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Charles van der Haegen

Manuel Castells on Vimeo communication Power. Protecting the Commons of Communication S... - 0 views

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    This is a fundamental lecture. Everyone interested in the future of the World should see this: Basic points (litterally transcribed from manuel Castells' conclusions * communication is the field of Power Making *Communication space has been transformed both by technology and by the restruction of Business and of the Madia *Because of that one of the things that has happened is that the space in the networked society, the space of communication, is more pervasive than ever in History: We all live in a hypertext of Communication * In that space, one of the things that has happenend is to increase the possibilities of the intervention, in autonomous terms, by people, by social actors, by grassroots movements, by social movements and by insurgent politics *It doesn't mean that there is freedom, it means that there are greater chances, greater possibilities *At the same time, because of that, business powers and political powers have understood the need to control also the horizontal networks of communication * Also to play the politics of the internet now has become too important and therefore we have all the attempts to senson the internet * We have all the attempts to use Internet users as potential hiders and cheaters *We have the debate of Internet neutrality because the owners of internet infrastructure are trying to appropriate the infrastructure for the servive of their clients and customers SO WE HAVE A MAJOR? MAJOR POLITICAL BATTLE? AND BUSINESS BATTLE FOR THE CONTROL OF INTERNET And so the most important practical conclusion of my analysis is that the autonomous construction of meaning can only proceed by preserving the commons of communication networks made possible by Internet, a free creation of freedom lovers This will not be an easy task, becuase the power holders in the network society must, to be in Power, must enclose free communication in commercial and public networks in order to close the public mind by programming the connection between communica
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    I believe this video to be fundamental, and so close to our themes: Learning, mind Amplifying, collaboration... Let's all together protect the commons of our Communication Space!
Charles van der Haegen

About Adbusters | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters - 1 views

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    "The Media Foundation We are a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age. Our aim is to topple existing power structures and forge a major shift in the way we will live in the 21st century. Adbusters Magazine Based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Adbusters is a not-for-profit, reader-supported, 120,000-circulation magazine concerned about the erosion of our physical and cultural environments by commercial forces. Our work has been embraced by organizations like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, has been featured in hundreds of alternative and mainstream newspapers, magazines, and television and radio shows around the world. Adbusters offers incisive philosophical articles as well as activist commentary from around the world addressing issues ranging from genetically modified foods to media concentration. In addition, our annual social marketing campaigns like Buy Nothing Day and Digital Detox Week have made us an important activist networking group. Ultimately, though, Adbusters is an ecological magazine, dedicated to examining the relationship between human beings and their physical and mental environment. We want a world in which the economy and ecology resonate in balance. We try to coax people from spectator to participant in this quest. We want folks to get mad about corporate disinformation, injustices in the global economy, and any industry that pollutes our physical or mental commons. Culturejammer's Headquarters"
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    That's the kind of group I wanted to get to know... Thanks marlelo Santos for leading me to them...
David McGavock

New Device Allows Brain to Bypass Spinal Cord, Move Paralyzed Limbs - ScienceNewsline - 0 views

  • For the first time ever, a paralyzed man can move his fingers and hand with his own thoughts thanks to an innovative partnership between The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and Battelle.
  • “It’s much like a heart bypass, but instead of bypassing blood, we’re actually bypassing electrical signals,” said Chad Bouton, research leader at Battelle. “We’re taking those signals from the brain, going around the injury, and actually going directly to the muscles.”
    • David McGavock
       
      Like bypass
  • Ian’s brain signals bypass his injured spinal cord and move his hand, hence the name Neurobridge.
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  • During a three-hour surgery on April 22, Rezai implanted a chip smaller than a pea onto the motor cortex of Burkhart’s brain. The tiny chip interprets brain signals and sends them to a computer, which recodes and sends them to the high-definition electrode stimulation sleeve that stimulates the proper muscles to execute his desired movements. Within a tenth of a second, Burkhart’s thoughts are translated into action.
  • Battelle also developed a non-invasive neurostimulation technology in the form of a wearable sleeve that allows for precise activation of small muscle segments in the arm to enable individual finger movement, along with software that forms a ‘virtual spinal cord’ to allow for coordination of dynamic hand and wrist movements.
  • As part of the study, Burkhart worked for months using the electrode sleeve to stimulate his forearm to rebuild his atrophied muscles so they would be more responsive to the electric stimulation.
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    Example of innovation in technology and biology
Antonio Lopez

The Global Square: an online platform for our movement | Reflections on a Revolution ROAR - 2 views

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    Global Square aims to be an online version of Occupation. This puts some of these various online practices we discuss into a political context.
Antonio Lopez

