The potential for genius is in most (or at least half) people. What most lack is the mentoring support and the personal drive to excel. What I got most out of the article, though, was that it is a perfect recipe for parenting: Support and mentor your children, encouraging hard working attitudes while providing exposure to a variety of topics so that they can find that which motivates them. That's what I'm trying to do, at least.
]]>The first sentence of her first response really grabbed me:
For some people, things move from "I have a feeling, I want to call a friend" to "I want to feel something, I need to make a call"
She goes on to talk about how an always-on, always there, instantaneous environment affects how we think about ourselves. It's not directly related, but I share enthusiasm with those of the Long Now Foundation. These kinds of short-term attitudes nurtured by immersion in the online space are directly relevant to the issues that the Clock of the Long Now is trying to address.
I've included the full text of the interview in the extended body, so check it out if you want. It's short and worth reading.
]]> Living online: I'll have to ask my friendsIs social networking changing the way people relate to each other?
For some people, things move from "I have a feeling, I want to call a friend" to "I want to feel something, I need to make a call". In either case, what is not being cultivated is the ability to be alone and to manage and contain one's emotions. When technology brings us to the point where we're used to sharing our thoughts and feelings instantaneously, it can lead to a new dependence, sometimes to the extent that we need others in order to feel our feelings in the first place.
Our new intimacies with our machines create a world where it makes sense to speak of a new state of the self. When someone says "I am on my cell", "online", "on instant messaging" or "on the web", these phrases suggest a new placement of the subject, a subject wired into social existence through technology, a tethered self. I think of tethering as the way we connect to always-on communication devices and to the people and things we reach through them.
How is it affecting families?
Let me take a simple example. Tethered adolescents are given a cellphone by their parents. In return, they are expected to answer their parents' calls. On the one hand, this arrangement gives the adolescent new freedoms. On the other, the adolescent does not have the experience of being alone, of having only him or herself to count on: there is always a parent on speed dial. This provides comfort in a dangerous world, yet there is a price to pay in the development of autonomy. There used to be a moment in the life of an urban child, usually between the ages of 12 and 14, when there was a first time to navigate the city alone. It was a rite of passage that communicated, "You are on your own and responsible." Tethering via a cellphone buffers this moment; tethered children think differently about themselves. They are not quite alone.
Does it worry you?
Our society tends toward a breathless techno-enthusiasm: "We are more connected; we are global; we are more informed." But just as not all information put on the web is true, not all aspects of the new sociality should be celebrated. We communicate with quick instant messages, "check-in" cell calls and emoticon graphics. All of these are meant to quickly communicate a state. They are not meant to open a dialogue about complexity of feeling. Although the culture that grows up around the cellphone is a "talk culture", it is not necessarily a culture that contributes to self-reflection. Self-reflection depends on having an emotion, experiencing it, taking one's time to think it through and understand it, but only sometimes electing to share it.
Is this a bad thing?
The self that grows up with multitasking and rapid response measures success by calls made, emails answered, messages responded to. In this buzz of activity, there may be losses that we are not ready to sustain. We insist that our world is increasingly complex, yet we have created a communications culture that has decreased the time available for us to sit and think, uninterrupted. Teens growing up with always-on communication are primed to receive a quick message to which they are expected to give a rapid response. They may never know another way. Their experience raises a question for us all: are we leaving enough time to take one's time?
Are you talking about a permanent change?
It seems to be part of a larger trend in media culture for people not to know what they think until they get a sense of what everyone else thinks. But we learn about what everyone else thinks by reading highly polarised opinions that encourage choosing sides rather than thinking things through. You can give media culture a positive spin and say that people are more socially enmeshed, but it has a darker side: as a feeling emerges, people share the feeling to see if they have the feeling. And sometimes they don't have the feeling until they check if other people have it too. This kind of behaviour used to be associated with early adolescents, with their need for validation. Now always-on technology is turning it into a norm.
Surely being socially enmeshed can also have a positive side?
The challenge for this generation is to think of sociality as more than the cyber-intimacy of sharing gossip and photographs and profiles. This is a paradoxical time. We have more information but take less time to think it through in its complexity. We're connecting globally but talking parochially.
Are you saying that people are missing the broader picture?
People are connecting one-on-one - they have their online social network or their cellphone with 250 people on speed dial - but do they feel part of a community? Do they feel responsibility to a set of shared political commitments? Do they feel a need to take responsibility for issues that would require that they act in concert rather than just connect? Recently, connectivity and statements of identity on places such as Facebook or MySpace have themselves become values. It is a concern when self-expression becomes more important than social action.
