1,402 Matching Annotations
  1. Apr 2022
    1. The book was reviewed in all major magazines and newspapers, sparking what historian Ronald Kline has termed a “cybernetics craze,” becoming “a staple of science fiction and a fad among artists, musicians, and intellectuals in the 1950s and 1960s.”

      This same sort of craze also happened with Claude Shannon's The Mathematical Theory of Information which helped to bolster Weiner's take.

  2. Mar 2022
    1. Melvin Vopson has proposed an experiment involving particle annihilation that could prove that information has mass, and by Einstein's mass-energy equivalence, information is also energy. If true, the experiment would also show that information is one of the states of matter.

      The experiment doesn't need a particle accelerator, but instead uses slow positrons at thermal velocities.

      Melvin Vopson is an information theory researcher at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom.

      A proof that information has mass (or is energy) may explain the idea of dark matter. Vopson's rough calculations indicate that 10^93 bits of information would explain all of the “missing” dark matter.

      Vopson's 2022 AIP Advances paper would indicate that the smallest theoretical size of digital bits, presuming they are stable and exist on their own would become the smallest known building blocks of matter.

      The width of digital bits today is between ten and 30 nanometers. Smaller physical bits could mean more densely packed storage devices.


      Vopson proposes that a positron-electron annihilation should produce energy equivalent to the masses of the two particles. It should also produce an extra dash of energy: two infrared, low-energy photons of a specific wavelength (predicted to be about 50 microns), as a direct result of erasing the information content of the particles.

      The mass-energy-information equivalence principle Vopson proposed in his 2019 AIP Advances paper assumes that a digital information bit is not just physical, but has a “finite and quantifiable mass while it stores information.” This very small mass is 3.19 × 1038 kilograms at room temperature.

      For example, if you erase one terabyte of data from a storage device, it would decrease in mass by 2.5 × 1025 kilograms, a mass so small that it can only be compared to the mass of a proton, which is about 1.67 × 1027 kilograms.

      In 1961, Rolf Landauer first proposed the idea that a bit is physical and has a well-defined energy. When one bit of information is erased, the bit dissipates a measurable amount of energy.

    1. open practices sit somewhat uneasily and unevenly within higher education.

      Yes, this is true. However, open practices are not = higher education. Open practices can exist in formal and informal learning contexts. Open practices are also not = OEPs. You can, for example, have an open art practice, or an open medical practice, etc.

    1. This hierarchical system ensures accuracy, rigour and competencyof information.

      Hierarchical systems of knowledge in Indigenous cultures helps to ensure rigor, competency, and most importantly accuracy of knowledge passed down from generation to generation.

    1. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/incorrect-use-information-theory-rafael-garc%C3%ADa/

      A fascinating little problem. The bigger question is how can one abstract this problem into a more general theory?

      How many questions can one ask? How many groups could things be broken up into? What is the effect on the number of objects?

    1. Such results suggest that the act of gesturing doesn’t just help communicatespatial concepts to others; it also helps the gesturer herself understand theconcepts more fully. Indeed, without gesture as an aid, students may fail tounderstand spatial ideas at all

      Could the pedagogy of using gestures to understand "strike and dip" in geology also be applied to using the right hand rule in better understanding electricity and magnetism? Would research on this idea show similar results as in geology? This could be an interesting way of testing this result in another area.

  3. Feb 2022
    1. The basic approach is in line with Krashen's influential Theory of Input, suggesting that language learning proceeds most successfully when learners are presented with interesting and comprehensible L2 material in a low-anxiety situation.

      Stephen Krashen's Theory of Input indicates that language learning is most successful when learners are presented with interesting and comprehensible material in low-anxiety situations.

    1. THE NATURE OF SOUND

      Harmonics, TET

    2. THEORY FOR GUITARISTS - INTERVALS, CHORDS AND HARMONICS

      Return to this.

    3. Quick Reminder: A harmonic interval is one in which both notes are played at the same time. A melodic interval is one in which the notes are played consecutively.
    4. If we start on the note G, this is what the harmonics appearing above it would be:

      The harmonic series.

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. the systems theory is the 00:00:38 study of systems i.e cohesive groups of interrelated interdependent parts that can be natural or human made every system is bounded by space and time influenced by its environment defined by 00:00:51 its structure and purpose and expressed through its functioning

      What is Systems Theory - how i relate it to note taking

    1. Together: responsive, inline “autocomplete” pow­ered by an RNN trained on a cor­pus of old sci-fi stories.

      I can't help but think, what if one used their own collected corpus of ideas based on their ever-growing commonplace book to create a text generator? Then by taking notes, highlighting other work, and doing your own work, you're creating a corpus of material that's imminently interesting to you. This also means that by subsuming text over time in making your own notes, the artificial intelligence will more likely also be using your own prior thought patterns to make something that from an information theoretic standpoint look and sound more like you. It would have your "hand" so to speak.

    1. Research is needed to determine the situations in which the redundancy principle does not hold

      p. 144-145

      The authors describe limits to the research (circa 2016) as follows: 1. Kinds of learners, 2. kinds of material, and 3. kinds of presentation methods. Each of these situations present interesting possibilities for research related to the use of closed captions used by first-year law students while watching course-related videos.

      When considering how "kinds of learners" might be relevant, the authors ask how redundant on-screen text might hurt or help non-native speakers of a language or learners with very low prior knowledge. It is probably reasonable to consider first-year law students as having "very low prior knowledge". Is there any sense in which those same students could be understand as having overlapping characteristics with TBD

    2. Principle 2: Consider Adding On‐Screen Text to Narration in Special Situations

      p. 139-141

      Clark and Mayer describe a key exception to the first principle they describe. One of the special situations they describe consists of when a learner must "exert greater cognitive effort to comprehend spoken text rather than printed text" (p. 140). This could be when the verbal material is complex and challenging, such as when learners are learning another language or when terminology is challenging such as might be encountered in scientific, technical, or legal(?) domains (p. 141).

