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Charles van der Haegen

Skeptic » About Us » A Brief Introduction - 1 views

www.skeptic.com/about_us

science education critical thinking controversial ideas unconmfortable knowledge claims investigating fringe

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 27 Jul 11 - Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 27 Jul 11
     
    "A Brief Introduction All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike - and yet it is the most precious thing we have. -Albert Einstein The Skeptics Society is a scientific and educational organization of scholars, scientists, historians, magicians, professors and teachers, and anyone curious about controversial ideas, extraordinary claims, revolutionary ideas, and the promotion of science. Our mission is to serve as an educational tool for those seeking clarification and viewpoints on those controversial ideas and claims. Under the direction of Dr. Michael Shermer, the Society engages in discussions with leading experts and investigates fringe science and paranormal claims. It is our hope that our efforts go a long way in promoting critical thinking and lifelong inquisitiveness in all individuals. I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them. -Baruch Spinoza Some people believe that skepticism is the rejection of new ideas, or worse, they confuse "skeptic" with "cynic" and think that skeptics are a bunch of grumpy curmudgeons unwilling to accept any claim that challenges the status quo. This is wrong. Skepticism is a provisional approach to claims. It is the application of reason to any and all ideas - no sacred cows allowed. In other words, skepticism is a method, not a position. Ideally, skeptics do not go into an investigation closed to the possibility that a phenomenon might be real or that a claim might be true. When we say we are "skeptical," we mean that we must see compelling evidence before we believe. Skepticism has a long historical tradition dating back to ancient Greece, when Socrates observed: "All I know is that I know nothing." But this pure position is sterile and unproductive and held by virtually no one. If you were skeptical about everything, you would have to be skeptical of your own skepticism. Like the dec
  • Charles van der Haegen on 27 Jul 11
     
    a nice source of curated uncomfortable knowledge
Alex Grech

Social Media's Slow Slog Into the Ivory Towers of Academia - Josh Sternberg - Technolog... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...244483

PhD Disruption Academia rheingold

shared by Alex Grech on 11 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • If you took a soldier from a thousand years ago and put them on a battlefield, they'd be dead,"
  • "If you took a doctor from a thousand years ago and put them in a modern surgical theater, they would have no idea what to do. Take a professor from a thousand years ago and put them in a modern classroom, they would know where to stand and what to do."
  • So they went back to school to learn how to create Facebook campaigns, how to incorporate SEO best-practices, how to blog, and how to create social media strategies.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • But as social interactions and technologies mature, there has been a swing in the pendulum. Professors are now approaching the teaching of social media from a pedagogical perspective, as much as a practical one.
  • the theories behind social media: why do things go viral, the social theories of how people act and how they communicate to a network, or one person at a time, and why do certain tools work they way they do for us
  • Instead of understanding social media as products, students are encouraged to treat status updates as part of a larger information ecosystem.
  • With social media being a pervasive, if not invasive, aspect of our lives, it makes perfect sense for the Ivory Tower to embrace social media from a theoretical perspective to help students understand the technology and its effect on their daily lives, as well as the epistemological question of "how do we know what we know?"
  • The medium is relatively new enough that there's no canon shaping social media, just conceptual frameworks for looking at the effects of social media on students' lives and communities and on society as a whole. The task of academics is to give students a vocabulary to understand these perspectives, tools to make sense of the theoretical discussions and think critically about social media.
  • "I don't think you have the credibility of doing research, of writing about, unless you get to really know that culture. And the best way of knowing the culture is to actually be immersed in it."
  • "no positive incentives for innovating in pedagogy."
  • Rheingold puts it,
  • Underpinning a disdain for social media in higher education is the assumption that incoming students already have an inherent aptitude for new technologies
  • Terms like "digital native" (those born during or after the introduction of digital technology -- computer, Internet, etc. -- and have an assumed greater understanding of how technology works because they've been using digital technology their entire lives) and "digital immigrant" (those born before this introduction and have had to adapt and adopt the technology at a later point in life) have been bandied around by experts and marketers as ways of classifying and differentiating between generations, and, more importantly, the expectations of those who fall into either category.
  • it has stopped educators from teaching what they need to teach. It has scared educators into thinking students know more than us. God forbid we learn something from our students. And, so, we assumed these kids already know, and we don't teach them. And we expect them to know things and we grade them; we evaluate them; we hire them based on what we think, we assume, they know. And they don't. How would you know this stuff if no one ever bothered to point it out to you that this is something you should be learning, because everyone assumes you already know?"
  • the lack of critical literacy.
  • ce students of the Digital Age have not had to acclimate to this sweeping change from analog to digi
  • al and are assumed to possess some innate technological knowledge based solely on the year they were born, they don't necessarily have to acclimate to the sheer velocity of recent innovations.
  • "We have on our hands the last generation of educators who do remember life before these tools, and so therefore, we have an opportunity to teach some critical literacy that these students may not get otherwise; this generation may not get otherwise
  • Rheingold puts the onus on the students to learn not just from him, but from each other. Instructors can serve as a facilitator, but the student has to want to be there, process that information, and use that information in a productive way.
  • "The issues around social media -- community, identity, presentation of self, social capital, public sphere, collective action; a lot of important topics from other disciplines -- aren't really being raised in academia," said Rheingold. "They ought to be because these topics, not only academically, in terms of the shifts in media and literacy that they're triggering in the world, are where the students live and work."
David McGavock

