I just came across VoiceThread, a new collaborative media site which aims to facilitate "Group conversations around images, docs and videos. It allows not only text comments, but audio and video comments, and even doodling (whiteboard style) on the presentation itself.
This has all sorts of amazing applications, but I've embedded this particular VoiceThread because I found it very moving, and it really captures the storytelling element of media and its collective emotional function.
In it, a woman from New Orleans shows her son around the house they lived in before Katrina, which he was too young to remember. This would be little more than a poignant family slideshow, were it not for Les (unrelated to the author) who has logged in to thank her for sharing her memories of his hometown before the flood.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Friday, December 14, 2007
German politician flames Wikipedia, then reverts
A little over a week ago, the SMH reprinted a Reuters report about criminal charges filed against the German version of Wikipedia by a left-wing German politician, Katina Schubert, over what she considered to be the excessive use of Nazi symbolism, especially on the site's page on the Hitler Youth.
Fortunately, by the time the Oz and Yahoo!7News picked up the story, Schubert's party - Die Linke- had made it clear that she did not have their support in bringing the charge, which she promptly dropped, although not before claiming a victory for beginning the "debate".
I'm starting to think we need some kind of award for naive attacks on Wikipedia. Any suggestions for a title?
Fortunately, by the time the Oz and Yahoo!7News picked up the story, Schubert's party - Die Linke- had made it clear that she did not have their support in bringing the charge, which she promptly dropped, although not before claiming a victory for beginning the "debate".
I'm starting to think we need some kind of award for naive attacks on Wikipedia. Any suggestions for a title?
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Liberal party ad bonanza
I thought the Liberal party's advertising onslaught last night was pretty intense in the leadup to the Wednesday night cut off for TV and radio election ads.
But today, we've gone from the annoying to the ridiculous. Liberal party ads are all over the SMH today, on the very same pages reporting the story about the Libs' Lindsay leaflet scandal.
Even Paul Keating's opinion piece had to compete with the Liberals scare campaign.
But never fear... the Tele is here!
In a shock move(!?), the Daily Telegraph has just announced it will back Kevin Rudd in the election on Saturday, citing John Howard's planned retirement in the middle of his next term as their justification.
"Our three-year terms of Federal Government are short enough without the added downside of the candidate for Prime Minister making a vague promise to walk away at half-way through.
"The 18-month to two year construction Mr Howard has put on his departure is, bluntly, an insult to the voters' collective intelligence."
...like the invasion of Iraq, climate change scepticism, detention centres, the AWB scandal, suspension of the rule of law for Dr Hanif and David Hicks, politicisation of the bureaucracy and the AFP, repeal of civil liberties, work choices (ha ha), excessive government secrecy, (it goes on and on) weren't enough!
But today, we've gone from the annoying to the ridiculous. Liberal party ads are all over the SMH today, on the very same pages reporting the story about the Libs' Lindsay leaflet scandal.
Even Paul Keating's opinion piece had to compete with the Liberals scare campaign.
But never fear... the Tele is here!
In a shock move(!?), the Daily Telegraph has just announced it will back Kevin Rudd in the election on Saturday, citing John Howard's planned retirement in the middle of his next term as their justification.
"Our three-year terms of Federal Government are short enough without the added downside of the candidate for Prime Minister making a vague promise to walk away at half-way through.
"The 18-month to two year construction Mr Howard has put on his departure is, bluntly, an insult to the voters' collective intelligence."
...like the invasion of Iraq, climate change scepticism, detention centres, the AWB scandal, suspension of the rule of law for Dr Hanif and David Hicks, politicisation of the bureaucracy and the AFP, repeal of civil liberties, work choices (ha ha), excessive government secrecy, (it goes on and on) weren't enough!
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
How to talk about books you've never read
The economist this week has a review of this book by Pierre Bayard, who argues that "the truly cultivated person is not the one who has read a book, but the one who understands the book's place in our culture." Well... that's not exactly what Bayard wrote, it's just a line from the publisher's blurb, but I think I get the idea. Perhaps I'll get around to reading his book one day...
Either way, it is deeply satisfying to hear someone argue for a more subtle relationship to books than simple consumption.
I've always thought of my relationship with authors I should have read or would like to read to be a kind of flirting (which is Irigaray's term, I believe). I've been flirting with de Beauvoir and Nietzsche for a number of years now. By contrast, I feel I am in a very domesticated relationship with Merleau-Ponty. Reading Husserl, it must be said, and I speak from experience here, is like soliciting a prostitute. The encounter is always very professional, but have no doubt, he will make you pay for it.
To be honest, just thinking about reading Nietzsche is enough to make me feel emasculated; nothing but a herd-like wimp. By contrast, I regularly have enjoyable one night stands with Alphonso Lingis and Michel Foucault.
