MachineMachine /stream - tagged with knowledge http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com The New Aesthetic Needs to Get Weirder http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-new-aesthetic-needs-to-get-weirder/255838/ A really new aesthetics might work differently: instead of concerning itself with the way we humans see our world differently when we begin to see it through and with computer media that themselves "see" the world in various ways, what if we asked how computers and bonobos and toaster pastries and Boeing 787 Dreamliners develop their own aesthetics. The perception and experience of other beings remains outside our grasp, yet available to speculation thanks to evidence that emanates from their withdrawn cores like radiation around the event horizon of a black hole. The aesthetics of other beings remain likewise inaccessible… ]]> Wed, 18 Apr 2012 09:33:37 -0700 http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-new-aesthetic-needs-to-get-weirder/255838/ The Mastery of Non-Mastery http://lareviewofbooks.org/post/20167996473/the-mastery-of-non-mastery/los-angeles-review-of-books-the-mastery-of-non-mastery MT @ilparone: The Mastery of Non-Mastery... reflections of an anthropologist: the normality of abnormal http://t.co/48WrZEC6 #x ]]> Sun, 08 Apr 2012 01:06:16 -0700 http://lareviewofbooks.org/post/20167996473/the-mastery-of-non-mastery/los-angeles-review-of-books-the-mastery-of-non-mastery Philip K. Dick : To the best of our KNOWLEDGE http://ttbook.org/book/philip-k-dick/philip-k-dick-to-the-best-of-our-knowledge “I wanted to write books exactly like the ones he didn't live long enough to write.” Lethem on Philip K Dick http://t.co/m3Y9WkpT ]]> Sun, 04 Mar 2012 02:35:20 -0700 http://ttbook.org/book/philip-k-dick/philip-k-dick-to-the-best-of-our-knowledge The Exegesis of Philip K Dick with Erik Davis http://tumblr.hrmtc.com/post/18676799423/the-exegesis-of-philip-k-dick-with-erik-davis/the-hermetic-library-tumblr-the-exegesis-of-philip-k-dick-with-erik-davis The Exegesis of Philip K Dick with Erik Davis - You might be interested in the episode “The Exegesis of... http://t.co/Uc7VEs5f ]]> Sat, 03 Mar 2012 13:05:19 -0700 http://tumblr.hrmtc.com/post/18676799423/the-exegesis-of-philip-k-dick-with-erik-davis/the-hermetic-library-tumblr-the-exegesis-of-philip-k-dick-with-erik-davis A Conversation with film-maker Adam Curtis http://www.e-flux.com/journal/in-conversation-with-adam-curtis-part-i/ Since the early 1990s Adam Curtis has made a number of serial documentaries and films for the BBC using a playful mix of journalistic reportage and a wide range of avant-garde filmmaking techniques. The films are linked through their interest in using and reassembling the fragments of the past—recorded on film and video―to try and make sense of the chaotic events of the present. I first met Adam Curtis at the Manchester International Festival thanks to Alex Poots, and while Curtis himself is not an artist, many artists over the last decade have become increasingly interested in how his films… ]]> Sun, 12 Feb 2012 05:36:52 -0700 http://www.e-flux.com/journal/in-conversation-with-adam-curtis-part-i/ The accidental universe: Science's crisis of faith http://www.harpers.org/archive/2011/12/0083720 The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles. One can add to the list of the fully explained: the hue of the sky, the orbits of planets, the angle of the wake of a boat moving through a lake, the six-sided patterns of snowflakes, the weight of a flying bustard, the temperature of boiling water, the size of raindrops, the circular shape of the sun. All these phenomena and many more, once thought to have been… ]]> Thu, 22 Dec 2011 13:24:04 -0700 http://www.harpers.org/archive/2011/12/0083720 What Is the Future of Knowledge in the Internet Age? http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=big-data-future-knowledge-internet-age/what-is-the-future-of-knowledge-in-the-internet-age-scientific-american What Is the Future of Knowledge in the Internet Age? http://t.co/sRP1qCUf ]]> Tue, 29 Nov 2011 07:37:06 -0700 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=big-data-future-knowledge-internet-age/what-is-the-future-of-knowledge-in-the-internet-age-scientific-american How Google Dominates Us http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/aug/18/how-google-dominates-us/?pagination=false Most of the time Google does not actually have the answers. When people say, “I looked it up on Google,” they are committing a solecism. When they try to erase their embarrassing personal histories “on Google,” they are barking up the wrong tree. It is seldom right to say that anything is true “according to Google.” Google is the oracle of redirection. Go there for “hamadryad,” and it points you to Wikipedia. Or the Free Online Dictionary. Or the Official Hamadryad Web Site (it’s a rock band, too, wouldn’t you know). Google defines its mission as “to organize the world’s… ]]> Sun, 31 Jul 2011 18:17:11 -0700 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/aug/18/how-google-dominates-us/?pagination=false Content-free prose: The latest threat to writing or the next big thing? http://blog.oup.com/2011/07/content-free-prose/ There’s a new online threat to writing. Critics of the web like to blame email, texts, and chat for killing prose. Even blogs—present company included—don’t escape their wrath. But in fact the opposite is true: thanks to computers, writing is thriving. More people are writing more than ever, and this new wave of everyone’s-an-author bodes well for the future of writing, even if not all that makes its way online is interesting or high in quality.