HOW CULTURE DROVE HUMAN EVOLUTION | Edge.org - 0 views

edge.org/...-culture-drove-human-evolution

anthropology evolution culture tools cooperation religion neuroscience

shared by David McGavock on 07 May 14 - No Cached
  • how culture drove human evolution
  • cultural brain hypothesis—this is the idea that the real driver in the expansion of human brains was this growing cumulative body of cultural information, so that what our brains increasingly got good at was the ability to acquire information, store, process and retransmit this non genetic body of information.
  • but tools and artifacts (the kinds of things that one finds useful to throw or finds useful to manipulate) are themselves products of cultural evolution.
  • ...116 more annotations...
  • or a long time was that status in humans was just a kind of human version of this dominant status
  • Chimps, other primates, have dominant status.
  • social status
  • second kind of status. We call this status prestige.
  • from being particularly knowledgeable or skilled in an area,
  • From this we've argued that humans have two separate kinds of status, dominance and prestige
  • give them deference in exchange for knowledge that you get back
  • you want to isolate the members of your group who are most likely to have a lot of this resources, meaning a lot of the knowledge or information that could be useful to you in the future
  • some of the big questions are, exactly when did this body of cumulative cultural evolution get started?
  • may have started early
  • another possibility is that it emerged about 800,000 years ago.
  • here's theoretical models that show that culture, our ability to learn from others, is an adaptation to fluctuating environments.
  • Another signature of cultural learning is regional differentiation and material culture, and you see that by about 400,000 years ago
  • 400,000 years ago
  • there's another possibility that it was a different kind of ape that we don't have in the modern world: a communal breeding ape that lives in family units rather than the kind of fission fusion you might see in chimpanzees
  • In the Pliocene, we see lots of different kinds of apes in terms of different species of Australopithecus.
  • we now have evidence to suggest that humans were communal breeders, so that we lived in family groups maybe somewhat similar to the way gorillas live in family groups, and that this is a much better environment for the evolution of capacities for culture than typical in the chimpanzee model
  • for cultural learning to really take off, you need more than one model.
  • trying out different technique
  • take advantage of the variation
  • the question is, how did we become such long distance runners?
  • only humans have it
  • humans who don't know how to track animals, can't run them down
  • idea being that the religions of modern societies are quite different than the religions we see in hunter gatherers and small scale societies
  • Most recently I've been also thinking about the evolution of societal complexity.
  • when societies begin to get big and complex
  • large-scale cooperation
  • What are the causal processes that bring these things about?
  • There's an interaction between genes and culture. First you have to get the culturally transmitted knowledge about animal behavior and tracking and spore knowledge and the ability to identify individuals, which is something you need to practice, and only after that can you begin to take advantage of long distance running techniques
  • I've worked in a couple of different areas on this, and one is religion.
  • there was an intense period that continues today of intergroup competition, which favors groups who have social norms and institutions that can more effectively expand the group while maintaining internal harmony
  • they've been shaped in ways that galvanize cooperation in larger groups
  • In small-scale hunter-gatherer religions, the gods are typically whimsical. They're amoral.
  • but as we begin to move to the religions in more complex societies, we find that the gods are increasingly moralizing.
  • if you remind believers of their god, believers cheat less, and they're more pro social or fair in exchange tasks,
  • more pro social in are the ones with anonymous others, or strangers. These are the kinds of things you need to make a market run to have a successful division of labor
  • ritual plays a role in this
  • rituals seem to be sets of practices engineered by cultural evolution to be effective at transmitting belief and transmitting faith
  • elevate the degree of belief in the high-moralizing gods
  • high-moralizing gods will often require rituals of this kind
  • Speaking in unison, large congregations saying the same thing, this all taps our capacity for conformist transmission;
  • People also engage in what we call credibility-enhancing displays [during rituals]. These are costly things. It might be an animal sacrifice or the giving of a large sum of money or some kind of painful initiation rite
  • We think religions are just one element, one way in which culture has figured out ways to expand the sphere of cooperation and allow markets to form and people to exchange and to maintain the substantial division of labor.
  • There's a lot of risk in developing specialization because you have to be confident that there's a market there that you can engage with. Whereas if you're a generalist and you do a little bit of farming, a little bit of manufacturing, then you're much less reliant on the market. Markets require a great deal of trust
  • In the intellectual tradition that I'm building on, culture is information stored in people's heads that gets there by some kind of social learning
  • We tend to think of cultural transmission, or at least many people think of cultural transmission as relying on language
  • , it's quite clear that there is a ton of cultural transmission that is just strictly by observational learning.
  • what we don't see amongst other animals is cumulative cultural evolution.
  • you can learn one thing from one generation, and that begins to accumulate in subsequent generations.
  • One possible exception to that is bird song.
  • One of the interesting lines of research that's come out of this recognition is the importance of population size and the interconnectedness for technology.
  • looking at a case study in Tasmania.
  • You start out with two genetically well-intermixed peoples. Tasmania's actually connected to mainland Australia so it's just a peninsula. Then about 10,000 years ago, the environment changes, it gets warmer and the Bass Strait floods, so this cuts off Tasmania from the rest of Australia, and it's at that point that they begin to have this technological downturn
  • You can show that this is the kind of thing you'd expect if societies are like brains in the sense that they store information as a group and that when someone learns, they're learning from the most successful member
  • study by Rob Boyd and Michelle Kline
  • larger islands had much bigger and more complex fishing technologies, and you can even show an effective contact. Some of the islands were in more or less contact with each other,
  • more in contact, you have fancier tools, and that seems to hold up.
  • rates of innovation should continue to increase, especially with the emergence of communication technologies
  • As an individual inventor or company, you're best off if everybody else shares their ideas but you don't share your ideas because then you get to keep your good ideas, and nobody else gets exposed to them, and you get to use their good ideas, so you get to do more recombination.
  • An important thing to remember is that there's always an incentive to hide your information.
  • Embedded in this whole information-sharing thing is a constant cooperative dilemma in which individuals have to be willing to share for the good of the group.
  • a norm of information sharing is a really good norm to have
  • I've done a lot of work on marriage systems with the evolution of monogamy.
  • Eighty-five percent of human societies have allowed men to have more than one wife
  • pushes us towards polygyny
  • But in the modern world, of course, monogamy is normative, and people who have too many wives are thought poorly of by the larger society. The question is, how did this ever get in place?
  • European Marriage Pattern,
  • Athens legislates the first rules about monogamous marriage
  • people are ready to moralize it,
  • it does seem to have societal level benefits. It reduces male-male competition. We think there's evidence to say it reduces crime, reduces substance abuse, and it also engages males in ways that cause them to discount the future less and engage in productive activities rather than taking a lot of risks
  • If I talk about normative monogamy as being successful, I mean that it spread,
  • especially if you have a society with widely varying amounts of wealth, especially among males. Then you're going to have a situation that would normally promote high levels of polygyny
  • to get into the mating and marriage market you would have to have a high level of wealth if we were to let nature take it's course
  • Part of my program of research is to convince people that they should stop distinguishing cultural and biological evolution as separate in that way. We want to think of it all as biological evolution. 
  • Culture is part of our biology.
  • We now have the neuroscience to say that culture's in our brain, so if you compare people from different societies, they have different brains.
  • Cognition and our ability to think are all interwoven,
  • A good example of this is the placebos. Placebos are something that depend on your cultural beliefs. If you believe that something will work, then when you take it, like you take an aspirin or you take a placebo for an aspirin, it initiates the same pathways as the chemically active substance. Placebos are chemically inert but biologically active, and it's completely dependent on your cultural beliefs.
  • One of the large research projects that I run in an effort to understand human sociality is called The Root of Human Sociality Project.
  • at the time to something called the Ultimatum Game, and the Ultimatum Game seemed to provide evidence that humans were innately inclined to punish unfairness.
  • behavioral economists find that students give about half, sometimes a little bit less than half, and people are inclined to reject offers below about 30 percent
  • The older you get, even if you have more wealth and more income, you're especially inclined to only offer half, and you'll reject offers below 40 percent.
  • I was thinking that the Machiguenga would be a good test of this
  • I did it in 1995 and 1996 there, and what I found amongst the Machiguenga was that they were completely unwilling to reject, and they thought it was silly. Why would anyone ever reject?
  • they made low offers, the modal offer was 15 percent instead of 50, and the mean comes out to be about 25 percent.
  • over the next two summers these field anthropologists went to the field and conducted the ultimatum game as well as a few other games
  • we found is that societies vary dramatically, from societies that would never reject, to societies that would even reject offers above 50 percent, and we found that mean offers ranged across societies from about 25 percent to even over 50 percent. We had some of what we called hyper fair societies. The highest was 57 percent in Lamalera, Indonesia.
  • able to explain a lot of the variation in these offers with two variables. One was the degree of market integration.
  • there seemed to be other institutions, institutions of cooperative hunting seemed to influence offers.
  • measured market integration much more carefully
  • subsequent project
  • large number of other variables, including wealth, income, education, community size, and also religion.
  • did the Ultimatum Game along with two other experiments. The two other experiments were the Dictator Game (the Dictator Game is like the Ultimatum Game except the second player doesn't have the option to reject) and the Third Party Punishment Game.
  • Third Party Punishment Game, there are three players and the first two players play a Dictator Game.
  • This gives us two different measures of willingness to punish strangers
  • one is rejection in the Ultimatum Game
  • three measures of fairness
  • size of the community predicts willingness to punish
  • suggesting that if you have small communities, you don't need punishment.
  • It could be some kind of reputational mechanism
  • There's a number of different ways to create norm systems that operate like that.
  • In a big society punishment can be most effective because reputational mechanisms can be weak. If you're in a big society and you encounter somebody, you probably don't have friends in common through which you could pass reputational information for which punishment could be generated. You might want to punish them right on the spot or someone who observes the interaction might want to punish them right on the spot or call the authorities or whatever, which is also costly.
  • This creates a puzzle because typically people think of small-scale kinds of societies, where you study hunter-gatherers and horticultural scattered across the globe (ranging from New Guinea to Siberia to Africa) as being very pro social and cooperative.
  • but the thing is those are based on local norms for cooperation with kin and local interactions in certain kinds of circumstances
  • these norms don't extend beyond food sharing. They certainly don't extend to ephemeral or strangers
  • large-scale society run you have to shift from investing in your local kin groups and your enduring relationships to being willing to pay to be fair to a stranger.
  • if you're going to be fair to a stranger, then you're taking money away from your family.
  • A commitment to something like anti-nepotism norms is something that runs against our evolutionary inclinations and our inclinations to help kin
  • In this sense, the norms of modern societies that make modern societies run now are at odds with at least some of our evolved instincts.
  • Lately we've been focused on the effects of religion
  • adherence to a world religion matters
  • People from world religions were willing to give more to the other person in the experiment, the anonymous stranger
  • Part of this is your willingness to acquire a norm of impartial roles; that we have a set of rules that governs this system.
  • political scientists call it the rule of law
  • those rules apply independently of the identities
  • If you want the rule of law to spread or to be maintained, you need conditions in which you're managing risk.
  • David McGavock on 07 May 14
     
    [JOSEPH HENRICH:] The main questions I've been asking myself over the last couple years are broadly about how culture drove human evolution. Think back to when humans first got the capacity for cumulative cultural evolution-and by this I mean the ability for ideas to accumulate over generations, to get an increasingly complex tool starting from something simple. One generation adds a few things to it, the next generation adds a few more things, and the next generation, until it's so complex that no one in the first generation could have invented it.
David McGavock