      [P]rinting unfamiliar technical terms on the screen may actually reduce cognitive processing because the learner does not need to grapple with decoding the spoken words.

      However, it may be necessary to ensure that video is slow-paced or learner-controlled under circumstances where both audio narration and on-screen text are provided. Mayer, Lee, and Peebles (2014) found that when video is fast-paced, redundant text can cause cognitive overload, even when learners are non-native speakers.

      Mayer, R. E., Lee, H., & Peebles, A. (2014). Multimedia Learning in a Second Language: A Cognitive Load Perspective. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 28(5), 653–660. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.3050

    3. boundary conditions.

      p. 131-132

      Clark and Mayer provide a brief summary of the boundary conditions, the situations in which learners benefit from the use redundant on-screen text. These situations include adding printed text when 1) there are no graphics, 2) the presentation rate of the on-screen text is slow or learner-controlled, 3) the narration includes technical or unfamiliar words, and the 3) on-screen text is shorter than the audio narration.

      The first three conditions described bear some similarity to closed caption use by students in legal education watching class lecture videos, especially students in first-year courses. Typically, the students are viewing videos with very few detailed graphics, they have control over the speed, pause, review, and advance features of the video player, and the narration provides numerous legal terms.

      Although closed captions are intended for hard of hearing and deaf viewers, they may have some benefits for other learners if the boundary conditions described by the authors turn out to be true. Dello Stritto and Linder (2017) shared findings from a large survey of post-secondary students reporting that a range of students found closed captions to be helpful.

      Dello Stritto, M. E., & Linder, K. (2017). A Rising Tide: How Closed Captions Can Benefit All Students. Educause Review Online. https://er.educause.edu:443/articles/2017/8/a-rising-tide-how-closed-captions-can-benefit-all-students

    4. graphics using words in both on‐screen text and audio narration in which the audio repeats the text. We call this technique redundant on‐screen text because the printed text (on‐screen text) is redundant with the spoken text (narration or audio).

      Clark and Mayer provide a definition of redundant: Graphics accompanied by words in both on-screen text and audio narration in which that text is repeated. p. 131

      The authors go on to provide guidance about concurrent graphics, audio, and on-screen text. Based upon the research that they summarize in Chapter Seven, they advise instructors not to add printed text to an on screen graphic.

      p. 131

    1. And the best ideas are usually the ones we haven’t anticipatedanyway.

      If the best ideas are the ones we haven't anticipated, how are we defining "best"? Most surprising from an information theoretic perspective? One which creates new frontiers of change? One which subsumes or abstracts prior ideas within it? Others?

    1. Coming from a functional programming background, I feel there is a profound distinction between function and method. Mainly methods have side effects, and that functions should be pure thus giving a rather nice property of referential transparency
    2. I agree it might be nice if "function" and "method" meant what you wanted them to, but your definitions do not reflect some very common uses of those terms.
    1. The problem almost certainly starts with the conception of what we're doing as "building websites".

      When we do so, we mindset of working on systems

      If your systems work compromises the artifacts then it's not good work

      This is part of a broader phenomenon, which is that when computers are involved with absolutely anything people seem to lose their minds good sensibilities just go out the window

      low expectations from everyone everyone is so used to excusing bad work

      sui generis medium

      violates the principle of least power

      what we should be doing when grappling with the online publishing problem—which is what this is; that's all it is—is, instead of thinking in terms of working on systems, thinking about this stuff in such a way that we never lose sight of the basics; the thing that we aspire to do when we want to put together a website is to deal in

      documents and their issuing authority

      That is, a piece of content and its name (the name is a qualified name that we recognize as valid only when the publisher has the relevant authority for that name, determined by its prefix; URLs)

      that's it that's all a Web site is

      anything else is auxiliary

      really not a lot different from what goes on when you publish a book take a manuscript through final revisions for publication and then get an ISBN issued for it

      so the problem comes from the industry

      people "building websites" like politicians doing bad work and then their constituents not holding them accountable because that's not how politics works you don't get held accountable for doing bad work

      so the thing to do is to recognize that if we're thinking about "websites" from any other position things that technical people try to steer us in the direction of like selecting a particular system and then propping it up and how to interact with a given system to convince it to do the thing we want it to do— then we're doing it wrong

      we're creating content and then giving it a name

  4. Jan 2022
    1. What, then, is the work of theory in the age of digital transformation? Digital theory offers us explanations, interpretations, and predictions which enables us to manage the process of technological change and its impact upon our social, cultural, economic, political, and personal lives. Digital theory provides a point of intersection between the languages and practices of science and engineering on the one hand and the arts and humanities on the other. Digital theory embraces the utopian imagination not as a way of predicting the future but as a way of envisioning meaningful change and keeping alive the fluidity which digital media has introduced into many aspects of our social and personal lives. Digital theory identifies historical antecedents for contemporary media developments and at the same time, defamilarizes older media and opens them to re-examination.

      Jenkins makes a call for digital theory as offering an intersection between the arts and humanities and science. Digital theory "...offers us explanations, interpretations, and predictions which enables us to manage the process of technological change ant it's impact"

    2. In a period of prolonged change, digital theory is more than an academic exercise. Digital media impacts all aspects of western society, from education to politics, from business to the arts. Journalists, science fiction writers, ideologues, entrepreneurs, activists, classroom teachers, rock stars, Supreme Court judges, government regulators are both consumers and producers of digital theory. For many, theorizing restores predictability and stability to a world rocked by radical change, while for others, theory fuels change, directing the energies unleashed by the digital revolution towards altering the nature of political life or personal identity. Our fantasies and fears about change shape our theories (including supposedly disinterested academic theories) as much as our theories help master those fears and fulfill those fantasies.

