June 2006 Archives

So what have I been writing about during the past month.

June was the month when I decided to return to regular blogging. So far I've posted an item every day since the 15th. I wrote about habits and writing to explain some of my reasons for updating on a regular basis. I talked a bit about plans for the summer both physical and mental.

I've started reading more political blogs again. Almost all of them on the liberal end of things. There was a time, two or three years ago, when I tried to be more ecumenical about reading conservative political blogs. But things have gotten so bad that it's not even worth it. I'm letting others trudge the depths of the wingnutospher.

This months SFF reading group prompted me to think about the qualities of good fiction. MaryAnn Johnson gave me some hope for the future and has also been writing well about generational issues.

Knowledge management continues to be one of my abiding interests, but I wasn't able to generate any of my own content this month, just some pointers to what I'd been reading on km. Another theme in my recent thinking has been learning communities and the sociology of education.

The arts and design prompted a comment on inspirational films in response to the recent AFI 100 cheers list and a post about a new sound on the bus.

A psychological study about loneliness prompted some thoughts on socializing on- and off-line.

My enthusiasm for weather led to some praise for summer thunderstorms.

Most recently I wrote up some reactions to the rather silly political and economic bromide that education will save us from outsourcing.

The Arts: books, movies, television, music

Music- Ladytron, Drive by Truckers, Steely Dan (the recent albums), Dream Theater, and Low

Movies- Da Vinci Code, Lake House, X Men 3

Television- To Serve them All My Days, Rescue Me

Books- Time Traveler's Wife

The March-April issue of Foreign Affairs contained an article by Alan Blinder on “Offshoring: the Next Industrial Revolution?” He begins the article by discussing the kerfluffle over Greg Mankiw's 2004 remarks about offshoring. Mankiw essentially reasserted the standard economic thinking that the offshoring is a good thing because it means that more things are tradable now than in the past. It's the standard comparative advantage argument, if a country can produce something cheaper than another country then it is only natural for the market to shift to the cheaper country.

Blinder doesn't disagree with this analysis but he does add a crucial point to the whole discussion: we have no knowledge about the size or types of changes that will occur in the economy as a result of offshoring. And the dividing line between jobs that are offshored and those that are not may not fall along the lines of high-skill, high-education versus low-skill, low-education that so many seem to expect. Globalization will push any service that can be delivered electronically to the cheapest bidder, and that supplier probably won't be the United States or any other developed country.

Many people blithely assume that the critical labor-market distinction is, and will remain, between highly educated (or highly skilled) people and less-educated (or less-skilled) people -- doctors versus call-center operators, for example. The supposed remedy for the rich countries, accordingly, is more education and a general “upskilling” of the work force. But this view may be mistaken. Other things being equal, education and skills are, of course, good things; education yields higher returns in the advanced societies, and more schooling probably makes workers more flexible and more adaptable to change. But the problem with relying on education as the remedy for potential job losses is that “other things” are not remotely close to equal. The critical divide in the future may instead be between those types of work that are easily deliverable through a wire (or via wireless connections) with little or no diminution in quality and those that are not. And this unconventional divide dose not correspond well to traditional distinctions between jobs that require high levels of education and those that do not.

Also there is a post at Max Sawicky's blog about the fallacy of the 'just get more education' mantra. The post is by Jared Bernstein, author of All Together Now: Commonsense for a Fair Economy. The thesis of the book is the battle between YOYO 'your on your own' and WITT 'we're in this together' economics. Here's a quote:

“In mid-2005…all the national polls began to reflect considerable dissatisfaction with the economy. The president and his economic team were forced to take notice and had a highly publicized summer meeting at his Crawford, Texas, ranch. When Treasury Secretary John Snow was asked to comment on the discrepancy between how the economy was growing overall and how people were faring, he declared that it ”points you in the direction of greater emphasis on education.“ His undersecretary, Randal K. Quarles, amplified the point: ”If the country as a whole is going to undergo economic growth, then the population has to be able to take advantage of opportunities.“

In other words, it’s not our fault, it’s your fault. The opportunities are there, but you’re not skilled enough to take advantage of them. Never mind that the evidence pointed in exactly the other direction. By mid-2005 the only groups to see fairly strong and consistent job growth were those with lower levels of education. The employment rate, or the share of a given population at work—a proxy for the extent of a group’s job opportunities—was up for high school dropouts and down for college graduates. (The reason had much to do with the boom in construction and health services, and the bust in information technology.)

But such facts were not admitted to challenge the hyper-individualistic YOYO analysis, which by definition ignores the possibility of a structural imbalance in the way economic growth is distributed. As is so often the case, the only solution—”Get more education“—handed the problem back to the victim”

Business Week has posted a story about the winners of the 2006 Industrial Design Excellence Awards. In 2005 8 percent of the winners were from Asia, this year that's up to 25%. Industrial design is one of the high-education, high-skill jobs that Blinder is talking about; it depends upon the types of education and skills that politicians keep telling us to get better at. But there is no guarantee that America will continue to be the education leader in the future.