Ironically, lately it has been a political economist, Michael Albert, and a lawyer, Roberto Unger, who have got my pulse racing. I actually did read all of Albert's book, Parecon, but Unger's heady passion was a little too much, so I had to set aside The Self Awakened for fear of swooning. In the cold light of day, however, I am starting to suspect I may have succumbed to nothing more a childish crush.
This may also explain why I tend to prefer to read minor literary figures. Reading incredibly popular books by Sartre or Heidegger or Zizek, or the classics like Hegel or even Kant, feels a little like getting on the town bike. You can't help but be constantly reminded that everyone has been here before.
At the moment, Bayard is just a pretty thing on the other side of the room. But who knows, he's unlikely to be as disappointing a tumble in the hay as Michel Onfray.
Either way, it is deeply satisfying to hear someone argue for a more subtle relationship to books than simple consumption.
I've always thought of my relationship with authors I should have read or would like to read to be a kind of flirting (which is Irigaray's term, I believe). I've been flirting with de Beauvoir and Nietzsche for a number of years now. By contrast, I feel I am in a very domesticated relationship with Merleau-Ponty. Reading Husserl, it must be said, and I speak from experience here, is like soliciting a prostitute. The encounter is always very professional, but have no doubt, he will make you pay for it.
To be honest, just thinking about reading Nietzsche is enough to make me feel emasculated; nothing but a herd-like wimp. By contrast, I regularly have enjoyable one night stands with Alphonso Lingis and Michel Foucault.
Ironically, lately it has been a political economist, Michael Albert, and a lawyer, Roberto Unger, who have got my pulse racing. I actually did read all of Albert's book, Parecon, but Unger's heady passion was a little too much, so I had to set aside The Self Awakened for fear of swooning. In the cold light of day, however, I am starting to suspect I may have succumbed to nothing more a childish crush.
This may also explain why I tend to prefer to read minor literary figures. Reading incredibly popular books by Sartre or Heidegger or Zizek, or the classics like Hegel or even Kant, feels a little like getting on the town bike. You can't help but be constantly reminded that everyone has been here before.
At the moment, Bayard is just a pretty thing on the other side of the room. But who knows, he's unlikely to be as disappointing a tumble in the hay as Michel Onfray.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Teachers v Students: MTV style
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Rock climbing and philosophy?
On Tuesday, I had my first experience of rock climbing for many years, down at the Ledge climbing centre at Sydney University.
It turns out that climbing is disproportionately represented among members of the philosophy faculty at Sydney, and it prompts the question: what's the attraction?
Not being one to shy away from generalisations founded on metaphors, I came up with a couple of striking similarities between the practice of philosophy and rock climbing.
The first may be the most contentious, since it's based on distinguishing philosophy from science (differences which some philosophers are loathe to emphasise). Philosophy is to science, what rock climbing is to playing with rocks. Science tends to proceed by imposing theoretical or practical boundaries on the phenomena which it is interested in. That is, science tends to be concerned with a particular isolable system. It then pokes and prods that system in order to understand the thing by explaining the way it responds. What distinguishes philosophy, and what may explain the attraction to rock climbing, is that philosophy grapples with phenomena that it can't constrain, phenomena like the worldhood of the world (to borrow from Husserl), questions like why there is something rather than nothing, and so on. Climbers similarly find themselves grappling with a structure that seriously exceeds their control. What they try to do is hang on and slowly ascend, rather than isolating things and breaking them down.
Secondly, the kind of phenomena philosophers are interested in are those in which one can become hopelessly entangled - for example, consciousness or knowledge - phenomena which include the inquiry and the ones conducting the inquiry themselves. Philosophy is for this reason a precarious pursuit. It is very difficult to simply walk away from philosophical problems, unless one is relatively satisfied with the sustainability of their position, because one often feels that one's very connection with the world is at stake.
Third, the attraction might also throw light on the way philosophers argue with one another. There are rarely knock-down arguments in philosophy. Positions are rarely proven or disproven. What happens rather is that philosophers debate over the relative fruitfulness of a particular next move, or else they seek to retrace the steps of a predecessor looking for alternative, unexplored branches of thought. This resembles talk about climbing. Certain holds and positions have relative merit depending on how secure they are, and what further moves up the face they allow.
On the other hand, as Juzzeau pointed out to me, philosophical debate itself has a tendency to focus on minutiae. I think the rock climbing analogy makes this more intelligible as a consequence of grappling with a phenomenon that is a) beyond one's control and b) places one's existence in question, and engaging in an activity where c) the smallest differences in approach can be the difference between overcoming the problem and becoming trapped at a particular spot.
What I like about this third aspect of the analogy is that, like Juzzeau's tango philosophy, it opens up the possibility of talking about differences between philosophical positions and practices in terms of differences in the bodies of practitioners, and the particular challenges they struggle with on their small patch of the philosophical cliff-face.