      Here Jenkins makes an argument for the practicality of digital theory as a way to make meaning of the rapid changes that have come with "the digital revolution"

    3. Theory will be understood here as any attempt to make meaningful generalizations for interpreting or evaluating local experiences and practices.

      Functional definition of theory

    1. https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2022-01-14/a-spanish-data-scientists-strategy-to-win-99-of-the-time-at-wordle.html

      Story of a scientist trying to optimize for solutions of Wordle.

      Nothing brilliant here. Depressing that the story creates a mythology around algorithms as the solution rather than delving in a bit into the math and science of information theory to explain why this solution is the correct one.

      Desperately missing from the discussion are second and third order words that would make useful guesses to further reduce the solution space for actual readers.

    2. The letters of “aeros” include the five most frequent letters used in English (as Edgar Allan Poe pointed out in the cryptographic challenge included in his famous short story The Golden Beetle)

      "Orate" and "aeros" are respectively the best words to start with when playing Wordle.

    3. “It makes perfect sense,” says Moro from his home in Boston. “For the game to be a success, it needs to be simple and playable, and picking the most common terms means that in the end, we all get it right in just a few tries.”

      Esteban Moro

      For games to be a success they need to meet a set of Goldilock's conditions, they should be simple enough to learn to play and win, but complex enough to still be challenging.

      How many other things in life need this sort of balance between simplicity and complexity to be successful?

      Is there an information theoretic statement that bounds this mathematically? What would it look like for various games?

    4. Cross-referencing the correct answers from previous Wordles with a body of the most commonly used English terms, Moro confirmed that Wardle chooses frequently used words in English, something the game’s inventor also pointed out in his interview with The New York Times, which mentioned that he avoided rare words.

      Wordle specifically chooses more common words which cuts back drastically on the complexity of the game.

    1. The relationship between the top-level subject area and the lower-leve

      subjects cannot be described in terms of a strictly hierarchical order, it is rather a form of loose coupling insofar as one can find lower-level subjects which do not fit systematically to the top-level issue but show only marginally connections.

      There is something suspiciously similar about the instantiation of a zettelkasten and the idea of small pieces loosely joined.

      Perhaps also related to the idea of a small number of primitives which can interact in a small number of ways, but which gives rise to incredible complexity.

    1. les lettres que je reçois des Services adaptés en rendent plusieurs visibles

      Most of us have received those letters, indicating that some learners will require special accommodations. And students learn to fit the description. Reminds me of those learners in my classes who expressed surprise at obtaining a high grade on an assignment.

      For instance, a musician in my ethnomusicology course, back in 2006, came to me with something of a complaint:

      You gave me an A on this assignment!

      Right. What's the problem?

      I have a learning disability!

      Erm... Not in my course, you don't! ;-)

      Students like this musician had done exactly the work required to fulfill the requirements... which didn't match expected requirements (which are overwhelmingly scriptocentric).

      Conversely, some learners assume they'll always get good grades ("I'm an A student!"), typically because their writing style matches academic expectations.

      Surely, there's research on this labelling effect. Now, I'm not saying that it's the only effect coming from these letters (or from "dean's lists"). Accommodations can be particularly important in courses where there's a pressure to perform in a certain way. And it sounds like grade-based rewards are important in several social systems. I'm merely thinking of links between Howie Becker's best-known book and his unsung work.

    2. baisser les attentes
    1. The sociological hy-pothesis that evolution implies not simply an increase in complexity but an increase in reducible complexity--or, to put it in other terms, that evolution is production of complexity through reduction of complexity--is thus verified.81

      81 Niklas Luhmann, ‘Reduktion von Komplexität’, in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philoso-phie, eds. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer, vol. 8 (Basel/Stuttgart, 1992), 377–78, at 377. On the claim that evolution leads to an increase in reducible complexity, there is an extensive literature. See J.W.S. Pringle, ‘On the Parallel Between Learning and Evolu-tion’, Behaviour 3 (1951), 174–215; Francis Heylighen et al., eds., The Evolution of Complexity (Boston/London, 1999), with large bibliography.

      Delve into the statement that "evolution leads to an increase in reducible complexity".

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. The term autopoiesis (from Greek αὐτo- (auto-) 'self', and ποίησις (poiesis) 'creation, production') refers to a system capable of producing and maintaining itself by creating its own parts.[1] The term was introduced in the 1972 publication Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to define the self-maintaining chemistry of living cells.[2] Since then the concept has been also applied to the fields of cognition, systems theory, architecture and sociology.

      I can't help but think about a quine here...

    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3Tvjf0buc8

      graph thinking

      • intuitive
      • speed, agility
      • adaptability

      ; graph thinking : focuses on relationships to turn data into information and uses patterns to find meaning

      property graph data model

      • relationships (connectors with verbs which can have properties)
      • nodes (have names and can have properties)

      Examples:

      • Purchase recommendations for products in real time
      • Fraud detection

      Use for dependency analysis

    1. Children construct intuitive theories of the world and alter and revise those theories as the result of new evidence.

      A very sophisticated way to say that kids make things up as they go along! Perhaps the authors' surprise comes from the fact that adults are not so different?

      There seems to be more agreement than not with Bada & Olusegun (2015) regarding the overall value of constructivism. However, it's unclear if the Piagetian-dismissing authors of Reconstructing constructivism would agree with constructivism as explained by Bada and Olusegun.

