| sneedle flipsock |
30 April 2004: bananaguard |
flipsockgrrl @ gmail .com |
This week:
Check your readabilityReadability.info runs your Word document or web page through a collection of readability calculations: Gunning's fog index, the Flesch index and so on. According to the results for Sneedle Flipsock's home page, you need only a Year 10 education to understand this weblog. The average word length on this page is 1.47 syllables, so you don't need to be at all polysyllabic to grok it. Sneedle Flipsock scores 68 on the Flesch Index, well below comics at 95 and approximately on a par with Sports Illustrated. All of which demonstrates last week's observation that it is indeed possible to write simply about complex ideas. 30 April 2004 | top of page Print, cut, fold, glueDownload paper templates and make your own Frank Lloyd Wright House, the Sydney Opera House, a Bruce Lee paper doll, Angkor Wat... 30 April 2004 | top of page How to get the most out of room serviceReality is usually cold soup, rubbery bacon and weak coffee. In our fantasies, "Room service is a culinary aphrodisiac. It lures you with visions of haute cuisine personally served by white-gloved waiters, while you luxuriate in a spa bath... You sip a vintage Krug French champagne from a lead crystal flute while noshing on white-chocolate covered lychee fruit imported from Borneo." David Ross demonstrates how to get the most out of room service. 30 April 2004 | top of page Great photo, shame we can't see what's in itA photo of soldiers' flag-draped coffins being loaded onto a military aircraft caused a stir when the "Seattle Times" newspaper published it last week. Reproduced on news web sites, the photo is pitifully small and tends to get overwhelmed by the clutter of other page furniture. Steve Outing reckons it's time news web sites did justice to their news photos. 30 April 2004 | top of page Great moments in research (a continuing saga)Winning this week's award for research into the (ahem) bleeding obvious, US researchers have found that joking doctors aren't necessarily good for your health. "[W]hile humour can 'humanise' and strengthen the relationship between patient and doctor, misplaced or inappropriate humour can be counterproductive and destructive." Well, der. 29 April 2004 | top of page Biodegradable nappies won't really go greenYour baby presents an environmental hazard no matter what sort of nappies you buy. Elisa Batista says, contrary to popular belief, biodegradable disposable nappies "aren't much better for the environment or the health of her baby than the Huggies and Pampers piled up in landfills." (via Utne) 29 April 2004 | top of page Web sites need people, tooOffering 100 per cent online services won't necessarily make your customers happier. Web sites need people, too. 29 April 2004 | top of page Security's as good as you areA man outside a London subway station at rush hour offered a chocolate bar to random passers-by if they would reveal the password they used to log on to the Internet. More than 7 out of 10 took the offer--though this New York Times article doesn't mention how many of them lied. (You need a user name (flipsock) and password (sneedle) to read the article.) 29 April 2004 | top of page Mood wallsA fabulous way to redecorate your office: use partitions with embedded wireless networking. They regularly check the stock market, Ebay bids or other Internet-transmitted data that interests you, and change color to let you know what's happening. 29 April 2004 | top of page Ions, jelly and self: Anne's responseAnne on the Science Matters discussion list has this to add:
Yippee! Two more names to look up :-) 29 April 2004 | top of page Ions, jelly and selfSome more thoughts about 'non-physical intelligence', this time specifically about the concept of 'self'. [NB: quotes in this post are from Vilayanur Ramachandran (2003) "The Emerging Mind". Profile Books, ISBN 1861973039] How does "the flux of ions in little bits of jelly--the neurons--in our brains give rise to the redness of red, the flavor of Marmite or paneer tikka masala or wine? Matter and mind seem so utterly unlike each other... [T]hink of them really as two different ways of describing the world, each of which is complete in itself... You can't have free-floating sensations or qualia with no one to experience it and you can't have a self completely devoid of sensory experiences." Qualia are sensations you perceive subjectively. They can come from outside via the physical senses (sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch) or from the internal workings of the brain (as in the 'phantom limbs' felt by some amputees). Experiments have shown that qualia produce activity in the lower parts of the brain first, the older parts that evolved first. Signals from these areas are passed up to the newer, evolutionarily younger areas where they are interpreted so that a decision can be made about how to respond to the qualia. This 'second brain' is also where we deal with abstractions, symbols and new ways of combining these--producing language, thinking and other complex effects. According to Ramachandran, 'self' has five defining characteristics.
