Look down at her ring to find an excuse. Whispering gallery walls have ears.
A Michigan company announced that for the low, low price of $1.99, you could have a lifetime license to use something you might not have thought you needed - a new punctuation mark.
It’s called the SarcMark, and it looks like a reversed “at” sign.
A thing out in the waves. A kind of bridge.
Photographs can serve as valuable memory aids but can also contribute to memory inaccuracies. The present studies examine whether photographs can make people claim they performed an action that they did not in fact perform. (…) Findings suggest that photographs can mislead people as to what they did or did not do.
photo { Robb Johnson }
It must be a movement then, an actuality of the possible as possible
Beyond the practical experiences and impressions being held for ages from ancient times, the scientific observations and surveys indicate that psychopathological symptoms, especially those belonging to the bipolar mood disorder (bipolar I and II), major depression and cyclothymia categories occur more frequently among writers, poets, visual artists and composers, compared to the rates in the general population. Self-reports of writers and artists describe symptoms in their intensively creative periods which are reminiscent and characteristic of hypomanic states. Further, cognitive styles of hypomania (e.g. overinclusive thinking, richness of associations) and originality-prone creativity share many common as indicated by several authors.
Among the eminent artists showing most probably manic-depressive or cyclothymic symptoms were: E. Dickinson, E. Hemingway, N. Gogol, A. Strindberg, V. Woolf, Lord Byron (G. Gordon), J. W. Goethe, V. van Gogh, F. Goya, G. Donizetti, G. F. Händel, O. Klemperer, G. Mahler, R. Schumann, and H. Wolf. Based on biographies and other studies, brief descriptions are given in the present article on the personality character of Gogol; Strindberg, Van Gogh, Händel, Klemperer, Mahler, and Schumann.
Further example is the enigmatic silence and withdrawal from opera composing of Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868), which is still a matter of various theories and explanations. Until his life of 37 years he composed 39 operas and lived almost another 40 years without composing any new one. Biographies show that severe depressive sufferings played a role in that withdrawal and silence, while in his juvenile years most probably hypomanic personality traits contributed to the extreme achievements and very fast composing techniques. Analysing the available biographies of Rossini and the character of music he composed (e.g. opera buffa, Rossini crescendo) strongly suggests the medical diagnosis of a bipolar affective illness.
Comparing to the general population, bipolar mood disorder is highly overrepresented among writers and artists. The cognitive and other psychological features of artistic creativity resemble many aspects of the hypomanic symptomatology. It may be concluded that bipolar mood traits might contribute to highly creative achievements in the field of art. At the same time, considering the risks, the need of an increased medical care is required.
‘If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.’ –Spinoza
The Chaos Theory of Careers (CTC) characterises individuals as complex systems subject to the influence of complex influences and chance events. However, over time patterns emerge in our behaviour that are self-similar but also subject to change.
Career trajectories / histories / stories are examples of such complex fractal patterns.
Our careers are subject to chance events far more frequently than just about any theory other than CTC and Happenstance Learning Theory would suggest.
Our careers are subject to non linear change — sometimes small steps have profound outcomes, and sometimes changing everything changes nothing.
Our careers are unpredictable, with most people expressing a degree of surprise/delight or disappointment at where they ended up.
Our careers are subject to continual change. Sometimes we experience slow shift (Bright, 2008) that results in us drifting off course without realising it, and sometimes our careers have dramatic (fast shift) changes which completely turn our world upside down.
photo { Arno Rafael Minkkinen }
There he is, says I, in his gloryhole, with his cruiskeen lawn and his load of papers, working for the cause
We understand the dynamics of the world around us as by associating pairs of events, where one event has some influence on the other. These pairs of events can be aggregated into a web of memories representing our understanding of an episode of history. The events and the associations between them need not be directly experienced—they can also be acquired by communication.