      In my experience as a First-Year Composition educator, I can say that students value the process of active learning far more than, say, formulaic, fill-in-the-blank assignments. Perhaps this is because there's more recursive inquiry and metacognition in active, process-oriented learning that reflects the theory theory?

  5. Dec 2021
    1. Bibliographical notes which we extract from the literature, should be captured inside the card index. Books, articles, etc., which we have actually read, should be put on a separate slip with bibliographical information in a separate box.

      Ross Ashby's note taking system, also within the field of systems theory, shows the use of an index card set up for bibliographical notes, however in Ashby's case, the primary notes were placed into notebooks and not onto note cards.

      Was there an ancestral link within the systems theory community that was spreading these ideas of note taking or were they (more likely) just so ubiquitous in the academic culture that such a link wouldn't have mattered?

      (Earlier ancestors like Beatrice Webb may have been a more influential link.)

    2. One of the most basic presuppositions of communication is that the partners can mutually surprise each other.

      A reasonably succinct summary of Claude Shannon's 1948 paper The Mathematical Theory of Communication. By 1981 it had firmly ensconced itself into the vernacular, and would have done so for Luhmann as much of systems theory grew out of the prior generation's communication theory.

    1. Marx thereby refused the sharp separation of the economy and the state, and argued that the state embodied the interests of the capitalist class. This tradition of political economy survived in Marxist thought, although it was not greatly extended until the 1960s and 1970s, when it anchored a strong interdisciplinary approach that combined economic, sociological, and political perspectives in the analysis of capitalism—especially in the developing world. Dependency theory and world-systems theory are the most prominent among these.

      Marxist political economy dependency theory world-systems theory

    1. The unwritten rule of Cybernetics seems to be - Maintain the homeostasis until you break it for the better. #Cybernetics #Ashby

      This is a good rule of thumb for political science as well. Some of our issue in America right now is that we're seeing systemic racism and many want to change it, but we're not sure yet what to replace it with.

      The renaissance created scholasticism which created a new system, but too tightly wound religion into the humanist movement. Similarly Englightement Europe and America subsumed the indigenous critique, which opened up ideas about equality and freedom which hadn't existed, but they still kept the structures of hierarchy which have caused immeasurable issues. These movements are worth studying to see how the new systems were created, but with an eye toward more careful development so as not to make things even worse generations later.

    1. Intellectual historians have never really abandoned the GreatMan theory of history. They often write as if all important ideas in agiven age can be traced back to one or other extraordinary individual– whether Plato, Confucius, Adam Smith or Karl Marx – rather thanseeing such authors’ writings as particularly brilliant interventions indebates that were already going on in taverns or dinner parties orpublic gardens (or, for that matter, lecture rooms), but whichotherwise might never have been written down

      The Great Man theory of history is the misconception that all the most important ideas can be traced back to a single great individual—usually a man—and ignoring the fact that they had likely been brewing in the social milieu of their time before being encapsulated, like a bug in ember, by a particular writer who then gets an outsized amount of credit for "inventing" the idea.


      I wonder if the effect of social media and ubiquity of communication will dampen this effect?

    2. Hobbes and Rousseau told their contemporaries things that werestartling, profound and opened new doors of the imagination. Nowtheir ideas are just tired common sense. There’s nothing in them thatjustifies the continued simplification of human affairs. If socialscientists today continue to reduce past generations to simplistic,two-dimensional caricatures, it is not so much to show us anythingoriginal, but just because they feel that’s what social scientists areexpected to do so as to appear ‘scientific’. The actual result is toimpoverish history – and as a consequence, to impoverish our senseof possibility.

      The simplification required to make models and study systems can be a useful tool, but one constantly needs to go back to the actual system to make sure that future predictions and work actually fit the real world system.

      Too often social theorists make assumptions which aren't supported in real life and this can be a painfully dangerous practice, especially when those assumptions are built upon in ways that put those theories out on a proverbial creaking limb.


      This idea is related to the bias that Charles Mathewes points out about how we treat writers as still living or as if they never lived. see: https://hypothes.is/a/VTU2lFvZEeyiJ2tN76i4sA

    3. Now, we should be clear here: social theory always, necessarily,involves a bit of simplification. For instance, almost any humanaction might be said to have a political aspect, an economic aspect,a psychosexual aspect and so forth. Social theory is largely a gameof make-believe in which we pretend, just for the sake of argument,that there’s just one thing going on: essentially, we reduce everythingto a cartoon so as to be able to detect patterns that would beotherwise invisible. As a result, all real progress in social science hasbeen rooted in the courage to say things that are, in the finalanalysis, slightly ridiculous: the work of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud orClaude Lévi-Strauss being only particularly salient cases in point.One must simplify the world to discover something new about it. Theproblem comes when, long after the discovery has been made,people continue to simplify.

      revisit this... it's an important point, particularly when looking at complex ideas with potentially emergent properties

  6. Nov 2021
    1. the name union comes from type theory. The union number | string is composed by taking the union of the values from each type. Notice that given two sets with corresponding facts about each set, only the intersection of those facts applies to the union of the sets themselves.
    2. For example, if we had a room of tall people wearing hats, and another room of Spanish speakers wearing hats, after combining those rooms, the only thing we know about every person is that they must be wearing a hat.
    1. The original critical race theorists argued for the use of a new lens to interpret the past and the present. You can dispute whether or not that lens is useful, or whether you want to look through it at all

      This is an important thing to say about critical race theory when the far conservative right is using it as a cudgel and boogeyman for all of society's problems.

