Stuff
2010 Feb 24
Chatting with Joel about the ‘sustainability RPG’.
One persistent question is the tension between individual ‘choice’ and collective action. Both technologists who design consumer products and environmentalists who see sustainability as a matter of personal ethics emphasize the former. For users, ‘environmentally responsible technology’ becomes a symbol of (often economic) status. For environmentalists, non-consumption of products perceived especially problematic (meat and gasoline) becomes a symbol of moral status. (‘Conspicuous consumption’ has generalized into ‘conspicuous hardship’ in some subcultures. In some subcultures, a BMW does the work of the peacock’s tail; in others, it’s not-driving.) In terms of ‘external’ effects, personal ‘improvement’ may (on one hand) yield diminishing returns and (on the other) confront difficult obstacles if it’s perceived as the main path to change. Many people experience work and home as fixed over medium periods of time. Even if they are not fixed in practice, changing either entails great uncertainty. But fixed home and work constrain personal behavior. One difficult task for ‘sustainability game’ designers is to help individuals see how their existing ‘contexts’ (infrastructural and social) constrain their personal actions — and that therefore if they drive alone 50 miles to work that does not make them ‘bad’ but rather suggests that (assuming they want to reduce emissions, or vulnerability to oil price spikes) they should work together to find a way to do something else. Carpooling, moving, and changing jobs may have similar carbon-emissions outcomes, but some may be ‘easier’ than others.
Amanda Williams has a nice, short, related Ubicomp ’07 workshop paper.
2010 Feb 21
The eye that looks ahead to the safe course is closed forever.
—Herbert, Dune
2010 Feb 20
I beat Swarm today, in the sense of figuring out how to win every time. It’s a subtle and clever game, and makes me want to actually make the network game I wrote about last quarter.
In related news, there is a similar-looking series of tower defense games called geodefense that maybe I will try.
In related non-news, I wonder if there are any games that train the player to think ecologically about agency and causality (e.g., Ulanowicz 1990, Aristotelian causalities in ecosystem development). At some point Derek was talking about trying to visualize (or somehow bring up) complex causality in KarunaTree, but I’m not sure if that’s a priority for the current development phase.
Notes on independent game design, for reference: NYT article Soderstrom (‘Cactus’), ‘How to make a game in four hours’ notes
2010 Feb 16
I like Jean-François Blanchette’s disclaimer.
And the award for most clever URL goes to…
Ah yes, to save typing.
What? No, I’m not going to give you a link. Type it in. Also, mouthwash users take note:
2010 Feb 13
I have released Augh, a Greasemonkey script and Rails app to help UCI patrons get the library book they want without recalling it.
Oh I see, this is where my life has gone.
(This is my ‘sent mail’ folder.)
2010 Feb 10
This is the best website you have ever seen about pies.
These are pies.
This is not a pie.
Wikipedia redirection win.
Why is this awesome?
2010 Feb 08
openDemocracy is rocking really hard this week. Radical homemakers.
2010 Feb 07
The Dark Mountain Manifesto is profound and provocative.
Those who witness extreme social collapse at first hand seldom describe any deep revelation about the truths of human existence. What they do mention, if asked, is their surprise at how easy it is to die.
The pattern of ordinary life, in which so much stays the same from one day to the next, disguises the fragility of its fabric. How many of our activities are made possible by the impression of stability that pattern gives? So long as it repeats, or varies steadily enough, we are able to plan for tomorrow as if all the things we rely on and don’t think about too carefully will still be there. When the pattern is broken, by civil war or natural disaster or the smaller-scale tragedies that tear at its fabric, many of those activities become impossible or meaningless, while simply meeting needs we once took for granted may occupy much of our lives…
2010 Feb 06
Finished the zeroth draft of the first of three or four sections of my advancement paper. Working title of the paper is Sustainability, ecology, and interaction. The section is “Unsustainability, vulnerability, and the destruction of meaning.”
2010 Feb 03
Papers with titles of the form The *reasonable *effectiveness of mathematics in X:
Wigner 1959, The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences (the original)
Schönemann, Measurement: the reasonable ineffectiveness of mathematics in the social sciences. In Borg and Mohler, eds., 1994, Trends and Perspectives in Empirical Social Research.
Velupillai 2005, The unreasonable ineffectiveness of mathematics in economics. Cambridge Journal of Economics 29(6): 849-872. (This one features the fantastic right-hand running head “Ineffective economics.”)
Wonderful ace-chat post from Tom:
more than you ever wanted to know about threaded fastenersOf course, they are systems unto themselves.
http://www.boltscience.com/pages/info.htm
After months of question-asking and fiddling around, I think I’ve solved a very old question of ‘why does the cylinder head on a Nash/Rambler 195.6 cubic inch six cylinder need to be re-torqued every 8000 miles’. Yes, some people wanted to know the answer to that question, mainly those whose cyl heads came loose and leaked water into the oil and other Bad Things. For example: me.
Short answer: the head heats up faster than the block it’s bolted to, temp. rise is about 150F. This makes the 30” long block “grow” about .025”. It shrinks back .025” after it cools. This is slow-motion vibration. Every time you start, drive, shut off the car, it loosens the bolts one tiny bit. The looser it gets the easier it is to loosen and the worse it leaks. Here’s a video that explains the how and why.
http://www.boltscience.com/pages/junkertestvideo.htm
Interesting EVERYONE IS WRONG tidbit: those split lock washers you probably use under nuts and bolts? Turns out THEY DO NOTHING. In fact they increase vibrational loosening. Everyone is wrong all the time.
You can never know enough.
(The reason to answer really really obscure questions like that is, turns they have general applications, because the underlying fizzicks is… fizzicks. Turns out, this is a common problem in a lot of things. It’s just that I’d not noticed before. So excruciatingly specific knowledge rarely is. Now I will likely notice an entirely new class of behaviours I did not know enough to observe.)
You might call this ‘pracitioner theory’. It is concise, immediately actionable, and broadly generalizable, and has a short publication schedule.
2010 Feb 02
A plausible argument.