====
Added 8th November:
Thinking about this a little more, I realise that one might be worried about how to conceive of the goal of philosophy as opposed to climbing - what's at the top of the mountain?
One can imagine an absurdist response - there is no goal, the task is meaningless. In that case, the philosopher starts to resemble Sisyphus, except that, instead of pushing a rock uphill, the philosopher pushes the rock below themself to make their way uphill.
It turns out that climbing is disproportionately represented among members of the philosophy faculty at Sydney, and it prompts the question: what's the attraction?
Not being one to shy away from generalisations founded on metaphors, I came up with a couple of striking similarities between the practice of philosophy and rock climbing.
The first may be the most contentious, since it's based on distinguishing philosophy from science (differences which some philosophers are loathe to emphasise). Philosophy is to science, what rock climbing is to playing with rocks. Science tends to proceed by imposing theoretical or practical boundaries on the phenomena which it is interested in. That is, science tends to be concerned with a particular isolable system. It then pokes and prods that system in order to understand the thing by explaining the way it responds. What distinguishes philosophy, and what may explain the attraction to rock climbing, is that philosophy grapples with phenomena that it can't constrain, phenomena like the worldhood of the world (to borrow from Husserl), questions like why there is something rather than nothing, and so on. Climbers similarly find themselves grappling with a structure that seriously exceeds their control. What they try to do is hang on and slowly ascend, rather than isolating things and breaking them down.
Secondly, the kind of phenomena philosophers are interested in are those in which one can become hopelessly entangled - for example, consciousness or knowledge - phenomena which include the inquiry and the ones conducting the inquiry themselves. Philosophy is for this reason a precarious pursuit. It is very difficult to simply walk away from philosophical problems, unless one is relatively satisfied with the sustainability of their position, because one often feels that one's very connection with the world is at stake.
Third, the attraction might also throw light on the way philosophers argue with one another. There are rarely knock-down arguments in philosophy. Positions are rarely proven or disproven. What happens rather is that philosophers debate over the relative fruitfulness of a particular next move, or else they seek to retrace the steps of a predecessor looking for alternative, unexplored branches of thought. This resembles talk about climbing. Certain holds and positions have relative merit depending on how secure they are, and what further moves up the face they allow.
On the other hand, as Juzzeau pointed out to me, philosophical debate itself has a tendency to focus on minutiae. I think the rock climbing analogy makes this more intelligible as a consequence of grappling with a phenomenon that is a) beyond one's control and b) places one's existence in question, and engaging in an activity where c) the smallest differences in approach can be the difference between overcoming the problem and becoming trapped at a particular spot.
What I like about this third aspect of the analogy is that, like Juzzeau's tango philosophy, it opens up the possibility of talking about differences between philosophical positions and practices in terms of differences in the bodies of practitioners, and the particular challenges they struggle with on their small patch of the philosophical cliff-face.
====
Added 8th November:
Thinking about this a little more, I realise that one might be worried about how to conceive of the goal of philosophy as opposed to climbing - what's at the top of the mountain?
One can imagine an absurdist response - there is no goal, the task is meaningless. In that case, the philosopher starts to resemble Sisyphus, except that, instead of pushing a rock uphill, the philosopher pushes the rock below themself to make their way uphill.
Save Election Tracker's young online journos from being Crikeyed
Tim Longhurst has raised the alarm about media player Crikey raining on the parade of a talented election commentary site run by Aussie youth since 2004.
The site, electiontracker.net, which is run by Vibewire, is now finding its online presence undermined by the creation in late September of Crikey's electiontracker.com.au.
Amber Sloan, General Manager of Crikey, has ruled out adding cross links between the sites (what Wikipedians would call a disambiguation page), claiming it will only exacerbate the problem.
The folks at Vibewire don't have the material resources to defend their trademark, but you can help get the site above Crikey's in Google searches, by linking from your own sites.
Oh hell, while you're at it, email Amber, and tell her you don't like Crikey undermining the next generation of online journalists.
The site, electiontracker.net, which is run by Vibewire, is now finding its online presence undermined by the creation in late September of Crikey's electiontracker.com.au.
Amber Sloan, General Manager of Crikey, has ruled out adding cross links between the sites (what Wikipedians would call a disambiguation page), claiming it will only exacerbate the problem.
The folks at Vibewire don't have the material resources to defend their trademark, but you can help get the site above Crikey's in Google searches, by linking from your own sites.
Oh hell, while you're at it, email Amber, and tell her you don't like Crikey undermining the next generation of online journalists.
Monday, October 15, 2007
BrainOfJ: Reading spaces = thinking room?
Just re-discovered this post from 2004 (BrainOfJ: Reading spaces = thinking room?), which suggests that Charlemagne started a revolution in communication by introducing spaces between words. Spaces enabled silent reading for the first time, separating writing from speech and contributing to the fall of the priestly class's monoploy on literacy.
