reBlog
Linkbaiting Science: Twitter and Fast-Twitch Ethics
Originally from: /Message.
Linkbaiting Science: Twitter and Fast-Twitch Ethics:
I love it. Just as Twitter’s Ev Williams appears on Oprah and flow apps seem positioned to become as ubiquitous as cell phones, researcher Mary Helen Immordino-Yang extrapolates from a brain study to suggest apps like Twitter can confuse our moral compass:
[Tweet this: Rapid-fire media may confuse your moral compass]
The study’s authors used compelling, real-life stories to induce admiration for virtue or skill, or compassion for physical or social pain, in 13 volunteers (the emotion felt was verified through a careful protocol of pre- and post-imaging interviews).
Brain imaging showed that the volunteers needed six to eight seconds to fully respond to stories of virtue or social pain.
However, once awakened, the responses lasted far longer than the volunteers’ reactions to stories focused on physical pain.
The study raises questions about the emotional cost—particularly for the developing brain—of heavy reliance on a rapid stream of news snippets obtained through television, online feeds or social networks such as Twitter.
“If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people’s psychological states and that would have implications for your morality,” Immordino-Yang said.
So the sound bite becomes ‘Twitter is blocks compassion,” although that is not what was studied. It’s simply an extrapolation, and it’s based on a falsehood. The unexamined premise if that if you use Twitter (or other streaming apps) then you never pause for six or eight seconds to reflect on what is going by. That’s not true for me, and I am sure that others stop and think about what they are reading. Twitter is not a game of Quake; we aren’t running from zombies or throwing bombs.
It’s a conversational milieu, like a cocktail party, not a battlefield.
But as I have predicted, the convention media and other arbiters of popular culture will attack Twitter and flow apps as illegitimate — the Oprah episode to one side — and the nature of the changes that web-based connection will introduce to society will be demonized for years to come.
The hype about Twitter will lead to a backlash about its dark side: we will hear more about the negatives of ‘fast-twitch ethics’, I am sure.
[update - Discovered a post by my pal, Jamais Cascio on this same research: Social Networking and the Brain: Continuous Partial Empathy?]
A Rather Troubling Newswire Image On The Day Obama Releases Bush Interrogation Memos
Originally from: BAGnewsNotes.
A Rather Troubling Newswire Image On The Day Obama Releases Bush Interrogation Memos:
Yesterday’s release of those Bush Administration interrogation memos has caused an unusual offering of file photos to be distributed to the newswire.
I’m surprised I never saw this one before. Shades of FEMA ‘05, what the image depicts is an “improvised” accounting of detainees recorded on a plywood wall who had been treated at the now-abandoned hospital facility at Gitmo’s Camp X-Ray.
Excuse my fury (and my nomination of the image as symbolic), but was the excuse here — as exemplified by the defense offered by the director of national intelligence at the end of the NYT memos story — that crude measures were necessary to prevent another 9/11 style attack?
In this case, things certainly must have been so dire there was no time even for even pen and paper.
(image: Paul J. Richards – AFP/Getty Images. April 25, 2007. US Naval Station in Guantanamo, Cuba)
Emotional Cartography – Technologies of the Self
Originally from: Networked_Performance.
Emotional Cartography – Technologies of the Self:
Emotional Cartography – Technologies of the Self, edited by Christian Nold, 2009 — Emotional Cartography is a collection of essays from artists, designers, psychogeographers, cultural researchers, futurologists and neuroscientists, brought together by Christian Nold, to explore the political, social and cultural implications of visualising intimate biometric data and emotional experiences using technology.
Essays by Raqs Media Collective, Marcel van de Drift, Dr Stephen Boyd Davis, Rob van Kranenburg, Sophie Hope and Dr Tom Stafford.
A5 Offset Litho – 96 pages – Full Colour ISBN 978-0-9557623-1-4 — Download the complete book: Full Quality PDF (44 meg); Screen Quality PDF (2 meg). Published under a Creative Commons, Attribution, NonCommercial, ShareAlike Licence.
BOOK LAUNCH: APRIL 24, 2009 6:30 PM at Space Studios :: Join us for drinks and discussion at the book launch, which will include talks by the editor Christian Nold as well as Dr Tom Stafford and Sophie Hope. A number of free copies of
the book will be available on the evening.
The Wire Bible
Originally from: kottke.org.
