27.8.04

Linguistics Prof. George Lakoff - Part I

"You've said that progressives should never use the phrase 'war on terror'. Why?

There are two reasons for that. Let's start with 'terror.' Terror is a general state, and it's internal to a person. Terror is not the person we're fighting, the 'terrorist.' The word terror activates your fear, and fear activates the strict father model, which is what conservatives want. The 'war on terror' is not about stopping you from being afraid, it's about making you afraid.

Next, 'war.' How many terrorists are there hundreds? Sure. Thousands? Maybe. Tens of thousands? Probably not. The point is, terrorists are actual people, and relatively small numbers of individuals, considering the size of our country and other countries. It's not a nation-state problem. War is a nation-state problem."

Enlivening Presentations ...

Question: Any hints on an application like powerpoint, but that lets you interact more during the presentation, e.g., typing in notes on the screen? Am looking for something for presentations in class, where ppt makes for nice image presentation but sucks all interaction and spontenaiety from class...

The quick answer is to turn off the powerpoint periodically - ie it guides to a certain point and then, pause (or block the projection).

Edward Tufte makes the same point, perhaps with more diatribe and authority than I might. What he is saying is 'form follows function' and we often use powerpoint when we really want to present a detailed argument better served by text ... I'd figure out what I was trying to do - show images, present an outline, make a coherent argument etc

So ... Not sure what you want to do ... Presumably brainstorm ideas with students about a particular point ...

Writing down the points, using the students own words on a flipchart, is very good (much better than just letting them hang in the air) - you could do this in ppt or another application, assuming you can type fast enough. (I find different parts of the brain are involved and so its hard to reflectively question the students and quickly write down their ideas.)

But maybe you have something else in mind for them? I keep in mind the adult learning cycle - experience (which could, at least some of the time, be a lecture), reflect (thinking about, ideally in conjunction with others - aka the small group discussion), generalization (connection to previous work, life experiences, etc.), application (opportunity to use - a formula in math class applied to a problem) - application to other, new situations which now fit the expanded or moulded paradigm. Etc. Ideally this cycle is created for each learning point.

You could browse both Course 1 and 2 at SCI Training quite a bit of material available therein.

Science experiments ...

Wedding day ...

Links ...

Camille Paglia: http://www.desires.com/1.2/sex/docs/paglia2.html

Steven King on Writing: http://www.msu.edu/~jdowell/King_Everything.html

Social Bookmarks: http://del.icio.us/

The number of Americans living in poverty rose by 1.3 million last year, to 35.9 million, while those without health insurance climbed by 1.4 million, to 45 million, the Census Bureau reported today. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/26/national/26cnd-cens.html?hp

Charles Bukowski on writing poetry:

CB: I write right off the typer. I call it my "machinegun." I hit it hard, usually late at night while drinking wine and listening to classical music on the radio and smoking mangalore ganesh beedies. I revise but not much. The next day I retype the poem and automatically make a change or two, drop out a line, or make two lines into one or one line into two, that sort of thing—to make the poem have more balls, more balance. Yes, the poems come "off the top of my head," I seldom know what I’m going to write when I sit down. There isn’t much agony and sweat of the human spirit involved in doing it. The writing’s easy, it’s the living that is sometimes difficult.

CB: There’s too much bad poetry being written today. People just don’t know how to write down a simple easy line. It’s difficult for them; it’s like trying to keep a hard-on while drowning—not many can do it. Bad poetry is caused by people who sit down and think, Now I am going to write a Poem. And it comes out the way they think a poem should be. Take a cat. He doesn’t think, well, now I’m cat and I’m going to kill this bird. He just does it.

I have written with children running about the room having at me with squirt guns. That often helps rather than hinders the writing: some of the laughter enters.

CB: A dry period for me means perhaps going two or three nights without writing. I probably have dry periods but I’m not aware of them and I go on writing, only the writing probably isn’t much good. But sometimes I do get aware that it isn’t going too well. Then I go to the racetrack and bet more money than usual and scream at and abuse my woman. And it’s best that I lose at the track without trying to. I can almost always write a damn near immortal poem if I have lost somewhere between 150 and 200 dollars.

~From: artdamage

deSoto, Titling, WorldBank policy ...

id21: "Land titles have been promoted by liberal economists such as Hernando de Soto on the assumption that they account for the affluence of the West and that if the poor had clear titles and rights enforceable in law over the land and property they live in they would be able to obtain credit and lever themselves out of poverty and into capitalist affluence. The evidence, even in Peru where de Soto's ideas have been most widely applied through government led titling programmes, is that increased access to credit for those granted titles is minimal. To date, the link between the provision of titles and poverty reduction remains unproven. "

Steven King: Everything You Need to Know....