The historical claim probably goes too far (historians: what should I read on this?), but it seems to me that focusing on a bodily enabling condition for a separation between writing and speaking might provide a starting point for re-introducing the body into Derrida's philosophy of the text.
The historical claim probably goes too far (historians: what should I read on this?), but it seems to me that focusing on a bodily enabling condition for a separation between writing and speaking might provide a starting point for re-introducing the body into Derrida's philosophy of the text.
Summer project: Pop-in-pot cooler
In 2000, Nigerian teacher Mohammed Bah Abba won the Rolex award for inventing the Pop-in-pot evaporation cooler. It so simple, put one terracotta pot inside another, and fill the gap with wet sand. On dry days, the water in the sand evaporates through the porous clay of the outer pot, cooling the contents much the same way that sweat cools the body. This simple device, which uses no electricity, keeps vegetables fresh for up to nine times longer than usual in the harsh, dry Nigerian climate.
So, I was thinking I'd like to bring a little Nigerian entrepreneurship into the backyard this summer, and build my own pot-in-pot cooler, to keep the drinks cool at barbies. It's a hell of a lot more energy efficient than starting up the mini-fridge! And a great way to subtly promote sustainable living among friends and family. (There are instructions on how to build one at instructables.com - one of my favourite websites.)
My only concern is that Sydney summer's won't be dry enough for the pot-in-pot to work. If not, perhaps the traditional Australian version, the Coolgardie Safe, which works in a similar way, would be a better option. Anyone got any pointers?
So, I was thinking I'd like to bring a little Nigerian entrepreneurship into the backyard this summer, and build my own pot-in-pot cooler, to keep the drinks cool at barbies. It's a hell of a lot more energy efficient than starting up the mini-fridge! And a great way to subtly promote sustainable living among friends and family. (There are instructions on how to build one at instructables.com - one of my favourite websites.)
My only concern is that Sydney summer's won't be dry enough for the pot-in-pot to work. If not, perhaps the traditional Australian version, the Coolgardie Safe, which works in a similar way, would be a better option. Anyone got any pointers?
Friday, October 12, 2007
The "Perfect Match" of politics
Tim Hollo at Greensblog has brought my attention to a bunch of interesting new sites springing up that offer an online test to determine which political party you're most ideological compatible.
I subjected myself to Bryan Palmer's version at OzPolitics. I was a little surprised by the results. I'd expected to be closest to the Democrats, but I came up with a nearly 90% compatibility with the Greens.
A quick look at the 100 most recent results turns up another interesting factoid: it seems that lefties are far more likely to play this game of political "Perfect Match" than conservatives. Maybe Bryan's test skews to the left, but I wouldn't be surprised if this turned out to be generally true. I wonder what it says about the left, about our need to reaffirm our ideological beliefs in a pseudo-scientific fashion, as though we ourselves weren't as well acquainted with what we stand for than a web-based thermometer. Or do we just like (need?) to have proof that we really are as left as we claim to be?
It's worth putting this all in the context of another site, the Political Compass, which also arrived on Facebook not long ago. The site advocates a two-dimensional model of politics, complementing the traditional left-right economic dimension with a social dimension that has authoritarian and anti-authoritarian positions at its poles. This allows political positions to be divided into four quadrants Authoritarian Right, Authoritarian Left, Libertarian Left and Libertarian Right.
The diagram really does help make sense of a lot of talking at cross-purposes I find I have with supporters of Friedman or Hayek . I think a lot of the time people find a quadrant they like, for example, the Libertarian Right position, and then collapse the rest of the diagram back into a single dimension. I'm thinking of friends of mine who assume that the only way to be a libertarian - i.e. to value human freedom - is to occupy the Libertarian Right position and so be in favour of deregulated markets. Anyone against free markets - i.e. on the left - is clearly an authoritarian (read, Stalinist). But this conveniently neglects the SW quadrant, or Libertarian Left, which is in favour of protecting individuals and communities against the irrational forces of markets, so they can exercise the freedoms in other ways than sleeping under bridges.
But the real reason I bring this site up is because the site maps the parties likely to participate in the 2007 Australian Election on this diagram. It's available here. What is terrifying about this representation is that it clearly shows the push toward the Authoritarian Right. Only two parties are actually located in the Libertarian half of the diagram. It just goes to show how far away from the mainstream many of us are.
I subjected myself to Bryan Palmer's version at OzPolitics. I was a little surprised by the results. I'd expected to be closest to the Democrats, but I came up with a nearly 90% compatibility with the Greens.