…My heart's in Accra » CHI keynote: Desperately Seeking Serendipity - 1 views

www.ethanzuckerman.com/...esperately-seeking-serendipity

filter bubble diversity bias cosmopolitan global local

shared by David McGavock on 07 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Cities embody political decisions make by their designers.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Sounds like program or be programmed to me
  • It’s much harder to get the architects behind Facebook or Foursquare articulate the behaviors they’re trying to enable and the political assumptions that underly those decisions.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Again - Programmers!
  • An urban planner who wants to make changes to a city’s structure is held in check by a matrix of forces: a desire to preserve history, the needs and interests of businesses and residents in existing communities, the costs associated with executing new projects. Progress is slow,
  • ...49 more annotations...
  • For those planning the future of Facebook, it’s hard to study what’s succeeded and failed for MySpace, in part because an exodus of users to Facebook is gradually turning MySpace into a ghost town.
  • If we learn from real-world cities instead of abandoned digital ones, what lessons might we take?
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Conclusions
  • The Jacobs/Moses debate suggests we need to be cautious of architectures that offer convenience and charge isolation as a price of admission. This is the concern Eli Pariser articulates in his (excellent) new book, “The Filter Bubble“.
  • He worries that between Google’s personalized search and the algorithmic decisions Facebook makes in displaying news from our friends, our online experience is an increasingly isolated one,
  • They’re cars, rather than public transit or busy sidewalks.
  • A map of Vancouver overlaid with my friends’ recommendations is one thing; one that recommends restaurants based on paid advertisements and doesn’t reveal this practice is another entirely.
  • The map I want is the one that lets me shuffle not just through my friends’ preferences but through annotations from different groups: first time visitors to the city; long-time Vancouverites; foodies; visitors from Japan, Korea or China.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      A diverse sampling of taste
  • People’s actions inscribe their intentions onto a city.
  • Online spaces are often so anxious to show me how my friends are using a space that they obscure how other audiences are using it.
  • It’s possible to find out what’s popular on Facebook to an audience broader than that of your friends.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Something Google+ should consider
  • One of the reasons curation is such a helpful strategy for wandering is that it reveals community maxima. It can be helpful to know that Times Square is the most popular tourist destination in New York if only so we can avoid it.
  • knowing where Haitian taxi cab drivers go for goat soup is often useful data on where the best Haitian food is to be found.
  • If you want to explore beyond the places your friends think are the most enjoyable, or those the general public thinks are enjoyable, you need to seek out curators who are sufficiently far from you in cultural terms and who’ve annotated their cities in their own ways.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      key to breaking the filter bubbles
  • Geocaching is its own peculiar form of community annotation, where the immediate goal is leaving your signature on someone else’s logbook, but the deeper goal is encouraging you to explore in a way you otherwise wouldn’t.
  • SF0, founded by a trio of Chicagoans transplanted to San Francisco, was designed to encourage players to discover things they’d never seen or done in the city, in a way that encouraged independence and exploration.
  • Combining the insights we may find from studying the organization of cities with the ability to reshuffle and sort digitally may let us think about designing online spaces for serendipity in different and powerful ways.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Conclusion?
  • - How do we design physical spaces to encourage serendipity? - What lessons about serendipity in physical spaces can we bring into the virtual realm? - How can we annotate the physical world, digitally, in ways that expand our encounters with the world, rather than limiting them?
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Questions over conclusion
  • We hope that cities are serendipity engines. By putting a diverse set of people and things together in a confined place, we increase the chances that we’re going to stumble onto the unexpected. It’s worth asking the question: do cities actually work this way?
  • Most of us are fairly predictable
  • We hope for random encounter with a diverse citizenry to build a web of weak ties that increases our sense of involvement in the community, as Bob Putnam suggested in Bowling Alone. And we worry that we may instead isolate and cocoon ourselves when faced with a situation where we feel like outsiders, as Putnam’s recent research suggests.
  • “Census data can describe the segregation of my block, but how about telling me how segregated my life is? Location data points in that direction.
  • Nathan Eagle, who has worked with Sandy Pentland at MIT’s Media Lab on the idea of “reality mining”, digesting huge sets of data like mobile phone records, estimates that he can predict the location of “low-entropy individuals” with 90-95% accuracy based on this type of data
  • We all filter the places we live into the places where we’re regulars and the ones we avoid, the parts of town where we feel familiar and where we feel foreign. We do this based on where we live, where we work, and who we like to spend time with.
  • I’m less concerned about left-right polarization in the US, and more concerned about us/them polarization around the world
  • through the design of the systems we use and our behavior with those systems, I see reasons to worry that our use of the internet may be less cosmopolitan and more isolated that we would hope.
  • There were – and are – reasons to distrust curators, but there’s a critical aspect of their work I believe we need to preserve as we move towards new models for organizing news.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      interesting view of curation
  • Countries that have more than 40 million or more internet users generally have a very strong bias towards local sources – the mean is roughly 95%/5%, which makes Americans look (slightly) cosmopolitan in comparison.
  • US broadcast media focuses much more on entertainment stories than on international news.)
  • What’s striking to me about this preference data is that there’s so little effort required to access international news sources like BBC, the Times of India or the Mail and Guardian – they’re one click away and don’t require crossing a language barrier – and how strong the “local” bias for national news sources appears to be.
  • on January 12th, I published “What if Tunisia had a revolution, but nobody watched?“… and I got a lot of phone calls when Ben Ali fled the country two days later.
  • The revolution in Tunisia caught intelligence and diplomatic services around the world flat-footed. It didn’t have to – there was a wealth of information being published on Tunisian Facebook pages
  • I’m forced to admit that there’s no way I would have known about the revolution brewing if I didn’t have close Tunisian friends.
  • I’m less interested in the ways in which we limit our paths through cities than in how we constrain what we do and don’t encounter online.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      key point
  • On the other hand, curators invariably have biases
  • We need mechanisms to ensure that search gets complemented with serendipity.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Point we have been discussing. Filter bubbles
  • Facebook offers a different answer to the question, “What do I need to know?” – “You need to know what your friends and your friends of friends already know that you do not.”
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Facebook world = ummm....
  • there’s a decent chance that their collective intelligence has some blind spots
  • The problem, of course, is that if your friends don’t know about a revolution in Tunisia or a great new Vietnamese restaurant, you may not know either.
  • It’s worth asking whether that bubble is able to provide us with the serendipity we hope for from the web.
  • Serendipity, at first glance, looks like the positive side of unintended consequences, the happy accident. But that’s not what the term meant, at least originally.
  • The word was coined by Horace Walpole, an 18th century British aristocrat,
  • A Google search turns up 11 million pages with the term, including restaurants, movies and gift shops named “serendipity”, but very few on unexpected discovery through sagacity.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Serendipity vs. Sagacity
  • he refers to a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, in which the titular characters were “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”
  • Louis Pasteur observed, “In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.”
  • In “The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity”, he and Barber explore discovery in a General Electric laboratory under the leadership of Willis Whitney, who encouraged a work environment that focused as much on fun as it did on discovery.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Sounds like Google. Tinkering, time to play, time to work.
  • If we want to create online spaces to encourage serendipity, we might start by learning from cities.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Moving to the point of online learning
  • Our loss, I believe, is that we’ve lost sight of the idea that we could prepare ourselves for serendipity, both personally and structurally.
  • vibrancy comes from the ongoing chance encounter between people using a neighborhood for different purposes, encountering one another as their paths intersect and cross.
  • The neighborhoods Jacobs celebrates are certainly not the most efficient in terms of an individual’s ability to move quickly and independently. Vibrancy and efficiency may not be diametrically opposed, but it’s likely that the forces are in tension.
Charles van der Haegen

‪The Most IMPORTANT Video You'll Ever See‬‏ - YouTube - 3 views

www.youtube.com/view_play_list

8 oarts of this lecture about arithmetic growth

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 09 Aug 11 - Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 09 Aug 11
     
    "2 million views for an old codger giving a lecture about arithmetic? What's going on? You'll just have to watch to see what's so damn amazing about what he (Prof. Albert Bartlett) has to say. When I saw this lecture at a conference in 1995, I came out blasted, thinking "This needs to be required listening for every person on the planet. Nothing else will matter if we don't understand this." The presenter is Albert Bartlett, a retired Physics prof. at U of Colorado-Boulder. The presentation is titled "Arithmetic, Population, and Energy," and I introduce it to my students as "The most boring video you'll ever see, and the most important." But then again, after viewing it most said that if you followed along with what Bartlett is saying, it's quite easy to pay attention, because the content is so damn compelling. If you forward this to everyone you know, we might actually stand a chance in staving off disaster in the global finance system, peak oil, climate change, and every other resource issue you can think of. Without a widespread understanding of what Bartlett's talking about, I think we won't be able to dodge ANY of those issues. BE ABSOLUTELY SURE you catch the parts about "the bacteria in the bottle" (in Part 3) and the list comparing things that add to the problem and things that address the problem. If we don't choose from that right-hand column, nature will choose for us. I for one, would rather we be the ones making the choice."
  • Charles van der Haegen on 09 Aug 11
     
    I suppose many of you have seen this video, at least the first one... The question is: will growth save humanity? Than answer is.... : Wrong question! Maybe it should be: What kind of growth should save humanity? Will pondering on this question bring us further? Einstein said once: The mere formulation of a problem is far more often essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science. Albert Einstein, (1879 - 1955) Physicist & Nobel Laureate How do we formulate Humanities Problem?
Charles van der Haegen

Turing's Cathedral. Author George Dyson in Conversation with John Hollar - YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 17 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 17 Oct 12
     
    "Publiée le 19 mars 2012 par ComputerHistory [Recorded: March 7, 2012] I am thinking about something much more important than bombs. I am thinking about computers. John von Neumann, 1946 The most powerful technology of the last century was not the atomic bomb, but software-and both were invented by the same folks. Even as they were inventing it, the original geniuses imagined almost everything software has become since. At long last, George Dyson delivers the untold story of software's creation. It is an amazing tale brilliantly deciphered. Kevin Kelly, cofounder of WIRED magazine, author of What Technology Wants Legendary historian George Dyson vividly re-creates the scenes of focused experimentation, incredible mathematical insight, and pure creative genius that gave us computers, digital television, modern genetics, models of stellar evolution-in other words, computer code. In the 1940s and '50s, a group of eccentric geniuses-led by John von Neumann-gathered at the newly created Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Their joint project was the realization of the theoretical universal machine, an idea that had been put forth by mathematician Alan Turing. This group of brilliant engineers worked in isolation, almost entirely independent from industry and the traditional academic community. But because they relied exclusively on government funding, the government wanted its share of the results: the computer that they built also led directly to the hydrogen bomb. George Dyson has uncovered a wealth of new material about this project, and in bringing the story of these men and women and their ideas to life, he shows how the crucial advancements that dominated twentieth-century technology emerged from one computer in one laboratory, where the digital universe as we know it was born. Join John Hollar for a captivating conversation with Dyson about John von Neumann and the beginnings of the digital universe. This event is part of ou
  • Charles van der Haegen on 17 Oct 12
     
    view this
David McGavock

(RE)VITALIZE VISUALS » what gives you energy? - 0 views

www.visualsforchange.com/...what-gives-you-energy

brain energy visuals thinking tools augmentation Infotention

shared by David McGavock on 01 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • What is it that gives you energy these days? And what at work gives you energy?
  • I love to draw with people to solve problems, gain insights about vision or just have some fun!Adding color and movement to the page via the bodily movement of drawing gives me energy.
  • David McGavock on 01 Jul 14
     
    "My energy rises when there's a challenge involved and I 'really have to think/draw' (thinking & drawing go together in my world). (#drawitout) Conversations where I don't know all the answers give me energy, for I find that it's usually a good question rather than an answer that propels me forward."
David McGavock