Practically Nonideological: A Chat with Ethan Zuckerman | Motherboard - 2 views

  • One of the things that I thought was very interesting with Occupy early on was not just the desire to occupy physical spaces, but the desire to occupy media.
  • Now, instead of it being difficult to get footage, what’s really difficult is to edit it down into a narrative in one fashion or another.
  • One thing I’m fairly well known for in my work is trying to be critical about whether we’re adopting technologies because they’re practical, or because they’re ideological.
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  • The reason I push back against this and say, ‘There’s some pretty good tech in Wimax, which probably is an easier way to put a pretty big cloud over an Occupy encampment, and then connect it into the Internet,’ is that I think it’s the Utopian technological politics that have people pursuing a very ground-up, very ad-hoc solution that may or may be the right technological solution.
  • There are two groups right now that are fighting for influence over the Internet. One groups is the guys who’ve run the Internet for a very long time. And I do mean guys. It’s mostly engineers – some with major tech companies, some with major telecom companies – who dominate meetings of things like the IETF, who are representatives of organizations like ICANN.
  • There’s a second camp in all this that is represented by governments, particularly governments of China, Russia, some governments from the global South, that are essentially saying ‘Look, this needs to be run through something closer to the UN system. It needs to be multi-national. It needs to be more representative.’
  • It’s interesting to think about how popular movements might insert themselves in that space. The truth is that with SOPA/PIPA, the traditional tech guys were on one side fighting more or less against Hollywood. And they pulled in support from millions of Internet users who signed up and said ‘We’re with you on this. We’re going to participate.’
  • I don’t see that popular movement [OWS] as the main actor in this space. I see companies like Tumblr, and Twitter, and Google doing a pretty good job of motivating their users. But whether that group of motivated Internet users actually maps onto Occupy…
David McGavock

After the Protests - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • Protests like this one, fueled by social media and erupting into spectacular mass events, look like powerful statements of opposition against a regime
  • Yet often these huge mobilizations of citizens inexplicably wither away without the impact on policy you might expect from their scale.
  • Now movements can rush past that step, often to their own detriment.
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  • Social media can provide a huge advantage in assembling the strength in numbers that movements depend on. Those “likes” on Facebook, derided as slacktivism or clicktivism, can have long-term consequences by defining which sentiments are “normal” or “obvious” — perhaps among the most important levers of change.
  • But activists, who have made such effective use of technology to rally supporters, still need to figure out how to convert that energy into greater impact. The point isn’t just to challenge power; it’s to change it.
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    Media in the hands of citizens can rattle regimes. It makes it much harder for rulers to maintain legitimacy by controlling the public sphere. But activists, who have made such effective use of technology to rally supporters, still need to figure out how to convert that energy into greater impact. The point isn't just to challenge power; it's to change it.
David McGavock

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

  • 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.
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    "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."
Charles van der Haegen

New Media Literacies: Greening a Digital Media Class - 0 views

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    Blogpost by Antonio Lopez, co-learner at MindAmp I've been a media literacy educator for a dozen years, although as a consequence of participating in the punk movement during the early '80s, I've been a lifelong proponent of do-it-yourself media. Since entering the field of education I've worked in numerous arts programs with youths, spending considerable time with disadvantaged groups. Working with Native Americans, Latinos and Afro-Caribbean youth has helped me to formulate a multicultural, multi-perspective approach to media literacy that has pushed me to reconceptualize cultural assumptions embedded in traditional media education.* Learners in those communities are under greater stress than mainstream Americans, and their particular needs call for attention to social justice, environmental issues and cultural citizenship, things that many privileged Americans take for granted. At one point when I was working on the rez, a Native American elder opined on the information highway by remarking, "any road can get you somewhere." Unfortunately, many programs that embrace digital media tools are too enamored with the technology to think more critically about the "somewhere" we are moving towards. It was during this period that I realized the importance of appropriate applications of technology and also understood the ethnocentrism embedded in the idea of "progress." More importantly, I was forced to think more carefully about who or what I was ultimately serving in my work as an educator. As a fellow media geek it might surprise you, then, to suggest that my approach since then has been to serve the planet: humans and nonhuman alike. In particular I feel a strong calling to speak to the best of my abilities on behalf of our silent partner: nature. These days in my current role as a professor of media studies at an American University in Rome, I have taken to heart the task of incorporating lessons I learned beyond the walled garden of academia to green the field of m
David McGavock

Multitude Project - 1 views

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    "The scope of the Multitude Project is to drive the multitude social movement. In other words, we try to understand how the new technology is changing the power structure in modern societies, we build a new vision for a brighter future, and we propose a path towards this future, whereby the potential introduced by the new technology is actualized to the advantage of the multitude. Change is clearly on the way, in the natural direction of the emancipation of masses, a trend which can be clearly recognized throughout history. Major institutions will be greatly transformed in the near future due to immense pressure mainly induced by rapid technological advancements. Our goal is to predict some of these changes and to channel the change into a peaceful, incremental and constructive revolution. Along with the aforementioned exploratory and speculative activities, we also propose new methods and tools, to help individuals and groups all around the world in their daily struggle against injustice and economical inequality."
David McGavock

