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Javier E

Reports of Rape of 5-Year-Old Set Off New Furor in India - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Seated at a drafting table with his back to his subject, the artist, Gil Zamora, asks the women a series of questions about their features. “Tell me about your chin,” he says in the soft voice reminiscent of a therapist’s. Crow’s feet, big jaws, protruding chins and dark circles are just some of the many physical features that women criticized about themselves. After he finishes a drawing of a woman, he then draws another sketch of the same woman, only this time it is based on how someone else describes her. The sketches are then hung side by side and the women are asked to compare them. In every instance, the second sketch is more flattering than the first.
  • The video, shot in a loft in San Francisco, has become a sensation online. The three-minute version has been viewed more than 7.5 million times on the Dove YouTube channel, and the version that is twice as long has been viewed more than 936,000 times.
  • Dove executives said the campaign resulted from company research that showed only 4 percent of women consider themselves beautiful
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  • “As women we are so hard on ourselves physically and emotionally,” Ms. Olive said. “It gets you to stop and think about how we think of ourselves.”
  • After watching the video a few times she wrote a post on her Tumblr site, which has become the dissident voice toward the campaign on social media. In a telephone interview, Ms. Brice took issue with the tag line for the ad, “You’re More Beautiful Than You Think.” “I think it makes people much more susceptible to absorbing the subconscious messages,” Ms. Brice said, “that at the heart of it all is that beauty is still what defines women. It is a little hypocritical.”
Javier E

Whither Moral Courage? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • It’s harder for us to see politicians, with the exception of Nelson Mandela and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, as courageous these days. Perhaps we have seen too much, grown too cynical about the inevitable compromises of power.
  • we have become suspicious of those who take a stand against the abuses of power or dogma.
  • THIS new idea — that writers, scholars and artists who stand against orthodoxy or bigotry are to blame for upsetting people — is spreading fast, even to countries like India that once prided themselves on their freedoms.
Javier E

Meeting 'the Other' Face to Face - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Sitting in a conference room at a hotel near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology here, I slip on large headphones and an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset and wriggle into the straps of a backpack, weighed down with a computer and a battery.
  • when I stand, I quickly find myself in a featureless all-white room, a kind of Platonic vestibule. On the walls at either end are striking poster-size black-and-white portraits taken by the noted Belgian-Tunisian photographer Karim Ben Khelifa, one showing a young Israeli soldier and another a Palestinian fighter about the same age, whose face is almost completely hidden by a black hood.
  • Then the portraits disappear, replaced by doors, which open. In walk the two combatants — Abu Khaled, a fighter for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Gilad Peled, an Israeli soldier — seeming, except for a little pixelation and rigid body movement, like flesh-and-blood people who are actually in the room with me.
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  • What he saw there was a culture of warfare that often perpetuated itself through misunderstanding and misinformation, with no mechanism for those of opposing sects or political forces to gain a sense of the enemy as a fellow human being.
  • “I began to think, ‘I’m meeting the same people over and over again,’” he said. “I’m seeing people I knew as kids, and now they’re grown-up fighters, in power, fighting the same fight. And you start to think about your work in terms of: ‘Am I helping to change anything? Am I having any impact?’ ”
  • “I thought of myself as a war illustrator. I started calling myself that.”
  • as a visiting artist at the university’s Center for Art, Science and Technology, he transformed what he initially conceived of as an unconventional photo and testimonial project involving fighters into a far more unconventional way of hearing and seeing his subjects, hoping to be able to engender a form of empathy beyond the reach of traditional documentary film
  • He interviewed Mr. Khaled in Gaza and Mr. Peled in Tel Aviv, asking them the same six questions — basic ones like “Who’s your enemy and why?”; “What is peace for you?”; “Have you ever killed one of your enemies?”; “Where do you see yourself in 20 years?”
  • Then he and a small crew captured three-dimensional scans of the men and photographed them from multiple angles
  • he began to build avatars of his interviewees and ways for them to move and respond inside a virtual world so realistic it makes even a 3-D movie seem like an artifact from the distant past. Mr. Harrell describes it as “long-form journalism in a totally new form.”
  • “You have something here you don’t have in any other form of journalism: body language.”
  • indeed, inside the world they have made, the power comes from the feeling of listening to the interviewees speak (you hear Mr. Ben Khelifa’s disembodied voice asking the questions, and the men’s voices answer, overlaid by the voice of an interpreter) as your body viscerally senses a person standing a few feet away from you, his eyes following yours as he talks, his chest rising and falling as he breathes.
  • Sofia Ayala, an M.I.T. sophomore, tested the project after I did and emerged — as I did — with a mesmerized flush on her face, a feeling of meeting someone not really there. “It makes it feel so much more personal than just reading about these things online,” she said. “When someone’s right there talking to you, you want to listen.”
  • “In many places I’ve been, you’re given your enemy when you’re born,” he said. “You grow up with this ‘other’ always out there. The best we can hope is that the ‘other’ will now be able to come into the same room with you for a while, where you can listen to him, and see him face to face.”
aliciathompson1