  7. Oct 2021
    1. Analog zur Struktur des Zettelkastens baut Luhmanns Systemtheorie nicht auf Axiome und bietet keine Hierarchien von Begriffen oder Thesen. Zentrale Begriffe sind, ebenso wie die einzelnen Zettel, stark untereinander vernetzt und gewinnen erst im Kontext Bedeutung.

      machine translation:

      Analogous to the structure of the card box, Luhmann's system theory is not based on axioms and does not offer any hierarchies of terms or theses. Central terms, like the individual pieces of paper, are strongly interlinked and only gain meaning in the context.

      There's something interesting here about avoiding hierarchies and instead interlinking things and giving them meaning based on context.

      Could a reformulation of ideas like the scala naturae into these sorts of settings be a way to remove some of the social cruft from our culture from an anthropological point of view? This could help us remove structural racism and other issues we have with genetics and our political power structures.

      Could such a redesign force the idea of "power with" and prevent "power over"?

    1. General relativity implies that information gets destroyed; quantum theory says it’s preserved. Hence the paradox.

      Isn't this an example of the law of the excluded middle? If LoEM doesn't exist (in Gisin's theory), then could there be information that isn't either created or destroyed?

    1. Timothy Caulfield on Twitter: “Will you fall into the conspiracy theory rabbit hole? Https://t.co/8mLQqSBnqb by @databyler @codingyan Good breakdown on some of the social forces (like ideology) that drive conspiracy theories. Despite the fact I study topic, still amazed how many believe this stuff. Https://t.co/L1T0cpy9kB” / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved October 8, 2021, from https://twitter.com/CaulfieldTim/status/1445794723101175818

  8. Sep 2021
    1. The Virginians needed labor, to grow corn for subsistence, to grow tobaccofor export. They had just figured out how to grow tobacco, and in 1617 theysent off the first cargo to England. Finding that, like all pleasurable drugstainted with moral disapproval, it brought a high price, the planters, despitetheir high religious talk, were not going to ask questions about something soprofitable.

      Told from this perspective and with the knowledge of the importance of the theory of First Effective Settlement, is it any wonder that America has grown up to be so heavily influenced by moral and mental depravity, over-influenced by capitalism and religion, ready to enslave others, and push vice and drugs? The founding Virginians are truly America in miniature.

      Cross reference: Theory of First Effective Settlement

      “Whenever an empty territory undergoes settlement, or an earlier population is dislodged by invaders, the specific characteristics of the first group able to effect a viable, self-perpetuating society are of crucial significance for the later social and cultural geography of the area, no matter how tiny the initial band of settlers may have been.” “Thus, in terms of lasting impact, the activities of a few hundred, or even a few score, initial colonizers can mean much more for the cultural geography of a place than the contributions of tens of thousands of new immigrants a few generations later.” — Wilbur Zelinsky, The Cultural Geography of the United States, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973, pp. 13–14.

    1. This is the theory of the extended mind, introduced more than two decades ago by the philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers. A 1998 article of theirs published in the journal Analysis began by posing a question that would seem to have an obvious answer: “Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?” They went on to offer an unconventional response. The mind does not stop at the usual “boundaries of skin and skull,” they maintained. Rather, the mind extends into the world and augments the capacities of the biological brain with outside-the-brain resources.

      https://icds.uoregon.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Clark-and-Chalmers-The-Extended-Mind.pdf

      Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?

      There seems to be a parallel between this question and that between the gene and the body. Evolution is working at the level of the gene, but the body and the environment are part of the extended system as well. Link these to Richard Dawkins idea of the extended gene and ideas of group selection.

      Are there effects to be seen on the evolutionary scale of group selection ideas with respect to the same sorts of group dynamics like the minimal group paradigm? Can the sorts of unconscious bias that occur in groups be the result of individual genes? This seems a bit crazy, but potentially worth exploring if there are interlinked effects based on this analogy.

    2. One last resource for augmenting our minds can be found in other people’s minds. We are fundamentally social creatures, oriented toward thinking with others. Problems arise when we do our thinking alone — for example, the well-documented phenomenon of confirmation bias, which leads us to preferentially attend to information that supports the beliefs we already hold. According to the argumentative theory of reasoning, advanced by the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, this bias is accentuated when we reason in solitude. Humans’ evolved faculty for reasoning is not aimed at arriving at objective truth, Mercier and Sperber point out; it is aimed at defending our arguments and scrutinizing others’. It makes sense, they write, “for a cognitive mechanism aimed at justifying oneself and convincing others to be biased and lazy. The failures of the solitary reasoner follow from the use of reason in an ‘abnormal’ context’” — that is, a nonsocial one. Vigorous debates, engaged with an open mind, are the solution. “When people who disagree but have a common interest in finding the truth or the solution to a problem exchange arguments with each other, the best idea tends to win,” they write, citing evidence from studies of students, forecasters and jury members.

      Thinking in solitary can increase one's susceptibility to confirmation bias. Thinking in groups can mitigate this.

      How might keeping one's notes in public potentially help fight against these cognitive biases?

      Is having a "conversation in the margins" with an author using annotation tools like Hypothes.is a way to help mitigate this sort of cognitive bias?

      At the far end of the spectrum how do we prevent this social thinking from becoming groupthink, or the practice of thinking or making decisions as a group in a way that discourages creativity or individual responsibility?

    3. Some studies in the field of physics education found that students’ understanding of the subject is less accurate after an introductory college physics course.

      The idea of learning by doing may have even more profound effects based on the idea of grounding. Experience in the physical world may dramatically inform experiences with the theoretical world.