In fact it's not even likely. Amit Paley wrote an article in the Washington Post last month about the increase in the number of cheap overseas tutors for American students. As someone who plans to make a living as an educator, in some form or another, this story hits close to home. Education will probably be outsourced just as fast, maybe even faster, as any other intellectual job.

On the one hand I applaud the spread of education to the rest of the world. On the other hand I'm afraid that America is unprepared to compete in education. Teachers are already compensated less than they are worth, and certainly too little to incent the most qualified to enter the teaching field.

It's like a free market perfect storm. Because America doesn't value education we look for the quickest and cheapest substitute for teaching, foreign tutors. The teaching profession is debased further and unable to attract high quality talent. Then we tell people who are losing their job that the way to cope with the problem is to retrain themselves and get some more education. But we've already sold our educational infrastructure to the cheapest bidder. And, to add insult to injury, jobs that require high education aren't being created as fast as jobs that require little education. Does anyone not think that this vicious circle is just plain stupid? Will anyone do anything to get us out of it?

I confess to being a weather nerd for a long time. I remember play acting as a weatherman back in elementary school. This was when the maps they used on television were either hand drawn or used wooden cutouts to signify the locations of fronts. All the satellite photographs were very grainy, low-resolution, and black and white. Today broadcast graphics have come a very long way. Part of that is due to Paul Douglas, meteorologist for WCCO-tv in my hometown of Minneapolis. I see he even has a blog of his own.

Summer is my second favorite season overall, and the most interesting season to watch the weather. Recently I've been watching thunderstorms move along just to the south of Ann Arbor, along the border between Michigan and Ohio.

Earlier this week I found an interesting graphic of global lightning strike at the NASA Earth Observatory. From there it was an easy click to the lightning research site at the Marshall Space Center. There they have pages describing the different satellite sensors used to measure lightning and brief page on the formation and causes of lightning.

It almost makes me want to study atmospheric science.

The Ann Arbor Transportation Authority has changed the sound of the 'stop requested' bell on their buses sometime in the last few days. Before, there was an anonymous electronic beep sound when you pulled the cord to signal the driver to stop, and then a female voice recording 'stop requested.' The electronic bell was similar to an elevator signal, but not quite as tinny and a bit longer duration. Now the single beep sound has been replaced by what sounds like a badly digitized three-stroke bell sound - clang-clang-clang.

The first time I heard this I thought I was experiencing a flashback to some Judy Garland musical scene. It's the Trolley Song all over again. But there's no zing to my heartstrings, I just think it's annoying. I'm sure in a few weeks it will just fade into the general background noise of everyday life.

I think the noises of everyday life might make for a good podcast. I can easily imagine sampling some of my favorite noises - rain drops on rooftops, water rushing through a sewer culvert, early morning bird song that keeps me from falling asleep.

Anyhow, the vestigial design mentioned in the title is the pull cord used to signal the driver to stop. My search clang clang turned up this story about the trolley system in Detroit during the first half of the twentieth century. The bell sound was partly generated by the motorman.

Detroiters climbed aboard the electric trolleys in droves. They waved and called to occupants of cars passing on the other track. They thoroughly enjoyed the new marvel of the age. The clang, clang, clang of the trolleys remained a part of the city symphony for more than half a century.

Kenard Lawrence wrote this about his boyhood memories of the trolley: “You got on in front and if you were quick and lucky you could get a seat right behind and to one side of the motorman. So much activity! Flip the knob to close the door. What magic as the doors would open and close, like an accordion, with the flip of a switch. A commuter reads the newspaper in his way to work on the Harper line.

”Clang the bell. Pull the big lever with the big wooden knob on top to the first notch and the car would jerk to a start. The next notch and we'd get rolling. Stamp the button on the floor and the bell would clang.

“Pull the big lever again and we'd really get rolling, and the rocking would start. Bang bang bang, side to side. Clang clang clang, banged the bell as he stamped his foot. Sitting in that polished wicker seat, which ran from front to rear along the car, I rode sideways, facing the other side of the car so I'd get stiff twisting round to watch out front and watch the motorman. But I never minded.

”And what a scare when another streetcar came at you on the other track! There was a rush of wind that pushed your car off to one side. Later I'd walk through the streetcar to the very rear. I didn't pay much mind to the conductor. He sat there bored in his cage, collecting the money and operating the back door to let you out. I paid more attention to the glass box you dropped the coins in, watching them bounce back and forth down the staggered chute.

“Put it all together, the clanging, rattling, banging back and forth, the oncoming cars, the motorman doing a ballet to maintain his balance on one foot while the other clanged the bell, and you had an experience to remember. And you could have it any time of any day, anywhere in the city, for 6 cents a throw. I can't imagine what cruel city planner decided to do away with such a marvel....”

