Generation, 2005, by Ricky Allman

Philosophy

Language Log » Subjects
“The police use of subject is missing from the OED entry, suggesting that it’s either American or recent or both. Curiously, the use of subject in general reports of human research is also missing, except for this curious residue of late-19th-century cultural preoccupations [...]”

The Splintered Mind: What Is an Illusion, Exactly?
“Due to (what we now know as) the laws of the refraction of light, the oar typically, in some sense, “looks bent” as it angles into the water. But one might argue (does John Austin argue this?) that that bent appearance is not really an illusion: If one knows enough about the world, one should know that an oar partly submerged in water (seen from a particular viewing angle) should look bent just like that. If it looked straight, I suppose, a longtime oarsman or a person very familiar with the laws of refraction might think the oar looked strange, might even think that it looked like an oar that is actually bent (bent in such a way as to exactly compensate for the bend a straight oar would seem to have at that angle). Perhaps part of what it is for an oar to look straight is for it to also (in a different sense) “look bent” when it is partly submerged in water. (This formulation is indebted to Alva Noe’s “dual aspect” view of perspectival appearance.)”

A Sort Of Abyss « Je Est Un Autre
“George Bataille on that Continental/Analytic split.”

Review: Pauliina Remes, Plotinus on Self: The Philosophy of the ‘We’ - Bryn Mawr Classical Review: 2009.01.06
“During the last thirty years of scholarship considerable attention has been paid to Plotinus’ theory of the self. The first complete monograph derives from G. O. Daly’s influential study Plotinus’ Philosophy of the Self (published in 1973) and, so far, a considerable number of studies have been published on Plotinus’ conception of selfhood, with more recently the work of Richard Sorabji Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life and Death (Oxford, 2006). Remes’ book aims to offer a new, complete and multi-angled study on Plotinus’ philosophy of the self ‘not just for students and scholars of Neoplatonism but also for readers interested in self and/or ancient philosophy in general, but who may be unacquainted with the subtleties of the heavy metaphysics of Plotinus’ (p. 18).”

Badiou and Correlationism « Larval Subjects .
“I’m a bit behind the curve on this, but unbeknownst to me a number of recent posts have been written jumping in on the critiques of Badiou’s ontology by Graham and me. Over at Complete Lies, Michael develops a critique of Badiou on the grounds of onto-ontology. Stellar Cartographies weighs in making its own points. Reid over at Planomenology has two excellent posts developing a critique of Badiou’s account of the event.”

Possible Positions on the Passage of Time - Soul Physics
Clever, illustrated examples of different theories of time.

Leaving room « An und für sich
“One often hears complaints that someone doesn’t “leave room” for something — most often freedom or mystery. I would contend that one should not consciously “leave room” for either. If freedom is really free, it brings its own room with it, and if there really is some irreducible mystery, its mysteriousness can take care of itself. Indeed, pushing as far as possible in the realm of the necessary or intelligible — that is, not “leaving” some predetermined “room” for freedom or mystery — seems to me to be precisely the way to trace the contours of these elusive realities.”

‘Out of Our Heads,’ by Alva Noë
“Alva Noë, a philosopher at UC Berkeley, argues that consciousness remains a mystery because we’ve been looking in the wrong place. In his provocative and lucid new book, Noë writes that scientists have been so eager to locate the mind in the brain that they’ve neglected to consider the possibility that our mind might not be inside our head.”

Modern Materialism: Darwin was wrong?
“This past Wednesday witnessed a debate between Rutgers’ own Jerry Fodor and Philip Kitcher on the merits of the theory of evolution by natural selection. What was unusual about this debate, as compared to others on the same topic, was that neither participant was anti-science, anti-reason, or pro-God. However, Jerry holds the iconoclastic (for a materialist) view that “the theory of evolution by natural selection is either false or vacuous, depending on how you read it.” Them, as they say, is fightin’ words.”

The New Atlantis » Why Minds Are Not Like Computers
“People who believe that the mind can be replicated on a computer tend to explain the mind in terms of a computer. When theorizing about the mind, especially to outsiders but also to one another, defenders of artificial intelligence (AI) often rely on computational concepts. They regularly describe the mind and brain as the “software and hardware” of thinking, the mind as a “pattern” and the brain as a “substrate,” senses as “inputs” and behaviors as “outputs,” neurons as “processing units” and synapses as “circuitry,” to give just a few common examples.”

Biology and Philosophy - Synthesizing insight: artificial life as thought experimentation in biology
“Next, I review three well-known accounts of thought experiments, and then offer my own synthesized account, to make the argument that s-Alife functions as thought experimentation in biology.”

New Media

Next-Gen Sex Gets Its Jollies From Web 2.0
“That’s a lesson I learned a few months ago, after writing that porn is scrambling to catch up with Web 2.0, not driving it.”

Thoughts on the “New Media” (Updated) — Small Wars Journal Blog
“Andrew Exum’s post / review of Tom Ricks’ The Gamble several weeks ago at Abu Muqawama got me thinking (once again) about the impact of the “new media” on issues concerning national security, military doctrine and concept development, as well as lessons learned.”

Museum lovers’ social networking | BBC News
“A group of the UK’s most famous museums, including the British Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum, is creating a collective website. As well as finding information about exhibits, museum lovers can use the website to create communities based on their historic and creative interests.”

