Whatever you can do or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.
– Goethe
In mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.
John Von Neumann
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Links for 13th October 2004
- The Book of Political Bollocks by Mark Hanks
- Practical Stats – A collection of useful guides to the application of data analytic procedures in the social sciences’
- limbicnutrition.com/blog/
- Kensho Furuya’s daily aikido thoughts
- Creativity and Structural holes (and the original paper).
- ‘What kind of questions do you get asked?’
- ‘Linguistics professor George Lakoff dissects the “war on terror” and other conservative catchphrases’
- The Earth at Night
- Teaching Melville and style: a catalogue of selected rhetorical devices (via interconnected).
- Why are Seacoasts Fractal?
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priming for social control
Catching up with my journal abstracts, I noticed this:
Rotteveel, M.; Phaf, R.H. (2004). Loading working memory enhances affective priming. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 11. 11, 2, 326-331(6).
Abstract: Stronger affective priming (Murphy & Zajonc, 1993) with suboptimal (i.e., reduced consciousness) than with optimal (i.e., full consciousness) prime presentation suggests that nonconscious processes form an important part of emotions. Merikle and Joordens (1997) have argued that both impoverished presentation and divided attention can produce suboptimal conditions and result in parallel effects. We manipulated attention by means of a concurrent working memory load while keeping presentation duration constant, as participants evaluated Japanese ideographs that were preceded by happy,neutral, or angry faces (affective priming) and male or female faces (nonaffective priming). In contrast to nonaffective priming, affective priming was larger with divided attention than with focused attention. It is concluded that manipulations of stimulus quality and of attention can both be used to probe the distinction between conscious and nonconscious processes and that the highest chances of obtaining the pattern of stronger priming with suboptimal presentation than with optimal presentation occur in the affective domain.
Which I can’t help thinking implies: if you want to pull people’s emotional strings (without them knowing it) then you should keep them busy.
Call me a social-control conspiracist, but i think this is another good reason for us all to spend more time sitting down with a cup of tea and less time working to keep the economy going
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soundbites
1. What a frikkin’ good day to be alive! Hello World!
2. It occurs to me that soundbite culture, like so many cultural phenomena, is the product of technological change. The television, and radio, technologies that carry the soundbites are those that create the need for the soundbites. We’ve always had slogans but the depthless soundbite is the product of the shift in political media from discursive to broadcast technologies.
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hacker ethics
Thanks to dan for this
Warnick B.R. (2004). Technological Metaphors and Moral Education: The Hacker Ethic and the Computational Experience. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 23, 4, 265-281.
This essay is an attempt to understand how technological metaphors, particularly computer metaphors, are relevant to moral education. After discussing various types of technological metaphors, it is argued that technological metaphors enter moral thought through their “functional descriptions.” The computer metaphor is then explored by turning to the “hacker ethic.” Analysis of this ethic reveals parallels between the experience of computer programming and the moral standards of those who are enmeshed in computer technology. This parallel suggests that the hacker ethic is being pushed by a computer metaphor and its functional descriptions in a direction of individualism and systems thinking. After examining some possible implications of the computer metaphor, this essay offers suggestions concerning how technological metaphors may be critiqued.
Ironically for a paper about the hacker ethic you can’t get the PDF on-line, but i did find Biella Coleman, from the University of Chicago and her blog, Sato Roams and her research proposal The Social Creation of Productive Freedom: Free Software Hacking and the Redefinition of Labor, Authorship, and Creativity. which contains, in the section headed ‘UNIX: A Living, Breathing Software Entity’, a quote from the wonderful In the Beginning was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson (1999):
..UNIX, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic… Likewise, UNIX is known, loved, understood by so many hackers that it can be recreated from scratch whenever someone needs it.
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an hour of being 75 years old
Quoting Slovic et al (1982), Facts versus fears: Understanding perceived risk:
…Sowby (1965) provided extensive data on risks per hour of exposure, showing, for example, than an hour of riding a motorcycle is as risky as an hour of being 75 years old.
Refs:
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Folding the Hakama
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Two more quotes
Real revolution means people choking to death on their own shit
Graffiti seen by Andy, London 2001
The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper
Eden Phillpotts
My feeling about technique in art is that it has the same value as technique in lovemaking. That is to say, heartfelt ineptitude has its charm and so has heartless skill, but what you really want is passionate virtuosity.
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Shambala photo gallery
I’ve just put up a gallery for Shambala photos. Here.
