May 14, 2012

WHY MEN DO NOT REVOLT “GAMER AND MANY OTHERS…

Why Men Do Not Revolt “Gamer and many others who study the nature of colonial rule offer the best insights into the functioning of our corporate state. We have been, like nations on the periphery of empire, colonized. We are controlled by tiny corporate entities that have no loyalty to the nation and indeed in the language of traditional patriotism are traitors. They strip us of our resources, keep us politically passive and enrich themselves at our expense. The mechanisms of control are familiar to those whom the Martinique-born French psychiatrist and writer Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,” including African-Americans. The colonized are denied job security. Incomes are reduced to subsistence level. The poor are plunged into desperation. Mass movements, such as labor unions, are dismantled. The school system is degraded so only the elites have access to a superior education. Laws are written to legalize corporate plunder and abuse, as well as criminalize dissent. And the ensuing fear and instability—keenly felt this past weekend by the more than 200,000 Americans who lost their unemployment benefits—ensure political passivity by diverting all personal energy toward survival. It is an old, old game. “A change of power does not require the election of a Mitt Romney or a Barack Obama or a Democratic majority in Congress, or an attempt to reform the system or electing progressive candidates, but rather a destruction of corporate domination of the political process—Gamer’s “patron-client” networks. It requires the establishment of new mechanisms of governance to distribute wealth and protect resources, to curtail corporate power, to cope with the destruction of the ecosystem and to foster the common good. But we must first recognize ourselves as colonial subjects. We must accept that we have no effective voice in the way we are governed. We must […]
May 13, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM JON LAWHEAD

Jon Lawhead originally shared this post: “Philosophy and science should be left to the frigid and impersonal investigator, for they offer two equally tragic alternatives to the man of feeling and action; despair if he fail in his quest, and terrors unutterable and unimaginable if he succeed.” -H.P. Lovecraft
May 13, 2012

ATTENTION ECONOMY 11: SYSTEMS OF ORGANIZATION…

Attention Economy 11: Systems of Organization This is the latest in my #attentioneconomy series of essays, and it’s a monster. I’ll need all the help I can get =D If you enjoy my stream, please read, share, and participate! ___ “Humanity is under no delusions about the nature and scale of the problems we face; we have been aware of the difficulty our future presents for at least a generation. However, for each of these tremendous challenges, the available solutions seem to fall into two rough categories: market solutions and state solutions. Private solutions and public solutions. These were the two basic organizational strategies that came out of the Enlightenment, each of which has clear advantages for certain kinds of tasks and potentially tragic disadvantages for others. The history of human organization over the last few centuries has involved finding a precarious balance between these two strategies. On the traditional model, this balancing act centered around the importance of individual freedom, and played out in the discursive border disputes that continue to rage between the public and the private spheres. The digital age has violently disrupted these delicate attempts at balance, instigating all new turf wars; but all available solutions assume that these lines have to be drawn somewhere around the individual, even while there is less and less clear sense of what such a thing might even be. Since state based or market solutions (and increasingly, some combination of the two) are the only organizational strategies on the table, there is and remains no consensus for how to reconcile these anomalies. Even while it is clear that neither state or market solutions will adequately address the problems we face, we lack any clear sense of what an alternative organizational structure might look like. This is my assessment of our […]
May 13, 2012

ATTENTION ECONOMY 11: SYSTEMS OF ORGANIZATION

The #attentioneconomy is a unified model of social organization. In the previous post, I explained a simple thought experiment for thinking about your role as an attender in the network. In this post, I will explain how attention economies fit into a larger schema of organizational strategies. This is the post where I make good on the claim to a “unified model”. ___________________________ (1) Enlightenment strategies Organizational structure is a fundamental question for any social creature; the history of human society is a history of different organizing strategies. In what follows, I will be giving a very general analysis of a certain class of organizational strategies. I’ll be painting with broad strokes that will be vague in the details in order to get the theory on the table, so please have patience with what is undoubtedly a inadequate historical analysis. In particular, much of what I will say will involve a caricature of what I call “Enlightenment” organizational strategies. By the Enlightenment, I’m referring to a wide range of philosophical and theoretical developments in the 17th and 18th centuries that, coupled with tremendous advances in the sciences, set the stage for the massive changes in human social organization that played out in the centuries that followed. On my telling, the Enlightenment culminates in the series of revolutions that characterize the age, including the French and American political revolutions and the economic and technological changes identified with the Industrial Revolution. These organizational revolutions served as the backdrop on which the drama of the 19th and 20th centuries unfolded. The Enlightenment is a conversation between many thinkers across many different social and historical contexts, so any remark on its lessons will inevitably involve a gross simplification. On my particular simplification, the Enlightenment involves a recognition and respect for the freedom of individuals. […]
May 12, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM JULIEN AMELOT

