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David McGavock

The Hidden Savant in You | Psychology Today - 0 views

www.psychologytoday.com/...the-hidden-savant-in-you

savant neuroscience psychology augmentation

shared by David McGavock on 18 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Savants can perform extraordinary cognitive feats much like trained experts, but unlike experts they usually cannot describe what makes them so talented, seemingly relying on intuition rather than conscious deliberation to quickly make choices.
  • he consensus among many researchers is that intuitions are judgments made by unconscious processes in the brain.
  • Studies have shown that inhibiting activity in certain areas of the brain can facilitate solving geometric puzzles.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Allan Snyder has used transcranial direct current stimulation (DCS) to alter the activity both in the left and right hemispheres.
  • DCS was applied for only ten minutes, specifically to decrease activity in the left hemisphere and increase activity in the right hemisphere, 40 percent of subjects were able to solve the puzzle.
  • Tasks like solving the nine-dots puzzle are notoriously difficult because of our brains are structured in such a way as to limit creativity.
  • The left hemisphere is thought to govern the role that right-brain activity may play in cognition. Inhibiting activity in the left hemisphere of the brain is thought to remove the predisposition to interpret random elements in meaningful ways, allowing for more creative solutions generated in the right brain to make it into consciousness.
  • Savants thus may have a greater degree of conscious access to judgments of unconscious processes than non-savants.
  • As we become more skilled at manipulating brain processes through psychoactive drugs or electronic devices, we may be able to invoke savant-like skills in neurotypical people. 
David McGavock

Kim Peek, The Real Rain Man | Psychology Today - 0 views

www.psychologytoday.com/...kim-peek-the-real-rain-man

kim peek rain man augmentation thinking tools neuroscience

shared by David McGavock on 18 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Kim Peek, who lent inspiration to the fictional character Raymond Babbitt—played by Dustin Hoffman—in the movie Rain Man, was a remarkable savant.
  • He could read both pages of an open book at once, one page with one eye and the other with the other eye
  • He would retain 98 percent of the information he read.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Unlike many individuals with savant syndrome, Kim Peek was not afflicted with autistic spectrum disorder. Though he was strongly introverted, he did not have difficulties with social understanding and communication.
  • The main cause of his remarkable abilities seems to have been the lack of connections between his brain's two hemispheres. An MRI scan revealed an absence of the corpus callosum, the anterior commissure and the hippocampal commissure, the parts of the neurological system that transfer information between hemispheres. In some sense Kim was a natural born split-brain patient.
  • Michael Gazzaniga and Roger W. Sperry, the first to study split brains in humans, found that several patients who had undergone a complete calloscotomy suffered from split-brain syndrome.
  • the left hemisphere gives orders that reflect the person’s rational goal, whereas the right hemisphere issues conflicting demands that reveal hidden preferences.
  • Despite his brilliant mind, his IQ was 87, significantly below normal. It was also difficult for him to follow directions of certain kinds.
  • Kim Peek may have developed additional subcortical connections for information transfer.
  • Peek's ability to retain large amounts of information may have had something to do with another condition he was afflicted with called macrocephaly. This brain abnormality consists in an excessively large head and a correspondingly huge brain.
  • As a baby the real rain man was diagnosed with mental retardation and the physicians told his parents that he never would be able to read or talk.
  • Despite the recommendation, Kim’s parents chose to raise him at home.
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