The art that shows what goes on deep in the human brain - BBC News - 0 views

  • From scary sleep paralysis, to recalling memories that never happened, a new exhibition is exploring the art inspired by human consciousness. Here, we see how artists have interpreted moments from the mind.
  • The exhibition challenges our idea of being able to accurately remember moments from the past - and considers the relative ease of creating false memories.
  • But what the next image does do is bring to mind a patient's feeling of mistrust when they are under anaesthesia.
Cecilia Ergueta

'The Art of the Qur'an,' a Rare Peek at Islam's Holy Text - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The Quran, like all foundational religious texts, is a tangle of ambiguities and mysteries, to which endless annotations can be, and are being, written.
  • So wide was the fame of the 11th-century Baghdad artist Ibn al-Bawwab (“son of the doorman”) that his signature was routinely forged
  • When a Mongol army laid waste to the city in 1258, his life was spared so that he could work for the new rulers,
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  • Spilling out of books onto wall tiles, ceramic vessels, glass lamps, textiles, mosque domes and building facades, it was both a sensual and ideological unifier, totalizingly utopian
  • Symbols were introduced to orchestrate the all-important recitation of its contents: indicators of where to pause, where to place emphasis, how to pronounce words.
  • Material preciousness became an end in itself, turning Qurans into prestige objects and political currency, valued as diplomatic gifts, as war booty and as pious, grace-earning donations to mosques and mausoleums.
  • I watched them as they looked intently at the manuscripts arrayed around us, and I knew they were seeing things I couldn’t see, and feeling things I couldn’t feel, because they could read the words.
  • I was aware — and this is an easy perception — of the larger barriers of unknowing that stand between art and understanding, and of the barriers that stand between cultures
dicindioha

The Neuroscience of Illusion - Scientific American - 0 views

  • It is a fact of neuroscience that everything we experience is a figment of our imagination. Although our sensations feel accurate and truthful, they do not necessarily reproduce the physical reality of the outside world.
    • dicindioha
       
      I find it interesting that a part of science, that studies the brain, says it is a fact that reality is not what we perceive. This is a science of showing humans that the way we see the world comes from our own brains. Learning these things through neuroscience probably made other scientists want to move our progress of biology and other sciences even more forward to try and gain a better look at the world. Perception seems to be another problem on top of never being able to come to a proof of science.
  • In other words, the real and the imagined share a physical source in the brain. So take a lesson from Socrates: “All I know is that I know nothing.”
    • dicindioha
       
      This is a humorous quote, and although maybe a bit extreme, it reflects somewhat of the way I felt after our recent discussions about how what we know in science is just a theory that has not been disproved yet.
  • One of the most important tools used by neuroscientists to understand how the brain creates its sense of reality is the visual illusion. Historically, artists as well as researchers have used illusions to gain insights into the inner workings of the visual system.
    • dicindioha
       
      A way of studying the brain is tricking it.
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  • Because of this disconnect between perception and reality, visual illusions demonstrate the ways in which the brain can fail to re-create the physical world.
    • dicindioha
       
      I like that the concepts we talk about in TOK, or what I think of as a course about theories and knowledge, come up in areas of science. Then this translates to how I feel as if I trust science very much, and how this is okay, but I must remember that what is shown to the public is affected by the scientific community
kushnerha

