rebarbarised

How more free stuff makes us poorer, allegedly

The internet, on which he has a lot to say, has had enormous benefits, but a striking amount of online activity is free and internet businesses create few new jobs (and displace lots of others). The result is growth in utility without much of a contribution to GDP, which would be fine except that countries and people have bills to pay, on things like health care, pensions, and government debt. Complicating matters is the fact that the fastest growing contributors to measured GDP—the government, education, and health sectors—deliver returns that are very difficult to measure. This suggests, he says, that rich world GDPs are likely overstated; we're poorer than we thought.

via broadstuff.com

Well this is terrible... GDP isn't rising because too many things are free! So a profession emerges and builds a measure that some might argue was wrong-headed to start with. As things change, it becomes clear that it's getting less and less useful measure. And what conclusion does this lead the commentators to? (No, not that we should just forget that GDP was ever invented.) They conclude things must be getting worse because lots of things are happening that don't register on their measuring instruments.

How terrible is it that so many valuable things are increasingly freely available? Well if you've got a vested interest in charting the gap between rich and poor, it's pretty bad, evidently.

Twitter trending: propagation and influence

From the abstract of this HP Labs research paper:

In this paper, we conduct an intensive study of trending topics on Twitter and provide a theoretical basis for the formation, persistence and decay of trends. We also demonstrate empirically how factors such as user activity and number of followers do not contribute stronglyto trend creation and its propagation. In fact, we find that the resonance of the content with the users of the social network plays amajor role in causing trends.

The last point is the main thing I wanted to see elaborated. I'm not sufficiently bothered about this area to get to grips with the maths in the middle of the paper, so I just skipped to the Trend-Setters and Conclusions sections. The researchers explain how they identified Twitter users who initiate the largest number of trending topics, and the process of propagation, mainly through retweeting.

From the conclusion:

When we considered the impact of the users of the network, wediscovered that the number of followers and tweet-rate of users are not the attributes that cause trends.

So it's not that there's a master-race of Influentials who call the tune that the masses dance to.

What proves to be more important in determining trends is the retweets by other users, which is more related to the content that is being shared than the attributes of the users.

The message is important, and some messages resonate more than others. There's a hint here, which Mark Earls I'm sure would want to draw out, that being able to see what resonates with others could be a major factor in amplifying one's sense of how important an issue is, and may influence one's likelihood of retweeting it oneself. A herd effect.

Finally,

Furthermore, we found that the content that trended was largely news from traditional media sources, which are then amplified by repeated retweets on Twitter to generate trends.

So Twitter hasn't completely usurped the usefulness of mainstream media, and the two coexist in a new ecology. Big surprise.

Spotify Classical Playlists: A Brief History of Post-World War II Music

A Brief History of Post-World War II Music

I am always fascinated by the seemingly incongruous worlds of music and other historical events. Isn't it a bit surreal that the last guardian of the classical tradition, Johannes Brahms, could have met the amateur violinist Albert Einstein? The latter was 18 years old when Brahms died. Richard Strauss, who was born in the year of Second Schleswig War, lived to see the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and composed arguably the last great late romanticism piece Four Last Songs three years after the bomb. Britten wrote his splendid yet shadowy Suite For Harp, "it is rather 18th century harp writing" as he put it, around the same time they put men on the moon. And Shostakovich was composing the formidable Viola Sonata when John Lydon joined the Sex Pistols. This bewitching conflict came all the way into the new millennium, when Gorillaz's single Clint Eastwood was released in 2001, the 71 years old Clint Eastwood himself had yet to make Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, Letters From Iwo Jima, Flags Of Our Fathers, Gran Torino, and Changeling. That single could come out today and still sounds utterly fresh, by the way.

A couple of months ago, I had this idea of trying to make a playlist that reflects, and plays with this surface conflict, by choosing one popular song, and one piece of classical works from every post-WWII year. Before long I realized that it's simply impossible to pick up "best songs of the 1960s" or "most representative composition of the year", so I just let my personal taste take the lead, while sticking to some simple principles: The micro-interplay of consecutive tracks is most important. Classical tracks should be less than 10 minutes long in order to maintain the flow of the playlist, except for tracks at or towards the end. And of course I tried to embrace as many styles and genres as I could. Needless to say, the title of the post is exaggerated, but History of Post-WWII English-Language Pop Music and Western Classical Music would be just too dull.