The situation is simple. We should reduce our oil consumption and dependence. If sustainability is a question of resilience — of reducing vulnerability to likely stresses — reducing oil dependence is desirable because declining oil availability is a likely stress. Systems that facilitate resilience in the face of other stresses (e.g., natural disasters that physically damage the built environment) are inadequate to the extent that they are themselves dependent on power generated mainly by burning oil. If we are concerned primarily with the resilience of lifeworlds in industrial countries, it is adequate to prepare at a pace that reflects the fact that oil availability in the North will likely fluctuate dramatically over the next few decades, declining gradually on average rather than suddenly collapsing. If however we take an ethical stance which proscribes the destabilization of other lifeworlds to augment our own comfort, reducing oil consumption is an immediate imperative. This will involve reconfiguring our own lifeworlds. This should not be understood as an individual endeavor only, but as with any collaborative effort if it is to be successful it must begin small.
2010 Feb 01
I’ve been working on my advancement paper. Tentative title is Sustainability, ecology, and interaction. In this case, ‘interaction’ means ‘human-computer interaction’, which is a mapping in HCI that might remind you of New Yorkers and San Francisco residents calling their respective hometowns ‘the city’. It will be submitted to ToCHI.
2010 Jan 30
Lovely collection of Philip K. Dick novel covers. via
Prickly Paradigm Press pamphlet by Jerome McGann, Are the humanities inconsequent? or, Marx’s riddle of the dog
A spectre is haunting literature today — the spectre of patacriticism. Nowhere is the threat more evident than in the dog riddle propounded by the late Marx: “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read” This book, which explains for the first time what Marx meant, works from two assumptions: 1. That the riddle conceals an allegory about book culture and is addressed to the academic custodians of book culture; and 2. that our explanation is necessarily implicated in the problem posed by the riddle of the dog. It therefore remains to be seen — it is the reader’s part to decide — whether the book is a friend to man or, perhaps like Marx’s riddle, too dark to read.
(Yes, that Marx.)
2010 Jan 29
UCSB Center for Spatial Studies #hmm
2010 Jan 27
Consequences of unsustainability, continued.
Like the first, this second hypothetical suburbanite wants to keep his job. His income allocation is the same as hers: a sixth to gas, a twelfth to ‘luxuries’, the remainder to basic needs. He lives just as far away from work. But he does not live near co-workers with whom he could carpool; his work role does not permit him to telecommute or shift his schedule; public transportation cannot get him from home to work for his shift; and the bike routes are unsafe. Like our first hypothetical suburbanite, he can buy cheaper gas, cut luxuries, make shorter or fewer non-work car trips, or some combination. But this second suburbanite, in this analysis, is more vulnerable, in the common use of the term, to rising oil prices than the first. As oil prices rise, the second suburbanite, without the ability to draw on social networks or public infrastructure to develop alternative transportation arrangements, is likely to lose his livelihood first (or, for example, to be forced to move). This vulnerability is complex: it is contingent on the geographical distribution of his co-workers and their work schedules; the nature and temporality of his own work role; the spatial and temporal availability of public transportation (and information about it); the locations and widths and road qualities of bike lanes and the quantity and speed of motor vehicle traffic on the roads where they appear; and so on, defying enumeration, representation, prediction, or even categorization (‘social’, ‘institutional’, ‘economic’, ‘geographic’, ‘technological’, ‘psychological’, etc.).
2010 Jan 26
Two more koans.
Bells and robes.Ummon asked: ‘The world is such a wide world, why do you answer a bell and don ceremonial robes?’
Blow out the candle.
Tokusan was studying Zen under Ryutan. One night he came to Ryutan and asked many questions. The teacher said: ‘The night is getting old. Why don’t you retire?’
So Tokusan bowed and opened the screen to go out, observing: ‘It is very dark outside.’
Ryutan offered Tokusan a lighted candle to find his way. Just as Tokusan received it, Ryutan blew it out. At that moment the mind of Tokusan was opened.
‘What have you attained?’ asked Ryutan.
‘From now on,’ said Tokusan, ‘I will not doubt the teacher’s words.’
The next day Ryutan told the monks at his lecture: ‘I see one monk among you. His teeth are like the sword tree, his mouth is like the blood bowl. If you hit him hard with a big stick, he will not even so much as look back at you. Someday he will mount the highest peak and carry my teaching there.’
On that day, in front of the lecture hall, Tokusan burned to ashes his commentaries on the sutras. He said: ‘However abstruse the teachings are, in comparison with this enlightenment they are like a single hair to the great sky. However profound the complicated knowledge of the world, compared to this enlightenment it is like one drop of water to the great ocean.’ Then he left the monastery.
2010 Jan 25
From Digg comments on ‘Craigslist for power users’.
I spent $90 to advertise a sportbike on cycletrader and all I got were scammers. I spent $0 on Craigslist and had the bike sold in days. Thanks Craiglist! Of course, I spent all the proceeds on hookers and weed I found on Craigslist, so there goes the profit. Hey law enforcement, it’s a joke about the hookers and weed.
[outlandish story demonstrating the utter superiority of Craigslist to any other remotely similar platform, process, or strategy] ...Thanks Craigslist! seems to be a popular form.
2010 Jan 24
Two koans from The Gateless Gate.
Everyday life is the path.Joshu asked Nansen: ‘What is the path?’
Nansen said: ‘Everyday life is the path.’
Joshu asked: ‘Can it be studied?’
Nansen said: ‘If you try to study, you will be far away from it.’
Joshu asked: ‘If I do not study, how can I know it is the path?’
Nansen said: ‘The path does not belong to the perception world, neither does it belong to the nonperception world. Cognition is a delusion and noncognition is senseless. If you want to reach the true path beyond doubt, place yourself in the same freedom as sky. You name it neither good nor not-good.’
At these words Joshu was enlightened.Without words, without silence.
A monk asked Fuketsu: ‘Without speaking, without silence, how can you express the truth?’
Fuketsu observed: I always remember spring-time in southern China. The birds sing among innumerable kinds of fragrant flowers.’
2010 Jan 21
More text over on the right.
2010 Jan 20
Sutton, R. I., The virtues of closet qualitative research. Organization Science 8(1): 97-106, 1997. via
“This research began with 47 seconds of unplanned observation by the first author…”
Closet qualitative and quantitative research will always have a place in the organizational studies literature because, as Linda Pike argues so well, good scholarly writing tells a story that captures the readers’ attention and interest. Keeping some of the research in the closet is one way that authors can avoid creating bored, irritated, and cynical readers. More broadly, many of the steps required to do good scholarly writing play a role like scaffolding does in the construction of a building. You need to use it to make something that is beautiful and useful. But if it is left as part of the finished product, the beauty and utility will be difficult for others to see.