I believe a cord has been used to signal the driver when to stop for a long time, at least based on the tried and true sociological method of watching old movies. I remember using the pull cord on buses in Minneapolis during the 1970s when I travelled on them with my grandmother. This design seems to have stayed around for quite a while. The Wikipedia doesn't confirm the staying power of this design, but it does have an interesting article about train whistles which contains this interesting fact:

American train whistles usually had either three or four frequencies that are sounded together, at the same time, to form a chord. As compared with automobile horns, for example, which form a major third, usually with the notes “F” and “A”, the train whistle usually forms a non-major chord which is full of dissonance, allowing it to have a distinct, frightening, and serious sound, rather than a happy one.

and another article on bus stops.

The American Film Institute released another one of it's top 100 lists a few weeks ago - 100 Cheers. It's supposed to be the most inspiring 100 films of all time. I've recorded my progress on the list at Lists of Bests. 80 out of 100 movies seems pretty good to me.

The presence of “It's a Wonderful Life” at number one makes me imagine an alternate world in which the copyright on the movie hadn't expired during the 1980s and the movie hadn't become the holiday movie staple that it became. There was a window of a few years when each December I would make it a challenge to find the maximum number of simultaneous showings of “It's a Wonderful Life” I could find on television. There were some weeks, usually the week before Christmas, when I could watch the movie on three channels at the same time. I'd change channels back and forth between them just to practice the dialogue.

Spielberg sure did well. Three movies in the top 10 - Schindler's List, E.T. and Saving Private Ryan. Better marks than I would have chosen. Spielberg is the perfect example of my conflict over whether art should be 'morally uplifting' or inspirational. “Schindler's List” was almost a perfect film except for two parts that stuck in my mind as being too over the top - the girl with the red dress who is killed in the ghetto, and the ending when Schindler emotes about how he could have done more. And these two items pushed me from enjoying the film to almost loathing it. I could appreciate the technical artistry, but the message became too preachy. There was no subtlety in it.

Over the many years that I've watched “It's a Wonderful Life” I've had a series of different reactions. When I was a teenager I felt it was mostly a positive message about the value of friendship and the positive impact we all have on each other's lives. In the last few years I've looked at it through a much darker lens. The stifling of all of George's dreams to travel and study become more prominent. And the black and white cinematography of the final sequence when George sees the world without him stuns me. It's bleak. I haven't rewatched “Schindler's List” recently, but I somehow don't think I'll be seeing new things in that movie.

So how to describe this difference in how movies teach or inspire us. The perspectives of both the viewer and the movie makers need to be considered. I can think of three possible attitudes toward movies or any other art form.

• Art should be realistic. No forced happy endings or silver linings. Film Threat blog has a reaction that's close to this. The mimetic tradition.
• Art as fantasy and escapism. We use art to get away from our real lives. Don't bother us with depressing movies with messages.
• Art as educational and moral. Art should be used to teach us to be better people, for whatever the director's definition of better happens to be.

I should look into Frank Capra's biography to find out just how conscious he was of making movies with messages. Hollywood had a different perception of itself during the height of the studio system. I think message movies were more prevalent then. According to the AFI press release 1939 was the most represented year on the initial ballot of 300 films. I'm not sure if that balance carried through to the final list.

Two summers ago I took a writing class at the Loft writing center in Minneapolis. The class was called 'The Writing Habit' and taught by Roseanne Bane. The main thrust of the class was to work on writing as a habit, something that you do regularly, day in and day out. The same sentiment was expressed by Jane Yolen at Wiscon this year when she said, “a writer writes.” The advice to do it, and do it consistently, is one of the main themes I've heard from writer's offering advice to other wannabe writers. Jay Lake says something similar in a recent interview at Locus.

I made a decision in December of 2000. After I went to my first Orycon I got hooked up with Wordos, the writers' group in Eugene -- which, for the record, is 100 miles away from my house. It meets weekly, and I decided (for no good reason that I can now remember) that I was going to take a story into the workshop every week. So I got on this kick of writing a story every week, and I've done that ever since. Once I started working on novels, I had to amend that and say a chapter counted, but essentially that's been my underlying discipline.

At the end of one of my classes last semester we discussed expertise. There were a lot of terms we learned such as 'deliberate practice' and the estimate that it takes 10 years to become an expert in any given field.

I have two problems with this ten year metric for achieving expertise. 1. I'm not sure what field I want to become an expert. There's too much of interest in the world and too much reluctance to close doors behind me, even if time is doing that already. 2. I'm impatient. I'd like to find a quicker route to that expertise. But that's not going to happen.

So here I am trying to put Roseanne's ideas into more regular practice. She suggested finding a routine in three different areas of life:

• The actual writing that you want to do. My work on Eccentric Eclectica for the past 10 days is a start on that. Sometimes I need to just get the words out there in order to discover what even I myself might not realize about my thoughts.
• A physical, self-care habit. I'm hoping to start doing more regular exercise this summer. The consistency on the weblog has been a good start to getting myself ready to make this move. I walk almost every day, but I'd like to add some strength training.
• A creative outlet, something that doesn't have to be a product or have an end goal. Drawing, sketching, making collages have all been possibilities I've considered. I've added a larger table in my office work area so making collages might be easier now than a few weeks ago.

