Tag Archives: politics

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  • 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. This pull is espe­cially strong in those com­mer­cial plat­forms that cel­e­brate their own dif­fer­ence from the so-​​called pas­sive media of pre­vi­ous decades, and in the process mon­e­tize their users’ par­tic­i­pa­tion either directly or indi­rectly. What if—from time to time—we chose not to iden­tify with the inter­ac­tive promise of new media plat­forms or for that mat­ter new media art? What if, when the new media savants lam­bast so-​​called old media audi­ences as denizens of pas­siv­ity and ide­ol­ogy, we say, “yes, that’s me”?”

    a-​​bit-​​too-​​theoryish cultural-​​norms ingroup-​​outgroup new-​​media

  • How Can Her­bert Spencer’s 1892 Revi­sions to his Social Sta­t­ics Help Us Under­stand Con­ser­v­a­tive Oppo­si­tion to the Indi­vid­ual Man­date? | Rortybomb

    “But I think it’s clear what his real objec­tion was: uni­ver­sal suf­frage has the poten­tial to advance social­is­tic causes, inter­fer­ing with his laissez-​​faire project. From his auto­bi­og­ra­phy: “Another exten­sion of the fran­chise since made…will inevitably be fol­lowed by a still more rapid growth of social­is­tic leg­is­la­tion.” When he real­ized women’s equal­ity could poten­tially inter­fere with laissez-​​faire eco­nom­ics, it was time for women’s equal­ity to get cut from his over­all the­ory of a bet­ter world. He would rather muti­late his intel­lec­tual project instead of allow­ing his ene­mies to con­tinue to build their gov­er­nance project.”

    Herbert-​​Spencer laissez-​​faire cor­po­ratism cap­i­tal­ism pol­i­tics con­ser­vatism via:cshalizi

  • BloJJ — About con­fer­ence poster design and defense:

    “My approach is dif­fer­ent. Poster pre­sen­ta­tion, like con­fer­ence pre­sen­ta­tion, belongs more to the area of dra­matic arts than to mar­ket­ing. It is information/​entertainment, and that is the main thing you have to bear in mind when prepar­ing for the ses­sion. Plus, while at a con­fer­ence you have the full atten­tion of your audi­ence (shared, of course, with email, Face­book, plus the 10% that are sim­ply speak­ing) in a poster ses­sion you have to first attract the atten­tion of the peo­ple wan­der­ing around a hall shared with other 20 to 100 posters, then keep them there for the dura­tion of the spiel and while you start a new one, and then, of course, con­vey the infor­ma­tion you want to share with your poster. ”

    advice academic-​​culture meet­ing poster-​​presentaitons skills

  • Economist’s View: The 999

    “Some Indi­vid­u­als of our Coun­try­men, by the Smiles of Prov­i­dence or some other Means, are enabled to roll in their four–wheel’d Car­riages, and can sup­port the Expence of good Houses, rich Fur­ni­ture, and Lux­u­ri­ous Liv­ing. But, is it equi­table that 99, or rather 999 should suf­fer for the Extrav­a­gance or Grandeur of one? Espe­cially when it is consider’d, that Men fre­quently owe their Wealth to the Impov­er­ish­ment of their Neighbours.”

    it-​​was-​​ever-​​thus

  • Ris­ingTide­Har­bor: Matt Barcomb’s Blog on Lean Agile Busi­ness Soft­ware Devel­op­ment: Stop B*tching About Local Optimizations

    “In fact, one approach is to inten­tion­ally over opti­mize a local opti­miza­tion. This will often make appar­ent to man­age­ment (or even to you) where the true bot­tle neck in the sys­tem is. We shouldn’t worry so much about doing the wrong things righter, but we should be aware that that may be the case and always work to be doing the right things. In the end, show­ing improve­ment and build­ing momen­tum can lead to excit­ing changes. In fair­ness, it can also come crash­ing to the ground if the right kinds of changes aren’t made at some point, but this should not deter any­one who thinks some­thing can be made bet­ter from try­ing to do so and it cer­tainly should not be a rea­son to do nothing!”

    change cultural-​​engineering organizational-​​behavior local-​​optimization

  • Geof­frey Chaucer Hath a Blog: A Long Tyme Agoon in a Shire Far Away

    “…A WHINY YOUTHE cam nexte, barl­eye a man, With yelwe haire, tunique, and farmeres tan. But aqua­cul­ture litel did he love, He wolde been a pilot al above And bulls­eye oump-​​rattes yn a nim­ble craft.…”

    amus­ing

  • knitr: Ele­gant, flex­i­ble and fast dynamic report gen­er­a­tion with R | knitr

    “The knitr pack­age was designed to be a trans­par­ent engine for dynamic report gen­er­a­tion with R, solve some long-​​standing prob­lems in Sweave, and com­bine fea­tures in other add-​​on pack­ages into one pack­age (knitr ≈ Sweave + cacheSweave + pgf­Sweave + weaver + R2HTML::RweaveHTML + highlight::HighlightWeaveLatex + 0.2 * brew + 0.1 * SweaveListingUtils + more).”