Government ‘Twittercrat’ to be paid more than Lord Chancellor - Telegraph
“The Director of Digital Engagement role requires the successful candidate to develop strategies to communicate with people on popular internet sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and Twitter. The Senior Civil Service position has a starting salary of £120,000 plus 30 days annual holiday but could rise to £160,000 - more than the Chief Whip, Cabinet Minister and Lord Chancellor get before allowances.”

Researchers Want to Add Touch, Taste and Smell to Virtual Reality | Wired Science from Wired.com
“Now, a group of British researchers want to round out the experience with virtual touch, taste and smell. To simulate the real world, they argue, all five of your senses must be stimulated. Toward that end, they’ve mocked up a “Virtual Cocoon” with a separate glove that — at least in theory — could tickle your tongue as it, uh, nukes your nose.”

Dreaming Cyborg Dreams: Virtual Identity and Religious Experience | ReligionDispatches
“In this essay, I look at four types of immersive new media that address the issue of religious identity: Waco Resurrection, a religiously-inspired first-person shooter, Noah’s Ark, a religious online reality show; Roma Victor, a massive multiplayer online role-playing game, and religious experiences in the online world of Second Life.”

Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds - Carnegie Council
“Carnegie Council Senior Fellows Joshua S. Fouts and Rita J. King will present findings from their Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds project. After a year of exploring digital Islamic communities, Fouts and King conclude that engaging with people in virtual worlds who self-identify as Muslim can be part of a broader public diplomacy strategy to foster inclusive perspectives on religion, society, and coexistence.”

Tim Knowles - Vehicle Motion Drawings | Serial Consign
“Last week Victor Brunetti posted some tantalizing imagery to his blog as part of a brief blurb on the Vehicle Motion Drawings of Tim Knowles. Knowles is an artist based in London with a penchant for creating generative systems to record motion and mark the passage of time. He’s worked with the postal service, balloons, insect flight paths and the movement of trees to create unique process pieces that sit slightly left of centre to what we might conventionally refer to as drawing machines.”

BPS Research Digest: Txtng associated wiv superior reading skills
“The growing use of mobile phones to send text messages, often with abbreviations and symbols (i.e. “textisms”), has been blamed by many for the alleged decline in correct English usage. But now Beverly Plester and colleagues have shown that young children who use more textisms also tend to be better readers.”

Virtual Ability | Metanomics - Business and Policy in the Metaverse
“When you can be any avatar, why wear a wheelchair? As Gentle Heron, Alice Krueger has quietly helped a community of people with disabilities to take flight in Second Life. Imagine what it means to be visually or hearing-impaired within a virtual world interface, the challenge of typing with your toes, or using voice recognition software to soar across the sims. Virtual Ability, Inc., a 501(c)(3) non-profit, conducts individualized skills assessments, helps people use specialized hardware and software, and provides customized training and orientation to the growing number of people with disabilities exploring Second Life.”

Mind and Body

Mind Hacks: It was planted on me
“I have discovered that there is small but budding group of cognitive scientists who study the psychological impact of indoor plants.”

What Makes You Happier, Stuff or Experience? « N e u r o n a r r a t i v e
“According to a study conducted at San Francisco State Univeristy, the things you own can’t make you as happy as the things you do.”

How persistent are intuitive (erroneous) beliefs? — Cognition and Culture
“However, an ingenious experimental procedure by Kohhenikov and Hegarty (2001), Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 8 ) shows that even expert physicists are guided by the intuitive impetus physics under some conditions. In their study, expert physicists had to remember the location of objects ‘frozen’ after moving along a trajectory. Afterwards, the objects vanished, and they had to recall their position. Typically, they remembered the object somewhat further along its trajectory, along a path best described by impetus physics, not Newtonian physics. So the question this raises for me is: are we ever able to truly internalize scientific and other forms of formal knowledge, or are we somehow always guided by our intuitive beliefs?”

Mind Hacks: On believing you died during the operation
“Despite our repeated explanations that she had suffered a local anesthetic-induced complication, the patient remained convinced that she had died and come back to life. This patient had been a non-practicing Christian who believed in an afterlife. She had not had any previous experience of this kind or know of others who had had. She had had no fear of death in the preoperative period.”

Neuroskeptic: How To Read Minds
“In the last couple of weeks we’ve seen not one but two reports about “reading minds” through brain imaging. First, two Canadian scientists claimed to be able to tell which flavor of drink you prefer (Decoding subjective preference from single-trial near-infrared spectroscopy signals). Then a pair of Nashville neuroimagers said that they could tell which of two pictures you were thinking about through fMRI (Decoding reveals the contents of visual working memory in early visual areas); you can read more about this one here. Can it be true? And if so, how does it work?”

10 Classics from Cognitive Science
“The editorial board of Cognitive Science has identified several classic articles that appeared in our journal over the last couple of decades. With the permission of the Cognitive Science Society, the full text for these articles is available here.”

Law

Do the Octuplets Have a Dad? « Related Topics
“All this time the octuplets mother has been described as a single mother. Indeed, I’ve discussed this before. But now here is a new angle on it. A man, identified as Denis Beaudoin, has come forward asserting that he is the sperm donor whose sperm was used to create all fourteen of the children.”