New Ways Into the Brain's 'Music Room' - The New York Times - 5 views

  • Every culture ever studied has been found to make music, and among the oldest artistic objects known are slender flutes carved from mammoth bone some 43,000 years ago — 24,000 years before the cave paintings of Lascaux.
  • And though the survival value that music held for our ancestors may not be as immediately obvious as the power to recognize words, Dr. Rauschecker added, “music works as a group cohesive. Music-making with other people in your tribe is a very ancient, human thing to do.”
  • devised a radical new approach to brain imaging that reveals what past studies had missed. By mathematically analyzing scans of the auditory cortex and grouping clusters of brain cells with similar activation patterns, the scientists have identified neural pathways that react almost exclusively to the sound of music — any music. It may be Bach, bluegrass, hip-hop, big band, sitar or Julie Andrews. A listener may relish the sampled genre or revile it. No matter. When a musical passage is played, a distinct set of neurons tucked inside a furrow of a listener’s auditory cortex will fire in response.Other sounds, by contrast — a dog barking, a car skidding, a toilet flushing — leave the musical circuits unmoved.
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  • “Why do we have music?” Dr. Kanwisher said in an interview. “Why do we enjoy it so much and want to dance when we hear it? How early in development can we see this sensitivity to music, and is it tunable with experience? These are the really cool first-order questions we can begin to address.”
  • Dr. McDermott said the new method could be used to computationally dissect any scans from a functional magnetic resonance imaging device, or F.M.R.I. — the trendy workhorse of contemporary neuroscience — and so may end up divulging other hidden gems of cortical specialization. As proof of principle, the researchers showed that their analytical protocol had detected a second neural pathway in the brain for which scientists already had evidence — this one tuned to the sounds of human speech.
  • Importantly, the M.I.T. team demonstrated that the speech and music circuits are in different parts of the brain’s sprawling auditory cortex, where all sound signals are interpreted, and that each is largely deaf to the other’s sonic cues, although there is some overlap when it comes to responding to songs with lyrics.
  • In fact, Dr. Rauschecker said, music sensitivity may be more fundamental to the human brain than is speech perception. “There are theories that music is older than speech or language,” he said. “Some even argue that speech evolved from music.”
  • , many researchers had long assumed that the human brain must be equipped with some sort of music room, a distinctive piece of cortical architecture dedicated to detecting and interpreting the dulcet signals of song. Yet for years, scientists failed to find any clear evidence of a music-specific domain through conventional brain-scanning technology
  • when previous neuroscientists failed to find any anatomically distinct music center in the brain, they came up with any number of rationales to explain the results.“The story was, oh, what’s special about music perception is how it recruits areas from all over the brain, how it draws on the motor system, speech circuitry, social understanding, and brings it all together,” she said. Some researchers dismissed music as “auditory cheesecake,” a pastime that co-opted other essential communicative urges. “This paper says, no, when you peer below the cruder level seen with some methodologies, you find very specific circuitry that responds to music over speech.”
  • The researchers wondered if the auditory system might be similarly organized to make sense of the soundscape through a categorical screen. If so, what would the salient categories be? What are the aural equivalents of a human face or a human leg — sounds or sound elements so essential the brain assigns a bit of gray matter to the task of detecting them?
  • Focusing on the brain’s auditory region — located, appropriately enough, in the temporal lobes right above the ears — the scientists analyzed voxels, or three-dimensional pixels, of the images mathematically to detect similar patterns of neuronal excitement or quietude.“The strength of our method is that it’s hypothesis-neutral,” Dr. McDermott said. “We just present a bunch of sounds and let the data do the talking.”
  • Matching sound clips to activation patterns, the researchers determined that four of the patterns were linked to general physical properties of sound, like pitch and frequency. The fifth traced the brain’s perception of speech, and for the sixth the data turned operatic, disclosing a neuronal hot spot in the major crevice, or sulcus, of the auditory cortex that attended to every music clip the researchers had played.
  • “The sound of a solo drummer, whistling, pop songs, rap, almost everything that has a musical quality to it, melodic or rhythmic, would activate it,” Dr. Norman-Haignere said. “That’s one reason the result surprised us. The signals of speech are so much more homogeneous.”
  • The researchers have yet to determine exactly which acoustic features of music stimulate its dedicated pathway. The relative constancy of a musical note’s pitch? Its harmonic overlays? Even saying what music is can be tricky.
Javier E

Practice And The Self - The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast - 0 views

  • Just about everything we do modifies connections between brain cells—learning and memory are dependent on this flexibility. When we improve a skill through practice, we strengthen connections between neurons involved in that skill
  • it reflects what one might call a conservative truth: we become what we do. We are not Etch-A-Sketches, blank slates on whom a new abstract idea can simply and easily be applied to turn our lives around. We are constantly evolving organisms, each choice leading to another fate and another choice and all of these creating us, slowly, by will and habit.
  • . I'm also reminded of Pascal's rather controversial dictum that merely practicing faith will instill it. Acts become thoughts which become acts, and habits become personality which becomes character. There can be no total rupture - which is why I am not a fan of "born-again" Christianity. It only takes if it reorients practice.
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  • what exercize and diet and sleep do for the body, thought and practice and sleep do for the brain. And when this kind of practice of something becomes effortless, when it becomes second nature, instinctual, it becomes part of you and you of it. You simply cannot describe the great skill of a craftsman, or a cook, or a priest, or an artist except by observing how he or she has become what she creates and does.
  • where the idea and the practice and the person simply become one, human activity takes flight. It becomes integral.
Javier E

AGNI Online: Open to Influence: Jonathan Lethem on Reading, Writing and Concepts of Ori... - 0 views

  • I think originality is a word of praise for things that have been expressed in a marvelous way and that make points of origin for any particular element beside the point.  When you read Saul Bellow or listen to Bob Dylan sing, you can have someone point to various cribbings and it won’t matter, because something has been arrived at which subsumes and incorporates and transcends these matters.  In that way, sourcing and originality are two sides of the same coin, they’re a nested partnership.  I don’t think originality has any value as a description of process.  In that regard it’s as meaningless a process word as beauty is.  No artist says, “Let me sit down and do some beauty now.”
Javier E

