How to take the perfect photograph? Hell if I know…
The other day I posted this shot, from Sarawub Intarot at National Geographic, on Facebook.
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Amusing ourselves to death: new Sciencegasm meme nails it
The public interest is what the public is interested in, bitches. Thanks to Facebook, we all see new memes every day. Some of them are funny, some insightful, and a lot are of the preaching to the choir variety, which even though they’re right as rain, they occasionally get tiresome. Like a lot of us, frustrated as hell with the
Read moreGetting a PhD was the best decision I ever made. And the worst.
American businesses are anti-intellectual. American universities are anti-relevance. The gods help the overeducated schmuck stuck in the middle. Hi. I’m Sam, and I’m a PhD. Hi Sam! For those of you who don’t know me, I have a doctorate. Communication, University of Colorado, 1999. Some days it’s the thing I have done in life that I’m most proud of. Other
Read moreAre you a socialist? Take the test….
A 2011 study yields surprising results. The word “socialist” was, for all intents and purposes, dead and buried after the fall of the Iron Curtain. But it has enjoyed a huge resurgence in popularity since, oh, 2008 or so. The thing is, since we hadn’t had any real socialistm for awhile, our understanding of what the term means has gotten
Read moreCyberspace, cognitive mapping and design: some stray thoughts
I apologize in advance because this is going to ramble. And be wonky. If it helps, please know that it all makes sense in my head. Our professional development program at work – yeah, my new job has an actual interest in professional development – has us doing some reading each week and informally discussing the insights. This week we
Read moreParenting in the age of (runaway) digital media
A newly released report from the Center on Media and Human Development at Northwestern University tells us some things we probably already know and some other things that ought to disturb us a little. Our good friend Dr. Lynn Schofield Clark, author of The Parent App, walks us through the main findings and offers some analysis in a post at Psychology Today, and it’s
Read moreCop Killer 2011: Police, power and the case of Lt. Pike
I think at some point in our lives, most of us imagine that it might be cool to be famous. But perhaps…perhaps not like this.
Read moreSkepticism vs. Denialism and how to tell the difference
I suppose, as a general rule, the human animal is built to prefer knowing to not knowing, but I have been struck over the course of the past decade or so at how much worse our society has gotten at tolerating uncertainty. It’s as if having to say “I don’t know” triggers some kind of DNA-level existential crisis that the
Read moreSaturday Video Roundup: World Cup Edition
The US takes on Ghana in the Round of 16 today, and we realize that soccer is a game whose nuances are alien to many American sports fans. SVR offers this brief primer on the basics of the game so as to enhance our readers’ enjoyment of today’s match.
Read moreWhy American media has such a signal-to-noise problem, pt. 2
Part 2 of a series; Previously: What Bell Labs and French Intellectuals Can Tell Us About Cronkite and Couric The Signal-to-Noise Journey of American Media The 20th Century represented a Golden Age of Institutional Journalism. The Yellow Journalism wars of the late 19th Century gave way to a more responsible mode of reporting built on ethical and professional codes that
Read moreWhy American media has such a signal-to-noise problem, part 1
Part one of a two-part series. From Cronkite to Couric: the Kingdom of Signal is swallowed by the Empire of Noise The recent death of Walter Cronkite spurred the predictable outpouring of tributes, each reverencing in its own way a man who was the face and voice of journalism in America for a generation or more. The irony of all
Read moreDr. Slammy’s Law of Social Communication
This came to me just now in an e-mail exchange with our friend John Harvin. So, tell me – am I onto something? Has this already been said? In any public communication system where access is generally open, noise tends to expand at an exponential rate while the expansion of signal is merely additive. Of course, it’s hard to imagine
Read moreChaos, Complexity, Kant and Mill
One of the great debates in the field of ethics centers around the thinking of Emmanuel Kant vs. the Utilitarians – most notably John Stuart Mill. To simplify, Kant’s philosophy suggests that the means justify the ends: we should always do the right thing and trust the results to work out for themselves. Mill, on the other hand, argued that
Read moreLIFE and the long view: ideologies of science and technology since the Enlightenment
Part two in a series. As I suggested in Part One, the messianic/utopian view of science and technology attributed to LIFE Magazine is consistent with an ideological bent that traces its lineage to the dawn of the Enlightenment in Europe. Francis Bacon’s highly influential New Atlantis, first published in 1626, recounts the narrator’s fictional shipwreck on the shores of Bensalem,
Read moreAttack ads getting out of control
Thx to Jim Gwyn for passing this on.
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lullaby pit 