What kind of responsibility are they ducking?
Summer 2006 finds the world enmeshed in multiple wars and genocidal campaigns. It finds the world incapable of calling a halt to environmental destruction. Yet, with all of this, people seem above all to be fascinated by novel technologies. On college campuses there is less interest in asking questions about the state of the world than in refining one's presence on Facebook or MySpace. Technology pundits may talk in glowing terms about new forms of social life, but the jury is out on whether virtual self-expression will translate into collective action.
Profile
Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her books include The Second Self: Computers and the human spirit (MIT Press, 2005) and Life on the Screen: Identity in the age of the internet (Touchstone, 1997). Her next, Evocative Objects: Things we think with, will be published in April 2007. She is also completing a book on robots and the human spirit.
From issue 2569 of New Scientist magazine, 20 September 2006, page 48-49
It's a political document more than it's an environmental one and anyone concerned about the strength of conservative or neocon cadres or interested in advancing liberal politics in the USA need to read it. I've often wondered why the Democratic platform (or any other, for that matter) doesn't build a core set of values that they stand on. They really do seem to exist as the anti-Republican or anti-conservative group, which only succeeds entrenching those who don't agree with you. The liberal market doesn't offer any compelling reasons for conservatives to shop there.
What would a liberal values platform look like? Consider first the appeal of the conservative platform, framed thus:
• No wasteful government• Strong defense of the nation
• Respect for religion (especially for God)
• Strong healthy families and communities
• Strong economic performance, with jobs for everyone
Of course those opposed to the conservative agenda read into this list, but just consider it at face value for a minute. Can you really argue against any of those? Do you prefer a wasteful government? Do you oppose strong defense of the nation? Do you think that we ought not to respect religion? Are strong families and communities against the best interests of the nation? Do you think that people shouldn't have jobs that they are proud of and that provide enough to live the American Dream on? This is the core value message of the conservative movement that they then build on to construct their pro-business, pro-(wasteful?) defense spending, hawkish foreign policy, integration of church/state interests, war on poverty the poor, and so on.
What could a liberal/ green platform look like? I don't have the answers, but I think that it might possibly be achievable with a single 2-part point from which the rest of everything builds on:
• Freedom and responsibility
• Respect for others (I know I said one point, but as I was writing, I decided to add this too as a fundamental plank).
Americans love freedom, but with freedom comes responsibility. You can't have irresponsible freedom; we call that anarchy.
From this seed, a whole host of values and policies immediately emerge:
• Legislation that increases or protects freedom is preferred over legislation that restricts freedom.
• Fiscally responsible government (ie no wasteful government spending). This isn't the same as the conservative small-government, but it is an improvement on it. It permits responsible public spending on works and services but is opposed to pork and bloat. The nanny-state is avoided by a reliance on notions of personal responsibility.
• Promotion of personal responsibility and accountability, in personal, local, and national matters. It is a person's responsibility to be and do good and to make something of themself, not the government's. This ethical platform is not only common sense, but appeals to the ethical interests of the conservatives. Part of the need for a liberal platform like this is to bring the liberal camp together but perhaps even more importantly, to bring people from the other side over here. Personal responsibility overlaps with the strong families, strong communities platform.
• Sustainable resource management. It is irresponsible to leave the the country, nation, world in a worse position than we found it.
• Energy independence. This is a double whammy point, in that it taps the independent streak of Americans and leads to sustainable energy as a policy outcome. Government subsidies should be switched from unsustainable and dependent energy sources to renewable and sustainable energy in order to reveal the former's true market cost (and don't forget to to do a total cost analysis!) and to help speed the adoption of viable but nascent economies that would be truly competitive once they are able to take advantage of economies of scale.
• Security via Peace and Prosperity. America can be made safer by engaging in a cooperative foreign policy that maximizes the strength of relationships to reduce global threats. Americans are generous and America does have a role to play as an international supporter of nations and people in need of help and desiring to better themselves. On a global level, most if not all threats to the US are also threats to the rest of the world and it is kind of dumb to squander the strength in numbers. Much more would be accomplished if America focused its international policy on "making the world a better place for everyone" instead of "making sure that the people who don't the USA can't really do anything about it."
• Economic security. This grows out of the last platform. Liberals need to recognize that the current econo-political structure isn't the only one that provides jobs. Just because capitalism has been proven more effective than communism, there are many flavors of capitalism.
• Education. Essential for success in business and life.• An end to hypocrisy. Goose and Gander guidelines for decision making.