What Is College For? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • 74 percent of graduates from four-year colleges say that their education was “very useful in helping them grow intellectually.”
  • When, as is often the case in business education and teacher training, practical skills far outweigh theoretical understanding, we are moving beyond the intellectual culture that defines higher education
  • This lack of academic engagement is real, even among schools with the best students and the best teachers, and it increases dramatically as the quality of the school decreases.  But it results from a basic misunderstanding — by both students and teachers — of what colleges are for.
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  • First of all, they are not simply for the education of students.  This is an essential function, but the raison d’être of a college is to nourish a world of intellectual culture; that is, a world of ideas, dedicated to what we can know scientifically, understand humanistically, or express artistically.  In our society, this world is mainly populated by members of college faculties: scientists, humanists, social scientists (who straddle the humanities and the sciences properly speaking), and those who study the fine arts. Law, medicine and engineering are included to the extent that they are still understood as “learned professions,” deploying practical skills that are nonetheless deeply rooted in scientific knowledge or humanistic understanding
  • there are serious concerns about the quality of this experience.  In particular, the university curriculum leaves students disengaged from the material they are supposed to be learning.  They see most of their courses as intrinsically “boring,” of value only if they provide training relevant to future employment or if the teacher has a pleasing (amusing, exciting, “relevant”) way of presenting the material. As a result, students spend only as much time as they need to get what they see as acceptable grades (on average, about 12 to 14 hour a week for all courses combined).  Professors have ceased to expect genuine engagement from students and often give good grades (B or better) to work that is at best minimally adequate.
  • Our support for higher education makes sense only if we regard this intellectual culture as essential to our society
  • This has important consequences for how we regard what goes on in college classrooms.  Teachers need to see themselves as, first of all, intellectuals, dedicated to understanding poetry, history, human psychology, physics, biology — or whatever is the focus of their discipline.  But they also need to realize that this dedication expresses not just their idiosyncratic interest in certain questions but a conviction that those questions have general human significance, even apart from immediately practical applications.  This is why a discipline requires not just research but also teaching
  • Students, in turn, need to recognize that their college education is above all a matter of opening themselves up to new dimensions of knowledge and understanding.  Teaching is not a matter of (as we too often say) “making a subject (poetry, physics, philosophy) interesting” to students but of students coming to see how such subjects are intrinsically interesting.  It is more a matter of students moving beyond their interests than of teachers fitting their subjects to interests that students already have.   Good teaching does not make a course’s subject more interesting; it gives the students more interests — and so makes them more interesting.
Javier E

The American Scholar: The Disadvantages of an Elite Education - William Deresiewicz - 1 views