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With clear and open desire
Murray is able to produce a look that is sneaky and frank at the same time. It is a look that gives equal credence to disaster and lecherous success. He says that in the old days of his urban entanglements he believed there was only one way to seduce a women, with clear and open desire. He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilised world-weariness and a tragic sense of history – the very things, he says, that are most natural to him. Of these he has allowed only one element, vulnerability, to insert itself gradually into his program of straighforward lust. He is trying to develop a vulnerability that women will find attractive. He works at is consciously, like a man in a gym with weights and a mirrow. But his efforts so far have produced only this half sneaky look, sheepish and wheedling.
Don DeLillo, White Noise (1984)
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A logic necker cube
Andy found a spiritual-epistemological necker cube! We both agree with the majority of the statements below, but reach exactly the opposite of conclusion from that intended by the original author.
I got a job at the University of Sheffield. Part time doing some social psychology (!) on a sustainability project, part time doing some social network work, and part time free for me to indulge my other interests (some cognitive psychology experiments have come up, during writing the book, which I would like to run, and I’m sure there’s some cog neuro / neuroimaging pies I can stick my fingers into).
So, back into academia, back to Sheffield…Is it like i’ve ever been away?
US to make legal the torture, without trial, of British citizens. Our government won’t be able to protect us from the US government’s breathtaking disrespect for human rights. Read about it here
(via helmintholog)
Update 9 Oct: here
Usually I use streetmap.co.uk to get a quick O/S map of an area by postcode or street name, but today I’ve found multimap.com more useful (the interface is more graphical, the zoom in and out is better – it’s easier to use if you’re not sure where what you are looking for is in relation to everything else).
I found a map of all the counties of Great Britain and a postcode map of the same
This guide tells you what the different parts of the postcode mean. And a map and list of all the london postcodes (strictly areas and districts, but not sectors or street information) is here
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The Other Tom Stafford
A friend writes:
if you click on ‘tom stafford’ on the amazon page for pre-ordering Mind Hacks,
you get a link to your other book. You know, the one you wrote when you were
minus three, about the space race.
And it’s true. The other Tom Stafford is an astronaut who flew on Apollo 10, amongst others. For a while he was top of google for a search on ‘Tom Stafford’, but i tipped him off the top spot.
Incidentally, he’s also quoted by my favourite band, the New Model Army (who are playing in manchester on the 16th of December, by the way). On their song Space from the album Impurity, Joolz reads this quotation by the astronaut:
The white twisted clouds and the endless shades of blue in the ocean make the hum of the spacecraft systems, the radio chatter, even your own breathing disappear. There is no cold or wind or smell to tell you that you are connected to Earth. You have an almost dispassionate platform – remote, Olympian and yet so moving that you can hardly believe how emotionally attached you are to those rough patterns shifting steadily below.
So there you go
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Mind Hacks pre-order
The single clenched fist, lifted and ready
Or the open asking hand held out and waiting
Choose:
For we meet by one or the otherCarl Sandburg (1878-1967)
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The Politeness Revolution
Good In Our Time this week on ‘Politeness’ (and thanks to Matt for the heads up). You can still use Radio 4‘s Listen Again thing to hear it online (until thursday i think).
So – politeness as an active, self-conscious – almost revolutionary – social moment, and as something evoked by social changes which brough people into new forms of contact, in new social spaces, and made less relevant the old behavioural guidelines of class, sex and rank.
I wonder how can ground-rules of behaviour, aimed at mitigating conflict and misunderstanding, can be propagated in the aftermath of the current, global, sweep of social change?
(remember quote #49)
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Links for 30 Sept 04
- Sharbat Gula – ‘So many share her story’
- The Last Page
- The Oil of Hyssop at hoplit.net
- America has used its victimhood to demand a monopoly on the right to feel and to inflict pain
- ‘America. America, I’ve given you my all and now I’m nothing’ (Ginsberg)
- America Needs You! (Please indicate any and all psychological deficiencies from which you currently or have ever suffered)
- Jubilee Iraq – the Iraqi people shouldn’t pay Saddam’s bills
- Chocolypse Now
- Tegwenroberts.com
- London Review of Books: Jerry Fodor on neuroimaging research
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Nostalgia Pics
For reasons which are not entirely nostalgia based – I promise – I’ve been looking through old photos. I’ve scanned a few and put them at the front of the gallery. They cover a random mix of people, in different places and in the date range 1998-2002. I resisted scanning anything from when I was at school – to the chagrin, i’m sure, of any old, nostalgia junky, school-friends who may read this blog (you know who you are).