ChessBase forced to cease Internet broadcasting of the Topalov-Kamsky match
“The German chess site ChessBаse was forced to cease the live broadcasting of the games of the match between World Cup candidates Veselin Topalov and Gata Kamsky. Without permission from the Bulgarian Chess Federation (BCF) the Germans broadcast the first four games on the global network in spite of the warning published to that effect by the organizers on the official site of the match wccc2009.com.”

SEC disclaimers in the age of Twitter | IR Web Report
“SPARE a thought for eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) corporate blogger Richard Brewer-Hay. He is the only person on the microblogging service Twitter who live-tweets his company’s quarterly earnings conference calls. That’s partly why I’ve previously called him one of the best corporate bloggers. However, he has been doing these live-tweeting sessions for the past three quarters without the company’s legal team knowing. But they found out, and recently called him in to discuss.”

Location, Location, Location - Concurring Opinions
“Several recent legal news stories illustrate the intuition that entities’ (or individuals’) physical proximity to each other, without more, sends powerful messages. For example, the Associated Press reports that Justice Stevens refuses to attend any swearings-in of justices at the White House because he views the ceremony’s mere physical location at a supposedly co-equal branch of government as signalling a lack of judicial independence.”

Imagine there’s no copyright/It’s easy if you’re the Supreme Court — Concurring Opinions
“One can only guess how the Lennons feel about Justice Alito reproducing the entire lyrics to Imagine in footnote 2 of his opinion for the Court today in Pleasant Grove City v. Summum. If the Supreme Court were not a slow adapter, Alito might have attached an audio file.”

Legal History Blog: Balogh on the State in Nineteenth-Century America
“Yesterday afternoon, at the American Political History Seminar sponsored by the History Department at Boston University, Brian Balogh of the University of Virginia presented a portion of his soon-to-be-published book, A Government out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America. Balogh asks “what if our understanding of the nineteenth century allowed for the possibility that the United States governed differently from other industrialized contemporaries, but did not necessarily govern less?” Exploring land distribution policies, the postal system, and legal structures facilitating corporate expansion, Balogh argues that while the state institutions that nineteenth-century Americans referred to as the “General Government” might not always have been visible, they represented a powerful force of governance. Of the laissez-faire Gilded Age, Balogh argues that “no period in America’s history was less representative of America’s past.”"

Design

Design leads us where exactly?: Apprenticeships: an economic history
“Contemporary art and design practices - even if now taught in art and design departments in modern universities - bear some relation to the institutions of apprenticeships that developed over hundreds of years in several European countries. A seminar at Said last week raised some interesting questions about what we think we know, and what we actually know, about such apprenticeships. Tim Leunig of LSE, an economic historian, gave a wonderful seminar for the Centre for Corporate Reputation drawing on his work into apprentices in London in the pre-modern period.”

41% of museums don’t know how dogs actually walk - collision detection
“Museums screwed things up a stunning 41% of the time. Taxidermy catalogues got it wrong 43% of the time, toys 50% of the time, and animal-anatomy catalogues were the worst, with 63.6% errors.”

Subtopia: Prisons & Urban Theory « Prison Photography
“The analysis of Bryan Finoki at Subtopia consistently join the dots between geopolitics & biopolitics; movement & paralysis; spatial theory and spatial reality. Unsurprisingly, for a writer in the 21st century, his interest in the production of structures & networks, often leads him to theories of militarised space.”

brilli.am/writes »The Stunning Art & Design of the Atari 2600
“I’m probably not the only one, but I am ready to throw up. The current generation box-art is computer-assisted, committee-designed, samey samey samey crap. The only exception is the oft-referenced Japanese box for Ico, but other than that, even the “good” stuff isn’t inspiring.”

Grand Text Auto » Atari Teenage TIA
“Karen Collins, author of Game Sound, did an amazing study in which she traces how the peculiarities of the TIA (Television Interface Adapter) may have influenced the tonal sensibilities of Western youth and may be linked to the later use of flat seconds in rave, heavy metal, and industrial music. The article is “Fine Tuning the Terrible Twos: The Musical Aesthetic of the Atari VCS” (PDF version, deprecated HTML).”

Is Flower the first game about global warming? - collision detection
“This week, I wrote about Flower, an insanely beautiful game released two weeks ago for the Playstation 3 by Jenova Chen. In the game, you control a gust of wind that blows a flower petal along, and you do … well, lots of things. You touch other flowers, opening them up and releasing their petals; if you do a lot of this you start to bring dead, dry land back to life. Sometimes you also cause huge rocks to shift and groan and open up like petals themselves. Other times dead trees explode with color and leaves, or winds start blowing that power wind turbines. The final “boss fight” — such as it is — consists of a crazy, massive “awakening” of an entire grey, dead, “fallen” city.”

Data & Visualization

Irregular Time Series? No. Oversampling. | Jorge Camoes’ Charts
“If you are a market researcher, and you want to make sure that you get more reliable results for a subgroup in a survey, what do you do? You must increase the overall sample size (and spend a lot of money), right? Actually, you don’t. You can oversample that group only, and then weight it down to its known proportion in the population. For example, you may want to increase the number of managers and decrease the number of housewives (because the former are usually more heterogeneous than the latter). Oversampling is a common research method, and a very cost-effective way to get precise estimates for a subgroup.”