21.8.04

Primer on Public Key Encryption

"The article below is an outline of the principles of the most common variant of public-key cryptography, which is known as RSA, after the initials of its three inventors - a mathematically detailed explanation of RSA by the programmer Brian Raiter, understandable to anyone willing to spend a little time with paper and pencil. Primer on Public Key Encryption

Adventures in Poetry

"Then came a time when I started to think about quality, and about what makes good things good. It would lengthen this essay too much to cover those ideas here. The basic summation is that something is good if you find it to be good. That is, does it please you?

"This turned out to be revolutionary in terms of my writing, because it undoes the need for a standard entirely. Instead of writing verses that longed for something outside myself, I begin to pen whatever it made me happy to write. This in turn made the experience of writing enjoyable, and I learned my first genuine lesson about poetry, that it satisfies the soul in its own way.

"Here is the first poem I ever wrote ... Adventures in Poetry" (via Martin)

17.8.04

Good Work

"It is of course not possible to summarize the results from so wide ranging a study and one, moreover, that is still very much in progress. We can say that professionals in most domains do have a clear vision of what constitutes good work and how it might be achieved, even as they recognize the challenges to carrying out such good work in the current milieu. Good Work is most readily carried out when the various interest groups are well-aligned - that is, when the long term professional mission, the individual practitioner, the current institutions and gatekeepers, the shareholders - in the case of for-profit enterprises- and the society's stakeholders all want the same thing from current work.

"In contrast, when there are wide disparities within and across these interest groups, good work is elusive. Nonetheless, even under less favorable conditions, some individuals and institutions succeed in carrying out good work and these exemplars serve to inspire others. Moreover, some individuals are actually stimulated by misalignment and proceed to 'right' the institutions in which they work or to devise new ones that realize their ideals.

"On a less positive note, many young workers feel that they cannot afford at present to be ethical as well as excellent. They believe that others around them are cutting corners all the time, and if they are to be successful, they must also sacrifice the means to achieve the desired ends. One day, they are confident, when they are in a position of power, they will be able to achieve and exemplify good work. This discouraging finding underscores the need for educational experiences that foreground goodwork as well as for periodic booster shots, should the image of good work become blurred. "

~From: About the GoodWork Project

15.8.04

iPlan - Community engagement techniques and tools

"... clusters of techniques that best suit each phase of plan making and development assessment processes."

iPlan - Community engagement techniques and tools

Collaboration Tiers

Many-to-Many: Collaboration Cases and Spaces
"The broadest tier is a guest space, available to all.
The second tier is a knowledgebase, accessible to all employees and contractors.
The third tier is product development, for employees and contractors bound by a confidentiality agreement.
The fourth tier is for the core management team to share confidential financial and HR information."

14.8.04

Happiness in Everyday Life

Happiness in Everyday Life: The Uses of Experience Sampling
"The strongest predictor of trait happiness was how Excited (vs. Bored) a person felt, followed by the variables Feeling Good about Self, Proud (vs. Ashamed), Sociable (vs. Lonely), feeling Active and Strong (vs. Weak). The correlation coefficients of these variables with Happiness (and controlling for age), were .58, .59, .47, and .53, respectively (with N= 799, all p?s<.0001)."

More Flow ...

Eudaomonia, The Good Life
"Central to Seligman's positive psychology is 'eudaemonia, the good life, which is what Thomas Jefferson and Aristotle meant by the pursuit of happiness. They did not mean smiling a lot and giggling. Aristotle talks about the pleasures of contemplation and the pleasures of good conversation. Aristotle is not talking about raw feeling, about thrills, about orgasms. Aristotle is talking about what Mike Csikszentmihalyi works on, and that is, when one has a good conversation, when one contemplates well. When one is in eudaemonia, time stops. You feel completely at home. Self-consciousness is blocked. You're one with the music.'
'The good life consists of the roots that lead to flow. It consists of first knowing what your signature strengths are and then recrafting your life to use them more - recrafting your work, your romance, your friendships, your leisure, and your parenting to deploy the things you're best at. What you get out of that is not the propensity to giggle a lot; what you get is flow, and the more you deploy your highest strengths the more flow you get in life.'"