A quick look at the 100 most recent results turns up another interesting factoid: it seems that lefties are far more likely to play this game of political "Perfect Match" than conservatives. Maybe Bryan's test skews to the left, but I wouldn't be surprised if this turned out to be generally true. I wonder what it says about the left, about our need to reaffirm our ideological beliefs in a pseudo-scientific fashion, as though we ourselves weren't as well acquainted with what we stand for than a web-based thermometer. Or do we just like (need?) to have proof that we really are as left as we claim to be?
It's worth putting this all in the context of another site, the Political Compass, which also arrived on Facebook not long ago. The site advocates a two-dimensional model of politics, complementing the traditional left-right economic dimension with a social dimension that has authoritarian and anti-authoritarian positions at its poles. This allows political positions to be divided into four quadrants Authoritarian Right, Authoritarian Left, Libertarian Left and Libertarian Right.
The diagram really does help make sense of a lot of talking at cross-purposes I find I have with supporters of Friedman or Hayek . I think a lot of the time people find a quadrant they like, for example, the Libertarian Right position, and then collapse the rest of the diagram back into a single dimension. I'm thinking of friends of mine who assume that the only way to be a libertarian - i.e. to value human freedom - is to occupy the Libertarian Right position and so be in favour of deregulated markets. Anyone against free markets - i.e. on the left - is clearly an authoritarian (read, Stalinist). But this conveniently neglects the SW quadrant, or Libertarian Left, which is in favour of protecting individuals and communities against the irrational forces of markets, so they can exercise the freedoms in other ways than sleeping under bridges.
But the real reason I bring this site up is because the site maps the parties likely to participate in the 2007 Australian Election on this diagram. It's available here. What is terrifying about this representation is that it clearly shows the push toward the Authoritarian Right. Only two parties are actually located in the Libertarian half of the diagram. It just goes to show how far away from the mainstream many of us are.
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
St Paul's College Talk
I haven't posted for a while, but I've been doing a lot of thinking about the implications of new social web technologies for academia, which culminated in a talk I gave at St Paul's College (USYD) on Monday 17th September. Thanks again to my student Don Cameron for the invitation.
The content of my talk doesn't really reflect the breadth of the ensuing discussion, which I found challenging and rewarding. I hope to cover some of the points raised in the coming weeks.
- J
Wikipedia and its potential consequences for the academy
The content of my talk doesn't really reflect the breadth of the ensuing discussion, which I found challenging and rewarding. I hope to cover some of the points raised in the coming weeks.
- J
Wikipedia and its potential consequences for the academy
Sometime last Thursday, Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia published its two millionth English article. The subject-matter of the article itself was particularly appropriate. It describes a Spanish TV show called El Hormiguero, which achieved fame in 2006 for getting audience members to walk across a swimming pool filled with a liquid goo, an "oobleck" of cornstarch and water.
On the face of it, this article seems to betray precisely the kind of low-brow popular interest that the internet is constantly criticised for promoting. However, within a click or two from this page one can find oneself learning about other non-Newtownian forms of liquid goo which, thanks to the relationship they exhibit between viscosity and shear, are a principal component in all-wheel drive cars. Another click away, and you're learning some of the basic physics of torque. Alternatively, taking a different route, you would quickly discover the term "oobleck" was coined Theodor Seuss Giesel, affectionately known as Dr. Seuss, and that the name is correctly pronounce soice, as in voice.
This slippage between the technical and the trivial is just one of the contradictions we find in the wonderful world of Wikipedia. Tonight I want to examine a few others, and make some irresponsible remarks about the impact this might have on academia. But first, a straw poll. How many of you have visited Wikipedia? How many have contributed in some way? And how many of you have vandalised a page by adding libellous material to an article about a public figure you loathe? No-one. Just me then.
Some history
Wikipedia was founded by Jimbo Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15th, 2001, as a free content adjunct to the Nupedia project, which invited only expert contributors. It was originally conceived as a good source of raw content for the Nupedia, content which would undergo expert editing before publication. However, Wikipedia soon became a cultural phenomenon, and Nupedia was abandoned. Within twelve months of Wikipedia's launch, the English edition boasted 1000 articles and several non-english language editions had been started, beginning with German, Catalan and French. Within two years, the English edition had passed 100,000 articles, and by 2004, the Wikipedia as a whole had reached 1 million articles in over 100 languages. Today, there are over 7.5 million articles on the Wikipedia in about 250 languages and the wikipedia.org domain name ranks as the 10th most visited domain on the Internet. It has upwards of 20 times the amount of internet traffic enjoyed by the online addition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
Intellectual Authority
Over its six-year history, Wikipedia has been the subject of a number of controversies, from an attempt by a false charity to gain credibility through the Boxing Day tsunami article, to the doctoring of biographies of US politicians by their political aides, and more recently the discovery that (after ISPs) our own Defense Department was biggest, Australian contributor of anonymous edits to Wikipedia. These have threatened to undermine the authority and reliability of the site, which is constantly under scrutiny.