This is a pretty scathing critique of our current condition, regardless of what lies in store if we continue on these paths. I’m not sure I’d blame lawyers for this. We’re all culpable for the inhumanity of the existing order of things. Julien Amelot originally shared this post: Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers By +Tom Scott #singularity #afterlife #themeaningoflife
May 12, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM ANIMESH SHARMA

Animesh Sharma originally shared this post: “Analysing the emotional expressions (positive, negative, neutral) of users, we revealed a remarkable persistence both for individual users and channels. I.e. despite their anonymity, users tend to follow social norms in repeated interactions in online chats, which results in a specific emotional “tone” of the channels. ” Emotional persistence in online chatting communities : Scientific Reports : Nature Publishing Group How do users behave in online chatrooms, where they instantaneously read and write posts? We analyzed about 2.5 million posts covering various topics in Internet relay channels, and found that user ac…
May 11, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM JONATHAN LANGDALE

+Jon Lawhead I’ve become convinced that what’s going on here is a fundamental failure to properly understand the phenomenon of organization at a quite general level. This is just circumstantial evidence, but it gives some hint at the extent of the problem. Consider the following two Wikipedia pages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organism Notice how, despite the obvious conceptual relations, the two pages share virtually no overlap whatsoever. The page on “organization” is almost exclusively about human bureaucratic institutional structures– with some notable exceptions, like the link to ANT and complexity theory. There are links, of course, but there are links everywhere on the web. But on its face this discussion bears almost no relation whatsoever to the discussion of organisms, presumably exactly those entities which are so organized. There is virtually no hope, at least from the Wiki entries, of figuring out how the process of organization might lead to any of the organisms that populate the planet. That’s not enough for the full argument, but in broad outline this mismatch convinces me that we are running against a fundamental conceptual gap. And Jon, I think we’ve put together a theory that can bridge this gap in ways that have consequences throughout the disciplines. Its a theory that makes the Queen of Spades hypothesis a paradigm case instead of a curious outlier crying for explanation. That’s how paradigm shifts work. I don’t think it is coincidental that the Greek roots for the word, ??????? literally means “instrument, implement, tool, for making or doing a thing”. It makes the solution seem almost obvious in retrospect. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Do%29%2Frganon ____ Left this comment in Jon’s thread. h/t +Jonathan Langdale https://plus.google.com/u/0/103315650425474752023/posts/9efsd68tV4v Jonathan Langdale originally shared this post: Get others to do the hard essential hard work. Sounds familiar. . Queen of spades key to new evolutionary hypothesis […]
May 11, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM REBECCA SPIZZIRRI

Rebecca Spizzirri originally shared this post: This research is particularly important because it overcomes some of the long standing limitations on studying fish. A colleague of mine studied clownfish for her thesis, with the goal of investigating how hormones change in the brain as the fish change sexes (clownfish change from male to female when they become socially dominant in their environment). But this process involved pairing up the subjects in test tanks to see which would become dominant, which was ultimately stressful on the fish. In fact, not a single one survived the experiment. But if researchers can use virtual environments to get the same results, then not only is that in the best interest of animal welfare, but also it increases the range of possible environments or situations that the subjects can be exposed to, allowing researchers to draw more specific conclusions from these experiments. “Dr. Ahrens and colleagues created a virtual environment for zebrafish, which allowed them to measure activity in the neurons as the fish ‘moved’. In reality, the zebrafish was paralysed to allow the researchers to image its brain; the fish perceived to ‘move’ through the virtual environment by activating their motor neuron axons, the cells responsible for generating movement.” Virtual reality allows researchers to measure fish brain activity during behavior at unprecedented resolution Researchers have developed a new technique which allows them to measure brain activity in large populations of nerve cells at the resolution of individual cells. The technique has been developed in ze…
May 11, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM BUG G. MEMBRACID

Even spiders cooperate! Bug G. Membracid originally shared this post: This movie contains spiders!!! (and David Attenborough)
May 11, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM FILIPPO SALUSTRI