• Total cost accounting. A wholistic economics of cost, that include cradle-to-grave production, consumption, disposal costs, as well as human costs. Take the dismantling of computer hardware or single hull oil tankers as an example of failures to do total cost accounting incorporating human costs. The viability of nuclear energy also fails when total costs are considered.
America is a leader in innovation and R&D. A sustainable energy policy would require massive restructuring of the world economy, and that means lots and lots and lots of jobs. Arguments have been made that switching to alternative energy sources would cost more. Even if true in the short term, this argument needs to be tackled head on with the observation that the cheaper prices we pay are devastating on a local and global level, borrowing on the future (ie its irresponsible and immoral). But more than this, sustainable energy is virtually limitless and most everyone knows that in a market economy, limitless supply makes costs very very low. It will be far cheaper to live on sustainable energy than to continue the current carbon economy, even if the carbon economy wasn't about to literally run out of gas or didn't have the negative environmental impacts that it does.
I dare someone to argue against any of the values in this list. Argue against the proposition that we should promote the idea of individuals/ companies/ nations being responsible for the predictable outcomes of their actions, I dare you. The policies I've proposed that grow out of the values are debatable (and should be debated!). But the values are sound and I believe are more compelling than the conservative alternatives (which are fairly good). The debate also needs to be redefined in terms of progressive vs conservative, as liberal is a confusing term (ask someone in the UK what a liberal is and they point to Ronald Reagan) and has been effectively spoiled by the conservative propaganda machine. But progressive is a positive word that looks forward to progress and is proactive. It's energetic and embodies a can-do ethic, whereas conservative is stable, but a bit stodgy and staid. Progressive taps the youth in all of us, whereas conservative is a refuge for the fearful.
This can be done. It needs to be done. I'm doing my part here and hopefully others will add their ideas and spread the word. We should see this message in the next presidential election, from the Green party if from nowhere else. And if this platform was launched today, in the current climate of widespread dissatisfaction with Republican leadership and the lack of compelling alternatives from the Democrats, a Green platform such as this would have huge grassroots and ultimately nationwide support. It is entirely conceivable that a Green president could be sitting in the Oval office just over two years from now.
]]>This was all the more relevant to me as I had just followed a Digg story linking to a series of photos purportedly showing Louis Wains' decent into schizophrenia. It's interesting and a bit scary even. I also ran across a BoingBoing story on the same photos that had additional comments suggesting that the linear progression indicated in the series of photos isn't a reliable as it is often portrayed. I guess that many of the pictures were arranged afterwards in a way that "shows" the progression of the diseases, when in fact it is just as plausible that the artist was experimenting with different styles of art as his career progressed.
Perhaps the researchers who analyzed Van Gogh's work could be brought in on this.
I think it also is plausible that this kind of underlying order in chaos could be implemented mechanically to help build artistic robots. We'll see.
All in all, it's cool research that further illuminates the way that our brains are responsible for making order out of the environment as well as contributing the environment that impacts us. Van Gogh's brain helped him create chaos and viewing that chaos makes us feel it, emotionally. It's all a big feedback loop between environment, culture, and cognition.
]]> Van Gogh had turbulence down to a fine artART experts have long marvelled at the emotional chaos apparent in the later paintings of the Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh. Perhaps that is because the images reflect light in a way that mimics the physics of turbulence.
At least that's the view of a team of physicists led by Jose Luis Aragon of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, who analysed several of Van Gogh's later paintings, including Starry Night, Road with Cypress and Star (see below) and Wheat Field with Crows.
Mathematically, they studied how the luminosity, which is a measure of the total amount of visible light reflected off the paintings, varied across the canvas. Specifically, they analysed the likelihood that two points a distance D apart would have the same, or similar, brightness. In each of the paintings, they found that points further apart were statistically less likely to have similar luminosities.
This in itself is not surprising. But this probability decreased in a very simple way, in proportion to the distance between the points, D, raised to some power.
This pattern is significant. The very same pattern characterises variations in fluid velocity at different points in a churning, turbulent liquid, a property called Kolmogorov scaling, after the Russian physicist Andrei Kolmogorov. "Some art critics have said that Van Gogh's paintings give the impression of looking through a turbulent atmosphere," says team member Gerardo Naumis. "But we were very, very surprised by the close link to Kolmogorov's theory."
Also surprising is the difference between Van Gogh's later and earlier work. The pattern of luminosity in the paintings Van Gogh created during periods of emotional calm bears little resemblance to real-world turbulence. A strong visual sense of turbulence, apparent also in the mathematical analysis, appeared only in paintings created during times when he was psychologically disturbed. Van Gogh painted his famous Starry Night, for example, during a year spent in an asylum. In contrast, he completed his Self-Portrait with Pipe and Bandaged Ear in a state of self-described "absolute calm". Mathematically, this work lacks the signature of turbulence (www.arxiv.org/physics/0606246).