I like the way this aerial survey begins with Bing Crosby's It's Been A Long, Long Time from 1945, is there a more appropriate title to start with? And the fact that Bruno Maderna's Notturno For Tape came out at the same time with Chuck Berry's Roll Over Beethoven makes the former sounds more bold - classical composers were quietly experimenting electronic instruments when the pop musicians just began to realise that they could challenge the old LvB too. The slow movement of Barber's piano concerto works surprisingly well as a postlude to Tony Bennett's I Left My Heart In San Francisco. The triumphant ending of the heroic Bridge Over Troubled Water makes the violent striking of Crumb's Black Angles that "sail right behind" even more frightening. Reich's Electric Counterpoint works great as an prelude to EBTG's ode to nostalgia. Listen to the Snoop Dogg track and Peter Lieberson opera extract back to back, you probably would have a hard time figuring out which is the rapper. Both are from 1992. The interlacing of different kinds of music adds an inexplicable charm to the whole listening experience.

via www.spotifyclassical.com

That rare thing: a playlist that looks interesting! I haven't listened to any of it yet: it may sound terrible.

French Kissing Map

via bigthink.com

I'd love to believe this research but the fact that they consistently refer to bises, when — as any Truffaut fan knows — it should be baisers (or, Google translate suggests, bisous), makes me a little sceptical.

If our body is prepared to do nothing, perhaps it will do something when we tell it to

Why practice the morning sitting?
Why not practice guitar for half an hour instead?

1.    Before we ask ourselves to do something, we begin by asking ourselves to do nothing. When our body is prepared to do nothing when we ask it to, perhaps it will do something when we tell it to: such as, integrating & co-ordinating specialised motor skills while playing a musical instrument.

2.     As relaxation develops & deepens over time, emotional states and memories fixed within muscular patterns and bodily postures lessen their hold on us. Our personal history, locked inside the body, begins to let us go; increasingly we move into the here-and-now. We gradually develop a relaxed & engaged sense of personal presence: life becomes a little more real.

3.    We begin to distinguish between what-we-are & who-we-are. For example, we discover the distance between the background noise of monkey-mind, its associational rattling & automatic mental commentaries (conventionally referred to as thinking), and who is listening to it.

4.    The volitional attention is practised & strengthened. Effectively, for nearly all practical concerns, the quality of our attention describes & defines who we are, and is pretty much all we can claim to own in life.

By Robert Fripp, via www.dgmlive.com

What is cybernetics?

One book that made no sense at all to me was The Human Use of Human Beings, Cybernetics and Society, by Norbert Wiener.  Some say “Wiener’s has impacted the fields of computers and technology, engineering, biology, sociology, and a broad range of other sciences.”

As I said, I didn’t get it. So when I found myself lunching with cyberneticist Paul Pangaro in San Paolo last month, I pointed my pocket video in his direction and asked him, “What the hell is cybernetics and why should I care?”

Here’s what he told me:

via www.internettime.com

Nice introduction and grounding in cybertnetics, which Pangaro advises us to link back to its etymology in steering a ship in the wind and tides (and the need to adjust the steering in the light of feedback about how far the ship had been blown "off course"). Don't think of "cyber" in the sense due to William Gibson and cyberspace.

No pain, more gain? Research supports "less learning more often"

Many years back, I coined a phrase that neatly summarised my view on how to change current training design and delivery practice so that it can dramatically improve effective learning and performance. My phrase?

"Less learning more often" 

(click to read the full article)

Is it happening? Well, it's beginning to it seems. We are clearly recognising that the concentrated, content-heavy course delivery model often fails to transfer effectively to competent performance in the workplace. A new approach that favours little and often, campaign over course, interwoven activities is, counter to many people's current beliefs, far more effective. Not only that, new research at Northwestern University suggests this new way of training could reduce by at least half the effort previously thought necessary to make learning gains.

The research also may be the first behavioral demonstration of meta-plasticity, the idea that experiences that on their own do not generate learning can influence how effective later experiences are at generating learning.

 

via larsislearning.blogspot.com

Ed Halliwell on Mindfulness and Change

In the UK, psychologists have positioned mindfulness within the cognitive-behavioural tradition, and there are similarities – like CBT, mindfulness offers a practical set of skills that can help people relate more effectively to their thoughts and feelings. But whereas CBT is primarily a change-focused approach, mindfulness-based stress reduction and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy show us how to let go of struggling for change – their magic lies in enabling us making peace with who and where we are, right now, in this moment.

 

This attitude draws on ideas and practices that have several thousand years of history and tradition behind them, and which have usually been advocated as part of a system of meditative training designed to facilitate a deep transformation in the way we experience ourselves, others and the world. A fundamental premise of this training is that we are already basically OK – we don't need to 'try' to get better, we just need to learn how to uncover and be who we really are. Curiously, adopting this attitude of deep and radical acceptance often seems to produce some of the change we were seeking. So, there's a paradox - mindfulness can change us, and can lead to effective change,  but while this takes effort, it doesn't come from striving. Indeed, striving can actually be a form of self-aggression, which just creates more misery.

 

Mindfulness practice, then, is not so much a tool for self-improvement, but more a way of relating to our lives in a spirit of awareness, openness and kindness. Jon Kabat Zinn, creator of the mindfulness-based stress reduction programme, recently said that “mindfulness is not a technique. It is a way of being, a way of seeing, a way of knowing.” It nurtures a process of unfolding, of allowing things to settle, so that that well-being might emerge from coming into flow with how things are, even when that isn't how we'd like them to be. It's true that this kind of awareness can  be the ground for more skilful decision-making and behaviour - but when we can let go of the tension created by struggling to be better or healthier, the need for our problems to have a 'cure' – even if one were possible – no longer seems quite so relevant. And at that point we might start to feel a whole lot better.

via theschooloflife.typepad.com

You know you're getting old when...

... it's not just the policemen that look young; it's Captain Beefheart as well. In my mind, he's always been an old, old man, so it was a shock to see him in this video from the end of his music career and think "he looks young!" He was younger then than I am now.   

Captain Beefheart - Ice Cream for Crow (HIgh Resolution)

Stuart Candy at Long Now London

Stuart Candy, of the Hawaii Center for Future Studies and Fellow of Long Now Foundation was speaking this evening at a Long Now London meetup.

The Clock of the Long Now is not so much about building a clock as building a culture around the clock.
The story goes that Long Now co-founder Stewart Brand was under the influence of LSD on top of a building in San Francisco in the 60s, and thought he saw the tops of the buildings diverging (an effect of the curvature of the earth). The next day he had badges produced: "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?". From this the Whole Earth Catalog and the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) were born.
The Long Now is doing for time what Whole Earth did for space.
We are programmed for continuity while living through discontinuity. "Building bridges across the experiential gulf", the gulf between the way we project (our feelings about) the future and how we experience it when it happens.
Guerrilla futures: ad-hoc incursions into future worlds, and finding ways to manifest future worlds in the present, whether people want them or not.
"Better to be surprised by a simulation than blind-sided by a reality."
Bruce Sterling asked 'What would happen if you changed "guerrilla" interventions into a "regular standing army"?'
"Ambient foresight" foresight as an emergent property; implicit, incidental, enabling.

• Nutrition facts on food
• Pictures of lung cancer on cigarette packs
• Carbon facts on products

Umbrella from Ambient Devices that has a handle that glows when it's about to rain (is linked up to meteorological service).
 

Q&A

A cranial osteopath, cites Susan Greenfield, and says she used to have children coming to her with colic and asthma, but now it's all that they can't sleep. Even in the womb their mothers are getting so stimulated that babies don't "just sleep" like they used to.
Vicissitudes of institutionalising foresight: government initiatives start up and do good work for a while, but then the government changes and doesn't want to hear certain things.