“In other words, self-sustaining, functionally closed structures can arise at a higher level (an autocatalytic set of autocatalytic sets), i.e., true emergence,” they say. That’s an interesting view of emergence and certainly seems a sensible approach to the problem of the origin of life. It’s not hard to imagine groups of molecules operating together like this. And indeed, biochemists have recently discovered simple autocatalytic sets that behave in exactly this way. But what makes the approach so powerful is that the mathematics does not depend on the nature of chemistry–it is substrate independent. So the building blocks in an autocatalytic set need not be molecules at all but any units that can manipulate other units in the required way. These units can be complex entities in themselves. “Perhaps it is not too far-fetched to think, for example, of the collection of bacterial species in your gut (several hundreds of them) as one big autocatalytic set,” say Kauffman and co. Link to the paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.0584 Filippo Salustri originally shared this post: Closing in on a scientific explanation of how life started. Boy, that’s piss the religulous fundiots off! #science #mathematics #abiogenesis The Single Theory That Could Explain Emergence, Organisation And The Origin of Life – Technology Review Biochemists have long imagined that autocatalytic sets can explain the origin of life. Now a new mathematical approach to these sets has even broader implications
May 11, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM JON LAWHEAD

Jon Lawhead originally shared this post: “Philosophy and science should be left to the frigid and impersonal investigator, for they offer two equally tragic alternatives to the man of feeling and action; despair if he fail in his quest, and terrors unutterable and unimaginable if he succeed.” -H.P. Lovecraft
May 11, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM ALBERT EINSTEIN

Albert Einstein originally shared this post: “Never memorize something that you can look up.” +Albert Einstein (step into my circle)
July 23, 2006

BORN AND RAISED

I took a trip out to Philly this weekend. Apparently some of the other CTY folk went out there for a big group trip, but I couldn’t stand to hang around with these guys all day. Plus, they left at 9am, and I did not want to abide by their schedule. So I left around 11, and hung out at the art museum for most of the day. From out front, you get a good view of the Philly skyline. I was extremely pleased to see the Segway tours held here, too. I’d take a tour on them just for the ride if they didn’t make the passengers wear helmets: The museum is big and beautiful and out in a relatively secluded part of the city. I took the requisite Rocky shot from the top of the steps, but I couldn’t have orchestrated this shot any better if I had planned for weeks. Outside the museum, there is this sprawling metal spider on one side of the steps. And directly inside the building is this guy, by Miro. Harmony and I saw his brother at the MOMA last winter, and I was happy to see him again: I knew the museum was big, but I had no idea what to suspect. I was thinking it would probably be a lot of traditional stuff, so I didn’t have my hopes up. But the collections here were amazing. They have quite a big Rodin collection, and one of the first things I saw was Thinker, which just made my day. Across the gallery, however, was a much better sculpture by Rodin: Thought. I was giddy as a school girl, and it was the first room I had walked in. There was lots of famous van Gogh, and all big impressionists, (Monet, Manet, […]
July 24, 2006

ONE LAST PRINCETON PIC

Near the end of the session, I found this door and frame sitting in the middle of the sidewalk, outside a theater. I dont know why it was there, but I took a picture.
July 26, 2006

CARPET PASSES THE IMITATION GAME

The carpet’s intelligence is derived from a layer of silicone rubber with built-in electrodes that measure the changes in electrical resistance and current flow caused by someone walking across it. Testing has produced a nearly perfect record when determining ages between 20 and 60, and gender is identified with about 75 percent accuracy — eerie to say to the least. |link|
July 27, 2006

YES, THERE’S WORK TO DO

But I’m gonna mess with my template anyway. Hang on, this page will be messy over the next few days. Edit 1:Alright, I decided to get rid of the red theme, which I wasn’t doing much with anyway. I can’t color coordinate anyway. So I’m back to a nice, somber black, white, and gray. Tell me what you think, and how it looks in whatever browers and whatever resolution you are using. It finally looks correct in IE, but I’d like some feedback for Safari. Edit 2: Meh, I think black and white was too dull. I added a muted red. waddaya think?
July 27, 2006

THE KING IS DEAD

Long live the King Alright, I think I hammered this thing into shape. It looks a bit awkward, but I think its pretty smooth. I’m just happy that it looks normal on IE, which is no small miracle. To look at how far this format has come, take a look at my old blogger page. We’ve come a long way, baby.
August 20, 2006

TV VS. MOM

I’ve been quite busy. I’ve moved, I’m preparing a new class (complete with website), and I have an bleeding ear infection that, thanks to a whole lot of vicodin has kept me bed ridden for the last week. But even still, I have to post this: The study involved 69 children, ages 7 to 12, who were separated into three groups and then asked to rate their pain on a numerical scale when they were stuck with needle used to take a blood sample. The children’s mothers also rated the kids’ pain. Those watching TV cartoons reported half the pain as those who were being soothed by Mom. When compared with children who just sat in a hospital room with mothers who didn’t try to soothe them, the TV watchers reported one-third the pain. “The power of television is strong and it can be harmful for children if it is stronger than the force made by the mother to distract children,” Bellieni said. “I believe that this power must be controlled and reduced.” |Link via Engadget| Too late, Bellieni. Way, way too late.
August 22, 2006