  • the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy
  • I’m talking about the whole system in which these skirmishes play out. Not just the Ivy League and its peer institutions, but also the mechanisms that get you there in the first place: the private and affluent public “feeder” schools, the ever-growing parastructure of tutors and test-prep courses and enrichment programs, the whole admissions frenzy and everything that leads up to and away from it. The message, as always, is the medium. Before, after, and around the elite college classroom, a constellation of values is ceaselessly inculcated.
  • The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous. Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals.
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  • My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me.
  • The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic.
  • Students at places like Cleveland State, unlike those at places like Yale, don’t have a platoon of advisers and tutors and deans to write out excuses for late work, give them extra help when they need it, pick them up when they fall down.
  • When people say that students at elite schools have a strong sense of entitlement, they mean that those students think they deserve more than other people because their SAT scores are higher.
  • The political implications should be clear. As John Ruskin told an older elite, grabbing what you can get isn’t any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the power of your fists.
  • students at places like Yale get an endless string of second chances. Not so at places like Cleveland State.
  • The second disadvantage, implicit in what I’ve been saying, is that an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth. Getting to an elite college, being at an elite college, and going on from an elite college—all involve numerical rankings: SAT, GPA, GRE. You learn to think of yourself in terms of those numbers. They come to signify not only your fate, but your identity; not only your identity, but your value.
  • For the elite, there’s always another extension—a bailout, a pardon, a stint in rehab—always plenty of contacts and special stipends—the country club, the conference, the year-end bonus, the dividend.
  • In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out. At schools like Cleveland State, they’re being trained for positions somewhere in the middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or another. They’re being conditioned for lives with few second chances, no extensions, little support, narrow opportunity—lives of subordination, supervision, and control, lives of deadlines, not guidelines. At places like Yale, of course, it’s the reverse.
  • Elite schools nurture excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I know calls “entitled mediocrity.”
  • An elite education gives you the chance to be rich—which is, after all, what we’re talking about—but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist
  • The liberal arts university is becoming the corporate university, its center of gravity shifting to technical fields where scholarly expertise can be parlayed into lucrative business opportunities.
  • You have to live in an ordinary house instead of an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in L.A.; you have to drive a Honda instead of a BMW or a Hummer; you have to vacation in Florida instead of Barbados or Paris, but what are such losses when set against the opportunity to do work you believe in, work you’re suited for, work you love, every day of your life? Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education?
  • Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes, and you miss your true calling.
  • This is not to say that students from elite colleges never pursue a riskier or less lucrative course after graduation, but even when they do, they tend to give up more quickly than others.
  • But if you’re afraid to fail, you’re afraid to take risks, which begins to explain the final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual.
  • being an intellectual is not the same as being smart. Being an intellectual means more than doing your homework.
  • The system forgot to teach them, along the way to the prestige admissions and the lucrative jobs, that the most important achievements can’t be measured by a letter or a number or a name. It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.
  • Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas—and not just for the duration of a semester, for the sake of pleasing the teacher, or for getting a good grade.
  • Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul. These few have tended to feel like freaks, not least because they get so little support from the university itself. Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers. GA_googleFillSlot('Rectangle_InArticle_Right'); GA_googleCreateDomIframe("google_ads_div_Rectangle_InArticle_Right_ad_container" ,"Rectangle_InArticle_Right"); Places like Yale are simply not set up to help students ask the big questions
  • Professors at top research institutions are valued exclusively for the quality of their scholarly work; time spent on teaching is time lost. If students want a conversion experience, they’re better off at a liberal arts college.
  • When elite universities boast that they teach their students how to think, they mean that they teach them the analytic and rhetorical skills necessary for success in law or medicine or science or business.
  • Although the notion of breadth is implicit in the very idea of a liberal arts education, the admissions process increasingly selects for kids who have already begun to think of themselves in specialized terms—the junior journalist, the budding astronomer, the language prodigy. We are slouching, even at elite schools, toward a glorified form of vocational training.
  • There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers—holders of power, not its critics. An independent mind is independent of all allegiances, and elite schools, which get a large percentage of their budget from alumni giving, are strongly invested in fostering institutional loyalty.
  • At a school like Yale, students who come to class and work hard expect nothing less than an A-. And most of the time, they get it.
  • Yet there is a dimension of the intellectual life that lies above the passion for ideas, though so thoroughly has our culture been sanitized of it that it is hardly surprising if it was beyond the reach of even my most alert students. Since the idea of the intellectual emerged in the 18th century, it has had, at its core, a commitment to social transformation. Being an intellectual means thinking your way toward a vision of the good society and then trying to realize that vision by speaking truth to power.
  • It takes more than just intellect; it takes imagination and courage.
  • Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them. But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system, so it’s almost impossible for them to see outside it, to see that it’s even there.
  • Paradoxically, the situation may be better at second-tier schools and, in particular, again, at liberal arts colleges than at the most prestigious universities. Some students end up at second-tier schools because they’re exactly like students at Harvard or Yale, only less gifted or driven. But others end up there because they have a more independent spirit. They didn’t get straight A’s because they couldn’t be bothered to give everything in every class. They concentrated on the ones that meant the most to them or on a single strong extracurricular passion or on projects that had nothing to do with school
  • I’ve been struck, during my time at Yale, by how similar everyone looks. You hardly see any hippies or punks or art-school types, and at a college that was known in the ’80s as the Gay Ivy, few out lesbians and no gender queers. The geeks don’t look all that geeky; the fashionable kids go in for understated elegance. Thirty-two flavors, all of them vanilla.
  • The most elite schools have become places of a narrow and suffocating normalcy. Everyone feels pressure to maintain the kind of appearance—and affect—that go with achievement
  • Now that students are in constant electronic contact, they never have trouble finding each other. But it’s not as if their compulsive sociability is enabling them to develop deep friendships.
  • What happens when busyness and sociability leave no room for solitude? The ability to engage in introspection, I put it to my students that day, is the essential precondition for living an intellectual life, and the essential precondition for introspection is solitude
  • the life of the mind is lived one mind at a time: one solitary, skeptical, resistant mind at a time. The best place to cultivate it is not within an educational system whose real purpose is to reproduce the class system.
Javier E

How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit - Yoni Appelbaum - Technolo... - 0 views

  • Last January, as he prepared to offer the class again, Kelly put the Internet on notice. He posted his syllabus and announced that his new, larger class was likely to create two separate hoaxes. He told members of the public to "consider yourself warned--twice."
  • One answer lies in the structure of the Internet's various communities. Wikipedia has a weak community, but centralizes the exchange of information. It has a small number of extremely active editors, but participation is declining, and most users feel little ownership of the content. And although everyone views the same information, edits take place on a separate page, and discussions of reliability on another, insulating ordinary users from any doubts that might be expressed. Facebook, where the Lincoln hoax took flight, has strong communities but decentralizes the exchange of information. Friends are quite likely to share content and to correct mistakes, but those corrections won't reach other users sharing or viewing the same content.
  • Reddit, by contrast, builds its strong community around the centralized exchange of information. Discussion isn't a separate activity but the sine qua non of the site. When one user voiced doubts, others saw the comment and quickly piled on.
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  • Kelly's students, like all good con artists, built their stories out of small, compelling details to give them a veneer of veracity. Ultimately, though, they aimed to succeed less by assembling convincing stories than by exploiting the trust of their marks, inducing them to lower their guard. Most of us assess arguments, at least initially, by assessing those who make them. Kelly's students built blogs with strong first-person voices, and hit back hard at skeptics. Those inclined to doubt the stories were forced to doubt their authors. They inserted articles into Wikipedia, trading on the credibility of that site. And they aimed at very specific communities: the "beer lovers of Baltimore" and Reddit.
  • Reddit prides itself on winnowing the wheat from the chaff. It relies on the collective judgment of its members, who click on arrows next to contributions, elevating insightful or interesting content, and demoting less worthy contributions. Even Mills says he was impressed by the way in which redditors "marshaled their collective bits of expert knowledge to arrive at a conclusion that was largely correct." It's tough to con Reddit.
  • hoaxes tend to thrive in communities which exhibit high levels of trust. But on the Internet, where identities are malleable and uncertain, we all might be well advised to err on the side of skepticism.
julia rhodes

