Eccentric Eclectica @ ToddSuomela.com http://toddsuomela.com Todd Suomela's Internet Home Sun, 13 May 2012 00:41:57 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Weekly List Bookmarks (weekly) http://toddsuomela.com/2012/05/12/weekly-list-bookmarks-weekly-30/ http://toddsuomela.com/2012/05/12/weekly-list-bookmarks-weekly-30/#comments Sun, 13 May 2012 00:41:56 +0000 tesbot http://toddsuomela.com/?p=957 Continue reading →]]>

  • Sapping Attention: Poor man’s sentiment analysis

    Using Google ngrams to break down 2-word phrases including “capitalism”

    tags: google-ngrams data-mining humanities digital-humanities capitalism text-analysis sentiment analysis

  • U.S. Intellectual History: Reading List: U.S. Intellectual and Cultural History

    tags: american-studies intellectual history reading bibliography list

  • Next Time, Fail Better – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education

    “Humanities students should be more like computer-science students. I decided that as I sat in on a colleague’s computer-science course during the beginning of this, my last, semester in the classroom. I am moving into administration full time, and I figured that this was my last chance to learn some of the cool new digital-humanities stuff I’ve been reading about. What eventually drove me out of the class (which I was enjoying tremendously) was the time commitment: The work of coding, I discovered, was an endless round of failure, failure, failure before eventual success. Computer-science students are used to failing. They do it all the time. It’s built into the process, and they take it in stride.”

    tags: learning education discipline humanities computer-science failure success

  • What My 11 Year Old’s Stanford Course Taught Me About Online Education – Forbes

    tags: education mooc online future

  • econfuture | Future Economics and Technology

    tags: technology economics robots work future capitalism outsourcing globalization

  • Twitter’s Defense Of ‘Occupy’ Protester Could Decide Future Of Information Laws | TPM Idea Lab

    “Experts in cyber law told TPM that Twitter’s stance in Harris’ case was undeniably important and could prove to be a landmark one for user privacy and law enforcement’s ability to access user information going forward.”

    tags: law cyberlaw twitter privacy crime court

  • UnderstandingSociety: Actor-centered sociology

    tags: philosophy social-science explanation micro-meso-macro supervenience emergence causation actors sociology

  • UnderstandingSociety: Social hierarchy and popular culture

    “Based on these findings, Peterson recommends junking the “elite culture-mass culture” distinction in favor of an “omnivore-univore” distinction. There is indeed a significant difference in the cultural tastes of high-status and low-status people; but it doesn’t correspond to the elite-mass distinction previously postulated.”

    tags: culture elites elitism taste music mass social hierarchy popular class

  • UnderstandingSociety: Does the microfoundations principle imply reductionism?

    “So I continue to believe both things: that statements about social entities and powers must be compatible there being microfoundations for these properties and powers; and that it is theoretically possible that some social structures have properties and powers that are relatively autonomous, in the sense that we can allude to those properties and powers in explanations without being obliged to demonstrate their microfoundations.”

    tags: philosophy social-science explanation micro-meso-macro supervenience emergence causation

  • UnderstandingSociety: European philosophy of social science

    “There is an active and extended group of scholars in Europe with a very focused concentration on the philosophy of the social sciences.”

    tags: philosophy social-science european

  • Livehoods

    “Livehoods offer a new way to conceptualize the dynamics, structure, and character of a city by analyzing the social media its residents generate. By looking at people’s checkin patterns at places across the city, we create a mapping of the different dynamic areas that comprise it. Each Livehood tells a different story of the people and places that shape it. “

    tags: urban urbanism cities big-data social-media data-mining lifestyle mapping

  • Overcoming Bias : Far Truth Is For Extremes

    “So assuming you actually have a viable choice, the situations where it makes sense to reject religion in favor of far truth are extreme – either there are big personally-useful far contrarian claims to learn, or you have a good shot at being a rare far expert, respected by a community with truth-correlated standards. So if such extremes seem unlikely to you, far truth probably isn’t worth its costs to you.”

    tags: religion belief construal-level-theory near-far truth benefits psychology atheism

  • Overcoming Bias : What Use Far Truth?

    Given 1. religious people tend to have better lives and 2. far beliefs, e.g. religion, have small effects on your life. Then why not believe in religion?

    tags: religion belief construal-level-theory near-far truth benefits psychology atheism

  • Overcoming Bias : Even When Contrarians Win, They Lose

    “If it is so hard to succeed as a contrarian, why do we hear so many stories of successful contrarians? Well celebrated contrarians are usually not the real contrarians.”

    tags: ideas adventure creativity innovation academic culture risk novelty insider outsider intellectual history contrarian influence credit success

  • Overcoming Bias : Taming The Wild Idea

    “I think this helps us understand why universities, some of the most conservative institutions we have, are home to our most celebrated intellectuals. Academic institutions such as universities, academic journals, peer review, etc. seem far from ideal ways to encourage innovative ideas. But they seem like better ways to ensure outsiders that ideas have been safely tamed. The new ideas that academics endorse can be safely quoted and an applied with minimal risk of wild uncontrolled disruption. So when ideas originate among wild untamed academic-outsiders, we prefer to attribute them to the safe academic insiders who tame them. When we are willing to risk being exposed to wild untamed ideas, we turn less to academics, and more to startup companies, passionate writers, activists, etc. And in our youth, many of us are eager for such exposure, to show that we are no longer children who must stay safely in camp – we are strong and brave enough to venture into the wild.”

    tags: ideas adventure creativity innovation academic culture risk novelty insider outsider intellectual history

  • What are the 7 ways to effectively kiss ass without looking like a kiss-ass? – Barking up the wrong tree

    tags: flattery behavior social-psychology hypocrisy networking

  • Stumbling and Mumbling: The wage & profit squeeze

    “The bottom line here is simple. Both capitalists and workers have cause for complaint. Capitalists have lost pricing power – the degree of monopoly has fallen – which has tended to depress the profit share. But this has not benefited workers because instead the “wedges” of other incomes and higher imports have depressed their share. “

    tags: economics history profit work wages income globalization neoliberalism

  • A new way to organize your life – Wunderkit

    tags: online tool collaboration

  • How venture capital is broken | Felix Salmon

    “What this says to me is that the VC industry, as a whole, is being incredibly successful at extracting rents from dumb institutional investors. These investors wouldn’t dream of investing in a public company where there was no transparency as to basic questions like how much money the principals were being paid, but they happily invest in venture capital funds where the founders cream off so much of the income that younger top performers end up leaving the firm. And in general, VCs are incredibly good at playing fear off against greed: would-be investors really want massive VC returns, and they really don’t want to be left out in the cold.”

    tags: money economics investment venture-capital

  • ClinicalTrials.gov — Too Many Studies Are Registered Late, Published Late, and Smaller Than Planned « The Scholarly Kitchen

    “The recent analysis published in JAMA reviewed the success of ClinicalTrials.gov in two time periods – 2004-2007 and 2007-2010. The findings are rather troubling if you want your studies to meet the highest possible standards — between 2007 and 2010, only 48% of eligible trials were registered before patient enrollment had commenced. Granted, this was up from 33% in the earlier period, but it’s still the minority. The majority (52%) were registered after patient enrollment had started. This means that most clinical trials are being registered after it’s theoretically possible that investigators have had a chance to peek at early data and tweak the enrollment criteria to generate a “better” trial.”

    tags: science bias communication public-understanding risk biology experiments reproduction error medicine

  • Beware the creeping cracks of bias : Nature News & Comment

    “Alarming cracks are starting to penetrate deep into the scientific edifice. They threaten the status of science and its value to society. And they cannot be blamed on the usual suspects — inadequate funding, misconduct, political interference, an illiterate public. Their cause is bias, and the threat they pose goes to the heart of research.”

    tags: science bias communication public-understanding risk biology experiments reproduction error

  • The Reason For the Ambivalence Towards the Philosophy of Science : EvolutionBlog

    tags: science philosophy relationship

  • Two Faces of Austerity

    “Philosophically, the Brooks and Rajan essays are interesting for the way they awkwardly combine an old-fashioned style of conservatism (the poor will always be with us, accept your lot) with a more modern form of inclusive neoliberalism (accept deregulation, and you too can be rich!) By itself, the first style of argument is simply intolerable to modern sensibilities, but the crisis has rendered the second increasingly implausible. Together, however, the two arguments add up to nonsense. The simplest response is that self-styled critics of “structural” economic problems are not being structural enough. The existence of a hyper-polarized wage structure is not a fact of nature but is itself a structural problem, and one that has been facilitated by specific policy choices. What we need is not “human capital” but a shift away from protecting rentiers and toward strengthening the bargaining position of labor.”

    tags: economics education jobs work labor austerity neoliberalism

  • Themeefy

    tags: tools curation online web2.0

  • Intended and unintended consequences of a publish-or-perish culture: A worldwide survey – van Dalen – 2012 – Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology – Wiley Online Library

    “How does publication pressure in modern-day universities affect the intrinsic and extrinsic rewards in science? By using a worldwide survey among demographers in developed and developing countries, the authors show that the large majority perceive the publication pressure as high, but more so in Anglo-Saxon countries and to a lesser extent in Western Europe. However, scholars see both the pros (upward mobility) and cons (excessive publication and uncitedness, neglect of policy issues, etc.) of the so-called publish-or-perish culture. By measuring behavior in terms of reading and publishing, and perceived extrinsic rewards and stated intrinsic rewards of practicing science, it turns out that publication pressure negatively affects the orientation of demographers towards policy and knowledge sharing. There are no signs that the pressure affects reading and publishing outside the core discipline.”

    tags: science scholarly-communication publishing incentives careers

  • I cite: Anarchy: “naughty, rebellious, insouciant, but deliciously safe”

    “Like it or not, thousands of self-styled anarchists have slowly surrendered the social core of anarchist ideas to the all-pervasive Yuppie and New Age personalism that marks this decadent, bourgeoisified era. In a very real sense, they are no longer socialists–the advocates of a communally oriented libertarian society–and they eschew any serious commitment to an organized, programmatically coherent social confrontation with the existing order.”

    tags: anarchism socialism politics activism

  • A Super-Efficient Email Process – Peter Bregman – Harvard Business Review

    tags: email productivity gtd time-management

  • Understanding Economic Statistics: an OECD perspective

    “The aim of this book is to help the reader to better understand how to use economic statistics in general and OECD statistics in particular. It introduces the main concepts used by statisticians and economists to measure economic phenomena and provides tables and charts with relevant data. Moreover, the book describes how the production of international statistics is organised, who are the main data producers, what are the main databases available over the Internet and how can the quality of statistics be assessed.”

    tags: economics history gdp statistics measurement metrics data government international development

  • Human Development Reports (HDR) – United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)

    tags: economics history gdp statistics measurement metrics alternative data government international united-nations development

  • The State of the USA

    “The nonprofit, nonpartisan State of the USA is preparing – in concert with the National Academy of Sciences – to support a Key National Indicator System by publishing a free website to provide every American with a single place to track progress across a range of national concerns, as determined by independent polling and research as well as expert and public input.”

    tags: economics history gdp statistics measurement metrics alternative data government

  • The Rise and Fall of the G.D.P. – NYTimes.com

    tags: economics history gdp statistics measurement metrics

  • GDP: a brief history – By Elizabeth Dickinson | Foreign Policy

    “Out of the carnage of the Great Depression and World War II rose the idea of gross domestic product, or GDP: the ultimate measure of a country’s overall welfare, a window into an economy’s soul, the statistic to end all statistics. Its use spread rapidly, becoming the defining indicator of the last century. But in today’s globalized world, it’s increasingly apparent that this Nobel-winning metric is too narrow for these troubled economic times. “

    tags: economics history gdp statistics measurement metrics

  • Droplr • Hello

    tags: sharing file online tool

  • On Defense Cuts, Both Parties Are Far Out of Step With Voters – R. Jeffrey Smith – Politics – The Atlantic

    tags: politics budget military defense military-industrial-complex american poll

  • “Unable”

    “But just because something is possible doesn’t make it reasonable, or smart, or sustainable. It also may have a hidden or long-term cost that is actually more negative than any benefit that will accrue from doing the requested task. It also, by the way, sets a bad expectation and precedent.”

    tags: gtd organization productivity

  • LiquidFeedback: What A Genuine Democratic Process Looks Like | David Bollier

    “The LiquidFeedback mission statement concludes, “All the experience we have gained over the past months shows people participate if they think it makes sense and representatives at least acknowledge the will of the participants rather than arguing with silent majorities.” It concludes with a ringing line from Thomas Jefferson: … every man is a sharer… and feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day.” “

    tags: commons community negotiating online deliberation dialog politics country(Germany)

  • Moral Intuitions: Are Philosophers Experts? by Kevin Tobia, Wesley Buckwalter, Stephen Stich :: SSRN

    “Recently psychologists and experimental philosophers have reported findings showing that in some cases ordinary people’s moral intuitions are affected by factors of dubious relevance to the truth of the content of the intuition. Some defend the use of intuition as evidence in ethics by arguing that philosophers are the experts in this area, and philosophers’ moral intuitions are both different from those of ordinary people and more reliable. We conducted two experiments indicating that philosophers and non-philosophers do indeed sometimes have different moral intuitions, but challenging the notion that philosophers have better or more reliable intuitions. “

    tags: philosophy morality ethics psychology expertise academic

  • xkcd: Every Major’s Terrible

    tags: comic academia humor

  • Summarizing All MOOCs in One Slide: Market, Open and Dewey – EdTech Researcher – Education Week

    tags: mooc education online typology market money economics prestige

  • Detailed History of Facebook Changes 2004-12 [Research] | JonLoomer.com

    tags: facebook history social-media 2000s

  • Alvin I. Goldman – Home Page

    tags: people philosophy academic social-epistemology epistemology

  • Coudal Partners The Museum of Online Museums (MoOM)

    tags: museum online curation

  • Welcome to the Knowledge Factory | Common Dreams

    “Just as American manufacturing turned belly-up in the face of the out-sourcing of labor in the globalized market in the 1990s, higher ed is now poised to do exactly the same thing with the professoriate. Distance learning, the fastest growing segment of the higher education market, will make it possible for a Ph.D. in New Delhi to teach that big section of Chemistry 100 to students from all over the world.  And in New Delhi, $4,000 will probably seem like pretty good money.”

    tags: education academia work labor online e-learning mooc economics outsourcing

  • Adam Yauch and Paul’s Boutique: How dumb court decisions have made it nearly impossible for artists to sample the way the Beastie Boys did – Slate Magazine

    “Even as hip-hop is more mainstream than ever, one of the key musical innovations has been pushed to the margins. That should serve as a reminder that the battles over intellectual property don’t merely pit the economic interests of creators against would-be freeloading consumers. The existing stock of recorded music is, potentially, a powerful tool in the hands of musicians looking to create new works. But it’s been largely cut off from them—for no good reason.”

    tags: copyright intellectual-property samples music hiphop history law culture

  • Why the Right Really Hates Obama — In These Times

    “Liberals often say that the Right’s hatred of Obama is about his race. Conservatives say it’s about his socialist agenda. But there’s something more going on, and it’s captured in the way that the Right has often mocked Obama as “the chosen one,” the Messiah. Dig a little under the surface of that derision and you’ll discover a world of confusion and ambivalence. Obama is a deeply familiar figure among tea partiers and conservative Christians. He has the energy and charisma of a pastor, and he’s the sort of authority figure many on the far-Right are conditioned to respect. But the context is all wrong. The messenger is a black man. The hope he offers is grounded in the possibility that human institutions can be expressions of the common good.”

    tags: politics people(BarackObama) conservative evangelical religion

  • it is NOT junk | a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball and other important things

    Michael Eisen I’m an evolutionary biologist at UC Berkeley and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. My research focuses on the evolution and population genomics of gene regulation in flies, and on the ways that microbes control animal behavior. I am a strong proponent of open science, and a co-founder of the Public Library of Science. And most importantly, I am a Red Sox fan.

    tags: weblog-individual science publishing open-access

  • Red Brains, Blue Brains: Republicans Are Stupid – The Stupid Premise Of A Stupid Book

    Criticism of The Republican Brain by Chris Mooney

    tags: book review politics beliefs psychology republicans biology ideology

  • Your Evil Twins and How to Find Them

    “An evil twin is defined as somebody who thinks exactly like you in most ways, but differs in just a few critical ways that end up making all the difference. Think the Batman and the Joker. Here’s why evil twins matter, and how to discover yours.”

    tags: ideas philosophy evil-twin connection mentor influence anxiety

  • Presentation Software | Online Presentation Tools | Web Presentations | SlideRocket

    tags: presentation slideshow powerpoint web2.0 tools software online

  • The Massive Open Online Professor | Academic Matters

    tags: mooc education online pedagogy access academia teaching future

  • Game on! UCLA researchers use online crowd-sourcing to diagnose malaria / UCLA Newsroom

    “Working on the assumption that large groups of public non-experts can be trained to recognize infectious diseases with the accuracy of trained pathologists, researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science and the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA have created a crowd-sourced online gaming system in which players distinguish malaria-infected red blood cells from healthy ones by viewing digital images obtained from microscopes.”

    tags: crowdsourcing medicine health diseases diagnosis citizen-science distributed

  • U.S. Education Reform and National Security – Council on Foreign Relations

    “The United States’ failure to educate its students leaves them unprepared to compete and threatens the country’s ability to thrive in a global economy and maintain its leadership role, finds a new Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)–sponsored Independent Task Force report on U.S. Education Reform and National Security.”

    tags: education mainstream report national-security rhetoric

  • Henry A. Giroux | Violence, USA: The Warfare State and the Brutalizing of Everyday Life

    Treads familiar ground but has some interesting references.

    tags: violence america american-studies militarism education pedagogy prison

  • What is Good Teaching? A Reflection | Common Dreams

    “As a public school teacher, I’ve come to believe that good teaching comes down to six essential practices. I call them Inducement, Conveyance, Meta-Learning, Empowerment, Modeling, and Application. Just as when all eight amino acids must be present for a protein to form, all six of these activities must be present for Good Teaching (and Good Learning) to occur.”

    tags: teaching pedagogy creativity definition success

  • Knowledgebase • A collaborative research programme on Global Civil Society

    “The Global Civil Society Knowledgebase is an online database of the LSE Global Civil Society Programme’s policy-oriented research expertise. It includes the content of nearly a decade of Global Civil Society Yearbooks, allowing academics, civil society practitioners, policymakers and journalists across the globe to quickly access a wealth of information on global civil society as an increasingly influential source of power and political influence in today’s interconnected world.”

    tags: civil-society research reference handbook annual review non-profit

  • Government Violence, Human Nature, and The Hunger Games | openDemocracy

    “Battle Royale and The Hunger Games are young adult novels in which governments force teenagers to kill each other. Comparing these books to classic works by William Golding and Robert Sheckley suggests that, while becoming more skeptical about governments, we’ve become more trusting about our own nature.”

    tags: literature sf fiction human-nature government fear culture violence

  • International land deals: who is investing and where | Claire Provost | Global development | guardian.co.uk

    The Land Matrix database is now the most comprehensive public source for information on international land deals – but it is not perfect. Some countries, for example, may be over-represented in the data simply because they are more transparent and routinely publish contract information. In other cases, the data may be skewed towards investors or countries that have featured in more media reports.

    tags: data land-use market economics exchange international

  • Sourcemap: where things come from

    tags: maps mapping resources geography gis crowdsourcing capitalism manufacturing visibility

  • David Harvey | Full Stop

    tags: interview capitalism marxism urbanism geography

  • Alone, in ‘the hole’

    “For most of the 20th century, prisoners’ stays in solitary confinement were relatively short. “People would get thrown in ‘the hole’ for a couple days at a time, maybe a couple weeks at a time,” says Craig Haney, PhD, a social psychologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, whose research has explored the psychological effects of incarceration. That’s changed over the last two decades or so. “Now they’re in the hole for years at a time,” he says. Over the last 20 years, so-called “supermax” prisons have become increasingly popular. There, tens of thousands of inmates spend years locked in small cells for 23 to 24 hours a day..”

    tags: prison isolation psychology punishment law crime

  • The Outsourced Life – NYTimes.com

    “We’ve put a self-perpetuating cycle in motion. The more anxious, isolated and time-deprived we are, the more likely we are to turn to paid personal services. To finance these extra services, we work longer hours.”

    tags: sociology outsourcing emotion psychology class lifestyle markets markets-uber-alles

  • The Problem With EdX | Inside Higher Ed

    “The problem with EdX is that, scale and cost aside, it IS essentially a traditional learning model revamped for a new business era. It puts decision-making power, agency, and the right to determine what counts as knowledge pretty much straight back into the hands of gatekeeping institutions.”

    tags: mooc education online pedagogy teaching prestige reputation

  • Essay on intensive group reading courses at non-elite colleges | Inside Higher Ed

    tags: teaching pedagogy learning great-books curriculum

  • Essay on the value of intense discussion-based instruction | Inside Higher Ed

    tags: teaching pedagogy learning great-books curriculum

  • On the Commons: A Public Interview with Massimo De Angelis and Stavros Stavrides | e-flux

    tags: commons economics politics activism marxism capitalism peer-production online enclosure

  • digital digs: constructing academic knowledge

    “What constructing ought to denote, but perhaps never will (hence Levi and Latour’s calls for a new term), is that the knowledge we produce is another object in the world, made from other objects in the world (including us). As one object among many, the knowledge we produce does not capture/represent in some pure way other objects in the world. It isn’t “true” in that sense. As academics we already accept this across the campus. However it also isn’t “untrue” or operating in a separate, noncommunicating realm from other objects. It isn’t purely discursive or purely social. “

    tags: constructivism knowledge objects discourse assessment academia humanities academic

  • Against Law, For Order

    “As recently as the 1960s there was a wave of literature arguing that the prison was becoming obsolete. Now the prison stands as a key mechanism for how the government has dealt with its own powers, and this has reconfigured the role of government. The law-and-order movement invokes a radically different role of the state in relation to its citizens than the one of the post-New Deal era. Though an incomplete project, the New Deal had a model of the state as a guarantor of economic security and freedom. Now the state primarily interacts with society as a maintainer of order. For those hoping to rebuild freedom through the state, finding a new vision of how government works needs to be at the front of the agenda.”

    tags: prison punishment law neoliberalism neoconservatism politics power structure

  • The ‘Big Four’ markers of the evangelical tribe

    “four tribal markers that characterize the boundaries of American evangelicalism: abortion, homosexuality, evolution and environmentalism. Opposition to all four of those constitutes evangelical tribal identity.”

    tags: evangelical religion conservatism politics groups signals

  • The death of genre – Charlie’s Diary

    “The infinite bookshelf is already a problem for us. To add to the fun, once we enter the world of ebooks, nothing ever goes out of print. So works going back many years or decades are presented with equal priority to the latest new titles. Upshot: we badly need better curation. Amazon and their competitors could present the results of author searches pre-sorted by time since publication and by language and by series. But that’s barely a start. Genre, in the ebook space, is a ball and chain. It stops you reaching new audiences who might like your work.”

    tags: publishing e-books sf genre audience marketing

  • Clouds’ Effect on Climate Change Is Last Bastion for Dissenters – NYTimes.com

    tags: science climate environment clouds climate-change global-warming

    Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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  • What I’m obsessed about – Boris Mann

    death of binary documents collaborative flow re-invention of email/inbox signal v. noise ebooks business data platforms

    tags: future technology education via:downes

  • The “Myth” of Media Multitasking: Reciprocal Dynamics of Media Multitasking, Personal Needs, and Gratifications – Wang – 2012 – Journal of Communication – Wiley Online Library

    “The increasing popularity of media multitasking is frequently reported in national surveys while laboratory research consistently confirms that multitasking impairs task performance. This study explores this apparent contradiction. Using dynamic panel analysis of time series data collected from college students across 4 weeks, this study examines dynamic reciprocal impacts of media multitasking, needs (emotional, cognitive, social, and habitual), and corresponding gratifications. Consistent with the laboratory research, cognitive needs are not satisfied by media multitasking even though they drive media multitasking in the first place. Instead, emotional gratifications are obtained despite not being actively sought. This helps explain why people increasingly multitask at the cost of cognitive needs. Importantly, this study provides evidence of the dynamic persistence of media multitasking behavior.”

    tags: technology technology-effects information-overload multitasking attention emotion communication

  • Multitasking, always-on, and the pleasures of things that feel like work – Contemplative Computing

    “This is easy to parody: one friend summarized the argument as, You’re not the tech industry’s bitch, you just don’t know when to stop being awesome, which maybe is taking things a bit far. (Though one commenter’s point that this might not be, but “‘fear’ of being dispensable” is also a good one.) But I think there are a couple valuable things embedded in Perlow’s study that I think are worth drawing out. First, it seems to me that people aren’t addicted to success, but to the feeling of success. There is an important difference.”

    tags: technology technology-effects information-overload multitasking attention emotion

  • My Standard Based Grading Notes | Wired Science | Wired.com

    “Standards Based Grading (SBG), what is it? Let me just say that SBG is a different way of thinking about grades. In Standards Based Grading, the main idea is that the grade is a measure of what students understand. It is not a measure of how well the students are obedient and it is not a measure of how much effort the students put into homework”

    tags: teaching pedagogy grading

  • [1205.0030] A Market for Unbiased Private Data: Paying Individuals According to their Privacy Attitudes

    “Since there is, in principle, no reason why third parties should not pay individuals for the use of their data, we introduce a realistic market that would allow these payments to be made while taking into account the privacy attitude of the participants. And since it is usually important to use unbiased samples to obtain credible statistical results, we examine the properties that such a market should have and suggest a mechanism that compensates those individuals that participate according to their risk attitudes. Equally important, we show that this mechanism also benefits buyers, as they pay less for the data than they would if they compensated all individuals with the same maximum fee that the most concerned ones expect. “

    tags: economics privacy data-sharing social-media

  • How A Private Data Market Could Ruin Facebook – Technology Review

    “Today, Bernardo Huberman and Christina Aperjis at HP Labs in Palo Alto, say there is an alternative. Why not pay individuals for their data? TR looked at this idea earlier this week. Setting up a market for private data won’t be easy. Chief among the problems is that buyers will want unbiased samples–selections chosen at random from a certain subgroup of individuals. That’s crucial for many kinds of statistical tests.”

    tags: economics privacy data-sharing social-media

  • Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science

    tags: book review celluar-automata complexity

  • Hume, Operational Closure, and Monad-Oriented Ontology « Larval Subjects .