"Stick your tongue out at a newborn baby and the baby will stick its tongue out too, poignantly dissolving the boundary, the arbitrary barrier, between self and others. To do this it must create an internal model of your action and then re-enact it in its own brain. An astonishing ability, given that it cannot even see its own tongue, and so must match the visual appearance of your tongue with the felt position of its own. We now know that this is carried out by a specific group of neurons, in the frontal lobes, called the mirror neurons." The mirror neurons are involved in embodiment, self-awareness and the emotion of empathy. They also enable us to learn by seeing someone else do something--use tools, make clothes, etc--and thus underpin human cultural evolution. (Orang utans can do it too, as fans of Terry Pratchett's Librarian will be completely unsurprised to learn.) Any or all of the five aspects of 'self' can be disrupted by brain disease or selective stimulation. For example, stimulating the right parietal cortex (while you're awake) will temporarily make you feel detached from your body, floating near the ceiling. In people with "Capgras' delusion" and "Cotard's syndrome", the neuronal signals don't get through in the normal way from the lower to the higher brain, and there are some interesting effects. The sense of self is disrupted (Cotard's) or the person feels disconnected from their perceptions (eg, in Capgras' delusion, believing your mother is actually not your mother but someone else identical to her in every way). We like to think of our 'self' as being separate from our physical body, existing on some sort of 'higher' plane than the meat and chemicals that pin us to the Earth and are susceptible to the insults of age, disease and injury. It's the old Cartesian mind-body duality, or the even older mortal body/immortal soul combo. Yet modern neuroscience shows us that 'self' is firmly embedded in the physical brain: neurons, chemical and electrical signals zipping around inside your head. Muck around with the brain, and your 'self' can get damaged. What remarkable creatures we are! How awesome that complexity! I'm wildly impressed. I'm also hoping that if I've gotten anything wrong above, or missed some subtleties, other more learned people will explain where I drifted off track :-) My e-mail address is at the top of the page. 29 April 2004 | top of page Cause, effect and free willI've been reading recently about how neuroscience is raising questions of consciousness, self, free will and other thought processes that are often believed to be 'non-physical'. Here's an example. Benjamin Libet and Hans Kurnhuber have done several experiments that seem to demonstrate that cause doesn't always precede effect. For example, they asked of volunteers to wiggle a finger at any point during a 10 minute period. Each volunteer, with an EEG attached to his or her scalp, chose freely when to wiggle. They found that the EEG picked up brain activity ("readiness potential") almost a second BEFORE the person consciously decided to wiggle. The conscious decision coincided almost exactly with the wiggle. How can your free will be the cause of the wiggle if the brain activity starts first? Does the brain activity cause the decision? Does the decision have a backwards-in-time effect and cause the brain activity? Is the decision a 'conscious' one made by the non-physical' mind, or merely a biological process? Are free will and conscious decision-making *really* 'non-physical' thought processes, or do are they the result of complex physical activities? Is there an evolutionary reason for the brain activity preceding the conscious decision? Some background reading: Libet's forthcoming book and a brief outline of the quantum possibilities of back-in-time decisions. 29 April 2004 | top of page Bloggers are editors, not journalists"In a word, what editors bring to the table is their sensibility. Of course, not all of the articles or news stories they select for our attention are picked because they are trustworthy. Sometimes, quite the opposite. But a good editor then tells us why that's the case." Same goes for webloggers. 28 April 2004 | top of page Interview with the GrasshopperDavid Carradine used to get into fights at school. "Most of the things that happened to me just seemed to happen. Or was it destiny?" 28 April 2004 | top of page .eduSome people will do anything to get an education. New York University student Steve Sanzak slept in the basement of the university library, kept his clothes and books in a locker and borrowed friends' bathrooms for the occasional shower, all because he couldn't afford to rent a flat. After eight months of the nomadic life, university officials heard about his weblog and found him a place to live. The CSIRO gets a funding bonus in this year's federal budget, provided the money is spent on certain "flagship programs" (read: "applied research"). The announcement is consistent with comments by Chief Scientist Robin Batterham that the "curiosity-driven" days of research have been overtaken by "user-driven" innovation, and Australia's priorities and funding commitments must reflect the new industry focus. A Harvard education should include more science, more contact with professors and some time spent outside the USA, say the committees charged with reviewing the undergraduate curriculum. The arts faculty at the University of Queensland has lodged its first patent application, for a G3 phone system that uses voice recognition software to teach English. 