More notes from the increasingly paralogical academy.
Andrea Zittel et al’s High Desert Test Sites. via
The High Desert Test Sites, first inaugurated in 2002, are a series of experimental art sites located along a stretch of desert communities including Pioneer town, Joshua Tree, 29 Palms and Wonder Valley. These locations generate truly alternative spaces for art that challenges traditional conventions of ownership, presentation and patronage. Asking the question “what role does contemporary art play in the world at large?” HDTS strives to interject contemporary art into a world of pickup trucks, new age meditation retreats, one stop supermarket shopping, dirt bike enthusiasts, rock climbing encampments, plastic surgery billboards and marine combat training.
Since its inception HDTS has hosted seven intermittent events and presented projects by over 150 artists. Our “intimate audience” (deliberately kept small by a somewhat loose attitude toward planning and promotion) has traversed countless miles of dirt road and participated in panoply of increasingly experimental approaches toward making art public.
Nuclear slide rules (or, as Tom calls them, ‘“How dead am I?” calculators’).
I had a weird moment reading this CFP. All of the STS calls I’ve ever read blurred together in my mind. (Sorry if this was your CFP. This isn’t meant to offend. Maybe STS scholars are now doing ‘normal’ science [studies]?)
What work does X do? How is it produced and how is it involved in settling questions of A, B, and C? What types of political engagements are made possible by making X and Y — rather than !X and !Y — a central analytical concern?
Recent scholarship in science studies and other fields suggests that the production and management of X is central to political, social, and ethical debates around many of today’s most controversial issues. Models of X and Y have been implicated in the recent financial crisis, and the threshold of Y required by “sound science” has been a matter of contention in debates about anthropogenic climate change and environmental toxicity. Similar issues of Y have marked a number of sites of critical inquiry, from the court room to the genetics lab to the experimental field plot. While a great deal of work on this topic and related inquiries into Y and Z have been motivated by the poststructural critique of D, E, and F, older debates in anthropology and related fields — about G and H, I and J, K, the L/M distinction, and the production of N, O, and P — have also been centrally concerned with X and Y.
This conference aims to foster productive dialogue across diverse areas of current study and long-standing scholarly discussion around these and related themes.
We invite submissions that engage with the problem of Y from across the critical social sciences and humanities: papers that investigate the production, marshaling, or technical management of Y from a historical, ethnographic, or theoretical perspective. Among other topics, papers might address the role of Y in environmental management, scientific and actuarial forecasting, the deployment of medical technologies and treatments, and the crafting of identity. We also welcome submissions focusing on the methods and ethics of social scientific inquiry and how we understand and communicate Y in our own research.
The conference will feature Bruno/Hugh and Donna/Karen as keynote speakers as well as faculty discussants from several institutions for student panels. There is no registration fee.
SF means supreme fascist. This would show that God is bad. I don’t claim that this is correct, or that God exists. This is just sort of half a joke. [Someone asked,] ‘What is the purpose of life?’ I said, ‘Prove and conjecture and keep the SF’s score low.’ Now, the game with the SF is defined as follows. If you do something bad, the SF gets at least two points. If you don’t do something good which you could have done, the SF gets at least one point. And if you are okay, then nobody gets any point. The aim is to keep the SF’s score low.
2010 Jan 19
Finished Norgaard’s Development Betrayed today. Implications for practice [own url]:
We could say something like “the institutional fixtures of the modern[ist] university militate culturally, materially, and logistically against timely political action.” This may not necessarily be wrong. Following Norgaard, by ‘modernist’ we denote the institution’s coevolution with universalism, monism, mechanism, atomism, and objectivism, silly metaphysical and epistemological beliefs that undergird contemporary public discourse, ostensibly rational administration of public life, and the legitimation of the social order generally, and have exacerbated (or perhaps caused) social, political, and environmental problems associated with ‘development.’ By ‘institutional fixtures’ we denote those persons, processes, and relations that simultaneously legitimate and constrain discourse and inquiry — departments, committees, administrators, protocols — and shape the nature and temporality of activity. They do this ‘culturally, materially, and logistically’: by creating a culture in which some things can be thought and others cannot; by directing material support to engagements with only a small subset of the former; and by complicating efforts to shift a project, once imagined, into this subset. Even in this tangled skein, many things can become possible. But when? As Michael Warner has written, political discourse is characterized by a temporal proximity to events which creates the potential to intervene in them. It is oriented to ‘practical’ action: ‘outward’ to the world rather than ‘inward’ to theoretical questions which have accumulated their own importance over time. Such an orientation is not traditionally the preserve of the academy and its inhabitants, and its managerial apparatus is not well suited to support it. We could say that the impulse to plan (and demand plans) that characterizes research precludes the emergent or coevolutionary engagements required to practice responsible (response-able?) politics, or responsible design, or even simply responsible being-in-the-world.
Well, we could say this. But it is unnecessarily recondite and, worse, deploys dubious binarisms: theory/practice; discourse/action; inside/outside. It both oversimplifies and overcomplicates. In this sense it provides an example of the configurations it critiques.
Paul Erdos said that the point of life is to prove and conjecture — he was a mathematician, the most proflific who ever lived — and keep the SF’s score low. ‘SF’ stands for ‘supreme fascist’, and denotes a hypothetical malevolent deity. In Erdos’ cosmology, the SF keeps ‘the Book’, the compendium of all of the most elegant proofs of mathematical theorems, to itself. According to Erdos, whenever you do something bad, the SF gets at least two points. Whenever you don’t do something good that you could have done, the SF gets at least one point. You can never score, so the SF always wins, but you can keep its score down.
Better than the long-winded formulation above is simply to say that the academy is oriented to the world in such a way that sitting inside it gives the SF too many easy chances to score.
2010 Jan 17
Tentative first-pass dissertation [proposal] title: The Ecological Metaphor in Systems Design. One possible cheeky ‘supertitle’ here is probably Life, World, and System (cf), but I doubt I could bring myself to actually use it.