    “Consequently, operational closure need not be a tragic thesis that we are forever doomed to completely misunderstand one another. Our ability to enter into the world of others– animal, social, human, and technological –can grow and develop, even if it will never be complete.”

    tags: observation other philosophy object-oriented-ontology understanding psychology

  • New Survey Confirms Librarians’ Commitment to Protecting Privacy Rights | Michael Zimmer.org

    tags: libraries privacy attitude survey

  • In Response to Popular Demand, More on the 5-Year Plan | The Professor Is In

    tags: phd graduate-school work jobs planning advice

  • Data Journalism Handbook

    tags: data journalism visualization media technology handbook

  • How to discuss politics with friends, v2 « Scott Berkun

    tags: politics discussion dialog

  • CTE, the concussion crisis, and an economic look at the end of football – Grantland

    tags: sports football injury brain economics

  • Football, dogfighting, and brain damage : The New Yorker

    tags: sports football injury health brain

  • In praise of strategic complacency : home cooked theory

    “Mentoring in the professional neoliberal workplace of is one of those classic words that can be used to invoke or simulate institutional benevolence when there is actually a waning of reciprocity in the employment relation. “

    tags: work advice school phd graduate-school academia mentor jobs

  • Make the Most of Career Opportunity! – event mechanics

    “The discourse of ‘opportunity’ belongs to the master narrative of neoliberalism. From a structural perspective, the role of government, business and social institutions is to ensure that subjects have access to ‘opportunities’. The discourse of opportunity is couched in the language of self-actualisation (bordering on ‘self-help’) and entrepreneurialism. Capitalising on an opportunity requires a strategic view that locates the present in the context of a particular set of future outcomes. ‘Opportunity’ is a process, a practice and an event. “

    tags: discourse capitalism opportunism opportunity business careers

  • Moral rethink | Prospect Magazine

    “But this does not mean that it is wrong to push the question even further, asking how we can be encouraged to care more about the well-being and suffering of those who happened not to be born within the same borders as us. Haidt thinks liberals ignore concepts like authority and the sacred. But really, liberalism’s power consists in challenging the moral relevance of such concepts. Since liberals dispute that authority really is of fundamental moral importance, it is circular reasoning to argue that this is a form of “moral blindness.””

    tags: book review morality politics liberal conservative moral-language cognition emotion ethics liberalism

  • Last hope for the left | Prospect Magazine

    “So, is the future post-liberal? The WEIRD liberalism of the baby boomer generation was perhaps condemned to a dogmatic universalism as a result of emerging in the shadow of two world wars, the Holocaust and the anti-colonial and civil rights struggles. There was a lot to react against and it is perhaps understandable that in eagerly embracing the moral equality of all humans, some boomers slipped into a carelessness towards national borders and identities and a rigidity towards many forms of equality. The next generation of politics need not make the same mistake.”

    tags: book review morality politics liberal conservative moral-language cognition emotion

  • Information Diet | 500 Words before 8am

    “The production of information is critical to a healthy information diet. It’s the thing that makes it so that your information consumption has purpose. I cannot think of more important advice to give anyone: start your day with a producer mindset, not a consumer mindset. If you begin your day checking the news, checking your email, and checking your notifications, you’ve launched yourself into a day of grazing a mindless consumption. “

    tags: information-overload consumer producer writing productivity

  • Awakening the Giant | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters

    “In his short book The Communist Hypothesis, Badiou argues that today all that remains of the ideological machinery of freedom, human rights and Western values is a simple, negative statement: communism failed. The labors of the capitalist philosophers, he says, amount to little more than the assertion that there is no choice but to consent to the capitalist, parliamentary present. But what “exactly do we mean by ‘failure’ when we refer to a historical sequence that experimented with one or another form of the communist hypothesis?” he asks.”

    tags: philosophy politics communism language future hope activism

  • College Doesn’t Make You Liberal – NYTimes.com

    “But contrary to conservative rhetoric, studies show that going to college does not make students substantially more liberal. “

    tags: college academic education political-science liberal

  • criticalengineering.org

    “The Critical Engineer considers Engineering to be the most transformative language of our time, shaping the way we move, communicate and think. It is the work of the Critical Engineer to study and exploit this language, exposing its influence.”

    tags: engineering technology critique technology-critique criticism design code law sts culture

  • Occupy the Future | Future Seeds

    “Here are some diverse resources we have found that have inspired us and might be helpful for you.”

    tags: resource linklog future reform occupations

  • fetishizing books and textualizing the digital » Wynken de Worde

    “But access is not all that digitization can do for us. Why should we limit ourselves to thinking about digital facsimiles as being akin to photographs? Why should we think about these artifacts in terms only of the texts they transmit? Let’s instead think about digitization as a new tool that can do things for us that we wouldn’t be able to see without it. “

    tags: digitization manuscript experience text access books

  • ‘Why Should We Care?’—What to Do About Declining Student Empathy – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education

    “The troubling conclusion of a recent study by a team of social psychologists (including one of us, Sara Konrath) is that American college students have been scoring lower and lower on a standardized empathy test over the past three decades. “

    tags: empathy psychology student youth generation trends community

  • UW CSE News » CSE’s Seth Cooper wins ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award!

    tags: science computer-science crowdsourcing citizen-science

  • Prof. Gregory V. Wilson

    “My main interest is the overlap between software engineering and computational science.”

    tags: people academic computer-science software software-studies science computational-science

  • Report warns of weather satellites’ ‘rapid decline’ – USATODAY.com

    tags: weather meteorology satellite infrastructure

  • Go Back In Time: How 10 Big Websites Looked 15 Years Ago

    tags: web-design history

  • U.S. Intellectual History: The Baffler Round Table, Entry #3: Keith Woodhouse

    “The new Baffler has a more difficult task. At a time when the Left is energized, or at least paying attention, and when everyone has a blog to stand on and shout from, it’s not clear what street corner The Baffler is laying claim to. It’s worth pointing out, for instance, the disappointment behind both Silicon Valley’s successes and the glamour of the creative class, and The Baffler does this as well as anyone. But fables of techno-utopia are not nearly as hegemonic as were the fantasies of post-industrial society in the 1990s. For every celebration of the latest dot-com there is another weary sigh that the internet, in the end, is just a massive waste of time. “

    tags: review magazine technology politics

  • Trickle Down Science : Uncertain Principles

    “Which is great when you’re in one of the fields that’s meant to serve as the grand and inspirational challenge. For the rest of us, though, this is trickle-down science: the best and the brightest get fired up to be rocket scientists, or high-energy particle physicists, and those who aren’t quite the best or the brightest, well… they can study condensed matter physics, or something less inspirational. They’ll still be an upgrade over the riff-raff who are presumably populating those fields now. You know, the ones motivated by wanting to save the world from cancer, or hunger, or pestilence. Not only is this kind of insulting to those of us who have chosen to make careers in fields that aren’t driven by Big Science, it’s not remotely sustainable. If getting people to go into science and engineering is dependent on something as ephemeral as “inspiration,” we’re forever going to be careening from boom to bust.”

    tags: science motivation physics goals goal-setting scale discipline

  • Why Are Physicists Hating On Philosophy? : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR

    “Its one thing for physicists exploring carbon nanotubes to say they have no use for philosophy. Their work lives or dies by experimental data that can be collected tomorrow. But over the last few decades, cosmology and foundational physics have become dominated by ideas that that appear to take a page from science fiction and, more importantly, remain firmly untethered to data.”

    tags: physics cosmology philosophy empirical

  • Self-enhancement and imposter syndrome: neither is good for your teaching | Science Edventures

    tags: education teaching psychology

  • iPad productivity apps – Matt Gemmell

    tags: gtd productivity ipad apps

  • - e-Literate – MOOCs: Two Different Approaches to Scale, Access and Experimentation

    “With all of the recent interest in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), it would be worth summarizing the two branches of MOOCs including recent posts or interviews by the founders of the concept.”

    tags: online education mooc definition

  • Distrust in the Media and Confirmation Bias — The Monkey Cage

    tags: media bias trust

  • A Balanced News Diet After All? — The Monkey Cage

    “The reemergence of a prominent partisan press has led many scholars to investigate partisan self-selection of news outlets. Political scientists and journalists have concluded that individuals are motivated to select media sources that match their own political views and avoid media sources that challenge their political views. However, an analysis of individuals’ actual media exposure patterns lead to conclusions about selective exposure quite different from previous research based on self-reported media exposure.”

    tags: media bias exposure politics

  • Stephen King: Tax Me, for F@%&’s Sake! – The Daily Beast

    tags: taxes income wealth

  • HippoCampus – Homework and Study Help – Free help with your algebra, biology, environmental science, American government, US history, physics and religion homework

    tags: resources math science education history e-learning

  • Is Stanford Too Close to Silicon Valley? : The New Yorker

    tags: education elites academia school(Stanford) business innovation technology silicon-valley

  • What does one do with millions of MARC records? | Gavia Libraria

    tags: library big-data cataloging

  • Zotero Blog » Blog Archive » Zotero Apps Go Mobile

    tags: zotero bibliography mobile iphone apps

  • Is the White Working Class Coming Apart?—David Frum – The Daily Beast

    “Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 is an important book that will have large influence. It is unfortunately not a good book—but its lack of merit in no way detracts from its importance. If anything, the book’s flaws add to its power, by enhancing the book’s appeal to the audience for whom it is intended. Coming Apart is an important book less because of what it says than because of what it omits; less for the information it contains than for the uses to which that information will be put.”

    tags: book review welfare economics politics conservatism ideology class culture behavior elites elitism power

  • How Geniuses Think | The Creativity Post

    tags: creativity genius thinking style psychology innovation

  • Dave’s Page: Why Google+ is still not working for humans

    “Ah, poor Google.  So full of really smart people, so detached from reality.  I say this with great respect for my many friends and colleagues who work there.  Your fundamental inhumanity is your tragic flaw, and the thing that made you so good providing search is going to doom you in the social space.”

    tags: google social-media facebook competition

  • The Psychology of Why the Right and the Left Believe in Media Bias | Age of Engagement | Big Think

    tags: media journalism media-studies trust psychology

  • Social status and health: Misery index | The Economist

    “In it, a group of researchers led by Jenny Tung and Yoav Gilad at the University of Chicago looked at the effects of status on rhesus macaques. Experience has shown that these monkeys display the simian equivalent of the Whitehall studies’ findings. The high risk of disease among those at the bottom of the heap in both cases suggests that biochemical responses to low status affect a creature’s immune system. Those responses must, in turn, depend on changes in the way the creatures’ genes are expressed. To investigate this phenomenon means manipulating social hierarchies, but that would be hard (and probably unethical) if it were done to human beings. You can, however, do it to monkeys, and the researchers did.”

    tags: biology stress status genetics social-status

  • Einer Elhauge: If Health Insurance Mandates Are Unconstitutional, Why Did The Founding Fathers Back Them? | The New Republic

    “But there’s a major problem with this line of argument: It just isn’t true. The founding fathers, it turns out, passed several mandates of their own. In 1790, the very first Congress—which incidentally included 20 framers—passed a law that included a mandate: namely, a requirement that ship owners buy medical insurance for their seamen. This law was then signed by another framer: President George Washington. That’s right, the father of our country had no difficulty imposing a health insurance mandate.”

    tags: politics health-care insurance history

  • Here’s Some More: Long Series, Novels and Chunks | Tor.com

    Some typologies on length and style of fictional series.

    tags: sf fantasy publishing genre length style typology

  • Is science fiction literature’s first international language? | Books | guardian.co.uk

    “It’s as a response to that cultural void that science fiction becomes genuinely interesting. In the midst of an ever accelerating technological revolution, science fiction has emerged as the literature best able to articulate the relentless pace of social change. And as that technological revolution has spread outward from the western world, so the symbols and archetypes of science fiction have become a shared language for understanding the new world we are entering.”

    tags: sf fiction literature international geek culture symbols language

  • Start-Ups Keep Revenue at Zero to Cash In on Acquisition – Disruptions – NYTimes.com

    “Getting acquired while producing no revenue is like performing a card trick without the deck of cards: the magician simply explains how magical the trick is, never actually showing it. (And we are supposed to step back in sheer awe.) For start-ups, fewer numbers in the equation mean a projected valuation can be plucked out of thin air. Look how well this worked for Instagram, which had zero in revenue and was bought for $1 billion.”

    tags: business silicon-valley startup bubbles internet venture-capital economics

  • Is “grabbing” someone’s attention like grabbing their privates? – Contemplative Computing

    “If as William James said, “My experience is what I agree to attend to,” then attention is rather more important than we usually think: what we pay attention to defines who we are. This makes attention a rather intimate thing. And efforts to capture your attention effectively say: You don’t deserve to control your own attention. You shouldn’t have sovereignty over the contents of your consciousness any longer. We should (subject to our decision to parse or resell that attention to other companies). Thanks, but no thanks.”

    tags: attention computers marketing technology business

  • Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog: Krauss vs. the Philosophers

    “Lawrence Krauss, a physicist at Arizona State University, wrote a book on the physics of how “something can come from nothing,” and thought it answered the old philosophical question to that effect. He got lots of praise from other philosophical ignoramuses, and then along came David Albert, a distinguished philosopher of physics at Columbia University (who even has a PhD in physics), who pointed out the confusions in a rather wicked, but as far as I can see apt, review in The New York Times. “

    tags: physics philosophy envy overconfidence science science-wars sts

  • Doc Searls Weblog · What and who are we?

    “It’s a Google Ngram that plots the prevalence of two terms — consumer and customer — in books between 1770 and 2004.”

    tags: consumer customer language business meaning identity

  • Study Hacks » Blog Archive » Do What Works, Not What’s Satisfying: Pseudo-Striving and our Fear of Reality-Based Planning

    “The Pseudo-Striving Hypothesis It’s significantly more pleasant to pursue a goal with a plan entirely of our own construction, then to use a plan based on a systematic study of what actually works. The former allows us to pseudo-strive, experiencing the fulfillment of busyness and complex planning while avoiding any of the uncomfortable, deliberate, often harsh difficulties that populate plans of the latter type.”

    tags: gtd work success planning tips

  • Research as a Second Language: The 40-Hour Challenge

    “Since an article consists of about forty 40 paragraphs and you should be able to write a paragraph about something you know in about 30 minutes, you should be able to draft a journal article in around 20 hours.”

    tags: writing phd graduate-school practice advice habit

  • Why You Need a 5-Year Plan | The Professor Is In

    tags: phd jobs work planning

  • Ageism and the Academy: My Thoughts and a Request for Yours | The Professor Is In

    tags: work age academia phd jobs discrimination

  • Food52 – food community, recipe search and cookbook contests

    tags: food cooking recipes community

  • Has the internet run out of ideas already? | Technology | The Observer

    “Each of these technologies, Wu argued, started out as gloriously creative, anarchic and uncontrolled. But in the end each was “captured” by corporate power, usually aided and abetted by the state. And the process in each case was the same: a charismatic entrepreneur arrived with a better consumer proposition – for example, a unified system and the guarantee of a dial tone in telephony; or a steady flow of good-quality movies created by a vertically integrated studio system in the case of movies – that enabled a corporation or a cartel to attain control of the industry. The big question, Wu asked, is whether this will happen to the net.”

    tags: internet innovation history business creativity capture monopoly future

  • The New Aesthetic and The New Writing : Kenneth Goldsmith : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

    “The Twenty-first century is invisible. We were promised jetpacks but ended up with handlebar moustaches. The surface of things is the wrong place to find the 21st century. Instead, the unseen, the Infrathin—those tiny devices in our pockets or the thick data-haze which permeates the air we breathe — locates us in the present. And in this way, The New Aesthetic is not so much a movement as it is a marker, a moment of  observation which informs us that  culture—along with its means of production and  reception —has radically shifted beneath our feet while we were looking the other way.  As such, The New Aesthetic handily articulates the importance of the new writing, situating it and its modus operandi within broader cultural trends.”

    tags: new-aesthetic invisible writing culture futures

  • FERN

    FERN is a global community of foresight students, alumni, faculty, employers, and advocates of graduate foresight education, employment, and research.

    tags: futurism futures research professional-association

  • How to Spot the Future | Epicenter | Wired.com

    tags: futurism futures trends

  • Neal Stephenson on Science Fiction, Building Towers 20 Kilometers High … and Insurance – Technology Review

    “In fact, said Stephenson, we already have much of the fundamental technology we need to fulfill such science fiction ambitions as large scale solar power production, or routine space flight. Instead, he said, we need to start looking at the non-technological obstacles to these advances, citing insurance as a key example. The development of alternative space launch systems has been curtailed by the unwillingness of the insurance industry to underwrite satellite launches on systems for which there is no good model of the risk involved. Turning to the audience of mostly MIT students, Stephenson said “maybe some of you people need to go into the insurance industry instead of writing code.” 

    tags: science sf future insurance law barriers technology

  • TED-Ed | Lessons Worth Sharing

    tags: education video teaching pedagogy

  • Apple’s Tax Strategy Aims at Low-Tax States and Nations – NYTimes.com

    tags: business taxes capitalism american apple

  • The Open Notebook – The stories behind the best science stories

    tags: weblog-group science journalism media writing

  • A Guide to Alternative Handwriting and Shorthand Systems

    tags: shorthand writing tips research journalism interview notetaking

  • Taking good notes: Tricks and tools |

    tags: hints tips notetaking journalism research

  • Extra! Get yer “Science Writing in the Age of Denial” conference recaps here! |

    This week about 200 science writers gathered in my hometown of Madison, Wisconsin for a conference on Science Writing in the Age of Denial, hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with support from the National Association of Science Writers.

    tags: conference reports science sts denial climate-change

    Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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  • ‘Gaia’ Scientist Reverses Climate Predictions | Global Warming Controversy | LiveScience

    “Lovelock, who introduced the Gaia Hypothesis describing life on Earth as a vast self-regulating organism some 40 years ago, also stated that since 2000, warming had not happened as expected. “The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now,” Lovelock told MSNBC.com in an interview. While warming may not have reached Lovelock’s expectations, it is clearly happening”

    tags: interview climate-change global-warming environment media celebrity expertise elites controversy

  • The Dragons of Inaction: Psychological Barriers That Limit Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation | CORPUS

    “Most people think climate change and sustainability are important problems, but too few global citizens engaged in high-greenhouse-gas-emitting behavior are engaged in enough mitigating behavior to stem the increasing flow of greenhouse gases and other environmental problems. Why is that? Structural barriers such as a climate-averse infrastructure are part of the answer, but psychological barriers also impede behavioral choices that would facilitate mitigation, adaptation, and environmental sustainability. Although many individuals are engaged in some ameliorative action, most could do more, but they are hindered by seven categories of psychological barriers, or “dragons of inaction”: limited cognition about the problem, ideological worldviews that tend to preclude pro-environmental attitudes and behavior, comparisons with key other people, sunk costs and behavioral momentum, discredence toward experts and authorities, perceived risks of change, and positive but inadequate behavior change. Structural barriers must be removed wherever possible, but this is unlikely to be sufficient. Psychologists must work with other scientists, technical experts, and policymakers to help citizens overcome these psychological barriers.”

    tags: climate-change global-warming environment psychology action individual

  • Research Ethics and the Blackberry Project | Michael Zimmer.org

    “The Blackberry Project (formerly known as the Friendship Project) is an ongoing longitudinal study examining teen behavior and sociability, which first recruited its subjects in 2003 (starting with 281 third and fourth graders from 13 Dallas public schools) and relied on yearly laboratory and home observation and surveys for data collection. Then, in 2009, the subjects (now entering 8th grade) were provided with BlackBerry devices with unlimited text and data plans paid for by the investigators. The devices were configured so that the content of all text messages, e-mail messages, and instant messages was saved to a secure server to be mined by the researchers — over 500,000 messages a month are being archived. “

    tags: research ethics irb privacy social-media mobile-phone

  • An Interview with Cameron Neylon, PLoS’ New Director of Advocacy « The Scholarly Kitchen

    tags: interview open-access scholarly-communication publishing

  • Data and visualization blogs worth following

    tags: data data-curation visualization weblog-recommendations

  • Wishing I Understood | iterating toward openness

    “If we take as a very loose definition of expert “someone who has more exper-ience than you do,” it is hard to imagine any form of learning that does not involve an expert – except pure, unguided, trial-and-error discovery learning. Without reference to any person – or any artifact created by a person – of more experience than ourselves, all learning would be maximally inefficient. We would each be left to rediscover the entirety of physics from scratch. And the entirety of music theory. And the entirety of every other field, without a conversation or a textbook or a Wikipedia article to guide us. “

    tags: education expertise elites

  • Minute – macwright.org

    “Minute counts keystrokes and every two minutes records how many keystrokes have transpired in a CSV file. Minute-reader uses d3 to build a visualization in the style of gel electrophoresis. It loads minute’s data directly using d3’s CSV reader – the data is compact, so months of data should still be usable.”

    tags: quantified-self data visualization time-management gtd

  • Is Our Adults Learning? – NYTimes.com

    “Manzi wants to infuse government with a culture of experimentation. Set up an F.D.A.-like agency to institute thousands of randomized testing experiments throughout government. Decentralize policy experimentation as much as possible to encourage maximum variation. His tour through the history of government learning is sobering, suggesting there may be a growing policy gap. The world is changing fast, producing enormous benefits and problems. Our ability to understand these problems is slow. Social policies designed to address them usually fail and almost always produce limited results. Most problems have too many interlocking causes to be explicable through modeling. “

    tags: government experiments pragmatism policy learning

  • Interview: John Robb | TechCrunch

    three themes: global guerrillas, resilient communities, and, more recently, drone disruption.

    tags: interview drones guerrilla war resilience

  • Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem. – The Washington Post

    tags: politics republicans america partisanship media polarization

  • Democracy in Objects: Mereology and Exploded Views « Larval Subjects .

    “Exploded view diagrams open up– a little –these black boxes so as to discern the multiple-composition that objects or units are as complexes of relations. What we discover is that every object is both a unit and a crowd of other objects or units.”

    tags: object-oriented-ontology objects metaphysics ontology philosophy world emergence

  • What is a World? « Larval Subjects .

    “Tim seems to conceive world as a container that entities are in. For me, by contrast, the world is anything but a container. Ultimately there are no containers, there are just relations between entities. And as a consequence, in the framework of my ontology, a world is nothing but a network of relations between structurally coupled entities. “

    tags: object-oriented-ontology objects metaphysics ontology philosophy world

  • Music, Modernism, and the Twilight of the Elites

    “By now it is becoming hard to remember that, at the peak of its popularity and influence, classical music carried with it an undeniable intellectual and even moral authority, qualities which would rub off on composers and performers such as Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Albert Schweitzer, Pierre Boulez, Van Cliburn and Igor Stravinsky, all of whom would, in different ways, play leading roles within the social and cultural landscape of the cold war period.”

    tags: history music expertise elites classical modernism genre influence

  • Why science has to promise profits – The Globe and Mail

    “In an increasingly knowledge-based economy, this push to position government-funded research as an engine of economic growth may seem logical. But there are innumerable problems with this commercialization strategy, beyond the reality that it is unclear how areas such as stem cell research and genetics will generate billions in profits.”

    tags: science sts research funding government profit business intellectual-property commercial biology genetics

  • BBC – BBC Radio 4 Programmes – Mind Changers

    “Series exploring the development of the science of psychology during the 20th century”

    tags: audio radio psychology

  • Brainstorming Doesn’t Really Work : The New Yorker

    tags: brainstorming creativity collaboration groupthink psychology thinking ideas innovation environment design space architecture structure

  • Behind the Right’s Phony War on the Nonexistent Religion of Secularism | Rick Perlstein | Politics News | Rolling Stone

    “Here’s some background those befuddled Democrats need to know: One of the most robust and effective conspiracy theories on the right, the notion that “secularism” – or, just as often, “Secular Humanism” – is a religion is meant to be taken entirely literally: right wingers genuinely believe it refers to an actually existing religious practice. How do conservatives know? Because, they say, the Supreme Court said so. “

    tags: religion politics secularism humanism evangelical conservatism republican

  • Shift Happens – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education

    “If you’ve seen that bumper sticker, you’ve seen what our culture has made of one of the central ideas in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published 50 years and 1.4 million copies ago. For the marketers and boosters of personal transformation who casually talk about paradigm shifts, the phrase designates not just a gestalt switch that casts things in a new light, but a world so insubstantial that it can be thoroughly transformed by a single idea. Tomorrow there may be another paradigm shift, and another after that. There is thus no real progress, just a new bubble as good as the old bubble.”

    tags: science sts philosophy paradigm history 2h20c

  • Journal, History and Theory

    “History and Theory publishes articles, review essays, and summaries of books principally in these areas: critical philosophy of history; speculative philosophy of history; historiography; history of historiography; historical methodology; critical theory; time and culture; and history and related disciplines. “

    tags: journal academic history theory

  • Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog: Summer reading lists?

    tags: philosophy reading recommendations

  • Pandoc – About pandoc

    “If you need to convert files from one markup format into another, pandoc is your swiss-army knife. Pandoc can convert documents in markdown, reStructuredText, textile, HTML, or LaTeX to HTML formats: XHTML, HTML5, and HTML slide shows using Slidy, S5, or DZSlides. Word processor formats: Microsoft Word docx, OpenOffice/LibreOffice ODT, OpenDocument XML Ebooks: EPUB Documentation formats: DocBook, GNU TexInfo, Groff man pages TeX formats: LaTeX, ConTeXt, LaTeX Beamer slides PDF via LaTeX Lightweight markup formats: Markdown, reStructuredText, AsciiDoc, MediaWiki markup, Emacs Org-Mode, Textile”

    tags: markdown converter software markup

  • Pear Note for Mac – Useful Fruit Software

    tags: macintosh software tool notetaking interview recording audio

  • Analytic Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief

    Scientific interest in the cognitive underpinnings of religious belief has grown in recent years. However, to date, little experimental research has focused on the cognitive processes that may promote religious disbelief. The present studies apply a dual-process model of cognitive processing to this problem, testing the hypothesis that analytic processing promotes religious disbelief. Individual differences in the tendency to analytically override initially flawed intuitions in reasoning were associated with increased religious disbelief. Four additional experiments provided evidence of causation, as subtle manipulations known to trigger analytic processing also encouraged religious disbelief. Combined, these studies indicate that analytic processing is one factor (presumably among several) that promotes religious disbelief. Although these findings do not speak directly to conversations about the inherent rationality, value, or truth of religious beliefs, they illuminate one cognitive factor that may influence such discussions.

    tags: science religion psychology cognition mental-process analytic thinking style

  • Harvard Library Open Metadata | Open Metadata

    tags: libraries metadata catalog data-sources

  • Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup – Class 4 Notes Essay

    “The usual narrative is that capitalism and perfect competition are synonyms. No one is a monopoly. Firms compete and profits are competed away. But that’s a curious narrative. A better one frames capitalism and perfect competition as opposites; capitalism is about the accumulation of capital, whereas the world of perfect competition is one in which you can’t make any money. Why people tend to view capitalism and perfect competition as interchangeable is thus an interesting question that’s worth exploring from several different angles.”

    tags: business startup monopoly capitalism competition entrepreneur technology

  • Psychologists Use Social Networking Behavior to Predict Personality Type – Technology Review

    “It turns out, they say, that various online behaviors are a good indicator of personality type. For example, conscientious people are more likely to post asking for help such as a location or e-mail address; a sign of extroversion is an increased use of emoticons; the frequency of status updates correlates with openness; and a measure of neuroticism is the rate at which blog posts attract angry comments. Based on these correlations, these guys say they can automatically predict personality type simply by looking at an individual’s social network statistics. “

    tags: personality technology behavior social-media online big-five psychology

  • More on DRM and ebooks – Charlie’s Diary

    “After I recommended that the major publishers drop mandatory DRM from their ebook products, I realized that my essay had elided a bunch of steps in my thinking, and needed to reconsider some points. Then I realized that it’s not a simple, straightforward argument to make. Consequently, I ended up writing another essay, although I’ve tried to summarize my conclusions below. “

    tags: publishing business business-model drm digital e-books markets consumer genre fiction

  • Silent Majority Millennials – By Connor Kilpatrick – The eXiled

    “As much fun as it is to kick around the Boomers, we gotta move past it. Generational politics is a dead-end. Fuck it, someone slap the shit out of me if I ever say the word “Millennial’ after this. Because once we’ve set up this economic collapse as nothing more than generational warfare, we’re already lost–we’ve created a narrative which the wealthy can easily co-opt and spin for their own fiendish ends. So keep your eyes on the prize, Millennials: it’s capitalism that’s the problem. Not the grey-hairs.”

    tags: generational-analysis generation politics argument capitalism social-security propaganda

  • The Cult of Positivity: If You Dream It, You Can’t Necessarily Become It | The University Times

    “To ask questions about how to live life, to question whether you should be doing what you are doing, is indeed admirable. But to conclude that a positive attitude can solve all problems is naive and denies the possibility to enact change, when necessary, on your circumstances.”

    tags: self-help psychology popular positive-thinking positive individual system scale

  • A Response to Ronald Lindsay Regarding The Republican Brain

    tags: politics ideology conservative liberal biology psychology

  • Instant Notifications for Facebook, Twitter, Email and More! — Boxcar

    tags: iphone notification application

  • Easy Online Appointment Scheduling, Appointment Booking, Online Scheduling, Online Booking Software | Appointron

    tags: scheduling appointment calendar online tool

  • Buffer – A Smarter Way to Share on Social Media

    Be awesome on social media. Easily add great articles, pictures and videos to your Buffer and we automagically share them for you through the day!

    tags: twitter tools scheduling social-media

  • Why Light Touching Can Double Your Chances of Getting a Date [Excerpt]: Scientific American

    During a conversation, a light touch can impart a subliminal sense of caring and connection, leading to more successful social interactions and even better teamwork

    tags: psychology touch physical collaboration contact

  • Nothing to Sneeze at: Allergies May Be Good for You: Scientific American

    In a paper published April 26 in Nature, Medzhitov and his colleagues argue that allergies are triggered by potentially dangerous substances in the environment or food to protect us.

    tags: biology allergies science parasites

  • Paying Too Much for Energy? The True Costs of Our Energy Choices  »  Papers  »  The Hamilton Project

    Energy consumption is critical to economic growth and quality of life. America’s energy system, however, is malfunctioning. The status quo is characterized by a tilted playing field, where energy choices are based on the visible costs that appear on utility bills and at gas pumps. This system masks the “external” costs arising from those energy choices, including shorter lives, higher health care expenses, a changing climate, and weakened national security. As a result, we pay unnecessarily high costs for energy. New “rules of the road” could level the energy playing field. Drawing from our work for The Hamilton Project, this paper offers four principles for reforming U.S. energy policies in order to increase Americans’ well-being.

    tags: energy environment cost economics

  • A Giant Among Giants – By Ken Silverstein | Foreign Policy

    tags: business capitalism law morality free-trade resources

  • Science on Stage: Expert Advice as Public Drama – Stephen Hilgartner

    Behind the headlines of our time stands an unobtrusive army of science advisors. Panels of scientific, medical, and engineering experts evaluate the safety of the food we eat, the drugs we take, and the cars we drive. But despite the enormous influence of science advice, its authority is often problematic, and struggles over expert advice are thus a crucial aspect of contemporary politics. Science on Stage is a theoretically informed and empirically grounded study of the social process through which the credibility of expert advice is produced, challenged, and sustained.

    tags: book publisher science sts performance sociology expertise

  • Are Women Really More Talkative Than Men?