About Ekman « Paul Ekman - 1 views

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    "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."
David McGavock

Astonishing - Sagarika Bhatta - 0 views

    • David McGavock
       
      As Sagarika Bhatta said in the hangout, this is a response to the effects of climate change rather than a response to decrease CO2 emissions. The traditional practices have an important role to play in the protection of agriculture in Nepal. The traditional practices are a protective factor for sustainability.
  • share urgency
  • expose and publicize
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  • critical mass who understands the urgency
  • exploration, discussion, documentation and promotion of the knowledge
    • David McGavock
       
      Find out what practices have sustained agriculture in the 3 climates within Nepal. Document it and disseminate it to the people and outside public.
  • Global movement
  • esearch and promotion of Knowledge that helps to combat climate change
  • helps in adaptation to climate change
  • indigenous Knowledge
  • plight of citizen
    • David McGavock
       
      This is another story: how do impacts and inappropriate technologies impact the local people.
  • documentation through research
  • community-based adaptation (CBA) to climate change
    • David McGavock
       
      CBA - community based adaptation to climate chage
  • possibilities of rain water harvesting and other means of water storage
  • watershed degradation, urbanization, growing population are the major factor for water crisis here
  • making it part of national development policy
  • Nepal is vulnerable to rising global temperatures and has already been dealing with the impact of erratic rainfall, frequent droughts and floods, which have been affecting food security
    • David McGavock
       
      Problem Statement for Nepal.
  • experiment with a bottom-up approach using Local Adaptation Plans of Action, or LAPAs, in 10 districts across the country in 2010
    • David McGavock
       
      what has been tried.
  • ultimately question the status of food security
    • David McGavock
       
      The bottom line problem is that these impacts - problems above will threaten the security of the people of Nepal - food/shelter/quality of life..
  • promote the Indigenous Traditional knowledge (ITK) as Community Based Adaptation techniques that has been practiced by different indigenous community in Nepal in agriculture
    • David McGavock
       
      This is the goal. Promote traditional knowledge in support of the people of Nepal - their agriculture, livelihood and social welfare.
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    This is a good summary of the goals of the work of Sagarika Bhatta in support of Nepali agriculture. It describe the idea of community based adaptation (CBA) to climate change and the Indigenous traditional knowledge (ITK).
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Alex Grech

How Hashtagging the Web Could Improve Our Collective Intelligence - 0 views

  • Why all the fuss over tweets? Twitter hosts valuable, communal conversation in real-time. And Twitter trends become more powerful the more users contribute to the dialogue. Finally, Twitter allows the chatter of millions to be parsed into channels (hashtags) of real-time conversation that covers widely varying topics. Jokes, rumors, political movements, pop culture fanaticisms, the collective screaming of teenagers — they all bubble to the surface and shift and change like an oil slick, much like a collective human consciousness.
  • One thing that makes Twitter so powerful is its use of a standard language: hashtags. Any hashtagged tweet is automatically linked to every other tweet that shares the same tag. This allows for consistent dialogue and measurement. However, the Internet as a whole is not a very consistent medium. Patterns emerge in specific areas of the web, but no uniform underlying structure exists to merge these patterns. Content may go viral or score a high page rank, but it doesn’t easily connect to related topics or encourage a larger conversation. It is a frustrating vestige of print culture that my web curation should be limited by my search ability.
  • Twitter can gather direct, mass conversation into subject categories like #watermelon, but the conversation is limited by the short form nature of the platform. If longer form methods of online communication could be aggregated into a similar form of direct conversation, it would serve both spectators and authors alike. For that to happen, citation must be standardized. Current citation methods like hashtags are rarely, if ever, exhaustive, and they often take on the subjective viewpoint of the author or sharer. Imagine the level of constructive debate and creativity that we might achieve when we organize and bucket all web content into Twitter-like categories. Imagine the kinds of things we might learn about our collective culture.
David McGavock