Two months ago, as the winter semester wound to its close, I read an intriguing note on miscommunication and measurement in grad school by William Tozier. He wrote

The point being: We often seem to forget how important issues of pragmatics and culture are in the pedagogic cycle. Instructors know the damned answer. The older the student is, the more confidence the instructor should have that the student also knows the damned answer. What an advancedinstructor should be doing is looking for cues that somewhere in that stranger’s head is a cultural framework and body of knowledge that together will suffice in the future. Maybe (for some weird reason we shouldn’t dwell upon) that graduate student won’t end up being a professor… I suppose… but in the meantime, a mentor should be seeing numerous cues that the student will soon be able to talk the talk, even outside this protected, nurturing creche that is graduate school.

So, two objectives: knowledge and communication.

To which I say, right on. The academy is all about acculturation and evaluation. And the evaluation never stops. There's always another class to pass, another paper to be written and reviewed, another grant to pursue. Business felt a bit different. There's always another customer to meet, another proposal to write or respond to, always another person to be hired. But there's also a lot of room for slack. Blame may be placed but it seems like failure is less individual, more global or team based.

Being a student is a much stranger ontological position. You're definitely not a member of the faculty, and you're not yet a member of a profession. It's a liminal position. I certainly feel in-between, uncertain about the future, not quite sure how to handle the present. Maybe it's part of being in a master's program as opposed to a PhD. Or perhaps it's even worse in a PhD program.

Just last week Notional Slurry pointed me to a related post on academic recognition at Slaves of Academe. This essay links through to another commentary at the Chronicle of Higher Ed by Gary Olson about the need for more recognition in the academy. Olson's main point is that the financial rewards of the academy are small, so the non-financial rewards of recognition need to be given more prominence. Olson claims that this focus on recognition is more common in the academy than business, but I have to disagree. After all it's books like this that get shelved in the management section. In the end talking about recognition is just another way of ignoring the economics of the situation.

But the politics of recognition in the university are wrapped up in both economic and symbolic values. Olson cites the “stingy” nature of the reluctance to extend recognition to colleagues in the university, but really goes no further in exploring this phenomenon. Extending or refusing recognition is a game of power, played most often by those with something to prove or something to lose, and if you don’t know the rules of the game, you are toast. The simple fact of the matter is that colleagues and deans and provosts use the carrot and the stick in enforcing the accepted norms and guidelines of the institution and the profession.

...

Could it be that Stanley Fish’s argument about academics is right, that we are masochists because it makes us feel better about ourselves, our sacrifices turning us into morally superior beings? But moreover, what cultural glitch, what retardation of civilization, what missed step in human evolution, legitimizes this approach? The unspoken ghost rattling its chains in Olson’s commentary regarding the withholding of recognition, present but unnamed, is both the human capacity for unkindness and specifically how that tendency plays out in the academy. People are mean, we know that, but so many of us can’t reach the point of drawing a line: I will eat shit until this point. As the Fierceness was once fond of saying about academia, “These motherfuckers want you to eat shit, and not only eat shit, but smile while you’re doing it.” And I think that’s about right, depressingly enough. I'm a realist: I know you have to eat some shit sometime to survive in any institutional context. But we don’t have to accept that bargain completely and exclusively, in spite of the fact that many of us feel trapped by the dialectics of labour, exploitation, and elusive agency, even as we attempt to resist this sadistic game. Humiliation is part of it, if not the game itself.

Reading stuff like this puts me off the academy for a while, but I still come back. Something here is still worth it. I like to think it's the education, the temporary freedom to learn new things without the immediate demands for a economic reward. It's a way of deferring the 'real world' (which, in this case, means money) for a chance to satisfy your curiosity. There's a value in that. I just wish that there were more ways for us to obtain that value than through a university.

Prompted by Eric's question about the nature of modern romance I offer the following links: Knight Ridder report on a study that finds more Americans feel isolated

It found that men and women of every race, age and education level reported fewer intimate friends than the same survey turned up in 1985. Their remaining confidants were more likely to be members of their nuclear family than in 1985, according to the study, but intimacy within families was down, too. The findings are reported in the June issue of the American Sociological Review.

Kieran Healy posts a link to the relevant research paper, Social Isolation in America, at Crooked Timber.

And Bill Tozier at Notional Slurry has a long essay on estate sales, rummaging though other people's possessions, inferring a life from clues, and erotica in the eye of the beholder.

Being an estate auctioneer grants you a certain degree of immunity. There is no sense in which the folks clearing out these three old dead guys’ houses can be cast as pornographers, just because they ended up selling pornography. Hell, if you asked them I bet they’d all say, truthfully, that they just stack it and sell it, and often as not don’t know what’s in the boxes.

...

What’s interesting — and maybe even worth the effort I took to tell the story — is this: In those small communities where the Dead Fellows lived, and where my prejudiced radical professor of an ex-neighbor no doubt assumes they are poised ready to lynch her, nobody batted an eye over the fact of these books. The auctioneer was not sanctioned for selling prohibited materials. Nobody looked askance at me, or the guy who bought the 20 David Hamilton books for $260, or the people buying 6-foot-tall nude paintings of proudly busty ladies.