This is quite a treat. Someone got ahold of some scripts from The Wire and posted them online:
Season 1, episode 1, “The Target”
Season 1, episode 9, “Game Day”
Season 5, epsisode 10, “-30-”
But the real gem is a document dated September 6, 2000 that appears to be David Simon’s pitch to HBO for the show. The document starts with a description of the show.
Simon had the show nailed from the beginning. Near the end of the overview, he says:
But more than an exercise is realism for its own sake, the verisimilitude of The Wire exists to serve something larger. In the first story-arc, the episodes begin what would seem to be the straight-forward, albeit protracted, pursuit of a violent drug crew that controls a high-rise housing project. But within a brief span of time, the officers who undertake the pursuit are forced to acknowledge truths about their department, their role, the drug war and the city as a whole. In the end, the cost to all sides begins to suggest not so much the dogged police pursuit of the bad guys, but rather a Greek tragedy. At the end of thirteen episodes, the reward for the viewer — who has been lured all this way by a well-constructed police show — is not the simple gratification of hearing handcuffs click. Instead, the conclusion is something that Euripides or O’Neill might recognize: an America, at every level at war with itself.
The list of main characters contains a few surprises. McNulty was originally going to be named McCardle, Aaron Barksdale became Avon Barksdale, and the Stringer Bell character changed quite a bit.
STRINGY BELL – black, early forties, he is BARKSDALE’s most trusted lieutenant, supervising virtually every aspect of the organization. He is older than BARKSDALE, and much more direct in his way, but nonetheless he is the No. 2. He has BARKSDALE’s brutal sense of the world but not his polish. BELL is bright, but clearly a child of the projects he now controls.
The final section is entitled “BIBLE” and contains draft outlines of a nine-episode season. I didn’t read it all, but the main story line is there, as are many plot details that made it into the actual first season. (thx, greg)
Slumchitecture
Originally from: Where.
Slumchitecture: 
While policymakers — backed by real estate developers, the development industry, and the pressures of global capitalism — are pushing slum redevelopment models that replace informal settlements with high-rise blocks, some urban practitioners are using slums as models for redeveloping decaying neighborhoods in the West.
Architect Teddy Cruz drew on design elements he observed in the shantytowns of Tijuana to inform a redevelopment plan aimed at reintegrating poor immigrants into the fabric of a gentrifying town in Hudson River Valley. He previously incorporated Tijuana’s lessons into a design for a residential complex for Latino immigrants near San Diego.
Cruz is one
of a growing number of architects and other professionals looking to informal settlements for lessons on good urban design. These practitioners point out that, for all their deprivations, slums exemplify many of the textbook qualities that make up strong urban environments: low-rise, high-density, mixed use. They are home to well-functioning public spaces, heterogeneous communities and aesthetically interesting spaces. They promote safety by channeling “eyes on the street.”
In an age where sustainability is the keyword, slums are “green” in their efficient use and reuse of materials for construction and livelihood activities. They are highly walkable, often represent optimal utilization of space and are easily adaptable to changing user needs.
Some have also argued that the decentralized, informal production pr
ocesses and blending of live-work spaces that slum typologies allow represent a restructuring in line with the demands of a post-industrial economy.
In February, no less than Prince Charles lauded Dharavi — a vast slum in central Mumbai that he visited in 2003 and has since become the focus of a multi-billion dollar redevelopment plan — as a healthy antidote to built environments created through a “brutal and insensitive process of globalisation.” He suggested that “it may be the case that in a few years’ time such communities [as Dharavi] will be perceived as best equipped to face the challenges that confront us because they have a built-in resilience and genuinely durable ways of living.”
It seems that slums are the new utopian landscapes — and they couldn’t be more different than the neat segmentation and uniformity of the previous generation’s suburban and modernist dreams.
While the West is trying to recapture something lost, many slum inhabitants can’t wait to get out. Slum residents who are relatively wealthy, better educated and young and who live in well-developed slums in cities where building-living is the norm (which are also the ones that designers are emulating) often strive for the privacy, social mobility and security that high-rise buildings connote. On one hand, you can argue that their face-value aspirations are unreliable because they have not been presented with another version of what it means to be modern, middle-class and legal. But all of our preferences and judgments are similarly socially conditioned. Is this a case of “you don’t miss it ’till it’s gone”? Or is the grass always greener?