Visualizing information flow in science - well-formed.eigenfactor.org
“Interactive visualizations based on the Eigenfactor™ Metrics and hierarchical clustering to explore emerging patterns in citation networks.”

The first sketches of history » Nieman Journalism Lab
Round-up of news visualization sites, software, applications.

Visualization of pharmaceutical industry activity - Biomedicine on Display
“Here’s a promising approach: mktlgcs has created this visualization of FDA pharma application approvals 2000-2008 — an excellent way to get an overview of the activities of the global pharmaceutical industry (all major manufacturers want an FDA approval to operate on the US market)”

Linnear, 2001, Hael Yxxs

Last-Minute Changes - Wall Street Journal

But is the timeline right? Did human evolution really stop? If not, our sense of who we are — and how we got this way — may be radically altered. Messrs. Cochran and Harpending, both scientists themselves, dismiss the standard view. Far from ending, they say, evolution has accelerated since humans left Africa 40,000 years ago and headed for Europe and Asia. Evolution proceeds by changing the frequency of genetic variants, known as “alleles.” In the case of natural selection, alleles that enable their bearers to leave behind more offspring will become more common in the next generation. Messrs. Cochran and Harpending claim that the rate of change in the human genome has been increasing in recent millennia, to the point of turmoil. Literally hundreds or thousands of alleles, they say, are under selection, meaning that our social and physical environments are favoring them over other — usually older — alleles. These “new” variants are sweeping the globe and becoming more common.

Transformation Tracker » Army Use of Social Media, Some Quick Stats

From Soldiers in the Blogosphere, a quick accounting of the Army’s current use of social media.

Count the Arts In - Making the Case That Culture, Too, Is Economic Player - New York Times

In debates on the measure some legislators dismissed the arts as a highbrow, left-wing luxury unworthy of scarce taxpayer dollars. Such arguments evoked the ideological battles of the 1990s, when some politicians denounced certain projects financed by the Endowment as un-American. “I just think putting people to work is more important than putting more art on the wall of some New York City gallery frequented by the elite art community,” Representative Jack Kingston, Republican of Georgia, was quoted as saying in the Congressional Quarterly’s online publication last month. He described arts as “the favorite of the left.” “Call me a sucker for the working man,” he said. (Americans for the Arts later challenged Mr. Kingston’s assertions, saying that as of last year his own Georgia congressional district was home to 778 arts-related businesses employing 2,663 people.)

Cantor, Paul A. “Is there Intelligent Life on Television?” - Claremont Review of Books (Fall 2008).

If you can tear yourself away from your favorite television shows long enough to wander down to your local bookstore, you will be amazed at all the books you’ll find these days—about your favorite television shows. The medium that was supposed to be the archenemy of the book is now giving an unexpected—and welcome—boost to the publishing industry. It is well known that for the genre of literary criticism, publishers are extremely reluctant to bring out what are called monographs—books devoted to a single author or a single work (unless that single author is Shakespeare or the single work is Hamlet). Those works of literary criticism that are published often come out in print runs that number in the hundreds. By contrast, a book devoted to a single television show, The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D’oh! of Homer (2001, published by Open Court and edited by William Irwin, Mark T. Conard, and Aeon J. Skoble), has reached its 22nd printing and its sales number in the hundreds of thousands.

Velvet Howler › DeLong vs. Harvey

On February 11 I posted a link to a David Harvey article regarding the likely failure of the stimulus package to recover the U.S. economy. Interestingly, prominent neoliberal economist/blogger Brad DeLong (often cited by Matthew Yglesias) responded to Harvey in a less than charitable manner. David Harvey responds back by questioning DeLong’s usage of neoclassical economic theory, with DeLong responding back (again) by arguing that Marxism is “objectively-reactionary,” and apparently theological (a claim I actually would embrace), while unironically citing (economist) Joan Robinson:

Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey » Exhibit A: The Arrogance of the Neoclassical Economists

I did once upon a time make the mistake of studying Sraffa somewhat carefully. His sophisticated mathematical proof (as yet never refuted, in spite of the best efforts of people like Peter Newman) that all of neoclassical theory is based on a tautology I found all too persuasive. Why bother with a theory that proves what it assumes to be true? At the heart of the controversy lies the question of how to value capital assets independently of market prices and since our contemporary difficulties rest on the problem of how to value paper claims to capital assets held by banks in the absence of a market, I would have thought some re-visitation of the so-called “capital controversy” of the 1970s is in order. At the time I concluded (possibly erroneously) that Joan Robinson had the better of the argument against Samuelson but that the Cambridge (Mass) neoclassicals then merely decided to ignore the problem and go on with their theorizing as if nothing had happened. But now look at the mess!

McCulture - The Wilson Quarterly

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is reading outside the lines, as anyone who walks through a European airport bookstore can attest: Twenty-five percent of books published in Spain in 2004 were translations, according to Hoffman’s study. In Italy the figure was 22 percent, and in South Korea 29 percent. Even China, with four percent, had a higher proportion of translations than the United States. The world has noticed our resistance to translation. The head of the Swedish Academy, Horace Engdahl, caused a furor last fall when he dismissed American literature several days before the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to a Frenchman many Americans had never heard of. “The U.S. is too isolated, too insular,” Engdahl told The Associated Press, explaining why he sees Europe, not the United States, as the center of the literary world. “They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.”

