1,466 Matching Annotations
  1. Jun 2016
    1. As a context, we must understand that there are four major types of these "technologies," each a matrixof practical reason: (I) technologies of production, which permit us to produce, transform, or manipulatethings; (2) technologies of sign systems, which permit us to use signs, meanings, symbols, orsignification; (3) technologies of power, which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them tocertain ends or domination, an objectivizing of the subject; (4) technologies of the self, which permitindividuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on theirown bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform I themselves in order toattain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.

      It's great to ask what are the trends? How are we working on ourselves? Is their a role capitalism plays in what is currently being "valued"? Where's the profit?

  2. May 2016
    1. nalogies between teaching and various aspects of show business or guidance counseling are more often than not excuses for having abdicated the task

      On why showy teaching is bad teaching p.3

      De Man, Paul. “The Resistance to Theory.” Yale French Studies, no. 63 (1982): 3–20. doi:10.2307/2929828.

  3. Apr 2016
  4. Mar 2016
    1. New property of prime numbers discovered. Primes greater than 5 can end with 1, 3, 7, or 9. The next prime is less likely to end with the same digit, and biased toward one of the remaining three. For instance, a prime ending in 3 is most likely to be followed by a prime ending in 9. The bias evens out as the primes get larger, but only very slowly.

      http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.03720

  5. Feb 2016
  6. Dec 2015
    1. Lemma 2.5.1.14

      Invoke universal property of products

    2. Since ducks can both swim and fly, each duck is found twice inC, once labeled as aflyer and once labeled as a swimmer. The typesAandBare kept disjoint inC, whichjustifies the name “disjoint union.”

      The disjoint union reminds me of algebraic datatypes in functional programming languages, whereas a set-theoretic union is more like a union in CS: the union has no label associated with it, so additional computation (or errors) may arise due to a lack of ready information about elements in the union.

    3. facts, which are simply “path equivalences” in an olog. It isthe notion of path equivalences that make category theory so powerful.Apathin an olog is a head-to-tail sequence of arrows
    4. Consider the aspectpan objectqhas››››—pa weightq. At some point in history, thiswould have been considered a valid function. Now we know that the same objectwould have a different weight on the moon than it has on earth. Thus as world-views change, we often need to add more information to our olog. Even the validityofpan object on earthqhas››››—pa weightqis questionable. However to build a modelwe need to choose a level of granularity and try to stay within it, or the whole modelevaporates into the nothingness of truth!
    5. An aspect of a thingxis a way of viewing it, a particular way in whichxcan be regardedor measured. For example, a woman can be regarded as a person; hence “being a person”is an aspect of a woman. A molecule has a molecular mass (say in daltons), so “havinga molecular mass” is an aspect of a molecule. In other words, byaspectwe simply meana function. The domainAof the functionf:A—Bis the thing we are measuring, andthe codomain is the set of possible “answers” or results of the measurement.

      Naïvely (since my understanding of type theory is naïve), this seems to mesh with the concepts of inheritance for the "is" relationships, and also with type-theory more generally for "has" relationships, since I believe we can view any object or "compound type", as defined here, as being a subtype of another type 'o' if one of its elements is of type 'o'. Though we have to be careful for functional mapping when thinking of aspects: we can't just say Int is an aspect of Pair(Int, Int), since this is ambiguous (there are two ints) --- we must denote which Int we mean.