Consequences of unsustainability.
The obvious answer is ‘it depends.’ Consider a particular suburbanite. Her workplace is 50 miles from home, and she drives to work and back each weekday on her own dime. A sixth of her income goes to pay for gas in an average month, with most of the rest paying for rent, food, insurance, and other ‘essentials.’ A twelfth is spent on ‘luxuries.’ Suppose gas prices rise by 50%. Our hypothetical suburbanite wants to keep her job. She can stop buying luxuries and continue driving to work alone every day. Some analysts might predict or even counsel this course of action. Equally plausibly, she can buy less costly gas (assuming it yields more miles per dollar); make fewer or shorter non-work car trips — by reducing total trips or by changing modes for some trips — carpool to work, telecommute, or change modes (for example, to public transit or bicycle); or any combination or variation of these and other strategies. (For example, she might carpool Mondays, telecommute Thursdays, take an earlier shift Fridays to catch the bus, and continue driving alone Tuesdays and Wednesdays.) This flexibility is an example of both what sustainability analysts Luers et al. (“A method for quantifying vulnerability, applied to the agricultural system of the Yaqui Valley, Mexico”, Global Environmental Change 13(4): 255-267, 2003) call “adaptive capacity,” and what systems ecologists Ulanowicz et al. (“Quantifying sustainability: resilience, efficiency, and the return of information theory”, Ecological Complexity 6(1): 27-36, 2009) call “resilience”, but they are different concepts and shed light on different aspects of our suburbanite’s predicament — and thus on the consequences of unsustainability. We will explore both in detail. But first consider another suburbanite.
Rereading Sterling’s punchy and lovely last Viridian note. #design #sustainability
Is your home a museum? Do you have curatorial skills? If not, then entropy is attacking everything in there. Stuff breaks, ages, rusts, wears out, decays. Entropy is an inherent property of time and space. Understand this fact. Expect this. The laws of physics are all right, they should not provoke anguished spasms of denial.
Guantanamo guard reunited with ex-inmates via #wow
2010 Jan 16
The category ‘sustainability’.
‘Sustainable’ is an adjective that classifies a process or practice within a context. Invoking it calls two categories into being in the context, ‘sustainable practices’ and ‘unsustainable practices’. If in a particular deployment no practice in the context appears in one of the categories, the classification does no analytical work. Thus for the classification ‘sustainable’ to be of use in orienting practice, it must distinguish practices from one another by their properties. Properties may be intrinsic to an object or practice, or relational, contingent on role, position, function, or meaning in the context. If ‘sustainability’ is to orient design practice, we must distinguish sustainable from unsustainable practices. So we need to ask, what are the properties of a sustainable practice?
In the clearest interpretation, an unsustainable practice is one whose consequences preclude its preconditions (Zencey, Virgin Forest, p. 153). But wide application of the term ‘unsustainable’ — to describe, for example, automobility-centric suburbia in the United States — raises more questions than it answers. What does the proposition ‘suburbia is unsustainable’ mean? Zencey’s interpretation allows us to ask more precisely: which of (say) suburbia’s consequences will preclude its preconditions? How? Over what period of time?
The statement ‘X is unsustainable’ only makes sense when qualified in time. This property of sustainability as a category is often ignored, but it has been developed in both academic and popular discourse. Ecological economists Costanza and Patten (“Defining and predicting sustainability”, Ecological Economics 15: 193-196, 1995), for example, write that “a sustainable system is one which survives or persists” (p. 193). But “for how long?” (p. 193) “Sustainability, at its base, always concerns temporality, and in particular longevity” (p. 194). “But nothing lasts forever, not even the universe as a whole. Sustainability thus cannot mean an infinite life span or nothing would be sustainable” (p. 195). That is: then ‘sustainability’ would do no analytical work. Similarly, design fiction author and futurist Bruce Sterling writes: “Sustainable practices navigate successfully through time and space, while others crack up and vanish. So basically the sustainable is about time — time and space” (The last Viridian Note, 2008).
Returning to our example, we might focus on a particular suburban practice whose consequences preclude its preconditions: driving. Suburban living in its current configuration encourages residents to rely on gasoline-fueled automobiles for transportation, so suburbanites consume vast quantities of oil.1 Oil is a finite, non-renewable resource, so eventually suburbanite oil consumption will erode oil supply relative to demand, raising gasoline prices and making it unaffordable in the quantities required for comfortable suburban living. Thus ‘suburbia’, as a collection of spaces, objects, ideas, and practices including automobile dependency, is unsustainable over the time frame of substantively declining oil supply. This is because automobile dependency leads to oil depletion, making continued automobile dependency impossible.
1 On navigating between the folk theories of technological neutrality and technological determinism, see Woodhouse and Patton, “Design by society: science and technology studies and the social shaping of design”, Design Issues 20(3): 1-12, 2004, especially pp. 4-5, and Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, pp. 17-18.
But what are the consequences of this unsustainability?
2010 Jan 15
Having a context.
For ethnographers, theory is developed to explain what happens at a site. Theory is explanatory but not necessarily predictive. If it is to be applied to another site, the ‘applier’ must understand the limits of the theory’s generalizability and the consequences of differences between the sites. In exposition, theory is never far from data and its interpretation. The psychoanalyst’s clinic, like the ethnographer’s site, is a space in which data are generated and theories developed, applied, tested, refined, complicated, and refuted. Ethnographer and psychoanalyst bring site and clinic into being by naming. The use of technical language — informant, respondent; analyst, analysand — maps an abstraction onto the space and its actors, augmenting it with the properties required for the production of disciplinary knowledge and rendering it susceptible to later theoretical interpretation and intervention. By classifying objects and actors in a space in categories with understood meanings, the analyst allows them and their relations to be known. ‘Interviewer’ and ‘respondent’ are names that explain and constrain the interactions of actors. ‘Interview’ describes a pattern of interactions. Naming such a pattern ‘an interview’ is an act of theorization. It explains the meaning and purpose of past action and implies constraints on future action. Thus by classifying objects and explaining their purposes and relations, theorization orients practice in the contexts where it is applied.