The Emergence of Musical Copyright in Europe from 1709 to 1850 by Frederic Scherer

This paper, written for a conference of the Society for Economic Research on Copyright Issues, explores the history of copyright protection for musical compositions. The first modern copyright law did not cover musical works. The role of Johann Christian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Johann Neopmuk Hummel in securing legal changes is traced. How Giuseppe Verdi exploited the new copyright law in Northern Italy is analyzed. The paper argues that Verdi, enriched by copyright protection, reduced his compositional effort along a backward-bending supply curve. However, his good fortune may have had a demonstration effect inducing other talented individuals to become composers. An attempt to determine the impact of legal changes on entry into composing is inconclusive. The paper shows, however, that a golden age of musical composition nevertheless occurred in nations that lacked copyright protection for musical works.

Paper Republic - Bookstores

An article from The Economist titled “The Little Red Bookshop” was recently emailed to subscribers of the MCLC List (the email listserv of the Modern Chinese Literature & Culture resource center, and the source of a good deal of the announcements we make on Pap-Rep). The article notices a possible resurgence of leftist thought in China, centered around a bookstore called Utopia, “the term used to describe those nostalgic for Mao Zedong’s rule and worried that the country is abandoning its communist principles.” For anyone familiar with Marxist ideology, though, “Utopia” is a strange name: wouldn’t those really nostalgic for the pre-Reform & Opening-up era believe that Marxist-Leninist Mao Zedong Thought was the only outcome of the capitalist class struggle, and therefore an embodiment of Scientific, not utopian, Socialism?

Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog: The APA and Discrimination Against Homosexuals…Again

While this complaint addressed an advertisement in the 2006-2007 JFP, Wheaton College also advertised in the 2007-2008 JFP. Further, while some universities are listed as censored universities, Wheaton is not. Azusa Pacific University, Belmont University, Biola University, Calvin College, Malone College, and Pepperdine University all advertised in the 2007-2008 or 2008-2009 JFP. None of these programs are listed as censored universities. Nevertheless, all of these programs possess ‘ethics’ requirements that prohibit homosexual activity. This is especially troubling given that the APA claims to endorse the following anti-discrimination policy

Mind Hacks: The myth of the concentration oasis

Wired has an interview with author Maggie Jackson who’s recently written a book called ‘Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age’ in which she argues modern life and digital technology constantly demand our attention and are consequently damaging our ability to concentrate and be creative. The trouble is, I just don’t buy it and it’s easy to see why. The ‘modern technology is hurting our brain’ argument is widespread but it seems so short-sighted. It’s based on the idea that before digital communication technology came along, people spent their time focusing on single tasks for hours on end and were rarely distracted. The trouble is, it’s plainly rubbish, and you just have to spend time with some low tech communities to see this is the case.

IGN: Editorial: Is Resident Evil 5 Racist?

Set in Africa, because (as revealed in Resident Evil: Code Veronica) that is where the Progenitor virus originated, your primary targets are native Africans. With the release of the first full RE5 trailer in 2007, numerous journalists and social commentators raised concern that RE5 depicted Africa as a nation of savages and that the game itself would reinforce unhealthy stereotypes. When Resident Evil 5 releases this March, those concerns won’t subside.

WFD : “Deaf people and Human Rights”

WFD and SDR are proud to release the report ‘Deaf People and Human Rights’, written by Ms Hilde Haualand, Reseacher, and Mr Colin Allen, Project Co-ordinator of the Global Education Pre-Planning Project on the Human Rights of Deaf People. The “Deaf People and Human Rights” report is based on a survey that is, up until now, the largest knowledge database on the situation of Deaf people. The lives of Deaf people in 93 countries, most of which are developing countries, is addressed. The Swedish National Association of the Deaf (SDR) and the World Federation of the Deaf (WFD) initiated the survey, with funding from the Swedish Agency for International Development Co-operation (Sida) and the Swedish Organisations of Disabled Persons International Aid Association (Shia).

Virtual ethnography and online fieldwork (2) « media/anthropology

Don Slater: 3. Does the idea that suburbs have some similar properties (and therefore (?) comparable internet practices) in Kuala Lumpur and Toronto necessitate recourse to concepts of macro structure and global processes? Don’t think so, in which case I’m not that bothered. I’ve probably got a very complicated process to unravel, and vast range of contingencies to track, so that I can see how these similar properties might arise from similar architectural and spatial arrangements, work/life relations, domestic arrangements (nuclear family?), class cultures, the practices of transnational corporations, and so on. And on, and on. Many of us have found the notion of ‘practice’ very useful in many of these studies as it posits an elementary unit of analysis that embraces so many features of a social setting without reducing them to structures.

Is resonance the cement of society?

This idea has been supported by many recent brain imaging studies (the kind debated here last month) that have shown overlapping activation patterns when subjects feel their own emotions and observe similar emotions in others. The theory of ‘‘embodied simulation” postulates that such overlap reflects an automatic resonance to others’ affective states, allowing implicit affect sharing and empathy (Gallese et al., 2004; Gallese, 2007; Keysers and Gazzola, 2006). Thus, according to the theory of “embodied dimulation”, resonance seems to be the “cement of society” (to use Hume ’s famous expression) : the mechanism that enables human interaction, sympathy and morality. A recent study by Danzinger and colleagues (here is a gated version) challenges this theory by looking at a unique population - individuals with congenital insensitivity to pain.