    6. We represent eachtype as a box containing asingular indefinite noun phrase.
    7. Data gathering is ubiquitous in science. Giant databases are currently being minedfor unknown patterns, but in fact there are many (many) known patterns that simplyhave not been catalogued. Consider the well-known case of medical records. A patient’smedical history is often known by various individual doctor-offices but quite inadequatelyshared between them. Sharing medical records often means faxing a hand-written noteor a filled-in house-created form between offices.
    8. As mentioned above category theory has branched out into certain areas of scienceas well. Baez and Dolan have shown its value in making sense of quantum physics, itis well established in computer science, and it has found proponents in several otherfields as well. But to my mind, we are the very beginning of its venture into scientificmethodology. Category theory was invented as a bridge and it will continue to serve inthat role.
    9. All this time, however, category theory was consistently seen by much of the mathe-matical community as ridiculously abstract. But in the 21st century it has finally cometo find healthy respect within the larger community of pure mathematics. It is the lan-guage of choice for graduate-level algebra and topology courses, and in my opinion willcontinue to establish itself as the basic framework in which mathematics is done
    10. In 1980 Joachim Lambek showed that the types and programs used in computerscience form a specific kind of category. This provided a new semantics for talking aboutprograms, allowing people to investigate how programs combine and compose to createother programs, without caring about the specifics of implementation. Eugenio Moggibrought the category theoretic notion of monads into computer science to encapsulateideas that up to that point were considered outside the realm of such theory.
    11. Bill Lawvere saw category theory as a new foundation for all mathematical thought.Mathematicians had been searching for foundations in the 19th century and were reason-ably satisfied with set theory asthe foundation. But Lawvere showed that the categoryof sets is simply a category with certain nice properties, not necessarily the center ofthe mathematical universe. He explained how whole algebraic theories can be viewedas examples of a single system. He and others went on to show that higher order logicwas beautifully captured in the setting of category theory (more specifically toposes).It is here also that Grothendieck and his school worked out major results in algebraicgeometry.

      I haven't studied toposes, but I can at least see how introductory algebraic geometry, i.e. the study of Groebner bases, relates to propositional logic.

    12. The paradigm shift brought on by Einstein’s theory of relativity brought on the real-ization that there is no single perspective from which to view the world. There is nobackground framework that we need to find; there are infinitely many different frame-works and perspectives, and the real power lies in being able to translate between them.It is in this historical context that category theory got its start.
    13. These theorems have not made theirway out into the world of science, but they are directly applicable there. Hierarchies arepartial orders, symmetries are group elements, data models are categories, agent actionsare monoid actions, local-to-global principles are sheaves, self-similarity is modeled byoperads, context can be modeled by monads.
    14. No one would dispute that vector spaces are ubiquitous.But so are hierarchies, symmetries, actions of agents on objects, data models, globalbehavior emerging as the aggregate of local behavior, self-similarity, and the effect ofmethodological context.
    15. I will use a mathematical tool calledologs, or ontology logs, to givesome structure to the kinds of ideas that are often communicated in pictures like theone on the cover. Each olog inherently offers a framework in which to record data aboutthe subject. More precisely it encompasses adatabase schema, which means a system ofinterconnected tables that are initially empty but into which data can be entered.
    16. Agreementis the good stuff in science; it’s the high fives.But it is easy to think we’re in agreement, when really we’re not. Modeling ourthoughts on heuristics and pictures may be convenient for quick travel down the road,but we’re liable to miss our turnoff at the first mile. The danger is in mistaking ourconvenient conceptualizations for what’s actually there. It is imperative that we havethe ability at any time to ground out in reality.
    1. Yes, my intention was to show the most easily replaced in dark and move it to the least easily replaced.

      One linear model, represented in something of a spiral… Agreed that the transformative experience is tough to “disrupt”, but the whole “content delivery” emphasis shows that the disruption isn’t so quick.

    1. And the result is a book, which is being released this month by Polity Press.

      The metaphor behind "release" is pretty profound. Released into the wild. Like the book is a injured wild thing that has been nursed to health and now returns to the zeitgeist from whence it came? More like a domesticated thing that we allow in and out through the pet flap in the door?

      I am thinking more in terms of 'reader response' theory which argues among other things that the book as a stable thing that the authors have control over no longer exists once it is 'released' into the reader wild. As lit-crit David Bleich once noted, "Knowledge is made by people, not found."

    1. The bubbles then stick around for about 20 to 30 minutes, and you won’t be able to crack your knuckles again until they are gone — a sure sign that the sound is not caused by bursting bubbles, as was the leading hypothesis for many years.

      My mum was wrong ha ha

  7. Nov 2015
    1. If the space doctor’s ideas were wrong, your phone wouldn’t be able to tell where it was.

      If all of the space boats travel at the same velocity and the same distance from the Earth's surface, the time shift of the on-board clock due to relativity would be the same. The difference between the clocks would be almost the same. How would the trouble appear?