But online. In the connected world, our newer “flatter” world, doesn’t it look as if the most reactionary social norm wins? I’m not being a libertarian market-monger here; I’m pointing out a limitation of connectedness: social norms don’t scale.

Long Tail, meet Social Scissors.

It’s a distinctive characteristic of online communities that the most vocal people are the biggest participants. Special interest groups, whether project-driven or general-purpose, tend to be swayed most by the biggest complainers. Those people who traditionally represented a minority in vocal, physical culture now play a role as the most influential controllers in online culture.

Somehow all of these things feel connected. Tozier is correct that online communities have very different social dynamics than face-to-face communities. The recent liberal blogosphere blowup over Kos and The New Republic illustrates the dulling sameness of flame wars. People will say things online that they would never say in person. So the most vocal complainers rise to the top of our online social world.

I know for a fact that this has had an effect on me. One of the reasons I stopped blogging for most of 2003-5 was because of blog spam, which felt like an intrusion into my online world from people who were too vocal for their own good.

Intrusions into personal privacy also seem to be on the increase. All of the domestic spying examples by the NSA that have been revealed over the last few months being but one example. The privacy of an individual book collection enabled some of the people Tozier described to be eccentric.

Eccentricity has a value to all of society. It's in the name of my weblog because I believe that everyone should be exposed to points of view that are outside the norm. People can choose to ignore the eccentricities around them. It's part of what a tolerant society does.

The crucial question raised by all of this is whether the online world will have the same diversity as the real world. Will it devolve to the lowest, most reactionary, social norm or will it become a new avenue through which romances bloom that could never have been thought of in the past? I think we are living in a transition time when all of these issues are still being worked out.

Last month I read a blog entry about the 'idea store', a new merger of libraries and learning centers that is being tried out in Britain. Ever since I've been toying with the idea of learning communities. Today I did some internet research and discovered that there has been a lot of discussion about learning communities within the university. Most of these programs and ideas have focused on creating a community of students inside a university or college. The focus seems to be on improving the student-student interactions, essentially another go around at the peer learning model. See this definition from evergreen.edu

In higher education, curricular learning communities are classes that are linked or clustered during an academic term, often around an interdisciplinary theme, and enroll a common cohort of students. A variety of approaches are used to build these learning communities, with all intended to restructure the students’ time, credit, and learning experiences to build community among students, between students and their teachers, and among faculty members and disciplines.

The idea store concept appeals to me because it takes learning beyond the classroom. A few years ago I was a semi-regular attendee at a Socrates Cafe meeting. One of my biggest complaints was the lack of continuity. Issues kept coming up again and again but never seemed to be resolved, lessons learned one week were forgotten the next. Part of this was because we exercised no control over who participated, new members joined and left at frequent intervals, some people were disruptive. There were some regular members but there wasn't any way to pass on information over time.

Somewhere between the formal programs of a university and the informal discussions of a weekly philosophy book there is a middle ground. The idea store seems to be approaching that middle ground. Here are some things I'd like to see:

• No formal evaluations or grades. People should join because they are interested in the material. This raises a problem for those who are unable to find people who share their interests.
• Combination of online an offline meetings. Online work can help store and share new knowledge but the community building that takes place in a university or at a library is also important.
• Availability of experts from various domains, such as business or a university, to answer questions and deepen understanding of a topic. Public lectures might be a starting point for this. Need to consider the difference between popularizing a topic for the general public and showing the progress of scholarship with work in progress.
• Suggested curricula from various sources. This might help to provide a focus to the freewheeling ad hoc discussions I encountered at Socrates Cafe.

Last semester I took a class on knowledge management or information in organizations. We talked a lot about the different routines, incentives, and rewards that encourage or discourage people to share knowledge with each other.

Two knowledge management professionals have posted a couple of posts that I'd like to highlight.

Dave Pollard at “How to Save the World” writes about creating our own peer-to-peer expertise finder.

But then it occurred to me that there is a profound difference between 'know-what' and 'know-where' on the one hand, and 'know-who' on the other: Finding the former are complicated search problems; finding the latter is a complex problem. Google can write an algorithm to point you to the documents most likely to be useful to you on subject x, and they can create maps to point you to location y. You don't have to do anything but ask. And although the numbers are vast, there are only a finite number of documents and places on the planet.

Social networking is only beginning to address these problems. Dave lists a bunch of suggestions about how such a system might work, such as letting people define their expertise in their own way, maintaining votes on your local hard drive, making voting on others expertise easy. All very good things to think about when trying to build the next generation expertise finders. He goes on to identify 25 information dysfunctions and then looks at the failure of KM over the past 12 years.

