I’m experimenting with a new installation of WordPress. I’ve tried to use WP in the past before and been less than impressed with it’s usability, at least in the admin sections.

So far I’m impressed with the improvements that have been made. But getting some of the older content I had in my blog to format correctly with markdown is going to be a challenge.

A test post.

Lux aeterna. Etc. etc.

Last month I read a blog entry about the ‘idea store’, a new merger of libraries and learning centers that is being tried out in Britain. Ever since I’ve been toying with the idea of learning communities. Today I did some internet research and discovered that there has been a lot of discussion about learning communities within the university. Most of these programs and ideas have focused on creating a community of students inside a university or college. The focus seems to be on improving the student-student interactions, essentially another go around at the peer learning model. See this definition from evergreen.edu >In higher education, curricular learning communities are classes that are linked or clustered during an academic term, often around an interdisciplinary theme, and enroll a common cohort of students. A variety of approaches are used to build these learning communities, with all intended to restructure the students’ time, credit, and learning experiences to build community among students, between students and their teachers, and among faculty members and disciplines. The idea store concept appeals to me because it takes learning beyond the classroom. A few years ago I was a semi-regular attendee at a Socrates Cafe meeting. One of my biggest complaints was the lack of continuity. Issues kept coming up again and again but never seemed to be resolved, lessons learned one week were forgotten the next. Part of this was because we exercised no control over who participated, new members joined and left at frequent intervals, some people were disruptive. There were some regular members but there wasn’t any way to pass on information over time. Somewhere between the formal programs of a university and the informal discussions of a weekly philosophy book there is a middle ground. The idea store seems to be approaching that middle ground. Here are some things I’d like to see: * No formal evaluations or grades. People should join because they are interested in the material. This raises a problem for those who are unable to find people who share their interests. * Combination of online an offline meetings. Online work can help store and share new knowledge but the community building that takes place in a university or at a library is also important. * Availability of experts from various domains, such as business or a university, to answer questions and deepen understanding of a topic. Public lectures might be a starting point for this. Need to consider the difference between popularizing a topic for the general public and showing the progress of scholarship with work in progress. * Suggested curricula from various sources. This might help to provide a focus to the freewheeling ad hoc discussions I encountered at Socrates Cafe.

Last semester I took a class on knowledge management or information in organizations. We talked a lot about the different routines, incentives, and rewards that encourage or discourage people to share knowledge with each other. Two knowledge management professionals have posted a couple of posts that I’d like to highlight. Dave Pollard at “How to Save the World” writes about creating our own peer-to-peer expertise finder. >But then it occurred to me that there is a profound difference between ‘know-what’ and ‘know-where’ on the one hand, and ‘know-who’ on the other: Finding the former are complicated search problems; finding the latter is a complex problem. Google can write an algorithm to point you to the documents most likely to be useful to you on subject x, and they can create maps to point you to location y. You don’t have to do anything but ask. And although the numbers are vast, there are only a finite number of documents and places on the planet. Social networking is only beginning to address these problems. Dave lists a bunch of suggestions about how such a system might work, such as letting people define their expertise in their own way, maintaining votes on your local hard drive, making voting on others expertise easy. All very good things to think about when trying to build the next generation expertise finders. He goes on to identify 25 information dysfunctions and then looks at the failure of KM over the past 12 years. >Most organizations, too, refused to abandon the top-down centralized information model that was already in place, merely institutionalizing it with firewalls, access restrictions, monster centrally-managed one-size-fits-all databases and websites and over-engineered, over-managed collaboration and community-of-practice tools. Democratizing corporate information entails the devolution of decision-making and other power to front-line workers, and executives are understandably nervous about this. The connections to democracy are intriguing and deserve further thought. One of the research areas that Mark Ackerman, who taught the class I referred to, is working on is medical information sharing. I thought this post about the different transfers of information in medicine was very interesting. It was posted by Patrick Lambe at Green Chameleon back in February. I wonder if Ackerman saw it because we worked on a very similar diagram in class. Lambe also addresses “Why KM is Hard to Do”. His ideas parallel a lot of the advice given by Pollard and mentioned in our class. * acknowledge institutional baggage * consult intensively but streamline decision making * use social networks * provide for habit changing strategies. And a few more.