Equally eager to leave slum settlements are those on the other side of the spectrum from Dharavi, where there is no public space to speak of, no more than half of the family fits in the house at a time, and you risk getting hit by a train or falling off a water pipe when you go outside. Although such places remind us of people’s capacity for ingenuity and survival and can be aesthetically interesting, no one actually wants to live here.
There are many places in between, and overall, I would guess most inhabitants of slums would prefer to preserve their current settlements and stay in ground-floor structures that they can increment over time. And there’s a lot to learn from these well-functioning, organic neighborhoods.
Those who use “slum” as a blanket term to connote blight and justify self-serving solutions ignore the diversity among slums and the strengths that many already possess. However, those admiring the forms of certain types of slums should also not glaze over the diversity of slum environments — as well as the people who live in them — to make their point. Let’s hope that this wave of excitement about “slumchitecture” does not lead to superficial conclusions, but rather that it energizes debates and generates perspectives that can create better cities in both proverbial hemispheres. 
(Photos by Katia Savchuk. Image of Teddy Cruz’s model from the New York Times.)
The Dark Side of Dubai
Originally from: Boing Boing.
(Image: “Dubai Metropolis,” The Business Bay Executive Towers in Dubai. From the CC-licensed Flickr stream of “twocentsworth.” )
An incredible piece by Johann Hari in the UK Independent about hard times hitting in the Arab city-state “built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery.” A long read, but you won’t want to miss a word. Toward the end of the piece, Hari boils his impression of the place down to these six words: “Market Fundamentalist Globalisation in One City.”
The feature starts with a vignette about an expat named Karen Andrews, who now lives in her Range Rover, camped in the parking lot of one of Dubai’s finest hotels. Her troubles began when her husband was diagnosed with a brain tumor, lost his job, and the couple quickly slipped into debt. Snip:
One doctor told him he had a year to live; another said it was benign and he’d be okay. But the debts were growing. “Before I came here, I didn’t know anything about Dubai law. I assumed if all these big companies come here, it must be pretty like Canada’s or any other liberal democracy’s,” she says. Nobody told her there is no concept of bankruptcy. If you get into debt and you can’t pay, you go to prison. “When we realised that, I sat Daniel down and told him: listen, we need to get out of here. He knew he was guaranteed a pay-off when he resigned, so we said – right, let’s take the pay-off, clear the debt, and go.” So Daniel resigned – but he was given a lower pay-off than his contract suggested. The debt remained. As soon as you quit your job in Dubai, your employer has to inform your bank. If you have any outstanding debts that aren’t covered by your savings, then all your accounts are frozen, and you are forbidden to leave the country.
“Suddenly our cards stopped working. We had nothing. We were thrown out of our apartment.” Karen can’t speak about what happened next for a long time; she is shaking.
Daniel was arrested and taken away on the day of their eviction. It was six days before she could talk to him. “He told me he was put in a cell with another debtor, a Sri Lankan guy who was only 27, who said he couldn’t face the shame to his family. Daniel woke up and the boy had swallowed razor-blades. He banged for help, but nobody came, and the boy died in front of him.”
Karen managed to beg from her friends for a few weeks, “but it was so humiliating. I’ve never lived like this. I worked in the fashion industry. I had my own shops. I’ve never…” She peters out.
Daniel was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment at a trial he couldn’t understand. It was in Arabic, and there was no translation. “Now I’m here illegally, too,” Karen says I’ve got no money, nothing. I have to last nine months until he’s out, somehow.” Looking away, almost paralysed with embarrassment, she asks if I could buy her a meal.
She is not alone. All over the city, there are maxed-out expats sleeping secretly in the sand-dunes or the airport or in their cars.
“The thing you have to understand about Dubai is – nothing is what it seems,” Karen says at last. “Nothing. This isn’t a city, it’s a con-job. They lure you in telling you it’s one thing – a modern kind of place – but beneath the surface it’s a medieval dictatorship.”
JOURNAL: Just How Easy it to Disrupt Infrastructure?
Originally from: Global Guerrillas.
JOURNAL: Just How Easy it to Disrupt Infrastructure?:
Here’s a great example of how easy it is to disrupt critical infrastructure, without computer skills (which is one of the reasons I believe, based on a broad number of examples, it is a more useful method of warfare).
