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Charles van der Haegen

Ribbonfarm and Venkatesh Rao - 1 views

www.ribbonfarm.com/about

unusual perspectives refactored perception philosophy sociology business innovation technology

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 29 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 29 Jul 11
     
    "My name is Venkatesh Rao (I go by 'Venkat') and I started writing the ribbonfarm blog in 2007. Since March, 2011, it has been my base for full-time writing, independent research, consulting and other random activities. I am also the author of a book on the interplay of timing and decision-making, Tempo and write an email newsletter called Be Slightly Evil. Between 1997 and 2011, I pursued a traditional research/entrepreneurial career (a PhD, a postdoc, a startup, and an industrial R&D lab where among other things, I founded trailmeme.com as Entrenrepeur-in-Residence). Ribbonfarm is a blog about looking at things from unusual perspectives (that's the "refactored perception" bit). The topics range from philosophy, art and sociology to business, innovation and technology. Unlike blogs that serve as content marketing channels for other products and services, Ribbonfarm is the main act here, and I try to organize the rest of my life and work around it.
  • Charles van der Haegen on 29 Jul 11
     
    I am looking for more people like this , looking at things from unusual perspectives (that's the "refactored perception" bit). The topics range from philosophy, art and sociology to business, innovation and technology. If you can indicate them to me, please do...
Charles van der Haegen

MIT TechTV - Pecha Kucha RFK-LA - 0 views

techtv.mit.edu/...9275-pecha-kucha-rfk-la

new media litteracies blue sky propositions pecha kucha RFK community schools

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 16 May 11 - No Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 16 May 11
     
    "RFK-Legacy in Action, LAUSD, RFK Community Schools, New Media Literacies and other USC departments join at The Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism Dean's Forum to explore a series of "blue sky" propositions about how we might spark new forms of teaching and learning in conjunction with the philosophy the RFK Community Schools were envisioned to epitomize."
Charles van der Haegen

‪George Siemens on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)‬‏ - YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

online distributed learning global community network self-managed self-determined PLN Tools

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 27 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 27 Jul 11
     
    Thanks Howard for having conducted this interview and having allowed George Siemens to expose the philisophy behind his MOOKC idea. Great educational content. Also a path is shown for the future of self-determined and self-managed, life-long autonomous, learning in teams and around personal and wider, global, community networks "George Siemens, at the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute at Athabasca Universityhas been running "Massive Open Online Courses" (MOOCs). I talk to him about what a MOOC is, how it works, and the educational philosophy behind it." Excellent Interview by Howard Rheingold
  • Charles van der Haegen on 27 Jul 11
     
    This video is really great. Howard is a master interviewer. George Siemens is provoked in answering the kind of questions that allow the viewer to reallt comprehend his thinking and the power of his MOOC. By the same token, it gives a nice indication of the similarity in design that Howard is following for his course... When will the two combine to a greater whole
David McGavock

Theory of mind - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Theory_of_mind

mind philosophy cognition awareness scanning

shared by David McGavock on 12 Jul 11 - Cached
  • The emerging field of social neuroscience has also begun to address this debate, by imaging humans while performing tasks demanding the understanding of an intention, belief or other mental state.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 12 Jul 11
       
      Mirror Neurons
  • The theory of mind (ToM) impairment describes a difficulty someone would have with perspective taking. This is also sometimes referred to as mind-blindness.
  • Individuals who experience a theory of mind deficit have difficulty determining the intentions of others, lack understanding of how their behavior affects others, and have a difficult time with social reciprocity.[27]
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • ToM deficits have been observed in people with autism spectrum disorders, schizophrenics, persons under the influence of alcohol and narcotics, sleep-deprived persons, and persons who are experiencing severe emotional or physical pain.
  • Research by Vittorio Gallese, Luciano Fadiga and Giacomo Rizzolatti (reviewed in [51]) has shown that some sensorimotor neurons, which are referred to as mirror neurons, first discovered in the premotor cortex of rhesus monkeys, may be involved in action understanding.
  • Neuropsychological evidence has provided support for neuroimaging results on the neural basis of theory of mind. A study with patients suffering from a lesion of the temporoparietal junction of the brain (between the temporal lobe and parietal lobe) reported that they have difficulty with some theory of mind tasks.[49] This shows that theory of mind abilities are associated with specific parts of the human brain.
  • However, there is also evidence against the link between mirror neurons and theory of mind. First, macaque monkeys have mirror neurons but do not seem to have a 'human-like' capacity to understand theory of mind and belief. Second, fMRI studies of theory of mind typically report activation in the mPFC, temporal poles and TPJ or STS,[54] but these brain areas are not part of the mirror neuron system.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 12 Jul 11
       