When we think and talk about changes in the world around us, we weave together discrete episodes to create a narrative. Events along the timeline of this narrative are connected by associations. For instance, if we recall that “since the gas price went up, I decided to buy a fuel-efficient car”, we can represent “gas price going up” and “I buying a fuel-efficient car” as two nodes of a directed graph with an associative arc connecting the former to the latter. Such arcs need not be a first-hand experience; we might believe that “increased political tension in the middle-East drove the gas price up” drawing an arc from “increased political tension in the middle-East” to “gas price going up”. Our recollection and understanding of the past can thus be represented as a web of events connected by associations like the above example.
Such autobiographical narratives take place within a social context. They are fluid and dynamic, bearing the hallmark of the social context within which they emerge. Associations between events are not only dependent on the personal experiences of the individual, but also on social processes of construction and re-construction that ultimately give place to what we experience as a collective history. Much of the social processes of collective history occur in conversational and communicative contexts, which convey personal and social meaning to events. Communication reinforces the memories of interacting individuals, and it is through this process that associative arcs can spread in a population so that memory webs come to share common elements across people. From this process, associative arcs can spread in a population so that groups of people share part of their webs of memories. We call such subnetworks in common to many people collective memories.
In this paper, we will investigate a model of how the web of memories of a population evolves, including the mechanisms mentioned above. We use the model to investigate the stability of collective memories, the minimal requirements for cycles (sequences of associations that must violate the time-ordering of the events) and the possibility that communication can lead to the formation of groups sharing collective memories. There are other conceivable mechanisms than communication for the evolution of a person’s web of memories: first-hand experiences, mass-medial information and logical deduction (to fill out gaps in one’s web of memories). In our model of the dynamics of collective memories these other mechanisms are grouped together and, as opposed to communication, treated as external input to the model.
Communications as a process for the understanding of history—the formation of causal networks, both on an individual and aggregate level—has been studied in the qualitative tradition of social and behavioral sciences. One has investigated the processes behind collective memories—how groups of people maintain a common narrative of a period of history. This type of research are to a large extent case studies about, ethnic groups’ memories of traumatic events, like the Jews’ collective memories of the holocaust, or comparative studies like the Palestinians and Israelis different histories of the state of Israel.
Recently there has been a considerable interest in models of the spreading of information and opinions between people. Such studies have for example investigated the minimal requirements for fads to spread, for groups of people to make correct collective decisions or predictions, and the conditions for a diversity of opinions (as opposed to a widespread consensus) to be the result of communication. In the present work we follow this tradition and create a model of collective memory emerging from communication. This model will take a web of memories as input. In this study we take this input network from an empirical dataset. The paper starts discussing the structure of this empirical data, then proceeds to the construction of the model and finally discusses the results of the simulations.
collage { Lola Dupré }
If a compact Riemannian manifold has positive Ricci curvature then its fundamental group is finite
{ According to the World Intellectual Property Organization’s website and Dime, Tinker Hatfield and his boys at the Nike Innovative Kitchen have filed patent papers for a shoe with an automatic lacing system, such as seen on the Nike Air Mag from Back to the Future II. | Nice Kicks | more }
‘A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.’ –Max Planck
Billions of brain cells are communicating at any given moment. Like an organic supercomputer they keep everything going, from breathing to solving riddles, and “programming errors” can lead to serious conditions such as schizophrenia, Parkinson’s Disease and Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
{ University of Copenhagen | Continue reading }
One of the great puzzles of cell biology is how information is stored, processed and passed from generation to generation at the biochemical level.
By far the most famous mechanism is the sequence of nucleotides in DNA. However, in recent years a number other data storage mechanisms have emerged, so-called epigenetic processes, and their role is under fierce debate. For example, the pattern of methyl groups attached to DNA seems to be an important data storage system as do modifications to the proteins that control how DNA is packaged.
Today, Georg Fritz at the University of Cologne and a few buddies put forward a new idea. They say that a simple network of genes can act as a conditional memory, that either stores or ignores information when it is told to do so. “The circuit behaves similarly to a “data latch” in an electronic circuit, i.e. it reads and stores an input signal only when conditioned to do so by a “read command,” say the group.