  8. Oct 2015
    1. he did not have strategies that might alter thesituation

      when is it the responsibility of the participant to have and employ strategies to move from peripheral to central? and when is it the responsibility of a more central participant or and oldtimer to recognize that someone is being marginalized and try to make resources more available to them so that they may become a more central part of the CoP?

    2. she saw herself asresponsible for and responsive to the needs of others.

      this is certainly an outcome we strive for in my office's work with student leaders on campus

    3. one can appropriate cultural tools (an aspect of learning) without takingthem on internally (an aspect of identity).

      bit of a departure from Wenger.

    4. maintenance.

      I feel like we focus a lot on identity development (in practice) and less so on the maintenance of identity. Curious to know what research is out there on this.

    5. reconceptualizes learning froman in-the-head phenomenon to a matter of engagement, participation, and member-ship in a community of practice.

      this helps me think about my own work with college students. their level of participation varies from year to year, their identities shift, both as a result of how they see themselves and also how others position them and influence their behavior.

    6. eripheral trajectories never lead to full participation-rather, individuals on thistrajectory stay marginal to the practice over time.

      is it possible for an individual to see her/himself as a full participant but to be truly marginal? who decides? other members of the CoP?

    1. In my research, we filmed an interaction between a couple and had each partner turn a rating dial as they watched their tape afterward. On this graph (at left), you can see how one couple rated their interaction. The blue dots represent the wife’s ratings over 15 minutes of conversation; the red dots represent the husband’s ratings. When you add them together, these ratings are a constant, which means that in this interaction, her gain is his loss and his gain is her loss. This is what’s called in game theory a “zero-sum game.” You’ve probably all heard of the concept. It’s the idea that in an interaction, there’s a winner and a loser. And by looking at ratings like this, I came to define a “betrayal metric”: It’s the extent to which an interaction is a zero-sum game, where your partner’s gain is your loss. On the other hand, by trust we really mean, mathematically, that our partner’s behavior is acting to increase our rating dial. Even though we’re disagreeing, my wife is thinking about my welfare, my best interests. When we scientifically tested these so-called trust and betrayal metrics, we found that a high trust metric is correlated with very positive outcomes, such as greater stability in the relationship. In a 20-year longitudinal study of couples in the San Francisco Bay Area that I recently completed with UC Berkeley psychologist Bob Levenson, we found that about 11 percent of couples had a zero-sum game pattern, like in that graph. Every six years, we would re-contact all of the couples in the study, and they would come back to Bob’s lab at Berkeley. Yet we noticed that many of the zero-sum couples weren’t coming back. I thought maybe they dropped out because they found the whole thing so unpleasant. Well, it turns out that they didn’t drop out. They died.
    2. Interestingly, the investors’ expectations about the back-transfer from the trustee did not differ between the oxytocin and placebo recipients. Oxytocin increased the participants’ willingness to trust others, but it did not make them more optimistic about another person’s trustworthiness.

      The Trust Game; however, there was no difference in groups when the trustee was a computer, showing oxytocin affects social connections but not risk-behavior itself.

    3. Conventional economic theory maintains that people will always behave in a purely self-interested manner. According to this worldview, it makes no sense to trust, whether in a trust game or in real life, as any trust will be exploited. The trustee will always keep her entire windfall for herself, so the investor would be better off not transferring any money in the first place. And yet when researchers like Joyce Berg and others have had people play the trust game with real monetary stakes, they have repeatedly found that the average investor will transfer half of her initial endowment and receive similar amounts in return. Through the trust game, researchers have also discovered a number of factors that seem to drive levels of trust. Familiarity breeds trust—players tend to trust each other more with each new game. So does introducing punishments for untrustworthy behavior, or even just reminding players of their obligations to each other.
    1. To become a forgiving person, we have to practice forgiving smaller grievances. Then, when a bigger insult comes, we are ready, willing, and able to deal with it. Alternatively, like Delores, once we learn to forgive a major grievance, we can understand the value of limiting the power that pain and anger hold over us the next time we are hurt.

      The first statement may be a specialization of Barbara Fredrickson's broaden-and-build theory.

  9. Sep 2015
    1. In a first analysis, data showed that people who took less than 10 seconds to decide how much to give gave approximately 15 percent more to the common pool than people who took longer than 10 seconds.