The designer has many contexts. What is the relation between theory, context, and practice for the designer? Like the ethnographer and the psychoanalyst, the designer alters the context by her practice. If practice is oriented by theory that explains and predicts salient relations and processes in the context, the designer can develop a practice which alters the context in a desired manner. A robust theory helps the designer to know both how practice may alter the context and how the context will resist alteration. That is, robust theory is a theory not only of the context but of the relation between context and practice. Thus without practice a theory can describe and predict relations and processes in the context only under ‘naturally occurring’ conditions: the non-practicing designer acts only as observer. To develop robust theory of practice in context requires the designer to act as designer and to act in the context.
The context is arbitrary, but the properties of the context constrain the kind of theory that can be developed about it. Without context there can be no theory.
I (re)watched (most of) Herzog’s documentary Encounters at the End of the World today.
I think there is a fair amount of the population here [in Antarctica] which are full-time travelers and part-time workers. So yes, those are the professional dreamers, they dream all the time. I think, through them, the great cosmic dreams come into fruition, because the universe dreams through our dreams. I think there is many different ways for reality to bring itself forward, and dreaming is definitely one of those ways.
—Stefan Pashov
2010 Jan 14
Woodhouse and Patton, 2004. Design by society: science and technology studies and the social shaping of design. Design Issues 20(3): 1-12. #design #sts #lovely
To study the social shaping of technologies, STS scholars work in the cognitive space between two commonly held perspectives regarding technology. The position of technological neutrality maintains that a given technology has no systematic effects on society: individuals are perceived as ultimately responsible, for better or worse, because technologies are merely tools people use for their own ends. Possibly the most common example of this position is the slogan, “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people” — according to which logic the gun is a neutral tool while agency is attributed to the individual pulling the trigger. In contrast, the position of technological determinism maintains that technologies are understood as simply and directly causing particular societal outcomes. Thus, a determinist might attribute the decay of U.S. cities to the invention of the automobile, perceiving that the new technology itself undermined the vitality of central cities. Technological neutrality and determinism are folk theories that attempt to understand how people and technologies interact: both explain that interaction in black-and-white terms, attributing agency either entirely to people or entirely to technology.
For STS scholars, better explanations require conceptual tools that allow us to think systematically about complex and simultaneous causation as people and technologies interact. One such tool is the concept of valence,
a bias or “charge” analogous to that of atoms that have lost or gained electrons through ionization. A particular technological system, even an individual tool, has a tendency to interact in similar situations in identifiable and predictable ways. In other words, particular tools or technologies tend to be favored in certain situations, tend to perform in a predictable manner in these situations, and tend to bend other interactions to them. Valence tends to seek out or fit in with certain social norms and to ignore or disturb others. (C. G. Bush, “Women and the assessment of technology”; in J. Rothschild, ed., Machina Ex Dea: Feminist Perspectives on Technology, p. 155)
Thus, a gun is neither neutral nor does it cause people to kill each other. Rather, a gun is valenced toward violence. The presence of a gun in the context of a dispute facilitates a course of events in which a person is shot. One can feel the valence of the gun in the tension it adds to the situation. Although a table lamp also can be used to kill, it does not lend itself as readily to the act.
2010 Jan 12
Massive earthquake in Haiti. Donate to the World Food Programme or other appropriate agency if you are able.
More new things in the right column.
I finally picked up Complex Ecology: The Part-Whole Relation in Ecosystems from the library. It is a collection of papers by ecologists dedicated to a ‘systems’ or ‘holistic’ approach to studying ecosystems. (It was published in 1994, and might be described as the first such collection. There is now a journal, Ecological Complexity. A shorter and more recent single-author book is Maurer’s Untangling Ecological Complexiy: The Macroscopic Perspective.) H. T. Odum’s Environment, Power and Society was on the shelf nearby. I glanced through it, and was tempted to check it out, but I managed to defer. It’s definitely added to the list, though.
2010 Jan 11
New things in the right column.
Today I discovered the fold command. #awesome #linux
2010 Jan 10
Jean-François Noubel’s blog. via see also radical nomadism #strange #fascinating #delightful #practice
Marsh, S., 2009. Living without money. Times Online. via #economics #practice
Former teacher Heidemarie Schwermer has lived without money in Germany for 13 years. Our writer finds out how she does it…
In the wake of setting up her Tauschring, she began to experiment with other sorts of jobs on the side. “I was working in a kitchen for ten deutschmarks an hour and people were saying to me, ‘You went to university, you studied to do this?’ But I thought, well, every person has an intrinsic value, why should I be valued more for being a teacher or a therapist than for working in a kitchen?”
The more ascetically she lived, the happier she became. By 1995 she was deeply involved in the Tauschring, house-sitting for short periods in exchange for cleaning or light maintenance work. She was buying virtually nothing: “When I needed something, I found that it would just come into my life. My glasses, for example. There was an optician who was a member of the Tauschring and he gave them to me in return for some therapy sessions.”
It was in 1996 she realised that “I had to go farther” and took what would be the most radical decision of her life: to live without money. She gave up her apartment and teaching job and resolved to live nomadically, an “extreme lifestyle”, she admits, moving from house to house, in return for menial work. Her new way of life was intended as a short-lived thing: she had given herself 12 months. But she found herself enjoying it so much that it never really ended.
Thirteen years on, she continues to live according to the principles of Gib und Nimm. “Life became much more exciting. More beautiful. I had everything I needed and I knew I couldn’t go back to my old life. I didn’t have to do what I didn’t like, I had a more profound sense of joy, and physically I feel better than ever. Living without money was just the first step. I realised that I wanted to change the world and I wasn’t going to do that by looking after someone’s cat while they were on holiday.”
She still lives — a week at a time — in the spare rooms of members of the Tauschring, cleaning or working in return for accommodation. Only very occasionally has she had personality clashes with her hosts and she tries to resolve any tension within herself “by going for a walk”. She has emergency savings of €200 (£180) and any other money that comes to her she gives away. “I decided it was OK to collect my pension but I give most of it away, except for what I need to pay for train tickets.”