Gitmo Details #1: Club Survivor
Originally from: BAGnewsNotes.
Gitmo Details #1: Club Survivor:
(click for full size)
In conjunction with Daylight Magazine , BNN takes a look at a series of images by photographer Christopher Sims taken at Guantanamo Bay. The photos were recently the subject of an exhibition at Civilian Art Projects, and are also featured in a Daylight multimedia podcast viewable here. Given BNN’s unique mission to fix on, delve into and create discussion around single images, we feel Chris’ photos, taken in 2006 and capturing atmosphere and character through mundanity, actually grow more curious as Guantanamo — having outlived the Bush Administration — retains its notoriety. Chris expands on the details with a few notes.
This is a photograph of Club Survivor.
At first glance, it could be any beach shack bar in any out-of-the-way place in the Caribbean. It’s the type of bar where people would hang out on Friday night, or unwind after work. It’s located near Camp Delta and it’s where guards might spend their free time. Looking closely at the building, we see hand-painted iguanas and palm trees and hand-painted signs. There are four windows into the bar, but we can’t see in. Instead we see reflections – reflections of the ocean, but also in two of the windows, reflections of flood lights used for security at the prison.
And, most prominently, hand-painted on the side of building, perhaps about five feet across, is a large painting of an old-fashioned rifle. It’s a painting based on the Combat Infantryman Badge. Whoever reproduced it on the side of this building managed to achieve something I found quite remarkable – to make the painting in a way that it is both menacing and child-like at the same time.
Christopher Sims teaches photography and multimedia at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. He worked previously as a photo archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
Leonardo publishes “New Criteria for New Media”
Originally from: Networked_Performance.
Leonardo publishes “New Criteria for New Media”:
Jon Ippolito wrote: I know some folks on this list have already requested these guidelines privately, but now that Leonardo has published them you can refer your peer committee to their Winter 2009 issue. Kudos to Roger Malina and co. for nudging academia into the 21st century!
Leonardo publishes New Criteria for New Media: Academia’s goal may be the free exchange of ideas, but up to now many universities have been wary — if not downright dismissive — of their professors using the Internet and other digital media to supercharge that exchange, especially in the arts and humanities. Peer review committees are supposed to assess a researcher’s standing in the field, but to date most have ignored reputations established by blogging, publishing DVDs, or contributing to email lists.
In a signal that some universities are warming to digital scholarship, however, the winter 2009 issue of MIT’s Leonardo magazine — itself a traditional peer review journal, though known for experimenting with networked media — has published a feature on the changing criteria for excellence in the Internet age. To make its point as concretely as possible, the feature includes the recently approved promotion and tenure guidelines of the University of Maine’s New Media Department, together with an argument for expanding recognition entitled New Criteria for New Media.
Rather than throw time-honored benchmarks for excellence out the window, New Criteria for New Media tries to extend them into the 21st century. To supplement the “closed” peer review process familiar from traditional journals, U-Me’s criteria recognize the value of the “open peer review” employed in recognition metrics such as ThoughtMesh and The Pool. As the name suggests, open peer review allows contributions from any community member rather than a group of experts, and all reviews are public; when combined with an appropriate recognition metric, the result is much faster evaluations than possible via the customary approach. New Criteria for New Media also urges academic reviews to reward collaboration in new media research; valuable roles include conceptual architect, designer, engineer, or even matchmaker (e.g., introducing two other researchers whose collaboration results in a publication).
Because the University of Maine hopes other institutions will adopt these criteria and adapt them to their own needs, it is releasing them under a Creative Commons (CC-by) license. (Due to a misprint by MIT Press, the Leonardo article highlights the authors’ copyrights rather than the CC license; it’s surprisingly hard to give things away in a print economy!) The new criteria have already been sought after by individual tenure candidates and cited in the Chronicle of Higher Education. You can find them in Leonardo’s winter 2009 issue (vol. 42 no. 1) or online at these links:
“New Criteria for New Media” (white paper)
“Promotion and Tenure Guidelines” (sample redefined criteria)
For more information, please email me or the Still Water lab at the University of Maine.
New Orleans Biennial , 2008, acrylic on diverse materials, by Katharina…
Originally from: VVORK.
New Orleans Biennial , 2008, acrylic on diverse materials, by Katharina…:
New Orleans Biennial, 2008, acrylic on diverse materials, by Katharina Grosse.