    R-​​language LaTeX type­set­ting dynamic-​​documents writ­ing tools

  • Math Notes | Futil­ity Closet

    kata for GP

    nudge-​​targets mathematical-​​recreations

  • Cere­bral Mastication

    “There’s a charm­ing lit­tle brain teaser that’s going around the Inter­webs. It’s got var­i­ous forms, but they all look some­thing like this:…”

    nudge-​​targets mathematical-​​recreations

  • Tanya Khovanova’s Math Blog » Blog Archive » Inter­lock­ing Polyominoes

    “A set of poly­omi­noes is inter­locked if no sub­set can be moved far away from the rest. It was known that poly­omi­noes that are built from four or fewer squares do not inter­lock. The project of Dhawan and his men­tor was to inves­ti­gate the inter­locked­ness of larger poly­omi­noes. And they totally deliv­ered. They quickly proved that you can inter­lock poly­omi­noes with eight or more squares. Then they proved that pen­tomi­noes can’t inter­lock. This left them with a gray area: what hap­pens with poly­omi­noes with six or seven squares? After draw­ing many beau­ti­ful pic­tures, they finally found the struc­ture pre­sented in our accom­pa­ny­ing image. The sys­tem con­sists of 12 hex­omi­noes and 5 pen­tomi­noes, and it is rigid. You can­not move a thing. That means that hex­omi­noes can be inter­locked and thus the gray area was resolved.”

    poly­omi­noes mathematical-​​recreations nudge-​​targets

  • Pool based evo­lu­tion­ary algo­rithm pre­sented in EvoStar 2012 « GeNeura Team

    “This is the first inter­na­tion­ally pub­lished paper (it was pre­vi­ously pub­lished in a Span­ish con­fer­ence of a series that deals with a sys­tem, intended for vol­un­teer com­put­ing, that uses a pool for imple­ment­ing dis­trib­uted evo­lu­tion­ary algo­rithms. The basic idea is that the pop­u­la­tion resides in a pool (imple­mented using CouchDB), with clients pulling indi­vid­u­als from the pool, doing stuff on them, and putting them back in the pool. The algo­rithm uses, as much as pos­si­ble, CouchDB fea­tures (such as revi­sions and views) to achieve good per­for­mance. All the code (for this and, right now, for the next papers) is avail­able as open-​​source code.”

    distributed-​​processing evolutionary-​​algorithms CouchDB nudge

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

    “If the major pub­lish­ers switch to sell­ing ebooks with­out DRM, then they can enable cus­tomers to buy books from a vari­ety of out­lets and move away from the walled gar­den of the Kin­dle store. They see DRM as a defense against piracy, but piracy is a much less imme­di­ate threat than a gigan­tic multi­na­tional with rev­enue of $48 Bil­lion in 2011 (more than the entire global pub­lish­ing indus­try) that has expressed its inten­tion to “dis­rupt” them, and whose chief exec­u­tive said recently “even well-​​meaning gate­keep­ers slow inno­va­tion” (where “inno­va­tion” is code-​​speak for “oppor­tu­ni­ties for me to turn a profit”). And so they will deep-​​six their exist­ing com­mit­ment to DRM and use the terms of the DoJ-​​imposed set­tle­ment to wig­gle out of the most-​​favoured-​​nation terms imposed by Ama­zon, in order to sell their wares as widely as pos­si­ble. If they don’t, they’re doomed. And all of us who like to read (or write) fic­tion get to live in the Ama­zon com­pany town.”

    monopoly-​​and-​​monpsony-​​sittin-​​in-​​a-​​tree Ama­zon eBooks disintermediation-​​in-​​action cor­po­ratism redis­in­ter­me­di­a­tion

Items of some interest:

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These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

  • Pin­board: Book­mark Detail


    you-​​are-​​supposed-​​to-​​have-​​read-​​that-​​young-​​man

  • Cyber­net­ick Inkwell · On a def­i­n­i­tion of “open humanities”

    “The dig­i­tal human­i­ties are a part of the open human­i­ties to the extent that those same val­ues are held, though of course the purely dig­i­tal ele­ments (the code, the markup, the hard­ware) are unique to the dig­i­tal human­i­ties and live largely out­side of OH. That being said, much of DH—the com­mit­ment to open source, the col­lab­o­ra­tive nature of the field, the interdisciplinarity—is open.”

    open­ness digital-​​humanities the-​​inevitability-​​of-​​enclosures cultural-​​dynamics theory-​​as-​​code