    “Women are generally assumed to be more talkative than men. Data were analyzed from 396 participants who wore a voice recorder that sampled ambient sounds for several days. Participants’ daily word use was extrapolated from the number of recorded words. Women and men both spoke about 16,000 words per day.”

    tags: linguistics gender psychology talk conversation

  • Reading List on Science Communication and Political Controversies | Age of Engagement | Big Think

    tags: bibliography science communication recommendations

  • Home – Floating University

    tags: education university e-learning online pay

  • Critical Dialogue: Interaction, Experience and Cultural Theory

    Over the last decade there has been a significant growth in interest in aspects of people’s experience with technologies under headings such as user experience, aesthetics, affect, fun, reflection, and enjoyment. In more recent years critical theory has begun to make a small but important impact at CHI conferences and other HCI publications. It is arguable that a relationship between critical theory and experience would benefit HCI research and practice as it has benefited other areas of research in the humanities and social sciences. However, in the history of ideas experience and critical theory have not always made good bedfellows, sometimes complementing each other, sometimes resisting each other. This workshop will explore the ways in which HCI might benefit from a constructive dialogue between critical theory and experience in questions of design and evaluation.

    tags: hci computers technology critical-theory

  • Pay-what-you-want, identity, and self-signaling in markets

    We investigate the role of identity and self-image consideration under “pay-what-you-want” pricing. Results from three field experiments show that often, when granted the opportunity to name the price of a product, fewer consumers choose to buy it than when the price is fixed and low. We show that this opt-out behavior is driven largely by individuals’ identity and self-image concerns; individuals feel bad when they pay less than the “appropriate” price, causing them to pass on the opportunity to purchase the product altogether.

    tags: economics cost self-concept pschyology

  • Free and Cheaper: The World’s Best News

    The dynamic of free and cheaper is not by itself going to solve all the world’s problems, but it is the best news in the world today.

    tags: internet economics

  • Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism

    The authors test the hypothesis that low-effort thought promotes political conservatism. In Study 1, alcohol intoxication was measured among bar patrons; as blood alcohol level increased, so did political conservatism (controlling for sex, education, and political identification). In Study 2, participants under cognitive load reported more conservative attitudes than their no-load counterparts. In Study 3, time pressure increased participants’ endorsement of conservative terms. In Study 4, participants considering political terms in a cursory manner endorsed conservative terms more than those asked to cogitate; an indicator of effortful thought (recognition memory) partially mediated the relationship between processing effort and conservatism. Together these data suggest that political conservatism may be a process consequence of low-effort thought; when effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases.

    tags: political-science psychology cognition style bias effort conservative

  • Using Less Effort to Think, Opinions Lean More Conservative | Arkansas Newswire | University of Arkansas

    “People endorse conservative ideology more when they have to give a first or fast response,” Eidelman said. “This low-effort thinking seems to favor political conservatism, suggesting that it may be our default ideology. To be clear, we are not saying that conservatives think lightly.”

    tags: political-science psychology cognition style bias effort conservative

  • [1201.2069] No entailing laws, but enablement in the evolution of the biosphere

    Biological evolution is a complex blend of ever changing structural stability, variability and emergence of new phenotypes, niches, ecosystems. We wish to argue that the evolution of life marks the end of a physics world view of law entailed dynamics.

    tags: science law philosophy explanation evolution complexity

  • The Miso Project

    Miso is an open source toolkit designed to expedite the creation of high-quality interactive storytelling and data visualisation content.

    tags: data data-exploration visualization library programming javascript toolkit

  • John Cook: Why and How People Use R | Lang.NEXT 2012 | Channel 9

    tags: video r statistics programming languages

  • New institute to tackle “data tsunami” challenge | Argonne National Laboratory

    Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have received part of a planned $25 million grant from the DOE Office of Science to tackle the problem of extracting knowledge from massive data sets. The work is part of the DOE’s newly established Scalable Data Management, Analysis, and Visualization (SDAV) Institute. Researchers in Argonne’s Mathematics and Computing Science division will receive a planned $3.4 million over five years for the research.

    tags: funding government research academic-center lab big-data

  • To Read All Of The Privacy Policies You Encounter, You’d Need To Take A Month Off From Work Each Year | Techdirt

    In fact, a new report notes that if you actually bothered to read all the privacy policies you encounter on a daily basis, it would take you 250 working hours per year — or about 30 workdays.

    tags: privacy internet policies research time reading

  • 9 Pro Tips for Developing a Killer Internal Link Structure – Search Engine Watch (#SEW)

    tags: seo search-engine

  • Open Site Explorer

    tags: seo search-engine weblog-tool

  • The Crisis of Big Science by Steven Weinberg | The New York Review of Books

    tags: big-science science policy america funding physics astronomy scale

  • Charles Murray on the new upper class « Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

    “I think Murray and I are basically in agreement about the facts here. If you take narrow enough slices and focus on the media, academia, and civilian government, you can find groups of elites with liberal attitudes on economic and social issues. But I’m also interested in all those elites with conservative attitudes. Statistically, they outnumber the liberal elites. The conservative elites tend to live in different places than the liberal elites and they tend to have influence in different ways (consider, for example, decisions about where to build new highways, convention centers, etc., or pick your own examples), and those differences interest me.”

    tags: elites expertise class wealth income economics politics

  • Welcome to Viewshare

    “Viewshare is a free platform for generating and customizing views (interactive maps, timelines, facets, tag clouds) that allow users to experience your digital collections.”

    tags: archives software free digital-humanities collection visualization interface

  • Timothy Noah, Charles Murray, and America’s Inequality : The New Yorker

    Review of The Great Divergence by Timothy Noah; Coming Apart by Charles Murray; Power, Inc by David Rothkopf; Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt; Greedy Bastards by Dylan Ratigan; Tea Party Patriots by Meckler and Martin; Spoiled Rotten by Jay Cost.

    tags: books review inequality economics politics america

  • Your Privacy Is Tested With Every Click You Make – NYTimes.com

    tags: privacy facebook social-media

  • Overjustification effect – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    tags: wikipedia psychology incentives rewards

  • Stumbling and Mumbling: Crisis, what crisis?

    “In this sense, what is in one way a parallel between now and the 70s is also a difference. Both eras brought into doubt a dominant economic paradigm – Keynesian social democracy is the 70s and neoliberalism now. However, because neoliberalism serves the interests of capitalists in a way that Keynesianism (by the 70s) did not, there’s less of a rush among the ruling elite to look for an alternative. But this merely raises the question. Why – given that its living standards are falling now in a way they did not in the 70s – is the working class so quiescent compared to then?”

    tags: economics history crisis 1970s 2000s 2010s neoliberalism conservatism

  • Does Philosophy Just Keep Going in Circles? – Brainstorm – The Chronicle of Higher Education

    “One interesting question provoked by my “Is Philosophy a Science?” series is about whether philosophy ever makes any progress. Does our thinking, our theories, get better? Or are we simply going around in circles, endlessly? As I noted in my first piece on this topic, in a way the question is a bit unfair. Parts of philosophy do start to lend themselves to regular empirical inquiry and progress. At which point they usually branch off, forming disciplines of their own. Psychology at the end of the nineteenth century was one such case. So what is left is almost by definition non-progressive, at least in a scientific sort of way. But we do have change and in a way it is progressive. Take the argument from design – the eye is like a telescope; telescopes have telescope designers; hence the eye has a designer, the Great Optician in the Sky.”

    tags: philosophy progress history

  • Book Review: What Money Can’t Buy – WSJ.com

    “Proponents of market morality claim that it imposes no belief system, but that’s just a smoke screen. Choosing to place utility maximization at the core of your belief system is no different from choosing any other guiding ideological precept. Every problem has an incentive-based solution; every tension can be resolved by seeking the maximally efficient outcome. This is a depressingly reductive view of the human experience. Men will die for God or country, kinship or land. No one ever picked up a rifle and got shot for optimal social utility. Economists cannot account for this basic fact of humanity. Yet they have assumed a role in society that for the past 4,000 years has been held by philosophers and theologians. They have made our lives freer and more efficient. And we are the poorer for it.”

    tags: book review economics morality philosophy markets triumphalism

  • Journal of Public Economic Theory – Managing Climate Change

    “Wiley-Blackwell is pleased to announce a special issue of the Journal of Public Economic Theory on Managing Climate Change. This issue is edited by two internationally renowned economists who combine the expertise of economic theory – with its application to issues at the forefront of climate change – and its economic consequences. Editors Roger Guesnerie and (Lord) Nicholas Stern are passionate about their subject and have sought out leading researchers in the area of climate change to contribute to the issue. The contributors include, among others, Professors William Nordhaus of Yale University, Martin Weitzman of Harvard University, Ujjayant Chakravorty, and Thomas Sterner. The articles in the issue address the timely and undeniably important question of how to evaluate the potential consequences of current economic decisions. Intertemporal values will have a profound effect on any assessment of the issues and on the shaping of policy and must be examined directly. A central issue is the probability of catastrophic future events and how these should be taken into account. Innovation and radical technological change must be at the heart of emissions reductions, but policy to foster the change must be carefully crafted – the pace and time path of emissions reductions are crucial, not just the eventual flow.”

    tags: climate-change economics management

  • “Future generations” are already here — Crooked Timber

    “Furthermore, by the nature of overlapping generations, there is no point at which a coherent distinction between current and future generations can be drawn. In the absence of some general catastrophe, many children alive today will still be alive in 2100, at which time people already alive will reasonably be able to anticipate the possibility of survival well into the 22nd century.”

    tags: philosophy future generation intergenerational argument

  • How Exercise Could Lead to a Better Brain – NYTimes.com

    “For more than a decade, neuroscientists and physiologists have been gathering evidence of the beneficial relationship between exercise and brainpower. But the newest findings make it clear that this isn’t just a relationship; it is the relationship. Using sophisticated technologies to examine the workings of individual neurons — and the makeup of brain matter itself — scientists in just the past few months have discovered that exercise appears to build a brain that resists physical shrinkage and enhance cognitive flexibility. Exercise, the latest neuroscience suggests, does more to bolster thinking than thinking does. “

    tags: science exercise psychology memory benefits brain body

  • Progressive Geographies | Thinking about place and power

    “Stuart Elden’s research is at the intersection of politics, philosophy and geography.”

    tags: weblog-individual academic geography

  • plastic bodies | thinking about material identities

    “Tom Sparrow (Philosophy, Slippery Rock University) maintains this blog so he can tinker with ideas and keep himself writing.”

    tags: weblog-individual academic philosophy teaching

  • BBC News – Secrets revealed by dirty books from medieval times

    “The reading habits of medieval people have revealed details of their lifestyle, in research carried out at St Andrews University. Researchers have found them to have many characteristics still found in modern readers. They said medieval people feared illness, were selfish and often fell asleep while reading late at night. The work used a technique developed by Dr Kathryn Rudy, which measures the dirt accumulated on medieval manuscripts.”

    tags: medieval history books traces

  • Vaughan Bell: the truth about lie detectors | Science | The Observer

    “But despite the inherent unreliability of lie detectors, they have recently seen a rebirth.”

    tags: crime punishment law lying truth psychology technology

  • A Lack Of Rigor Leaves Students ‘Adrift’ In College : NPR

    “Public and policy discussions of higher education over the course of the twentieth century have focused on one issue in particular: access. “

    tags: education academia criticism history access economics measurement success metrics university curriculum

  • Science-Mart – Philip Mirowski | Harvard University Press

    “This trenchant study analyzes the rise and decline in the quality and format of science in America since World War II. During the Cold War, the U.S. government amply funded basic research in science and medicine. Starting in the 1980s, however, this support began to decline and for-profit corporations became the largest funders of research. Philip Mirowski argues that a powerful neoliberal ideology promoted a radically different view of knowledge and discovery: the fruits of scientific investigation are not a public good that should be freely available to all, but are commodities that could be monetized.”

    tags: book publisher scinece history sts 20c privatization corporate government funding public-interest university academia

  • AmericanScience: A Team Blog: STS and the Spectre of ELSI

    ELSI = ethical, legal, and social implications

    tags: sts research funding trends discipline

  • [1204.4346] Your Two Weeks of Fame and Your Grandmother’s

    “Did celebrity last longer in 1929, 1992 or 2009? We investigate the phenomenon of fame by mining a collection of news articles that spans the twentieth century, and also perform a side study on a collection of blog posts from the last 10 years. By analyzing mentions of personal names, we measure each person’s time in the spotlight, using two simple metrics that evaluate, roughly, the duration of a single news story about a person, and the overall duration of public interest in a person. We watched the distribution evolve from 1895 to 2010, expecting to find significantly shortening fame durations, per the much popularly bemoaned shortening of society’s attention spans and quickening of media’s news cycles. Instead, we conclusively demonstrate that, through many decades of rapid technological and societal change, through the appearance of Twitter, communication satellites, and the Internet, fame durations did not decrease, neither for the typical case nor for the extremely famous, with the last statistically significant fame duration decreases coming in the early 20th century, perhaps from the spread of telegraphy and telephony. Furthermore, while median fame durations stayed persistently constant, for the most famous of the famous, as measured by either volume or duration of media attention, fame durations have actually trended gently upward since the 1940s, with statistically significant increases on 40-year timescales. Similar studies have been done with much shorter timescales specifically in the context of information spreading on Twitter and similar social networking sites. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first massive scale study of this nature that spans over a century of archived data, thereby allowing us to track changes across decades. “

    tags: fame history 20c celebrity time

  • happy science: How to use Twitter

    “I am somewhat.. persistent.. in my efforts to get every single PhD student I meet on, and using, Twitter. Surprisingly, although my generation is labelled as being, ‘social networkers’ the vast majority of people I know and meet are not on Twitter. Facebook yes. Twitter no. Twitter is for weirdos and celebrity stalkers. “

    tags: twitter social-media academia phd graduate-school

  • Is Facebook making us lonely? No, the Atlantic cover story is wrong. – Slate Magazine

    tags: facebook social-media perception psychology community communication loneliness

  • Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? – Magazine – The Atlantic

    tags: facebook social-media perception psychology community communication loneliness

  • Clive Thompson on How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense

    “Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination. “

    tags: twitter perception social-media psychology community communication

  • Observations on film art : It’s good to be the King of the World

    “I’m left with two observations. First, there was a time when exhibitors called these directors’ bluff. When Lucas griped that there weren’t enough digital screens for Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith (2005), John Fithian, president of the National Organization of Theater Owners, replied memorably: “I don’t put projectors in just for Star Wars.” Now, it seems, the exhibitors are so scared of missing the next blockbuster that the filmmakers can dictate terms. It’s remarkable that these men can do something neither Griffith nor DeMille nor Disney nor any other powerful Hollywood filmmaker of the classic years dared do. They keep asking that the fundamental technology of cinema be changed so we can all watch a couple of their movies for a month or two every few years. Second, if these guys are so passionately committed to quality, why don’t they make better movies?”

    tags: movies cinema film 3d business marketing

  • The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future – Alexis Madrigal – Technology – The Atlantic

    “For at least five years, we’ve been working with the same operating logic in the consumer technology game. This is what it looks like: There will be ratings and photos and a network of friends imported, borrowed, or stolen from one of the big social networks. There will be an emphasis on connections between people, things, and places. That is to say, the software you run on your phone will try to get you to help it understand what and who you care about out there in the world. Because all that stuff can be transmuted into valuable information for advertisers. That paradigm has run its course. It’s not quite over yet, but I think we’re into the mobile social fin de siècle.”

    tags: technology-cycles technology mobile social-media bubble

  • Philosophy Is Not a Science – NYTimes.com

    “The intellectual culture of scientism clouds our understanding of science itself. What’s more, it eclipses alternative ways of knowing — chiefly the philosophical — that can actually yield greater certainty than the scientific. While science and philosophy do at times overlap, they are fundamentally different approaches to understanding. So philosophers should not add to the conceptual confusion that subsumes all knowledge into science. “

    tags: scientism science philosophy discipline knowledge

    Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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  • PLoS ONE: Assessing Public Engagement with Science in a University Primate Research Centre in a National Zoo

    “Recent years have seen increasing encouragement by research institutions and funding bodies for scientists to actively engage with the public, who ultimately finance their work. Animal behaviour as a discipline possesses several features, including its inherent accessibility and appeal to the public, that may help it occupy a particularly successful niche within these developments. It has also established a repertoire of quantitative behavioural methodologies that can be used to document the public’s responses to engagement initiatives. This kind of assessment is becoming increasingly important considering the enormous effort now being put into public engagement projects, whose effects are more often assumed than demonstrated. Here we report our first attempts to quantify relevant aspects of the behaviour of a sample of the hundreds of thousands of visitors who pass through the ‘Living Links to Human Evolution Research Centre’ in Edinburgh Zoo. This University research centre actively encourages the public to view ongoing primate research and associated science engagement activities. Focal follows of visitors and scan sampling showed substantial ‘dwell times’ in the Centre by common zoo standards and the addition of new engagement elements in a second year was accompanied by significantly increased overall dwell times, tripling for the most committed two thirds of visitors. Larger groups of visitors were found to spend more time in the Centre than smaller ones. Viewing live, active science was the most effective activity, shown to be enhanced by novel presentations of carefully constructed explanatory materials. The findings emphasise the importance and potential of zoos as public engagement centres for the biological sciences.”

    tags: science public-understanding engagement assessment measurement museum zoo

  • The Science of Public Engagement « Wellcome Trust Blog

    tags: science public-understanding engagement

  • The Reason Silicon Valley Hasn’t Built a Good Health App – Kanyi Maqubela – Technology – The Atlantic

    tags: health startup business entrepreneur entrepreneurship innovation age demography quantified-self

  • Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

    “This phenomenon is one of the most important things you can understand about startups. You’d expect big startup ideas to be attractive, but actually they tend to repel you. And that has a bunch of consequences. It means these ideas are invisible to most people who try to think of startup ideas, because their subconscious filters them out. Even the most ambitious people are probably best off approaching them obliquely.”

    tags: business entrepreneur entrepreneurship startup ideas inspiration

  • The Foreign-Language Effect

    “Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue? It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less systematic. We discovered, however, that the opposite is true: Using a foreign language reduces decision-making biases. Four experiments show that the framing effect disappears when choices are presented in a foreign tongue. Whereas people were risk averse for gains and risk seeking for losses when choices were presented in their native tongue, they were not influenced by this framing manipulation in a foreign language. Two additional experiments show that using a foreign language reduces loss aversion, increasing the acceptance of both hypothetical and real bets with positive expected value. We propose that these effects arise because a foreign language provides greater cognitive and emotional distance than a native tongue does. “

    tags: foreign-language learning psychology bias

  • Irresponsible Skepticism: Lessons Learned From the Climate Disinformation Campaign – Climate Ethics

    “This is the fourth and last entry in a series that has examined the climate change disinformation campaign as an ethical matter. The purpose of this series has been to distinguish between responsible scientific skepticism, an approach to climate change science that should be encouraged, and the tactics of the climate change disinformation campaign, strategies deployed to undermine mainstream climate change science that are often deeply ethically offensive. “

    tags: climate-change climate science denial ethics skepticism disinformation agnotology ignorance propaganda

  • Five Darwinian/Posthumanist Theses « Larval Subjects .

    “It’s no exaggeration to suggest that Darwin’s account of speciation is the most revolutionary idea in the last two hundred years. In claiming this, I am not original, for this is also the thesis of Dennett in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. I will never have words fine enough to capture the greatness of Darwin, but nonetheless it is important to at least attempt the articulation of what is so revolutionary in his thought.”

    tags: evolution ideas object-oriented-ontology objects intellectual history

  • Four Futures

    “There are therefore four logical combinations of the two oppositions, resource abundance vs. scarcity and egalitarianism vs. hierarchy. To put things in somewhat vulgar-Marxist terms, the first axis dictates the economic base of the post-capitalist future, while the second pertains to the socio-political superstructure. Two possible futures are socialisms (only one of which I will actually call by that name) while the other two are contrasting flavors of barbarism.”

    tags: economics future capitalism socialism freedom rent utopia communism futurism post-scarcity

  • Chaiyos – Home

    tags: food restaurant

  • Hacking the Non-Disposable Planet

    “I was initially very annoyed by what I saw as a content-free overloading of the term, but the more I examined the various uses, the more I realized that there really is a common pattern to everything that is being subsumed by the term hacking. I now believe that the term hacking is not over-extended; it is actually under-extended. It should be applied to a much bigger range of activities, and to human endeavors on much larger scales, all the way up to human civilization.”

    tags: hacking future definition debt environment stability technology sts technology-effects

  • Remarks on Utopia in the Age of Climate Change – arena

    “I came to utopia by accident, having painted myself into a corner with an idea for a trilogy: three science fiction novels consisting of an after-the-fall novel, a dystopia and a utopia, all set in the same place, and about the same distance into the future. The idea came to me in 1972, and I didn’t know how to write a novel then, so the plan needed brooding on. Some sixteen years later, the time came for the utopia. I had written the after-the-fall novel, The Wild Shore, and the dystopia, The Gold Coast. The utopia was the only one left.”

    tags: author interview sf utopia fiction climate-change environment future

  • Commonwealth of Learning – Dual-Mode Universities in Higher Education: Way Station or Final Destination?

    tags: education distance distance-education mooc future open-courseware open-education university profit private public

  • Values in Design of Future Internet Architecture | Michael Zimmer.org

    “A central theme in much of my research and advocacy is ensuring attention to ethical values becomes an integral part of the conception, design, and development of information systems. Various frameworks have been developed to help pursue this goal (ie, value-sensitive design, values at play, critical technical practice), which can collectively be termed Values-In-Design (VID). Broadly, VID seeks to broaden the criteria for judging the quality of technological systems to include the advancement of moral and human values, and to proactively influence the design of technologies to account for such values during the conception and design process. VID has been a motivating factor in my research on vehicle safety communication technologies, Web search engine privacy practices, and book digitization projects, just to name a few examples, and my commitment to achieving VID has also lead to explorations of some of its challenges”

    tags: values design research academic projects future internet architecture

  • CURATEcamp | A series of unconference-style events focused on connecting practitioners and technologists interested in digital curation

    “A series of unconference-style events focused on connecting practitioners and technologists interested in digital curation”

    tags: unconference curation data-curation libraries

  • 5 Ways to Turn a Liberal Into a Conservative (At Least Until the Hangover Sets In) | The Crux | Discover Magazine

    “Indeed, the growing science of politics has uncovered a variety of interventions that can shift liberal people temporarily to the political right. And notably, none of them seem to have anything substantive to do with policy, or with the widely understood political differences between Democrats and Republicans. Here is a list of five things that can make a liberal change his or her stripes:”

    tags: politics biology psychology liberal conservative ideology personality

  • The American Conservative » China’s Rise, America’s Fall

    “These facts do not provide much evidence for the thesis in Why Nations Fail that China’s leaders constitute a self-serving and venal “extractive” elite. Unfortunately, such indications seem far more apparent when we direct our gaze inward, toward the recent economic and social trajectory of our own country Against the backdrop of remarkable Chinese progress, America mostly presents a very gloomy picture. Certainly America’s top engineers and entrepreneurs have created many of the world’s most important technologies, sometimes becoming enormously wealthy in the process. But these economic successes are not typical nor have their benefits been widely distributed. Over the last 40 years, a large majority of American workers have seen their real incomes stagnate or decline.”

    tags: economics corruption america decline conservative commentary scale

  • The American Conservative: “Extractive Elites” and “Macro-Corruption” | Angry Bear – Financial and Economic Commentary

    ““Extractive elites” and “macro-corruption” encapsulate it pretty perfectly. It’s also essential reading for those like me who can’t seem to look away from the decades-long train wreck of contorted, self-contradictory conservative “thinking.””

    tags: economics corruption america decline conservative commentary

  • This is Our Society on Drugs: Top 5 Infographics | The White Noise, Scientific American Blog Network

    tags: drugs visualization infographics

  • Project Overview – Mathematical Cultures

    “Mathematics has universal standards of validity. Nevertheless, there are local styles in mathematics. These may be the legacy of a dominant individual (e.g. the Newtonianism of 18th century British mathematics). Or, there may be social or economic reasons (such as the practical bent of early modern Dutch mathematics). Sometimes, a local style results from deliberate policy. For example, in the 1920s and 1930s, Polish officials identified ‘foundations of mathematics’ in the style of topology and real analysis as something that Polish mathematicians should excel in. Local mathematical cultures can reflect the uneven geographical spread of a methodological division. For example, in theoretical computer science, there are two main directions: ‘Algorithms and Complexity’, and ‘Logic in Computer Science’ . In many countries, the split between those areas is heavily uneven. “

    tags: mathematics sts science history culture style

  • The 99 Percent – It’s not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen.

    tags: inspiration design creativity ideas productivity innovation

  • What are the superstitions of our age? « Scott Berkun

    tags: superstition history modern contemporary

  • Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Technology and culture: a test case

    “We’re going to get some insight into this question over the next decade or so as e-readers – in the form of both devices and apps – spread and become even cheaper. As Caroline Winter of Bloomberg Businessweek reports, in two of the most prosperous Western countries – the U.S. and Germany – the adoption of electronic books has so far taken very different routes.”

    tags: technology technology-adoption culture determinism sts e-books publishing

  • How Psychedelic Drugs Can Help Patients Face Death – NYTimes.com

    tags: drugs death medicine health psychedelic

  • It’s The People, Stupid | Savage Minds

    tags: academic practice genre networks literature review phd literature-review tip

  • In Praise of Ignorance: Why It’s OK to Tweet, ‘Who Is Dick Clark?’ – Megan Garber – Technology – The Atlantic

    “And, given all the new platforms that exist solely for the purpose of satisfying curiosity, the web is also a reminder of our perpetual knowledge. The answers, for the most part, are there for us; we just need to take the step of asking the questions. So while it’s easy to make fun of the people who broadcast their ignorance, it’s much better to celebrate them. They’re a collective reminder that, with the world’s knowledge newly at our fingertips, the only thing worse than ignorance is indifference.”

    tags: ignorance agnotology technology media new-media social-media behavior attitude

  • If We Had a Better Story Could We Tell the Truth? « how to save the world

    tags: environment catastrophe optimism pessimism ecology civilization collapse story-telling play grief emotion nature

  • It’s all downhill for US equality – FT.com

    tags: economics inequality wealth income-distribution equality money class finance