Small Talk: Nanotechnology and Metaphor - Joseph C. Pitt

The general topic I am addressing concerns the epistemological role of the use of metaphor in the philosophy of science. More specifically, I am concerned with the role metaphor plays in scientific and technological change. In the case in point, nanotechnology, I will explore the role of metaphor in changing our conception of the confirmation of the plausibility of theoretical notions. The basic idea is that metaphors either offer or suggest images that are meant to persuade one to change one’s belief. Thus the confirmatory role is variable..

Novels without Words

Book from the Ground is a novel writ­ten in a “language of icons” that I have been col­lect­ing and orga­niz­ing over the last few years. Regard­less of cul­tural back­ground, one should be able under­stand the text as long as one is thor­oughly entan­gled in modern life. We have also cre­ated a “font library” com­puter pro­gram to accom­pany the book. The user can type Eng­lish sen­tences (we are still lim­ited in this way, but the next step will include Chi­nese and other major lan­guages) and the com­puter will instan­ta­neously trans­late them into this lan­guage of icons. It can func­tion as a “dictionary,” and in the future it will have prac­ti­cal applications.

Concurring Opinions - Gender and Pay

But this reminded me of a remarkable study released last year that examined the wages of transgender people – individuals who change their gender, typically with hormone therapy and surgery – to learn more about the relationship between gender and workplace experience while holding human capital investments constant. The authors found that workers who transitioned from male to female (MTFs) experienced “significant losses in hourly earnings,” while those who transitioned from female to male (FTMs) experienced “no change in earnings or small positive increases in earnings from becoming men.”

Neuroethics & Law Blog: On the Philosophical Foundations of Law & Neuroscience (Goldberg)

Via the Professor comes word of an important new paper authored by Michael S. Pardo and Dennis M. Patterson, entitled Philosophical Foundations of Law and Neuroscience. Here is the Abstract: According to a wide variety of scholars, scientists, and policymakers, neuroscience promises to transform law. Many neurolegalists - those championing the power of neuroscience for law - proceed from problematic premises regarding the relationship of mind to brain. In this Article, we make the case that their accounts of the nature of mind are implausible and that their conclusions are overblown. Thus, their claims of the power of neuroscience for law cannot be sustained. We discuss a wide array of examples including lie detection, criminal-law doctrine, economic decision-making, moral decision-making, and jurisprudence.

Concurring Opinions - Can You Buy an Internship on Snobster?

Timothy Noah has described the growth industry in internship sales at Slate: [T]he internship-selling racket has slipped the surly bonds of philanthropy and entered the for-profit marketplace. An outfit called the University of Dreams guarantees placement or your money back. Summer-internship fees (the University of Dreams prefers to call it “tuition”) range from $5,499 to $9,499. For 3 percent extra, you can pay on an installment plan. The interns have been placed with firms like Hill and Knowlton and Smith Barney (did a rich, dumb intern start the credit crunch?) “It’s a huge misconception to say this is a program for rich kids,” Eric Lochtefeld, CEO of University of Dreams, told the Journal. “The average student comes from the middle class, and their parents dig deep.” To whatever extent that were true, inegalitarianism would shade into encyclopedia-salesman-style exploitation.

Legal History Blog: Reese on the History of Copyright Infringement

R. Anthony Reese, University of Texas School of Law, has posted Innocent Infringement in U.S. Copyright Law: A History, which appeared in the Columbia Journal of Law and the Arts 30 (2007). Here’s the abstract: American law generally imposes liability on anyone who infringes a copyright, regardless her mental state, and even if her infringement is innocent - that is, when she engages in infringing activity without reason to know that her conduct infringes (perhaps most commonly when she knowingly copies from another’s work but reasonably believes that her copying is legally permissible). This is true even though one of copyright law’s most important goals is distinguishing legitimate copying, which is encouraged, from illegitimate copying, which is to be deterred. Courts and commentators have paid little attention to this aspect of copyright law.

Green Fur? Green Wash! « The Discerning Brute

Fur is Green? More like Fur is Greed. The fur industry is jealous of the environmental movement. Green with envy, in fact. This has resulted in the Greenwashing award of the decade going to the Canada Fur Council’s “Fur is Green” campaign, which includes a spiffy website, a Facebook group, and amazing rationalizations that make historical comparisons impossible to ignore!

infinite thØught: the objectivity of illness

I know we’re not supposed to like totalities and technology after the twentieth century, but you know, we can’t actually measure very many things at all. Heidegger’s fears about calculation seem premature, and his alternative even worse. One of my least favourite academic tropes is the anti-technology paper, where someone sits their with their laptop, their vaccines, their antibiotics, their clothes and their hospitals bemoaning the lack of authenticity of modern life.

Before asking “How would the activity of sublimation be solicited?” Jodi Dean of I cite isolates a provocative passage from Zizek that begins: “What if, however, this very choice between the dissolution of a symptomal knot and its acceptance as a positive condition is, again, a false one? What if the very structure of a drive (as opposed to instinct) provides a solution? We are stuck on a knot around which drive circulates, yet it is this very stuckness that pushes us again and again forward to invent ever new forms to approach it.”

Neurophilosophy points us to a study, conducted by Vilayanur Ramachandran and David Brang of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, that found a new form of synaesthesia: tactile-emotion synaesthesia.

