"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn." — T.H. White, The Once and Future King

A website by Shanta Rohse on learning, technology and design

Recently in: Portable Learner

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Memories, Emotion and the Nose

Natalie Ang­ier reports from the Inter­na­tional Sym­po­sium on Olfac­tion and Taste held in San Fran­cisco, includ­ing this insight into how smells, feel­ings and mem­o­ries become so eas­ily and inti­mately entan­gled: “With a phone num­ber, if you get a new one, a week later you may have for­got­ten the old one,” Dr. Herz said. “With smells, it’s the other way around. The first asso­ci­a­tion is bet­ter than the second.”

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Making Decisions Tires Your Brain

Mar­ket­ing research involv­ing mak­ing choices reveals the brain as a mus­cle: when depleted it comes less effec­tive. Mak­ing choices exhausts what is known as exec­u­tive resources, and “down­stream” deci­sions are affected adversely when we are forced to choose with a fatigued brain. Not only does this explain why I always pick plain yogurt in the refrig­er­a­tor isle, but sug­gests that if we’ve just spent lots of time focus­ing on a par­tic­u­lar task, exer­cis­ing self-control or even if we’ve just made lots of seem­ingly minor choices, then we prob­a­bly shouldn’t try to make a major decision.

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Don’t Share — Build

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.

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How To Write With Style

“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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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 (cf. the first Renais­sance). 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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