Most organizations, too, refused to abandon the top-down centralized information model that was already in place, merely institutionalizing it with firewalls, access restrictions, monster centrally-managed one-size-fits-all databases and websites and over-engineered, over-managed collaboration and community-of-practice tools. Democratizing corporate information entails the devolution of decision-making and other power to front-line workers, and executives are understandably nervous about this.

The connections to democracy are intriguing and deserve further thought.

One of the research areas that Mark Ackerman, who taught the class I referred to, is working on is medical information sharing. I thought this post about the different transfers of information in medicine was very interesting. It was posted by Patrick Lambe at Green Chameleon back in February. I wonder if Ackerman saw it because we worked on a very similar diagram in class.

Lambe also addresses “Why KM is Hard to Do”. His ideas parallel a lot of the advice given by Pollard and mentioned in our class.

• acknowledge institutional baggage
• consult intensively but streamline decision making
• use social networks
• provide for habit changing strategies.

And a few more.

MaryAnn Johnson, a Generation Xer, who blogs at FlickPhilosopher and GeekPhilosophy recently saw An Inconvenient Truth and came out of the theater galvanized.

I’ve been letting the experience of seeing the film and seeing Gore in person sink in, and I find myself feeling optimistic, maybe, for the first time in a long time, optimistic about the direction our society may be going in. And I’m itching to do something about pushing us in that direction. I can’t recall ever feeling like this before. And could be it’s symptomatic of a grand shift in Generation X from complacency and apathy to caring and action.

She goes on to describe the new kind of green activist, a neo-green who wants to make environmentalism sexy. Dump the old mantras that called for a return to a simpler past, instead we need to be more complex more savvy with our technology. She drops Bruce Sterling's Viridian Design movement into the mix and concludes with this..

And it all starts coming together, signs of some kind of exit, an out, how we can get off the hamster wheel of mindless consumerism and soulless Toll Brothers suburban McMansion developments and 60-hour workweeks with only two weeks of annual vacation you can’t take anyway because you’re afraid it’ll make you look like a slacker and not like a team player. It’s a major challenge -- how do we redefine what is cool? -- but it can be done. In only, what?, ten years we’ve made cigarette smoking uncool. Whether you agree with the disdain now heaped upon smokers or not, the point is this: It’s theoretically possible to program a majority of people to feel a surge of disgust when they see some idiot tooling around town in a Hummer. We could enjoy that feeling of profound relief Sterling talks about if we can tie up the insanities of the typical American lifestyle with the devastation we’re wreaking on the planet and get rid of them in favor of something more sane, more livable, more gentle on the planet.

What those things are, and how we denote them as cool, I don’t know. But I’m finding it exciting to thing about what might be done. It’s about shaping a vision of the future that is optimistic and sexy and, yes, cool. It doesn’t mean it’ll be easy, but it does mean, hopefully, that at the end of the struggle, life will be better than it is today, more fun and more enjoyable and more satisfying.

I don’t know where we’re going, but it’s nice to feel like the journey there might actually be worth it.

I read this and fell to my knees and said “At long last, a light at the end of the tunnel.” I hope she's right, with all of my science fiction fueled dreams of the future. Something has got to give and the sooner it begins the better.

And then to temper my optimism on the bitter pill of doubt I look back a month ago to something I wrote down but didn't publish.

Sometimes it's all just too much to take. I've noticed that my attitudes toward changing the world for the better are becoming more and more cynical over time. Part of why I decided to even consider going back to grad school, or possibly pursuing a PhD, despite the dire warnings about the future of academia, was because I wanted to do something for myself and screw the rest of the world. I sometimes feel the same way about starting a business. Forget everybody else I just want to get my piece of the pie too.

So I read the following entries by Dave Pollard The Place You Love is Gone and How Would We Behave in a Great Depression? and I say bring on the rending of garments and the gnashing of teeth, for it is time to clean this fallen world.

I had the same reaction when I read an essay at the Internet Review of Science Fiction about the recent lack of interest by Hollywood in the eco-disaster film genre. When was the last time we saw a film about the end of the world like Soylent Green or Silent Running? As MaryAnn Johnson so ably shows the worries about ecological disaster seem to have disappeared from Hollywood during the last twenty-five years. Where did they go?

Inside my head I'm oscillating between high dudgeon and strategic planning. I'm afraid of hatred and disgust, emotions that are all too easily abused. Just look at the religious right and the Republicans who crusade against most of what I believe. Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, the list of haters never seems to end. And cynically inside me there is a voice that says this hatred, this disgust, is the way to power and that's we will need in order to remake the world. Countering all this is the philosopher in me that knows, deep down, there are no fulcrums upon which to turn the world. It's turtles all the way down; there are no fundamental narratives. Given all this, the question is how do we string our way between the fundamentalisms that drive our faith-based politics, and the rational post-modernity that questions everything? So far I've got nothing but a tiny seed of hope inspired by one person being Gored.

Part of the joy of the blogosphere is finding connections to ideas that I was previously unaware of. Today's discovery was the writing Arthur Silber has been doing about suicide, child rearing, morality, father figures, psychoanalysis, and more. The inspiration for this latest bit of writing was the recent suicide by prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Via Avedon Carol at the Sideshow.