MaryAnn Johnson, a Generation Xer, who blogs at FlickPhilosopher and GeekPhilosophy recently saw An Inconvenient Truth and came out of the theater galvanized. >I’ve been letting the experience of seeing the film and seeing Gore in person sink in, and I find myself feeling optimistic, maybe, for the first time in a long time, optimistic about the direction our society may be going in. And I’m itching to do something about pushing us in that direction. I can’t recall ever feeling like this before. And could be it’s symptomatic of a grand shift in Generation X from complacency and apathy to caring and action. She goes on to describe the new kind of green activist, a neo-green who wants to make environmentalism sexy. Dump the old mantras that called for a return to a simpler past, instead we need to be more complex more savvy with our technology. She drops Bruce Sterling’s Viridian Design movement into the mix and concludes with this.. >And it all starts coming together, signs of some kind of exit, an out, how we can get off the hamster wheel of mindless consumerism and soulless Toll Brothers suburban McMansion developments and 60-hour workweeks with only two weeks of annual vacation you can’t take anyway because you’re afraid it’ll make you look like a slacker and not like a team player. It’s a major challenge — how do we redefine what is cool? — but it can be done. In only, what?, ten years we’ve made cigarette smoking uncool. Whether you agree with the disdain now heaped upon smokers or not, the point is this: It’s theoretically possible to program a majority of people to feel a surge of disgust when they see some idiot tooling around town in a Hummer. We could enjoy that feeling of profound relief Sterling talks about if we can tie up the insanities of the typical American lifestyle with the devastation we’re wreaking on the planet and get rid of them in favor of something more sane, more livable, more gentle on the planet. >What those things are, and how we denote them as cool, I don’t know. But I’m finding it exciting to thing about what might be done. It’s about shaping a vision of the future that is optimistic and sexy and, yes, cool. It doesn’t mean it’ll be easy, but it does mean, hopefully, that at the end of the struggle, life will be better than it is today, more fun and more enjoyable and more satisfying. >I don’t know where we’re going, but it’s nice to feel like the journey there might actually be worth it. I read this and fell to my knees and said “At long last, a light at the end of the tunnel.” I hope she’s right, with all of my science fiction fueled dreams of the future. Something has got to give and the sooner it begins the better. And then to temper my optimism on the bitter pill of doubt I look back a month ago to something I wrote down but didn’t publish. >Sometimes it’s all just too much to take. I’ve noticed that my attitudes toward changing the world for the better are becoming more and more cynical over time. Part of why I decided to even consider going back to grad school, or possibly pursuing a PhD, despite the dire warnings about the future of academia, was because I wanted to do something for myself and screw the rest of the world. I sometimes feel the same way about starting a business. Forget everybody else I just want to get my piece of the pie too. >So I read the following entries by Dave Pollard The Place You Love is Gone and How Would We Behave in a Great Depression? and I say bring on the rending of garments and the gnashing of teeth, for it is time to clean this fallen world. >I had the same reaction when I read an essay at the Internet Review of Science Fiction about the recent lack of interest by Hollywood in the eco-disaster film genre. When was the last time we saw a film about the end of the world like Soylent Green or Silent Running? As MaryAnn Johnson so ably shows the worries about ecological disaster seem to have disappeared from Hollywood during the last twenty-five years. Where did they go? Inside my head I’m oscillating between high dudgeon and strategic planning. I’m afraid of hatred and disgust, emotions that are all too easily abused. Just look at the religious right and the Republicans who crusade against most of what I believe. Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, the list of haters never seems to end. And cynically inside me there is a voice that says this hatred, this disgust, is the way to power and that’s we will need in order to remake the world. Countering all this is the philosopher in me that knows, deep down, there are no fulcrums upon which to turn the world. It’s turtles all the way down; there are no fundamental narratives. Given all this, the question is how do we string our way between the fundamentalisms that drive our faith-based politics, and the rational post-modernity that questions everything? So far I’ve got nothing but a tiny seed of hope inspired by one person being Gored.