Mission for week two: Evolution of cooperation questions (ACTION REQUESTED) | Social Me... - 0 views

socialmediaclassroom.com/...ion-questions-action-requested

HRU cooperation action social support

shared by David McGavock on 25 May 14 - No Cached
  • Pavel's
  • a lot of smart people across the region also begin to identify themselves with one of the sides, inevitably getting involved in arguments they don't want to be part of, raising hostility towards each other. 
  • ake control over our pre-wired responses.
  • ...69 more annotations...
  • awareness (such as meditation)
  • help people learn how to identify and de-identify with various groups, by allowing them to experience the variety of social contexts.
  • Roland's
  • not only be critical thinking but systems thinking
  • help people become more self-dependent.
  • experiences are organized for children from the early age
  • raise the level of critical thinking
  • Education is liberating.
  • The notion of indirect reciprocity could be important here: doing things for those groups without expecting to get a return, but setting an example
  • reject the notion of tribes or of people being permanently and essentially bad and extremist, and to be welcoming and kind
  • Bodil's
  • I can work with other communities which are open, tolerant and welcoming.
  • Better distribution of resources.
  • reputation and trust
  • know how to build trust and create cooperation, we should know something about breaking bad patterns
  • knowledge about social dilemmas
  • “growth mindset”
  • David's
  • separating fiction from fact,
  • interaction in order to reveal the "true" characteristics of inform
  • physical security, enough to eat, a place to sleep, freedom from threat.
  • John's
  • little can be done at the level of the individual, other than being aware that our appreciation of ideas, and our tendency to engage in counterproductive behavior may be due to forces other than the ideas themselves.
  • becoming aware of our own weaknesses with regard to absorbing new information
  • it is possible to gather individuals into a super organism that is less vulnerable to being victimized by false or misleading information,
  • we need access to information and skill in critical thinking
  • Hermano's
  • My political answer is internationalism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalism_(politics).
  • High level of material, political, physical, psychological etc personal independance
  • My cultural answer is to displace the ubiquitous narrative of competition by this narrative of cooperative
  • traces of trustworthiness online,
  • tactical tool is the internet.
  • empowers the common man to act at multiple levels, assuming responsibility for all the nested groups to which he would belong.
  • Inger's
  •  Fighting discrimination
  • stereotypes
  • negative stereotypes
  • experience the feeling of discrimination in order to fight it.
  • Discrimination starts with stereotypes that turn into prejudice, and the individual becomes a member of a group that is dehmanised and stripped of human qualities.
  • Elena's
  • Meditation skills
  • life satisfaction
  • transferring an ultimate level of governance and common legislation to structures above nation states
  • Practices of integration of spirit-mind-body
  • value of own life and personal voe not to destroy self
  • Calisa's
  • only possible escape route is to get a glimpse of life on the outside, to see that there are different ways to live one's life, to understand that there are choices.
  • only through the glimpse can the child even begin to contemplate the notion of breaking the "pre-wiring"
  • glimpse does not guarantee escape
  •  shine your light brightly:
  • If there are children in your life, invest in them
  • Sahil's
  • Stay informed about the big, complex world-shaping issues
  • Use technology to express yourself beyond your home and workplace
  • same forces producing the 'dark' forms of social cooperation mentioned above - compliance, conformance, solidarity - are perhaps the same forces behind 'good' cooperation.
  • continually trying to re-imagine our 'imagined communities'
  • the more connected we are, the more we'll be forced to recognize others' interests as our own.
  • might include: cultural traits and norms based on morality (i.e. religion), integration of market economies, promoting greater free-flow of people/ideas, promoting denser urban centers, open access to information, monogamy??, anti-nepotism norms, cooperative higher institutions (with ability to manage laws/reputations/punishment).
  • Luis'
  •  We are “pre-wired” to cooperate within our tribe
  • impact of group identity
  • “manifold and profound”
  • make group identity salient
  • redefining the boundaries of the group to include more people is the best opportunity for change
  • Once you include everyone in the group, you find ways to encourage interactions among both sub-groups,
  • narcos manage to stay loyal and cooperate within their cartel when competing against other cartels with equally loyal members.
  • discourage cooperation inside the cartel groups
  • Assurance game, because one narco will only fight if the other fights, and will defect if the other defects
  • The key issue in the Assurance Game is whether we can trust each other.
  • David McGavock on 25 May 14
     
    Answers from all co-learners
David McGavock

How the brain creates the 'buzz' that helps ideas spread - 1 views

medicalxpress.com/...2013-07-brain-ideas.html

mindamp buzz sharing curation learning culture

shared by David McGavock on 08 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • UCLA psychologists have taken a significant step toward answering these questions, identifying for the first time the brain regions associated with the successful spread of ideas, often called "buzz."
  • "Our study suggests that people are regularly attuned to how the things they're seeing will be useful and interesting, not just to themselves but to other people,"
  • We always seem to be on the lookout for who else will find this helpful, amusing or interesting, and our brain data are showing evidence of that.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The study findings are published in the online edition of the journal Psychological Science, with print publication to follow later this summer.
  • "Now we have mapped the brain regions associated with ideas that are likely to be contagious and are associated with being a good 'idea salesperson.' In the future, we would like to be able to use these brain maps to forecast what ideas are likely to be successful and who is likely to be effective at spreading them."
  • the interns who were especially good at persuading the producers showed significantly more activation in a brain region known as the temporoparietal junction, or TPJ, at the time they were first exposed to the pilot ideas they would later recommend.
  • We found that increased activity in the TPJ was associated with an increased ability to convince others to get on board with their favorite ideas.
  • Thinking about what appeals to others may be even more important."
  • The TPJ, located on the outer surface of the brain, is part of what is known as the brain's "mentalizing network," which is involved in thinking about what other people think and feel.
  • David McGavock on 08 Jul 13
     
    Interesting findings. The emphasis here is on identifying activity of the brain that indicates a person's effectiveness with passing on (sharing) information. While that is notable, it would be great to know what activity indicates that the information has merit in and of itself. We have plenty of buzz in our world. What we need are authoritative sources.
David McGavock

A New Culture of Learning | Social Media Classroom - 3 views

socialmediaclassroom.com/...a-new-culture-learning

culture learning mistakes WIERD JSB mindamp learning culture

shared by David McGavock on 21 May 11 - No Cached
  • A New Culture of Learning
  • what strikes me is the second part of the title Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change.
  • I love seeing a child's imagination being captivated
  • ...32 more annotations...
  • I am challenged by many who see social-media as the next project rather than a shift in the paradigm of existence.
  • I believe that dissatisfaction with the factory model of school, along with the growing number, ubiquity, and accessiblity, of tools (for connection, collaboration and creation) will tip the balance toward new models and cultures of learning.
  • I love to see teachers and student figuring out how to use technology together; asking questions, trying stuff, "messing around" as Brown would say.
  • The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
  • Can I just say that it is amazingly prescient and still relevant even a decade later? I'm interested in comparing it to his more recent book in discussion here.
  • Howard reponds with an idea on assignments (and the power of assignments). I found the questions (or in other courses the assignements) to really good at directing my brain. 1.Read the question 2. go to sleep 3. stare at the ceiling for hours 4. brush teeth 5. eurekaThese methods are also used in action learning and action research
  • I'm reading the book "the myth of management" (which is not related to learning), and I found out that finding "faults" is actually a dirty consultant trick, as it expands the window through which you can sell your solution. I hacked that idea and replaced solution with learning.
  •  The role of the instructor in balancing freedom and structure -- setting enough structure so that the unlimited freedom doesn't become vertiginous and overwhelming -- resonates with my experiences with Rheingold U. so far. Assignments seem to help, but they can't be too onerous.
  •  Very nice article comparing Thomas/JSB ideas to John Dewey's:
  •  http://charlestkerchner.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/DeweyThomas.pdf
  • Ernst - I am particularly interested in Action Research of the "plan, act, observe,reflect" variety where we never really arrive at conclusions but start again in a new cycle of teaching and learning.
  • that idea of teaching people to fail is very important - I notice that this is acceptable very often in business especially in the contexts of 'start-ups' but unacceptable in most schools. Here in Europe, the work of the Finnish educationalist Pasi Sahlberg gets a lot of attention - one of his motifs is learning to be wrong.
  • Knowing who to listen to in the 'noise' of all the information overload is important - I'm looking forward to our continuing review of how we all re-imagine that new culture of learning.
  • Can You, and if yes, How,  Change a system from within? This is one of the key issues of our time. Learning, PLN, Community support structures, activism, Social media, cooperation.. are all part of that... so it is realIy at the heart of our SMC Alumni topics. 
  • I would suggest, we should be dialoguing in depth about the question, and how to formulate it, before jumping to solutions...
  • The work of social and developmental psychologist, Carol Dweck can inform our discussion about failure,
  • Her book, Mindset, posits that some students have growth mindsets and some have fixed mindsets.
  • Ernst, I adore your description of problem-solving (especially the enumerated part). Downtime is essential for processing information and I agree, even subtle shifts within group dynamics can cause huge internal vistas to open up.
  • The idea of structuring for failure in itself is a whole new take on creative thinking.
  • Schools reward success.  That's our measurement system, our "leaderboard".  Some winners at school go on to run schools. Schools punish failure deeply, systematically.  Remember dunce caps? So taking failure as a good thing is, at the very least, weird and defamiliarizing!
  • Chapter Two of Thomas and Seely-Brown's book  is so short - just five pages - They conclude with the idea ....the point is to embrace what we don't know, come up with better questions about it, and continue asking those questions in order to learn more and more, both incrementally and exponentially. I wonder do the authors want us to reflect repeatedly on the contents of the chapter given its brevity.
  • is it certain type of people who fail, who are subsequently allowed to start again?
  • book's first chapter
  • Two key elements: network ("a massive information network that provides almost unlimited access and resources", sounds like mobile + Web) and environments ("bounded and structural") (19).
  • what do you make of the examples they present?  What do they suggest about the theory they exemplify?
  • ohn Seely Brown is particularly interested in the idea of tinkering. He suggests one of the best 'tinkering' models is the architectural studio -- the place where students work together trying to solve each others' problems, and a mentor or master can also take part in open criticism. Find out why this is a model for us all.  http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bydesign/stories/2011/3147776.htm
  • The first chapter is a pretty rosy, and might I say westernized, view of the power of Internet access + play in learning.* It manages to enlighten and engage using a few choice narratives (I imagine we will get to the power of those at some point in the book, too) and sets us up for the rationale to come.
  • * I'm looking for some reaction with regards to that comment
  • based on WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic) concepts. (An aside, here's a truly wonderful post unpacking of the idea of WEIRD in social science research.)
  • I can only talk for myself but there are contradictions between what I think is best to do with the students I teach and what I actually do. This "living contradiction" is something I consider in my own studies - I noticed a Tweet last night from Howard: Online and blended learning is NOT about automating delivery of knowledge, but about encouraging peer learning, inquiry, discourse.
  • The sentence I liked most from Chapter One reads "One of the metaphors we adopt to describe this process is cultivation. A farmer for example takes the nearly unlimited resources of sunlight, wind, water, earth, and biology and consolidates them into the bounded and structured environment of garden or farm. We see a new culture of learning as a similar kind of process - but cultivating minds instead of plants"
  • Everyone - you may have seen the piece below - if not please take 12 minutes to view it - it fits nicely with our current discussion
  • David McGavock on 21 May 11
     
