonigal in Reality Is Broken (2011). ‘What if we decided to use everything we know about game design to fix what’s wrong with reality?’
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But gamification’s trapping of total fun masks that we have very little control over the games we are made to play – and hides the fact that these games are not games at all. Gamified systems are tools, not toys. They can teach complex topics, engage us with otherwise difficult problems. Or they can function as subtle systems of social control.
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The problem of the gamified workplace goes beyond micromanagement. The business ethicist Tae Wan Kim at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh warns that gamified systems have the potential to complicate and subvert ethical reasoning. He cites the example of a drowning child. If you save the child, motivated by empathy, sympathy or goodwill – that’s a morally good act. But say you gamify the situation. Say you earn points for saving drowning children. ‘Your gamified act is ethically unworthy,’ he explained to me in an email. Providing extrinsic gamified motivators, even if they work as intended, deprive us of the option to live worthy lives, Kim argues. ‘The workplace is a sacred space where we develop ourselves and help others,’ he notes. ‘Gamified workers have difficulty seeing what contributions they really make.’
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A radio play about radio that became the first fake-news story | Aeon Essays - 0 views
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The broadcast has become an origin story of fake news and technological anxiety in the United States, and its tentacled aliens watch when we talk of fake news today. Then, as now, the worry over whether the news can be believed was a proxy for something else entirely – fear of the new technologies that brought it. Scholars have convincingly questioned the scale of the 1938 panic. Everybody loves a good story – especially the newspapers threatened by radio news, the social scientists seeking a claim to relevance, and Welles, great ham that he was. Firsthand accounts attest that some listeners did panic, but many more did not. Why, then, did millions more find the panic so easy to believe these past 80 years?
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In that decade, radio became more trusted than newspapers. The reasons had to do partially with the unique characteristics of the medium – its intimacy and ability to put you on the spot to hear as an event unfolded without a reporting gap in which craven newspapermen could insert their own slant. It also had to do with the trueness of the sounds that radio reproduced.
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In November, three days after the War of the Worlds broadcast, Dorothy Thompson, a syndicated columnist and radio reporter, published an oft-cited piece in response, entitled ‘Mr Welles and Mass Delusion’, in which she argued that the broadcast suggested American susceptibility to foreign propaganda:All unwittingly Mr Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre of the Air have made one of the most fascinating and important demonstrations of all time. They have proved that a few effective voices, accompanied by sound effects, can so convince masses of people of a totally unreasonable, completely fantastic proposition as to create nationwide panic … If people can be frightened out of their wits by mythical men from Mars, they can be frightened into fanaticism by the fears of Reds, or convinced that America is in the hands of 60 families, or aroused to revenge against any minority, or terrorised into subservience to leadership because of any imaginable menace.
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The Chinese scientist who claims he made CRISPR babies is under investigation - MIT Tec... - 0 views
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Separately, a group of 122 Chinese academics and scientists put out a statement condemning He’s research and calling on authorities to establish legal governance over gene editing. “This presents a major blow to the image and development of Chinese life sciences on the global stage,” they said. “It is extremely unfair for the many honest and sincere scholars working to adhere to moral practices in the sciences.”
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In his video, He presented himself as a willing martyr to some higher cause. “I understand my work should be controversial, but families need this technology, and I am willing to take the criticism,” he said.
Jeff Sessions is shamefully undermining WEB Du Bois's legacy | Marc Mauer - 0 views
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Since 2002, the US Department of Justice’s WEB Du Bois program has sponsored research fellowships on issues of race and criminal justice. During Republican and Democratic administrations, a diverse group of academics have carried the spirit of the noted sociologist and civil rights leader to the race challenges of the 21st century. Given the racial disparity endemic at every stage of the justice system the DoJ’s investigation of these issues has been praiseworthy. But with Jeff Sessions as attorney general exploring the roots of this injustice may now be compromised. In the recently released solicitation for the Du Bois fellowships the DoJ invited scholars to engage in research on five issues arising out of the “tough on crime” era that would make a student of the Du Bois legacy shudder. Whereas Du Bois is widely known for promoting the idea that “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line”, the DoJ solicitation displays no interest in such high-profile issues as police killings of unarmed black men or the impact of mass incarceration on the African American community. Instead, “protecting police officers” is the only area of law enforcement prioritized by the DoJ. Another research priority, “enhancing immigration enforcement”, coming at a moment when barely disguised racist imagery accompanies those policies, seems particularly jarring when upheld in the name of a civil rights legend. The DoJ approach to research is unfortunately consistent with the misconstrued “law and order” agenda that Jeff Sessions has brought to his leadership. Within a month of taking office Sessions had rescinded the Obama-era decision to phase out federal contracting with private prisons. That initiative had been based in part on an inspector general’s finding that such prisons had higher levels of assault and safety concerns than public prisons.