28 April 2004 | top of page The missing women of AsiaBy some estimates, more than 100 million females are now missing from the populations of India and China, having been aborted or adopted overseas because of their sex. As young men grow up without female contact and socialisation, will the world become a more dangerous place? On the other side of the world, Nigeria is known for its exports: spam, coffee... and women. "No one knows how many are shipped out each year, but everyone in Benin City knows someone who has gone. The most popular destination appears to be Italy, where Nigerian girls in tight jeans can be seen lolling on many a street corner." (via Disinfo.com) 28 April 2004 | top of page TuesdaySome physicists will use any excuse to play with rubber appliances. This is a real project in a real university department. (nods to Pete Fuggle, via the flite list) An employee of an air freight company has been sacked after her photo of US Army coffins was published in the local newspaper. Her husband was also sacked by the company. Viewers believe there is too little originality and innovation on British TV. In the past five years, the number of viewers watching the five main terrestrial channels has fallen by 9 per cent, and the decline is even more pronounced among 16- to 34-year-olds and ethnic minorities. On historical averages, a poet has a life-expectancy of 62, playwrights 63 years, novelists 66 years and non-fiction writers 68 years. Female poets have had a higher incidence of mental incidence than male poets. The once-inspiring idea has fallen out of fashion: we no longer believe courageous novels about the big issues of war and injustice make a difference to the world. "I don't expect fiction to change public policy," says Canadian novelist Maggie Helwig. "Radovan Karadzic isn't going to read my book and say, 'Dammit, I'm going to turn myself in.'" Young jazz musicians grew up with rock, R&B and hip-hop. They're moving away from the Wynton Marsalis brand of 'neoclassical' jazz and towards "the tradition of jazz, which is creativity, spontaneity and the expression of the individual. If you're pushing forward, you're playing traditional jazz. That's the nature of the art form." What would happen if a young woman wrote a sharp, brilliant new novel, a portrait of the artist as a young woman in the city? "Its publishers would wrap it in pink, slap a martini glass on the cover, and get Anna Maxted to blurb it... there's more than a little of the chick lit spirit in the novel-of-manners tradition that produced Jane Austen--and who's to say that this thriving genre won't produce a modern-day Austen who can turn Prada, martinis, and the quest for Mr Right into literary gold?" Creativity, psychology and writing: "Once one has achieved a relative mastery over one’s craft, the pleasures of composition are like few others: certainly none that I have known. Constructing well-made sentences, in which words and thought appear to make a seamless fit, causing the small but intense light of insight to click on, can only be compared, I should imagine, to the delight of dancing faultlessly to one’s own choreography. Where do the words come from? The same mysterious place, I suspect, where notes of music go. They precede ideas, and are inseparable from them." "The Lord of the Rings’s chief defect is that it’s too glorious--it is the Albert Speer of contemporary cinema." A masterpiece? Or a "silly faux-Wagnerian pastiche of porcupine-tusked elephants, glam rock haircuts, and aquamarine contacts"? Both, methinks. According to US universities' data, students from upper-income families are edging out those from the middle class. Officials long accustomed to discussing racial diversity are now "taking steps to improve economic diversity. They say they are worried that their universities are reproducing social advantage instead of serving as an engine of mobility." You need a user name (flipsock) and password (sneedle) to read the full story. Outstanding academic staff are being poached from public universities by wealthier institutions that offer better facilities and services. A scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project, Ray Crist, retired this month for the third time. He's 104. How to choose a project team: keep it small, aim for diversity, go for attitude over specific skills, and look for people who have worked together before. Are you fed up with bringing bananas to work or school only to find them bruised and squashed? You need BananaGuard! The British Design Council tracked 63 public companies over 10 years to understand the correlation between design and business success. The result: design-intelligent companies beat the FTSE 100 index by 200 per cent. (via Fast Company) "Usability is dead, long live Product Value... Isn't it the usability police and gurus that gets us all a bad name?" asks Gilbert Cockton. "One of the things I have noticed about people who take [Jakob] Nielsen's teachings at face value is that they end up communicating like him. The blaming, critical and self-righteous tones that characterize Nielsen's articles and interviews are not to be confused with how a professional usability consultant ought to communicate... [Nielsen Norman Group partner Bruce Togazzini's] response was that this communication style was for marketing purposes only and that it was not the way he and his colleagues speak to their clients." Improve your Powerpoint presentations by making better use of the notes view. 27 April 2004 | top of page |
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