At first I was unsurprised that prisoners who are being held without the hope of a trial would choose to take their life. I can't imagine many situations that would be more despairing. Then I read the stories about the reactions of Admiral Harry, the commander, who claimed the suicides were an act of asymmetrical warfare, and the comment of Colleen Graffy that the suicides were a good 'PR' move. I was numb. A few years ago, before Abu Gharib, my jaw would have fallen to the floor after hearing these callous statements. Today my jaw barely moved; the standards have been set so low that surprise seems worthless.

George Lakoff has gotten a lot of mileage out of his ideas about strict-father and nurturing-mother frames in politics. Silber links these ideas to German psychologist Alice Miller, whom I hadn't encountered before. Miller's theory is that children fail to develop an authentic self when they are abusively disciplined by their parents. They see their parents as the authority figures and later in life transfer that respect for authority to the strongest thug who comes around.

This perfect adaptation to society's norms--in other words, to what is called “healthy normality”--carries with it the danger that such a person can be used for practically any purpose. It is not a loss of autonomy that occurs here, because this autonomy never existed, but a switching of values, which in themselves are of no importance anyway for the person in question as long as his whole value system is dominated by the principle of obedience. He has never gone beyond the stage of idealizing his parents with their demands for unquestioning obedience; this idealization can easily be transferred to a Fuhrer or to an ideology.

From there it's not too hard to make a critique of religion as just another substitution of authority, from fathers to gods. Silber glosses Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ in this light.

If you wonder why people refuse to give up a belief in God, why they are completely impervious when you point out the most obvious contradictions in their belief system, why they are perfectly content to accept what is easily shown to be nonsense, this is why: they have never escaped the parent who demanded obedience, and now as adults -- since they have never developed an authentic, independent sense of self -- they dare not question the goodness of their additional authority figure. But the underlying psychological mechanism is precisely the same.

And if you wonder why they become so angry when you point out the numerous inconsistencies in their beliefs, the obvious contradictions, the completely nonsensical nature of what they proclaim to believe, and why they may as well believe in the Easter Bunny -- this is the reason for that response, as well. You are not merely challenging one particular belief: you are challenging their entire sense of self -- or rather, their entire false sense of self. They have never been allowed to develop a true sense of self, and that is the real tragedy. The parent prevented them from developing one in the first instance, and now God does. Also, and this makes the tragedy even worse, they themselves now prevent themselves from doing so.

I know some very intelligent religious people, whom I deeply respect, and for them there does seem to be more to religion than authority. At the same time I've met others for whom Silber's analysis of Miller is completely apt. The question for the immediate future is whether these two can ever be reconciled.

As a side note I wonder if a study has ever been made that compared the religious attitudes of children raised in single parent homes. Do children raised by single mothers have different attitudes toward religion than their counterparts raised by fathers or any other familial form?

Yesterday's list of potential curiosities was all mental. No doubt those who believe in a balance between mind and body would be disappointed. So as a countermeasure I bought an exercise book this evening in addition to a copy of Dracula and Frankenstein.

The missing physical element in my summer curiosities is mostly habit. I've never been a very athletic person despite growing up with a health and physical education teacher. Nor was my father ever really a good example of physical activity, at least not in my memory. All my memories of him are in a wheelchair or a hospital bed.

From a theoretical point of view (here I return to the ways of habit, always trying to think my way into and out of situations) the connection between physicality and religion has been at the forefront of my mind in recent months. The Da Vinci Code brought the conflict between the body and the mind to the forefront of an adventure tale. Fred Clark of Slactivist had two very interesting posts last month on the reasons why Christians hate sex. The ongoing discussion of Christianism by Andrew Sullivan also ties into the question of the body and the soul. How are they connected?

I knew this would all get back to philosophy in the end. If only I could lose 20 pounds by reading Plato.

Ambition always seems to exceed my grasp, but for lack of anything else to post I'll note some topics that I'd like to study in more depth this summer. Seems like I've been making a lot of lists for the past few entries, but so be it.

To study:

1. Math - I have both calculus and linear algebra textbooks in my apartment. I started in on the linear algebra book last month, but I still need a better way to take notes.
2. Foreign language - Improving or recollecting what French I took. Spanish would be nice, especially for Borges. Latin has been another on my list of perennials, but I'm still looking for a good pronunciation CD. There are actually a lot of Latin books available online for free because they have passed out of copyright.
3. Weather and atmospheric science - there is a cool course of study available via MIT open courseware that deserves more of my attention. It involves plenty of physics and fluid dynamics. I may yet understand wet and dry adiabats.
4. Philosophy - need to brush up on the Frankfurt school and continental philosophy in general. This thread at Crooked Timber might be of use.
5. Computers and programming - lisp, perl, python, databases. And a healthy helping of Knuth's 'Art of Programming'.
6. Recreation - chess and go, more perennials for the list.