Naumis speculates that there could be some link between fluid turbulence and the dynamics of neural processes in disturbed individuals, and that mathematics might provide a means for detecting psychic disturbance through the analysis of drawings. "The work so far is only a first step," he says. "We need to apply it to patients and see if it works."
From issue 2560 of New Scientist magazine, 15 July 2006, page 17
]]>I am not one of those who believe that there is any moral issue here. Privatization is neither good nor bad; it’s a question of who profits and what people pay. If a private company could take over the water system of Delhi (or any other city), fix the pipes, and deliver water at an affordable price, why is that worse than letting a government control the water when it has proved incapable of doing the job properly?This kind of common sense is essential to developing policy these days. Absolutist ideas that privatization is inherently good or bad are useless and pragmatic approaches are the only way to find success. Otherwise we just end up bouncing between two extremes, which are unsustainable by definition. If we do have major water wars, I wonder how genocidal they will be. It almost seems that if someone is using water in a way that impacts you enough that you are willing to go to war for it, the solution would lie in exterminating them, or at least running them away from the water which would probably have the same effect. Water is actually one of the core issues in the Palestinian conflict in Israel that doesn't seem to get much attention. If they ever come to terms with the physical land agreements and what to do about refugees, water use is bound to be a sticking point in any peace deal. Oil and water, they don't mix, but if we don't learn to use them correctly, they are poised to combine to make life pretty rough in the future.]]>
But let's accept that more people are using the internet for their news now. Let's further assume that they are using the internet more AND using paper sources left. This assumption is necessary since its very possible that the people who are reading the internet were never print news readers to begin with, so overall print consumption isn't really decreasing. But there are real indicators that this is happening, so we continue.
In July, Bob Cringely commented on the observation that it takes about 36 hours for half the readers of an internet news story to read it versus less than 24 hours for a newspaper, which is to say that internet news lives longer (not to mention is much more accessible, both in terms of audience and archives). Here's what he had to say, in fact.
More and more of us are getting our news from the Internet and that's hurting newspapers and ultimately hurting us, too, because we are getting less news overall.Newspapers, because they are printed daily, have a lifespan of one day. And because they generally have several stories on each page, we have the opportunity to SCAN the news in parallel. These are two huge advantages of print journalism over its electronic counterpart. In newspapers, news gets out of the way at the end of each day, leaving room for more news. On the Internet, we're still talking about that safe landing of the Space Shuttle Discovery 48 hours after it happened. Okay, they're down, get on with it. So people who get their news from the Internet may know a lot about Britney Spears' attitude toward child car seats, but they don't know about many other things because of all that Britney news cluttering the ether.
Internet news also tends to be serial. The New York Times, for example, has an average of 25 stories each day in its business section and every one of those stories can be read online. But only a handful are presented as headlines in the Times web edition. So unless you are very diligent about ferreting it out, at least 75 percent of the Times' business content is invisible and unread online.
Yes, we can get our Internet news straight from Kazakhstan if we want to, but most of us don't have the language skills or the gumption. We rely, instead, on aggregators, mainly newspapers, which are again aggregated by outfits like Google News. The result is that some information gets to the web long after it gets into print.
Yes, you can beat print deadlines, but it requires EFFORT and readers generally don't like to use much of that.
So the result is that those of us who rely on the Internet for our news tend to get less of it later rather than the more of it earlier that we think we do.
This is pretty good analysis and something we all need to keep in mind. The net is great for many things, including news. But the ease of access that the net brings allows us to shift news reading to a convenient time (we don't have to read it daily as we can catch up on what we missed later). But this not only allows us to slip behind what's current, when we do get around to reading the news, we check the headlines real quick and move on. Even if we have a full list of headlines, how often do we even glance at the article contents in case something catches our eye. I know that when reading a newspaper I often skip based on a headline but then find myself reading the article when I happen to glance at it while reading the rest of the page. There's good stuff there that we aren't seeing.
Some of the problem can be reduced by using a good RSS reader. If you don't know what RSS is, take a few minutes and figure it out. Basically a RSS reader is a program that will check news and blog sites for you and provide a list of new stories, saving you the time and effort it takes to check all those sites you want to keep up on the news with. Some sites provide the full text of their news to RSS readers, others only a little snippet. Some RSS readers have a build in web browser that you can use to visit the parent site to read the whole article as well. This site should be subscribed to as well, since I don't update so often. Using RSS means that you'll be notified when I do update. It is worth the effort it takes to figure RSS out, whether you end up using a website like bloglines, a browser like Firefox or Safari, or a standalone application like NetNewsWire or FeedDemon.