  • Four Types of Scoops – Jay Rosen: Public Notebook

    “But not all scoops are created equal. I see four main types. The politics of credit-claiming vary, depending on which type of scoop we’re talking about. “

    tags: media media-studies journalism news culture

  • Information Diet | Home

    “Healthy information consumption habits are about more than productivity and efficiency. They’re about your personal health, and the health of society. Just as junk food can lead to obesity, junk information can lead to new forms of ignorance. The Information Diet provides a framework for consuming information in a healthy way, by showing you what to look for, what to avoid, and how to be selective. In the process, author Clay Johnson explains the role information has played throughout history, and why following his prescribed diet is essential in today’s information age.”

    tags: book website information technology diet information-overload attention

  • Can You Make Yourself Smarter? – NYTimes.com

    tags: intelligence cognition memory learning

  • Time Management, Productivity, & Project Tracking Software (Mac/PC) | RescueTime

    tags: productivity management lifehacks gtd time-management tools

  • Skeumorphism & Storytelling / Tobias Bjerrome Ahlin

    “Skeumorphism is about communcating and reinforcing feelings – getting an application to become a memorable experience, not just a tool. It’s about communicating the purpose of a UI, not only the functions it enables.”

    tags: design skeuomorphism communication ux interface

  • The Future of Reading: The Syllabus | Jane Friedman

    tags: future reading syllabi recommendations

  • Nate Weiner • Why Read It Later/Pocket Went Free

    tags: business business-model apps computer

  • Evolution of a Web Developer: From PHP Newbie To Python Ninja

    tags: web-programming experience programming

  • stroll.js – CSS3 Scroll Effects

    tags: css web-design demonstration

  • PAKDD 2012

    The 16th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD) is pleased to organize a data mining competition.

    tags: data-mining competition practice

  • The Politics of the New Aesthetic: Electric Anthropology and Ecological Vision / by @jongoodbun #newaesthetic

    tags: new-aesthetic aesthetics politics capitalism computers technology

  • War and Presidential Greatness by David Henderson, Zachary Gochenour :: SSRN

    “Historians and journalists commonly survey other historians on the relative ‘greatness’ of American presidents, and these rankings show remarkable consistency between surveys. In this paper we consider commonalities between highly ranked presidents and compare plausible determinants of greatness according to historians. We find that a strong predictor of greatness is the fraction of American lives lost in war during a president’s tenure. We find this predictor to be robust and compare favorably to other predictors used in previous historical research. We discuss potential reasons for this correlation and conclude with a discussion of how historians’ views might affect policy. “

    tags: political-science war military perception success greatness

  • Species Concepts | EvoEcoLab, Scientific American Blog Network

    tags: biology evolution theory species definition taxonomy typology

  • Book – Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS

    tags: css html web-design tutorials

  • Infographics & Data Visualizations | Visual.ly

    tags: infographics visualization graphics data visual

  • 86 helpful tools for the data professional PLUS 45 bonus tools – Kitlas

    tags: tools data data-processing tips

  • 25 Must-Follow Information, Data and Visualization Blogs and RSS Feeds for the Data Professional

    tags: visualization data weblog-recommendations

  • Rhetological Fallacies

    tags: rhetoric logic fallacy visualization infographics design

  • UnderstandingSociety: Neil Gross’s pragmatist sociology

    “What makes this set of assumptions a “pragmatist” approach? Fundamentally, because it understands the actor as situated within a field of assumptions, modes of behavior, ways of perceiving; and as being stimulated to action by “problem situations”. So action is understood as the actor’s creative use of scripts, habits, and cognitive frameworks to solve particular problems. (Gross refers to this as an A-P-H-R chain: actor, problem situation, habit, and response; 343.)”

    tags: action agents structure norms sociology explanation philosophy pragmatism theory social-theory rationality

  • UnderstandingSociety: A pragmatist action theory

    “Joas thinks that this interpretation of action as extended intelligent adaptation to shifting circumstances helps to account for complex social circumstances that rational-actor and normative-actor theories have difficulty with. He illustrates this claim with the extended examples of reciprocity and innovation. “

    tags: action agents structure norms sociology explanation philosophy pragmatism theory social-theory

  • Will Free Education Technology Benefit the Rich? (@bjfr) – EdTech Researcher – Education Week

    “In other words, the end result of an explosion of freely available OER and education technology resources could be to widen the opportunity gaps between wealthy and poor students. So if we think that’s a problem, then we should not depend on the Internet to be a democratizing, equalizing platform for distributing learning tools and platforms. We need to think very carefully about how we can design learning tools and distribution pathways that serve students with the greatest needs. “

    tags: education technology pedagogy teaching class economics socioeconomic status open-education

  • …My heart’s in Accra » The tweetbomb and the ethics of attention

    “Twitterbombing is a tactic that forces us to think about the ethics of attention. We may believe that Reese and Athene are engaged in a deeply important cause – does that mean we’re ethically justified in asking someone else to pay attention? What’s the difference between asking a friend for their attention, and someone you don’t know? A public figure versus a media curator, versus someone who simply has a lot of Twitter followers? “

    tags: twitter behavior social-media celebrity spam attention

  • Resources | Assessment

    “AAC&U develops and advances assessment practices that deepen, integrate, and demonstrate student learning, through advocacy of learning-centered assessment policies, support for campus work to develop meaningful assessment approaches, and experimentation with common e-portfolio frameworks. Through its ground-breaking national initiative, VALUE (Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education), AAC&U has worked with faculty and assessment expert teams across the country to develop a set of 15 rubrics through which institutions can evaluate cross-cutting capacities students develop across courses and programs. More than 2000 institutions are currently using VALUE rubrics as part of their assessment plans. AAC&U “

    tags: academia education assessment measurement

  • Are Great Wikis Born or Made? (@bjfr) – EdTech Researcher – Education Week

    “The take home messages are two-fold. First, great wikis are born not made. High quality wikis typically start as high levels of quality. I’d encourage teachers to think very carefully about the behaviors they hope to see on wiki learning environments, and scaffold projects so that those behaviors appear early on. If you want rich collaborative behaviors to occur, get them happening as soon as you can. Second, collaboration is rare in wiki learning environments (as is the case in all online peer production platforms.) Just making blogs, wikis, and other Web 2.0 available to teachers is highly unlikely to result in much higher levels of collaborative learning. Teachers need time, curricular freedom, PD support and so on to make it possible. “

    tags: wiki teaching education quality collaboration

  • INFEST WISELY | a lo-fi sci-fi movie in seven episodes

    tags: movie art sf

  • Can Artists Help Us Reboot Humanism in an Over-Connected Age? | Artinfo

    “Rhizome.org’s annual “Seven on Seven” conference isn’t really meant to have a theme beyond simply exploring the intersection of art and technology. Rhizome director Lauren Cornell plays yenta, matching various figures from the two fields who then brainstorm collaborations and build whatever prototypes can be whipped up in the very abbreviated 24-hours they actually have together (the teams first meet Friday morning, then talk, hatch an idea, and finally present on Saturday afternoon). It was notable, then, that at this year’s conference — held April 14 at the New Museum — a theme did emerge organically: Quite a few of these pairs, in one way or another, were responding to a sense that the quality of mental experience was on the decline in our over-wired world.”

    tags: art aesthetics technology new-aesthetic humanism technology-effects computers

  • Pathways Through Graduate School and Into Careers

    Pathways Through Graduate School and Into Careers examines the critical link between graduate education and preparation for careers. The findings and recommendations provide universities, employers and policymakers with concrete steps each sector can take, individually or in collaboration, to support the future success of the U.S. economy and society.

    tags: education academia research graduate-school

  • Don’t Tell Me What (I Need) To Do, Tell Me What (I Want) To Do « how to save the world

    “No matter that simplistic models and solutions and symptoms rarely work: Still, we want books that tell us we can lose weight easily in 7-10 days, or that we can geoengineer our way out of climate change. We want to believe what we already believe, or at least what we want to believe, or, in cases when there is overwhelming evidence that those beliefs no longer make sense, we want to believe what we are ‘born-again’ ready to believe. And, likewise, we want to be told that what we ‘should’ do is what we are already doing, or what we want to do, or what we are at last ready and willing to do. Until then, we are deaf, and there is no point arguing with us.”

    tags: habit psychology disaster risk

  • The source of American punitiveness | Friends of Justice

    “The results of this study indicate that Americans tend to view crime through a racial lens. Because of this, crime is often associated with “others” — usually poor people of color. It is this “other” status that keeps many Americans from identifying with and having empathy for those caught up in the criminal justice system. This lack of “empathic identification” contributes to Americans’ support for punitive criminal justice policies.”

    tags: crime law punishment american prison race sociology

  • Visualizing iOS Text Editors – Kieran Healy

    “I made a CSV file of the table and dumped it into R. Here’s a reproduction of Brett’s table as a figure, with blocks of color for the data values. The figure was produced with ggplot.”

    tags: r statistics visualization

  • In Economics, You Are What You Model – NYTimes.com

    tags: book interview economics modeling scientism ideology

  • Reproductive Rights and the Long Hand of Slave Breeding | The Nation

    “Bridgewater argues that because slavery depended on the slaveholder’s right to control the bodies and reproductive capacities of enslaved women, coerced reproduction was as basic to the institution as forced labor. At the very least it qualifies among those badges and incidents, certainly as much as the inability to make contracts. Therefore, sexual and reproductive freedom is not simply a matter of privacy; it is fundamental to our and the law’s understanding of human autonomy and liberty. And so constraints on that freedom are not simply unconstitutional; they effectively reinstitute slavery.”

    tags: feminism slave history reproduction sex gender american-studies

  • AmericanScience: A Team Blog: 23andMe: Genetic Testing or Bioprospecting?

    “On the one hand, Wojcicki highlighted her desire to empower consumer-patients by circumventing the medical establishment and making data available; on the other, she insisted on the role of 23andMe as a research platform, arguing that its unique dataset rendered it invaluable as a partner and model for further research. There’s a potential tension here, one increasingly central to the modern biomedical establishment and, more generally, to the longer history of the interaction between patients (or subjects), science (or medicine), and capitalism. Who owns what? What’s the impact of information asymmetries? Who is this research (or data) for?”

    tags: technology silicon-valley consumerism data ownership information asymmetrical sts

  • Pang’s Zombie Apocalypse Memorization Test – Contemplative Computing

    “One of the questions I’ve been working through in my book is this: how do you decide when it’s okay to outsource a cognitive function? When is it okay to let your electronic address book remember all your phone numbers, for example? When should you try to memorize a street address, rather than let your GPS or iPhone remember it for you. I think the simple answer is this. Will memorizing the information help you survive a Zombie Apocalypse?”

    tags: information-overload memory technology context

  • This Is What A Scientist Looks Like

    tags: science tumblelog photos representation stereotypes

  • Ashley Judd Slaps Media in the Face for Speculation Over Her ‘Puffy’ Appearance – The Daily Beast

    “Ashley Judd’s ‘puffy’ appearance sparked a viral media frenzy. But, the actress writes, the conversation is really a misogynistic assault on all women. P”

    tags: feminism media celebrity gender body

  • U.S. Intellectual History: Conference on Public Intellectuals

    tags: history public-intellectual public intellectual 20c expertise laypeople

  • Startups, This Is How Design Works – by Wells Riley

    tags: design startup inspiration resources web-design business management justification

  • A Companion to Relativism // Reviews // Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame

    The question we most need addressed is not what epistemic modals mean, but what to do with other people’s.

    tags: book review philosophy relativism epistemology expertise people testimony trust

  • Judge Janice Rogers Brown wants to return to the libertarian legal notions of the 1930s. – Slate Magazine

    At the risk of saying it again, whatever the Supreme Court’s decision regarding Obamacare in June, the net effect of the case has been to illustrate how dramatically the nation’s federal courts have shifted to the right. This shift isn’t evident only in terms of the judiciary’s willingness to embrace long-dormant libertarian ideas, but also in its willingness to wholeheartedly adopt the political language and tone in which these ideas are packaged. Liberals who don’t think of the courts as a political issue should read Judge Brown’s concurrence closely, not merely as an example of the ways partisan politics are bleeding into the federal courts, but as a warning about how radically the federal courts are poised to reshape our politics.    

    tags: law legal supreme-court libertarian conservative republican judicial

  • Center for Communicating Science

    tags: academic-center science communication

  • How to Start the Big Project You’ve Been Putting Off – Peter Bregman – Harvard Business Review

    Here’s why acknowledging your fear works: You’re scared because you expect a lot from yourself and you’re afraid you’ll underperform. When you acknowledge that fear, you’re acknowledging that you might not have all that it takes to meet your expectations; you might not have all the tools, information, skills, etc. Admitting that, in turn, reduces your expectation of getting it perfect right off the bat.

    tags: productivity project time-management gtd procrastination

  • Google+: The Charge Of The Like Brigade | TechCrunch

    tags: google facebook business internet culture competition social-media

  • Download The Universe

    tags: books reviews science e-books

  • Toolmaker Talk: Yoni Donner (Quantified Mind) | Quantified Self

    Donner: Quantified Mind is a web application that allows users to track the variation in their cognitive functions under different conditions, using cognitive tests that are based on long-standing principles from psychology, but adapted to be repeatable, short, engaging, automatic and adaptive. The goal is to make cognitive optimization an exact science instead of relying on subjective feelings, which can be deceiving or so subtle that they are hard to interpret. Quantified Mind allows fun and easy self-experimentation and data analysis that can lead to actionable conclusions.

    tags: quantified-self cognition psychology metrics measurement self-improvement

  • A chat with Chris Mooney about The Republican Brain | Grist

    tags: book interview conservatism republicans motivated-cognition cognition psychology social-psychology denial

  • But it moves: the New Aesthetic & emergent virtual taste | metaLAB (at) Harvard

    tags: new-aesthetic art being objects alien

  • BLDGBLOG: Autonomous Angels of Maintenance

    The idea that little machine-guardians at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, like mechanical demiurges on the invisible edge of the world, are at least partially responsible for ensuring that this post can be read in Europe is a comforting thought before bed.

    tags: infrastructure network internet oceans

  • Evangelical tribalism and the Protestant ethic (Or, Max Weber doesn’t live here anymore)

    tags: religion evangelical tribalism culture belief fear anxiety economics

  • Robots Are Grading Your Papers! – Brainstorm – The Chronicle of Higher Education

    tags: new-aesthetic digital-humanities technology computers labor reading rhetoric academia

  • digital digs: robot graders, new aesthetic, and the end of the close reading industry

    “This post brings together several threads I’ve been pondering recently: the explosion of conversation over the new aesthetic (see Ian Bogost and Bruce Sterling), conversation about the future of digital humanities (see Steven Ramsay and Ted Underwood), and an insightful post from Cathy Davidson on attention and education.”

    tags: new-aesthetic digital-humanities technology computers labor reading rhetoric

  • Rationally Speaking: On fundamentalist reductionism

    “The book goes on to propose a particular version of a philosophy of science position known as structural realism, according to which scientific theories neither track objective reality in a straightforward sense (the so-called realist position), nor do they simply provide us with theoretical conceptions that “work” but whose closeness to truth cannot be assessed (the so-called anti-realist position). Rather, structural realism posits that when scientists abandon one theory for another one (say, Newtonian mechanics in favor of General Relativity) what is retained in the new theory from the old one is a set of mathematical relationships (describing the underlying “structure” of reality).”

    tags: philosophy science epistemology realism

  • Structural Realism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

    “Structural realism is considered by many realists and antirealists alike as the most defensible form of scientific realism. There are now many forms of structural realism and an extensive literature about them. There are interesting connections with debates in metaphysics, philosophy of physics and philosophy of mathematics. This entry is intended to be a comprehensive survey of the field.”

    tags: philosophy science epistemology realism

  • Archive Fire: Matter, Contingency, Chaos and Math

    tags: philosophy metaphysics ontology object-oriented-ontology

  • Radical Noumena: A Taxonomy of Gaps | Knowledge Ecology

    “Kant’s Copernican revolution has enjoyed, in diverse ways, a reconceptualization in much current philosophy. I’m interested in doing a quick taxonomy of some of the ways Kant is being thought anew in three different contexts: A.N. Whitehead’s process philosophy, Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology, and Brett Buchanan’s onto-ethology. “

    tags: philosophy metaphysics ontology object-oriented-ontology

  • The Demise of Higher Education in the United States « unsettling economics

    tags: education academia history 20c structure economics markets

  • Why DH has no future. | The Stone and the Shell

    “In thinking about these eschatological questions, I start from Matt Kirschenbaum’s observation that DH is not a single intellectual project but a tactical coalition. Just for starters, humanists can be interested in digital technology a) as a way to transform scholarly communication, b) as an object of study, or c) as a means of analysis. These are distinct intellectual projects, although they happen to overlap socially right now because they all require skills and avocations that are not yet common among humanists. “

    tags: digital-humanities humanities digital technology future academia movement

  • Metropolitan: the Worldbuilding

    “The people who created modern fantasy, safe to say, were not normal. They led reasonably normal lives, perhaps, but the territory inside their skulls was well off anybody’s map. Think of William Morris obsessively detailing floral wallpaper designs while his wife Jane was off boffing Dante Rossetti; James Branch Cabell spending decades writing his arch, umpty-volume saga about human futility while the twentieth century sang its song of greed, progress, and mass murder; JRR Tolkien (catholic and married in a day when Oxford dons just weren’t) doing scholarly work on the Oxford English Dictionary while secretly transforming his linguistic obsessions into the neography of Middle Earth; and Mervyn Peake— well, just look at Gormenghast, will you?”

    tags: sf fantasy writing publishing

  • Manufacturing Stupidity

    “Here we have the ideology of testing reduced to its fatuous essence. The ritual memorization and regurgitation of a decreed list of “facts” is the paramount value, superseding all other goals of education. We simply “cannot assume” that a student might “receive instruction beyond what the benchmark states”, that they could “make the connection to other materials”, or that they “saw a TV show or read an article.” Not only does the FCAT not assume these things, it actively penalizes them. The test is not merely indifferent but actually hostile to any understanding or learning that happens outside the parameters of the testing regime.”

    tags: education tests reform capitalism future stupidity

  • A Tale of Two Blogospheres

    “In this article, the authors compare the practices of discursive production among top U.S. political blogs on the left and right during summer 2008. An examination of the top 155 political blogs reveals significant cross-ideological variations along several dimensions. Notably, the authors find evidence of an association between ideological affiliation and the technologies, institutions, and practices of participation. Blogs on the left adopt different, and more participatory, technical platforms, comprise significantly fewer sole-authored sites, include user blogs, maintain more fluid boundaries between secondary and primary content, include longer narrative and discussion posts, and (among the top half of the blogs in the sample) more often use blogs as platforms for mobilization. The findings suggest that the attenuation of the news producer-consumer dichotomy is more pronounced on the left wing of the political blogosphere than on the right. The practices of the left are more consistent with the prediction that the networked public sphere offers new pathways for discursive participation by a wider array of individuals, whereas the practices of the right suggest that a small group of elites may retain more exclusive agenda-setting authority online. The cross-ideological divergence in the findings illustrates that the Internet can be adopted equally to undermine or to replicate the traditional distinction between the production and consumption of political information. The authors conclude that these findings have significant implications for the study of prosumption and for the mechanisms by which the networked public sphere may or may not alter democratic participation relative to the mass mediated public sphere. “

    tags: weblog-research weblog politics partisanship behavior technology

  • A Blogosphere Divided — Differences Abound Within Left and Right Political Blogs « The Scholarly Kitchen

    “Our starkest, most objective finding is that the left and right wings of the blogosphere adopted significantly different technological features and platforms. More than 40% of blogs on the left adopt platforms with enhanced user participation features. Only about 13% of blogs on the right do so.”

    tags: weblog-research weblog politics partisanship behavior technology

  • The Global Diffusion of Public Policies: Social Construction, Coercion, Competition, or Learning? – Annual Review of Sociology, 33(1):449

    “Social scientists have sketched four distinct theories to explain a phenomenon that appears to have ramped up in recent years, the diffusion of policies across countries. Constructivists trace policy norms to expert epistemic communities and international organizations, who define economic progress and human rights. Coercion theorists point to powerful nation-states, and international financial institutions, that threaten sanctions or promise aid in return for fiscal conservatism, free trade, etc. Competition theorists argue that countries compete to attract investment and to sell exports by lowering the cost of doing business, reducing constraints on investment, or reducing tariff barriers in the hope of reciprocity. Learning theorists suggest that countries learn from their own experiences and, as well, from the policy experiments of their peers. We review the large body of research from sociologists and political scientists, as well as the growing body of work from economists and psychologists, pointing to the diverse mechanisms that are theorized and to promising avenues for distinguishing among causal mechanisms.”

    tags: sociology diffusion global public-policy social-science politics

  • techBASIC

    “techBASIC brings the power of a desktop computer to your iPhone/iPad for programming, collecting and analyzing data, and visualizing and manipulating stunning 3D graphics. It’s a full implementation of the famously easy to use BASIC Programming Language with specialized array and matrix commands built in.”

    tags: apps iphone ipad data-exploration programming science experiments

  • Rosen’s Trust Puzzler: What Explains Falling Confidence in the Press? » Pressthink

    “As you can see from the chart, the percentage of Americans who had a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust in the news media has declined from over 70 percent shortly after Watergate to about 44 percent today. Why? That is my question in this post.”

    tags: media journalism trust 2h20c institutions history america media-studies expertise

  • personal information ecology – mamamusings

    “I’ve been getting a lot of questions recently about what technology tools–both software and devices–I use for collecting, storing, and retrieving information. As someone whose academic training was in library science, this is a topic I think (and care) about a lot. And while I’m not very good at organizing my physical environment, I do a pretty good job of organizing my digital life. Here’s a rundown of what I’m currently using, and for what…organized by task rather than by platform, because most of what I use is cross-platform anyways. “

    tags: information personal management gtd environment

  • The Philosopher’s Stone: A CREDO FOR PROGRESSIVES

    “The foundation of my politics is the recognition of our collective interdependence. In the complex world that we have inherited from our forebears, it is often difficult to see just how to translate that fundamental interdependence into laws or public policies, but we must always begin from the acknowledgement that we are a community of men and women who must care for one another, work with one another, and treat the needs of each as the concern of all.”

    tags: progressive politics manifesto principles

  • Octopress

    “Octopress is a framework designed by Brandon Mathis for Jekyll, the blog aware static site generator powering Github Pages. To start blogging with Jekyll, you have to write your own HTML templates, CSS, Javascripts and set up your configuration. But with Octopress All of that is already taken care of. Simply clone or fork Octopress, install dependencies and the theme, and you’re set.”

    tags: weblog-tool ruby framework jekyll

  • curator’s ǝpoɔ

    tags: attribution curation copyright collaboration tools knowledge data-curation sharing reference

  • Content Curators Are The New Superheros Of The Web | Fast Company

    Curation is the act of individuals with a passion for a content area to find, contextualize, and organize information. Curators provide a consistent update regarding what’s interesting, happening, and cool in their focus. Curators tend to have a unique and consistent point of view–providing a reliable context for the content that they discover and organize. To be clear, Pinterest both creates tools to organize the noisy web and, at the same time, creates more instances of information in a different context. So it’s both part of the problem, and a solution. The trick is finding the Pinterest pinboards that you like, and tune out the rest.

    tags: content web business data-curation curation

  • Research Data Curation Bibliography

    The Research Data Curation Bibliography includes selected English-language articles and technical reports that are useful in understanding the curation of digital research data in academic and other research institutions. For broader coverage of the digital curation literature, see the author’s Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010.

    tags: data curation research bibliography data-curation information-science

  • Aesthetic Appeal May Have Neurological Link to Contemplation and Self-Assessment, NYU Researchers Find

    “A network of brain regions which is activated during intense aesthetic experience overlaps with the brain network associated with inward contemplation and self-assessment, New York University researchers have found. Their study sheds new light on the nature of the aesthetic experience, which appears to integrate sensory and emotional reactions in a manner linked with their personal relevance.”

    tags: fmri mri brain-imaging aesthetics contemplation experience

  • Hyperallergic — Sensitive to Art and its Discontents

    tags: weblog-group art technology modern-art news

  • Art and Science Get Intimate

    Both the exhibition and the book are the outcome of Andrea Grover’s research as a Warhol Foundation Curatorial Fellow at Miller Gallery and the Studio for Creative Inquiry. In her curatorial statement for Intimate Science and in the introduction to New Art/Science Affinities, Grover explains that contemporary artists working in the art/science matrix are distinct from their 1960s predecessors, a shift she attributes to the networked communication and open-source culture enabled by the internet: “Artists two generations ago were dependent on access to technicians, labs, computer time or manufacturers to realize works of scientific or technological complexity.” In contrast, “practitioners now have greater agency to work fluidly across disciplines and beyond rarified institutions and industries.”

    tags: art science new-aesthetic collaboration access technology

  • Is the New Aesthetic a Thing? Searching for Signs in Tupac and Google

    tags: new-aesthetic art technology aesthetics modern computers

  • Dark Sky for iPhone and iPad

    Dark Sky is a new kind of weather app. It uses state-of-the-art weather forecasting to predict when it will rain or snow — down to the minute — at your exact location, and presents it to you alongside the most beautiful radar visualizations you’ve ever seen.

    tags: apps weather meteorology radar iphone ipad

  • The New Aesthetic

    tags: new-aesthetic tumblelog movement curation

  • Aho/Ullman Foundations of Computer Science

    tags: book computer-science algorithms

  • Analytic Combinatorics Philippe Flajolet and Robert Sedgewick

    tags: book website combinatorics mathematics computer-science

  • interfluidity » Depression is a choice

    “We are in a depression, but not because we don’t know how to remedy the problem. We are in a depression because it is our revealed preference, as a polity, not to remedy the problem. We are choosing continued depression because we prefer it to the alternatives.”

    tags: economics crisis recession policy debt preferences depression politics

  • The Creators Project | Technology and the Brightest Young Minds in Music, Art, Film, and Design

    “The Creators Project is a global celebration of art and technology. Founded by a revolutionary partnership between Intel and VICE, The Creators Project supports visionary artists across multiple disciplines who are using technology in innovative ways to push the boundaries of creative expression.”

    tags: creativity computers technology

  • What if Interactivity is the New Passivity? Jonathan Sterne / McGill University | Flow

    “What if all the bad things that media critics have been said about passivity for the past century or two are now equally applicable to all the demands to interact, to participate? What if interactivity is now one of the central hinges through which power works? In many moments today, the most compliant gesture we can make is to consent to interact on the terms presented to us by our software and machines. “

    tags: media critique criticism passivity interaction interactive television social-media critical-theory

  • How to Perfect Real-Time Crowdsourcing  – Technology Review

    “So how quickly can a crowd be put into action.?That’s the question tackled today by Michael Bernstein at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and a few pals. In the past, these guys have found ways to bring a crowd to bear in about two seconds. That’s quick. But the reaction time is limited to how quickly a worker responds to an alert. Now these guys say they’ve find a way to reduce the reaction time to 500 milliseconds–that’s effectively realtime. A system with a half second latency could turn crowdsourcing into a very different kind of resource. The idea that Bernstein and co have come up with is straightforward. These guys simply “precruit” a crowd and keep them on standby until a task becomes available. Effectively, they’re paying workers a retainer so that they are available immediately when needed”

    tags: real-time crowdsourcing computer-science distributed cognition

  • Is Psychology About to Come Undone? – Percolator – The Chronicle of Higher Education

    “If you’re a psychologist, the news has to make you a little nervous–particularly if you’re a psychologist who published an article in 2008 in any of these three journals: Psychological Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, or the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. Because, if you did, someone is going to check your work. A group of researchers have already begun what they’ve dubbed the Reproducibility Project, which aims to replicate every study from those three journals for that one year. “

    tags: science reproduction repetition verification psychology social-science social-psychology research

  • In Response To Bruce Sterling’s “Essay On The New Aesthetic” | The Creators Project

    tags: new-aesthetic memes online culture art modern technology computers movement