To read:

1. the Bible - always mean to become more acquainted with this founding document but never seem to get around to it. I'm giving the NIV translation a try this time around.
2. Lots of fiction authors - Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, Murakami, DeLillo, McCarthy, Vonnegut. I just finished The Time Traveler's Wife and want to compare it to Slaughterhouse-Five.
3. Non-fiction - Digital Copyright by Jessica Litman is high on my list, especially since I'm thinking of writing a thesis on the topic.

At this weeks SF/F reading group meeting the question was raised: what really makes a good book. So I'm trying to describe, at least to myself, the dimensions in a work of fiction that I enjoy and consider when trying to decide wheteher some book is good. So far here's what I've come up with.

• Sympathy and empathy for characters. There should be some connection between me and the characters of the book. The characters don't have to be good people. I just need to be able to comprehend them, to put myself into their place, if only for the duration of the story.
• Setting. A interesting location or background to the story is also important. Hopefully the author will provide enough detail to make the setting come alive in my imagination. One author who does this really well is Borges, especially in some of his infinite library stories. Calvino's “Invisible Cities” is another good example, in fact it's almost all setting.
• Allusive depth. The story connect to something outside of itself. Most often these connections are to other works of art. Elizabeth Hand does this very well with music.
• Novelty density. I'm not sure if this is the same or different than the allusive depth above. I put this here to get at the difference present in the science fiction that I really like: a lot of ideas are presented in a compressed frame and sometimes left unexplained. I think this is what Delany was getting at when he wrote that a sentence like “The door dilated” has a different reading in SF and F than in normal fiction.
• Expressive language. This connects to my love of poetry. A well turned phrase can make a work come alive. First sentences stick in my mind with this quality. Gibson's “The sky above the port was the color of a television, tuned to a dead channel.”
• Metaphor. At a micro level this can shade into expressive language, at a macro level it links to allusive depth. But allusion mostly connects to other artwork. Metaphor connects the story to the world, making the story stand in for our experience of life.
• Narrative structure. The arrangement of the whole into a set that makes sense and creates the ideal feeling in the reader. This is the criterion that puts the reveal of the murderer at the end of a mystery.

Here are some links for a search on 'what makes a good story'. From Creative Keys, Screenwriting.info, and the Thinking Writer

Looking to the Future via Reality Television

Dave Pollard at How to Save the World posts a very intriguing set of theories about the sucess of reality television in the last few years. Is it conservative propaganda, schadenfreude, the hero myth, attention deficit, or self-preservation? Dave thinks its the latter.

The theory that answers this question, and does make some sense to me, is the Self-Preservation Theory, and it holds that we are intuitively so pessimistic about our future that we need to insulate and inure ourselves against the sadness and suffering that we are likely to face. A recent study suggests that people who are prepared for pain report it as less intense, when it occurs, than people who are surprised by it. While the average person continues to think his/her life is, and will continue to be, better than average, we are overwhelmed with evidence that this 'average' is getting worse and will continue to worsen. Subconsciously, perhaps, we are preparing for the worst, numbing ourselves to anguish by witnessing it happening to others and preparing for it ourselves. It is our nature to lower our expectations when things get bad: During Great Depressions, wars, and in the face of personal tragedy, it takes less to make us happy and more to really make us miserable. We adapt.

I think he's mostly correct about this. My optimism about the future has declined in the past few years for reasons that I'm still trying to explain to myself. Pollard continues

Generations X and Y clearly have lower expectations of the future than our boomer generation had at the same age. They are the ones whose behaviours increasingly exhibit signs of anomie, fatalism, thrill-seeking and other tendencies (psychopathies?) illustrated in the lower right corner of the above chart. They are the ones who go to see movies with graphic violence and horror that we fund repulsive. And they are the ones (disproportionately) watching Reality TV. Maybe they're just steeling for a future that will see even more horrific abuses of power, greater disparity between rich and poor, more suffering and misery for all.

Most of this resonates with me. A lot of problems I see around me have been at the center or edges of my awareness for at least the last two decades.

• Global Warming and climate change. I first read about this in the late 1980s. I can't remember the title of the book but it persuaded me early on that humans were causing changes to the climate. Worst of all we have no idea what the results of all these changes will be. Given what we've learned about chaotic and complex systems in the last twenty years one would think that an attitude of caution would be the rational response. Instead politicians have spent two decades demanding more studies.
• The growth of fundamentalism. The 9/11 attacks were just the icing on the cake of a problem that intelligent people have been writing about since the early 1990s. The Moral Majority was a bogeyman of the 1980s for goodness sake. Worst of all has been the growing connections between politics and religion in the United States. Kevin Phillips offers the most recent glossing of this problem in American Theocracy.
• Economics, globalization, and employment. This is probably the most recent area where pessimism has begun to overtake optimism. As one of the knowledge workers in the economy it's becoming increasingly clear to me that everything we do will be outsourced to the lowest bidder. And the hope that we can educate ourselves for new jobs is turning out to be a false hope. Of all the knowledge professions education is just as likely to be outsourced as any other. Homework Help, From a World Away shows this trend in action.