Amateurisation
This brings us to the central issue surrounding the emergence of Wikipedia as the dominant source of encyclopedic information of the internet. That is, it's reliability and its status as an encyclopedia. One of the founders of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, has actually become the biggest critic of the site in this regard, claiming that the Wikipedia suffers from a serious inconsistency in the quality of articles on any topic in a highly specialized, namely, those topics to which one traditionally defers to experts. For example, in an article in Kuro5hin, Sanger claimed that Wikipedia's philosophy section leaves a lot to be desired when compared to that of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. "From the point of view of a specialist," he wrote, "let's just say that Wikipedia needs a lot of work." http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/30/142458/25
We'll come back to why Sanger thinks this is a problem that is unlikely to go away. What is clear is that this criticism plays into a more general criticism of the Internet, which stresses the threat of a rapidly developing Cult of the Amateur. That's the title of a recent book by Andrew Keen, who champions the movement. Keen is well-known for his conspiratorial view of Web 2.0. He writes that "Just as Marx seduced a generation of European idealists with his fantasy of self-realization in a communist utopia, so the Web 2.0 cult of creative self-realization has seduced everyone in Silicon Valley. The movement bridges counter-cultural radicals of the '60s such as Steve Jobs with the contemporary geek culture of Google's Larry Page." "Elite artists and an elite media industry are symbiotic. If you democratize media, then you end up democratizing talent. The unintended consequence of all this democratization, to misquote Web 2.0 apologist Thomas Friedman, is cultural "flattening." No more Hitchcocks, Bonos, or Sebalds. Just the flat noise of opinion--Socrates's nightmare."
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/006/714fjczq.asp?pg=2
Sanger himself has taken up the challenge and recently created a competitor site to Wikipedia, named Citizendium. In effect, it's a rehashing of the Nupedia idea, with all articles being edited by content experts in the relevant field. Despite its awkward name, Citizendium claims to be matching Wikipedia early growth rate, with over 1000 english language articles in its first year. "The result," Sanger claims, "will be not only enormous and free, but reliable.” Times Online, Sept 8, 2007
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article2409783.ece
Brittanica vs Wikipedia
But how reliable is Wikipedia? In 2005, the relative intellectual merit of Wikipedia was tested by the preeminent scientific journal, Nature. Nature took random sample articles from Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Brittania, and sent the text via email to experts in the relevant field. Altogether 42 articles from each encyclopedia were given peer reviews. Nature reported that "Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia." Nature also reported that while Wikipedia's articles were found to have an average of about four factual errors, omissions or misleading statements per article, the Encyclopedia Brittanica only managed to go one better, with an average of three. They did find that Brittanica's articles were better written and more readable, but that because of it's editorial processes, Brittanica lagged behind developments in research compared to Wikipedia, which is able to update its content almost in real time.
Brittanica was so incensed by this result that, somewhat foolishly, it attempted to challenge it, and suffered a comprehensive rebuttal by Nature's editors. In some ways, this test only goes to show the limitations of the comparison and the standard that it represents. After all, the strength of Wikipedia is, firstly, that it is built by a community without any boundaries. Anyone can edit. Most people equate "anyone" with the lowest-common denominator, but this openness actually cuts both ways. It means that those on the cutting edge of a discipline can contribute just as easily as the most naïve. It also means that as Wikipedia becomes more of a household resource, those genuinely concerned with the representation of their discipline will be more inclined to shift from being users or critics of Wikipedia, to being contributors.
What's more, there's no reason why the same people who consult the encyclopedia brittanica for their information can't also contribute to Wikipedia. The second remarkable thing about the Wikipedia, and another source of its strength, is that it's agnosticism about its sources allows it to rapidly absorb its competitors advances. Improving the standard of the encyclopedia Brittanica can't help but improve the standard of the Wikipedia. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that Wikipedia simply does not recognize competitors, it only recognizes collaborators.
As a commentator on John Quiggins' blog recently put it "Many of wikipedias critics dont appear to understand the meaning of the word[s] collaborative and user editable. Rather than bagging it’s inaccuracies, why don’t they fix them?"
http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2006/04/27/wikipedia-doubling-time
The final aspect of Wikipedia that is revealed by Nature's attempt to assess its intellectual value is the inherently provisional character of its content. In a wiki, by virtue of their being editable, articles never actually leave the editing phase. They are never published in the traditional sense. This gives the Wikipedia, and indeed every wiki, the sense of being an unfinished (and we might say, unfinishable) project. To be sure, people do still generally arrive at Wikipedia expecting a finished, authoritative article – and some have complained that this is precisely the problem with the site calling itself an encyclopedia. However, the more interesting question is whether a shift in readers' expectations to match what the site delivers would actually be a good thing.