  • The Banality of The New Aesthetic | www.furtherfield.org

    “It’s a bizarre thing when you stumble upon the “new art movement” filtering through discursive chatter. Is it actually a movement, or is it simply a bunch of like-minded individuals telling me its a movement? Behold The New Aesthetic then – a new art meme in visual culture whimsically constructed by James Bridle, which manifests itself in a Tumblr blog, a presentation for Web Directions South, Sydney and an original blog post. Recent attention to it has reached feverish proportions coming off the back of a SXSW panel in March and a generally positive endorsement by Bruce Sterling in Wired, plus some group responses on the creators project. More recently, the computational media scholar and philosopher Ian Bogost has posted his own thoughts for The Atlantic.”

    tags: new-aesthetic memes online culture art modern technology computers movement

  • Personal Informatics

    “Personal informatics is a class of tools that help people collect personally relevant information for the purpose of self-reflection and self-monitoring. These tools help people gain self-knowledge about one’s behaviors, habits, and thoughts. It goes by other names such as living by numbers, personal analytics, quantified self, and self-tracking. This site is a resource for all things related to personal informatics. “

    tags: informatics personal quantified-self tools research

  • Contrary Brin: Take the Wager Challenge…and help push back Culture War

    “I have found that no amount of facts or evidence will shift an “ostrich” republican back to the old ways of Goldwater and Buckley, in pre-Fox days, when conservatism respected knowledge and facts. Back when the average education level of republicans was higher than democrats, when 40% of scientists were in the GOP, instead of less than 5% today. When knowledge and intellect weren’t the openly declared enemy. Nevertheless, I found a bullet! When faced with absolute denial and perfect assertion-addiction, one thing cracks the turtle shell. Demanding a wager!”

    tags: denial republicans conservatism betting wager motivated-cognition

  • BloJJ – About conference poster design and defense:

    tags: presentation poster tips hints

  • P2PU | Learning for everyone, by everyone, about almost anything

    “Learn anything with your peers. It’s online and totally free. At P2PU, people work together to learn a particular topic by completing tasks, assessing individual and group work, and providing constructive feedback.”

    tags: education online learning p2p autodidact e-learning open-courseware

  • A Book Apart, Welcome

    tags: publisher web-programming web-design reference

  • Grantville Gazette » Columns » Secret Crocodiles and Strange Doings (or Sometimes the Magic Really Works)

    Review and commentary on R.A. Lafferty

    tags: author fiction sf fantasy review biography

  • Pocket (Formerly Read It Later)

    tags: apps iphone reading

  • The Digital Humanities as a Part of the New Aesthetic | Digital Humanities Specialist

    tags: digital-humanities new-aesthetic

  • Streamified | All Your Social Streams in One Beautiful Journal

    tags: iphone appearance social-media

  • Grading Written Assignments

    tags: writing teaching grading pedagogy

  • Eloquent JavaScript: A Modern Introduction to Programming

    tags: online programming training teaching learning web-programming javascript

  • Learn to Program, by Chris Pine

    tags: online programming training teaching learning ruby

  • Google: HTML, CSS, and Javascript from the Ground Up – Google Code University – Google Code

    tags: online programming training teaching learning

  • Software training online-tutorials for Adobe, Microsoft, Apple & more

    tags: online programming training teaching learning

  • The Pomodoro Technique®

    tags: productivity gtd lifehacks time-management

  • Rise in Scientific Journal Retractions Prompts Calls for Reform – NYTimes.com

    “Ms. Bradford, of Science magazine, agreed. “I would agree that a scientist’s career advancement should not depend solely on the publications listed on his or her C.V.,” she said, “and that there is much room for improvement in how scientific talent in all its diversity can be nurtured.” Even scientists who are sympathetic to the idea of fundamental change are skeptical that it will happen any time soon. “I don’t think they have much chance of changing what they’re talking about,” said Dr. Korn, of Harvard. “

    tags: science sts peer-production incentives academia publisher structure social reform retractions accuracy

  • Academic reforms: A four-part proposal – Brendan Nyhan

    1. pass/fail first semester 2. pre-accepted article 3. replication audit 4. a frequent flier system for journals

    tags: academia reform peer-review teaching

  • Table of Contents — December 2011, 31 (6)

    “Special Issue: The Social Study of Corporate Science Guest editors: David Schleifer and Bart Penders”

    tags: sts science business corporate journal academic sociology

  • How to Make Things Happen « Scott Berkun

    tags: project-management projects management business gtd

  • The Portal Problem, Part 2: The Plight of the Library Collection « The Scholarly Kitchen

    “Today, I’d like to suggest that the traditional research library faces a similar challenge. The library collection is simply a bigger version of the encyclopedia: a seemingly exhaustive but actually (in the great majority of cases) very limited information portal that invites increasingly-skeptical customers to “start your research here.””

    tags: libraries future access research purpose information-science

  • Opinion: Misguided Science Policy? | The Scientist

    “Public meetings and consensus conferences seem to be the tool du jour for many government agencies, including the National Institutes of Health and the US Department of Agriculture. Designed to give the public a voice in policy decisions, they can, in some cases, provide valuable insights into the local public’s views and opinions on certain issues. But they can also have disastrous consequences when used as a policy-making tool designed to tap public opinion more broadly. And the likelihood of failure is particularly high when debates emerge in a community about if and where to build controversial facilities for storing nuclear waste or conducting research on potentially deadly biological pathogens.”

    tags: science communication public-understanding public meetings controversy consensus community

  • Suspended Judgment: Humanity on full display

    “The problem, or difference, that everyone was trying to point to is that India has not developed the practices and philosophies of hiding to the extent that America, and in other ways Europe, has. America is so good at hiding that even the claims to acknowledge injustice are themselves a hiding of American injustice: not only is the noting of poverty, caste, and pollution a displacing of subjectivity, it is also a hiding of American poverty, class, and consumptive pollution. So the differential problem is not Indian injustice and violence, which exists in equal measure in America, but that India does not hide a human essence towards violence and injustice, it has not developed the practices or philosophies to withdraw our injustice and violent essence from public view. It is, in other words, not modern in a Weberian, Protestant-rationalized way. “

    tags: american culture modernity poverty visibility judgment humanity

  • Tree Lobsters!: #365 Accomplishment

    “Astrologists didn’t discover the cosmic microwave background radiation…ufologists didn’t discover extrasolar planets…cryptozoologists didn’t find these insects…just a friendly reminder of who’s doing all the damn work.”

    tags: humor science comic accomplishments rhetoric work rationality

  • Allergies 101: Part the Third : We Beasties

    “I know this post has been a long time coming. In the first part of this series, I told you that allergies are the result of an immune response against an external, but normally not harmful substance. In part 2, I told you that allergies are the result of a specific type of immune response called “Th2,” which leads to the production of IgE antibodies, and that this immune response is thought to have evolved to combat infections caused by worms. But what makes your immune system think it’s supposed to be battling a worm?”

    tags: biology allergies health medicine

  • From the Archives: CVs and Annual Reports – ProfHacker – The Chronicle of Higher Education

    tags: cvs advice academic jobs

  • Around the Web: Some resources on the Panton Principles & open data : Confessions of a Science Librarian

    “As part of a workshop on Creative Commons, I’m doing a short presentation on Open Data and The Panton Principles this week to various members of our staff. I thought I’d share some of the resources I’ve consulted during my preparations. I’m using textmining of journal articles as a example so I’m including a few resources along those lines as well.”

    tags: commons creative-commons open-data

  • Relevant History: Second reflections on writing

    “I just finished the first draft of the manuscript– as in, sent it off to my editor and agent a couple hours ago– and while it’s all still fresh, thought I’d spend a little more time on what I’ve learned about writing.”

    tags: writing non-fiction tips practice advice

  • How SEO software is changing the way we read and write

    “Fifty years ago, a layer of editors stood between writers and their public. For a while there, in the heady 2000s, we believed we’d toppled the reign of editorial tastemakers and put writers directly in touch with their audiences. Increasingly, however, there are layers of reading, writing, and analysis machines standing between writers and readers on the web. Certainly this isn’t true of all writing, all the time. Still, it’s worth pondering the idea that we are becoming reading cyborgs. When we are online, we often cannot read without machines.”

    tags: writing reading seo search-engine algorithms

  • PHD Comics: Academic Homepage

    tags: comic academia humor

  • Another Reason Why DRM Is Bad — For Publishers | Techdirt

    As a way of fighting unauthorized sharing of digital files, DRM is particularly stupid. It not only doesn’t work — DRM is always broken, and DRM-less versions quickly produced — it also makes the official versions less valuable than the pirated ones, since they are less convenient to use in multiple ways. As a result, DRM actually makes piracy more attractive, which is probably why most of the music industry eventually decided to drop it. Sadly, the world of ebooks seems unable to learn from that experience, and insists on making the same mistakes by using DRM widely. But it turns out that there are even more problems in the publishing domain, as this fascinating tale of how DRM acts as a barrier to entry in the online bookstore market makes clear

    tags: business publishing drm intellectual-property copyright technology publisher

  • Tracking the trackers: help us reveal the unseen world of cookies | Technology | guardian.co.uk

    “Cookies and web trackers are constantly monitoring our online lives. But who are the big players tracking us? Help us to identify them and we’ll reveal what they’re doing with our data”

    tags: internet marketing business privacy tracker tracking technology cookies crowdsourcing

  • How to get more likes on Facebook – The Oatmeal

    tags: facebook twitter humor comic social-media marketing

  • Council for Secular Humanism

    “Products of intelligent design typically have capabilities that exceed usefulness precisely because these can be “intelligently” engineered, not in order to make the product more useful but in order to make it more impressive. In biological evolution, by contrast, “barely good enough” is the highest level that can be reached, because expense that does not improve overall fitness cannot be tolerated. The “barely good enough” standard is also maintained in biological evolution because species characteristics cannot be redesigned from scratch. Human bipedalism is far less than perfect—consider all those endemic back problems! It is clearly the result of a quadruped design being turned into a biped design rather than having been intelligently designed from scratch. This is exactly the mark of the “blind watchmaker” of natural evolution. But the nonblind watchmakers who intelligently design watches can, and do, redesign from scratch.”

    tags: evolution intelligent-design design efficiency humanism

  • The Architecture of Information: Architecture, Interaction Design and the Patterning of Digital Information (Paperback) – Routledge

    “This book looks at relationships between the organization of physical objects in space and the organization of ideas. Historical, philosophical, psychological and architectural knowledge are united to develop an understanding of the relationship between information and its representation. Despite its potential to break the mould, digital information has relied on metaphors from a pre-digital era. In particular, architectural ideas have pervaded discussions of digital information, from the urbanization of cyberspace in science fiction, through to the adoption of spatial visualizations in the design of graphical user interfaces. This book tackles: the historical importance of physical places to the organization and expression of knowledge the limitations of using the physical organization of objects as the basis for systems of categorization and taxonomy the emergence of digital technologies and the twentieth century new conceptual understandings of knowledge and its organization the concept of disconnecting storage of information objects from their presentation and retrieval ideas surrounding ‘semantic space’ the realities of the types of user interface which now dominate modern computing.”

    tags: book publisher information-science information architecture space

  • Book Series: Heritage of Sociology Series

    From University of Chicago Press

    tags: book publisher series sociology

  • Clifford Geertz on “Ideology” as an Analytical Term, Pt. 2 « Ether Wave Propaganda

    “Getting back to ideology, then, Geertz supposed that it was a template for understanding and action at times when existing templates had failed, “where institutionalized guides for behavior, thought, or feeling are weak or absent” (63). It could certainly be negative and pathological, but it might also be inevitable, and, indeed, positive in times of social and political uncertainty.”

    tags: ideology definition anthropology psychology sts history social-science

  • Clifford Geertz on “Ideology” as an Analytical Term, Pt. 1 « Ether Wave Propaganda

    “Geertz divided diagnostic accounts of ideology into the “interest” theory and the “strain” theory”

    tags: ideology definition anthropology psychology sts history social-science

  • My Experiments with Introductions

    “This “retreating from all nearby centers” is not exactly the personality description of a great social hub. So why is it a great position for introduction-making? It’s the same reason Switzerland is a great place for international negotiations: neutrality and small size anchoring credibility, but with sufficient actual clout to enforce good behavior. If you are big or powerful, you have an agenda. If you are from the center of a community, you have an agenda.”

    tags: introvert psychology behavior personality culture social-psychology weblog community weak-links networking

  • Extroverts, Introverts, Aspies and Codies

    “Here are just a few of the ideas I’ve been mulling: As more relationships are catalyzed online than offline, a great sorting is taking place: mixed E/I groups are separating into purer groups dominated by one type Each trait is getting exaggerated as a result The emphasis on collaborative creativity, creative capital and teams is disturbing the balance between E-creativity and I-creativity Lifestyle design works out very differently for E’s and I’s The extreme mental conditions (dubiously) associated with each type in the popular imagination, such as Asperger’s syndrome or co-dependency, are exhibiting new social phenomenology”

    tags: introvert psychology behavior personality culture sociology social-psychology

  • 10 Myths About Introverts | CarlKingdom.com :: Writer. Director. Artist.

    “So here are a few common misconceptions about Introverts (not taken directly from the book, but based on my own life experience):”

    tags: introvert psychology behavior personality myths shyness

  • I’m an introvert. And that’s ok.

    tags: introvert psychology behavior

  • Science in the Open » Blog Archive » The Nature of Science Blog Networks

    Like Paulo Nuin said, the future of scientific blogging is what it has always been. It’s just writing. It’s always just been writing. That’s not the interesting bit. The interesting bit is that how we find what we want to read is changing radically…again. That’s where the next big thing is. If someone figures out please tell me. I promise I’ll link to you.

    tags: science writing online weblog communication

  • What science blog networks do you visit – an update

    tags: science weblog-networks review popular

  • Time for a new type of peer review?

    tags: peer-review publishing science scholarly-communication reform future alternative

  • Spring Science Festivals Mix Stars from Sky and Screen | Budding Scientist, Scientific American Blog Network

    tags: science public festival

  • Hunters of Myths: Why Our Brains Love Origins | Literally Psyched, Scientific American Blog Network

    “So uncomfortable is it for us if something doesn’t have a cause that we strive to determine one, one way or the other, even absent the necessary evidence. In other words, no one even needs to suggest that Turing may have inspired the Apple logo for us to come up with that explanation—or another one, for that matter, should our brain decide something else works best at the moment—spontaneously. As philosopher David Hume observed in 1740, “Causality is the cement of the universe.””

    tags: causation psychology story-telling narrative explanation origin

  • elearnspace › Distributed research lab: request for feedback

    “ne of the things that I like most about blogging and social media is the ability to share partially-formed ideas and open them to critique. As I stated in a previous post, I recently had a mild disappointment in enacting a research project. And it got me thinking about why important research is often not conducted because granting agencies are actually not horribly innovative. What is established as a clear trend may receive research dollars, but early stage ideas are often only able to access small pockets of funds.”

    tags: academia research distributed

  • Be Happier – Less Wrong

    tags: happiness psychology research bibliography goals

  • The People of the Petabyte – Forbes

    “You Too Can Become a Data Scientist So the bottomline is that there is big money looming. Fortunes will be made and lost. Which means you too should attempt to become a data scientist. The skills have become increasingly easy to acquire, and are getting easier by the week. But at the same time, cultural barriers to people self-classifying into the data scene are being erected. Redefine yourself while you can. Let me know if you need any pickaxes.”

    tags: data-science data-curation description metaphor business economics

  • Strip Searches | Talking Philosophy

    Comments on 2012 supreme court decision authorizing strip searches after any arrest.

    tags: supreme-court law america crime punishment prison power

  • Attention control is critical for changing/increasing/altering motivation – Less Wrong

    tags: attention mental activity learning habit brain motivation automaticity

  • AmericanScience: A Team Blog: Environmental History & History of Science: The New Synthesis?

    “But there is also a deeper and ultimately more interesting sense in which the two fields are in dialogue with one another. My sense is that Environmental Historians have become increasingly aware that one cannot simply take the natural world as a given. Nature is now routinely interrogated as category of historical analysis. (Of course, this is not entirely new. People like William Cronon who are on the vanguard of the discipline have been doing it for a long time. But what used to be a fairly radical position seems to have become more or less mainstream.) In so doing, environmental history has found much inspiration from historians of science, scholars who have sought to embed our knowledge and experience of the natural world within narratives of social and cultural change for several decades.”

    tags: sts science history environmental discipline interdisciplinary

  • Publicly available large data sets for database research

    tags: data-sources online data-mining reference teaching pedagogy

  • PebbleRoad: Organizing digital information for others

    “When we interact with web and intranet teams, we find many struggling to move beyond conceptual-level discussions on information organization. Hours on end are spent on discussing the meaning of “metadata”, “controlled vocabulary” and “taxonomy” without any strategic understanding of how everything fits together. Being so bogged down at this level they fail to look beyond to the main reason for their pursuit—organizing information for others (the end users) so that they can find the information easily.”

    tags: information-science organization other people digital

  • What happens when you get more Ph.D.s?

    “This study offers an important policy lesson. Training more Ph.D.s in some targeted areas might fail to improve research output in these areas. In this instance, supply-side economics fails. It might be preferable to create new research jobs instead and attract the Ph.D.s with better salaries.”

    tags: phd academia work jobs

  • Surviving referees’ reports

    “Making revisions in response to referees’ comments can be challenging and sometimes discouraging. A pragmatic step-by-step approach can help overcome barriers.”

    tags: criticism phd research publishing

  • Project MUSE – Theory & Event-Volume 15, Issue 1, 2012

    tags: journal politics culture ecology capitalism marxian

  • I cite: Theory & Event 15.1

    “Issue 15.1 takes up systems, processes, and habits of power. Ranging from the geological scale of oil and glaciers to the personal scale of memory and habit, the articles in this issue confound conventional disciplinary determinations of what can be thought with what, of what belongs together. They creatively reassemble the components of contemporary theory to approach the capitalist economy as an ecology, expanded state power as an individual desire for freedom, memory as segregated, habits as volatile, and biopolitics as depoliticizing. As they engage Toni Morrison and Sigmund Freud, Felix Ravaisson and James Baldwin, to mention but a few, the pieces in this first issue of Volume 15 enact the expansive approach to political theory not only for which Theory & Event is known, but for which we advocate.”

    tags: journal introduction politics culture ecology capitalism marxian

  • Rationally Speaking: On debunking relatives

    “The bottom line is that I was much less willing to engage my relative’s cuckoo beliefs than I normally am with strangers, even though I think I did manage to make her/him doubt or even reconsider part of the nonsense s/he apparently so readily accepts. The question is: should I not have done more? After all, I subscribe to virtue ethics, an approach to morality according to which your friends and relatives are actually more important (to you) than strangers because you have a relationship with and duties toward them. Do these duties not include steering them away from falsehoods, some of which (e.g., the ones concerning alternative medicine) can actually be directly deleterious to them?”

    tags: rationality behavior family groups religion atheism

  • The Republic of Nature | Mark Fiege

    An environmental history of the United States by Mark Fiege

    tags: book website environment history america

  • The Real Boundaries of the Bible Belt – Politics – The Atlantic Cities

    tags: religion american american-studies bible fundamentalism the-south

  • The truth about where your technology comes from. | The Prime Directive

    tags: technology global economics risk capitalism foreign free-trade markets

  • UnderstandingSociety: Causal realism and historical explanation

    “The point here is a fundamental one. The covering law model depends on a metaphysics that gives primacy to laws of nature. The framework of critical realism and its cousins depends on a view of the world as consisting of things and processes with real causal powers. This intellectual framework is applicable to the social world as well as to the natural world. And it provides a strong intellectual basis for postulating and investigating social causal mechanisms. Any conception of causal powers requires that we have an idea of the nature of the substrate of causation in various areas. And the social metaphysics of actor-centered sociology provide a strong candidate for such a framework in the case of social causation.”

    tags: philosophy social-science epistemology law nomological explanation causation logical-positivism positivism realism

  • UnderstandingSociety: Hempel after 70 years

    “Seventy years after Hempel’s classic article, the covering law theory is now generally regarded as a fundamentally wrong-headed way of thinking about historical (and social) explanation. Logical positivism is not a convenient lens through which to examine the social and historical sciences. There is too much contingency in the social world. Rather than being the result of law-governed processes, social outcomes proceed from the contingent and historically variable features of the actors who make them. So the attention of many people interested in specifying the nature of historical and social explanation has focused on social mechanisms constituted and driven by common features of agency.”

    tags: philosophy social-science epistemology law nomological explanation causation logical-positivism positivism

  • HERBERT A. SIMON: Political Scientist – Annual Review of Political Science, 6(1):433

    “Although Herbert Simon’s work is often cited by political scientists, it has not generated a large research program in the discipline. This is a waste of a major intellectual resource. The main challenge to the rational choice research program—now the most important research program in political science—can be developed by building on Simon’s ideas on bounded rationality. The essay defends this assertion by examining how the work of both the early Simon (primarily satisficing-and-search models) and the later Simon (on problem solving) can shed light on important topics in our discipline such as budgeting, turnout, and party competition.”

    tags: rationality bias bounded-rationality limits political-science economics organizations

  • Herbert Simon Was Right: Rationality is an Accomplishment, Not an Assumption « A (Budding) Sociologist’s Commonplace Book

    “In the review piece, Bendon notes that there are two main branches of BR approaches – that pioneered by Simon (and March), and that associated with Kahneman and Tversky (K&T). These two approaches are compatible, but different in focus. K&T focus on universal or nearly universal errors in judgment (prospect theory) or perception (framing effects, where the description of otherwise identical choices can influence decisions). Simon, on the other hand, was more interested in processes of decision-making in light of the impossibility of by-the-book rationality.”

    tags: rationality bias bounded-rationality limits political-science economics

  • Abandoned Footnotes: The Limits of Protest in Complex Societies

    “Dissatisfaction with the social and political world can take many forms – everything from resignation and escape to covert resistance and sabotage to full-blown collective action. It is only sometimes that such dissatisfaction expresses itself as what we have come to understand as protest: collective public action that aims for social or political change. The past year has seen a great global wave of protest movements, among which the Arab Uprisings and the Occupy Wall Street movement are only the most well known. But what can protest accomplish in highly complex societies? What are the limits of protest? “

    tags: politics protests revolution political-science sociology institutions effects limits societies

  • Transverse section shows multiscale detail | Notional Slurry

    tags: work practice agile-methods conservatism travel experience

  • Open Science Framework

    “OSF is an open collaboration of scientists to increase the alignment between scientific values and scientific practices. Efforts include development of tools and infrastructure, and conducting research about scientific practices. Infrastructure and tool projects include tools to improve and document scientific workflow and defining Replication Value of existing findings. Research projects include the Reproducibility Project evaluating the replicability of published psychological science, and a survey of opinions about disclosure standards in scientific reportin”

    tags: open-science science psychology reproduction repetition philosophy methodology publishing incentives results framework

  • Psychology’s Bold Initiative

    “Reproducibility is supposedly a basic tenet of science, but a number of fields have raised concerns that modern publishing pressures inhibit replication of experiments. In a well-known 2005 PLoS Medicine essay, epidemiologist John Ioannidis, now at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, argued that in biomedicine, many if not most published research claims are false. He outlined a number of factors—including small sample sizes, small effect sizes, and “flexibility” in the research process—that contribute to a high rate of false positives. One reason those false positives aren’t caught is because of a lack of emphasis on replication studies, which is “standard across fields of science,” says Columbia University statistician Victoria Stodden, who studies reproducibility and openness in computational science. “

    tags: science psychology reproduction repetition philosophy epistemology methodology publishing incentives results

  • Abandoned Footnotes: The Irrelevance of Legitimacy – now as a working paper!

    “The main ideas of the paper were motivated by my dissatisfaction with the Weberian dictum (almost a cliche at this point) that power needs to be legitimated in order to endure. Though relationships of domination are often embedded within justificatory discourses, my view is that we cannot in general explain the stability of such relationships by pointing to the genuine acceptance of such justifications by the subordinate. “

    tags: sociology legitimacy government power political-science justification

  • Journal of Communication – Volume 62, Issue 2 – April 2012 – Wiley Online Library

    Journal issue on politics, communication, revolution, and social media.

    tags: social-media activism politics revolution

  • The Economy is not a Complex System « A (Budding) Sociologist’s Commonplace Book

    tags: economics complexity agents modeling accidents risk

  • U.S. Intellectual History: In the Lists: Reading for Exams

    “For those of you putting together exam lists (or syllabi), I want to call your attention to several past posts on USIH that have featured discussions of “must-read” texts in U.S. intellectual history, U.S. history in general, the “long 19th century,” and so forth:”

    tags: american history intellectual reading recommendations bibliography

  • ZotPad | an iPad client for Zotero

    “ZotPad is an iPad client for the Zotero reference management software. The software enables reading of PDF files stored on the Zotero server with an iPad. ZotPad stores the data and files that it downloads from the Zotero server in a local cache enabling online and offline use.”

    tags: zotero bibliography ipad software application apps

  • Fired for Wearing the Wrong Color Shirt: The Scary Truth About Our Lack of Workplace Protections | | AlterNet

    A point I’ve argued many times but usually fail to convince. “Most American workers labor under the auspices of employment-at-will, which allows employers to hire, fire and promote for good reasons, bad reasons, or no reason at all. “

    tags: labor work law america freedom repression

  • Red States See Massive Public Sector Job Losses | The Nation

    “Our analysis has shown that this conservative, anti-public worker agenda works hand-in-glove with both restrictions on reproductive freedom and attempts to curtail voting rights. In 2010, Republican Governor Mitch Daniels argued that conservatives should call a “truce” on culture issues and focus on reducing the deficit. Instead, conservative state governments managed to do both at once: push through a record number of government layoffs while also restricting reproductive freedom and democratic voting rights.”

    tags: politics republicans tea-party influence conservatism 2010 state

  • New Article and Paper on the State Public Workforce Losses in 2011 | Rortybomb

    “I had two questions about this that I tried to answer in this article. The first was where these state losses were occurring, and whether there was anything interesting going on with the distribution of lost jobs. The second question was how the new Tea Party influenced Republican state legislatures, especially Republicans that took over 11 states in the historic 2010 midterm elections, were governing. “

    tags: politics republicans tea-party influence conservatism

  • According to Page and Jacobs, Americans are conservative egalitarians who accept higher taxes and more government spending so as to give people equal opportunities — The Monkey Cage

    “In their 2009 book “Class War? What Americans Really Think about Economic Inequality,” Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs put together survey data and make a convincing case that this cynical story is not a fair summary of public opinion in the United States. Actually, most Americans—Democrats and Republicans alike—support government intervention in health care, education, and jobs, and are willing to pay more in taxes for these benefits.”

    tags: book review polls politics partisanship democrats republicans taxes government spending

  • Technology speedup graph « Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

    tags: innovation technology cycle visualization consumption development speed

  • Internet ’96

    tags: internet history web-design

  • The Future of Apps and Web | Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project

    The Web Is Dead? No. Experts expect apps and the Web to converge in the cloud; but many worry that simplicity for users will come at a price. Tech experts generally believe the mobile revolution, the popularity of targeted apps, the monetization of online products and services, and innovations in cloud computing will drive Web evolution. Some survey respondents say while much may be gained, perhaps even more may be lost if the “appification” of the Web comes to pass.

    tags: research web internet mobile open standards future apps

  • Detect Geolocation On Web Browser Using HTML5

    tags: geolocation gis web html5 web-programming

  • Flavorwire » Lu Xinjian’s Beautiful Abstract Paintings of Cities

    tags: art modern-art urban design abstract-art cities

  • DAYTUM

    tags: data statistics tracking visualization web2.0 tools

  • Computer History Museum Event Summary: “The Idea Factory” – Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation | The Viodi View

    tags: interview computer history museum event summary innovation management business creativity

  • Ramblings of a Graduate Student |

    tags: weblog-individual weather meteorology severe risk tornado

  • The New Aesthetic Needs to Get Weirder – Ian Bogost – Technology – The Atlantic

    “A really new aesthetics might work differently: instead of concerning itself with the way we humans see our world differently when we begin to see it through and with computer media that themselves “see” the world in various ways, what if we asked how computers and bonobos and toaster pastries and Boeing 787 Dreamliners develop their own aesthetics. The perception and experience of other beings remains outside our grasp, yet available to speculation thanks to evidence that emanates from their withdrawn cores like radiation around the event horizon of a black hole. The aesthetics of other beings remain likewise inaccessible to knowledge, but not to speculation–even to art. “

    tags: art modern contemporary technology computer visual graphics new-aesthetic mediation digital aesthetics object-oriented-ontology