    This is the first capture of the conversation from the thread "A New Culture of Learning". We'll see how this goes
  • Howard Rheingold on 21 May 11
     
    I read the book almost cover to cover. It led me to think more about pushing what I've been doing closer to pure p2p. One of the co-learners in the latest Mindamp told me about "paragogy." That one is worth bookmarking.
David McGavock

Q&A: David Eagleman, Director, Initiative on Neuroscience and the Law | SmartPlanet - 1 views

www.smartplanet.com/...922

learning culture neuroscience law augmentation thinking tools

shared by David McGavock on 30 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • David Eagleman is about as close to a rock star that a neuroscientist can be.
  • Eagleman was excited to talk to SmartPlanet about his work at both the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law, a national, interdisciplinary organization he founded that’s looking at how to remake the U.S. legal system; and the Laboratory for Perception and Action, at Baylor College of Medicine. The former initiative tackles topics such as how brain imaging and analyses of “Big Data” on crime patterns can help communities better understand and prevent violent behavior in new ways. The latter looks broadly at how individual brains are not at all alike — and how the differences might be significant for how we construct and manage our societies.
  • His work is particularly relevant in policy-related discussions in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy in Connecticut.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • “To the newsreaders who feel that mental illness is best viewed as an excuse, let me suggest instead that we might more effectually recognize it as a national priority for social policy,” he wrote on his blog shortly after the shootings.  “If we care to prevent the next mass shooting, we should concentrate our efforts on getting meaningful diagnoses and resources to the next Adam Lanza.”
  • Because we are able now to measure things we have never been able to measure before, this allows us potentially to customize sentencing and rehabilitation. The goal is to have the whole system be more just and have more utility.
  • Our system is built on the assumption that if you’re over 18 and over the IQ of 70, you’re a practical reasoner, free to choose how you act. But modern neuroscience suggests that those are not good assumptions.
  • I have to emphasize, though, that this is not about exculpation. I have to be very clear that this is really about customized sentencing and rehab that works.
  • It’s helpful to be able to talk about science in basic ways that anyone can understand. What I tell my students in my lab is that they need to be able explain their research to an 8th grader.
  • I’m an amateur history buff, and if I want to read about the Roman Empire, I don’t want to read an academic debate, but instead a narrative by a trusted guide who’s done their homework, who will offer the filter of how they understand the Roman Empire, to shepherd me through its history in only 200 pages.
  • Rather than “playful,” I’d say that my approach is simply the opposite of boring. It’s about looking for and then trying to answer questions that are poweful enough to get you out of bed at 5AM.
  • My intuition on this idea: being a good scientist or creative writer is about maintaining the wide-eyed wonder of a child and asking questions all the time. That’s what really makes discovery happen in any field.
  • Science is changing really rapidly. One way is that lots of scientists are moving into Big Data
  • Right now we’re involved with serious crunching to pull out statistical info on recidivism and crime. Our first challenge is visualizing it. So in this sense, creativity and art also relevant. Data visualization is really valuable stuff; you can discover a trend when you see, wow, I didn’t realize that bump would be there. To be able to tie together data in beautiful ways allows us to see and discover patterns.
  • I don’t have any fear about losing the mystery of creativity. If I explain every single chemical piece in the process of why you enjoy the taste of a soy latte, it wouldn’t diminish your enjoyment of a soy latte. It might even enhance it
  • Neuroscientists work on how to understand how brains construct reality in general, but we are in the position of fish trying to understand water. What I mean by that is that we only know one way of seeing the world very well, like a fish only knows water.  Learning about how synesthesia works allows us to get out of our fishbowl,
  • You don’t need to know anything about the brain to understand what shape or style will be appealing. We may come scrambling up behind advertisers and product designers and validate them. If Apple wanted to hire me, sure, I’d say yes immediately and do the best job I could! But honestly, they already know how to do it. They’re the design experts. We neuroscientists would in come with our fancy machines and theories and explain why what they do is already true.
  • David McGavock on 30 Dec 12
     
     "To the newsreaders who feel that mental illness is best viewed as an excuse, let me suggest instead that we might more effectually recognize it as a national priority for social policy," he wrote on his blog shortly after the shootings.  "If we care to prevent the next mass shooting, we should concentrate our efforts on getting meaningful diagnoses and resources to the next Adam Lanza."
David McGavock

Transom » Radiolab: An Appreciation by Ira Glass - 0 views

transom.org/?p=20139

radiolab storytelling resources

shared by David McGavock on 24 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Real journalism – and by that I mean fact-based reporting – is getting trounced by commentary and opinion in all its forms, from Fox News to the political blogs to Jon Stewart. Everyone knows newspapers are in horrible trouble. TV news continually loses ratings. And one way we broadcast journalists can fight back and hold our audience is to sound like human beings on the air. Not know-it-all stiffs. One way the opinion guys kick our ass and appeal to an audience is that they talk like normal people, not like news robots speaking their stentorian news-speak. So I wish more broadcast journalism had such human narrators at its center. I think that would help fact-based journalism survive.
  • particularly the places where the story turns, or where the hosts are to take different sides of an issue, those moments are always improvised.
  • Thus the utterly effortless chitchat that floats you so cheerfully from plot point to character moment to scientific explanation to the next plot point is actually worked over second by second and beat by beat, over the course of weeks.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Jad’s an Oberlin-trained composer so he’s always either writing the music to fit the stories on his show, the way a composer writes a film score, or he adapts other people’s music so well you can’t tell it wasn’t custom made.
  • And all that meticulous work is in the service of something that’s the opposite of careful and meticulous: this totally chatty, happy, loose, spontaneous-sounding conversation between Jad and Robert and their interviewees.
  • on Radiolab. They invented this insanely concise, entertaining way to tell that story, and they have no problem hurtling through it quickly.
  • For my part, I find it comforting that this level of excellence is so labor intensive that they only can make ten full shows a year (plus, sure, 16 “shorts” that they distribute on the Internet). If they could do an hour of this every week, I think I’d have to quit radio. What would be the point of continuing? How could anyone compete with that?
  • There was an entire hour recently that took up the provocative question: from an evolutionary perspective, why would it be useful for us, or for any creature, to ever help one another? To ever be good? That’s a really hard premise for stories with ideas and emotion and strong characters and interesting plot lines.
  • Radiolab also does a beautiful job figuring out a mix of stories that’ll move us from one idea to the next over the course of an hour. Lots of their episodes have a coherent argument to them, an argument that takes an hour and several stories to lay out.
  • What’s striking is the ambition of all this. Jad and Robert seem to be inventing their effects and techniques as they go.
  • Sometimes it seems like the only people who understand how terrific the show is, are listeners.
  • “In an almost comic attempt to make their job hard, the duo take only the most difficult subjects from science and philosophy: ‘Time,’ ‘Morality,’ ‘Memory and Forgetting,’ ‘Limits.’”
  • Radiolab: An Appreciation I marvel at Radiolab when I hear it. I feel jealous. Its co-creators Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich have digested all the storytelling and production tricks of everyone in public radio before them, invented some slick moves of their own, and ended up creating the rarest thing you can create in any medium: a new aesthetic.
  • A 2010 NPR/SmithGeiger survey of news consumers who rightly should be in the public radio audience, showed that one of the biggest reasons adults say they choose not to listen to public radio is that they’re put off by the tone. One survey respondent said: “This type of story could be interesting, but the reporter’s voice and intonation is soooo affected, upper class, wasp, Ph.D. student-like, it detracts from the story.
  • This information is presented quickly and cheerfully. There’s a bounce to the whole thing. Music plays behind. Jad looks at a map, as he’s talking to Laura, naming the cities the balloon passed on its flight across England. It’s visual. Do I need to explain here that part of making great radio is remembering that you always need to give the audience things to look at?
  • All this banter also helps them solve a storytelling problem
  • David McGavock on 24 Sep 11
     