Thus, Wikipedia can be regarded as playing an important, but generally unacknowledged, part in what network-economy theorist Yochai Benkler calls "the most fundamental and long-standing effect that Internet communications are having … on the cultural practice of public communication," which is that
"the Internet allows individuals to abandon the idea of the public sphere as primarily constructed of finished statements uttered by a small set of actors socially understood to be "the media" (whether state owned or commercial) and separated from society, and to move toward a set of social practices that see individuals as participating in a debate. Statements in the public sphere can now be seen as invitations for a conversation, not as finished goods." (Benkler 2006, 180)
Substitute the academy for the media in that quote, and you get an idea of the subtle transformation taking place. As the public sphere in which academic discourse takes place comes to be regarded as populated with unfinished statements, the harder it is to distinguish a group of agents or academics who have a specialised capacity and authority to contribute to the conversation.
In fact, the breakdown of the boundaries of academia have been welcomed in some quarters. For example, the influential members of the Institute for the Future of the Book argue that
the goals of scholarship, teaching, and service are deeply intertwined, and that a reimagining of the scholarly press through the affordances of contemporary network technologies will enable us not simply to build a better publishing process but also to forge better relationships among colleagues, and between the academy and the public.
They argue that the shift to an open-access scholarly network will allow the academy
to forge a more inclusive community of scholars who challenge opaque forms of traditional scholarship by foregrounding process and emphasizing critical dialogue. Such dialogue … will also build bridges with diverse non-academic communities, allowing the academy to regain its credibility with these constituencies who have come to equate scholarly critical discourse with ivory tower elitism.
http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2006/07/introducing_mediacommons_or_ti.html
It's worthwhile returning to Larry Sanger at this point. Sanger argues that the reason why the representation of specialised knowledge on the Wikipedia is not likely to improve with the growth of the site, is because the openness of Wikipedia forces experts to defend their views against attack from non-experts, usually on the talk page of the article in question. That is, Sanger regards an open-access scholarly network as opening the door to anti-intellectualism.
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/30/142458/25
The debate, like the internet itself, remains open and unfinished. Yet it's clear that it has enormous significance for the very notion of an academy, and the relationship between that community and the public at large, since significant sectors of the public are now clearly expressing a desire to take responsibility themselves for the production of knowledge. The question for us within the academy is not, how do we reassert our rights as experts, since we have other avenues of publication where those rights are respected. The question for us is rather how can we embrace this desire and play an effective role (even if it is a supporting one) in the biggest aggregation of human knowledge since the Library at Alexandria.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
IE6 not displaying images
Here's a bug in IE6 that is worth remembering.
Situation:
All the thumbnails in a site I am working on display in FF, but some of them do not display in IE6. (Note: they all display fine in IE7).
I've ruled out mistakes in the img src field, and the images preview fine in the standard Windows preview utility.
Diagnosis:
Turns out some of these images are GIFs that have been saved with a .jpg suffix (i.e. someone has tried to convert them to JPEGs by changing the extension).
Now, Firefox can handle this little mistake fine, since it takes it's cue from the encoding of the image (I presume), but IE6 simply refuses to display the images.
How to tell:
If you suspect this may be the problem you're having, a good way to check is by trying to open the offending image in Photoshop, which is also incapable of handling this ambiguity, and throws up the following error
Situation:
All the thumbnails in a site I am working on display in FF, but some of them do not display in IE6. (Note: they all display fine in IE7).
I've ruled out mistakes in the img src field, and the images preview fine in the standard Windows preview utility.
Diagnosis:
Turns out some of these images are GIFs that have been saved with a .jpg suffix (i.e. someone has tried to convert them to JPEGs by changing the extension).
Now, Firefox can handle this little mistake fine, since it takes it's cue from the encoding of the image (I presume), but IE6 simply refuses to display the images.
How to tell:
If you suspect this may be the problem you're having, a good way to check is by trying to open the offending image in Photoshop, which is also incapable of handling this ambiguity, and throws up the following error
Could not complete your request because reading arithmetic coded JPEG files is not implemented.Ah yes, the old arithmetic coded JPEG file... aka a GIF!
Friday, May 18, 2007
Dirk Gently and the new Internet Radio
Is it just me or are internet radio stations like Pandora and last.fm based on an idea that resembles Dirk Gently's method of holistic navigation: i.e.
When trying to get somewhere, follow a random car.
You may not end up where you were going.
But you'll certainly find yourself somewhere you needed to be.
The only difference being on these stations, you don't follow one car, you follow the traffic.
When trying to get somewhere, follow a random car.
You may not end up where you were going.
But you'll certainly find yourself somewhere you needed to be.
The only difference being on these stations, you don't follow one car, you follow the traffic.
