science
Neil Postman: Education as a Cure for Stupidity (Part I)
Who is Neil Postman?
Wanna watch more? I sure did. Click here.
Neil Postman
From Wikipedia:
Neil Postman (March 8, 1931 – October 5, 2003) was an American author, media theorist and cultural critic, who is best known by the general public for his 1985 book about television, Amusing Ourselves to Death. For more than forty years, he was associated with New York University. Postman was a humanist, who believed that “new technology can never substitute for human values.”
What was he like? You can get an idea from this brief interview
Mr. Postman worked closely with Marshall McLuhan
In 1977, Marshall McLuhan defined media ecology as:
…means arranging various media to help each other so they won’t cancel each other out, to buttress one medium with another. You might say, for example, that radio is a bigger help to literacy than television, but television might be a very wonderful aid to teaching languages. And so you can do some things on some media that you cannot do on others. And, therefore, if you watch the whole field, you can prevent this waste that comes by one canceling the other out.
Inspired by McLuhan, Neil Postman founded the Program in Media Ecology at New York University in 1971. He described it as:
Media ecology looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival. The word ecology implies the study of environments: their structure, content, and impact on people.
Michael Pollan and The Botany of Desire
Author Michael Pollan says:
The tulip, by gratifying our desire for a certain kind of beauty, has gotten us to take it from its origins in Central Asia and disperse it around the world. Marijuana, by gratifying our desire to change consciousness, has gotten people to risk their lives, their freedom, in order to grow more of it and plant more of it. The potato, by gratifying our desire for control, control over nature so that we can feed ourselves has gotten itself out of South America and expanded its range far beyond where it was 500 years ago. And the apple, by gratifying our desire for sweetness begins in the forests of Kazakhstan and is now the universal fruit. These are great winners in the dance of domestication.
MIT Media Lab: Personas
Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you. Here’s one of mine but you can click on it to make it bigger and easier to read: 
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Salt
From Wikipedia: Chloride and sodium ions, the two major components of salt, are necessary for the survival of all known living creatures, including humans. Salt is involved in regulating the water content (fluid balance) of the body.
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Flow = Attention deconcentration?
It comes up around nearly every turn. It’s one of the wobbles of life that leads us into such ideas repeatedly: Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Proposed by Mihály CsÃkszentmihályi, the positive psychology concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields.
Jason Kottke posted an excellent article today that is relevant and timely:
It’s a bummer that Alec Wilkinson’s article on free diving isn’t available online (except for NYer subscribers)…it’s fascinating and right up the alley of the relaxed concentration/deliberate practice enthusiast. One of the two divers profiled uses a technique called attention deconcentration to govern her body and mind as she dives.
To still the unbidden apprehensions that might interfere with her dive — what she describes as “the subjective feeling of empty lungs at the deep” — Molchanova uses a technique that she refers to as “attention deconcentration.” (“They get it from the military,” Ericson said.) Molchanova told me, “It means distribution of the whole field of attention — you try to feel everything simultaneously. This condition creates an empty consciousness, so the bad thoughts don’t exist.”
“Is it difficult to learn?”
“Yes, it’s difficult. I teach it in my university. It’s a technique from ancient warriors — it was used by samurai — but it was developed by a Russian scientist, Oleg Bakhtiyarov, as a psychological-state-management technique for people sho do very monotonous jobs.”
I asked if it was like meditation.
“To some degree, except meditation means you’re completely free, but if you’re in the sea at depth you will have to be focused, or it will get bad. What you do to start learning is you focus on the edges, not the center of things, as if you were looking at a screen. Basically, all the time I am diving, I have an empty consciousness. I have a kind of melody going through my mind that keeps me going, but otherwise I am completely not in my mind.”
I found only one other reference online to attention deconcentration, an article on free diving written by Natalia Molchanova herself. In it, she talks about the three types of attention deconcentration: visual, aural, and tactile.
Rising from the depth, it is important to constantly scan your condition to prevent shallow water black-out, which can occur without any discomfort sensations. Somatic attention deconcentration appears to be extremely useful in this situation. Somatic AD implies attention distribution on the whole volume of the body and allows noticing tiny changes of organism state.