    Radiolab: An Appreciation I marvel at Radiolab when I hear it. I feel jealous. Its co-creators Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich have digested all the storytelling and production tricks of everyone in public radio before them, invented some slick moves of their own, and ended up creating the rarest thing you can create in any medium: a new aesthetic.
  • David McGavock on 24 Sep 11
     
    Telling a story - capturing the attention and curiosity of people. Sparking our humanity.
David McGavock

Users for Sale: Has Digital Illiteracy Turned Us Into Social Commodities? - 1 views

mashable.com/...users-products-rushkoff

shared by David McGavock on 08 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • In answer to your question, engaging with people costs us privacy. It always has. I think the only way to behave is as if nothing is private. And then fight to make what you care about legal and acceptable.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 08 Jul 11
       
      key point
  • You warn against the dangers of “selling our friends” by connecting our social graphs to various networks and apps. How does this damage our relationships, even if we’re doing it unwittingly?
  • Unwittingly, well, it’s more like when your friends keep inviting you to FarmVille or LinkedIn. When they unwittingly turn over their address book to one of these companies that’s really just in the business of swelling their subscriptions so that they can go have an IPO.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • You advocate “programming literacy” in the online platforms we use every day. How much can the average web user be expected to understand?
  • I don’t think the average web users of this century will achieve basic programming literacy.
  • If they don’t know how to make the programs, then I’d at least want them to know what the programs they are using are for. It makes it so much more purposeful. You get much more predictable results using the right technologies for the right jobs.
  • I want people to be able to ask themselves, “What does this website want me to do? Who owns it? What is it for?”
  • You note how our traditional social contracts (e.g. I can steal anything I want, but I won’t do it out of shame, fear, etc.) break down due to the anonymity and distance of the web. How can we change this and still maintain an open online culture?
  • We have an economic operating system based in scarcity — that’s how we create markets — so we don’t have a great way yet of sharing abundant resources.
  • It’s a problem of imagination, not reality. We have imaginary boundaries.
  • rather than getting people to use the web responsibly and intelligently, it may be easier to build networks that treat the humans more responsibly and intelligently. Those of us who do build stuff, those of us who are responsible for how these technologies are deployed, we have the opportunity and obligation to build technologies that are intrinsically liberating — programs that reveal their intentions, and that submit to the intentions of their users.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 09 Jul 11
       
      On one hand Rushkoff is saying all people need to become more literate of "programming". On the other hand he says that programmers need to focus on doing the job well (treat humans more responsibly - reveal their intentions more fully).
David McGavock

Values, Vision, Mission & Strategy - Mind & Life Institute - 0 views

www.mindandlife.org/mission

neuroscience thinking tools Cooperation Infotention Personal learning network Mind and Life

shared by David McGavock on 19 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • To guide us in our Mission, Vision and Strategy, the Mind & Life Institute has adopted a set of core values: Love, Mindfulness and Compassion Trust and Integrity Teamwork and Collaboration Impeccability and Continuous Improvement Open Communication and Transparency
  • Vision The Mind & Life Institute sees the potential of a world that fully understands the critical importance of training the mind in ways that reduce individual and societal suffering and promote individual and planetary peace, health, well-being and cooperation. Moreover, we envision a world where everyone has access to age-appropriate and culturally appropriate mental and emotional fitness practices.
  • we implement a practical, results-oriented Mission and Strategy based on scientific research to understand how we, as humans, can train our minds
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • promote and support rigorous, multi-disciplinary scientific investigation of the mind
  • dissemination of practices that cultivate the mental qualities of attention, emotional balance, kindness, compassion, confidence and happiness
  • rooted in an integrated way of knowing that combines the first and second person direct experience of contemplative practice with a modern scientific third person inquiry.
  • David McGavock on 19 Feb 12
     
    "The Mind & Life Institute is a non-profit organization that seeks to understand the human mind and the benefits of contemplative practices through an integrated mode of knowing that combines first person knowledge from the world's contemplative traditions with methods and findings from contemporary scientific inquiry. Ultimately, our goal is to relieve human suffering and advance well-being."
David McGavock

The Myth Of AI | Edge.org - 1 views

edge.org/...the-myth-of-ai

augmentation neuroscience myth Jaron Lanier

shared by David McGavock on 17 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • what I'm proposing is that if AI was a real thing, then it probably would be less of a threat to us than it is as a fake thing.
  • it adds a layer of religious thinking to what otherwise should be a technical field.
  • we can talk about pattern classification.
  • ...38 more annotations...
  • But when you add to it this religious narrative that's a version of the Frankenstein myth, where you say well, but these things are all leading to a creation of life, and this life will be superior to us and will be dangerous
  • I'm going to go through a couple of layers of how the mythology does harm.
  • this overall atmosphere of accepting the algorithms as doing a lot more than they do. In the case of Netflix, the recommendation engine is serving to distract you from the fact that there's not much choice anyway.
  • If a program tells you, well, this is how things are, this is who you are, this is what you like, or this is what you should do, we have a tendency to accept that.
  • our economy has shifted to what I call a surveillance economy, but let's say an economy where algorithms guide people a lot, we have this very odd situation where you have these algorithms that rely on big data in order to figure out who you should date, who you should sleep with, what music you should listen to, what books you should read, and on and on and on
  • people often accept that
  • all this overpromising that AIs will be about to do this or that. It might be to become fully autonomous driving vehicles instead of only partially autonomous, or it might be being able to fully have a conversation as opposed to only having a useful part of a conversation to help you interface with the device.
  • other cases where the recommendation engine is not serving that function, because there is a lot of choice, and yet there's still no evidence that the recommendations are particularly good.
  • there's no way to tell where the border is between measurement and manipulation in these systems.
  • if the preponderance of those people have grown up in the system and are responding to whatever choices it gave them, there's not enough new data coming into it for even the most ideal or intelligent recommendation engine to do anything meaningful.
  • it simply turns into a system that measures which manipulations work, as opposed to which ones don't work, which is very different from a virginal and empirically careful system that's trying to tell what recommendations would work had it not intervened
  • What's not clear is where the boundary is.
  • If you ask: is a recommendation engine like Amazon more manipulative, or more of a legitimate measurement device? There's no way to know.
  • we don't know to what degree they're measurement versus manipulation.
  • If people are deciding what books to read based on a momentum within the recommendation engine that isn't going back to a virgin population, that hasn't been manipulated, then the whole thing is spun out of control and doesn't mean anything anymore
  • not so much a rise of evil as a rise of nonsense.
  • because of the mythology about AI, the services are presented as though they are these mystical, magical personas. IBM makes a dramatic case that they've created this entity that they call different things at different times—Deep Blue and so forth.
  • Cortana or a Siri
  • This pattern—of AI only working when there's what we call big data, but then using big data in order to not pay large numbers of people who are contributing—is a rising trend in our civilization, which is totally non-sustainable
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 17 Nov 14
       
      Key relationship between automation of tasks, downsides, and expectation for AI
  • If you talk about AI as a set of techniques, as a field of study in mathematics or engineering, it brings benefits. If we talk about AI as a mythology of creating a post-human species, it creates a series of problems that I've just gone over, which include acceptance of bad user interfaces, where you can't tell if you're being manipulated or not, and everything is ambiguous.
  • It creates incompetence, because you don't know whether recommendations are coming from anything real or just self-fulfilling prophecies from a manipulative system that spun off on its own, and economic negativity, because you're gradually pulling formal economic benefits away from the people who supply the data that makes the scheme work.
  • I'm going to give you two scenarios.
  • let's suppose somebody comes up with a way to 3-D print a little assassination drone that can go buzz around and kill somebody. Let's suppose that these are cheap to make.
  • Having said all that, let's address directly this problem of whether AI is going to destroy civilization and people, and take over the planet and everything.
  • some disaffected teenagers, or terrorists, or whoever start making a bunch of them, and they go out and start killing people randomly
  • This idea that some lab somewhere is making these autonomous algorithms that can take over the world is a way of avoiding the profoundly uncomfortable political problem, which is that if there's some actuator that can do harm, we have to figure out some way that people don't do harm with it.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 17 Nov 14
       
      Another key - focus on the actuator, not the agent that exploits it.
  • the part that causes the problem is the actuator. It's the interface to physicality
  • not so much whether it's a bunch of teenagers or terrorists behind it or some AI
  • The sad fact is that, as a society, we have to do something to not have little killer drones proliferate.
  • What we don't have to worry about is the AI algorithm running them, because that's speculative.
  • another one where there's so-called artificial intelligence, some kind of big data scheme, that's doing exactly the same thing, that is self-directed and taking over 3-D printers, and sending these things off to kill people.
  • There's a whole other problem area that has to do with neuroscience, where if we pretend we understand things before we do, we do damage to science,
  • You have to be able to accept what your ignorances are in order to do good science. To reject your own ignorance just casts you into a silly state where you're a lesser scientist.
  • To my mind, the mythology around AI is a re-creation of some of the traditional ideas about religion, but applied to the technical world.
  • The notion of this particular threshold—which is sometimes called the singularity, or super-intelligence, or all sorts of different terms in different periods—is similar to divinity.
  • In the history of organized religion, it's often been the case that people have been disempowered precisely to serve what were perceived to be the needs of some deity or another, where in fact what they were doing was supporting an elite class that was the priesthood for that deity.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 17 Nov 14
       
