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Don’t say you haven’t been warned. NASA put out an official document today specifying how close any future spacecraft and astronauts visiting the Moon can come to the artifacts left on the lunar surface by all US space missions, including the Apollo landing sites, any robotic landing sites like Surveyor and impact sites like LCROSS.
"Each tale was carefully fabricated by undergraduates at George Mason University who were enrolled in T. Mills Kelly's course, Lying About the Past. Their escapades not only went unpunished, they were actually encouraged by their professor. Four years ago, students created a Wikipedia page detailing the exploits of Edward Owens, successfully fooling Wikipedia's community of editors. This year, though, one group of students made the mistake of launching their hoax on Reddit. What they learned in the process provides a valuable lesson for anyone who turns to the Internet for information. "
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Why did the hoaxes succeed in 2008 and not in 2012? If thousands of Internet users can be persuaded that Abraham Lincoln invented Facebook, surely the potential for viral hoaxes remains undiminished.
One answer lies in the structure of the Internet's various communities. Wikipedia has a weak community, but centralizes the exchange of information. It has a small number of extremely active editors, but participation is declining, and most users feel little ownership of the content. And although everyone views the same information, edits take place on a separate page, and discussions of reliability on another, insulating ordinary users from any doubts that might be expressed. Facebook, where the Lincoln hoax took flight, has strong communities but decentralizes the exchange of information. Friends are quite likely to share content and to correct mistakes, but those corrections won't reach other users sharing or viewing the same content. Reddit, by contrast, builds its strong community around the centralized exchange of information. Discussion isn't a separate activity but the sine qua non of the site. When one user voiced doubts, others saw the comment and quickly piled on.
"If it is so hard to succeed as a contrarian, why do we hear so many stories of successful contrarians? Well celebrated contrarians are usually not the real contrarians."
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The lessons to draw here depends on whether you want credit or influence. If you want credit as an innovator then you should actually be pretty conservative. Become prestigious in a conservative way, until late in your career. Reject non-standard views but not explicitly; just ignore them so your quotes won’t bite you later. When the time is right, look around for ripe once-contrarian ideas and take one. Change the name and vary the methods and topics, grab the first few high profile resources, and trash the original contrarians as weirdos.
If you instead want influence, then go ahead and be contrarian early in your career. You are still well advised to be radical in a conservative way, but know that influence is easier than it seems, even if credit is harder that it seems. Most important, know that the fact that few support your contrarian view says less than it might seem about how reasonable is your view. Most people prefer credit to influence, and credit-seekers are better off rejecting a non-standard view now and grabbing it later, should it succeed.
"I think this helps us understand why universities, some of the most conservative institutions we have, are home to our most celebrated intellectuals. Academic institutions such as universities, academic journals, peer review, etc. seem far from ideal ways to encourage innovative ideas. But they seem like better ways to ensure outsiders that ideas have been safely tamed. The new ideas that academics endorse can be safely quoted and an applied with minimal risk of wild uncontrolled disruption. So when ideas originate among wild untamed academic-outsiders, we prefer to attribute them to the safe academic insiders who tame them.
When we are willing to risk being exposed to wild untamed ideas, we turn less to academics, and more to startup companies, passionate writers, activists, etc. And in our youth, many of us are eager for such exposure, to show that we are no longer children who must stay safely in camp – we are strong and brave enough to venture into the wild."
"The bottom line here is simple. Both capitalists and workers have cause for complaint. Capitalists have lost pricing power - the degree of monopoly has fallen - which has tended to depress the profit share. But this has not benefited workers because instead the "wedges" of other incomes and higher imports have depressed their share. "
"The aim of this book is to help the reader to better understand how to use economic statistics in general and OECD statistics in particular. It introduces the main concepts used by statisticians and economists to measure economic phenomena and provides tables and charts with relevant data. Moreover, the book describes how the production of international statistics is organised, who are the main data producers, what are the main databases available over the Internet and how can the quality of statistics be assessed."
"The nonprofit, nonpartisan State of the USA is preparing - in concert with the National Academy of Sciences - to support a Key National Indicator System by publishing a free website to provide every American with a single place to track progress across a range of national concerns, as determined by independent polling and research as well as expert and public input."