Final Report: Introduction | DIGITAL YOUTH RESEARCH - 1 views

digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/book-introduction

socialnetworks digitalnatives socialnetworking youthmedia

shared by David McGavock on 27 Apr 12 - Cached
  • What is generally lacking in the literature overall, and in the United States in particular, is an understanding of how new media practices are embedded in a broader social and cultural ecology. While we have a picture of technology trends on one hand, and spotlights on specific youth populations and practices on the other, we need more work that brings these two pieces of the puzzle together. How are specific new media practices embedded in existing (and evolving) social structures and cultural categories?
  • we describe how our work addresses this gap, outlining our methodological commitments and descriptive focus that have defined the scope of this book. The first goal of this book is to document youth new media practice in rich, qualitative detail in order to provide a picture of how young people are mobilizing these media and technologies in their everyday lives.
  • In this section of this introductory chapter, we outline our methodological approach and how we have defined the objects and focus of our study. The descriptive frame of our study is defined by our ethnographic approach, the study of youth culture and practice, and the study of new media.
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • How are new media being taken up by youth practices and agendas? Our analytic question follows from this: How do these practices change the dynamics of youth-adult negotiations over literacy, learning, and authoritative knowledge?
  • We have developed an interdisciplinary analytic tool kit to investigate this complex set of relations between changing technology, kid-adult relations, and definitions of learning and literacy. Our key terms are “genres of participation,” “networked publics,” “peer-based learning,” and “new media literacy.”
  • The primary distinction we make is between friendship-driven and interest-driven genres of participation, which correspond to different genres of youth culture, social network structure, and modes of learning.
  • We use the term “peer” to refer to the people whom youth see as part of their lateral network of relations, whom they look to for affiliation, competition, as well as disaffiliation and distancing. Peers are the group of people to whom youth look to develop their sense of self, reputation, and status.
  • In contrast to friendship-driven practices, with interest-driven practices, specialized activities, interests, or niche and marginalized identities come first.
  • nterest-driven practices are what youth describe as the domain of the geeks, freaks, musicians, artists, and dorks, the kids who are identified as smart, different, or creative, who generally exist at the margins of teen social worlds.
  • Rather than relying on distinctions based on given categories such as gender, class, or ethnic identity, we have identified genres based on what we saw in our ethnographic material as the distinctions that emerge from youth practice and culture, and that help us interpret how media intersect with learning and participation
  • Genres of participation provide ways of identifying the sources of diversity in how youth engage with new media in a way that does not rely on a simple notion of “divides” or a ranking of more- or less-sophisticated media expertise. Instead, these genres represent different investments that youth make in particular forms of sociability and differing forms of identification with media genres.
  • Our work here, however, is to take more steps in applying situated approaches to learning to an understanding of mediated sociability, though not of the school-centered variety. This requires integrating approaches in public-culture studies with theories of learning and participation.
  • A growing body of ethnographic work documents how learning happens in informal settings, as a side effect of everyday life and social activity, rather than in an explicit instructional agenda.
  • Our interest, more specifically, is in documenting instances of learning that are centered around youth peer-based interaction, in which the agenda is not defined by parents and teachers.
  • What counts as learning and literacy is a question of collective values, values that are constantly being contested and negotiated between different social groups. Periods of cultural and technological flux open up new areas of debate about what should count as part of our common culture and literacy and what are appropriate ways for young people to participate in these new cultural forms.
  • While what is being defined as “new media literacy” is certainly not the exclusive province of youth, unlike in the case of “old” literacies youth are playing a more central role in the redefinition of these newer forms. In fact, the current anxiety over how new media erode literacy and writing standards could be read as an indicator of the marginalization of adult institutions that have traditionally defined literacy norms (whether that is the school or the family).
  • our work does not seek to define the components of new media literacy or to participate directly in the normalization of particular forms of literacy standards or practice. Rather, we see our contribution as describing the forms of competencies, skills, and literacy practices that youth are developing through media production and online communication in order to inform these broader debates.
  • Although the tradition of New Literacy Studies has described literacy in a more multicultural and multimodal frame, it is often silent as to the generational differences in how literacies are valued.
  • The chapters that follow are organized based on what emerged from our material as the core practices that structure youth engagement with new media.
  • Media Ecologies, frames the technological and social context in which young people are consuming, sharing, and producing new media.
  • introduces three genres of participation with new media that are an alternative to common ways of categorizing forms of media access: hanging out, messing around, and geeking out.
  • following two chapters focus on mainstream friendship-driven practices and networks.
  • instant messaging, social network sites, and mobile phones
  • making friendships, gossiping, bullying, and jockeying for status are reproduced online, but they are also reshaped
  • chapter on Intimacy
  • examines practices that are a long-standing and pervasive part of everyday youth sociality.
  • flirting, dating, and breaking up.
  • these norms largely mirror the existing practices of teen romance
  • The next chapter on Families also takes up a key “given” set of local social relationships by looking across the diverse families we have encountered in our research. The
  • use of physical space in the home, routines, rules, and shared production and play. The chapter also examines how the boundaries of home and family are extended through the use of new media.
  • final three chapters of the book focus primarily on interest-driven genres of participation, though they also describe the interface with more friendship-driven genres.
  • Gaming examines different genres of gaming practice: killing time, hanging out, recreational gaming, mobilizing and organizing, and augmented game play
  • Creative Production, looking across a range of different case studies of youth production, including podcasting, video blogging, video remix, hip-hop production, fan fiction, and fansubbing.
  • Work examines how youth are engaged in economic activity and other forms of labor using new media. The chapter suggests that new media are providing avenues to make the productive work of youth more visible and consequential.
  • David McGavock on 27 Apr 12
     
