Month: August 2013

Tiffany Jenkins writing in The Scotsman reviews the Edinburgh Fringe production of “HeLa“ by IronOxide.

The controversy looks set to fester long after the Festival, with developments in genetic research and Opera Winfrey and HBO making a movie of Lack’s life story. The dominant narrative is of a poor black woman who was exploited by science, when it is in fact a story of how dedicated researchers helped to save millions of lives in an unequal society. It’s a narrative that does Henrietta Lacks a disservice by focusing on her tumour cells and not on the person: she was always more than tissue. She was a mother, a wife and a woman who loved to dance. That is how she should be remembered.

Good to see a journalist and campaigner for the arts and humanities, who really does see the cultural distorting privilege of “scientism” in policy and economics generally, also defending science from the spurious accusations of race-politics and scientific exploitation in an artistic production. With balance there is hope.

Contrast that with Larry Krauss – the 5th Horseman – disingenuously twisting a story to score scientific and logical argumentation points against a theologian. If people don’t argue with respect and constructive intent, then scientism, and not humanism, continues to reign.

Larry is being pompous, disingenuous, rude and unethical – to use his own words – and “for entertainment” too! Sure, Dawkins doesn’t “set Pell up” in advance of the Q&A conversation. Pell makes a mistake (as a non-expert) in answering the host’s question, by not recognising the particular lines of genetic heredity between specific species, whilst nevertheless accepting that genetic evolution of species is “probably true”. And Dawkins, the expert, ridicules and sneers at him, rather than building on the probable truth between them. We don’t see the context before and after this exchange, but with this kind of behaviour, a pox on both their houses.

We don’t see the full Craig dialogue, so can’t comment further on that either, but ditto Larry’s “stadium rant” in the above clip shamelessly conflating the “explanation of the diversity of life – the origin of species” with the “origins of life” – reprehensible. (Same problem with his “a universe from nothing” thesis – which is really a very good, “something complex from a next-to-nothing potential-energetic vacuum” story. Simply not the same thing, and he knows it. Krauss previously on Psybertron)

I have a pretty evident agenda here that objectifying (and measuring in order to manage) the wrong things, or too narrow a slate of things, is counter-productive: Partly because objectifying or reifying the issue may be misguided in itself, and partly because “governance” is at least a two-way, if not more complex, system-behavioural game anyway, where turning measures into targets generally manifests predictably-unintended, unpredictably-undesirable consequences.

Here Part 1 and Part 2 of a paper by Ron Baker of VeraSage Institute (via LinkedIn). Not yet digested fully, but seems to cover some good ground – starting with counting as obsession and a reference to Saint-Exupery. Also the fact that Peter Drucker was definitely NOT the source of the “if you can’t measure, you can’t manage” maxim, if anything quoting it to make the opposite point – noted here before. (Interesting to see Lord Kelvin as the probable source – originally in a distinctly scientific knowledge context.) Part 2 starts with Milton Friedman’s opening gambit “How do you know?” – sound familiar? Useful reference resource.

Interesting piece in CMS Wire review a Forrester Research paper. I’m sure CMIS Building Blocks with REST API’s must be pretty close to what we’re doing with manageable reference fragments to define information involved at business interface transactions. (Thanks to Margaret Warren on Facebook also LinkedData, EmbeddedMetaData and ImageSnippets in there.)

Steven Pinker in New Republic writing Science Is Not Your Enemy – An impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled professors, and tenure-less historians – for an intellectual truce. (Posted by BHA on Facebook)

Not quite sure why particularly the neglected, embattled and tenure-less, but a plea for a truce between science and humanities. Good to add Pinker to Al Khalili amongst the scientists recognising that ongoing war is not the way forward. Science has no monopoly on intellectual rationality so it, or rather it’s more righteous scientistic humanists, really should stop attacking the humanities if they don’t want to be seen as the enemy.

The Catch-22 is that because scientistic rationality holds sway politically, socially and culturally, the humanities are indeed embattled when it comes the cycles of funding and resources. The Mexican stand-off does require the party holding the upper hand to fold first, but it takes two in any event. Pinker is of course making the case for the scientistic side only, so …

TO SIMPLIFY IS NOT TO BE SIMPLISTIC.

Diagnoses of the malaise of the humanities rightly point to anti-intellectual trends in our culture and to the commercialization of our universities. But an honest appraisal would have to acknowledge that some of the damage is self-inflicted. The humanities have yet to recover from the disaster of post-modernism, with its defiant obscurantism, dogmatic relativism, and suffocating political correctness.

If anything is naïve and simplistic, it is the conviction that the legacy silos of academia should be fortified and that we should be forever content with current ways of making sense of the world. Surely our conceptions of politics, culture, and morality have much to learn from our best understanding of the physical universe and of our make-up as a species.

But it’s not simply commercialisation and anti-intellectual trends is it Mr Pinker? That is being simplistic. It’s a reaction to an intellectualism based on scientistic standards alone. It’s a reaction to scientistic commercialism based on objective “outcomes”. Sure there were excesses in post-modernism and the like, their excesses were probably making a point, and all schools have their extremists somewhere along the line. The politically correct suffocation is if anything caused by the scientistic standards in policy-making, which exclude all non-objective standards of “correctness”.

Surely our conceptions of science and rationality have much to learn from our humanistic values. It takes two to truce.

[Post Note : Link to John Brock’s blog – Cracking the Enigma – and his post on Bronowski in response to the Pinker post comments on Twitter. One to follow – majoring on Autism – another topic here.]

It’s difficult enough trying to find balanced scepticism when it comes to anthropogenic global warming claims, but this stuff takes the biscuit. [via email from someone who should know better]

Contrails from aircraft vapour are indeed an indication that air travel dumps a lot of low grade heat, CO2 and water vapour into our atmospheric ecosystem – something we should aim to reduce by any reasonable considerations. The idea that there is some concerted project to deliberately test and introduce additional crap into that ecosystem to globally engineer weather systems is kooky. Sure there have been, and no doubt continue to be, tests and local uses to seed rain clouds in critical areas, lesser of evils, but as a global conspiracy – do me a favour.

And as I said here, I’m not an anthropogenic global warming (AGW) sceptic, I’m sceptical about objective-intentional scientific (and political) claims about AGW. Funnily enough it was this blog What’s Up With That that drew my attention via another rant from PZ Myers about this post on the new editor of Science magazine. A pox on both their houses, I say. So much middle-ground being overlooked when people take sides. Come in Zizek.

Very similar Application UI design approach I think I saw mentioned previously with Angry Birds of all things. (Hat tip to BifRiv – The article acknowledges the approach in games – discovering more plays as you progress through levels of successful use.)

Your UI design must start simple with lots of help for new users using basic new functions – you and your product are both new to its use – but of course the potential power is in ever more expert users finding more efficient and creative use of your product. So your product UI needs to have this layered user approach built in, evolving as the individual user’s use evolves.

Another interesting post from Sam. (My James Willis Scylla and Charybdis ref.)

Ideas evolve, species are created only with hindsight, everyone’s thoughts are woven from others. Original creation is no exception. Good piece on Oliver Sacks from Brain Pickings – Maria Popover again.