Simple living. via #sustainability #economics #practice
Economics
...Recently, David Wann has introduced the idea of “simple prosperity” as it applies to a sustainable lifestyle. From his point of view, and as a point of departure for what he calls real sustainability, “it is important to ask ourselves three fundamental questions: what is the point of all our commuting and consuming? What is the economy for? And, finally, why do we seem to be unhappier now than when we began our initial pursuit for rich abundance?” In this context, simple living is the opposite of our modern quest for affluence and, as a result, it becomes less preoccupied with quantity and more concerned about the preservation of cities, traditions and nature. A reference point for this new economics can be found in James Robertson’s A New Economics of Sustainable Development, and the work of thinkers and activists, who participate in his Working for a Sane Alternative network and program. According to Robertson, the shift to sustainability is likely to require a widespread shift of emphasis from raising incomes to reducing costs. The principles of the new economics, as set out by Robertson, are the following:
systematic empowerment of people (as opposed to making and keeping them dependent), as the basis for people-centred development; systematic conservation of resources and the environment, as the basis for environmentally sustainable development; evolution from a “wealth of nations” model of economic life to a one-world model, and from today’s inter-national economy to an ecologically sustainable, decentralising, multi-level one-world economic system; restoration of political and ethical factors to a central place in economic life and thought; respect for qualitative values, not just quantitative values
Duane Elgin has released a second revised edition of Voluntary Simplicity. via
Lin, A. and R. Whitaker, 2009. Alive in the world: conversation with Audrey Lin. Works and Conversations. via
I first met Audrey Lin at the Mehta home in Santa Clara where each Wednesday evening the Mehtas host a meditation followed by a circle of sharing and then a vegetarian dinner eaten in silence. No two Wednesdays are the same since the mix of guests is always changing along with the thoughts and stories that come to life there.
Whenever I attend one of these evenings, I help with the car-pooling. There are always five or six people, often students at UC like Audrey, who need rides. I’d gotten to know her from conversations among us all on the drives down and back from Santa Clara. And it wasn’t long before I noticed that Lin exhibited a particular something my old college philosophy professor called “the disease” — really more of a dis-ease. Perhaps it’s not always apparent who is afflicted in this special way, that is, having the persistent need to find out what is Real. It can be described with other words, but I think the effect is the same. For the individual in the grip of this need, following the certified pathways in life will never be enough. One will have to find the answers for oneself.
And so it was not entirely surprising when one day I got an email from Lin, sent to a group of us, announcing her intention to walk to Santa Clara for the next meeting at the Mehta’s home. It wasn’t entirely a surprise, but I admit to feeling a little alarmed. Was this really a good idea? My first reaction was followed by a feeling of guilt as I realized I wasn’t about to join her.
In fact, Lin’s invitation — given on short notice — netted no walking companions, and so she walked the fifty-some miles alone…
Dictionary of Ethical Politics. #politics #language #wiki #hmm
The world is entering a new epoch, one in which social justice, ecological balance, sustainable economic systems, and spiritual evolution will be inextricably woven into our political systems.
In order to help define this new era, and offer a resource to all those concerned about ethical governance—activists, politicians, policy makers, students, and writers—we are building a lexicon of new political thought centered on the relationship between ethics and politics. We examine the basic concepts of our political life: freedom, equality, sovereignty, justice, sustainability, sympathy, love … and how all can exist in an interconnected balance. It is meant as a popular but serious examination of central political concepts in the light of ecology, spirituality, and radicalism.
To emphasize open source collaboration, the dictionary will be developed in the Wikipedia model, using a combination of authors and activists who have been approached directly for the project, and volunteer contributors who express interest in participating. Collectively, we aim to provide 300-500 word entries on specific political terms, topics and concepts.
Price, T. C., 2010. Does environmentalism destroy the world? OpenDemocracy.net. #climate #culture #politics
The youthful NGO movements have been born into environmentalism. When the mother of one of them was asked what her Climate Action-bound son thought about the climategate emails, I heard her report his charming but chilling response: “we don’t care about the science. This is about changing the world.” But will they change the world? What does it mean to do so?
Bush-father’s position is the starting point for Alain Finkielkraut in last week’s discussion on France Culture’s Réplique. Finkielkraut brings the poet and philosopher Michel Deguy and scientist André Lebeau – onetime head of France’s metereological office – into conversation about what has to change in order for humanity to actually face up to its resource-constrained, climate-affecting future. The scientist and the philosopher agree on the surface diagnostic – resource limits, population growth, income inequalities – but they disagree deeply on how this will change.
Lebeau is no techno-optimist, but he has a technocratic approach: we are close to a Malthusian limit of food, water and other resources; we need to educate women to contain population; we need to reduce inequalities in order to make less energy intensive life-styles acceptable … Lebeau’s position is square in the center of the consensus from the epistemic community of expert environmentalists. It is a community that has grown in the idiom of science, and problems relate to quantities and these become policy variables. In a way, Lebeau represents the world of experts and negotiators – not politicians – who were assembled at Copenhagen.
Deguy, on the other hand, believes that too much environmentalism kills the world. Not that he is a techno-optimist or an anti-warmist. His point is that the world – the humanly inhabited world, the world such as it makes sense to live in – is constructed metaphorically, poetically and culturally rather than through the equations of the technocrat. And unprecedented changes in the environment – in our relationship to the earth – will require correspondingly unprecedented changes in consciousness – in how we see and build a meaningful world. Deguy reminds us that for Patocka, it was WW1 that was unprecedented and required a re-invention of humanity; for many – including Deguy and Finkielkraut – the unprecedented comes from WW2, the Shoah and Hiroshima. And now we face another unprecedented change required to the world: that which comes from the rebellion of the earth. When the unprecedented happens, there is a sense that it is too little to say that “consciousness” changes. More than that changes: our understanding of the world, our place in it, the meanings of words… Making that change, for Deguy, is cultural, not scientific work. It is not essentially a work of understanding by uncovering, but of recovering and reshaping the world’s significance after an unprecedented confrontation…
Jevons paradox. via see also #energy #efficiency #economics
In economics, the Jevons paradox (sometimes called the Jevons effect) is the proposition that technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used, tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource. It is historically called the Jevons Paradox as it ran counter to popular intuition. However, the situation is well understood in modern economics. In addition to reducing the amount needed for a given use, improved efficiency lowers the relative cost of using a resource — which increases demand and speeds economic growth, further increasing demand. Overall resource use increases or decreases depending on which effect predominates.
