Tuned in as I am to A History of the World in 100 Objects and the notion that humans make tools and tools remake humans, I couldn’t help but notice Chris Anderson claim that everyone now has the power to make complex things. In the DIY culture of the internet, manufacturing will be radically democratized; in the next industrial revolutions, “atoms are the new bits.” What was once mass produced will become mass personalized. Think on the ways in which we manage our daily lives, through our education systems, work practices, community services and governance, all of which are designed and coordinated with tools we have had at our disposal. What will these tools look like in the DIY model when collaboration, crowdsourcing and great ideas attracting like-minded individuals? The garage/basement examples Chris Anderson provides remind us that the manufacturing revolution is very much confined to hobbyist and boutique markets, not mainstream industry. But the whole notion of moving from mass production to mass personalization is rather intoxicating.
Tag Archives: engaging with online learning
Tech Law Crystal Ball
What’s in store for Canada in 2009 in the area of technology law and policy? Michael Geist’s month-by-month blow predicts entrenched positions, slow, comprised progress on issues like copyright reform and net neutrality, only to be interrupted and displaced off the agenda by a November election (the fourth in six years). Funny in a laugh-instead-of-cry kind of way.
Set in Our Ways: Why Change Is So Hard
Even though we yearn for what is new, most of us are unable or willing to make fundamental changes in our lives. <a href=“http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=set-in-our-ways” title=“Set in Our Ways” Why Change is so Hard”>Change is rarely as easy as we think it will be. Our openness to new experiences typically increases during our 20s and then gradually declines until about age 60. After that, some of us become more open again, perhaps because our responsibilities for raising a family and earning a living have been lifted.
Skeletal Remains
Dinosaur mounts have become so fundamental to our idea of what makes a natural history museum that it can be difficult to imagine the institutions ever existing without them. So does it matter that 140 years after the first Hadrosaurus foulkii mount, today’s paleontologists have reinterpreted its reliance on four rather than two legs? Yes, says Jesse Smith:
… it’s not so much that, say, Hadrosaurus walked on four legs, but more that this new knowledge reflects a better understanding of the world as it was before we appeared in it. We’re compelled by improved understandings of those environments that have yet to open themselves to human occupation — Mars, the deep sea, the past. Understanding life in a way that either spatially or temporally transcends the presence of humans builds a context that helps us understand that presence. The fact that we have a better idea of what the Hadrosaurus’ skull looked like, that we can replace some of the bones Hawkins used to fill in the blanks, so to speak, suggests that an image of the past is fully constructible if only we’re given the right parts.
EEGs Show Brain Differences Between Poor and Rich Kids
Kids from lower socioeconomic levels show brain physiology patterns similar to someone who actually had damage in the frontal lobe as an adult,
said Robert Knight, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology and director of their Neuroscience Institute. This is a wake-up call. It’s not just that these kids are poor and more likely to have health problems, but they might actually not be getting full brain development from the stressful and relatively impoverished environment associated with low socioeconomic status: fewer books, less reading, fewer games, fewer visits to museums.
This study has been repeated many times in the last thirty years, with analogous results; this one is unique in that is sorts out the variables that people have used to discount previous studies and yet ends by asking “Can this be replicated?” For heaven’s sake. What more proof do we need?
Procrastinating Again?
Procrastination is not a time-management problem. It’s a complex problem involving personality, situations and motivation. Everyone occasionally procrastinates, 15 to 20 percent of adults routinely put off activities that would be better accomplished right away, and a whopping 80 to 95 percent of college students have a penchant for postponement. Trisha Guru covers contemporary views on and advice for kicking the procrastination habit.
How do you find what you want and how do you know it is true?
All of the world’s knowledge is in the air to be plucked down by our telephone. Of course it’s also all the world’s disinformation, misinformation, spam, porn, Nigerian frauds, urban legends, hoaxes. So how do you find what you want and how do you know that it’s true? Those seem like to me both extremely important questions today .…
The answer, says Judy Breck, is nothing less than to change both where we look and the way we ascertain truthfulness.
No Heaven on Earth
Why are so many of us so skeptical when confronted with the overwhelming evidence for environmental consequences of destroying everything we come in contact with? In her review of American Earth, an anthology of American environmentalist views, Verlyn Klinkenborg has this reaction to the barrage of evidence and entreaties to reconnect with nature:
After a day or two, I found myself reading this anthology as if it were a series of reports from a distant planet in a distant time — as an appendix, perhaps, to Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos novels. Reading American Earth in that light helped make several things clear. First, each document in the volume is a minority report — sometimes a minority of one. The assumptions, the hopes, the arguments in nearly every one of these pieces, no matter when they were written, are contradicted by the way the vast majority of Americans live and by the political and economic structures that determine that lifestyle. Second, the fundamental environmentalist arguments — the fundamental perceptions — are unchanging over time; only the details vary. We are still catching up to Thoreau, still coming to terms with the outrage George Perkins Marsh expressed in 1864, his worries about “climatic excess” and our “restless love of change.” Third, writers in every generation take a crack at finding the crystalline argument that will induce an epiphany in skeptical readers — for nothing less than an epiphany will do to persuade them to change the way they go about living. Yet every generation fails, in part because skeptical readers so seldom pick up this kind of writing or submit to its evidence.
Her conclusion is also worth noting. She reaches for Kafka (There is infinite hope, but not for us.
) and writes regretfully: I would say something different if I could. I have every faith in nature’s recuperative powers.…What I doubt is our ability, as a species, to see and, having seen, to continue to pay attention.
There are facts that don’t change, like the height of Mount Everest, and facts that change a lot, like the weather. Then there are mesofacts, facts that are neither fast nor momentus, and so don’t receive the same scrutiny, but are still worthy of your attention. For example, the Periodic table has added 12 elements since 1970. 400 new extrasolar planets have been discovered since the first one in 1995. The world’s population stands at 6.8 million. Many dinosaurs were swift and warm-blooded. “Updating your mesofacts,” says Samuel Arbesman, “can change how you think about the world.” (And, I’m always drawn to insights that change how I think about the world):