      Technical priesthood.
  • If AI means this mythology of this new creature we're creating, then it's just a stupid mess that's confusing everybody, and harming the future of the economy. If what we're talking about is a set of algorithms and actuators that we can improve and apply in useful ways, then I'm very interested, and I'm very much a participant in the community that's improving those things.
  • A lot of people in the religious world are just great, and I respect and like them. That goes hand-in-hand with my feeling that some of the mythology in big religion still leads us into trouble that we impose on ourselves and don't need.
  • David McGavock on 17 Nov 14
     
    "The idea that computers are people has a long and storied history. It goes back to the very origins of computers, and even from before. There's always been a question about whether a program is something alive or not since it intrinsically has some kind of autonomy at the very least, or it wouldn't be a program. There has been a domineering subculture-that's been the most wealthy, prolific, and influential subculture in the technical world-that for a long time has not only promoted the idea that there's an equivalence between algorithms and life, and certain algorithms and people, but a historical determinism that we're inevitably making computers that will be smarter and better than us and will take over from us."
David McGavock

Babies help unlock the origins of morality - Page 3 - CBS News - 0 views

www.cbsnews.com/...3

babies origins morality neuroscience cbs

shared by David McGavock on 04 May 14 - No Cached
  • From this Wynn concludes that infants prefer those "who harm... others" who are unlike them.
  • We are predisposed to break the world up into different human groups based on the most subtle and seemingly irrelevant cues, and that, to some extent, is the dark side of morality.
  • Karen Wynn: I think, we are built to, you know, at the drop of a hat, create us and them.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Lesley Stahl: Sounds to me like the experiment show they are little bigots. Paul Bloom: I think to some extent, a bias to favor the self, where the self could be people who look like me, people who act like me, people who have the same taste as me, is a very strong human bias.
  • David McGavock on 04 May 14
     
    Page 3
David McGavock

Are Babies Born Good? | Science | Smithsonian - 0 views

www.smithsonianmag.com/...are-babies-born-good-165443013

babies moral compass debate neuroscience Cooperation Smithsonian

shared by David McGavock on 06 May 14 - No Cached
  • The study of babies and young toddlers is a perplexing business. Even the most perceptive observers can be tempted to see what isn’t there.
  • “When our infant was only four months old I thought that he tried to imitate sounds; but I may have deceived myself,” Charles Darwin wrote in “A Biographical Sketch of an Infant,” his classic study of his own son.
  • Even well-behaved babies are notoriously tough to read: Their most meditative expressions are often the sign of an impending bowel movement.
  • ...40 more annotations...
  • “People who’ve spent their whole careers studying perception are now turning toward social life, because that’s where the bio-behavioral rubber meets the evolutionary road,” Konner says. “Natural selection has operated as much or more on social behavior as on more basic things like perception. In our evolution, survival and reproduction depended more and more on social competence as you went from basic mammals to primates to human ancestors to humans.”
  • The lab’s initial study along these lines, published in 2007 in the journal Nature, startled the scientific world by showing that in a series of simple morality plays, 6- and 10-month-olds overwhelmingly preferred “good guys” to “bad guys.” “This capacity may serve as the foundation for moral thought and action,” the authors wrote. It “may form an essential basis for...more abstract concepts of right and wrong.”
  • spate of related studies hinting that, far from being born a “perfect idiot,” as Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued, or a selfish brute, as Thomas Hobbes feared, a child arrives in the world provisioned with rich, broadly pro-social tendencies and seems predisposed to care about other people.
  • No seasoned parent can believe that nurture doesn’t make a difference, or that nature trumps all. The question is where the balance lies.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 06 May 14
       
      Key thought - where is the balance?
  • Wynn and her husband, the psychologist Paul Bloom, collaborated on much of Hamlin’s research, and Wynn remembers being a bit more optimistic: “Do babies have attitudes, render judgments? I just found that to be a very intuitively gripping question,” she says.
  • Infant morality studies are so new that the field’s grand dame is 29-year-old J. Kiley Hamlin, who was a graduate student at the Yale lab in the mid-2000s.
  • she stumbled on animated presentations that one of her predecessors had made, in which a “climber” (say, a red circle with goggle eyes) attempted to mount a hill, and a “helper” (a triangle in some trials) assisted him, or a “hinderer” (a square) knocked him down.
  • When I visited, Tasimi was recreating versions of Hamlin’s puppet shows as background work for a new project.
  • The child shot her a woebegone look before dutifully hauling himself out of the ball pit, picking up the pen and returning it to the researcher.
  • When babies at the Yale lab turn 2, their parents are tactfully invited to return to the university after the child’s third birthday.
  • The next lab I visited was at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and it has made this age group something of a specialty, through work on toddler altruism (a phrase that, admittedly, rings rather hollow in parental ears).
  • One advantage of testing slightly older babies and children is that they are able to perform relatively complicated tasks. In the Laboratory for Developmental  Studies, the toddlers don’t watch puppets help: They themselves are asked to help.
  • Warneken was initially interested in how little children read the intentions of others, and the question of whether toddlers would assist others in reaching their goals. He wanted to sound out these behaviors in novel helping experiments—“accidentally” dropping a hat, for instance, and seeing if the kids would return it.
  • prominent psychologists had previously argued that children are selfish until they are socialized; they acquire altruistic behaviors only as childhood progresses and they are rewarded for following civilization’s rules, or punished for breaking them.
  • One day he and a toddler were bouncing a ball together. Truly by accident, the ball rolled away—“the moment of serendipity,” as Warneken now calls it. His first impulse was to retrieve the toy and carry on, but he stopped himself.
  • The little boy watched him struggle, then after a moment heaved himself up, waddled over to the toy and—defying the scientific community’s uncharitable expectations—stretched out his own chubby little arm to hand the ball to his gigantic playmate.
  • In the following months, Warneken designed experiments for 18-month-olds, in which a hapless adult (often played by him) attempted to perform a variety of tasks, to no avail, as the toddlers looked on. The toddlers gallantly rescued Warneken’s dropped teaspoons and clothespins, stacked his books and pried open stubborn cabinet doors so he could reach inside.
  • videotaped experiment of a toddler wallowing in a wading pool full of plastic balls.
  • But the elements that underpin morality—altruism, sympathy for others, the understanding of other people’s goals—are in place much earlier than we thought, and clearly in place before children turn 2.”
  • Because they were manifested in 18-month-olds, Warneken believed that the helping behaviors might be innate, not taught or imitated. To test his assumption, he turned to one of our two nearest primate relatives, the chimpanzee.
  • The first chimps Warneken studied, nursery-raised in a German zoo
  • as the caretaker dropped the first object: As if on cue, the chimp bounded over and breezily handed it back.
  • Warneken wondered if perhaps human-reared chimps had been conditioned to be helpful to their food providers
  • They would consistently help when the person was reaching for the object,” even in the absence of any payoff.
  • The final step was to see if chimps would assist each other. So Warneken rigged apparatuses where one caged chimp could help a neighbor reach an inaccessible banana or piece of watermelon. There was no hope of getting a bite for themselves, yet the empowered chimps fed their fellow apes regardless.
  • But under what circumstances are toddlers altruistic?
  • Some recent chimp studies suggest that chimps won’t help others unless they witness the dismay of the creature in need. Are human children likewise “reactive” helpers, or can they come to another’s assistance without social cues?
  • “You can see the birth of this proactive helping behavior from around 1.5 to 2.5 years of age,” Warneken explains. “The children don’t need solicitation for helping. They do it voluntarily.” Proactive helping may be a uniquely human skill.
  • Criticisms of the “nice baby” research are varied, and the work with the youngest kids is perhaps the most controversial.
  • such method­o­­­logical worries are never far from baby researchers’ minds.
  • Other critics, meanwhile, fault the developmental philosophy behind the experiments.
  • these researchers argue, but actually they start from scratch with only senses and reflexes, and, largely through interaction with their mothers, learn about the social world in an astonishingly short period of time.
  • And still other scientists think the baby studies underestimate the power of regional culture.
  • Ideas of the public good and appropriate punishment, for instance, are not fixed across societies: Among the Matsigenka people of the Peruvian Amazon, where Henrich works, helping rarely occurs outside of the immediate household, if only because members of the tribe tend to live with relatives.
  • Plenty of bleak observations complicate the discovery of children’s nobler impulses. Kids are intensely tribal: 3-month-olds like people of their own race more than others, experiments have shown, and 1-year-olds prefer native speakers to those of another tongue.
  • Babies, in addition, are big fans of punishment. Hamlin likes to show a video of a young vigilante who doesn’t just choose between the good and bad puppets; he whacks the bad guy over the head.
  • Perhaps babies are not really trying to help in a particular moment, per se, as much as they are expressing their obliging nature to the powerful adults who control their worlds—behaving less like Mother Teresa, in a sense, than a Renaissance courtier. Maybe parents really would invest more in a helpful child, who as an adult might contribute to the family’s welfare, than they would in a selfish loafer—or so the evolutionary logic goes.
  • A different interpretation, Warneken says, is that in a simpler world maybe toddlers really could help, pitching in to the productivity of a hunter-gatherer group in proportion to their relatively meager calorie intake.
  • For many researchers, these complexities and contradictions make baby studies all the more worthwhile.
  • “I’m trying to think of a lesser-of-two evils study,” he says. “Yes, we have our categories of good and bad, but those categories involve many different things—stealing $20 versus raping versus killing. Clearly I can’t use those sorts of cases with, you know, 13-month-olds. But you can come up with morality plays along a continuum to see...whether they form preferences about whether they like the guy who wasn’t as bad as the other bad guy.”
  • David McGavock on 06 May 14
     
    "The study of babies and young toddlers is a perplexing business. Even the most perceptive observers can be tempted to see what isn't there."
David McGavock