If you hover the cursor over a thumbnail you get a little caption about that photo…
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The Haas Effect
A neat little effect:
Moore says,
If two successive sounds are heard as fused, the location of the total sound is determined largely by the location of the first sound. This is known as the “precedence effect”, although it has been called the “Haas effect”…
This, among other things, stops you getting confused when a sound comes at you from two speakers at once.
Now, if you drop something and record the sound, and then play it back backwards, you can hear the echos that are normally masked.
(Thanks to Nicol, and his supervisor, for the info)
There is more, of course, in the book
Ref:
B.C.J. Moore, An Introduction to the Psychology of Hearing, 5th Ed., Academic Press, San Diego (2003).
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late night book editing quote
Tom: It is Good and True and those are some of our favourite things.
Matt: Good. True. Easy. Choose Two.
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Morals on Copyright
The great thing about trying to coordinate book production over three continents is that whatever time of the day or night it is, there is always someone you can ring. I just wish we were working with more people in Japan so I’d have more to do in the hours when the Americans have left work but the Europeans haven’t got up yet.
I’ve hit a momentary lull, so here are some mental notes-to-self on the business of getting permission to reprint figures and excerpts from other people’s books, articles and websites (I am not a lawyer, so there may be errors in my understanding here – it’d love to hear any corrections/qualifications people have):
Note:
[1] Another part of the general scam of scientific publishing. Scientists (paid by public money often) write, edit, peer-review and proof the articles for free, draw the figures, etc, etc and then the publishers hold the copyright and make money by selling the journal back to the University libraries (also paid for by public money).
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
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Get me away from here I’m dying
London, I’m leaving you
London, I’ve given you my all and I’m becoming less and less
London twenty-third of september two-thousand and four
I can’t stand it any more
You can keep the casual brutality of the tube
The hours lost travelling
A city not built to a human scale
The rootless anonymity of the crowds
The indifference of fearLondon, I’m sick of your insane demands
London, when will you be worthy of your overblown reputation?
London, when can I go into the supermarkets and buy back the hours I lost commuting?
I’m addressing you
Are you really going to let your emotional life be run by mammon?
Do we all really believe our own PR?
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
It occurs to me that I am being unfair
I am talking to myself againLondon, you are a vampire city
It’s like national service – compulsory, crowded, dirty and with a pervading air of violence. I’ve done my year, I want out
A hundred pretty distactions and no time or money to do them
London this is quite serious
London this is the impression I get from a year of busy insecurity
London is this correct?
I’d better get right down to the job
It’s true I don’t want to be in Westminster or drink in expensive wine-bars, I’m misanthropic and maladjusted anyway.
London, I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel
As of now I am based in Sheffield. With apologies to Allen Ginsberg.
‘all things flow and nothing is permanent‘
…in the midst of a putative peace, you could, like me, be unfortunate enough to stumble on a silent war. The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out
– Arundhati Roy
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What has psychology done?
What has psychology done? A challenge to silence the doubters comes from the BPS in this Month’s issue of The Psychologist
The Society’s Publications and Communications Board would like to produce a new document to complement the Annual Report, focusing on psychology rather than the Society. This report would outline significant scientific research developments and practical applications from the discipline in the last year.The aim is to promote the usefulness of the discipline to an external audience of research councils, politicians, civil servants, employers and journalists. Before potentially producing this as a separate document in 2006 we would like to pilot the project as a special feature in The Psychologist. Your contributions are sought. We are looking for brief descriptions of:
published research from the last year partnerships between academia and the public or commercial sector leading to new products or applications of psychological knowledge; or new professional developments which will have a significant impact on the lives of others.
…you could even just send one sentence on what has been found, one on why it is important in terms of understanding people or making a difference to their lives, plus the reference. Material has to be intrinsically relevant and interesting to an extremely wide audience with little or no background knowledge of the area, and written in a way that makes it more so. It is a tough task, but this is a great opportunity to show what psychology has been up…This is your chance to silence the psychology doubters by showcasing interesting and useful research from the last year, so get writing. Send your contribution to jonsut@bps.org.uk by Monday 15 November. Feel free to get in touch before then if you have any questions about the process or the suitability of material. [my emphasis]