The dreams of readers | ROUGH TYPE - 1 views

  • Psychologists and neurobiologists have begun studying what goes on in our minds as we read literature, and what they’re discovering lends scientific weight to Emerson’s observation.
  • “aesthetic emotions” that we feel when we view art from a distance, as a spectator:
  • We create our own version of the piece of fiction, our own dream, our own enactment.” Making sense of what transpires in a book’s imagined reality appears to depend on “making a version of the action ourselves, inwardly.”
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  • The scholars used brain scans to examine the cellular activity that occurs inside people’s heads as they read stories. They found that “readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative.”
  • When, for example, a character in a story puts a pencil down on a desk, the neurons that control muscle movements fire in a reader’s brain. When a character goes through a door to enter a room, electrical charges begin to flow through the areas in a reader’s brain that are involved in spatial representation and navigation.
  • More than mere replication is going on.
  • we really do enter, so far as our brains are concerned, a new world — one conjured not just out of the author’s words but out of our own memories and desires — and it is our cognitive immersion in that world that gives reading its emotional force.
  • ” A work of literature, particularly narrative literature, takes hold of the brain in curious and powerful ways.
  • there are the “narrative emotions” we experience when, through the sympathetic actions of our nervous system, we become part of a story, when the distance between the attendee and the attended evaporates
  • A 2009 experiment conducted by Oatley and three colleagues suggests that the emotions stirred by literature can even alter, in subtle but real ways, people’s personalities.
  • Norman Holland, a scholar at the McKnight Brain Institute at the University of Florida, has been studying literature’s psychological effects for many years, and he offers a provocative answer to that question.
  • when we open a book, our expectations and attitudes change. Because we understand that “we cannot or will not change the work of art by our actions,” we are relieved of our desire to exert an influence over objects and people and hence can “disengage our [cognitive] systems for initiating actions.”
    • David McGavock
       
      Theory of mind 
  • The central subject of literature is society, and when we lose ourselves in a book we often receive an education in the subtleties and vagaries of human relations.
  • reading tends to make us at least a little more empathetic, a little more alert to the inner lives of others.
  • can strengthen a person’s “theory of mind,” which is what psychologists call the ability to understand what other people are thinking and feeling.
  • That frees us to become absorbed in the imaginary world of the literary work.
  • Jeff Jarvis, a media consultant who teaches journalism at the City University of New York, gave voice to this way of thinking in a post on his blog. Claiming that printed pages “create, at best, a one-way relationship with a reader,” he concluded that, in the internet era, “the book is an outdated means of communicating information.” He declared that “print is where words go to die.”
  • Society is growing ever more skeptical of the value of solitude. The status quo treats with suspicion  even the briefest of withdrawals into inactivity and apparent purposelessness. We see it in the redefinition of receptive states of mind as passive states of mind.
  • the arts of production and consumption, of getting stuff done, to which most of us devote most of our waking hours.
  • In a 2003 lecture, Andrew Louth, a theology professor at the University of Durham in England, drew a distinction between “the free arts” and “the servile arts.” The servile arts, he said, are those “to which a man is bound if he has in mind a limited task.”
  • free arts, among which Louth included reading as well as meditation, contemplation, and prayer, are those characterized, in one way or another, by “the search for knowledge for its own sake.”
  • We open ourselves to aesthetic and spiritual possibilities.
  • It may be that readers have to enter a state of languid pleasure, a dream, before they can experience the full spermatic vitality of a book. Far from being a sign of passivity, the reader’s outward repose signals the most profound kind of inner activity, the kind that goes unregistered by society’s sensors.
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    "The free arts, among which Louth included reading as well as meditation, contemplation, and prayer, are those characterized, in one way or another, by "the search for knowledge for its own sake." "
David McGavock

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

  • 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.
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  • “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
       
      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.”
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    "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."
Charles van der Haegen

Jesse Schell: When games invade real life | Video on TED.com - 1 views

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    "About this talk Games are invading the real world -- and the runaway popularity of Farmville and Guitar Hero is just the beginning, says Jesse Schell. At the DICE Summit, he makes a startling prediction: a future where 1-ups and experience points break "out of the box" and into every part of our daily lives. About Jesse Schell Beyond Facebook, beyond consoles and even computer screens, games are becoming the medium for everyday life, says game designer Jesse Schell. Full bio and more links"
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    Rather flabbergasted by this 28 min video about how we could live in the future, disembodied by games directing us as cosumer automatons...
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    Isn't it an amazing talk? It blew me away when I first saw it. And now you can see why it kicked off the gamification movement.
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    Oh my. I need to think more about this one. It's a paradox with some of the privacy concerns of folks for Gowalla or Four Square versus Jesse's notion that our lives will be constant gaming and surrendering of personal info.
Charles van der Haegen

UCLI collective UC & Public Higher Education: A Teach In on Vimeo - 0 views

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    Very interesting video collection to understand the policy problems on the commons of education in California... I hear there very practical living testimonies which illustrate the dilemma of the commons, the opposint solidarities in Socio-Cultural viability Theory, the vested interest idssues, the democracy principles who are used as myths and metaphores that are influencing people's thinking... It is life policy making and activism in action
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