  • James March on Education, Leadership, and Don Quixote: Introduction and Interview « 茫茫戈壁

    “Starting off in political science and then moving through several disciplinary domains such as management theory, psychology, sociology, economics, organization and institutional theory, March’s academic career has been focused on understanding and analyzing human decision making and behavior. The basic thesis that he has pursued is that human action is neither optimal (or unboundedly rational) nor random, but nevertheless reasonably comprehensible (March, 1978, 1994, 1999). The ideas that were developed to understand human behavior in organizations in March’s early work in the analysis of how people deal with an uncertain and ambiguous world included, among other things, the concepts of bounded rationality and satisficing “

    tags: organizations rationality boundaries limits institutions business management decision-making leadership

  • Brett Keller » Hunger Games survival analysis

    “As a student of epidemiology and economics I feel duty-bound to apply my cursory knowledge of statistics to the novel natural cohort presented in the Hunger Games novel, as documented by author Suzanne Collins. I present a Hunger Games survival analysis: in a Cox proportional hazards model, which covariates are associated with the odds (or hazard ratios) being ever in your favor? A taste of what’s to come:”

    tags: statistics fun literature sf modeling survival

  • AmericanScience: A Team Blog: Lovecraft, Science, and Epistemic Subcultures

    “Thinking about these communities reminded me of Lovecraft’s earlier interactions. In some ways, amateur journalism and epistolary circles of Lovecraft’s day were not unlike the blogs and webpages that Less Wrong and the chemtrailers use. (Yes, I know the dangers of cross-temporal and cross-technological comparisons.) Still, I think there is much to explore about how such groups produce and distribute their knowledge against the background of an epistemic status quo. If scientists have their journals—as Alex Csiszar has been exploring—the laity have their amateur journalism and their blogs. And such spaces give historians of science and technology and STS scholars a chance to examine and probe the practices of epistemic subcultures.”

    tags: sts science media amateur history technology insider outsider boundaries expertise laypeople journalism

  • AmericanScience: A Team Blog: Feathered Dinosaurs

    “So, what’s the relationship between material evidence and imagination in producing these illustrations? Why have our visual renderings of dinosaurs changed so much over time? I think the answer is neither just cultural — artists are simply making it up as they go along — nor is it just empirical — artists are simply following the available evidence. Rather, the two interact with one another in a very deep way.”

    tags: science sts history paleontology interpretation evidence material

  • U.S. Intellectual History: How — And For Whom — We Write

    “But while I certainly want academic history to continue valuing clear, non-technical prose, I also think we should try to have a more realistic sense of who we reach and how we reach them. The myth of accessible academic history has its costs as well as its benefits. To begin with, the myth of accessibility can devalue some of what academic historians do uniquely well. We produce knowledge about the past regardless of whether there is a mass market for the knowledge we produce. And since I don’t believe that the mass market does a good job of determining what’s worth knowing, I think we ought to moderate our polemics against specialization. Many good ideas–even ideas that eventually have a profound impact on broad, public conversations–start in abstruse corners of academic work. Think, for example, of Kuhn and the idea of a “paradigm shift.”"

    tags: history profession outreach audience public-understanding writing academic specialization access tone

  • AHA Today: Debating “Professional Boredom” in History

    “In his article “Professional Boredom” in the March 2012 issue of Perspectives on History, AHA President William Cronon discussed what it means to be a “professional historian” and advocated for history writing that’s engaging and accessible to a broad audience. His article generated numerous insightful responses and discussions online, and today we highlight a few.”

    tags: history profession outreach audience public-understanding writing academic specialization

  • Tips, Tricks, Wisdom, and a Few Links for Creating a Poster Presentation « HSS Graduate and Early Career Caucus

    tags: poster presentation academic tips hints

  • Shifting public opinion on climate change: an empirical assessment of factors influencing concern over climate change in the U.S., 2002–2010 Robert J. Brulle, Jason Carmichael and J. Craig Jenkins Climatic Change

    “This paper conducts an empirical analysis of the factors affecting U.S. public concern about the threat of climate change between January 2002 and December 2010. Utilizing Stimson’s method of constructing aggregate opinion measures, data from 74 separate surveys over a 9-year period are used to construct quarterly measures of public concern over global climate change. We examine five factors that should account for changes in levels of concern: 1) extreme weather events, 2) public access to accurate scientific information, 3) media coverage, 4) elite cues, and 5) movement/countermovement advocacy. A time-series analysis indicates that elite cues and structural economic factors have the largest effect on the level of public concern about climate change. While media coverage exerts an important influence, this coverage is itself largely a function of elite cues and economic factors. Weather extremes have no effect on aggregate public opinion. Promulgation of scientific information to the public on climate change has a minimal effect. The implication would seem to be that information-based science advocacy has had only a minor effect on public concern, while political mobilization by elites and advocacy groups is critical in influencing climate change concern. “

    tags: climate-change global-warming 2010s polls public-opinion sociology elites politics influence media journalism

  • What Drives Public Opinion About Climate Change? : CJR

    “Following stable, tepid concern from 2002 to 2005, apprehension began to climb in 2006, peaked in late 2007, and then fell back to where it was in 2002. But the team of three sociologists, led by Drexel University’s Robert Brulle, wanted to know why, so they gathered data on five likely influences: extreme weather events, scientific information, media coverage, congressional attention, and advocacy groups on both sides of issue. They also looked at four control variables: unemployment, gross domestic product, war deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the price of oil. The team then compared that data to changes in the Climate Change Threat Index. They found the most important factors that influenced public concern were public statements by Democrats in support of addressing climate change; anti-environmental votes by Republicans; unemployment; GDP; and the number of times The New York Times mentioned the film, An Inconvenient Truth.”

    tags: climate-change global-warming 2010s polls public-opinion sociology elites politics influence media journalism

  • The Science Journalist Online: Shifting Roles and Emerging Practices | Climate Shift

    “The new science media ecosystem in the US and UK that we have mapped in this article – a mostly online environment that is deeply pluralistic, participatory and social – has presented challenges to the traditional professional role and working practices of the science reporter. In this environment, journalists have moved from their dominant historical role as privileged conveyors of scientific findings to an increasing plurality of roles that involve diverse, pluralistic and interactive ways of telling science news.”

    tags: science journalism journalist media news ecosystems roles online climate

  • ACLS’s Newest Program: Public Fellows

    tags: fellowships grants phd postdoc

  • American Council of Learned Societies – Fellowships & Grants

    tags: grants fellowships phd postdoc

  • Ecological Headstand: “Efficiency’s Promise: Too Good to Be True” “More Jobs Predicted for Machines, Not People”

    “The thread that unites the two books is an idea Marx called “the theory of compensation as regards the workpeople displaced by machinery” and Keynes criticized as the doctrine of self-adjustment. William Stanley Jevons described the doctrine as “a principle recognised in many parallel instances.” Specifically, with regard to workers displaced by machinery, Jevons observed, > The economy of labour effected by the introduction of new machinery, for the moment, throws labourers out of employment. But such is the increased demand for the cheapened products, that eventually the sphere of employment is greatly widened. Jevons related the doctrine to the consumption of fuel, arguing, “Now the same principles apply, with even greater force and distinctness, to the use of such a general agent as coal. It is the very economy of its use which leads to its extensive consumption.” This rebound effect has become known as the “Jevons Paradox” and is the central argument of Owen’s book. “

    tags: economics efficiency rebound-effect environment energy production technology

    Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

    ]]> http://toddsuomela.com/2012/04/21/weekly-list-bookmarks-weekly-27/feed/ 0 The NewAesthetic and the Sound of the Future http://toddsuomela.com/2012/04/18/the-newaesthetic-and-the-sound-of-the-future/ http://toddsuomela.com/2012/04/18/the-newaesthetic-and-the-sound-of-the-future/#comments Wed, 18 Apr 2012 19:49:36 +0000 tes http://toddsuomela.com/?p=946 Continue reading →]]> Two interesting articles passed the transom recently. Bruce Sterling started it all with a post on the NewAesthetic – a tumblr that has been collecting visual examples of our current age under the non-manifesto title the “New Aesthetic.” Most of these images are inspired by computer imagery, data mining, and new GIS technologies. Part of what they have in common is recording the breakdown of the digital and the unexpected appearence of the digital in the analog world. Call it the “uncanny” of cyberspace.

    Ian Bogost followed up with an article at the Atlantic: The New Aesthetic Needs to Get Weirder. Bogost talks a bit about his new book Alien Phenomenology and the possibility that he new aesthetic is working toward a new epistemology of objects. If you read the article you’ll see how it all links into various ideas that he has been talking about for a while, especially object oriented ontology.

    I’m curious what the #NewAesthetic will do with music. Just what does it mean to perform or compose modern music?

    A trip to yesteryear

    Today I came across a notice that Important Records is going to release a 12-cd collection of early tape recording experiments by Pauline Oliveros. The recordings date from the 1960s, but as I started listening to some of the previews I started wondering if this isn’t my stereotypical sound of the future. The sound is all electronic – glitches, fragments of found sounds, feedback. To me it sounds futuristic. But it’s really almost 50 years old.

    Oliveros was one of the pioneers of using technology to rework the everyday soundworld. The invention of the magnetic tape recorder occurred during the 1940s and 1950s. Artists, like Oliveros, recognized the possibility of using these machines to do more than just record sounds; they could manipulate sounds as well.

    The tape recorder became more than just a record of sounds but also a creator of sounds. Jazz artists, such as Sun Ra, would use feed the output of one taperecorder into another and get unique echo effects.

    Here’s an example of Oliveros “Bye bye butterfly” in 1967.

    The cutting edge of current synthesis

    I’ve also been listening to a number of videos and demonstrations of current sound design programs over the past few weeks. I started looking for cool sound programs on my iPhone and then descended down the rabbit hole to listen to Moog recordings, analog drum kits, modular synthesizers and more.

    One of the programs I found was Ableton Live, one of the many Digital Audio Workstations that are available. Many of these programs work by giving the artists a bunch of samples which are combined together to create a new song.

    Here’s an example of a tutorial in Ableton Live.

    The modern DAW is so good that “mistakes” are almost impossible. Programs automatically match beats, keys, and any other sonic attributes that might create dissonance we don’t want. The result is modern, hyperreal, but feels completely different than the haunting explorations carried out by Oliveros and Sun Ra.

    DJ culture is another example of this same phenomenon. Controllerism is essentially tape manipulation taken to a new digital level and perhaps the closest we come to a #NewAesthetic in music today.

    Ian Bogost writes:

    For another part, the New Aesthetic fails the ultimate test of novelty: that of disruption and surprise. Misguided as they may seem a century hence, avant-garde movements like Futurism and Dada were not celebrating industrialism nor lamenting war so much as they were replacing familiar principles with unfamiliar ones on the grounds that the familiar had failed. The New Aesthetic is not surprising, but expected. After all, the artists now wield the same data access APIs, mapping middleware, and computer vision systems as the corporations. In some cases, the artists are the corporations.

    I agree. There’s just something missing from musical mashup aesthetics that fails to raise the hairs on the back of my neck and make me wonder at the world. I’ll listen to Girl Talk or Beardyman when I want musical nostaligia invoked but I’ll return to Oliveros or Sun Ra when I want to hear the uncanny.

    ]]>     http://toddsuomela.com/2012/04/18/the-newaesthetic-and-the-sound-of-the-future/feed/ 0     Weekly List Bookmarks (weekly) http://toddsuomela.com/2012/04/14/weekly-list-bookmarks-weekly-26/ http://toddsuomela.com/2012/04/14/weekly-list-bookmarks-weekly-26/#comments Sun, 15 Apr 2012 00:42:32 +0000 tesbot http://toddsuomela.com/?p=943 Continue reading →]]>

  • 05-863/08-763/46-863: Introduction to HCI for Technology Executives

    tags: syllabi hci technology web-design teaching

  • Skeptical of Science : CJR

    “The dominant way of thinking about the role of science journalists historically was to view them as translators, or transmitters, of information. Now, however, a powerful metaphor for understanding their work as science critics is to see them as cartographers and guides, mapping scientific knowledge for readers, showing them paths through vast amounts of information, evaluating and pointing out the most important stops along the way.”

    tags: science journalism media journalist communication public-understanding roles

  • Philosophy and the Infinite

    “This page is a selection of philosophical writings about infinity with links to other resources on the net. “

    tags: philosophy infinity

  • The Taint of ‘Social Darwinism’ – NYTimes.com

    “Given the well-known Republican antipathy to evolution, President Obama’s recent description of the Republican budget as an example of “social Darwinism” may be a canny piece of political labeling. “

    tags: politics republicans rhetoric evolution

  • Green Groups Rebrand Global Warming Around Public Health | Age of Engagement | Big Think

    tags: environment policy rhetoric persuasion public-health brand global-warming

  • Visualising Innovation, Research and Actor-Networks – event mechanics – event mechanics

    tags: research concept process cycle mapping visualization

  • Global Warming’s Six Americas in May 2011 |  Yale Project on Climate Change Communication

    “Nearly 40 percent of American adults are in the two groups most concerned about climate change – the Alarmed and the Concerned – while 25 percent of Americans are in the two groups least concerned about the issue – the Dismissive and Doubtful. “

    tags: global-warming climate-change environment poll america

  • Why Youth Are Less Civically Minded, Active on the Environment | Age of Engagement | Big Think

    tags: generation generational-analysis environment activism politics age personality social-psychology

  • Why Airport Security Is Broken—And How to Fix It – WSJ.com

    tags: airport security politics terrorism risk

  • Ask the Chefs: “What’s the Biggest Elephant in the Room?” « The Scholarly Kitchen

    A grab bag of potential pitfalls and opportunities to consider.

    tags: scholarly-communication academia future Inspiration

  • Interview with Paula Stephan — Economics, Science, and Doing Better « The Scholarly Kitchen

    tags: interviwe book scholarly-communication economics publishing future

  • What Amazon’s ebook strategy means – Charlie’s Diary

    “DRM on ebooks is dead. (Or if not dead, it’s on death row awaiting a date with the executioner.) It doesn’t matter whether Macmillan wins the price-fixing lawsuit bought by the Department of Justice. The point is, the big six publishers’ Plan B for fighting the emerging Amazon monopsony has failed (insofar as it has been painted as a price-fixing ring, whether or not it was one in fact). This means that they need a Plan C. And the only viable Plan C, for breaking Amazon’s death-grip on the consumers, is to break DRM. “

    tags: publishing e-books business retail publisher drm intellectual-property monopsony monopoly

  • Breakthrough Journal: Peter Kareiva, Robert Lalasz, and Michelle Marvier : CONSERVATION IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

    “In the face of these realities, 21st century conservation is changing. Conservationists have taken steps to become more “people friendly” and to attend more seriously to working landscapes. Conservation will likely continue to create parks and wilderness areas, but that will be just one part of the field’s larger goals. The bigger questions for 21st century conservation regard what we will do with the rest of it — the working landscapes, the urban ecosystems, the fisheries and tree plantations, the vast swaths of agricultural monocultures, and the growing expanses of marginal agricultural lands and second growth forests that, as agriculture and forestry become more productive and intensive, are already returning to something that may not be wilderness, but is of conservation value, nonetheless. In answering these questions, conservation cannot promise a return to pristine, prehuman landscapes. Humankind has already profoundly transformed the planet and will continue to do so.6 What conservation could promise instead is a new vision of a planet in which nature — forests, wetlands, diverse species, and other ancient ecosystems — exists amid a wide variety of modern, human landscapes. For this to happen, conservationists will have to jettison their idealized notions of nature, parks, and wilderness — ideas that have never been supported by good conservation science — and forge a more optimistic, human-friendly vision.”

    tags: environment activism pessimism optimism anthropocene human-activity nature debate sustainability conservation

  • Another Round: Conservation on a Human-Shaped Planet – NYTimes.com

    “Here’s another round in what has become a heated, but ultimately productive, conversation on strategies for sustaining the planet’s biological integrity as humanity’s influence builds. Critics of Peter Kareiva, the lead scientist for the Nature Conservancy, had the floor in the last post and now Kareiva reacts:”

    tags: environment activism pessimism optimism anthropocene human-activity nature debate sustainability

  • Spinuzzi: Reading :: The Exploit

    book review of The Exploit: a Theory of Networks

    tags: networks genre network-analysis rhetoric

  • How Do You Run Away from Home?

    tags: history individualism psychology

  • Homepage ::: Planet Under Pressure

    tags: conference archive video environment global-warming climate-change energy sustainability

  • The New York Times – Energy for Tomorrow Conference: Fueling a New Global Economy

    tags: conference archive video environment global-warming climate-change energy

  • ACM Special Interest Group on Design of Communication

    “SIGDOC is the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group (SIG) on the Design of Communication (DOC). Until 2003, SIGDOC focused on documentation for hardware and software. With the shift in focus from systems to computer documentation to the design of communication, SIGDOC has better positioned itself to emphasize the potentials, practices, and problems of multiple kinds of communication technologies, such as Web applications, user interfaces, and online and print documentation.”

    tags: professional-association interest-groups design communication hci documentation

  • Morgan & Claypool Publishers – Synthesis Lectures on Human-Centered Informatics

    “Human-Centered Informatics (HCI) is the intersection of the cultural, the social, the cognitive, and the aesthetic with computing and information technology. It encompasses a huge range of issues, theories, technologies, designs, tools, environments and human experiences in knowledge work, recreation and leisure activity, teaching and learning, and the potpourri of everyday life. The series will publish state-of-the-art syntheses, case studies, and tutorials in key areas. It will share the focus of leading international conferences in HCI.”

    tags: book publisher series hci human computer interaction technology design

  • Bob Sutton

    tags: weblog-individual business research groups work behavior collaboration management

  • BBC – BBC Radio 4 Programmes – Analysis, What Is Money?

    “We dream about it, argue about it, worry about it, celebrate it, spend it, save it, we transfer it from one emotion to another. But what exactly is money? And why do we trust it? Frances Stonor Saunders takes a journey through some of the fundamentals of money. During her journey she dips her toe into the world of quantitative easing. How is that money invented? Is it as real as the pieces of paper in our wallets? And she explores some of the reasons for the calls to return to a gold standard. Essentially, she tries to gain a better understanding of what this stuff which we call money is really about; how and why do we maintain our faith in it, or has it just become too complicated?”

    tags: podcast economics money sociology

  • Spatial Analysis

    tags: data maps visualization weblog statistics r analysis gis geography mapping

  • Sapping Attention

    Digital Humanities: Using tools from the 1990s to answer questions from the 1960s about 19th century America.

    tags: weblog-individual digital-humanities statistics language linguistics history visualization

  • Walking in America: What scientists know about how pedestrians really behave. – Slate Magazine

    tags: science walking crowds behavior groups models dynamics urban urbanism america design

  • Crowd dynamics: The wisdom of crowds | The Economist

    tags: science complexity emergence walking crowds behavior groups models dynamics

  • Hallucinations – Springer.com

    “In this book, 44 international neuroscientific experts join forces to present a state-of-the-art overview of hallucinatory phenomena, ranging from visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and bodily hallucinations to less well-known phenomena such as synaesthesias, musical hallucinations, hallucinated pain, autoscopic phenomena, phantom sensations, sensed presences, and compound hallucinations attributed to djinns. Additional sections deal with the conceptual, phenomenological, and neuroscientific aspects of those phenomena, and offer an update on contemporary treatment possibilities ranging from pharmacotherapy to electroconvulsive therapy, transcranial magnetic stimulation, cognitive-behavioral therapy, and self-help groups.”

    tags: book publisher hallucination psychology

  • How reliable are fMRI results? « Mind Hacks

    “A new study has looked at the reliability of fMRI brain scanning results over time, finding that the same experiment will only only be moderately reproducible when conducted at two different times, suggesting that fMRI is much less reliable than most researchers assume.”

    tags: fmri psychology biology reliability experiments

  • The Left and the Right: Physiology, Brain Structure and Function, and Attentional Differences

    “Here is a list of peer reviewed papers that I’ve found that only discuss liberal-conservative differences in brain structure and function, in physiology, or in the kinds of stimuli that attract attention. And of course this is only one small area of research on liberal-conservative differences:”

    tags: politics psychology biology brain structure mental attitude research reference physiology neurology

  • The Left and the Right, Part II: Eleven Genetic Studies

    “Here, then, is the second post listing such studies. It is in a different genre: Genetics. The idea that our political preferences may be at least partly traceable to genetic influences is, it is fair to say, wildly controversial. However, the growing body of science makes it pretty hard to deny. That’s not to say that environmental influences don’t matter–but genetic influences at this point appear undeniable.”

    tags: politics psychology genetics attitude research reference

  • Liberals and conservatives don’t just vote differently. They think differently. – The Washington Post

    tags: politics science psychology denial thinking liberal conservative

  • Instagram as an island economy (11 Apr., 2012, at Interconnected)

    tags: facebook business labor marxian economics social-media

  • Why Sharing Makes Sense to Pleistocene Hunters and Digital Economies | David Bollier

    “So what does a hunting economy have to say about our times? Bowles proposes that the Internet has created all sorts of digital resources that are as fugitive and difficult to own as wild game on the hoof. No one can really make a software program all by themselves (it takes a lot of people to make one), and it is difficult to own software privately (because it is so easily copied and therefore very expensive to “fence in” as private property). “

    tags: economics commons technology software internet culture anthropology archaeology

  • Tinderbox « Welcome to Sherwood

    “I’ve written several times about an amazing, but sometimes baffling software application for handling notes called Tinderbox. This seems to be the main reason people visit this site, so to make it a little easier for you to find those posts, I am creating this page with links to each post in chronologic order:”

    tags: software macintosh tips tinderbox

  • Professional Boredom

    commentary by William Cronon

    tags: writing history academic specialization style genre publication culture incentives expertise

  • TL;DR for Historical Scholarship | Easily Distracted

    “What I wrote in my appreciation of Beach was that he’d converted me to valuing this kind of fine-grained empiricism more than I previously had. I came to admire the professional craft that it took to research and relate this knowledge (and Cronon notes that he similarly values this kind of effort) but I also realized more completely how scholarship is a very old and deep practice of collaboration between thousands of people separated by time and space. The exciting, engaging, communicative work that Cronon and I esteem often relies upon scholars who do “boring” work. You can’t synthesize or generalize without specialists doing their work first. “

    tags: writing history academic specialization style genre publication culture incentives

  • Greg Downey @ UW-Madison

    “Hi there. I’m a US-based historian and geographer of information and communication technology and labor, employed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 2001 in two College of Letters & Science departments at once: the School of Journalism & Mass Communication (where I serve as the current Director) and the School of Library & Information Studies. “

    tags: people school(UWisconsin) information-science journalism sts technology

  • The Note on my Door: Counterintuitive digital media assignments

    “Over the last week in my new first-year undergraduate course, Media Fluency for the Digital Age, my students have been wrestling with a very counterintuitive digital media assignment, and I think it’s worth exploring why these members of the “born digital” generation found this assignment so difficult — and so rewarding. Here’s the challenge they were given: Finding information that’s not online. Find an article (research journal article, analytic newspaper article, serious magazine article, or scholarly book chapter) that is on the topic of the Internet or new media, but not available (at least, not to you) on the Internet, and acquire a digital copy of that article. “

    tags: digital information-literacy education teaching Inspiration

  • Open the Future: Opaque Projections

    “I think somebody should start selling T-Shirts that say, in big block letters, I LIE TO FACEBOOK. That may or may not be true for me — but how would Facebook (or Google Plus, or Friendster, or whatever) know for sure? So here’s the big problem: we’ve become accustomed to the assumption that the status quo of deteriorating privacy is the only possible world. That’s unlikely — but the alternatives are going to be problematic in their own ways. Is a world of people lying about themselves preferable to a world of asymmetric transparency, where those with money and power can hide themselves but know whatever they want about you? We’re not likely to have a perfect future of (as David Brin says) privacy for me and accountability for everybody else. It’s going to be a choice between various imperfect options. Wish us luck.”

    tags: privacy technology internet social-media business truth pollution information-ethics information lying regulation

  • The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration – Homepage

    tags: data-sources government mental-illness health-care health medicine communication

  • 1 in 5 Americans Suffers From Mental Illness – ABC News

    “One in five Americans experienced some sort of mental illness in 2010, according to a new report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. About 5 percent of Americans have suffered from such severe mental illness that it interfered with day-to-day school, work or family.”

    tags: american health health-care mental mental-illness statistics surveys

  • The Great Collision – Umair Haque – Harvard Business Review

    “We don’t want the future we’re getting — but most of us shrug our shoulders at the end of the day; only to wake up panicked, the next — and begin the cycle all over again. Welcome to the Great Collision. In the aggregate, our preferences are savagely at odds with our expectations; the future we want is at odds with the present we choose.”

    tags: future economics choice institutions capitalism politics activism change

  • RealClimate: Evaluating a 1981 temperature projection

    “To conclude, a projection from 1981 for rising temperatures in a major science journal, at a time that the temperature rise was not yet obvious in the observations, has been found to agree well with the observations since then, underestimating the observed trend by about 30%, and easily beating naive predictions of no-change or a linear continuation of trends. It is also a nice example of a statement based on theory that could be falsified and up to now has withstood the test. The “global warming hypothesis” has been developed according to the principles of sound science.”

    tags: climate climate-change global-warming science 1980s 1981 environment

  • What Is Science? From Feynman to Sagan to Curie, an Omnibus of Definitions | Brain Pickings

    tags: science definition

  • Quantum mechanics in popular-science books – physicsworld.com

    “Since its inception in the early part of the 20th century, the theory of quantum mechanics has consistently baffled many of the great physicists of our time. But while the ideas of quantum physics are challenging and notoriously weird, they seem to capture the public imagination and hold an enduring appeal. Evidence of this comes in part from the numerous popular-science books that have been written on the topic over the years. This episode in the Physics World books podcast series looks at the popularity of quantum mechanics in science writing”

    tags: physics science podcast publishing public-understanding popularize

  • Study Hacks » Blog Archive » The Father of Deliberate Practice Disowns Flow

    “In other words, the feeling of flow is different than the feeling of getting better. If all you seek is flow, then you’re not going to get better. There is no avoiding the deliberate strain of real improvement. “

    tags: practice deliberate flow psychology growth learning

  • How To Talk To A Dean | The Professor Is In

    “I would say that Deans tend to fall into three general patterns in terms of interactions with job candidates—the explanatory pattern, the budgetary pattern, and the intellectual pattern. These are not necessarily mutually exclusive.”

    tags: teaching academia assessment job interview phd

  • Using a WordPress Multisite Network for Class Web Pages – ProfHacker – The Chronicle of Higher Education

    tags: teaching syllabi technology wordpress

  • Music Playlists to Soothe Your Mind | Science & Nature | Smithsonian Magazine

    Yay! Science confirms something I’ve been doing for most of my life.

    tags: science psychology music

  • How to Fork a Syllabus on GitHub – ProfHacker – The Chronicle of Higher Education

    “In that spirit, in this post I want to explain how to go about forking a document, such as a syllabus, on GitHub. I also want to suggest some best practices that will make it easier to fork shared documents.”

    tags: syllabi sharing github teaching pedagogy

  • What the Heck is “Assessment”? (A Guest Post) | The Professor Is In

    “The first question in the phone interviews asked how I would assess a course. The second asked how I would incorporate assessment in curriculum development. I’m reproducing my responses below because I think that it would be helpful to blog readers to have a response ready should similar questions be asked of them.”

    tags: teaching academia assessment job interview phd

  • Are the Left and Right Equally Biased?–Debating Dan Kahan

    “My guest was Yale’s Dan Kahan, who was also on the show a year earlier, discussing his cultural cognition model. This is a very powerful and increasingly influential account of how different ideological groups–hierarchs, individualists, egalitarians, communitarians–are biased towards rejecting science on particular topics that are, shall we say, in their emotionally defensive “zones.” Kahan ascribes this to motivated reasoning–e.g., our preexisting emotional commitments, or group commitments, skew our reading of evidence (scientific or otherwise) and lead us to elaborately defend our prior commitments. And because hierarchical-individualists have a very different vision of the “good” society and how it is organized than do egalitarian-communitarians, they accordingly reason very differently about scientific issues that threaten their values (like global warming) than do those on the other side.”