    "What is generally lacking in the literature overall, and in the United States in particular, is an understanding of how new media practices are embedded in a broader social and cultural ecology. While we have a picture of technology trends on one hand, and spotlights on specific youth populations and practices on the other, we need more work that brings these two pieces of the puzzle together. How are specific new media practices embedded in existing (and evolving) social structures and cultural categories?"
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.
David McGavock

From Brain to Mind: Using Neuroscience to Guide Change in Education « Learnin... - 0 views

learningwithscience.wordpress.com/...e-to-guide-change-in-education

augmentation Personal learning network thinking tools neuroscience brain education

shared by David McGavock on 20 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • Zull begins his journey with sensory-motor learning, and how that leads to discovery, and discovery to emotion. He then describes how deeper learning develops, how symbolic systems such as language and numbers emerge as tools for thought, how memory builds a knowledge base, and how memory is then used to create ideas and solve problems. Along the way he prompts us to think of new ways to shape educational experiences from early in life through adulthood, informed by the insight that metacognition lies at the root of all learning.
  • he argues that self-knowledge, awareness of how and why we think as we do, and the ability to adapt and learn, are critical to our survival as individuals; and that the transformation of education,
  • David McGavock on 20 Dec 11
     
    "This book offers the reader an engrossing and coherent introduction to what neuroscience can tell us about cognitive development through experience, and its implications for education."
David McGavock

Jason Silva's Captivating Videos Deliver a Dose of 'Techno-Optimism' | Underwire | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...1

augmentation techno-optimism Jason Silva tools solution

shared by David McGavock on 14 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • video maker and self-described “philosophical performer” Jason Silva has a much more optimistic (and logically sound) mode of thinking about the future and all the technologically awesome possibilities it has to offer.
  • As technology has advanced, it acts as a buffer that shrinks the lag time between what we dream about and what we can create and substantiate in the world.”
  • Techno-optimism is a belief in the power of technology to extend our sphere of possibilities, and ultimately a belief that technology helps us solve and transcend problems, limitations and obstacles.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • we should decide that we need to make better tools to solve the problems caused by the initial tools
  • The world’s best IT is the alphabet
  • it can be used to compose Shakespearean sonnets
  • But you can also use the alphabet to compose hate speech
  • I’m interested in inspiring people to see the ways in which it has extended our possibilities for the better
  • we’re in need of a new narrative. I see my place as somebody who wants to help craft that narrative.
  • I begin by deciding on a specific idea I want to ecstatically explore
  • the videos are noncommercial, they are meant to be seen as mashups.
  • we map out the vibe and the “feeling” we want. We discuss examples, certain placement and “moments” I want to create, and then she sits on it, gets inspired, interprets and plugs it in. Then we discuss and exchange until we’re happy with it.
  • David McGavock on 14 Jun 14
     
    Interview in Wired magazine describing an optimistic view of technology, used for good not evil.
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."
mesbah095

Guest Post Online - 0 views

guestpostonline.com

Creative Commons Cooperation Infotention RSS Yahoo pipes augmentation Personal learning network twitter literacy commons game theory meditation neuroscience thinking tools learning culture

shared by mesbah095 on 03 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • mesbah095 on 03 Apr 14
     
    Article Writing & Guestpost You Can Join this Site for Your Article & guest post, Just Easy way to join this site & total free Article site. This site article post to totally free Way. Guest Post & Article Post live to Life time only for Current & this time new User. http://guestpostonline.com
David McGavock

Infotention, internal: Attentional strategies | Social Media Classroom - 2 views

socialmediaclassroom.com/...nternal-attentional-strategies

infotention attention brain computer sociality

shared by David McGavock on 23 May 11 - No Cached
  • We can talk about attention training, multitasking, the dangers of distraction.
  • What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it"
  • Infotention
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • brain-powered attention skills and computer-powered information filters.
  • work best together with a third element — sociality
  • Honing the mental ability to employ the form of attention appropriate for each moment
  • put together intelligence dashboards, news radars, and information filters from online tools like persistent search and RSS is the external technical component of information literacy.
  • Infotention involves a third element
  • other people
  • recommendations that make it possible to find fresh and useful signals amid the overwhelming noise of the Internet
  • Mentally trained, technologically augmented, socially mediated
  • detecting information that could be valuable specifically to you, whenever and wherever it is useful to you.
  • crap detection skills and basic mindfulness come in. 
B.L. Ochman