      Public Goods Game

    1. These definitions allow us toconsider the relation between learning and identity while still considering them to beindependent processes.

      Slightly different then Wenger, who is mentioned in the previous page as suggesting "that learning and identity are identical processes and that to learn isthe process of becoming that is identity"

    2. Coach J engagedconversations that fostered social relationships to sustain their effort in a difficultmoment As relationships were built, runners repeated important aspects of thepractice that allow them to gain competence.

      Fostering social relationships similar to the storytelling in the AA narratives. By creating a figured world, then they are able to gain an understanding.

    3. They argue that the ability todo the math alone is not enough to support strong mathematical identities for stu-dents; rather, mathematical identities are tied to understanding and eng

      Agreed! I see this way too often in my classes.

    4. This finding highlights the critical role of the nature ofthe relationship with the teacher/coach for opportunities both to develop practice-linked identities and to become better at the practice.

      Learner and Teacher relationship is crucial - provides access to resources. Similar to the discussion of community, teachers, mentors in Lave and Wenger, and in Holland et al.

    5. Our analyses show that relational resources sometimes served as akind of gateway to material and ideational resources (and thus as a gateway tolearning

      Access to resources directly relates to positions of power and relationship/proximity to privilege

    6. three levels of analysisthat are required to offer an account of identity, including individuals, social interac-tion, and broader society.

      Identity - must consider individuals, social interaction, broader society. This is consistent with previous readings

    7. Our analyses show that relational resources sometimes served as akind of gateway to material and ideational resources (and thus as a gateway tolearning).We als

      Is this similar to the politics of power mentioned by Lave and Wagner?

    8. . Our data seem to indicate that the personal relationshipbetween the coach and the athlete was central in determining athletes' access to theother material and ideational resources, as much of the teaching and learningoccurred in one-on-one interactions

      Similar to Becker's iron workers?

    9. Octavia displayed this same drive and independence, but at theend of practice she sat down on the grass for about 20 minutes to socialize with herteammates. At this point in the season, Octavia seemed to be participating in thepractice not for others but for herself, so that she might improve her performance.

      As she is no longer a "novice," she is not following the rules strictly.

    10. We argue that Octavia's practice-linked identity with respect to track increasedover the course of the season. That is, she became more connected to the practice oftrack. This shift was evidenced both in her retrospective account in an interviewtoward the end of the year and in changes in her participation in practices and meetsfrom early in the season to later in the year. Co-occurring with these shifts werechanges in Octavia's goals in track, changes in her performance as she learned tohurdle, and changes in her social relationships with other members of the team

      This is similar to Spiro's stages of learning (Holland et. al.)

    11. In this interaction, several ideationalartifacts about Octavia and about hurdling were made salient Importantly, sheactively participated in this exchange, deconstructing her own performance.

      This is unlike Lave and Wagner's examples. There is an element of competition that requires one to gain mastery, not just participate in the event. Seeing oneself as a success, identifying as a winner, is an important element, similar to identifying as an alcoholic in AA.

  10. Aug 2015
    1. Connoisseurscallforthecontemplationofcomplexityalmostforitsownsake,orremindeveryonethatthingsaremoresubtlethantheyseem,orthanyoujustsaid.eattractivethingaboutthismoveisthatitisliterallyalwaysavailabletothepersonwhowantstomakeit.eoryisfoundedonabstraction,abstractionmeansthrowingawaydetailforthesakeofabitofgenerality,andsothingsarealways“morecomplicatedthanthat”—foranyvalueof“that”.

      Saying that reality is more complicated than an abstract theory accounts for is tautological.

  11. Jul 2015
    1. cf. actor-network theory

      Actor Network Theory is a powerful framework under which we can understand complex socio-technical assemblages. To justify using it through an extreme reductionist interpretation that "critical theory = absolutism" doesn't seem to do it justice.

    2. If you think everybody answers the same way, you may be an advocate of critical theory.

      I do not think a single person I know who has read any amount of critical theory or even agreed with it would really think that people would ascribe universal values onto words and not understand that value systems are historically and socially inflected. They might, as do Adorno and Horkheimer, consider the holocaust to be an absolute moral evil, but if that's something that Lyotard is here supposed to free us from, I don't quite know what we gain.