Monday, April 23, 2007
Owning an Idea
Ideas cannot be owned. They belong to whomever understands them. - Sol Lewitt(thanks to dataisnature for the quote)
Maybe ownership of ideas should take into account the way they are acquired - i.e. by understanding them.
Monday, April 16, 2007
Mars Bar bombs
Ok. Here's a bit of trivia that puts the energy needs of the human body into perspective.
1 Mars bar contains about 1 megajoule (239,000 calories) of energy, which is about a 1/4 of the energy released by explosion of one kilogram of TNT, and about 10 times the kinetic energy of a car travelling at highway speeds.
The mars bar isn't that special, by the way. There's an equivalent nutritional energy to be had in 150g of rice!
(Source: Wikipedia "Orders of Magnitude (Energy)")
1 Mars bar contains about 1 megajoule (239,000 calories) of energy, which is about a 1/4 of the energy released by explosion of one kilogram of TNT, and about 10 times the kinetic energy of a car travelling at highway speeds.
The mars bar isn't that special, by the way. There's an equivalent nutritional energy to be had in 150g of rice!
(Source: Wikipedia "Orders of Magnitude (Energy)")
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Kung Fu Monkey on 300
Larvatus Prodeo put me on to this post by Kung Fu Monkey John Rogers,
which is spot-on.
Rogers exposes the way this film actually opposes core American values.
The independent hero is not everyman, he's a professional soldier -
which the minutemen and the Band of Brothers were not! And the freedom
he's fighting for isn't for everyone, since in Sparta everyone is not
created equal - in fact, you're lucky to survive a few days if you have
any kind of deformity.
http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2007/03/writing-300-and-viewpoints.html
which is spot-on.
Rogers exposes the way this film actually opposes core American values.
The independent hero is not everyman, he's a professional soldier -
which the minutemen and the Band of Brothers were not! And the freedom
he's fighting for isn't for everyone, since in Sparta everyone is not
created equal - in fact, you're lucky to survive a few days if you have
any kind of deformity.
http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2007/03/writing-300-and-viewpoints.html
West Wing and Real Life - Ethanol in Iowa
In the episode I'm thinking of, Alan Alda's character stuns a roomful of farmers in Iowa (I think) by refusing to take the Ethanol pledge.
Well, Castro is encouraging everyone to follow Alda's example, and the Economist agrees with him.
It will be interesting to see how the real Presidential candidates manage this one.
Well, Castro is encouraging everyone to follow Alda's example, and the Economist agrees with him.
It will be interesting to see how the real Presidential candidates manage this one.
Ethanol
Castro was right
Apr 4th 2007
From The Economist print edition
As a green fuel, ethanol is a good idea, but the sort that America produces is bad
FLPA
IT IS not often that this newspaper finds itself in agreement with Fidel Castro, Cuba's tottering Communist dictator. But when he roused himself from his sickbed last week to write an article criticising George Bush's unhealthy enthusiasm for ethanol, he had a point. Along with other critics of America's ethanol drive, Mr Castro warned against the “sinister idea of converting food into fuel”. America's use of corn (maize) to make ethanol biofuel, which can then be blended with petrol to reduce the country's dependence on foreign oil, has already driven up the price of corn. As more land is used to grow corn rather than other food crops, such as soy, their prices also rise. And since corn is used as animal feed, the price of meat goes up, too. The food supply, in other words, is being diverted to feed America's hungry cars.
...
Corn-based ethanol, the sort produced in America, is neither cheap nor green. It requires almost as much energy to produce (more, say some studies) as it releases when it is burned. And the subsidies on it cost taxpayers, according to the International Institute for Sustainable Development, somewhere between $5.5 billion and $7.3 billion a year. Ethanol made from sugar cane, by contrast, is good. It produces far more energy than is needed to grow it, and Brazil—the main producer of sugar ethanol—has plenty of land available on which to grow sugar without necessarily reducing food production or encroaching on rainforests. ... There is a brighter prospect still out there: cellulosic ethanol. It is made from feedstocks rich in cellulose, such as wood, various grasses and shrubs, and agricultural wastes. ... Eventually, it might even allow countries with lots of trees and relatively few people, such as Sweden and New Zealand, to grow their own fuel rather than import oil. That is still some way off. In the meantime, America should bin its silly policy. If it stopped taxing good ethanol and subsidising bad ethanol, the former would flourish, the latter would wither, the world would be greener and the American taxpayer would be richer.
...
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Measuring Burnout
Something to keep in mind.
From New York Magazine
From New York Magazine
In 1981, Maslach, now vice-provost at the University of California, Berkeley, famously co-developed a detailed survey, known as the Maslach Burnout Inventory, to measure the syndrome. Her theory is that any one of the following six problems can fry us to a crisp: working too much; working in an unjust environment; working with little social support; working with little agency or control; working in the service of values we loathe; working for insufficient reward (whether the currency is money, prestige, or positive feedback).
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