    1. Critical pedagogy, among other things, borrows its ‘critical lens’ from the critical theory. It views society as divided and hierarchical (i.e. based on power relations); and education as a tool used by dominant groups to legitimise the iniquitous arrangement. By enabling the oppressed to look at the oppressor’s ideologies critically, it believes, education can assist them in ridding themselves of their ‘false consciousness’ – an important step, as we will see later, in their struggle for liberation. As is apparent, contrary to traditional claims of the ‘neutrality’ of education, “critical pedagogy views all education theory as intimately linked to ideologies shaped by power, politics, history and culture.” (Darder 1991, p. 77) And the primary function of the critical pedagogue is thus “to empower the powerless and transform those conditions which perpetuate human injustice and inequity.” (McLaren, 1988) – a concern that it shares with critical theory.8

      Critical Pedagogy (CP):

      • Sees society as divided into a hierarchy based on power relations.
      • Education is used as a tool by the dominant to uphold the hierarchy.
      • Education can also be used by the oppressed to rid themselves of false consciousness.
      • CP does not think any education is neutral. All education is shaped by power, politics, history, and culture.
      • CP can empower the powerless to change the power structures.
    1. The CommunitySensor community network ontology can be positioned somewhere in the middle of this spectrum: community network representatives are totally free to come up with their own terms for element and connection types in their own ontologies. However, these terms are organized in a deep structure with community-specific element and connection types being classified by higher-order element and connection type (sub)categories described in the CommunitySensor community network conceptual model.
    1. “With whistling, it was more like, let’s see what people did naturally to simplify the signal. What did they keep?” she says.
    2. In practice, almost every whistled tonal language chooses to use pitch to encode the tones.

      Why is pitch encoding of tones more prevalent in tonal languages? What is the efficiency and outcome of the speech and the information that can be encoded?

    3. Whistlers of tonal languages thus face a dilemma: Should they whistle the tones, or the vowels and consonants? “In whistling, you can produce only one of the two. They have to choose,” says Meyer.

      Non-tonal speech is easy to transfer into whistling language, but tonal languages have to choose between whistling the tones or the vowels and consonants as one can only produce one of the two with whistling.

      What effect does this tell us about the information content and density of languages, particularly tonal languages and whistling?

  9. Aug 2021
    1. theory is often conflated with “conceptual”. So people talk about having a theoretical or conceptual framework.

      See Varpio, L., Paradis, E., Uijtdehaage, S., & Young, M. (2020). The Distinctions Between Theory, Theoretical Framework, and Conceptual Framework. Academic Medicine: Journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges, 95(7), 989–994.

    1. therefore in practice it's a bit academic to worry about which lines inside that block the compiler should be happy or unhappy about. From falsehood, anythihng follows. So the compiler is free to say "if the impossible happens, then X is an error" or "if the impossible happens, then X is not an error". Both are valid (although one might be more or less surprising to developers).
    1. The Attack on "Critical Race Theory": What's Going on?

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P35YrabkpGk

      Lately, a lot of people have been very upset about “critical race theory.” Back in September 2020, the former president directed federal agencies to cut funding for training programs that refer to “white privilege” or “critical race theory, declaring such programs “un-American propaganda” and “a sickness that cannot be allowed to continue.” In the last few months, at least eight states have passed legislation banning the teaching of CRT in schools and some 20 more have similar bills in the pipeline or plans to introduce them. What’s going on?

      Join us for a conversation that situates the current battle about “critical race theory” in the context of a much longer war over the relationship between our racial present and racial past, and the role of culture, institutions, laws, policies and “systems” in shaping both. As members of families and communities, as adults in the lives of the children who will have to live with the consequences of these struggles, how do we understand what's at stake and how we can usefully weigh in?

      Hosts: Melissa Giraud & Andrew Grant-Thomas

      Guests: Shee Covarrubias, Kerry-Ann Escayg,

      Some core ideas of critical race theory:

      • racial realism
        • racism is normal
      • interest convergence
        • racial equity only occurs when white self interest is being considered (Brown v. Board of Education as an example to portray US in a better light with respect to the Cold War)
      • Whiteness as property
        • Cheryl Harris' work
        • White people have privilege in the law
        • myth of meritocracy
      • Intersectionality

      People would rather be spoon fed rather than do the work themselves. Sadly this is being encouraged in the media.

      Short summary of CRT: How laws have been written to institutionalize racism.

      Culturally Responsive Teaching (also has the initials CRT).

      KAE tries to use an anti-racist critical pedagogy in her teaching.

      SC: Story about a book Something Happened in Our Town (book).

      • Law enforcement got upset and the school district
      • Response video of threat, intimidation, emotional blackmail by local sheriff's department.
      • Intent versus impact - the superintendent may not have had a bad intent when providing an apology, but the impact was painful

      It's not really a battle about or against CRT, it's an attempt to further whitewash American history. (synopsis of SC)

      What are you afraid of?

    1. We can use the itertools.combinations function to find all possible subsets of a chord for a given cardinality.

      Ha! Found a Ruby method to do the same thing in Sonic Pi. https://in-thread.sonic-pi.net/t/exploring-modes-of-pitch-class-sets-using-chord-invert/5874/10?u=enkerli

      Glad this is explicitly mentioned here as it was my initial goal as I got into musical applications of Set Theory!

    1. when you're reading some fresh code in your browser, do you really want to stop to configure that test harness

      Running the tests should be as easy as opening something in the browser.

    1. Normally, thousands of rabbits and guinea pigs are used andkilled, in scientific laboratories, for experiments which yieldgreat and tangible benefits to humanity. This war butcheredmillions of people and ruined the health and lives of tens ofmillions. Is this climax of the pre-war civilization to be passedunnoticed, except for the poetry and the manuring of the battlefields, that the“poppies blow”stronger and better fed? Or is thedeath of ten men on the battle field to be of as much worth inknowledge gained as is the life of one rabbit killed for experi-ment? Is the great sacrifice worth analysing? There can be onlyone answer—yes. But, if truth be desired, the analysis must bescientific.