MY NETRIOTIC DUTY

I have a bunch of videos I want to show my students, but my classroom doesn’t have the resources to show them any video clips, and I don’t have a laptop to bring in anyway. I’ve been putting videos on the HTEC site, but I can’t be sure that everyone will have the codecs to view them, or will even have access to the site on anything other than a public computer. So I’ve been trying to mess around with video editing so I can cut out some important clips and upload them to YouTube for everyone to see. I honestly feel somewhat guilty for not having put anything on YouTube until now, as if I didn’t register for the draft or something. So I uploaded my first ever video last week, of Bush’s recent foray into French existentialism. Amazingly, the video has already been viewed over 1500 times, which I’m sure says something about something. In any case, it was frighteningly easy to cut the clip and upload it, so I thought it’d be a good way of preparing clips for class. However, the other films I’m trying to cut together are all much larger files, and much harder to deal with, especially given YouTube’s 10 minute/100 meg file limit. My second attempt is uploading at the moment, I’ll update this post when its up and running. edit: Here we go
August 25, 2006

VISUALIZING SPEECH

The basic debate over folk psychology is whether or not our common sense psychological terms like ‘intentions’ refer to actual entities in the brain. I generally side with the eliminativists on these issues, but the token eliminiativists like Churchland often come across as if the (primitive, ignorant) ‘folk’ are making a huge mistake by continuing to use words like ‘belief’ and ‘desire’ and (especially) ‘intention’ in describing the mind. To make the view a little more appealing, I usually compare folk-psychological terms to speech and thought bubbles in comic books. We all know what speech and thought bubbles mean, and how to read them in order to understand the illustration. But none of us think that speech actually occurs in bubble form, or that the comics are trying to accurately represent the mechanics of speech in depicting them as bubbles. They are just convenient ways to depict behavior in a simple, static way. Well, we all understand thought bubbles, but they didn’t always have the form they currently have. BoingBoing recently linked to an interesting study in the evolution of speech bubbles. I’ll just point out some examples I found interesting after the break. Speech ‘balloons’ started out as scrolls, which is somewhat understandable. Interestingly, however, they often came out of the speaker’s hands, and not their mouths. The srolls were very ornate and elaborate. It looks like speech bubbles evolved for the most part due to the laziness of the artist, and the fact that extremely ornate scrolls weren’t necessary (or appropriate) for a quick political cartoon. You start seeing a more balloon-like shape in the mid-18th century. Eventually, this appears to have evolved in to a method not only for keeping track of speakers and what they said, but also the order in which they say it. This […]
August 25, 2006

WIKIALITY

Thanks, DS. “The power of the community to decide, of course, asks us to reexamine what we mean when we say that something is ‘true.’ We tend to think of truth as something that resides in the world. The fact that two plus two equals four is written in the stars-we merely discovered it. But Wikipedia suggests a different theory of truth. Just think about the way we learn what words mean. Generally speaking, we do so by listening to other people (our parents, first). Since we want to communicate with them (after all, they feed us), we use the words in the same way they do. Wikipedia says judgments of truth and falsehood work the same way. The community decides that two plus two equals four the same way it decides what an apple is: by consensus. Yes, that means that is the community changes its and decides that two plus two equals five, then two plus two does equal five. The community isn’t likely to do such an absurd or useless thing, but it has the ability.” -From “The Hive”, The Atlantic, September 2006 Discussions of Wikipedia have become increasingly confused and confusing in popular discussions, thanks in no small part to Steven Colbert. But Wikipedia has always been clear and concise about its own position relative to the ‘truth’. From Wikipedia in eight words Facts: Wikipedia contains facts, not opinions, and not original research. Since any opinion of note has been expressed by some person or group of people, we do not try to decide or claim that an opinion is “true” or “false”. We state instead, neutrally and factually, which people hold what views, and allow the facts to speak for themselves. Wikipedia, I think rightly and as any honest encyclopedia should, does not claim to […]
August 29, 2006

YOU MAKE EVERYTHING

… Groovy I just found out that Spike Jonze is making a film based on Where the Wild Things Are, and Dave Eggers is getting screenwriting credits. How neat is that? I stumbled across this after finding this commercial Jonze Wes Anderson directed. I posted it up on the HTEC website, but it is worth posting here too. I like the way it contrasts with one of my favorite short films ever, Camera. If you are reading this site, I’ve probably shown it to you a few times already. But if not, you can watch it after the break.
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