At Four Seasons, Picasso Tapestry Hangs on the Edge of Eviction - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • On the surface, the dispute is about grout and tiles, but it is also a collision of values and taste. Ms. Breen said she suspected that one of the founders of RFR was just not a fan of “Le Tricorne” — a person who heard him discussing the work said he dismissed it as “a schmatte,” Yiddish for rag — and was using the damaged-wall argument as a pretense to ditch it for good.
  • His own tastes run to contemporary artists, like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, and he has told people that he wants to showcase highlights of his vast trove in the space now occupied by “Le Tricorne.”Neither Mr. Rosen nor anyone contacted at RFR returned calls for comment.
  • “Le Tricorne” is not regarded as one of Picasso’s masterpieces, partly because it strays from the avant-garde path he had started traveling a decade earlier with Cubism. Its sheer size reduces its market value, as does its origins as a stage prop. In 2008, when the conservancy wanted an estimated value for insurance purposes, Christie’s appraised the work at $1.6 million.
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  • The curtain has apparently been on the verge of eviction for months. In November, Mr. Rosen called the conservancy to say steam was leaking from the wall in what is informally known as Picasso Alley, and needed repairs that could be done only by taking down the curtain.
  • But the Picasso biographer John Richardson once called “Le Tricorne” the artist’s “supreme theatrical achievement,” and many art historians and architects consider it an integral part of the Four Seasons.
  • “But then the question is when anyone would ever see it again,” she added, “if it survived the move.”
Javier E

What Machines Can't Do - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • certain mental skills will become less valuable because computers will take over. Having a great memory will probably be less valuable. Being able to be a straight-A student will be less valuable — gathering masses of information and regurgitating it back on tests. So will being able to do any mental activity that involves following a set of rules.
  • what human skills will be more valuable?
  • In the news business, some of those skills are already evident.
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  • Technology has rewarded sprinters (people who can recognize and alertly post a message on Twitter about some interesting immediate event) and marathoners (people who can write large conceptual stories), but it has hurt middle-distance runners (people who write 800-word summaries of yesterday’s news conference).
  • Technology has rewarded graphic artists who can visualize data, but it has punished those who can’t turn written reporting into video presentations.
  • More generally, the age of brilliant machines seems to reward a few traits.
  • First, it rewards enthusiasm. The amount of information in front of us is practically infinite; so is that amount of data that can be collected with new tools. The people who seem to do best possess a voracious explanatory drive, an almost obsessive need to follow their curiosity.
  • Second, the era seems to reward people with extended time horizons and strategic discipline.
  • a human can provide an overall sense of direction and a conceptual frame. In a world of online distractions, the person who can maintain a long obedience toward a single goal, and who can filter out what is irrelevant to that goal, will obviously have enormous worth.
  • Third, the age seems to reward procedural architects. The giant Internet celebrities didn’t so much come up with ideas, they came up with systems in which other people could express ideas: Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, etc.
  • One of the oddities of collaboration is that tightly knit teams are not the most creative. Loosely bonded teams are, teams without a few domineering presences, teams that allow people to think alone before they share results with the group. So a manager who can organize a decentralized network around a clear question, without letting it dissipate or clump, will have enormous value.
  • Fifth, essentialists will probably be rewarded.
  • creativity can be described as the ability to grasp the essence of one thing, and then the essence of some very different thing, and smash them together to create some entirely new thing.
  • In the 1950s, the bureaucracy was the computer. People were organized into technocratic systems in order to perform routinized information processing.
  • now the computer is the computer. The role of the human is not to be dispassionate, depersonalized or neutral. It is precisely the emotive traits that are rewarded: the voracious lust for understanding, the enthusiasm for work, the ability to grasp the gist, the empathetic sensitivity to what will attract attention and linger in the mind.
  • Unable to compete when it comes to calculation, the best workers will come with heart in hand.
julia rhodes

Fict or Faction - How Much Do We Care About the Truth? | Psychology Today - 0 views