      Idea: Neural net parameter analysis but with society as the 'neural net' and the 'training examples' things like industrial accidents, etc. How many 'training examples' does it take to 'learn' a lesson, and what can we infer about the rate of learning from these statistics?

    1. William Ross Ashby (1903-1972) was a British pioneer in the fields of cybernetics and systems theory. He is best known for proposing the law of requisite variety, the principle of self-organization, intelligence amplification, the good regulator theorem, building the automatically stabilizing Homeostat, and his books Design for a Brain (1952) and An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956).

  10. Jul 2021
    1. we emphasize here the lack of theorising on the urban commons, particularly the urban part of it.

      I think this it is unfortunate that the autors missed Kip (2015), who treated exactly that.

      Kip, M. (2015). Moving Beyond the City: Conceptualizing Urban Commons from a Critical Urban Studies Perspective. In Urban commons: Moving beyond state and market (pp. 42–59). Bauverlag; Birkhäuser.

      https://books.google.com/books?id=UlDyCQAAQBAJ&pg=PA42#v=onepage&q&f=false

    1. Unlike orthodox Marxism, critical theory is concerned with language and identity more than with material conditions.

      critical theory versus Marxism

    2. Critical theory upends the universal values of the Enlightenment: objectivity, rationality, science, equality, freedom of the individual. These liberal values are an ideology by which one dominant group subjugates another. All relations are power relations, everything is political, and claims of reason and truth are social constructs that maintain those in power.

      Critical theory versus Englightenment

    1. Here by "learning" is meant understanding more, not remem­bering more information that has the same degree of intelli­gibility as other information you already possess.

      A definition of learning here. Is this the thing that's missing from my note above?

    2. The first sense is the one in which we speak of ourselves as reading newspapers, magazines, or anything else that, according to our skill and talents, is at once thoroughly intel­ligible to us. Such things may increase our store of informa­tion, but they cannot improve our understanding, for our understanding was equal to them before we started. Otherwise, we would have felt the shock of puzzlement and perplexity that comes from getting in over our depth-that is, if we were both alert and honest.

      Here they're comparing reading for information and reading for understanding.

      How do these two modes relate to Claude Shannon's versions of information (surprise) and semantics (the communication) itself. Are there other pieces which exist which we're not tacitly including here? It feels like there's another piece we're overlooking.

    1. or Jonas, one of the questions we must face is this“What force shall represent the future in the present?”

      This is a pressing question which our governments pay far too little attention to.

    1. A quick overview of the basics and general history of critical race theory.

    2. Crenshaw and her classmates asked 12 scholars of color to come to campus and lead discussions about Bell’s book Race, Racism, and American Law. With that, critical race theory began in earnest.
    3. The late Harvard Law professor Derrick Bell is credited as the father of critical race theory. He began conceptualizing the idea in the 1970s as a way to understand how race and American law interact, and developed a course on the subject.
  11. arxiv.org arxiv.org
    1. a basic ingredient of quantum theory: the category Hilb whose objects are Hilbert spaces, usedto describe physicalsystems, and whose morphisms are linear operators, used to describephysicalprocesses

      [[hilb]] == [[hilbert spaces]] + [[linear operators]]

    1. ARinterventiontypicallyconsistsoftwomainphases:ARinduc-tionandARconsolidation.UsuallyARinductionisaninformationalsession(e.g.,viaavideotapeoranoral/handoutpresentation)aimingatpresentingandsummarizingthebenefitsoffunctionalattributions(e.g.,loweffort),theopportunityandtheadvantagesofchangingdysfunctional,self-defeatingcausalattributions(e.g.,lowability)tomoreadaptiveones,andofferingsuggestionscon-cerningstudents’causalthinkingaboutfailure.ARinductionisusuallyreinforcedbyaconsolidationphase,aimingatworkingindepthontheattributionalinformation.Consolidationactivitieshaveincludedseveralactivitiessuchasgroupdiscussion(e.g.,Perry&Struthers,1994)orwritingassignmentsincludingprimarilycog-nitiveoraffect-orientedcontent(e.g.,Halletal.,2006,Halletal.,2007;VanOverwalle&Metsenaere,1990).

      Brief summary of what AR Intervention and AR Induction means.

    2. peoplelookforcausestoexplainoutcomesandeventsintheirlives,especiallyifunexpected,important,ornegative.ManyinvestigationsconductedbyWeiner(e.g.,Weiner,1985,1995,2005)revealedathree-dimensionalstructureofcausalthinkingwhosecomponentsarethelocus,thestability,andthecontrol-labilityofcauses.

      three locus of focus

    1. ‘Don’t get fooled by those mangled teeth she sports on camera!’ says the ABC News host introducing the woman who plays Pennsatucky. ‘Taryn Manning is one beautiful and talented actress.’ This suggestion that bad teeth and talent, in particular, are mutually exclusive betrays our broad, unexamined bigotry toward those long known, tellingly, as ‘white trash.’ It’s become less acceptable in recent decades to make racist or sexist statements, but blatant classism generally goes unchecked. See the hugely successful blog People of Walmart that, through submitted photographs, viciously ridicules people who look like contemporary US poverty: the elastic waistbands and jutting stomachs of diabetic obesity, the wheelchairs and oxygen tanks of gout and emphysema. Upper-class supremacy is nothing new. A hundred years ago, the US Eugenics Records Office not only targeted racial minorities but ‘sought to demonstrate scientifically that large numbers of rural poor whites were genetic defectives,’ as the sociologist Matt Wray explains in his book Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (2006). The historian and civil rights activist W E B du Bois, an African American, wrote in his autobiography Dusk of Dawn (1940) that, growing up in Massachusetts in the 1870s, ‘the racial angle was more clearly defined against the Irish than against me. It was a matter of income and ancestry more than colour.’ Martin Luther King, Jr made similar observations and was organising a poor-people’s march on Washington at the time of his murder in 1968.

      examples of upper-class supremacy

      This seems an interesting sociological issue. What is the root cause? Is it the economic sense of "keeping up with the Jonses"? Is it a zero-sum game? really?