Emily Yoffe of Slate makes the case that Obama tapped into a new “powerful – and only recently studied – human emotion called ‘elevation.’” Quintilian and Vico would be proud.

Referencing a new Harvard study, Discover Magazine tell us what we already know: a punch hurts more when your attacker really means it.

Focusing on Deleuze and Kant, respectively, Larval Subjects explains the profound difference between the transcendent and the transcendental.

Matt Kinsman of Folio prepares us for a return, in the tough economic years ahead, of community publishing and new multimedia workflow strategies.

Farhang Erfani of Continental Philosophy links to Simon Critchley’s latest salvo in his battle with Zizek, entitled: “Critchley’s Violent Thoughts about Slavoj Zizek”.

Thomas Söderqvist of Biomedicine on Display ruminates over two projects concerning the auditory space of contemporary medicine: Øystein Horgmo’s work on the sounds of the operating room, and “sound artist John Wynne’s recordings of the medical soundscape at Harefield heart hospital, aired in BBC3’s Between the Ears slot in June.”

In case you’re having a tough time getting a hold of Ian Heywood and Barry Sandywell’s edited volume Interpreting Visual Culture: Explorations in the Hermeneutics of the Visual – it’s notoriously expensive ($180), usually checked-out, and unavailable for preview on Amazon – you can view a good chunk of it on Google Books.

In a remarkable post on Concurring Opinions, Mark Edwards explains how a 1642 case, Paradine v. Jane, taught in every property law class, is suddenly relevant. Just as the King’s court found back rent to be owed on a lease despite that property’s recent occupation by a foreign army, after the 9/11 attacks on the WTC, when “lessees were deprived of use and possession of land through no fault of their own, and would be for years [...] the question arose: who should bear the cost?”

Putting people first links to a pamphlet in which authors Adam Greenfield and Mark Shepard provide an overview of “the key issues, historical precedents, and contemporary approaches to designing situated technologies and inhabiting cities populated by them.”

Brita d’Agostino of Wired tips us off to the new San Francisco Museum of Modern Art retrospective exhibit The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now, which shows “how artists have dabbled in two-way communication with viewers over the past 60 years.”

In a timely post on the “occupation” – his quotes – of a Republic Windows and Doors plant in Chicago, Patrick S. O’Donnell of Ratio Juris responds to Professor Slater’s observation that some “labor historians have a tendency to romanticize and exaggerate the importance of certain forms of worker ‘militancy.’”

In a two post response, Michael Drake of Strange Doctrines eloquently dismantles Nadeem Hussain’s argument that “Nietzsche’s criticisms of value cannot generally be so restricted—that we should ascribe to him an error theory about all evaluative judgments.”

A new study, conducted by Friederike Range of the University of Vienna, Austria, shows that dogs have a sense of fairness. As for humans, the jury’s still out.

Alex Leo catalogs five sexist trends the advertising world just can’t shake. If only they were trying.

Thinking of having that iPod engraved for a loved one? Better hope they like it, because it can’t be returned. So reveals the Consumerist.

Called Muxlim Pal, the first virtual world aimed at the Muslim community has just been launched, and shut down by “griefers”, “organized bands of anonymous idiots whose goal is to harass and annoy other users.” Rose Springvale of Dispatches from the Information Age gives background in a post on “Understanding Islam Through Virtual Worlds”.

Christopher Green of Advances in the History of Psychology points us to an article by Herbert A. Friedman, published in the British Psychological Society’s journal The Psychologist, on the failed use of sex in World War II propaganda.

Molly Wright Steenson, doctoral student of architecture at Princeton, just announced the topic of the project that will undergird her dissertation, and it sounds rather brilliant: Postal services and pneumatic tube systems in the late 19th and early 20th century, especially in Paris. “I’m reading these services in terms of their urban interfaces, their material qualities and the interest in the 1870s-1890s of physical networks across cities.”

Julie Robotham of The Sydney Morning Herald reports that because of a company’s patent on a gene, “Babies with a severe form of epilepsy risk having their diagnosis delayed”. “It is the first evidence that private intellectual property rights over human DNA are adversely affecting medical care.” (via Chris Williamson of Blogging the Singularity)

Simon Pegg of The Guardian makes a convincing case for why, in film, the undead shouldn’t run: “The fast zombie,” she writes, “is bereft of poetic subtlety.” “Zombies are our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes in, unstoppable, intractable.”

Before asking, politely if disingenuously, “Should art museums remain purely temples to art? Are interactives in an art museum condescending to the primary audience?”, Paul Orselli of ExhibiTricks praises The Detroit Institute of Arts’ recent “reinvention” of itself, and links to a “report from the radio show Studio 360 that details an interactive ‘virtual dining’ experience that serves to highlight some of the DIA’s decorative arts collection.”

Christine L. Borgman, professor of information studies at the University of California at Los Angeles and author of the recently published Scholarship in the Digital Age, explains to The Chronicle of Higher Education how the new “scholarly information infrastructure” demands that the accumulation of data “be considered a scholarly act as well as the publication that comes out of it.”

An enRoute article by Craille Maguire Gillies profiles curator Scott Burnham, who has a knack for taking the gallery to the street.