  • Don’t Hold Your Breath | Paul Shep­heard | Archi­tect and writer | Words

    “…Nar­ra­tives are bet­ter than thumps, is the mes­sage; and in the field of human rela­tions this might well be so, but here’s the rub. Nature’s not a per­son. Nature’s not a mother. We are not fight­ing it but liv­ing it. The indus­trial land­scapes pur­sued with such ter­rific thor­ough­ness, the agri­cul­tural deserts as well as the sub­urbs, the mine­fields as well as the wind farms, the cities them­selves, are the out­comes not of rage but of sto­ries, nar­ra­tives in the dream of the human dom­i­na­tion of the world. That’s why I hug the boy’s head. It’s good that he sees him­self as a par­ti­cle of nature, a being rather than a human being, and his life as fun­da­men­tally con­sump­tive. He knows if he holds his breath he will die. He knows he must live in the present. So now I must try and teach him this: the bolt-​​ons and band-​​aids of the sus­tain­abil­ity move­ment that try to man­age our fear of the future are but another chap­ter in that book of dom­i­na­tion. It will not, in the face of the red giant, ulti­mately sus­tain. And nature as we know it now, in this snap­shot of human time, will not stay as it is, how­ever we try to pre­serve it.”

    paul-​​shepheard sus­tain­abil­ity crit­i­cism how-​​to-​​rite-​​gud

  • Grounds For Dis­per­sal | Paul Shep­heard | Archi­tect and writer | Words

    “Anonymity does not mean with­out deep con­tact, it means that the con­tact has no pre­empt­ing cer­e­mony. Col­lab­o­ra­tion, like­wise, is the proof of itself. It exists nei­ther before or after the moment it takes place, except in how it inflects your char­ac­ter. Inclu­sive­ness and par­tial­ity are sym­bi­otic, too. If par­tial is a move taken to out­flank hege­mony, the inclu­sive works to recom­bine dif­fer­ences. The para­doxes implicit in such terms are part of what makes them inter­est­ing. I’m try­ing to elu­ci­date a think­ing that is not dialec­tic, no longer depen­dent on oppo­si­tions, not look­ing for the right way. As one of the direc­tors of The­mepark, a Lon­don based fashion-​​architecture-​​photography-​​landscape com­bine said to me: “we are inter­ested in show­ing con­tent in its pure form.” At first I thought it was a joke, more of that London-​​Thing irony, but then I thought, what else is the mate­r­ial world but con­tent in its pure form? Today’s pho­tog­ra­phers, who mis­trust the Mag­num generation’s point-​​and-​​shoot real­i­ties, who set up every shot elab­o­rately, who treat land­scape, por­trait, action and spec­ta­cle as the same thing, are not being min­i­mal­ist. They are posit­ing the veloc­ity of the image.”

    paul-​​shepheard crit­i­cism style how-​​to-​​rite-​​gud

  • Mario Carpo: Post-​​Authorial Cre­ation | berfrois

    “This is where the design pro­fes­sions are increas­ingly feel­ing some dis­com­fort.  Design­ers like to design.  They like to be in charge of all aspects of what they cre­ate.  Many design­ers are noto­ri­ously con­trol freaks.  And rightly so: being in con­trol is their rai­son d’être.  Tra­di­tion­ally, design­ers “authored” objects and “autho­rized” their pro­duc­tion, repro­duc­tion, or mod­i­fi­ca­tion.  Their sig­na­ture had (it still has, by the way) bind­ing, legal value–implying autho­r­ial priv­i­leges pro­tected by law, and all the lia­bil­i­ties result­ing from that.  But once again, dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies do not work that way.  When so many peo­ple can work together, who is in charge?  Who reaps the hon­ors?  Who pays the damages?”

    design con­trol planning-​​as-​​a-​​symptom mass-​​customization control-​​of-​​the-​​means-​​of-​​thought

  • Repub­li­can con­ser­vatism (com­plete rewrite) — Crooked Timber

    “The polit­i­cal impli­ca­tion, which has drawn some flak in the com­ments, but which I think is cor­rect is that there is no point in polit­i­cal engage­ment with author­i­tar­ian con­ser­v­a­tives. In a polit­i­cal envi­ron­ment where they are con­cen­trated in one party,politics is going to be a mat­ter the only strat­egy open to lib­er­als is to out­num­ber and out­vote them by peel­ing off as many periph­eral groups (for exam­ple, those who devi­ate from the approved cul­tural iden­tity in some way) as pos­si­ble. Obvi­ously, that’s an unpalat­able con­clu­sion in all sorts of ways, but I think it’s a valid one.”

    con­ser­vatism Repub­li­cans pol­i­tics nature-​​and-​​nurture-​​sittin-​​in-​​a-​​tree

  • Bot­tle the Infla­tion Mon­ster! — Crooked Timber

    ‘Fur­ther­more this seems to me to play once again into the view that ‘eco­nom­ics’ is tech­ni­cal and has right answers, while ‘pol­i­tics’ is emo­tive and con­tested, so stu­dents of the EU don’t have to talk about it.’

    eco­nom­ics infla­tion ped­a­gogy for-​​the-​​little-​​chilluns

Items of some interest:

Posted on by

These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

Items of some interest:

Posted on by

These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

Items of some interest:

Posted on by

These are my recent Pin​board​.in links: