October 2006 Archives

October was a sparse month for weblog updates. To the few who might be reading, I'm sorry. I've been putting my head down and plowing through a bunch of midterm papers, exams, and presentations. The last major one was today.

In theory that would give me a week to relax, but the inevitability of looming deadlines at the end of the semester make any relaxation feel like procrastination. Pleasure just turns into anxiety. Such is the life of a student.

What I did write about this month, in reverse chronology:

• The emotional retardation of academic environments. Basically they're stuck competing when they should be cooperating.
• A miscellaneous grab-bag of fall impressions. Including an interesting presentation by the CEO of Pandora.
• A news story about past extinctions and asteroids. File under, death from above.
• Short speculation on genius and environment, prompted by a story about the brother of R. Crumb.
• Notes on different ways to tell a history.

Enjoy the rest of the year. 2006 is drawing to a close.

Another arrow in the quiver against education fell today. It arrived in Information Ethics, during a discussion of affective psychological development. We were climbing the ladders of development from meeting physical needs, to power, to adult approval, peer approval, self approval, on up to self-understanding and integration. But we stumbled, every last one of us involved in education, at competition with others. How can we operate at a level of mutuality and reciprocity when the academic environment keeps forcing us to be competitive?

Grades are the primary weapon in this war between students and teachers. I said it in college and I'll say it now in grad school, grades are a sham. The grades that appear on my transcript are a poor shadow of what I've learned in school. But still these damn things persist, even in grad school. I just don't understand it.

Actually I do understand part of it. Universities need to be accredited just like the students who are seeking the degrees. In order to be accredited there needs to be a curriculum and there needs to be an assessment, an outcome, some kind of result that says the mission has been accomplished. But just what is the mission and the outcome we want to measure?

The rote group think that comes out whenever someone explains group or cooperative learning just continues to fall on deaf ears. In school there is no cooperative. There is no group. It's just you and your cohort.

It's damned odd and it's been bugging me for almost twenty years. I don't know if I'll ever understand it.

Fall, as a season, has been a struggle this year. Physically my allergies have gone haywire. I went into health services to consult with an allergist a few weeks ago and was turned into a temporary pincushion. The hardest part was kicking antihistamines for the five days prior to the test. The results weren't too different from when I last was tested some 15 years ago. Still allergic to dust, most tree and grass pollens. Now I just need to decide whether I want to start up allergy shots again.

Psychically I'm worrying about the next step after finishing off my masters degree next spring. Do I want to find a PhD program and give that a shot? Would I rather find a job? What kind of job would it be? Who knows? My current inclination is to send out some PhD applications and see what sticks. If I chose today I would study philosophy. Sure the humanities employment picture is for crap, but I'm not too worried. If I don't try it I'll never know what success or failure feel like.

Classes and school continue to percolate along on a relatively even keel. My recommender systems class sparked an interest in linear algebra and matrices that I satisfied by reading through a textbook or two. There are two fields I'd consider studying at a bachelors level again for the heck of it: math and astronomy.

My information culture class has pushed me to follow some scholarly links to information ethics and ethical theory in general. I checked out the Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theories from the library in order to refresh my memory on terms and schools of ethical theory.

I've seen a couple of good presentations in the last week or so. Today Tim Westergren from Pandora and the Music Genome Project stopped by the iSchool to talk about his company and project. Basically he created a system to classify music based on its underlying structure. For example, fast or slow tempos and vocal harmonies. Then they compute the nearest musical neighbors and use them to power a recommendation system, called Pandora. I set up an account tonight and found one intriguing new discovery, a band called Needle that sounds like a cross between Dead Can Dance and Low.

John Seely Brown spoke at the iSchool conference last Sunday. I was so disgusted with the talk afterwards that I still haven't figured out a way to discuss it. But I'll keep working on it. He basically said a lot of things that I already agreed with but in a context, the university and a self-congratulatory iConference, where the contradictions were just too damn hard to ignore. It all goes back to the tangled question of higher education, the production of new scholars, the insularity of the university, and a bunch of other stuff that keeps me on the edge of academia, never quite sure whether I want to jump all the way in.

Lynn Eden stopped by as part of the STS colloquium on the 9th and gave an interesting talk about the analysis of blast and fire damage from nuclear weapons. The estimates made by the Defense department and it's various hanger-ons, such as Rand, after WW2 ignored the effect of fire damage and concentrated on blast damage. Her book, Whole World on Fire, tries to find out why scientists ignored fire damage despite knowing that it would probably be worse than blast damage alone. Her explanation is a failure of knowledge frames and a type of institutional blindness or inertia.

Like many children dinosaurs were one of my first interests in science. A recent article in Scientific American describes developments that may be turning away from asteroid collisions as the primary cause of mass extinctions in the past. It looks like the dinosaur die-off at the Cretaceous/Tertiary (K-T) boundary is still strong but other extinctions may be due to changes in ocean chemistry and gas releases.

I watched the movie Crumb many years ago. I was mostly interested in the biography of the creative artist instead of Crumb's work in particular. Crumb clearly had problems and a twisted family life that scarred him and his siblings. The link between suffering, depression, and art is long and twisted. Two books, The Wound and the Bow by Edward Wilson and Touched with Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison, are worth considering.

Today I went for a short spin through my usual news pages and found this followup story about Maxon Crumb, Robert's brother, who was, and still is, living in a 'Sixth street dump.' The man looks like a mad genius. I'd cast him in the part well before Kirk Douglas.

I thought the whole story was a useful reminder that life is strange in ways that our own normality rarely reveals. We're all precariously balanced on one edge or another, but sometimes it takes looking at another to realize it.

On the environment for the self I found an article about apartment therapy at the Christian Science Monitor. I know there's lots of things that I'd like to do to improve my own home environment. Perhaps this article will be a spur to put those ideas into action.

Thinking about the different ways we tell history to each other.

• A history of people. Biography, Pultarch's Lives.
• A history of things. The telegraph, telephone, steam engine, computer.
• A history of phenomenon. History of ideas: freedom, myth.

You can pick a topic and choose to tell it through one of the viewpoints. Listening In, on radio, a thing, tells the story as a phenomenon.

A book like iCon about Steve Jobs, tells the story of Apple through a person.

Where does the history of organizations fit on this spectrum?

Do we need a new form of history, a history of networks or systems?

Personally I find the history of phenomenon to be the most appealing. Perhaps that's to be expected when a philosopher reads history.