    tags: politics psychology motivated-cognition reasoning group cognition bias

  • Network Awesome – Electronic Music Week

    tags: music electronic video curation collection

  • Fast Analytics and Rapid-fire Business Intelligence from Tableau Software | Tableau Software

    tags: visualization software analytics data analysis tools database statistics data-curation data-exploration

  • 10 Free And Powerful Windows Text Editors For Web Developers

    tags: web-programming web-development editor text-editing tools software windows

  • Walking in America: How we can become pedestrians once more. – Slate Magazine

    tags: transportation design government automobile urban suburbia

  • A Manifesto For Creativity In The Modern Era | Techdirt

    “What I love most about this is how inclusive it is, and how much of it is about recognizing and embracing what an amazingly creative time this is for artists. All too often, we hear of artists who decry such things, who complain about the fact that their club doesn’t feel as exclusive any more. For artists and an art exhibit to not just embrace, but joyfully celebrate the way creativity works today, while recognizing how these tools mean that anyone and everyone are creating art all the time, is really wonderful to see.”

    tags: manifesto creativity modern internet computer technology mashup appropriation art optimism

  • Mars Viking Robots ‘Found Life’ : Discovery News

    tags: life mars astrobiology space biology extraterrestrial

  • Typekit

    tags: fonts typography web-design web-development

  • Safe web fonts

    tags: fonts typography web-design

  • The College Majors That Do Best in the Job Market – NYTimes.com

    tags: college academia education jobs employment economics income work labor degree discipline

  • College has been oversold — Marginal Revolution

    tags: college academia education jobs employment economics income work labor degree discipline

  • Journal of Digital Humanities

    “The Journal of Digital Humanities is a comprehensive, peer-reviewed, open access journal that features the best scholarship, tools, and conversations produced by the digital humanities community in the previous quarter.”

    tags: journal academic digital-humanities humanities digital technology

  • Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing

    tags: web-design web-development web-programming book resource teaching

  • Software Engineering for Internet Applications

    tags: web-design web-development web-programming book resource teaching

  • Programmer 101: Teach Yourself How to Code

    tags: programming tutorial howto

  • Help me develop a curriculum for an HTML course – html curriculum syllabus | Ask MetaFilter

    tags: teaching syllabi web-design web-development curriculum

  • Course Materials | Teach the Web

    tags: syllabi teaching web-design web-development exercises Inspiration

  • Google Code University – Google Code

    tags: teaching web-design web-development programming syllabi resources

  • Teaching Materials: HTML & CSS

    tags: teaching web-design web-development html css slideshow

  • Curriculum | WaSP InterAct Curriculum

    tags: education curriculum web standards web-design web-development teaching syllabi resources

  • Ask HN: A Syllabus for Modern Web Development? | Hacker News

    tags: syllabi teaching web-development web-design

  • Hacks of Valor | Foreign Affairs

    tags: hacktivism hackers online activism anonymity internet

  • CIA Committed ‘War Crimes,’ Bush Official Says | Danger Room | Wired.com

    tags: cia war crime law jurisprudence torture terrorism 2010s

  • Cooperation and the evolution of intelligence

    “The high levels of intelligence seen in humans, other primates, certain cetaceans and birds remain a major puzzle for evolutionary biologists, anthropologists and psychologists. It has long been held that social interactions provide the selection pressures necessary for the evolution of advanced cognitive abilities (the ‘social intelligence hypothesis’), and in recent years decision-making in the context of cooperative social interactions has been conjectured to be of particular importance. Here we use an artificial neural network model to show that selection for efficient decision-making in cooperative dilemmas can give rise to selection pressures for greater cognitive abilities, and that intelligent strategies can themselves select for greater intelligence, leading to a Machiavellian arms race. Our results provide mechanistic support for the social intelligence hypothesis, highlight the potential importance of cooperative behaviour in the evolution of intelligence and may help us to explain the distribution of cooperation with intelligence across taxa.”

    tags: intelligence evolution simulation cooperation neuralnetworks

  • Why e-books cost so much | Internet & Media – CNET News

    tags: e-books publishing publisher economics cost

  • Bad bots: DDoS attacks spike in first quarter, outdoing all of 2011

    tags: security online web internet

  • The Mechanical Turk Blog

    tags: amazon mechanical-turk weblog-company reference

  • Data for the Public Good - O’Reilly Media

    As we move into an era of unprecedented volumes of data and computing power, the benefits aren’t for business alone. Data can help citizens access government, hold it accountable and build new services to help themselves. Simply making data available is not sufficient. The use of data for the public good is being driven by a distributed community of media, nonprofits, academics and civic advocates. This report from O’Reilly Radar highlights the principles of data in the public good, and surveys areas where data is already being used to great effect, covering: Consumer finance Transit data Government transparency Data journalism Aid and development Crisis and emergency response Healthcare

    tags: data public benefits citizenship citizen

  • Data Analysis, Data Mining and Data Management – O’Reilly Media

    tags: book publisher data reference training data-curation data-mining visualization

  • Minimalist posters explain complex philosophical concepts with basic shapes

    tags: poster design philosophy

  • CouperPress – ACSS – Hamilton College

    “This monographic series is devoted to the study of American communal societies past and present, including the Shakers, Harmonists, Oneida Community, Amana, House of David, and others.”

    tags: book publisher series commune american-studies

  • Communal Studies Bibliography

    “The following lists are an attempt to gather together some of the recent research in Communal Studies. Many, but not all, of the citations for 1993-1999 appeared in issues of the Newsletter of the Communal Studies Association.”

    tags: community utopia commune bibliography

  • Action for Happiness

    “Action for Happiness is a movement for positive social change. We’re bringing together people from all walks of life who want to play a part in creating a happier society for everyone.”

    tags: happiness activism collaboration community psychology positive well-being

  • Authors of political science book argue for changes in methodology | Inside Higher Ed

    “In their recently published book A Model Discipline: Political Science and the Logic of Representations (Oxford University Press), Clarke and Primo delve into the ramifications of this “physics envy” for political science. In their quest to emulate the hard sciences, Clarke and Primo write, political scientists have placed far too much emphasis on model testing, resulting in the widespread view “that theoretical models must be tested to be of value and that the ultimate goal of empirical analysis is theory testing.” A Model Discipline argues that the logic behind this stance is hopelessly flawed, while its impacts have been detrimental to political science in a variety of ways.”

    tags: book interview methods methodology hypothetical deduction political-science social-science physics hard-v-soft science scientism

  • Transformative Research Workshop | Comparative Assessment of Peer Review

    “The March 8 and 9, 2012 workshop on “Transformative Research: Social and Ethical Implications” at NSF Headquarters in Virginia will explore the history and alternative conceptions of a term – “potentially transformative research” (PTR) – that has come to play an increasingly important role in policy debates at NSF, at other federal agencies, and in public discourse about the future of science in society.”

    tags: research workshop science policy nsf transformation future

  • Transformative Research: Reflections on a NSF Workshop – CCC Blog

    “The term ‘transformative research’ is being used to describe a range of endeavors which promise extraordinary outcomes, such as: revolutionizing entire disciplines; creating entirely new fields; or disrupting accepted theories and perspectives — in other words, those endeavors which have the potential to change the way we address challenges in science, engineering, and innovation. Supporting more transformative research is of critical importance in the fast-paced, science and technology-intensive world of the 21st Century.”

    tags: science policy nsf research transformation future workshop

  • xkcd: Lakes and Oceans

    tags: oceanography oceans scale comic

  • LukeW | Multi-Device Layout Patterns

    tags: web-design patterns mobile ux usability design

  • Just Because It’s Now Cheaper And Easier To Spy On Everyone All The Time, Doesn’t Mean Governments Should Do It | Techdirt

    “Today, thanks to our networked lives and the plummeting cost of hardware, national governments can monitor everything we do online for the same outlay as the much more limited surveillance of yesteryear. So what is really being preserved is not some supposedly circumscribed spying capability, but the orders-of-magnitude cost. By keeping that cost constant, governments can increase the scope of their spying hugely. But just because the technology makes it possible, and the economics makes it feasible, doesn’t mean governments ought to go ahead and do it. They may claim that they are simply “compensating for technical developments”, but really they are trying to exploit those developments to go way beyond what was agreed before as socially acceptable, and to do so without any consultation on how much online surveillance should be permitted in a free society.”

    tags: spying government surveillance computer capabilities

  • The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say) | Threat Level | Wired.com

    tags: spying government surveillance computer nsa security terrorism

  • xSort – Free card sorting application for Mac OS X

    tags: ux design usability tool testing card-sort taxonomy macintosh software

  • Card Sorting with Results | WebSort.net

    tags: ux design usability card-sort technique method

  • The political left rolls with the good and the political right confronts the bad: connecting physiology and cognition to preferences

    “We report evidence that individual-level variation in people’s physiological and attentional responses to aversive and appetitive stimuli are correlated with broad political orientations. Specifically, we find that greater orientation to aversive stimuli tends to be associated with right-of-centre and greater orientation to appetitive (pleasing) stimuli with left-of-centre political inclinations. These findings are consistent with recent evidence that political views are connected to physiological predispositions but are unique in incorporating findings on variation in directed attention that make it possible to understand additional aspects of the link between the physiological and the political. “

    tags: politics psychology liberal conservative cognition

  • Chris Mooney | Can Geeks Defeat Lies? Thoughts on a Fresh New Approach to Dealing With Online Errors, Misrepresentations, and Quackery

    tags: ignorance agnotology technology computers filtering

  • Chris Mooney | The Science of Truthiness: Why Conservatives Deny Global Warming

    tags: politics psychology conservatism global-warming climate-change denial science

  • Structure+Strangeness: Things to read while the simulator runs (higher ed. edition)

    tags: science humanities academic ethics behavior repetition validation incentives verfication

  • The WELL: Ellen Ullman, “The Bug”

    Interview with Ullman, author of Close to the Machine.

    tags: interview online book writing fiction engineering computers psychology behavior

  • echovar » Blog Archive » A Place For Our Infinities

    “When we discuss economies of abundance in the digital age, we’re assuming the low-cost production of very large finitudes. Plastic is this kind of thing, it’s the least expensive physical simile for a large range of objects. It also has the strange quality of sometimes having a lifespan that is five or six times that of an ordinary human. In this ecological age where we are newly surrounded by economies of abundance, what shall we do with our infinities? We can no longer send them away when we’ve annihilated distance through technology. The plastic as “plastic” waves to us from the gyres in the ocean. It will swirl there for our children and our children’s children. What ever shall we do with our infinities?”

    tags: ecology philosophy moral infinity plastic commons network online future

  • echovar » Blog Archive » Tales of the Network: A Moment of Privacy; A Moment of Sharing

    “Sharing and community seem to be attributes of a positive morality. When we see the commercialization of these qualities, we believe their moral quality suffers. We react to the commercialization of Christmas by attempting to retrieve what we imagine is an historical original experience. We react to the automation of sharing and community by Facebook by turning off our connected devices and attempting a direct connection without digital mediation. Bad people are greedy, they aren’t willing to share. They don’t form cooperative communities where resources are shared to the benefit of the whole group. To some extent, this is how we determine who is bad and who is good. What would it mean if “sharing and community” were detached from our ideas about positive morality. Both movies and murder are better with community and sharing. Perhaps we should stop for a moment and ask: what’s the meaning of the word “better” in the previous sentence?”

    tags: sharing community commons network online culture future distribution security privacy

  • echovar » Blog Archive » Doctorow, General Computing and Preserving the Possibility of Evil

    “The necessary feature of the open systems and networks that Doctorow advocates is that they must preserve the possibility of evil. The systematic exclusion of evil breaks the open (unit operational) nature of the system. From a political perspective, you won’t score too many points campaigning for the preservation of the possibility of evil. The most successful argument of this kind is the theological argument around why God has given humans free will. Being good without choosing good means that goodness isn’t a virtue. The possibility of choosing evil makes the choice of good meaningful. Pre-deleting evil processes from the operating environment pre-empts the possibility of choosing to run good processes and the act of terminating the evil ones.”

    tags: computing computers freedom open architecture history future law regulation evil good design purpose open-source

  • echovar » Blog Archive » Year-End Processing: The Network as Growth Medium

    “While networked computational tools can assist us in expanding the scope and breadth of the sharing we do with groups and individuals, it’s our ability to navigate the new social customs and ceremonies of the Network that will determine how far all this spreads. It’s a counter-cultural idea, instead of placing the highest value on independence and individuality, it takes us down the path of interdependence and coexistence. And this brings us back to this idea of a growth medium. As the old year ends, and the new one begins, I’m imagining an as yet unpublished Whole Earth Catalog filled with tools and perspectives on how we might grow this new crop in the fields of the Network. It’s a thing that “is” what it describes.”

    tags: social-networks social-media business culture community commons sharing

  • echovar » Blog Archive » A Permanent Sense of Asymmetry: Watching the Non-Human Enter

    “As Morton points out, in the age of ecology there is no clean transaction you can walk away from. The fact that everything is connected isn’t something you can turn off when it’s inconvenient. There’s always something still owed, a remaining debt. Morton describes this as the viscous quality of the hyperobject, the more you know about it the more it sticks to you. And as Graeber shows, capital fails to capture the full extent of a transaction because it doesn’t fully represent the object. In the social context of the transaction, there’s always a remainder, the market never fully clears. At the level of capital and pricing, the numbers always add up, but the object of the transaction is broadcasting on multiple frequencies. And if you hold the concept of capital in abeyance for just a moment, you’ll find there were many more parties to the transaction than you had assumed, and if you listen closely, you can hear that the non-human has continued its relationship with you. “

    tags: ecology economics transaction exchange commons debt capital relationship gifts meta-analysis fundamental objects object-oriented-ontology literature poetry

  • Book Review: David Harvey’s Rebel Cities « Ph.D. Octopus

    “David Harvey’s new book, Rebel Cities, is the latest entry in his life-long interest in uncovering the intersection between capitalism and urbanization. It’s a collection of previously published, but updated and revised, essays and articles. They are all particularly important to our understanding of both the long fall out of 2008’s economic crash and the rise of urban revolts in Egypt, Greece, New York and elsewhere. “

    tags: book review urban urbanism cities marxism capitalism economics growth accumulation creative-class

  • Twitterpated « Hoarded Ordinaries

    “For me, the appeal of Twitter doesn’t lie in its rapidity or its reach, with celebrities gathering thousands of followers who hang on every Tweeted word. For me, the appeal of Twitter lies in its enforced brevity: the fact that like a poet you are required to count and consider every character. There is a lot of disposable chitchat on Twitter–that is, after all, what the site is designed to cultivate. But in the hands of a writer, Twitter’s space constraints are invaluable, forcing the long-winded and prosaic among us to jettison every scrap of dead wood.”

    tags: twitter writing social-media user

  • Top five regrets of the dying | Life and style | guardian.co.uk

    “There was no mention of more sex or bungee jumps. A palliative nurse who has counselled the dying in their last days has revealed the most common regrets we have at the end of our lives. And among the top, from men in particular, is ‘I wish I hadn’t worked so hard’.”

    tags: death hope psychology health medicine

  • Technology and the Baroque Unconscious

    “This post is a sequel of sorts to The Gollum Effect. You can read it stand-alone, but you will probably get more out of it if you read that first. Within the Lord of the Rings metaphor I developed in that post, “baroque unconscious” is basically my answer to the question, if extreme consumers are Gollums, who is Sauron? This idea of a baroque unconscious helps clarify things about the phenomenon of technological refinement that have been bothering me for a while. In particular, it helps distinguish among three kinds of refinement in technological artifacts: refinement that is useful to the user, refinement (often exploitative) that is useful to somebody besides the user, and refinement that benefits nobody at all.”

    tags: technology consumerism interchangeable unconscious baroque refinement technology-cycles engineering manufacturing standards infrastructure

  • The World is Small and Life is Long

    “I am not certain whether I like or dislike this emerging world. I think I am leaning towards dislike. The slogan, the world is small and life is long describes a tense and anxious world of constant social shadow-boxing. One where you must always be on, socially. A world where burning bridges is more dangerous, and open conflict becomes ever costlier, leading to less dissent and more stupidity. It is a situation of false harmony. One where peace is less an indicator of increasing empathy and human connection, and more an indicator of increasing wariness. You never know which world your world will collide with next, with what consequences. You never know what missed opportunity or threat could decisively impact your life.”

    tags: facebook social-media networks social-networking behavior interaction psychology social-psychology

  • Peak Attention and the Colonization of Subcultures

    “The question of how such coded language emerges, spreads and evolves is a big one. I am interested in a very specific question: how do members of an emerging subculture recognize each other in public, especially on the Internet, using more specialized coded language? The question is interesting because the Web is making traditional subcultures – historically illegible to governance mechanisms, and therefore hotbeds of subversion – increasingly visible and open to cheap, large-scale economic and political exploitation. This exploitation takes the form of attention mining, and is the end-game on the path to what I called Peak Attention a while back. Does this mean the subversive potential of the Internet is an illusion, and that it will ultimately be domesticated? Possibly.”

    tags: internet culture subculture code code-words attention data-mining social social-networking social-media communication signals society power government facebook social-movement

  • Can Hydras Eat Unknown-Unknowns for Lunch?

    “The general idea behind the Hydra narrative in a broad sense (not just what Taleb has said/will say in October) is that hydras eat all unknown unknowns (not just Taleb’s famous black swans) for lunch. I have heard at least three different versions of this proposition in the last year. The narrative inspires social system designs that feed on uncertainty rather than being destroyed by it. Geoffrey West’s ideas about superlinearity are the empirical part of an attempt to construct an existence proof showing that such systems are actually possible.”

    tags: uncertainty risk trends history technology innovation narrative terrorism

  • Hall’s Law: The Nineteenth Century Prequel to Moore’s Law

    “Interchangeability of parts breaks the coupling between scaling and manufacturing capacity by substituting supply-chain limits for manufacturing limits. For a rifle, you can build up a stockpile of spare parts in peace time, and deliver an uninterrupted supply of parts to match the breakdown rate. There is no need to predict which part might break down in order to meaningfully anticipate and prepare. You can also distribute production optimally (close to raw material sources or low-cost talent for instance), since there is no need to locate craftsmen near the point-of-use. So when interchangeability was finally achieved and had diffused through the economy as standard practice (a process that took about 65 years), demand-management complexity moved to the supply chain, and most problems could be solved by distributing inventories appropriately.”

    tags: history economic technology innovation manufacturing interchangeable industrial 18c 19c country(UnitedStates) country(GreatBritain) military growth revolution capitalism capital design

  • Glimpses of a Cryptic God

    “The more I study technology, the more I tend to the view that it is a single connected whole. Recurring motifs like container ships can turn into obsessions precisely because they offer glimpses of a cryptic God. An object for the devoutly atheist and anti-humanist soul to seek in perpetuity, but never quite comprehend. I go on infrastructure pilgrimages. I write barely readable pop-theology treatises with ponderous titles like The Baroque Unconscious in Technology, and I do my little dabbling with math, software and hardware on the side. But I still haven’t seen It. Just an elbow here, a shoulder blade there. And I make my modest attempts to measure those distances.”

    tags: technology philosophy infrastructure scale perception visibility legibility

  • Lawyer Mind, Judge Mind

    “Several recent discussions on a variety of unrelated topics with different people have gotten me thinking about two different attitudes towards dialectical processes. They are generalized versions of the professional attitudes required of lawyers and judges, so I’ll refer to them as lawyer mind and judge mind. In the specialized context of the law, the dialectical process is structurally constrained and the required attitudes are codified and legally mandated to a certain extent. Lawyers must act as though they were operating from a lawyer-mindset, even if internally they are operating with a judge-mind.”

    tags: law mind habit professional thinking style dialectic judicial

  • After Nature: process-relational thought: a guide

    tags: philosophy process reference bibliography recommendations

  • How the World Works: Part II

    Commentary on World 3.0 by Panaj Ghemawat

    tags: book review commentary politics economics

  • How the World Works

    “If you want to seriously level-up your thinking about how the world works, you might want to try reading 3 very ambitious books together: Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order, Pankaj Ghemawat’s World 3.0 and David Graeber’s Debt: the first 5000 years.”

    tags: book review commentary politics economics

  • The Gollum Effect

    “The concrete idea is something I call the Gollum effect. It is a process by which regular humans are Gollumized: transformed into hollow shells of their former selves, defined almost entirely by their patterns of consumption.”

    tags: economics consumerism behavior addiction class middle-class

  • Acting Dead, Trading Up and Leaving the Middle Class

    “Another reason is that I was (and remain to some extent) guilty of what science fiction writer Bruce Sterling calls acting dead: being irrationally averse to spending money where it matters, in a misguided attempt to “save” money to the point that the behavior paralyzes you. A large segment of the middle class is starting to act dead these days. Which makes sense since the class itself is dying. To stop acting dead, you have to resolve to exit the traditional middle class as well, unless you want to go down with it.”

    tags: america economics class middle-class income spending satisfaction

  • The Evolution of the American Dream

    tags: american-dream america economics class income generational-analysis dreams

  • The late American jobs machine « Consider the Evidence

    tags: economics america jobs employment unemployment growth middle-class

  • An Essay on the New Aesthetic | Beyond The Beyond | Wired.com

    “Valorizing machine-generated imagery is like valorizing the unconscious mind. Like Surrealist imagery, it is cool, weird, provocative, suggestive, otherworldly, but it is also impoverished. That’s the big problem, as I see it: the New Aesthetic is trying to hack a modern aesthetic, instead of thinking hard enough and working hard enough to build one. That’s the case so far, anyhow. No reason that the New Aesthetic has to stop where it stands at this moment, after such a promising start. I rather imagine it’s bound to do otherwise. Somebody somewhere will, anyhow.”

    tags: art aesthetics modern contemporary computer technology movement new-aesthetic commentary review

  • #sxaesthetic | booktwo.org

    “One of the core themes of the New Aesthetic has been our collaboration with technology, whether that’s bots, digital cameras or satellites (and whether that collaboration is conscious or unconscious), and a useful visual shorthand for that collaboration has been glitchy and pixelated imagery, a way of seeing that seems to reveal a blurring between “the real” and “the digital”, the physical and the virtual, the human and the machine. It should also be clear that this ‘look’ is a metaphor for understanding and communicating the experience of a world in which the New Aesthetic is increasingly pervasive.”

    tags: art aesthetics modern contemporary computer technology movement new-aesthetic

  • Too Big to Know

    Website and blog for Too Big to Know by David Weinberg.

    tags: book website knowledge scale internet network online folksonomy classification taxonomy information-overload

  • …My heart’s in Accra » David Weinberger: Too Big To Know

    “David closes by returning to his original question: why were old knowledge systems so fragile? These systems assumed knowledge was bounded, settled, orderly and proceeded step by step. But that’s not what knowledge feels like in the age of the internet. It feels unbounded, overwhelming, unsettled, messy, linked and governed by our interests. And those properties are the properties of what it means to be human in the world. “Networked knowledge may or may not be truer about the world, but is is truer about knowing… This crazy approach to knowledge feels familiar to us, because it’s how we tend to know.” He closes with an observation that’s both hopeful and unsettling: “What we have in common is a shared world about which we disagree, not a common knowledge we share and can collectively come to.””

    tags: book review knowledge scale internet network online folksonomy classification taxonomy

  • Temples | through the looking glass

    “If de Botton wants to build a temple to atheism, good luck to him. I just hope it’s a place where a diversity of people feel able to work together to discuss options for a shared future, not simply sit in awe of a world they’ve been given. At their best, religious sites provide this. I’d hope any atheist one would too.”

    tags: atheism awe emotion religion space design architecture

  • Polymaths, bumblebees and the ‘expert’ myth – The Washington Post

    A problematic opinion piece at best.

    tags: expertise criticism myths

  • Awareness | Harold Jarche

    “To be able to seek, first you have to be aware. Wolfgang Reinhardt has looked at knowledge workers, researchers in particular, and examined how they can be aware in their fields of expertise”

    tags: knowledge-work knowledge-management information community-of-practice sharing roles

  • Alone Together II: The Unburdening

    Review of Alone Together by Sherry Turkle.

    tags: book review computers technology-effects psychology behavior

  • Alone Together 1: Stories

    Review of Alone Together by Sherry Turkle.

    tags: book review computers technology-effects psychology behavior

  • Contrary Brin: There is Madness on the Other Side Too: The Left’s War on Optimism

    “Our root problem today is not obdurate denialism coming from the right. That insanity is part of Culture War and can only be treated as a mental illness. Blue America must do what it did in every previous phase of the U.S. Civil War. Simply win. Answer the Tea Party’s tricorner hat nonsense with the Union volunteer’s kepi. We will stop resurgent feudalism and know-nothingism. Tell the troglodytes and oligarchs they cannot have our renaissance. Our enlightenment. Our proudly scientific civilization. No. What I find far more worrisome is the left’s mania to confuse ALL optimism with complacency, proclaiming any zealous, can-do enthusiasm to be part and parcel of the right’s madness.”

    tags: pessimism liberal politics conservatism denial

  • Automating Terrorism (the decline of the suicide bomber) – Global Guerrillas

    “It’s my belief that warfare, aka organized violence, is undergoing punctuated change due to robotics/drones and other technologies of superempowerment. That’s not a good thing since I believe that warfare defines the path of development for everything else (economics, politics, culture). It makes certain paths forward possible, and closes others. A rapid change in warfare means a rapid change in everything else. “

    tags: war robotics drones future military terrorism

  • You Don’t Need a Cyber Attack to Take Down The North American Power Grid – Global Guerrillas

    “So, in other words, the tens billions we are going to spend on cybersecurity is mostly a waste of time/money. It’s not only a waste of money, it’s yet another example of how the US national security system is not producing real, tangible security for the people it expects to pay for it. The real solution to network vulnerability? Decentralized production. The tech is available. If the billions spent on cyber were spent on growing local production by building resilient communities, it wouldn’t only make us safer it would likely ignite an economic Renaissance. “

    tags: government military cyberwar resilience electric-grid energy risk security vulnerability

  • Stargate and Ester Dean, Making Music Hits : The New Yorker

    tags: music business 21c

  • Piazza – Ask. Answer. Explore. Whenever.