About Wolfram|Alpha - 0 views

www.wolframalpha.com/about.html

searchengine semantic knowledge visualization thinking tools augmentation

shared by B.L. Ochman on 23 May 11 - Cached
  • B.L. Ochman on 23 May 11
     
    Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute what
David McGavock

Jennifer Lynn Aaker | Creating Infectious Action - 1 views

itc.conversationsnetwork.org/...detail4834.html

aaker jennifer Cooperation augmentation infectious actions audio podcast

shared by David McGavock on 14 May 11 - No Cached
  • David McGavock on 14 May 11
     
    "in one class she conducted a crowdsourced experiment which literally changed the way Jennifer views and thinks about social media. In her class one of her students gave her a set of slides that told a very compelling story. She shares that story and explains how it led her to come up with a new theory for creating infectious action."
David McGavock

Steve Rosenbaum | Future of Content - 0 views

itc.conversationsnetwork.org/...detail4847.html

Cooperation Infotention augmentation thinking tools learning culture curation

shared by David McGavock on 14 May 11 - No Cached
  • David McGavock on 14 May 11
     
    "Dr. Moira Gunn talks with Steve Rosenbaum about how the data aggregator's new role on the Internet from the pages of his new book, Curation Nation: Why the Future of Content is Context. " Rosenbaum predicts a new stage in web interactions where the overwhelming data that is being created is balanced through the efforts of curators: people organizing knowledge.
David McGavock

Jeffrey Johnson | Haiti: CrisisMapping the Earthquake - 0 views

itc.conversationsnetwork.org/...detail4613.html

haiti Cooperation crisis mapping augmentation tools

shared by David McGavock on 15 May 11 - No Cached
  • After the earthquake in Haiti, a community of crisis mappers immediately began crowdsourcing open street maps in a way that has changed disaster response forever.  Using an open source stack and simple collaboration tools to combine and annotate image sets, usable maps were quickly put in the hands of rescue workers, allowing a rapid response that saved lives. 
  • And, is it repeatable in the future?  Johnson challenges the audience to consider ways that collaborative, volunteer efforts can be sustained.  It takes a passionate crowd to make crowdsourcing work, and the key to fostering that passion is relationships.
  • David McGavock on 15 May 11
     
    After the earthquake in Haiti, a community of crisis mappers immediately began crowdsourcing open street maps in a way that has changed disaster response forever. Using an open source stack and simple collaboration tools to combine and annotate image sets, usable maps were quickly put in the hands of rescue workers, allowing a rapid response that saved lives.
B.L. Ochman

How to have a brilliant brainstorm - 1 views

www.slideshare.net/...-to-have-a-briljant-brainstorm

how to brainstorm thinking tools Cooperation Infotention augmentation learning culture

shared by B.L. Ochman on 12 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • B.L. Ochman on 12 Aug 11
     
    best brainstorm presentation, ever
  • Bryan Alexander on 13 Aug 11
     
    That's a lot of fun.
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.
David McGavock

CmapTools - Home Page Cmap.html - 0 views

cmap.ihmc.us

mindmapping software freeware visualization concept thinking tools augmentation learning culture

shared by David McGavock on 02 Jul 11 - Cached
  • David McGavock on 02 Jul 11
     
    IHMC Cmap Tools empower users to construct navigate, share, and criticize knowledge models represented as Concept Maps.
David McGavock

About Ekman « Paul Ekman - 1 views

www.paulekman.com/about-ekman

augmentation neuroscience thinking tools meditation Ekman

shared by David McGavock on 01 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • David McGavock on 01 Nov 11
     
    "Dr. Paul Ekman (1934 -) Paul Ekman was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago and New York University. He received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Adelphi University (1958), after a one year internship at the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute. After two years as a Clinical Psychology Officer in the U.S. Army, he returned to Langley Porter where he worked from 1960 to 2004. His research on facial expression and body movement began in 1954, as the subject of his Master's thesis in 1955 and his first publication in 1957. In his early work, his approach to nonverbal behavior showed his training in personality. Over the next decade, a social psychological and cross-cultural emphasis characterized his work, with a growing interest in an evolutionary and semiotic frame of reference. In addition to his basic research on emotion and its expression, he has, for the last thirty years, also been studying deceit."
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