Ian and Alex from The Art of the Title Sequence find the True Blood intro to be inspired by Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, and a commenter notes that the decaying fox clip was used in the Nine Inch Nails live music video for “Hurt”.

Air Crosswalk by Art Lebedev

Triple Canopy takes us on a tour of the new Young Earth museum in Kentucky, which features humans and dinosaurs living comfortably in proximity.

Larval Subjects gives an excellent explanation of the meaning of the borromean knot in Lacan’s work.

In a post on “Lincoln and the Mud-sill”, Greg Afinogenov of Slawkenbergius’s Tales asks a question that isn’t asked nearly enough, “When we think we are deterritorializing, maybe we are only reproducing a cycle?”

In a post titled “On Zizek and Consequences” Planomenology responds to Adam Kirsch’s recent, controversial article for The New Republic.

In yet another chapter of the story of how stories are dying, the London Telegraph finds narrative very much alive in new media forms like Grand Theft Auto, Twitter, and interactive learning programs.

Feminist Philosophers calls for papers for the “The Palin Factor” edited collection. (Be sure to check out our own calendar for conferences, deadlines, and calls for papers.)

Yochai Benkler presents “Two (Radical?) Thoughts on Infrastructure” that couldn’t be implemented soon enough.

Adam Kotsko of An und für sich posts a talk on “The Prehistory of Jean-Luc Nancy’s Deconstruction of Christianity”, to which I hope to respond in the near future.

Philosopher Jürgen Habermas discusses “Life after bankruptcy” with Thomas Assheuer of Sign and Sight.

In an article first published in Libération on 19 November, Giorgio Agamben reminds us “today, numerous European countries (in particular France and Italy), have introduced laws and police measures that we would previously have judged barbaric and anti-democratic, and that these are no less extreme than those put into effect in Italy under fascism.”

David Cassuto of the Animal Blawg succinctly describes the annual “turkey pardon” as a ritual that “amounts to transferring the guilt of the perpetrators on to the victims and then forgiving a token few of them in a bizarre act of self-absolution by proxy.”

“Is Urban Loneliness a Myth?”, New York Magazine asks (before answering “Yes”).

The New Yorker profiles Naomi Klein as the beacon of the “new new left”.

In the midst of all the uproar over the Human Terrain System, Maximilian Forte of Open Anthropology reminds us of Canada’s own “white situational awareness teams”.

Lawrence Lessig gives an interesting political talk on Web 2.0.

Dan Goldman of Adobe walks us through a forthcoming user-friendly method for interactive video object manipulation.

Mona N. expresses annoyance and perplexion over the whole OpenID project.

James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, analyzed a database of 34 million articles in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and found that the turn to online research has narrowed the range of modern scholarship.

Sarah shows how to use LinkedIn to get a job in this awful economy.

#

(The Air Crosswalk, featured in the photo above, is a public safety innovation recently introduced by the Art Lebedev design studio. The giant overhead lights mimic the zebra crosswalk pattern, helping drivers see pedestrians more easily. The first Air Crosswalk will be installed in Tumen, Russia in 2009.)

Employment lawyers are busier than ever.

Nick Monfort of Grand Text Auto asks, “Is game development an artistic practice? That is, is the making of a game like the making of an artistic work - visual, plastic, literary, performative, or otherwise? This is a different question. I am not one of those who believe that only those who identify themselves as artists can create art.”

Of a sad space needle in belltown Monica Guzman asks, “Is it rejected debris or spontaneous public art”?

When Alex the famous African gray parrot died in September 2007, at the age of 31, his last words to her were “You be good. I love you.” In her new book Alex & Me, Dr. Irene Pepperberg discusses their deep bond and the cognition research she conducted on Alex.

Michael Shermer of Scientific American lists five ways brain scans mislead us.

An Armed Forces Journal article on the usefulness of the blog format for sharing information in counterinsurgency operations.

The keynote speaker for the upcoming Cinema, Nature, Ecology conference in Chicago next April will be Hanna Rose Shell, assistant professor of Science & Technology Studies at MIT. Her forthcoming Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance, from Zone Books, is much anticipated.

Writing about the medicalization of “normal sadness”, Allan V. Horwitz at the Psychiatric Times explains how unlike many other diagnoses in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, “which contain qualifiers that require symptoms to be ‘excessive’ or ‘unreasonable,’ no such qualifiers exist for MDD [major depressive disorder]. Aside from the bereavement exclusion, the diagnostic criteria do not take into account the context in which symptoms arise.”

Three articles on the implosion of the US military’s ill-conceived Human Terrain System.

Vaughan over at Mind Hacks tips us off to a new Brain study which found that letter-color synaesthesia is relatively common in 6-8 year old children, but that the condition changes as the children grow.

Charlotte Roche’s scandalous German best-seller “Feuchtgebiete” will be published in the US next year under the title “Wetlands“.

A group of seventh- and eighth-grade students at Jefferson Elementary are participating in the Intelligence Technology Initiative, a new after-school program offered through Mercyhurst College, the Erie School District, and the Boys and Girls Club of Erie aimed at “training the a new generation of information technologists.”

Scientists from Maastricht University have kinda-sorta developed a method to look into the brain of a person and read out who has spoken to him or her and what was said.

Through some clever real-world experiments, Kees Keizer and colleagues from the University of Groningen have found that the presence of graffiti significantly increases littering.