2010 Jan 09
2010 Comparative Literature Graduate Student Conference: “theory/practice”. March 12-13, UCI. Submit 300-word abstracts to uci.theory.practice@gmail.com by February 5.
In a year when many of us have thought long about the social and political obligations of the academy, this conference hopes to further conversation about the relationship between varying types of work academics do: that which is cast as non-quantifiable and thus abstract (reading, “thinking,” or even teaching) and that which is imagined as a more concrete sort of “doing.” “Doing” might be the ways in which scholars actualize the potential of their academic work (eg, operating as an activist or in the public sphere) or might alternately refer to the demands placed upon them at every level to be “pragmatic” and practical.
Our central question is how and to what end differentiations between thinking and doing are made. What are the ways in which theory and practice are imagined and configured? What sorts of work are variously attributed to each, and how is that work valued? How is a consideration of the work performed by both theory and practice inherent in the structure of disciplinary knowledge?
We are interested in papers that examine the relationship between material conditions and artistic or intellectual work – your work or others’. This may also include considerations of the following: comparative disciplinary practices; art theory and particular artistic practices; pragmatism as ideology; intellectual labor; humanities undergraduate education; teaching/modeling activism; scholars as public intellectuals; scholars as activists; the ‘real’ world
Hassan, G., 2010, Living in a world of make-believe: the mythmakers of the globalising age. OpenDemocracy.net’s OurKingdom: Power and Liberty in Britain. #economics #media #discourse #infovis?
Despite the global crisis, the collapse of the financial sector and severe strain which has challenged every single neo-liberal tenet, it is telling that the way the media reports our economics and politics has become more ideological, dogmatic and unquestioning. This is in part because the dominant economic orthodoxies of recent times have succeeded in presenting themselves as truisms which are uncontested and basically unideological. They have become part of what I have called ‘the official future’: an account of the world and a version of globalisation which in its simplicity and mechanical determinism can be understood by anyone.
Despite the failings of the free market model and its associated ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘new economy’ paradigms, the dominant spokespeople used in the media to explain and analyse the crisis are from City institutions, financial bodies and agencies associated with them: banks, hedge funds and independent analysts who work in the City. Alternative voices, whether they be from academia, trade unions, NGOs or other independent bases are time and again marginalised, ignored and excluded.
This cannot be allowed to go on unchecked and unchallenged, and as a start should be monitored and analysed. This points to the need for a contemporary Glasgow University Media Group of our age to map the biases, judgements and values which are at play in how the modern media cover our politics and economics. Surely this is a project worthy of trade union or university research?
2010 Jan 08
Latour, B., 2004. Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern Critical Inquiry 30(2). #“critical” #politics
What has become of critique when DARPA uses for its Total Information Awareness project the Baconian slogan Scientia est potentia? Have I not read that somewhere in Michel Foucault? Has Knowledge-slash-Power been co-opted of late by the National Security Agency? Has Discipline and Punish become the bedside reading of Mr. Ridge?
A Clothing Clearance Where More Than Just the Prices Have Been Slashed. New York Times, 5 Jan 2010. #retail #sustainability #vulnerability #wtf
In the bitter cold on Monday night, a man and woman picked apart a pyramid of clear trash bags, the discards of the HM clothing store that reigns in blazing plate-glass glory on 34th Street, just east of Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. At the back entrance on 35th Street, awaiting trash haulers, were bags of garments that appear to have never been worn. And to make sure that they never would be worn or sold, someone had slashed most of them with box cutters or razors, a familiar sight outside H & M’s back door. The man and woman were there to salvage what had not been destroyed. He worked quickly, never uttering a word. A bag was opened and eyed, and if it held something of promise, was tossed at the feet of the woman. She said her name was Pepa.
Were the clothes usually cut up before they were thrown out?
“A veces,” she said in Spanish. Sometimes. She packed up a few items that had escaped the blade — a bright green T-shirt that said “Summer of Surf,” and a dark-blue hoodie in size 12, with a Divided label. The rest was returned to the pyramid.
It is winter. A third of the city is poor. And unworn clothing is being destroyed nightly.
A few doors down on 35th Street, hundreds of garments tagged for sale in Wal-Mart — hoodies and T-shirts and pants — were discovered in trash bags the week before Christmas, apparently dumped by a contractor for Wal-Mart that has space on the block. Each piece of clothing had holes punched through it by a machine…
2010 Jan 07
Public Goods: From Ecology to Economics #interdisciplinarity #systems_theory #modelling #conference #uci
Begins 12:00 PM, January 22, 2010; UCI Social Science Plaza A, Room 2112
Ecological and socioeconomic systems alike are complex adaptive systems in which individual agents pursue their own agendas, often with negative consequences for public goods. In such systems there are obvious conflicts between the interests of individuals and the society to which they belong; resolution of these issues raises challenges of a game theoretic nature. With speakers coming from economics, biology, and ecology, these concerns will be addressed with an interdisciplinary focus at a three day conference sponsored by the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences in the School of Social Sciences.
USGS develops Twitter-based earthquake detection system via #hmm #internet_methods
“People like to tweet after earthquakes,” says USGS Seismologist Paul Earle, adding that “after an earthquake, they often rapidly report that an earthquake has occurred and describe what they’ve experienced.” And those quick, early reports are able to come out of the epicenter faster than the existing detection and reporting systems. “For felt earthquakes in populated regions, Twitter reports often precede the USGS’s publicly-released, scientifically-verified earthquake alerts,” said Earle. The energy behind that kind of behavior is what is behind the Twitter Earthquake Detection (USGSted) project Dr. Earle is heading up. TED uses the Twitter social networking platform to collect real-time, earthquake-related messages from anywhere around the globe.usgsted “For earthquakes in sparsely instrumented regions, these detections could provide an initial heads up that an earthquake may have occurred,” explains Earle.
[...]
Also, most ‘quake-centric’ tweets will generally lack a ton of hard data, instead falling into the ‘qualitative data’ camp. These are usually personal reactions, quick recollections and little bits of narrative that can help capture descriptive dimensions of earthquakes that hard scientific data might not adequately capture. Earle and his team at USGS know that they have just scratched the surface of combining qualitative, narrative data with quantitative scientific measurements. But as new Web 3.0 systems emerge, there will be ever more ways to tag tweets with the kind of metadata — seismic and otherwise — that will further blur the distinction between the soft and hard sciences.
