“Pity the readers,” advises Kurt Vonnegut, whom he calls “imperfect artists,” struggling to master the difficult task of making sense of thousands of scribbles on the page. This is my favourite bit advice from Kurt Vonnegut’s “How to Write With Style” (originally published in Palm Sunday, 1981) that remains relevant in the networked age: “Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient readers, ever willing to simplify and clarify—whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales. This is the bad news.” The good news? We can write about whatever we please.
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Getting there is half the fun.
portable learner
The continuing education of an educator in the net age
- Just Packed
The Weird Science of Stock Photography
Advertising deconstructed: Stock photography suppliers must be able to guess which abstract concepts clients want to illustrate, and then have photos and video on hand that resonates. So,what can we glean from the ubiquitous “Everywhere Girl” and mid-ocean oil rig in a storm?
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Shortening the Tail of Scientific Expertise?
Is the web narrowing scientists’ expertise? Sociologist James Evans’ work identifies that as more journals become available online, dramatically fewer articles are being cited in the research papers within them. “Rather than measuring the length of the tail, it seems that modern science is actually focusing on a tiny bit of it.” The reasons for this phenomenon are unclear, but he does suggest that online databases make it less likely now than in the past for researchers to integrate serendipitous gems of discoveries into their research. Perhaps proving the old adage that, an “expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until, eventually, he knows everything about nothing.”
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The Importance of Being There
Bill Thompson’s thoughtful conclusions on attending a seminar to see Clay Shirky think out loud about social tools, a seminar that he might just as easily have attended online, but one he was driven to attend in person by an ‘inner need’:
What is clear, however, is that the boundaries between the online and offline worlds are blurring as we put our hands through the looking-glass of the screen to shake hands with those on the other side, occasionally pulling them back through into what we still like to call “real life”.
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Cultural Evolution
Paul Ehrlich makes some observations on the daunting task of building a comprehensive theory of cultural change. He dismisses Richard Dawkins’ brave but flawed conjecture about “memes” (gene analogs of cultural inheritance), but does support the contentious notion that natural selection can operate in cultural evolution as well as in genetic evolution, although not likely as a central force. He paints a daunting but hopeful and certainly vital undertaking. “…since everything from weapons of mass destruction to global heating are the results of changes in human culture over time, acquiring a fundamental understanding of cultural evolution just might be the key to saving civilization from itself.”
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The Next Renaissance
In his keynote address at the Personal Democracy Forum 2008, Douglas Rushkoff points out that there is in fact nothing personal about democracy. Rather, it is about transcending the self and acting collectively. Sadly, even though the social media tools we use cede central authority to decentralized groups and give us a way to participate in small ways, we tend to miss the real opportunity to reconfigure how democracy operates. The opportunity is not to blog about politics, but rather to reclaim our role as citizens who participate in the creation of the society in which we want to live:
If Obama is indeed elected “the first truly Internet-enabled candidate—we should take him at his word. He does not offer himself as the agent of change, but as an advocate of the change that could be enacted by people. It is not for government to create solar power, for example, but to get out of the way of all those people who are ready to implement solar power, themselves. Responding to the willingness of people to act, he can remove regulations developed on behalf of the oil industry to restrict its proliferation.
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Dawn of the Picasso Fish
Carl Zimmer gives a typically fascinating account of the evolution of our understanding of how the flatfish came to have two eyes on one side of its head, an evolutionary conundrum that engaged both Charles Darwin and his critics. Darwin argued that the trait evolved over many generations of flatfish; however there was no evidence for this morphological development in the fossil record.The most recent contribution to the story is evolutionary biologist Matt Friedman’s discovery of three examples of transitional forms of flatfish among the dusty fossil collections of Europe. What is most interesting to me is that these fossils were long ago collected and curated, but so clearly satisfy the requirement of a Darwinian intermediate. Matt Friedman explains:
I suppose there is a general perception that museum collections are dusty, static archives, and that everything in them has been carefully studied and precisely identified. But the truth is that they are much more than just long-term storage, because as our interpretive framework matures, we can begin to make sense of specimens that evaded or baffled earlier generations of researchers, or draw new conclusions about materials we mistakenly thought we had figured out ages ago.
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The Sky Is Falling
The odds that a potentially devastating space rock will hit Earth this century may be as high as one in 10. Gregg Easterbrook explores why NASA isn’t trying harder to prevent catastrophe, and in doing so offers insight into why our institutions learn so slowly. Conventional thinking–that the remaining space rocks are few, and that encounters with planets were confined to our prehistoric past–has been eclipsed by more dangerous realities, but serve to support NASA’s preoccupation with building a manned moon base.
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The Crowd Within
Psychologists reveal in a study published in Psychological Science a corollary of the wisdom of crowds: the average of two guesses made by the same person at different times are better than either guess on its own. The accuracy of the second guesses improves when it is made three weeks rather than immediately after the first. If a guess by definition is the best possible answer, where do these second guesses come from? The researchers suggest that we are constantly creating hypotheses about the world, and checking them against reality. Second guesses are refined first guesses that have passed muster.
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Victor Newman on the futility of everyone sharing everything in an organization: The first problem is the implicit economic paradigm people apply to ideas and knowledge: if everything is shared, it will be perceived to have little or no value. Second, you can spend as much time interpreting shared things of low value as high. Third, people will only share with those whom they respect and from whom they can expect a return or who share the same problem of preserving or reinventing identity. These people don’t always work in the same organization. And fourth, not everyone is either pre-disposed or equipped to create (leave alone share) knowledge.