‘You have to find it. No one else can find it for you.’ –Björn Borg
I’m not going to gripe about the price of tickets or the price of concessions or the exclusive Heineken sponsorship that forced me to drink, well Heineken, or even the weather, as you had no control over that.
But a few questions:1. Upon arriving at the stadium bag-free as per your security notes, I was told that e-readers were not allowed in the stadium. E-READERS! iPhones, BlackBerries, video cameras, real cameras, these things are all allowed. On these things one can take pictures, video, talk, blog, surf the web. On an e-reader, one can … read. Why does the USTA hate literacy? By the way, I went to another entrance and snuck mine in, so take THAT!
My childhood bends beside me. Too far for me to lay a hand there once or lightly.
{ Every adopted child wonders who his biological mother is. | AOL News | full story }
‘The aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced.’ –Deleuze
Pursuit of novelty may be one of fashion’s most durable illusions. The fact is that very little in fashion is new, in any real sense, nor is it truly supposed to be. (“There’s so much striving for newness now that newness feels less new,” as Marc Jacobs told Style.com.) Many of the 175,000 people who work in fashion in New York, in the more than 800 businesses that generate $10 billion in total annual wages and tax revenues of $1.7 billion, could probably confirm Mr. Asfour’s proposition that fashion is at heart a conservative business.
I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass, and time one livid final flame
One of the extraordinary features of the mammalian sound detection system is the range over which it works. This extends from 11 KHz in birds to 200 KHz in marine mammals.
This is only possible because the inner ear amplifies sounds by a factor of up to 4000. That’s a huge amount of gain. So much, in fact, that it’s hard to square with conventional thinking about mechanical amplification. So there is much head scratching among biologists over how the ear achieves this amplification.
Part of the puzzle is that the amplification is not entirely passive. The inner ear is essentially a fluid-filled tube, divided along its length by a thin elastic membrane. This membrane is covered in hair cells, which come in two types.
The so-called inner hair cells convert pressure waves within the fluid into electrical signals the brain can interpret. However, the outer hair cells act like mechanical amplifiers. When struck by a pressure wave, the cells themselves begin to vibrate at the same frequency, thereby boosting the wave as it passes.
The trouble is that measurements using outer hair cells indicate that they amplify pressure waves by a factor of about 10, a gain that falls far short of what’s required.
Today, however, Tobias Reichenbach and James Hudspeth at The Rockefeller University in New York city say they’ve worked out what else is going on to boost the signal.
Sound enters the inner ear as a pressure wave which travels through the fluid filled chamber, causing the membrane that divides it along its length to vibrate, like a sheet of rubber. Since the hair cells sit on this membrane they also move.
Reichenbach and Hudspeth calculate that the vibration of the outer hair cells not only amplifies the pressure wave, but also increases the displacement of the membrane, like a child bouncing on a trampoline.
The game’s out there, and it’s play or get played. That simple.
Why We’re Teaching ‘The Wire’ at Harvard
“The Wire,” which depicted inner-city Baltimore over five seasons on HBO, shows ordinary people making sense of their world. Its complex characters on both sides of the law defy simplistic moral distinctions. (…) We think it is more than just excellent television. Impressed by its treatment of complex issues, we developed a course at Harvard drawing on the show’s portrayal of fundamental sociological principles connected to urban inequality. Our seminar was designed for 30 students; four times that many showed up for the first class last week.
Of course, our undergraduate students will read rigorous academic studies of the urban job market, education and the drug war. But the HBO series does what these texts can’t. More than simply telling a gripping story, “The Wire” shows how the deep inequality in inner-city America results from the web of lost jobs, bad schools, drugs, imprisonment, and how the situation feeds on itself.
Those kinds of connections are very difficult to illustrate in academic works. Though scholars know that deindustrialization, crime and prison, and the education system are deeply intertwined, they must often give focused attention to just one subject in relative isolation, at the expense of others. With the freedom of artistic expression, “The Wire” can be more creative. It can weave together the range of forces that shape the lives of the urban poor.
{ Julius Wilson and Anmol Chaddha/Harvard College | Continue reading }
photo { Anthony Suau }