"Out of the carnage of the Great Depression and World War II rose the idea of gross domestic product, or GDP: the ultimate measure of a country's overall welfare, a window into an economy's soul, the statistic to end all statistics. Its use spread rapidly, becoming the defining indicator of the last century. But in today's globalized world, it's increasingly apparent that this Nobel-winning metric is too narrow for these troubled economic times. "
"Even as hip-hop is more mainstream than ever, one of the key musical innovations has been pushed to the margins. That should serve as a reminder that the battles over intellectual property don’t merely pit the economic interests of creators against would-be freeloading consumers. The existing stock of recorded music is, potentially, a powerful tool in the hands of musicians looking to create new works. But it’s been largely cut off from them—for no good reason."
"But there’s a major problem with this line of argument: It just isn’t true. The founding fathers, it turns out, passed several mandates of their own. In 1790, the very first Congress—which incidentally included 20 framers—passed a law that included a mandate: namely, a requirement that ship owners buy medical insurance for their seamen. This law was then signed by another framer: President George Washington. That’s right, the father of our country had no difficulty imposing a health insurance mandate."
"Each of these technologies, Wu argued, started out as gloriously creative, anarchic and uncontrolled. But in the end each was "captured" by corporate power, usually aided and abetted by the state. And the process in each case was the same: a charismatic entrepreneur arrived with a better consumer proposition – for example, a unified system and the guarantee of a dial tone in telephony; or a steady flow of good-quality movies created by a vertically integrated studio system in the case of movies – that enabled a corporation or a cartel to attain control of the industry. The big question, Wu asked, is whether this will happen to the net."
"By now it is becoming hard to remember that, at the peak of its popularity and influence, classical music carried with it an undeniable intellectual and even moral authority, qualities which would rub off on composers and performers such as Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Albert Schweitzer, Pierre Boulez, Van Cliburn and Igor Stravinsky, all of whom would, in different ways, play leading roles within the social and cultural landscape of the cold war period."
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t a certain point a dominant critical narrative would emerge announcing the death of contemporary classical music at the hands of a cadre of modernist zealots. Working within the legacy of the second Viennese School (Schoenberg, Berg and Webern), figures such as Pierre Boulez and Milton Babbitt — so the story goes — attempted to reduce the creation of music to a technocratic specialty. More fluent with the manipulation of abstruse arithmetic formulas than with the nuts and bolts of melody, harmonic progressions, audible form, or sonic appeal, they believed that the creation of music could be reduced to autonomous syntactic form at its most cognitively opaque, with little concern as to what, or even whether, a message of any significance was communicated to their audiences.
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Rather than denigrating academic modernism, my objective here is to note that such charges directed against it would come to assume the status of a conventional wisdom and, as such, had an important impact on the ultimate viability of the field and in the capacity of recognized elites to dictate the terms of the broader public’s engagements with musical culture.
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"If you've seen that bumper sticker, you've seen what our culture has made of one of the central ideas in Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published 50 years and 1.4 million copies ago. For the marketers and boosters of personal transformation who casually talk about paradigm shifts, the phrase designates not just a gestalt switch that casts things in a new light, but a world so insubstantial that it can be thoroughly transformed by a single idea. Tomorrow there may be another paradigm shift, and another after that. There is thus no real progress, just a new bubble as good as the old bubble."
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Kuhn rejected our old metaphysics—consciousness consists of an inner representation of an outer reality—as incoherent, impossible, and fundamentally inhuman. That's why he begins SSR by invoking history not as a discipline that can be applied to science, but as a necessary part of scientific understanding. All understanding is historical, and no human project escapes the characteristics of history-based humanity: fallible, limited, impure of motive, social, and always situated in a culture, a language, and a time. Not even science with its method and its formulas. Our very words have meaning not because of a set of definitional rules, Kuhn thought, but because they are based on ostensive exemplars, paradigms. Our age, characterized by a Network that refuses to keep ideas, communication, and sociality apart, is making manifest the messy, inescapable humanness of all of our endeavors.
The problems that dominated Kuhn's life after his great moment of insight arose not because Kuhn wasn't brilliant enough. Rather, they arose and persist because while we increasingly understand that the old metaphysical paradigm has failed, for several generations now we have not found our new paradigm. Our culture has inappropriately latched on to Kuhn's message as an exaltation of the rootless disconnection of our ideas from the world because we were ready to hear that knowledge is not apart from our knowing of it. But he and we have not yet come to a new shared understanding about what it means to live truthfully as humans.
"History and Theory publishes articles, review essays, and summaries of books principally in these areas: critical philosophy of history; speculative philosophy of history; historiography; history of historiography; historical methodology; critical theory; time and culture; and history and related disciplines. "
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