    Welcome to Piazza—a place where students can come together to ask, answer, and explore under the guidance of their instructor. It’ll save you time, and your students will love using it. It’s also free, and easy to get started

    tags: education collaboration tools discussion forum learning

    Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

    ]]> http://toddsuomela.com/2012/04/14/weekly-list-bookmarks-weekly-26/feed/ 0 Weekly List Bookmarks (weekly) http://toddsuomela.com/2012/04/07/weekly-list-bookmarks-weekly-25/ http://toddsuomela.com/2012/04/07/weekly-list-bookmarks-weekly-25/#comments Sun, 08 Apr 2012 00:41:11 +0000 tesbot http://toddsuomela.com/?p=941 Continue reading →]]>

  • Capitalism Against Capitalists

    “But it turns out that nobody hates a free market more than the capitalist class. It was Adam Smith who observed that “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” The unwillingness of really existing capitalism to face market competition goes beyond a complacent assumption of the right to cheap labor. It’s at the foundation of Ashwin Parameswaran’s far-reaching account of our current troubles, which he traces to a “system where incumbent corporates do not face competitive pressure to engage in risky exploratory investment.” “

    tags: capitalism business innovation labor class

  • Thomas Jones reviews ‘Starman’ by Paul Trynka and ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ by Peter Doggett · LRB 5 April 2012

    tags: book review people(DavidBowie) music 20c history

  • DJ TechTools

    tags: dj music review software midi

  • Marx at 193 ( 2 Apr., 2012, at Interconnected)

    “On the origin of value, “In Marx’s judgment surplus value is the entire basis of capitalism: all value in capitalism is the surplus value created by labour.” And so Marx “creates a model which allows us to see deeply into the structure of the world, and see the labour hidden in the things all around us. He makes labour legible in objects and relationships.”"

    tags: marx capitalism empiricism bias economics

  • Healthier Information draft presentation « Tim McCormick

    tags: information-overload tasks interruption attention technology-effects self-improvement

  • End the Religion of ROE – Chris Meyer & Julia Kirby – Chris Meyer & Julia Kirby – Harvard Business Review

    “Brown noted a simple fact: Return on equity can be broken down into a three-part equation. It is logically the product of return on sales times the ratio of sales to assets times the ratio of assets to equity. By parsing ROE into the DuPont Equation (very rapidly to become a business school mainstay), he provided the basis for organizations divided into functions with their own objectives. He reasoned that if marketers worked on maximizing return on sales, production managers were rewarded for the sales they squeezed out of their physical plant, and finance managers focused on minimizing the amount of equity capital they needed, ROE would take care of itself. Thus Brown not only sowed the seeds of the today’s hated silos, he also set three “runaways” in motion. That is to say, he created objectives with such strong feedback loops that they were pursued single-mindedly, even to unhealthy excess. “

    tags: business management history roi inertia feedback loop

  • Peak Attention and the DuPont Equation ( 3 Apr., 2012, at Interconnected)

    tags: economics attention roi business management history labor

  • Republican conservatism (complete rewrite) — Crooked Timber

    tags: politics psychology conservatism republicans

  • Tim McCormick

    “TJM.org is the website of Tim McCormick. I work for HighWire Press, Stanford University, in Palo Alto, CA, as Sr. Product Manager for Emerging Content. Also reader, writer, library student.”

    tags: weblog-individual libraries publishing digital-humanities

  • Arguments For Things I Don’t Believe, 1: Research on String Theory is Largely a Waste of Time | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine

    A gedankenexperiment on “So here we go: the best argument I can think of for why research on string theory is a waste of time.”

    tags: physics research justification theory experiments philosophy

  • US Supreme Court Sets New Limits on Owning the “Laws of Nature” | David Bollier

    tags: intellectual-property patents biology science law supreme-court business

  • Is The Will to Change a Matter of Free Will? | No Map. No Guide. No Limits.

    Comment on Willpower by Tierney and Baumeister and Mindset by Dweck.

    tags: book review commentary will-power psychology success

  • Is science media just about selling us stuff? | through the looking glass

    “I can see why people worry if and how science media can clearly communicate scientific knowledge, but it should also open up questions about how science is made and what we want to do with it too. Here’s my final question: how can science media more effectively discuss commercial interests of science, rather than just being constrained by them?”

    tags: science public-understanding media business discussion journalism commercial

  • Mark Bernstein: The New Value of Text

    tags: text writing books future infrastructure

  • Cambridge Journals Online – Abstract – Did Meditating Make Us Human?

    “Campfire rituals of focused attention created Baldwinian selection for enhanced working memory among our Homo sapiens ancestors. This model is grounded in five propositions: the emergence of symbolism occurred late in the archaeological record; this emergence was caused by a fortuitous genetic mutation that enhanced working memory capacity; a Baldwinian process where genetic adaptation follows somatic adaptation was the mechanism for this emergence; meditation directly affects brain areas critical to attention and working memory; and shamanistic healing rituals were fitness-enhancing in our ancestral past. Each proposition is discussed and defended. Supporting evidence and potential future tests are presented.”

    tags: anthropology meditation psychology evolution ritual

  • Digital nativism and nonverbal cue detection – Contemplative Computing

    tags: digital native behavior psychology personality introvert interaction technology-effects

  • David Brin’s Official Web Site: “Disputation Arenas” (article)

    tags: dispute argument behavior learning

  • Creativity tools: The next wave of iOS apps? — Apple News, Tips and Reviews

    tags: iphone creativity apple application development amateur

  • danah boyd | apophenia » Reflections on Fear in a Networked Society

    tags: fear culture youth online moral-panic

  • U.S. Intellectual History: The Present and Future of American Intellectual History

    tags: american intellectual history academic future discipline

  • The user interface of Seldon’s Plan (13 Mar., 2012, at Interconnected)

    “What fascinates me is the user interface by which the Plan is read and explored by “Speakers” — the secret members/academics/bureaucrats of the Second Foundation. It is projected on the wall as a network of dense, interlocking equations by a device named the “Prime Radiant,” and manipulated using a combination of gestural interface and thought control. Black equations were part of the original Seldon plan; red is used for those added by Speakers; blue is where unanticipated deviations from the plan have occurred.”

    tags: sf fiction interface design psychohistory

  • Debt: The First 500 Comments At Crooked Timber | Easily Distracted

    “What I’ve tried to do over time is embody more and more of my main advisor’s approach to critiquing the work of his students and colleagues. He didn’t want to break you on the wheel, convert you to his church, capture you for his tribe: he generally tried to help people make their work better, more acute, in their own terms, to help them find the best versions of their claims, the richest grounds for convening debates. “

    tags: academia academic behavior culture argument personality insult verbal

  • The inadmissible assumptions – Charlie’s Diary

    tags: advertising internet online business commerce assumptions

  • U.S. Intellectual History: “You Can’t Say That”: A Reply to Michael Fisher

    tags: book review economics consumerism

  • U.S. Intellectual History: Book Review: Fisher on Livingston’s Against Thrift

    “Review of James Livingston’s Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture is Good for the Economy, the Environment, and Your Soul (New York: Basic Books, 2011). ISBN: 9780465021864. 288 pages.”

    tags: book review economics consumerism

  • Richard Sennett on the Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation | David Bollier

    tags: book review cooperation social behavior commons

  • The Rise and Fall of Online Empires

    tags: internet online business business-cycle empire history

  • The Secret Science of Memorable Quotes – Technology Review

    tags: movies quotes memory psychology advertising

  • HappyDayRecords.com

    tags: music tutorial synthesizer computer daw ableton dj samples

  • An Ableton Live Tutorial Blog | Ableton Life

    tags: music tutorial synthesizer computer daw ableton dj

  • What’s the five-a-day for your mind? | Healthcare Network | Guardian Professional

    “I started Mindapples to encourage people to think positively about the health of their minds. I wanted to create a campaign that did for mental health what the five-a-day campaign has done for physical health: to make taking care of our minds a normal, natural thing for all of us.”

    tags: psychology mental health mental-illness mood

  • Affectograms « Disorderly Chickadee

    tags: psychology tracking quantified-self mood mental

  • Mindapples

    “Mindapples helps people look after their minds. We encourage people to take better care of themselves, and educate the public about how our minds work and how to manage them. We want to make looking after our minds as natural as brushing our teeth, by asking everyone: “What’s the 5-a-day for your mind?””

    tags: mind mental health psychology happiness well-being

  • Jedediah Purdy for Democracy Journal: The Roberts Court v. America

    How the Roberts Supreme Court is using the First Amendment to craft a radical, free-market jurisprudence.

    tags: law supreme-court regulation government federal markets capitalism constitution markets-uber-alles free-markets free-speech first-amendment

  • Brain imaging: fMRI 2.0 : Nature News & Comment

    tags: sts science history mri brain-imaging fmri

  • maps.stamen.com

    “For over a decade, Stamen has been exploring cartography with our clients and in research. These three maps are presented here for your enjoyment and use wherever you display OpenStreetMap data.”

    tags: maps design open-access

  • I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave | Mother Jones

    tags: work labor american economics

  • Why The ‘Missing 20th Century’ Of Books Is Even Worse Than It Seems | Techdirt

    tags: books publishing public-domain intellectual-property copyright history 20c law

  • Climate & Capitalism, An ecosocialist journal

    tags: environment capitalism green socialism politics climate activism

  • MBA buzzwords are hurting scientific progress. – Slate Magazine

    tags: science management funding government metrics measurement performance

  • The Social Sciences’ ‘Physics Envy’ – NYTimes.com

    “This might seem like a worthy aspiration. Many social scientists contend that science has a method, and if you want to be scientific, you should adopt it. The method requires you to devise a theoretical model, deduce a testable hypothesis from the model and then test the hypothesis against the world. If the hypothesis is confirmed, the theoretical model holds; if the hypothesis is not confirmed, the theoretical model does not hold. If your discipline does not operate by this method — known as hypothetico-deductivism — then in the minds of many, it’s not scientific.”

    tags: social-science methodology philosophy scientism epistemology

  • Top of Tree – Tree, outliner for Mac OS X. Horizontally expanding outliner.

    tags: macintosh software outliners

  • Stop Apps From Tracking You Without Your Knowledge Using Foursquare And Facebook [How-To] | Cult of Mac

    tags: privacy facebook social-networking safety tips

  • LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS | The Mastery of Non-Mastery

    tags: book review anthropology ethnography experience

  • Confessions of an Ivy League Frat Boy: Inside Dartmouth’s Hazing Abuses | Culture News | Rolling Stone

    tags: ivy-league school(Dartmouth) behavior fraternity drugs culture

  • Immanent Transcendence: A Glossary of Pragmatic Phenomenology

    “This is a glossary of terms for my research program in pragmatic phenomenology/phenomenological pragmatism. My project is a contemporary derivation of John Dewey’s work as read through Thomas Alexander, Jim Garrison, James Gouinlock, Victor Kestenbaum, and others. The glossary will be helpful for those interested in peering into the depths of Deweys thought, which is often omitted by contemporary commentaries, and into my own development of it.”

    tags: pragmatism philosophy phenomenology about(JohnDewey)

  • How to survive an atomic bomb | Just Well Mixed

    tags: nuclear weapons terrorism risk survival

  • Review 31 Home | Review 31

    tags: magazine book review academic non-fiction

  • Communicating between the Academic and Non-Academic Worlds « Ph.D. Octopus

    “However, from talking to numerous faculty members and academics from a variety of institutions, it has become clear to me that a central problem remains: none of these extra-curricular activities matter when a job search committee determines which graduate student to invite for an interview, and they do not matter for tenure. These facts make it subtly clear that, as a whole, the modern American academy expresses a keen indifference toward the relationship between academic knowledge and the public interest/public good”

    tags: academia crisis jobs work labor expertise public public-understanding communication

  • Ronin Institute | A community of independent scholars

    “The purpose of the Ronin Institute is to create a new model for scholarly research, one that is not confined to traditional research institutions such as universities, and that recognizes that the world outside of academia is filled with smart, educated, passionate people who have a lot to offer to the world of scholarship. We aim to transform the way that scholarly research is coordinated and funded. Ultimately, we want anyone who is interested in pursuing high-quality scholarly research to be able to do so. More importantly, we want these people to be able to pursue their research in a way that is consistent with all of their life’s priorities.”

    tags: independent scholar academic research alternative reform

  • Structure+Strangeness: A crisis in higher education?

    “So, let’s take stock. Is there a crisis? Not in the usual definition of the word, no. But, there are serious issues that we should consider, and these tap deep into both the mission and purpose of higher education and its relationship to society as a whole.”

    tags: academia crisis phd teaching supply education

  • Some small observations on: dumb center, smart edge?

    “Why most people seem intent on taking computing back to the mainframe era with all of the intelligence at the center of the network in mega datacenters and the endpoint devices acting like fancy display terminals is beyond me. However, rather than prognosticating about the future at the architecture astronaut altitude, I’m going to just point out three interesting details that occurred to me over the course of the summer as I caught up with some geek stuff. And they all start with: Writing a webapp is different now than it was five years ago “

    tags: web-development future technology web-programming service webserivces

  • Hard Truths and a Heavy Heart for the Humanities « Ph.D. Octopus

    “If we are going to be serious about helping the academic humanities survive into the 21st century, we need to make the dissertation (a little) less rigorous, but make graduate schools harder to get into, by cutting the number of slots, even of entire departments. That way, only the very best students (ideally) will pursue PhDs, but those who do will likely finish and may actually have tenure-track jobs awaiting them. The most committed and most talented students will get a greater proportion of the financial and faculty support universities can provide. Fewer students will be around to teach, but since there will be fewer programs, they will congregate around top faculty, creating very high level intellectual communities. Yes, it’s elitist and “meritocratic,” insofar as any of this is meritocratic and not purely subjective (another debate altogether). But I can’t think of any other good solution.”

    tags: academia humanities phd education jobs markets work

  • “Computers In The University” | Gardner Writes

    ” I re-read some material from Mitchell Waldrup’s epic The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution that Made Computing Personal. I’ve read this book about three times all the way through, and I dip into it habitually to relive those defining moments of the emergent digital age–including the defining moments of rank unbridled idiocy that almost strangled the revolution in its cradle, such as the British Postal Service’s refusal to let the team that developed packet-switched communications develop their innovation, in any way, for any purpose. Too disruptive, you see; an entrenched bureaucracy and its reliable revenue streams were at stake.”

    tags: computers education augmentation intelligence history technology 20c

  • VES Honoree and Effects Guru Douglas Trumbull on How Technology, Spectacle Can Rescue Hollywood – Hollywood Reporter

    “My experience has shown me that in spite of the fact that there’s incredible genius in this room, with these master craftsmen that are really holding up the tentpoles and making these amazing visions that everybody wants to see, the latest amazing thing, amazing monster, amazing place, whatever it is, there are some structural problems inside the motion picture industry and the entertainment industry, which is that the studios who are producing and distributing the content have virtually no technological infrastructure inside their management structure. They rely entirely on third-party purveyors of special services, whether they’re actors, directors, or special effects people, and so they don’t really understand the technology of their own medium.”

    tags: movies film cinema arts technology business distribution

  • Midwest Pragmatist Study Group

    “The Midwest Pragmatist Study Group meets annually to promote interaction among scholars and students interested in classical and contemporary pragmatism broadly conceived. Papers on any aspect of pragmatist philosophy are welcome.”

    tags: conference pragmatism philosophy midwest

  • Not an April Fool – Charlie’s Diary

    tags: facebook privacy application social-media mashup mapping feminism

  • This Creepy App Isn’t Just Stalking Women Without Their Knowledge, It’s A Wake-Up Call About Facebook Privacy [Update] | Cult of Mac

    tags: facebook privacy application social-media mashup mapping feminism

  • Zen Coding: A Speedy Way To Write HTML/CSS Code | Smashing Coding

    tags: programming web-development html tool css

    Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

    ]]> http://toddsuomela.com/2012/04/07/weekly-list-bookmarks-weekly-25/feed/ 0 The creepiness factor goes to 11 http://toddsuomela.com/2012/04/02/the-creepiness-factor-goes-to-11/ http://toddsuomela.com/2012/04/02/the-creepiness-factor-goes-to-11/#comments Mon, 02 Apr 2012 20:59:16 +0000 tes http://toddsuomela.com/?p=938 Continue reading →]]> John Brownlee started a bit of storm on March 30 when he posted a story about Girls Around Me, an app for the iPhone. The idea behind the app is relatively simple – you turn it on, it finds your current location, and then it locates all of the people (men or women) who are currently nearby. The information is taken from public Facebook profiles and Foursquare check-ins. Brownlee tells a great story about the reaction of friends to whom he showed the app; they gradually move from fascination to a tingly ickiness and finally outright worry.

    All of the data is public, there’s nothing illegal about what the app is doing. In fact a lot of the fear and reactions come from the ridiculous splash screen, which can be seen at the link above, of “girls” in stripper profile pictures. The more Brownlee thinks about the app the more he realizes that it demonstrates the truly worrying things about privacy on social networks like Facebook and Foursquare. We are, mostly by default, sharing much more than we might like to think when we use these services. I don’t think we should ban them, but we do need to use them with much more caution and consideration.

    Charlie Stross noted the story and summarized my feelings quite well:

    In the worst case, it’s possible to envisage geolocation and data aggregation apps being designed to facilitate the identification and elimination of some ethnic or class enemy, not only by making it easy for users to track them down, but by making it easy for users to identify each other and form ad-hoc lynch mobs. (Hence my reference to the Rwandan Genocide earlier. Think it couldn’t happen? Look at Iran and imagine an app written for the Basij to make it easy to identify dissidents and form ad-hoc goon squads to proactively hunt them down. Or any other organization in the post-networked world that has a social role corresponding to the Red Guards.)

    But as I said earlier, the app is not the problem. The problem is the deployment by profit-oriented corporations of behavioural psychology techniques to induce people to over-share information which can then be aggregated and disclosed to third parties for targeted marketing purposes.

    ]]>     http://toddsuomela.com/2012/04/02/the-creepiness-factor-goes-to-11/feed/ 0     Weekly List Bookmarks (weekly) http://toddsuomela.com/2012/03/31/weekly-list-bookmarks-weekly-24/ http://toddsuomela.com/2012/03/31/weekly-list-bookmarks-weekly-24/#comments Sun, 01 Apr 2012 00:42:11 +0000 tesbot http://toddsuomela.com/?p=935 Continue reading →]]>

  • Distrust for Atheists & the New Relevance of Faith » Sociological Images

    “The take home point has to do with shifting social alliances. Now that most Americans have abandoned a strong dislike for members of other religions, it’s possible for The Religious to emerge as a socially-meaningful identity group. In other words, once members of different religions begin to see each other as the same instead of different, they can begin to align together. Suddenly atheists become an obvious foe. Instead of one of many types of people who had lost their way (along with people of different faiths), atheists could emerge as uniquely problematic. It is the building of cross-religious alliances, then, that undergirds the strong dislike for atheists specifically.”

    tags: atheism sociology religion belief social-status groups prejudice politics history american-studies

  • Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

    “We have this pet physicist and.. something’s wrong. It keeps babbling about linguistics and neurology and climate science.”

    tags: comic humor academia physics econophysics

  • UnderstandingSociety: Definitions in social theory

    tags: definition social-theory sociology philosophy methods research

  • Study Hacks » Blog Archive » Monday Master Class: How to Solve Hard Problem Sets Without Staying Up All Night

    “How do you solve hard problem sets in such a way that they can be integrated into a structured, low-stress study schedule? In this post I will present a four step process. The process is an elaboration on the advice given in Straight-A. It’s a mixture of the results of my research for this book as well as personal experience, having fought these beasts over the past seven years.”

    tags: studying tips education learning pedagogy strategy

  • Overcoming Bias : Limits To Growth

    “Current growth rates simply cannot continue at familiar levels for ten thousand more years. We’ll eventually learn everything worth knowing about how to arrange atoms, and growth in available atoms will be limited by the speed of light.”

    tags: future growth welfare

  • UnderstandingSociety: Ordinary and theoretical knowledge of capitalism

    “Is the participant-level even the right perspective from which to try to identify an explanation? I don’t think so. Were conditions in this factory harsh because this owner was hostile or cruel towards these particular workers? No, rather because the competitive environment of profitability and accumulation created an inexorable race to the bottom. So we can’t explain this factory’s working conditions by referring to specific features of this factory and its owner. This logic is spelled out very clearly in Capital, and it is a system-level characteristic.”

    tags: sociology explanation level system scale foundation phenomenology participation capitalism social-theory theory

  • UnderstandingSociety: Social subjectivities

    “So it seems fairly clear and direct to say that human subjectivity is itself an important cause of a variety of forms of social patterns: forms of collective behavior, the shaping of social practices, and the adjustment and accommodation of the behavior of other actors in society. This seems to have a fairly striking consequence, however: it seems to imply that the ways that we think about society and social relations actually has a substantial effect on the ways in which society plays out. This is a fundamentally different situation from the natural sciences; it doesn’t matter how we think about gravity, since the inverse square law applies irrespective of our beliefs.”

    tags: sociology social explanation subjectivity psychology philosophy causation

  • Graduate School Is a Means to a Job – Manage Your Career – The Chronicle of Higher Education

    tags: graduate-school phd advice job

  • Doctoral Devotion – To Complete or Not Complete? « The Thesis Whisperer

    “That’s why I have a large poster of James Franco up next to my computer; to remind me that no matter what enticing career paths may arise in the short term, its vital to keep on the path and complete the PhD. No, seriously, that’s really why I have a poster of Franco next to my computer….”

    tags: phd grit graduate-school motivation

  • How To Make Small Talk on Your Campus Visit | The Professor Is In

    tags: graduate-school phd jobs interview advice

  • Online LaTeX Editor • ScribTeX

    tags: latex tool online collaboration

  • Collaborative LaTeX writing: a review of ScribTeX

    “I’ve recently been experimenting with different methods to collaboratively write papers and proposals. In this post, I’ll review the strengths and weaknesses of ScribTeX. The upshot is I love this powerful, easy-to-use tool, despite a few flaws, and encourage you to check it out.”

    tags: latex review tool online collaboration

  • Lobbyists, Guns and Money – NYTimes.com

    “And ALEC, even more than other movement-conservative organizations, is clearly playing a long game. Its legislative templates aren’t just about generating immediate benefits to the organization’s corporate sponsors; they’re about creating a political climate that will favor even more corporation-friendly legislation in the future. “

    tags: conservative libertarianism business lobbying law

  • Cosmic Log – Study tracks how conservatives lost their faith in science

    “An analysis of 36 years’ worth of polling data indicates that confidence in science as an institution has steadily declined among Americans who consider themselves conservatives, while confidence levels have been at steadier levels for other ideological groups.”

    tags: science politics ideology conservative public-understanding

  • The Digital↔Physical: On building Flipboard for iPhone and Finding Edges for Our Digital Narratives — by Craig Mod

    tags: design iphone graphics application usability interaction interface

  • Noahpinion: Did the Krugman insurgency fail?

    “So the battle over Keynesianism may be over, with the New Old Keynesians fought to a bloody standstill, but the wider Macro Wars have only begun. As for how this affects the blogosphere and the rest of econ’s public face, one thing is for sure – we’re not going back to talking about how abortion affects crime rates.”

    tags: economics macroeconomic ideology growth unemployment

  • Captains | Savage Minds

    “I’ve never been one for visual anthropology, and I’m totally uninterested in pushing the boundaries of what constitutes ‘ethnography’. As a fieldworker, I’m fascinated by the micro-dynamics of human behavior and how we create roles for each other to inhabit in everyday life. When I watch documentaries, then, I’m usually trying to imagine the human situations involved in production and let me tell you, there is a whole lot of that stuff in Captains, William Shattner’s documentary on the different actors who have portrayed captains in the sprawling Star Trek franchise.”

    tags: title(StarTrek) documentary interview technique method demonstration learning research film movie review

  • Stumbling and Mumbling: Marx, capitalists & the state

    tags: economics marxism marx capitalism state

  • Study Hacks » Blog Archive » 4 Weeks to a 4.0: Streamline Your Notes

    tags: study academic tips notetaking

  • What do you wish you knew before starting grad school? – Quora

    tags: graduate-school advice

  • How to Annotate a Philosophical Text « The Relative Absolute

    tags: reading notetaking annotation philosophy teaching learning pedagogy education

  • Experts Debate Public Access to Scholarly Research at House Hearing – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education

    tags: scholarly-communication publication publisher open-access

  • Reading Critically – Interrogating Texts – Harvard Library LibGuides at Harvard Library

    tags: reading annotation notetaking study-guide recommendations learning education pedagogy

  • Essay: Research universities must pay more attention to student learning | Inside Higher Ed

    tags: academia academic future research university education

  • We’re Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction – Ross Andersen – Technology – The Atlantic

    Interview with Nick Bostrom

    tags: future extinction time philosophy singularity transhumanism technology

  • The Last Enclosures | Easily Distracted

    tags: academia economics money incentives enclosure commons

  • A Picture of Language – NYTimes.com

    tags: language grammar history diagram teaching learning

  • Perpetual Ocean [hd video] | Flickr – Photo Sharing!

    tags: oceanography oceans visualization video

  • 10 Books Every Fantasy Author Should Read

    tags: book recommendations fantasy literature reading

  • Wind Map

    “This map shows you the delicate tracery of wind flowing over the US right now.”

    tags: data visualization weather meteorology climate wind-power real-time

  • Too Smart to Fail: Notes on an Age of Folly | | Notebook | The Baffler

    “Of course there was a place where ideas weren’t simply for sale, I thought: the professions. Ethical standards kept professionals independent of their clients’ gross pecuniary interests. These days, though, I’m not so sure. Money has transformed every watchdog, every independent authority. Medical doctors are increasingly gulled by the lobbying of pharmaceutical salesmen. Accountants were no match for Enron. Corporate boards are rubber stamps. Hospitals break unions, and, with an eye toward future donations, electronically single out rich patients for more luxurious treatment.

    tags: economics profession expertise money corruption capitalism

  • The Problem With 1,000 True Fans – Whatever

    tags: rant publishing promotion marketing economics art humanities writing technology internet

  • Wikibollocks: Mathew Ingram and Seth Godin on publishing

    tags: rant publishing promotion marketing economics art humanities

  • Participatory Democracy: From the Port Huron Statement to Occupy Wall Street | The Nation

    tags: democracy history 1960s participation

  • The Judo of Clicktivism | openDemocracy

    “The clicktivism of very targeted campaigns, like Londoners on Bikes, Move Your Money or the Big Switch will transform our democracies. The important lesson from micro-campaigning is that identity follows political relevance, not the other way around. “

    tags: politics activism online technology nudge economics

  • An adaptability limit to climate change due to heat stress

    “Despite the uncertainty in future climate-change impacts, it is often assumed that humans would be able to adapt to any possible warming. Here we argue that heat stress imposes a robust upper limit to such adaptation. Peak heat stress, quantified by the wet-bulb temperature TW, is surprisingly similar across diverse climates today. TW never exceeds 31 °C. Any exceedence of 35 °C for extended periods should induce hyperthermia in humans and other mammals, as dissipation of metabolic heat becomes impossible. While this never happens now, it would begin to occur with global-mean warming of about 7 °C, calling the habitability of some regions into question. With 11–12 °C warming, such regions would spread to encompass the majority of the human population as currently distributed. Eventual warmings of 12 °C are possible from fossil fuel burning. One implication is that recent estimates of the costs of unmitigated climate change are too low unless the range of possible warming can somehow be narrowed. Heat stress also may help explain trends in the mammalian fossil record. “

    tags: global-warming climate-change climate biology consequences

  • And You Thought That Heat Wave Was Bad? | Mother Jones

    All of this got Huber and Steven Sherwood, his colleague at Australia’s University of New South Wales, to thinking: Economic considerations aside, they asked, how much warming can we physiologically tolerate? At what point does it get so bad that our bodies can no longer keep cool, so bad that we can no longer work or play sports or even survive for long out of doors? Will we flee for colder climes? Live underground like hobbits, surviving on cold fungus?

    tags: climate climate-change global-warming research consequences

  • Howard Markel Reviews Robert N. Proctor’s “Golden Holocaust” | The New Republic

    tags: book review history business science expertise trust sts

  • PodCastle » PodCastle 200: In The Stacks

    “Hargus Molnar, Master Librarian, had a face that would have been at home in a gallery of military statues, among dead conquerors casting their permanent scowls down across the centuries. Lean and sinewy, with close-cropped gray hair and a dozen visible scars, he wore a use-seasoned suit of black leather and silvery mail. Etched on his cuirass was a stylized scroll, symbol of the Living Library, surmounted by the phrase Auvidestes, Gerani, Molokare. The words were Alaurin, the formal language of scholars, and they formed the motto of the Librarians: RETRIEVE. RETURN. SURVIVE.”

    tags: libraries library humor tests fiction fantasy

  • Enough – The Book

    tags: book author website satisfaction time

    Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

    ]]> http://toddsuomela.com/2012/03/31/weekly-list-bookmarks-weekly-24/feed/ 0 White House announces “big data” initiative http://toddsuomela.com/2012/03/29/white-house-announces-big-data-initiative/ http://toddsuomela.com/2012/03/29/white-house-announces-big-data-initiative/#comments Thu, 29 Mar 2012 19:47:05 +0000 tes http://toddsuomela.com/?p=931 Continue reading →]]> Today the White House held a press conference announcing a new “big data” initiative pledging $200 million dollars to new efforts. Agencies involved include the National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, National Institutes of Health, Department of Energy, and US Geological Survey.

    A PDF of the press release and a fact sheet is available at the Office of Science and Technology Policy website.

    ]]>     http://toddsuomela.com/2012/03/29/white-house-announces-big-data-initiative/feed/ 0