Thinking about Africa

Virtual Communities: Africa Rising
"About a decade ago, I migrated directly from a frontier Wyoming cattle ranch to the frontier of cyberspace. I began to focus on concepts rather than cows. It was a surprisingly easy transformation.

But there is a surface tension on this new world that some folks find difficult to penetrate. It appears to me that common perceptions of the potential of virtual commerce, digital society, and intangible work are limited by the habits of mind one develops in an industrial society.
I believe that my background of working in agriculture, avoiding television, and living in a small town rather than a 'burb spared me some crippling assumptions about this emerging world. And it therefore seemed likely that others in the so-called developing world - Africans, for instance - might have been spared these illusions as well. "

Keith Hart?s Memory Bank - Biography

Keith Hart?s Memory Bank - Biography: "KEITH HART is an anthropologist who lives in Paris and commutes to London, where he teaches part-time at Goldsmith?s College. He started out studying classical languages and literature and went on to explore Atlantic society from the point of view of Africans in North America, West Africa, the Caribbean, Britain, France and South Africa. He has taught in ten universities on both sides of the Atlantic, for the longest time in Cambridge, where he was Director of the African Studies Centre. He has worked as a consultant, journalist, publisher and gambler. He contributed the concept of the informal economy to development studies, and has published widely on economic anthropology, especially about money. The abiding theme of his work is the relationship between movement and identity in the transition from national to world society. His life is now defined by the poles of solitary writing and world travel. He is sustained by his family and the virtual intellectual network in his laptop. He is currently writing a novel and several other works of non-fiction. His greatest ambition is to be a movie critic. "

Keith Hart?s Memory Bank - Welcome!

Keith Hart?s Memory Bank - Welcome!: "Money and language are the main means of communication available to us and both serve as a store of individual and collective memory. The idea of a ?Memory Bank? refers to the convergence of the two as information ? especially now that the exchange of objects through money and the exchange of meanings through language are coming together in a single network of communication, the Internet.The various sections of this portal give access to my published and unpublished work on people, machines and money? as well as to other forms of creative writing and information about me. The site grew out of the publication of my book, The Memory Bank (Profile Books, London, 2000), which was later published in the U.S.A. as Money in an Unequal World (Texere, New York, 2001). "

The New York Review of Books: Twilight at Easter

The New York Review of Books: Twilight at Easter: "Why were Easter Islanders so foolish as to cut down all their trees, when the consequences would have been so obvious to them? This is a key question that nags everyone who wonders about self-inflicted environmental damage. I have often asked myself, 'What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?' Like modern loggers, did he shout 'Jobs, not trees!'? Or: 'Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we'll find a substitute for wood'? Or: 'We need more research, your proposed ban on logging is premature'?
Similar questions arise for every society that has inadvertently damaged its environment, including ours today. It turns out that there is a series of reasons why people in any society? whether Easter Islanders, Maya, or ourselves?may make fatal mistakes that will look foolish to their successors. They may not anticipate a problem, because of the problem being unprecedented in their experience: e.g., today's overharvesting of the ocean's seemingly inexhaustible fisheries, for the first time in human history. They may fail to perceive the problem when it does arrive: e.g., global warming today, initially difficult to distinguish from just the usual year-to-year fluctuations in temperature. Conflicts of interest may prevent them from addressing a perceived problem: e.g., dumping toxic wastes into rivers is bad for people living downstream but saves money for the company doing the dumping. Some problems just prove too difficult to solve with current abilities: e.g., no one has figured out how to eliminate the Dutch elm disease that reached North America. Probably all of those kinds of explanations apply to deforestation on Easter Island, but the most important reason there may be conflicts of interest. A chief's status depended on his ststatus depended on his statues: any chief who failed to cut trees to transport and erect statues would have found himself out of a job.

The Easter Islanders' isolation probably also explains why their collapse, more, perhaps, than the collapse of any other pre-industrial society, haunts readers and visitors today. The parallels between Easter Island and the modern world are chillingly obvious. Thanks to globalization, international trade, jet planes, and the Internet, all countries on Earth today share resources and affect each other, just as did Easter's eleven clans. Polynesian Easter Island was as isolated in the Pacific Ocean as the Earth is today in space. When the Easter Islanders got into difficulties, there was nowhere to which they could flee, or to which they could turn for help; nor shall we modern Earthlings have recourse elsewhere if our troubles increase. Those are the reasons why people see the collapse of Easter Island society as a metaphor, a worst-case scenario, for what may lie ahead of us in our own future."