Part of the joy of the blogosphere is finding connections to ideas that I was previously unaware of. Today’s discovery was the writing Arthur Silber has been doing about suicide, child rearing, morality, father figures, psychoanalysis, and more. The inspiration for this latest bit of writing was the recent suicide by prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Via Avedon Carol at the Sideshow. At first I was unsurprised that prisoners who are being held without the hope of a trial would choose to take their life. I can’t imagine many situations that would be more despairing. Then I read the stories about the reactions of Admiral Harry, the commander, who claimed the suicides were an act of asymmetrical warfare, and the comment of Colleen Graffy that the suicides were a good ‘PR’ move. I was numb. A few years ago, before Abu Gharib, my jaw would have fallen to the floor after hearing these callous statements. Today my jaw barely moved; the standards have been set so low that surprise seems worthless. George Lakoff has gotten a lot of mileage out of his ideas about strict-father and nurturing-mother frames in politics. Silber links these ideas to German psychologist Alice Miller, whom I hadn’t encountered before. Miller’s theory is that children fail to develop an authentic self when they are abusively disciplined by their parents. They see their parents as the authority figures and later in life transfer that respect for authority to the strongest thug who comes around. >This perfect adaptation to society’s norms–in other words, to what is called “healthy normality”–carries with it the danger that such a person can be used for practically any purpose. It is not a loss of autonomy that occurs here, because this autonomy never existed, but a switching of values, which in themselves are of no importance anyway for the person in question as long as his whole value system is dominated by the principle of obedience. He has never gone beyond the stage of idealizing his parents with their demands for unquestioning obedience; this idealization can easily be transferred to a Fuhrer or to an ideology. From there it’s not too hard to make a critique of religion as just another substitution of authority, from fathers to gods. Silber glosses Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ in this light. >If you wonder why people refuse to give up a belief in God, why they are completely impervious when you point out the most obvious contradictions in their belief system, why they are perfectly content to accept what is easily shown to be nonsense, this is why: they have never escaped the parent who demanded obedience, and now as adults — since they have never developed an authentic, independent sense of self — they dare not question the goodness of their additional authority figure. But the underlying psychological mechanism is precisely the same. >And if you wonder why they become so angry when you point out the numerous inconsistencies in their beliefs, the obvious contradictions, the completely nonsensical nature of what they proclaim to believe, and why they may as well believe in the Easter Bunny — this is the reason for that response, as well. You are not merely challenging one particular belief: you are challenging their entire sense of self — or rather, their entire false sense of self. They have never been allowed to develop a true sense of self, and that is the real tragedy. The parent prevented them from developing one in the first instance, and now God does. Also, and this makes the tragedy even worse, they themselves now prevent themselves from doing so. I know some very intelligent religious people, whom I deeply respect, and for them there does seem to be more to religion than authority. At the same time I’ve met others for whom Silber’s analysis of Miller is completely apt. The question for the immediate future is whether these two can ever be reconciled. As a side note I wonder if a study has ever been made that compared the religious attitudes of children raised in single parent homes. Do children raised by single mothers have different attitudes toward religion than their counterparts raised by fathers or any other familial form?

Yesterday’s list of potential curiosities was all mental. No doubt those who believe in a balance between mind and body would be disappointed. So as a countermeasure I bought an exercise book this evening in addition to a copy of Dracula and Frankenstein. The missing physical element in my summer curiosities is mostly habit. I’ve never been a very athletic person despite growing up with a health and physical education teacher. Nor was my father ever really a good example of physical activity, at least not in my memory. All my memories of him are in a wheelchair or a hospital bed. From a theoretical point of view (here I return to the ways of habit, always trying to think my way into and out of situations) the connection between physicality and religion has been at the forefront of my mind in recent months. The Da Vinci Code brought the conflict between the body and the mind to the forefront of an adventure tale. Fred Clark of Slactivist had two very interesting posts last month on the reasons why Christians hate sex. The ongoing discussion of Christianism by Andrew Sullivan also ties into the question of the body and the soul. How are they connected? I knew this would all get back to philosophy in the end. If only I could lose 20 pounds by reading Plato.

Ambition always seems to exceed my grasp, but for lack of anything else to post I’ll note some topics that I’d like to study in more depth this summer. Seems like I’ve been making a lot of lists for the past few entries, but so be it. To study: 1. Math – I have both calculus and linear algebra textbooks in my apartment. I started in on the linear algebra book last month, but I still need a better way to take notes. 2. Foreign language – Improving or recollecting what French I took. Spanish would be nice, especially for Borges. Latin has been another on my list of perennials, but I’m still looking for a good pronunciation CD. There are actually a lot of Latin books available online for free because they have passed out of copyright. 3. Weather and atmospheric science – there is a cool course of study available via MIT open courseware that deserves more of my attention. It involves plenty of physics and fluid dynamics. I may yet understand wet and dry adiabats. 4. Philosophy – need to brush up on the Frankfurt school and continental philosophy in general. This thread at Crooked Timber might be of use. 5. Computers and programming – lisp, perl, python, databases. And a healthy helping of Knuth’s ‘Art of Programming’. 6. Recreation – chess and go, more perennials for the list. To read: 1. the Bible – always mean to become more acquainted with this founding document but never seem to get around to it. I’m giving the NIV translation a try this time around. 2. Lots of fiction authors – Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, Murakami, DeLillo, McCarthy, Vonnegut. I just finished The Time Traveler’s Wife and want to compare it to Slaughterhouse-Five. 3. Non-fiction – Digital Copyright by Jessica Litman is high on my list, especially since I’m thinking of writing a thesis on the topic.