    3. So how can you be beyond critical theory, given that it generally aims “to explain and transform all the circumstances that enslave human beings?“

      I think the definition that you give of critical theory here, from the Stanford encyclopedia, is just wrong. Adorno's /Negative Dialectics/ begins, for example, with an epigraph that rejects the totalities that you here ascribe to Critical Theory: "The whole is the false", thereby countering Hegel's Absolute.

  12. Apr 2015
  13. Mar 2015
    1. What does it mean to be an “item” or “computational object” within this collection? What is such a collection?

      This is a great example of the type of critical thinking involved in scholarly digital building—often such projects include hard thinking about the exact nature of scholarly objects. Patrick Murray-John has a fantastic article that further discusses “where the theory is” when scholars design and build (Theory, Digital Humanities, and Noticing). The penultimate paragraph in particular lists some of the critical questions that arise out of designing for an “item” in a digital archives platform.

  14. Feb 2014
    1. The fourth of the theories is as yet the least influential but seems to be gaining strength. Its key ideas are that human nature causes people to flourish more under some conditions than under others, and that social and political institutions should be organized to facilitate that flourishing. What, more specifically, are the conditions or “functionings” that enable people to flourish?
      • Life
      • Health
      • Bodily integrity – protection against physical hazards and against physical and sexual assault
      • Autonomy – in the sense of the ability to choose freely one’s vocations and avocations
      • Competence – the ability to confront and solve problems
      • Engagement – active involvement in professional and leisure activity, as opposed to passive consumption of goods and services
      • Self-expression – the ability to speak one’s mind and express one’s creative impulses
      • Relationships – participation in freely chosen communities
      • Privacy – access to zones of intimacy in which relationships can be nurtured and identity developed
    1. The innate qualities of intellectual pr operty, however, in combination with INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY: POLICY FOR INNOVATION 15   strong economic motivations have led U.S. intellectual property policy to operate according to rights - based, non - utilitarian theory, possibly as a result of lobbying (capture theory).

      Lobbying has led to a rights-based non-utilitarian theory copyright policy in the US at the present time (2014).

    2. The “romantic conception of authorship” mentioned earlier as a formative trend of the rights - based theory of intellectual property is evident in the first pe rspective: t he notion that ideas are individual achievements and of indeterminate origin (not reliant on a process of building) (Fisher, 1999, Sect. II. B).
    3. This is understatement to be sure, but the debate has been principally between two theories: a utilitarian policy theory, and a rights - based , non - utilitarian property theory (Long, 1995, n.pag.) .

      The debate in intellectual property law has centered around utilitarian policy theory and a rights-based non-utilitarian property theory.

    4. The U . S . Co nstitution firmly grounds the proper role of intellectual property policy as utilitarian .

      Identify where/how this ground is established.

    5. Keywords : anticommons, copyright, intellectual property, Lockean Proviso, patent, property rights, state of nature, trademark, utilitarian theory
    1. The architect of Berlin's new main train station won a lawsuit against Deutsche Bahn AG in a court decision that forces the German s tate - owned rail company to replace the building's ceiling with his original design. Architect Meinhard von Gerkan sued Deutsche Bahn for distorting his plan by exchanging his ceiling, designed to resemble a cathedral's nave, for one made of flat metal des igned by another architect. German copyright rules protect the integrity of work by artists and architects.
    2. In his ruling, judge Edmundo Rodríguez Achútegui recognized that Calatrava’s rights as author of the bridge had been infringed, but he ruled that the public utility of the addition took precedence over this private right. “In addition to constituting a singular artistic creation suitable for protection, the work is public one, offering a service to the citizens, and thus satisfies a public interest,” he said. “If we weigh these interests, the public must prevail over the private.

      This seems like a much more reasonable ruling than the one in the Deutsche Bahn case.

    1. ecause such accumulation is less typical, the realm of intellectual property has less of the laborer/capitalist hierarchy of Marxist theory.
  15. Nov 2013
    1. What makes number theory interesting is that problems that are simple to state (at least to mathematicians) are often fiendishly difficult to solve. The most famous such problem, Fermat's last theorem, was postulated in the 17th century. It took until 1993 to prove that it was true.