  • Many books and hundreds of articles have been written about how drug companies have “gamed every system” to push their products. Negative clinical studies are suppressed; claims are made for larger usefulness that have no real basis in fact; side effects are ignored or deliberately underreported; and companies pay fines in the billions that still represent small fractions of total sales.
  • Spending enormous amounts of cash looking at cancer, cardiovascular and “women’s health” research, the Bayer scientists could corroborate less than a quarter of the studies they tested. In other words, 75-80% of these major research findings could not be confirmed.
  • Science lives on replication. Yet these clinically critical attempts to corroborate research findings could not confirm them. Why? Ironically, the reasons resemble many that are used to describe the malfeasance of drug companies – the need for money, grant support, major findings to achieve tenure – and a desire for others not to have the “secret sauce” of methodology needed to create the research.
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  • The author retorts “I really have an issue with the word hoax.” He regards himself as a performance artist. His response – “It’s the people who reported it who are deceiving their audience.”
  • Why is fake news so popular on newssites? Here are two reasons: first, it provides emotional “buzz.” Second, because it can make a lot of money. As the Washington Bureau chief of the Pulitzer winning Huffington Post lamented, “If you throw something up without fact checking it, and you’re the first one to put it up, and you get millions and millions of views, and later it’s proved false, you still got those views. That’s a problem. The incentives are all wrong.”Especially when, as at places like Bloomberg, remuneration is based on the number of hits an article receives. But incentives are wrong not just for news gathering organizations.
  • Americans continue to believe important historical “facts” that are untrue. After 9/11, Americans were incensed to hear that the many in the Middle East thought Osama bin Laden’s horrifying attack was the product of a CIA-Mossad plot. To this day, large majorities in countries like Pakistan think the massacre of 9/11 was created in Washington or Tel Aviv.
  • Yet close to a majority of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein, tyrant of Iraq, was in cahoots with Al-Qaeda, especially before the 9/11 attack. The Bush administration told them so.Which people in the Middle East rightly regard as preposterous.Saddam Hussein was the leader of a boldly secular, Arabist tyranny. Sunni fanatics like Al Qaeda were his regime’s blood enemies. That they would work together rather than murder each other was just insane. Welcome to the world of fict and faction.
  • What can we learn from this? Plausibility is not truth; when something is “too good to be true” it generally isn’t; institutions increasingly do not back up what they proclaim and sell.And the “free informational marketplace” of the Internet is a wonderful site for fraud, scams, lies, plausible lies, and pleasant, beautiful untruths. So we all need our own truth detectors.
Javier E

Where's the Money? US Arts and Culture Economy By the Numbers - 0 views

  • An unprecedented survey of the role of the arts in the larger economy, last week’s breakdown of the GDP contribution of America’s creative industries in 2011
  • a joint effort of the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and National Endowment for the Arts, reveals that advertising dwarfs the economic clout of every single other creative endeavor, followed by arts education in a distant second place
  • the total size of the arts and culture economy is 3.2 percent of GDP, coming in at $504 billion
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  • the small size of the “Independent artists and performing arts” ($48.9 billion) compared to the “Arts education” category ($104 billion) should provide some pause as far as the economic linkage that exists between arts education and the production of what we consider high (or “fine”) art: teaching art — i.e. the promise of art — is a more lustrous pearl than the actual messy business of producing it
  • As a reminder, the annual budget of the National Endowment for Arts in 2011 was $154.7 million. In that same year, the Philadelphia “Phillies,” a Major League Baseball team, paid their players alone $173 million.
Emily Freilich

Integrating Design Theory & the Scientific Process - Blog - Mills-Scofield LL... - 0 views

  • I am sitting across the table from my thesis advisor. We stare at one another in silence, our faces reflecting equal levels of frustration. After a 15-minute debate on the differences between a parameter and a constraint, it has become apparent my advisor is an engineer, and I am not. My advisor and I meet weekly to discuss my research. Each week we inevitably hit a wall; expressing the same words, but interpreting them in entirely different ways. With a background in biology and design, my definition of details often do not align with an engineer’s. However, we both know the objectives of my thesis, and both want to work towards that goal (and diploma)  So why are we having such a difficult time communicating?
  • ealization that our different disciplines do not speak the same language.
  • There was never room for another subject like art, no space for speaking two languages fluently. My educational system created silos between the different disciplines. Once I chose one path, essentially my language, other subjects became foreign.
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  • Connections are missing between these disciplines, and in particular between the arts and sciences. On almost every project I have worked on thus far, my analytical and creative teammates have struggled to connect.
  • it would be extremely naïve to think that type of interdisciplinary education can be implemented everywhere - and nor should it be. We still need the classically trained “quant jocks” as well as the “edgy creatives”. Without them, a melting pot of full-fledged hybrids such as myself would lose any sort of concrete base for reference.
  • So where do we go from here? I believe each individual, no matter how much of a purist they may be in their respective field, should be responsible for entertaining interdisciplinary ideas.
  • n an era where buzzwords like “collaboration” and “innovation” land you a job, its time to actually start flexing both sides of our brains. At the end of this journey, behind our various languages, it is surprising how similar my analytical and creative peers are.
  • The proof can be found just looking at the scientific process alongside design theory.
  • Although one approach may rely more on quantifiable data and the other on a more “human” means of communication, step by step the two share striking similarities. Combining these two theories helps me personally make sense of my own analytical and creative brain. When they come together as one scientific and artistic critical thinking tool, the result is a deeper understanding of defining problems and finding solutions.
Javier E