      Contrary Mirror Neuron Evidence
  • The presumption that others have a mind is termed a theory of mind because each human can only intuit the existence of his/her own mind through introspection, and no one has direct access to the mind of another.
Charles van der Haegen

Robert Thurman | Professor of Buddhist Studies, Columbia University; President, Tibet H... - 0 views

bigthink.com/robertthurman

East west thinking holistic vison Robert Thureau

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 16 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 16 Jul 11
     
    "Robert Thurman is Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies in the Department of Religion at Columbia University, President of Tibet House US, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and promotion of Tibetan civilization, and President of the American Institute of Buddhist Studies. The New York Times recently hailed him as "the leading American expert on Tibetan Buddhism." The first American to have been ordained a Tibetan Buddhist monk and a personal friend of the Dalai Lama for over 40 years, Professor Thurman is a passionate advocate and spokesperson for the truth regarding the current Tibet-China situation and the human rights violations suffered by the Tibetan people under Chinese rule. His commitment to finding a peaceful, win-win solution for Tibet and China inspired him to write his latest book, Why the Dalai Lama Matters: His Act of Truth as the Solution for China, Tibet and the World, published in June of 2008. Professor Thurman also translates important Tibetan and Sanskrit philosophical writings and lectures and writes on Buddhism, particularly Tibetan Buddhism; on Asian history, particularly the history of the monastic institution in the Asian civilization; and on critical philosophy, with a focus on the dialogue between the material and inner sciences of the world's religious traditions."
  • Charles van der Haegen on 16 Jul 11
     
    I believe this is a great interview... and video set
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

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.
  • “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.’”
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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

The Forward Foundation - http://forwardfound.org/ - 1 views

forwardfound.org/About

Cooperation forwardfound.org commons OpenSource foundation

shared by David McGavock on 29 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • About the Forward Foundation   Forward Foundation is a Foresight/Futures studies not for profit research and development group. Our members in the past have worked in the past with http://www.iftf.org/, MacArthur Foundation, Stanford University, MIT Press, MITE, USDA, and hundreds of small groups and networks across the globe. We produce research and forecasting like most "futures studies think tanks", but we also produce open source software and code, open source hardware and designs, and open licensed education materials. Examples include http://code.google.com/p/flows-dev/ http://flows.panarchy.com/ http://socialmediaclassroom.com and some of us have worked on http://cooperationcommons.com with http://iftf.org
  • Our Wealth Generating Ecology building skills and experience includes:   Working with meta and alternative currencies, local economy and social enterprise development, network-based project management, collaborative food, energy, creative output and physical object production, envrionmental scanning for network collaboration ecologies, and more.
  • Our design philosophy is to share not just the rendered output of the education package, but also the standard model that was used to produce the output.  We believe that it is important to design for interoperability first, then to address what works best for you. 
  • David McGavock on 29 Jun 11
     
    "About the Forward Foundation Forward Foundation is a Foresight/Futures studies not for profit research and development group. Our members in the past have worked in the past with http://www.iftf.org/, MacArthur Foundation, Stanford University, MIT Press, MITE, USDA, and hundreds of small groups and networks across the globe. We produce research and forecasting like most "futures studies think tanks", but we also produce open source software and code, open source hardware and designs, and open licensed education materials. Examples include http://code.google.com/p/flows-dev/ http://flows.panarchy.com/ http://socialmediaclassroom.com and some of us have worked on http://cooperationcommons.com with http://iftf.org"
Ted Newcomb

Are you sleepwalking now? What we know about mind-wandering | Aeon Essays - 0 views

aeon.co/...t-we-know-about-mind-wandering

mindful meditatation self

shared by Ted Newcomb on 06 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • Ted Newcomb on 06 Feb 18
     
    mindful meditation...Whether this sort of cognition really requires a robust notion of selfhood, as most Western philosophers would argue, would be disputed in many Eastern traditions. Here the highest level of mental autonomy is often seen as a form of impersonal witnessing or (in the words of the Indian-born philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti) 'observing without an observer' (though even this pure form of global meta-awareness still contains the implicit knowledge that the organism could act if necessary). There seems to be a middle way: perhaps mental autonomy can actually be experienced as such, in a non-agentive way, as a mere capacity. The notion of 'mental autonomy' could therefore be a deep point of contact where Eastern and Western philosophy discover common conceptual ground.
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