The Evolution of Cooperation* - 1 views

webcache.googleusercontent.com/search

evolution cooperation Axelrod prisoners dilemma defection

shared by David McGavock on 31 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • To find a good strategy to use in such situations, I invited experts in game theory to submit programs for a computer Prisoner’s Dilemma tournament – much like a computer chess tournament.
  • the winner was the simplest of all candidates sub- mitted. This was a strategy of simple reciprocity which cooperates on the first move and then does whatever the other player did on the previous move. Using an American colloquial phrase, this strategy was named Tit for Tat.
  • face of an uncalled-for defection by the other, forgiveness after responding to a provocation, and clarity of behavior so that the other player can recognize and adapt to your pattern of action.
  • ...13 more annotations...
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 31 Mar 14
       
      These conditions are core.
  • data from these tournaments reveals four properties which tend to make a strategy successful: avoidance of unnecessary con- flict by cooperating as long as the other player does, provocability in the
  • What made this mutual restraint possible was the static nature of trench warfare, where the same small units faced each other for extended periods of time. The soldiers of these opposing small units actually violated orders from their own high commands in order to achieve tacit cooperation with each other
  • the individuals involved do not have to be rational: The evolutionary process allows successful strategies to thrive, even if the players do not know why or how. Nor do they have to exchange messages or commit- ments: They do not need words, because their deeds speak for them. Likewise, there is no need to assume trust between the players: The use of reciprocity can be enough to make defection unproductive. Altruism is not needed: Successful strategies can elicit cooperation even from an egoist. Finally, no central authority is needed: Cooperation based on reciprocity can be self-policing
  • An indefinite number of interactions, therefore, is a condition under which cooperation can emerge
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 31 Mar 14
       
      This condition is especially important in the case of egoists. Relationship over time.
  • So there must be some clustering of individuals who use strategies with two properties: The strategy cooperates on the first move, and discriminates between those who respond to the cooperation and those who do not
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 31 Mar 14
       
      The check for reciprocation is a bit of evidence that the other side knows the value of the move of cooperation; that they won't be abandoned.
  • Whether the players trust each other or not is less important in the long run than whether the conditions are ripe for them to build a stable pattern of cooperation with each other
  • It turns out that if one waits to respond to uncalled-for defections, there is a risk of sending the wrong signal. The longer defections are allowed to go unchallenged, the more likely it is that the other player will draw the conclusion that defection can pay.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 31 Mar 14
       
      Immediate feedback appears to be important in many domains.
  • The foundation of cooperation is not really trust, but the durability of the relationship.
  • Waiting for probes to accumulate only risks the need for a response so large as to evoke yet more trouble.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 31 Mar 14
       
      I have found that testing limits is a factor in working with children and adults. We are alert to the boundaries.
  • For this reason, the only arms control agreements which can be stable are those whose violations can be detected soon enough. The critical requirement is that violations can be detected before they can accumulate
  • Therefore, the advice to players of the Prisoner’s Dilemma might serve as good advice to national leaders as well: Don’t be envious, don’t be the first to defect, reciprocate both cooperation and defection, and don’t be too clever.
  • We are used to thinking about competitions in which there is only one winner, competitions such as football or chess. But the world is rarely like that. In a vast range of situations, mutual cooperation can be better for both sides than mutual defection. The key to doing well lies not in overcoming others, but in eliciting their cooperation
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 31 Mar 14
       
      Herein lies another key... that we have a cooperative (win-win) attitude and understanding of the "game". We see our survival as tied with not exclusive of the fate of the "other".
  • David McGavock on 31 Mar 14
     
    We are used to thinkingabout competitions in which there is only one winner, competitions such asfootball or chess. But the world is rarely like that. In a vast range ofsituations, mutual cooperation can be better for both sides than mutualdefection. The key to doing well lies not in overcoming others, but ineliciting their cooperation
srgupta

http://www.ach.lit.ulaval.ca/Gratis/Evans_Electronic.pdf - 0 views

electronic journals print reading science scholarship Think-Know

shared by srgupta on 16 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • What is the effect of online availability ofjournal issues? It is possible that by makingmore research more available, online searchingcould conceivably broaden the work cited andlead researchers, as a collective, away from the“core”journals of their fields and to dispersedbut individually relevant work. I will show,however, that even as deeper journal back is-sues became available online, scientists andscholars cited more recent articles; even asmore total journals became available online,fewer were cited
    • srgupta
      srgupta on 16 Apr 16
       
      Thesis
  • Figure 1 shows the speed of the shift toward commercial and free electronic provision of articles, and how deepening backfiles have made more early science readily available in recent years.
    • srgupta
      srgupta on 16 Apr 16
       
      Clear evidence of increase in accessibility and availability of articles.
  • Panel regression models were used to explore the relation between online article availability and citation activity—average historical depth of citations, number of distinct articles and journals cited, and Herfindahl concentration of citations to particular articles and journals—over time (details on methods are in the Supporting Online Material)
    • srgupta
      srgupta on 16 Apr 16
       
      Methodology
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The graphs in Fig. 2 trace the influence of online access, estimated from the entire sample of articles, and illustrated for journals and subfields with the mean number of citations. Figure 2A shows the simultaneous effect of commercial and free online availability on the average age of citations
  • The first question was whether depth of citation—years between articles and the work they reference—is predicted by the depth of journal issues online—how many years back issues were electronically available during the previous year when scientists presumably drafted them into their papers.
  • Collectively, the models presented illustrate that as journal archives came online, either through commercial vendors or freely, citation patterns shifted. As deeper backfiles became available, more recent articles were referenced; as more articles became available, fewer were cited and citations became more concentrated within fewer articles. These changes likely mean that the shift from browsing in print to searching online facilitates avoidance of older and less relevant literature. Moreover, hyperlinking through an online archive puts experts in touch with consensus about what is the most important prior work—what work is broadly discussed and referenced. With both strategies, experts online bypass many of the marginally related articles that print researchers skim. If online researchers can more easily find prevailing opinion, they are more likely to follow it, leading to more citations referencing fewer articles. Research on the extreme inequality of Internet hyperlinks (14), scientific citations (15, 16), and other forms of “preferential attachment” (17, 18) suggests that near-random differences in quality amplify when agents become aware of each other’s choices. Agents view others’ choices as relevant information—a signal of quality—and factor them into their own reading and citation selections. By enabling scientists to quickly reach and converge with prevailing opinion, electronic journals hasten scientific consensus. But haste may cost more than the subscription to an online archive: Findings and ideas that do not become consensus quickly will be forgotten quickly .
    • srgupta
      srgupta on 16 Apr 16
       
      Conclusion and possible explanation
  • This research ironically intimates that one of the chief values of print library research is poor indexing. Poor indexing—indexing by titles and authors, primarily within core journals— likely had unintended consequences that assisted the integration of science and scholarship. By drawing researchers through unrelated articles, print browsing and perusal may have facilitated broader comparisons and led researchers into the past. Modern graduate education parallels this shift in publication—shorter in years, more specialized in scope, culminating less frequently in a true dissertation than an album of articles (19)
    • srgupta
      srgupta on 16 Apr 16
       
      I have a hard time accepting this. A hint of nostalgia for the "old way" of doing things?
  • As 21st-century scientists and scholars use online searching and hyperlinking to frame and publish their arguments more efficiently, they weave them into a more focused—and more narrow—past and present.
    • srgupta
      srgupta on 16 Apr 16
       
      Empirical results are convincing, but this isn't a given. New medium enables new forms of knowledge, and requires new forms of know-how.
    • srgupta
      srgupta on 16 Apr 16
       
      Filter bubble
  • srgupta on 16 Apr 16
     
    An empirical study of how the shift from print to online publication of journals has changed citation, research, and reading habits. Compelling use of data, though I find the some of the explanations somewhat tenuous.
David McGavock

The Technium: Amish Hackers - 1 views

www.kk.org/...amish_hackers_a.php

technology Amish Hacking diy sustainability Cooperation Infotention thinking tools augmentation commons

shared by David McGavock on 26 Apr 12 - Cached
  • comes up with a justification of how it fits into the Amish orientation. So he goes to his bishop with this proposal: "I like to try this out." Bishop says to Ivan, "Okay Ivan, do whatever you want with this. But you have to be ready to give it up, if we decide it is not helping you or hurting others." So Ivan acquires the tech and ramps it up, while his neighbors, family, and bishops watch intently. They weigh the benefits and drawbacks. What is it doing to the community?
  • 1) They are selective. They know how to say "no" and are not afraid to refuse new things. They ban more than they adopt. 2) They evaluate new things by experience instead of by theory. They let the early adopters get their jollies by pioneering new stuff under watchful eyes. 3) They have criteria by which to select choices: technologies must enhance family and community and distance themselves from the outside world. 4) The choices are not individual, but communal. The community shapes and enforces technological direction.
  • David McGavock on 26 Apr 12
     
    The Amish have the undeserved reputation of being luddites, of people who refuse to employ new technology. It's well known the strictest of them don't use electricity, or automobiles, but rather farm with manual tools and ride in a horse and buggy. In any debate about the merits of embracing new technology, the Amish stand out as offering an honorable alternative of refusal. Yet Amish lives are anything but anti-technological. In fact on my several visits with them, I have found them to be ingenious hackers and tinkers, the ultimate makers and do-it-yourselfers and surprisingly pro technology.
  • David McGavock on 26 Apr 12
     
    Kevin Kelly describes Amish Hackers and the way the Amish community sifts and selects appropriate technology. Talk about infotention! These people have focus on what a technology can do for them and how it will benefit the greater community.
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