Snapped this at Fashion Island today. It says “be FASHIONABLY green.” There is a woman standing on a lawn watering a hedge with a hose. #hmm
Becker, H., 1993, How I learned what a crock was. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 22:28-35. via #delightful #sociologists #short
2010 Jan 06
Elkus, A., 2010. Science, defence and strategy. OpenDemocracy.net: openSecurity. #complexity #operational_theory #strategy #positivists
“Contemporary American strategic problems flow from the fact that we cannot adjust the ossified thinking of Washington D.C. to the constantly shifting observed reality of the outside world. A failure to match concepts to observed reality has amplified the already formidable entropy of the American political system.”
Read, R., 2010. “Beyond Copenhagen: what kind of bottom-up climate activism do we need?” OpenDemocracy.net’s OurKingdom: Power and Liberty in Britain. #climate #politics #complications
“...it is quite wrong to think that [local] contributions can possibly be enough. ...if you burn less fossil fuel, others who are less eco-conscious will receive a price-signal that it is fine to burn more.
“There is enough fossil fuel still in the ground to cook the planet. So the only solution is global constraint of others’ carbon emissions, as well as of your own. There simply has to be a replacement for the stalled COP15 process. If we as a species are not to die, politics cannot be dead.”
It’s provocative, but misses the distinction between local resiliences (and vulnerabilities) and global sustainability. The latter is the democratic ideal, but the former will be the basis for climate, peak oil, and fresh water politics. As Hornborg writes in Zero-sum world, we are all most definitely not in the same boat. Problems will get shifted around. The North and China may have no problem creating climate refugees if it maintains the comfort of their well-lubricated and/or coal-powered citizens (and industries).
Elkington, J., 2010, “Can consumers save our climate?” OpenDemocracy.net. #climate #green_consumerism #sustainable_hci #greenscanner_2.0 #hmm
2010 Jan 05
Hohendahl, P. U., 1995, Response to Luhmann. Cultural Critique No. 30, The Politics of Systems and Environments, Part I: 187-192. #systems_theory #postmodernism
Luhmann, N., 1995. Why does society describe itself as postmodern? Cultural Critique No. 30, The Politics of Systems and Environments, Part I: 171-186. #systems_theory #postmodernism
“The discussion about modern or postmodern society operates on the semantic level. In it, we find many references to itself, many descriptions of descriptions, but hardly any attempt to take realities into account on the operational and structural level of social communications…”
Right Wing Noodle’s Singapore Noodles are delicious. #food #irvine #who_knew? $8.50
Flashing the Aspire One BIOS #linux
I neglected my machine for a while and now the battery is low, so I need to do this to charge the battery.
2010 Jan 04
Hecht, J. M., 2004. Doubt: A History #to_read
King, J. L. and R. L. Frost, 2002, “Managing distance over time: the evolution of technologies of dis/ambiguation.” In Hinds and Keisler, eds., Distributed Work: 3-27. MIT Press. via #cscw #to_read
Web 2.0 Suicide Machine via #lol
“Liberate your newbie friends with a Web2.0 suicide! This machine lets you delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles, kill your fake virtual friends, and completely do away with your Web2.0 alterego. The machine is just a metaphor for the website which moddr_ is hosting; the belly of the beast where the web2.0 suicide scripts are maintained. Our service currently runs with Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and LinkedIn! Commit NOW!”
Lofland and Lofland, Analyzing Social Settings via #reading #delightful #scientists
Gans, H., 1972. “The positive functions of poverty.” American Journal of Sociology 78: 275-289. via
N.B. I think ‘positive’ is meant ironically.
#mturk #wtf
Cognitive models of information systems: workshop at CHI 2010 via #computationalists
I wonder if there is space here to talk about information ecologies, or even to bridge ‘second paradigm’ and ‘third paradigm’ approaches in HCI?
3-5 page research note or position paper due 2010 Jan 6.
2010 Jan 03
Champaign husband, wife are ultra-frugal so they can help charities via #cool
“Homelessness has pretty much replaced debtors’ prison in America” via #whoa
Agre, The market logic of information #to_read
Agre, Beyond the mirror world: privacy and the representational practices of computing #to_read
“conditional cash transfers” #hmm
“Positioning Global Systems”, Yale School of Architecture Symposium CFP #cfp
300-word abstracts due 2010 Jan 08.
“I’ve discovered the virtues of idleness” #yes
Case study: Mumbai via #maps #hmm
“An analysis of informal water delivery and distribution networks that emerge within slums in Mumbai. The city is characterized by an incomplete municipal water infrastructure that requires the physical collection of water, as well as a demand that vastly exceeds the supply for drinking water. The maps document conditions that lead to the advent of water cartels, middlemen, hawkers, and illegal taps that constitute a protocological distribution network whose complexity and conditional logics resists conventional mapping. Data sets are developed that tabulate travel distance, carrying capacity, and available volume and mapped within a recursive node and line network organization in order to predict a set of social factors that include satisfaction and effort, and monetization and commodification, that suggest a context for a series of aid-based water management infrastructures, collection systems, and market systems, as well as a more ad hoc network of other municipally or civically minded informal infrastructures such as informal schools, pharm trading, and temporary clinics. social factors that include satisfaction and effort, and monetization and commodification, that suggest a context for a series of aid-based water management infrastructures, collection systems, and market systems, as well as a more ad hoc network of other municipally or civically minded informal infrastructures such as informal schools, pharm trading, and temporary clinics.”
BBC documentary, ‘The Power of Nightmares’ via #whoa #to_watch
“This film explores the origins in the 1940s and 50s of Islamic Fundamentalism in the Middle East, and Neoconservatism in America, parallels between these movements, and their effect on the world today From the introduction to Part 1: ‘Both [the Islamists and Neoconservatives] were idealists who were born out of the failure of the liberal dream to build a better world. And both had a very similar explanation for what caused that failure. These two groups have changed the world, but not in the way that either intended. Together, they created a nightmare vision of a secret organized evil that threatens the world. A fantasy that politicians then found restored their power and authority in a disillusioned age. And those with the darkest fears became the most powerful.’”