At this weeks SF/F reading group meeting the question was raised: what really makes a good book. So I’m trying to describe, at least to myself, the dimensions in a work of fiction that I enjoy and consider when trying to decide wheteher some book is good. So far here’s what I’ve come up with. * Sympathy and empathy for characters. There should be some connection between me and the characters of the book. The characters don’t have to be good people. I just need to be able to comprehend them, to put myself into their place, if only for the duration of the story. * Setting. A interesting location or background to the story is also important. Hopefully the author will provide enough detail to make the setting come alive in my imagination. One author who does this really well is Borges, especially in some of his infinite library stories. Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” is another good example, in fact it’s almost all setting. * Allusive depth. The story connect to something outside of itself. Most often these connections are to other works of art. Elizabeth Hand does this very well with music. * Novelty density. I’m not sure if this is the same or different than the allusive depth above. I put this here to get at the difference present in the science fiction that I really like: a lot of ideas are presented in a compressed frame and sometimes left unexplained. I think this is what Delany was getting at when he wrote that a sentence like “The door dilated” has a different reading in SF and F than in normal fiction. * Expressive language. This connects to my love of poetry. A well turned phrase can make a work come alive. First sentences stick in my mind with this quality. Gibson’s “The sky above the port was the color of a television, tuned to a dead channel.” * Metaphor. At a micro level this can shade into expressive language, at a macro level it links to allusive depth. But allusion mostly connects to other artwork. Metaphor connects the story to the world, making the story stand in for our experience of life. * Narrative structure. The arrangement of the whole into a set that makes sense and creates the ideal feeling in the reader. This is the criterion that puts the reveal of the murderer at the end of a mystery. Here are some links for a search on ‘what makes a good story’. From Creative Keys, Screenwriting.info, and the Thinking Writer

Looking to the Future via Reality Television Dave Pollard at How to Save the World posts a very intriguing set of theories about the sucess of reality television in the last few years. Is it conservative propaganda, schadenfreude, the hero myth, attention deficit, or self-preservation? Dave thinks its the latter. >The theory that answers this question, and does make some sense to me, is the Self-Preservation Theory, and it holds that we are intuitively so pessimistic about our future that we need to insulate and inure ourselves against the sadness and suffering that we are likely to face. A recent study suggests that people who are prepared for pain report it as less intense, when it occurs, than people who are surprised by it. While the average person continues to think his/her life is, and will continue to be, better than average, we are overwhelmed with evidence that this ‘average’ is getting worse and will continue to worsen. Subconsciously, perhaps, we are preparing for the worst, numbing ourselves to anguish by witnessing it happening to others and preparing for it ourselves. It is our nature to lower our expectations when things get bad: During Great Depressions, wars, and in the face of personal tragedy, it takes less to make us happy and more to really make us miserable. We adapt. I think he’s mostly correct about this. My optimism about the future has declined in the past few years for reasons that I’m still trying to explain to myself. Pollard continues >Generations X and Y clearly have lower expectations of the future than our boomer generation had at the same age. They are the ones whose behaviours increasingly exhibit signs of anomie, fatalism, thrill-seeking and other tendencies (psychopathies?) illustrated in the lower right corner of the above chart. They are the ones who go to see movies with graphic violence and horror that we fund repulsive. And they are the ones (disproportionately) watching Reality TV. Maybe they’re just steeling for a future that will see even more horrific abuses of power, greater disparity between rich and poor, more suffering and misery for all. Most of this resonates with me. A lot of problems I see around me have been at the center or edges of my awareness for at least the last two decades. * Global Warming and climate change. I first read about this in the late 1980s. I can’t remember the title of the book but it persuaded me early on that humans were causing changes to the climate. Worst of all we have no idea what the results of all these changes will be. Given what we’ve learned about chaotic and complex systems in the last twenty years one would think that an attitude of caution would be the rational response. Instead politicians have spent two decades demanding more studies. * The growth of fundamentalism. The 9/11 attacks were just the icing on the cake of a problem that intelligent people have been writing about since the early 1990s. The Moral Majority was a bogeyman of the 1980s for goodness sake. Worst of all has been the growing connections between politics and religion in the United States. Kevin Phillips offers the most recent glossing of this problem in American Theocracy. * Economics, globalization, and employment. This is probably the most recent area where pessimism has begun to overtake optimism. As one of the knowledge workers in the economy it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that everything we do will be outsourced to the lowest bidder. And the hope that we can educate ourselves for new jobs is turning out to be a false hope. Of all the knowledge professions education is just as likely to be outsourced as any other. Homework Help, From a World Away shows this trend in action.