There is one more kind of AD — aural attention deconcentration. It is not so effective in the water, but it helps preparing to the dive and not to be distracted by judge’s countdown.
It’s interesting that both the attention deconcentration and flow techniques are designed to get the practitioner to basically the same place (i.e. ready to perform difficult tasks) from opposite directions.
Cheers, Jason – thanks for this one.
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Malecha
This is our pal, Pat.
After having lived in Little Port Walter (known by those in the know as Club Fed) for a few years, our pals Pat and Jen have moved back to Juneau with their little boy, Bruno.
Now, we don’t get to see them as often as we’d like but seeing as you’re visiting us @ Lofto this week, we’ve dedicated today’s post to you : )
We’ve missed you!
Some cool facts about Pat:
Subsequent to being a Rasmuson Fellow, Pat initially worked as a research analyst at the Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission where he reported on aspects of diverse Alaska fisheries including Pacific cod, weathervane scallops, Pacific herring, and horsehair crab. Since 2001, Pat has worked as a research fishery biologist for the National Marine Fisheries Service at the Auke Bay Laboratory in Juneau. In his primary role, he studies the effects of commercial fishing on benthic habitats. These studies, utilizing both submersibles and scuba, have varied objectives from simple habitat typing to manipulative studies identifying effects of trawling at varied intensities.
Pat is also involved with other work that is attempting to determine growth rates of two species of sponge and two species of coral. These studies will help managers understand habitat and fishery interactions and allow for sustainable fisheries.
Those interested in checking out some of Pat’s work can find a good start here.
Some cool facts about Jen:
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Remembering the contributions of Phil Dodds
Mark Oehlert, an acquaintance of mine via Twitter, turned me onto his friend Phil Dodds, who turns out was not only in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but contributed a great deal to our culture in his short life, including, but not limited to, SCORM:
From Wikipedia:
He was the chief architect of the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) under the guidance of the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative, a project of the United States Department of Defense. The ADL SCORM is widely perceived as a means to achieve interoperability, accessibility and reuse of the component pieces of web-based instruction, irrespective of Learning Management Systems. Philip’s work on SCORM will continue as hundreds of organizations around the world continue their collective efforts to resolve remaining issues associated with SCORM’s Simple Sequencing Models, such as a lack of common instructional strategies and taxonomies (common definitions) for learning objects.
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Fahrenheit versus Celsius
In my quest to learn to translate between Fahrenheit and Celsius quickly and accurately, I’ve put this handy calculator here to help me and also to enable me to cheat until I can do it on my own. Type a value in either field below and its equivalent will populate the other:
I *borrowed* this bit of javascript code from NOAA so I should thank them appropriately : )
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Hero : James Burke
James Burke has the storytelling powers of the immortal. Here we can listen and see him discuss the thinking behind his work. Groovy, indeed.
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Overlooked : Slackers in Nature
Earlier this morning, Tim O’Reilly tweeted about this research published in the NYT and I am so completely fascinated and thus fixated on it today:
Dr. Dornhaus is breaking new ground in her studies of whether the efficiency of ant society, based on a division of labor among ant specialists, is important to their success. To do that, she said, “I briefly anesthetized 1,200 ants, one by one, and painted them using a single wire-size brush, with model airplane paint  Rally Green, Racing Red, Daytona Yellow.â€Â
After recording their behavior with two video cameras aiming down on an insect-size stage, she analyzed 300 hours of videotape of the ants in action. She discovered behavior more worthy of Aesop’s grasshopper than the proverbial industrious ants.
“The specialists aren’t necessarily good at their jobs,†she said. “And the other ants don’t seem to recognize their lack of ability.â€Â
Dr. Dornhaus found that fast ants took one to five minutes to perform a task  collecting a piece of food, fetching a sand-grain stone to build a wall, transporting a brood item  while slow ants took more than an hour, and sometimes two. And she discovered that about 50 percent of the other ants do not do any work at all. In fact, small colonies may sometimes rely on a single hyperactive overachiever.
Why do some worker ants lean on their shovels and let the rest of the workers do all the work? “It’s like students living together  you’ll always find one will have a lower threshold for doing the washing up and will end up always doing it all,†she said.