    1. These criteria – surprise serendipity, information and inner complexity

      These criteria – surprise serendipity, information and inner complexity – are the criteria any communication has to meet.

      An interesting thesis about communication. Note that Luhmann worked in general systems theory. I'm curious if he was working in cybernetics as well?

    2. Irritation: basically, without surprise or disappointment there’s no information. Both partners have to be surprised in some way to say communication takes place.

      This is a basic tenet of information theory. Interesting to see it appear in a work on writing.

  12. Jun 2021
    1. As an example, online datingapps add long ties on sexual contact social networks—often bydesign, as they seek to connect strangers. This has the potential toincrease disease burden even for those that do not use the services

      How can online networks with long ties increase disease burden UNLESS the implication is that, they eventually translate to physical contact?

    1. But a better path forward is one of true global cooperation based on mutual benefit and reciprocity.

      This is the case for so many human endeavors.

      How might game theory help to ensure it? Are there other factors that could assist as well?

    1. This leads us to Markovits’s second critique of the aspirational view: The cycle that produces meritocratic inequality severely harms not only the middle class but the very elite who seem to benefit most from it.

      What if we look at meritocracy from a game theoretic viewpoint?

      Certainly there's an issue that there isn't a cap on meritocratic outputs, so if one wants more wealth, then one needs to "simply" work harder. As a result, in a "keeping up with the Jones'" society that (incorrectly) measures happiness in wealth, everyone is driven to work harder and faster for their piece of the pie.

      (How might we create a sort of "set point" to limit the unbounded meritocratic cap? Might this create a happier set point/saddle point on the larger universal graph?)

      This effect in combination with the general drive to have "power over" people instead of "power with", etc. in combination with racist policies can create some really horrific effects.

      What other compounding effects might there be? This is definitely a larger complexity-based issue.

  13. May 2021
    1. Moreover, “[r]elations of power are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of relationships (economic processes, knowledge rela­tionships, sexual relations), but are immanent in the latter.” Such claims played some role in the rise of a mode of analysis that vastly expands the range of what can be treated as political.

      power is everywhere; in every relationship; this is why the range of what is "political" is actually quite vast

    1. These “Songline” stories are ancient, exhibit little variation over long periods of time, and are carefully learned and guarded by the Elders who are its custodians [7].

      What is the best way we could test and explore error correction and overwriting in such a system from an information theoretic standpoint?

    1. 130 years on, privacy is still largely conceived of as an individual thing, wherein we get to make solo decisions about when we want to be left alone and when we’re comfortable being trespassed upon.

      How could one design a mathematical balancing system to help separate individuals embedded within a variety of societies or publics to enforce a balance of levels of privacy.

      • There's the interpersonal level between the individuals
      • There's the person's individual privacy and the public's reaction/response to the thing captured, for which the public may shun or not
      • There's the takers rights (possibly a journalist or news outlet) to inform the broader public which may shame or not
      • There's the publics' potential right to know, the outcome may effect them or dramatically change society as a whole
      • others facets?
      • how many facets?
      • how to balance all these to create an optimum outcome for all parties?
      • How might the right to forget look like and be enforced?
      • How do economic incentives play out (paparazzi, journalism, social media, etc.?)
    1. Braud, M., Gaboriaud, A., Ferry, T., Mardi, W. E., Silva, L. D., Lemouzy, M., Guttierrez, J., Petit, S., Szabelska, A., & IJzerman, H. (2021). COVID-19-related conspiracy beliefs and their relationship with perceived stress and pre-existing conspiracy beliefs in a Prolific Academic sample: A replication and extension of Georgiou et al. (2020). PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/t62s7

    1. ReconfigBehSci on Twitter: ‘@taylorgrayson @skepticscience @ClimateOfGavin @kostas_exarhia I guess this depends on what kind of misinformation/’conspiracy" you are faced with. In the context of climate denial, there is evidence that understanding of expert consensus can impact belief @STWOrg" / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved 19 February 2021, from https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1361608256486047748

  14. Apr 2021
    1. Exercise can tackle symptoms of schizophrenia

      Not only am I unsurprised by this, but I'd be surprised if it were otherwise. The logic is that schizophrenia is a sleep disorder, and exercise enhances sleep. Additionally, lack of movement is one of the negative symptoms of schizophrenia. Therefore, this poverty of movement may play a role in the pathogenesis of schizophrenia symptoms.

      I need to start a google search document with predictions prior to actually searching. It will slow down my research speed, but it is necessary in order to provide unbiased data on my intuitive understanding of diseases. It seems like the majority of my strong intuitions are true. Edit: I'll just record the search phrase in my hypothes.is notes. This one was "exercise schizophrenia"

    1. A reproduction of Carroll’snotes on his number alphabet will be found in Warren Weaver’s arti-cle “Lewis Carroll: Mathematician,” inScientific Americanfor April1956.)

      I need to track down this reference and would love to see what Weaver has to say about the matter.

      Certainly Weaver would have spoken of this with Claude Shannon (or he'd have read it).

  15. Mar 2021
    1. If those problems are planetary, then trying to cohere them around the game theory dynamics of locally embedded sovereign zones called countries disables the paths that should be open.
    1. graph theory is the study of graphs, which are mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects