Working notes

James Watson’s genome is sequenced and published in Nature. It cost $1-2 mln as opposed to $70 mln for Craig Venter’s genome. Next-generation technologies make sequencing cheaper. Watson’s genome is annotated and publicly available except for one Alzheimer-related gene. It shows more genomic variation than expected. What does this all mean? How can a lay person interpret this news? It seems that without investing a significant amount of time in figuring out what it all means, all we can do is worry about negative outcomes of new technologies.

Full text

Traditional work of art exists within a certain tradition. It is present in time and space and has a unique existence. This uniqueness gives the work of art authenticity, which is outside of technical reproducibility. The work of art loses its authority with mechanical reproduction, which shatters “aura” of it. Mechanical reproduction takes the work out of its historical and physical context and places it closer to the individual. Can this shattering act to empower people?

Potentially shattering can release art from its existing meanings and help to reconstitute the meanings on a different level. In reality, capitalist modes of production re-appropriate new ways of mechanical reproduction (photography and film) and turn it into fixed narratives. Art as techne becomes an exhibition placed within the market; it is reduced to imagery and aesthetics (e.g. a series of perceptual experiences that have certain value).

I like drinking from water fountains every once in a while, but I could never understand those who tried to get 6-8 glasses of water in them daily. Poor people became victims of a just another myth:

A review conducted by the University of Pennsylvania casts doubt on the perception that drinking large amounts of water is beneficial to your health. The reviewers noted a lack of evidence that drinking lots of water improves skin, curbs appetite, or detoxifies the body.

(notes from a seminar and my reading of Heidegger)

How can we understand technology? Or, in Heidegger’s words, respond to the essence of technology and see it within its own boundaries?

The Greek word “Techne” means activities and skills of the craftsman, but also to activities of the mind and fine arts. These skills and activities belong to poiesis, or bringing-forth. Poiesis is rooted in causality. In Greek tradition causality is based on 4 causes: formal, material, final, and efficient. Formal cause is the form, shape or the idea of what is being brought forward. Material cause is the material out of which something is made. The final cause is the end, or the purpose of this something. The efficient cause is something that brings about the effect.

In broader sense formal cause can be associated with cultural affordances of techne, material cause can be associated with material affordances; the final cause can be associated with social affordances (or uses), and the efficient cause can be associated with human activities.

The modern understanding of technology is highly teleological in a sense that it privileges the final cause, or product and devalues all other affordances that take place. The product becomes the goal in itself and in achieving this goal (end) we develop means (technology) regardless to the cultural, material, and social affordances as well as our actions. Yet all these affordances are co-responsible for something to be produces, or brought forth. By ignoring them, we risk our existence in the planet as mitsein (being with others).

The ordering of the world around us according to our rules and views of causality takes place because we are given this ability to order. As human species we are given the ability to recognize things, name, and order them, but we have to think past that in order to stop challenge the nature and everything around us. Such challenging (unlocking, transforming, storing, and distributing regardless to all four causes that are co-responsible for any production) is destructive.

For Scientists, a Beer Test Shows Results as a Litmus Test - New York Times

…scientific performance steadily declined with increasing beer consumption across the board, from scientists who primly sip at two or three beers over a year to the sort who average knocking back more than two a day.

… the study documents a correlation between beer drinking and scientific performance without explaining any correlation. That leaves open the possibility that it is not beer drinking that causes poor scientific performance, but just the opposite.

From New York Times: The Encyclopedia of Life, No Bookshelf Required

Scientists are writing the Book of All Species on the Web, in the hopes it will be useful to scientists and nonscientists alike.

W. Perry in his book “Forms of intellectual and ethical development in the college years” (1970) describes students’ development as a sequence of epistemological “positions”:

1. Basic dualism - seeing the world in polarities of right/wrong, good/bad, etc.
2. Multiplicity - being aware of diversity of opinions.
3. Relativism subordinate - analytical, evaluative approach in academics.
4. Relativism - understanding that truth is relative and that its relativity goes beyond academia.

When people have no opportunity to be exposed to multiple points of view and engage in dialog, they usually remain on the position of basic dualism.

A tool that can aggregate information about anybody by email: Rapleaf: Reputation Lookup and Email Search

What can you do with Rapleaf?
- Lookup the reputation of buyers and sellers
- Learn about the people you interact with
- Allow people to trust you

Powered by ScribeFire.

These are my notes from an old seminar “The Contemporary Art and Design of Book Space: Thoughts for Critical Practice in Traditional and Electronic Media” (March 31, 2004). My main question almost 3 years later is whether changing practices suggested by the speaker are being employed anywhere… To put it bluntly “Is literary hypertext dead?”

Points made by the speaker:

• How do we design e-books and conceptualize them?If e-book developers new more about codeces, they would design differently (better structure, navigation, etc.)
• E-books develop for profit and cultural advances motives. Assumption: codex is flawed and limited, e-books are going to improve it. In fact e-book replicates codex and uses it as a metaphor (paper clips, turning pages, side-to side relationships).
• What is the idea of a book? There is no single idea of the book but many cultural understandings that include sets of processes, rules, meanings, and discourse.
• Why not painting a book, where all possibilities of the book are shown (text, images, scores, etc.)
• What are the functions of header, footer, marginalia, etc.? There is a long and complicated history, no particular answer.
• At some point reading practices change from monastic (sequence for contemplation) to scholastic (fragmented for argumentation purposes). Book is an informational space to be navigated and used, not just read through.
• The poem of R. Queneau (check Wikipedia for Hundred Thousand Billion Poems) - an example of the design of unusual piece of literature (so what? how does it help to understand literary practices and their changing nature?)
• It is important to design a space for educational and scholarly reuse of textual materials and revisit e-book functionality (examples at www.speculativecomputing.org).

Managing ICT: ICT Hub

This guide is aimed at staff and volunteers from voluntary and community organisations who want to manage their ICT better. It is intended particularly for staff and volunteers form small and medium sized organisations and especially for those who don’t have access to ‘paid for’ technical advice and support.

Powered by ScribeFire.