It’s amazing it took us so long to figure this out – what with all the ant farms we’ve been watching for years and years. No one seemed to notice the slackers until now. Perhaps, they’re there for their personalities, for keeping morale up, or maybe for some other brutally apparent reason that we won’t notice for another hundred years?
Maybe they’re just slackers.
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They sure didn’t walk very far…
Last weekend, I watched In the Shadow of the Moon, a documentary put together by Ron Howard about the Apollo missions to the Moon.
Like a lot of us, I’ve always been extremely curious about all of these things and in my searching for more and more details, I found the pic below [click on it to see it larger] – those fellas sure didn’t go wandering off into the Earthlight too far while they were there…
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oldie but a goodie
Remember this?
If you see the dancer spinning clockwise it means you’re using the right half of your brain. If she spins counter-clockwise it means you’re using the left.
The theory: by watching the direction of her spin, we can determine which half of our brains we’re using.
Or maybe it’s just a random optical illusion? Who knows?
The interesting thing = some of us see her spinning one direction, some the other, while some see her change directions and others, for the life of them, just aren’t able to make her change directions.
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Tag : Complete
Tag isn’t just a documentary, it’s a chad-calease-made odyssey on the subject of a game that touches everything we do.
Enjoy the trailer.
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Langer wins Millennium Award
MIT Institute Professor Robert Langer has won the Millennium Technology Prize, the world’s largest award for technology innovation.
Langer was chosen “for his inventions and development of innovative biomaterials for controlled drug release and tissue regeneration that have saved and improved the lives of millions of people,” according to Technology Academy Finland, which gives the award every other year.
The award goes to developers of a technology that “significantly improves the quality of human life, today and in the future.” Winners receive 800,000 euros, or about $1.2 million.
Tarja Halonen, president of Finland, handed Langer the prize and the trophy Wednesday afternoon at an award ceremony in Helsinki.
“It’s such a great honor — particularly given the quality of the people who have won it before as well as the quality of the innovations and people considered this year,” Langer told the MIT News Office.
At MIT, Langer runs the largest biomedical engineering lab in the world. He holds more than 550 issued and pending patents and has written some 900 research papers.
“Bob Langer’s pioneering work places him at the very forefront of science, engineering and medical innovation,” said MIT President Susan Hockfield. “In his remarkably collaborative spirit, extraordinary productivity, depth of curiosity and record of fearless innovation, he embodies the core values of MIT. We are extraordinarily proud of his many contributions and the great good that his work has brought to so many people.”
Langer’s achievements have had a profound impact on the field of cancer research. He entered the field with a PhD in chemical engineering when he teamed with cancer researcher Judah Folkman at Children’s Hospital in Boston in 1974. At that time, the scientific community believed that only small molecules could pass through a plastic delivery system in a controlled manner.
In the 1970s, Langer developed polymer materials that allowed the large molecules of a protein to pass through membranes in a controlled manner to inhibit angiogenesis, the process by which tumors recruit blood vessels. Blocking angiogenesis is critical in fighting cancer because the new blood vessels allow tumor cells to escape into the circulation and lodge in other organs.
“Bob has been a pioneer in applying materials science and engineering to drug delivery and tissue engineering,” said Subra Suresh, dean of MIT’s School of Engineering and Ford Professor of Engineering. “I’m delighted to see his seminal contributions recognized through his selection for this most prestigious award.”
Andrew Viterbi ’56, SM ’57, founder of Qualcomm, was one of four other finalists for this year’s award. He was picked as a finalist for creating an algorithm that became “the key building element in modern wireless and digital communications systems, touching lives of people everywhere,” according to the Technology Academy Finland.
The other finalists, or laureates, were Alec Jeffreys, who developed DNA fingerprinting techniques, and a trio of scientists who developed an optical amplifier that transformed telecommunications: David Payne, Emmanuel Desurvire and Randy Giles.
“It is sufficient to say that each and every one of today’s laureates has excelled in fulfilling the most important of our requirements: benefit to mankind,” said Stig Gustavson, chairman of Technology Academy Finland.
This year marks the third time the prize has been awarded — and the second time an MIT researcher has won it. Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web and senior research scientist at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, won the honor in 2004.
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