Is Amazon Creating a Cultural Monopoly? - The New Yorker - 0 views

  • “We are not experts in antitrust law, and this letter is not a legal brief. But we are authors with a deep, collective experience in this field, and we agree with the authorities in economics and law who have asserted that Amazon’s dominant position makes it a monopoly as a seller of books and a monopsony as a buyer of books.” (A monopoly is a company that has extraordinary control over supply as a seller of goods to consumers; a monopsony has extraordinary control over suppliers as a buyer of their goods.)
  • a highly unorthodox argument: that, even though Amazon’s activities tend to reduce book prices, which is considered good for consumers, they ultimately hurt consumers
  • U.S. courts evaluate antitrust issues very differently, nowadays, than they did a hundred years ago, just after antitrust laws were established to keep big corporations from abusing their power. Back then, judges tended to be largely concerned with protecting suppliers from being squeezed by retailers, which meant that, if a corporation exercised monopoly power to push prices down, hurting suppliers, the company could easily lose an antitrust case. But by the nineteen-eighties, the judiciary’s focus had shifted to protecting consumers, leading courts to become more prone to ruling in favor of the corporation, on the grounds that lower prices are good for consumers.
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  • specific argument—that Amazon’s actions are bad for consumers because they make our world less intellectually active and diverse—is unorthodox in its resort to cultural and artistic grounds. But it can be read as the inverse of a case like Leegin v. PSKS: that lower prices for worse products could be bad for consumers—and perhaps constitute an antitrust violation.
  • if higher prices corresponded with better products, that could be good for consumers—and not necessarily an antitrust violation.
  • Their argument is this: Amazon has used its market power both to influence which books get attention (by featuring them more prominently on its Web site, a practice I’ve also written about) and, in some cases, to drive prices lower. These practices, the authors argue, squeeze publishers, which makes them more risk-averse in deciding which books to publish. As a result, they claim, publishers have been “dropping some midlist authors and not publishing certain riskier books, effectively silencing many voices.” And this is bad not only for the non-famous writers who go unpublished, but for their would-be readers, who are denied the ability to hear those voices.
  • While it may be attractive, on a philosophical level, to argue that Amazon is bad for us because it makes our culture poorer, measuring that effect would be difficult, if not impossible. How would one go about valuing an unpublished masterpiece by an unknown author? This is further complicated by the fact that Amazon makes it easy for authors to self-publish and have their work be seen, without having to go through such traditional gatekeepers as agents and publishers; Amazon might argue that this allows for more free flow of information and ideas
  • Furthermore, U.S. law is concerned with diversity in media, Crane said, but that tends to be regulated through the Federal Communications Commission, not the Justice Department.
  • it’s quite possible the Justice Department will read the Authors United letter and dismiss it as uninformed. But even if that happens, Preston said, it will have been worthwhile for the writers to have made their case.
  • Authors United’s larger mission, he told me, was this: “We hope to show the public that getting products faster and cheaper isn’t necessarily the greatest good. It comes at a human cost.”
Javier E

What Is Talent? - David Shenk - National - The Atlantic - 1 views

  • "the circular logic of talent." "When we say that someone is talented," he says, "we think we mean that they have some innate predisposition to excel, but in the end, we only apply the term retrospectively, after they have made significant achievements."
  • The closer we look at the building blocks of success, the more we understand that talent is not a thing; rather, it is the process itself. 
  • Genes influence our traits, but in a dynamic way. They do not directly determine our traits. In fact, it turns out that while it is correct to say that "genes influence us," it's just as correct to say that "we influence our genes."
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  • Everything about our lives is a process
  • Friedrich Nietzsche described greatness as being steeped in a process, and of great artists being tireless participants in that process:
Javier E

Clive Thompson on Memory Engineering | Magazine - 0 views

  • a new trend I call memory engineering — the process of fashioning our inchoate digital pasts into useful memories.
  • Many of us generate massive amounts of personal data every day — phonecam pictures, text messages, status updates, and so on. By default, all of us are becoming lifeloggers. But we almost never go back and look at this stuff, because it’s too hard to parse.
  • Memory engineers are solving that problem by creating services that reformat that data in witty, often artistic ways.
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  • Lifeloggers have long touted the “total recall” that’s achievable if you obsessively store and organize personal records: Never forget a thing! But Wegener has found that less can be more. When you show someone their year-old check-ins and nothing else, it’s a very crude signal — just a bunch of points on a map. But our brains seize these cues and fill in the details
  • these techniques can also work with “semantic” memories of facts and info. Last winter, Amazon released a clever app called Daily Review, which takes your Kindle clippings and redisplays them for you weeks or months later — timed on a schedule that’s designed to help you absorb your reading more deeply into your brain
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