David Rumsey Historical Map Collection

David Rumsey Historical Map Collection: "The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection has over 10,000 maps online. The collection focuses on rare 18th and 19th century North and South America maps and other cartographic materials. Historic maps of the World, Europe, Asia and Africa are also represented. "

Geospatial Solutions - From Parchment to Ether: Fusing Historical Maps with Web GIS

Geospatial Solutions - From Parchment to Ether: Fusing Historical Maps with Web GIS: "For the past 20 years, I have built my map collection with the help of dealers, bookstores, auction houses, and other collectors. Today, with more than 150,000 maps, the collection is recognized as one of the largest in the United States focusing on 18th and 19th century North and South American cartographic materials (see 'What's in a Collection?' sidebar). The collection also features maps covering the entire world and includes atlases, globes, school geographies, maritime charts, and a variety of pocket, wall, children's, and manuscript maps. "

10.8.04

Blog de Jour: Journal

Journal: "Ledger 1.7
Version 1.7 of Ledger, the command-line accounting tool, is now available and ready for download. This tool is written in C++, and depends on the GNU multi-precision library (gmp) and the Perl regular expression library (pcre).
Version 1.7 adds support for historical pricing information, making it possible to generate cost basis reports, market value reports, and net gain/loss reports. See the new section in the README, under 'Currencies and Commodities'.

Sat, 17 Jul 2004 A house divided
Why is following certain standards so hard? Why can we not 'whip ourselves into shape'? Why do some behaviors feel impossibly hard to stop, with self-deception always making think we've succeeded, only to prove later than we still fail?"

Krzysztof Kowalczyk weblog

Krzysztof Kowalczyk weblog: "Weblog Without Honor or Humanity
by Krzysztof Kowalczyk"

9.8.04

waferbaby

Not quite Everything but waferbaby is pretty interesting: "the details: originally developed in 1995 as a site for the author's shareware, waferbaby has since grown into a crazy web community, with most of the content created by the users. the name was originally intended for a comic label that has yet to see the light of day."

Software Project Management

Software Project Management: "Principles of Software Project Management (Q7503)"

tonypierce.com + busblog

tonypierce.com + busblog: "teenage fanclub is on my ipod talking about what they do when theyre fucked up.

ive got groceries in the trunk, the cubs on the telly, and a bbq at welches house that i am fixin to attend.

just after i write and tell you that this ipod deal is pretty sweet, i must admit."

Beijing Art Scene

Beijing Art Scene: "A decade ago avant-garde photographer Rong Rong lived in a ramshackle farmhouse and took odd jobs to support himself. "No one was interested in buying my work," he recalls. On the contrary: once when he was photographing performance artist Zhang Huan, who had stripped naked, covered himself with honey and then sat for an hour in a Beijing public toilet while flies landed on him, a villager stumbled upon the shoot and called the authorities."

The Shape of Your Life

The Shape of Your Life - Outside Magazine July 2002

Elsa Dorfman, Portrait Photographer

Elsa Dorfman, Portrait Photographer: "My web site is my obsession. Here is a map that Andrew Grumet and I came up with, inspired by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. Browse on the different subway lines."

Before Sunrise @Everything2.com

Excerpt from the quirky, borderline encyclopedic Everything2.com: Before Sunrise @Everything2.com: "If you could take a whole bunch of questions and theories that relate to birth, life, relationships, and death and have two mutually attractive and intelligent people meet up to discuss them and maybe even fall in love at the same time, then Before Sunrise would pretty much be the result of filming them for a night.
What is interesting is the way in which the extremely sharp dialogue moves in cycles through these topics like the chronology of life itself, woven together with the dynamics of boy meets girl, of European meets American and the idea that even circumstances of complete alienation can bring about the strongest of connections. "

3.8.04


Queen Charlottes

Gansu Grasslands

Edward Burtynsky: Photographic Works

Brilliant photos - Edward Burtynsky Photographic Works

"Exploring the Residual Landscape: Nature transformed through industry is a predominate theme in my work. ... These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear."

Kangding ... Children's Day Festival

Representations of Global Capital

Toether with Chomsky's blog, a radical, intelligent critique: Representations of Global Capital: "Like the other ads in this campaign, this ad is structured by using the technique of splicing together the speech of many actors conducted in many separate interviews to create the impression that they are altogether uttering a common, shared idea. "