But RSS isn't the whole answer since it only provides a list of headlines that most of us with scan; we won't see full articles and our eye won't be caught. And because RSS is so easy, I suspect that many of us subscribe to many more RSS feeds than we can really keep up with, which further taxes our limited attention.
If there was a solution to this, I'd say it rests with a combination of a newspaper subscription that gets read every day as well as acceptance that there is too much good information on the internets to keep up with. This means you just have to come to terms with the reality that there is going to be a lot of interesting news that you simply aren't going to read. But as long as you're getting regular, current news and are going beyond just the headlines, you'll be okay.
It's like my question: Would you rather know a little bit about a lot or a lot about a little? Most people claim that a little bit of knowledge in a variety of areas is preferable (even though I argue that narrow expertise is actually more valuable). For most cases, I agree. We need to be proactive in thought and action and make sure we adopt practices that put that philosophy into effect.
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But I watched that one first.
Then I found this one.
But it's all cool, especially if you've just polished off a bottle of Bowmore.
]]>But the best thing about Daring Fireball thus far is....Ze Frank. Good shit, that. Enjoy. If you like it enough to want to send me money, give it to Gruber instead. He deserves it more than me (and I feel guilty for taking up his time with my email).
]]>But that's the rub. Civilized behavior dictates that we return the body, just as we expect those who kill our people to return theirs. So we'd be violating our rules of decency, morality, and civilized behavior if we don't send it back. But if we do, we'd be handing the insurgency and Al Qaeda-inspired forces a rather substantial victory of sorts.
I'd like to see the US hand the body over to Iraq to make the decision, and then I'd like to see Iraq bury the body in Iraq wherever they bury the other bodies of insurgents. But then I realized that I don't know what they do with dead insurgent bodies. If their identities are known, are they shipped home or returned to families? Are dead bodies even recovered, or do Coalition forces just let them lay? If there are protocols in place for what to do with bodies (there have to be, as some are bound to have died in captivity or in the hospital), where does Zarqawi fit in? If anyone knows, please let me know.
]]>(In fact, someone did take time to look: 1) Good balanced article on the game; 2) Interview with the game creator; 3) Interview with a Columbine survivor (shot and paralyzed) who played the game.)
But the original article I linked explores the knee-jerk response to the issue and talks about the notion that video games about controversial subjects are inherently bad or off-limits, whereas books and movies are somehow ok. I haven't been keeping up on The Escapist lately, but they've often talked about this issue, mostly in the abstract. I hope that they pick up on this game and story (if they haven't already), since we really need to be pushing the boundaries here. He also talks about how just because victims of an event are deeply affected emotionally doesn't mean that they get to determine the scope of the discussion. Does Todd Beamer's wife have any claim to how we use his image: "Let's Roll"? While of course we must respect their emotions, just because it hurts to talk about what happened doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. In fact, there are pretty good arguments about why we should engage the difficult topics. Ignoring the pain doesn't really solve anything and is actually kind of a chickenshit way to deal with it, if you think about it.
Video games offer such potential for dealing with emotional issues. Some people criticize the medium because it puts people in the driver's seat, but it is precisely this perspective that gives games the power to go beyond the passive delivery of, say, a movie. SCMRPG intentionally does this in fact. The author was a Coloradan high school student during the Columbine event (different school) and the event really impacted his life. He wanted to make people think about the perpetrators perspective, not to glorify or justify it, but just to get that perspective into the discussion. I can't think of any good reason why the perspectives of all parties shouldn't be included in an attempt to understand an event, whether that event be a childhood fight, diplomatic summit, school shooting, or 9/11-scale terrorist event.
The games industry has long lamented its inability to move past the pursuit of better blood-splatter algorithms and more detailed graphics and realize the potential of the art form. And gaming is indeed an art form, every bit as much as texts and moving pictures, albeit in different and unique ways that provide different and unique opportunities to engage participants.
I applaud the creator of SCMRPG and the coverage of it that I linked above. I decry the sensationalization of it by the press and ignorant commentary by those who've never played it or considered what the game stands for. And I respectfully set aside the opinions of the bereaved, for their bias should not be allowed to speak for the rest of society, especially when it is an event of the scale of Columbine which struck at the core of our society.
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