But two new digital developments, ebook spam and content farms, now threaten the survival of writing as we know it. ]]> Mon, 25 Jul 2011 02:46:50 -0700 http://blog.oup.com/2011/07/content-free-prose/ Michel Serres on the word 'human' http://www.universite-du-si.com/en/conferences/8-paris-usi-2011/sessions/961-michel-serres Son of a barge man, Michel Serres joined the Ecole Navale in 1949 and the Ecole Normale supérieure in 1952 where he obtained the aggregation of philosophy in 1955. From 1956 to 1958, he served as an officer of the navy: squadron of the Atlantic, reopening of the Suez Canal, Algeria, and squadron of the Mediterranean Sea.
 
Michel Serres defended his thesis in 1968 and taught philosophy in Clermont-Ferrand, Vincennes (Paris I) and at Standford University. In his books, he focuses, among other themes, on the history of sciences (“Hermes”, 1969-1980). His philosophy, concerning as much sensibility… ]]> Wed, 06 Jul 2011 15:15:38 -0700 http://www.universite-du-si.com/en/conferences/8-paris-usi-2011/sessions/961-michel-serres Knowledge, not the way you knew it http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/2011/06/13/knowledge-not-the-way-you-knew-it-studying-the-impact-of-wikipedia-on-the-reception-of-knowledge/ 17.000.000 articles. 91.000 active contributors. 270 languages.

No matter what words one would choose to describe Wikipedia, numbers cannot speak but the truth: Wikipedia, which was set out as an “experiment” in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, nowadays constitutes the largest free, collaboratively authored encyclopedia in the world.

There is a more important aspect however, that numbers won’t reveal: Wikipedia stopped being an encyclopedia a long time ago. Rather, it has grown into a socio-cultural phenomenon that changed – and keeps changing- radically the way knowledge is received, produced and disseminated. ]]> Tue, 28 Jun 2011 16:11:04 -0700 http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/2011/06/13/knowledge-not-the-way-you-knew-it-studying-the-impact-of-wikipedia-on-the-reception-of-knowledge/ Views on Evolution, Intelligent Design Hinge on Death Anxiety http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/death-anxiety-shapes-views-on-evolution-29580/ It may be the foundation of modern biology, but fewer than 40 percent of Americans say they believe in the theory of evolution. While frustrated scientists sometimes blame religion for this knowledge gap, newly published research suggests the key factor isn’t faith per se but rather a benefit it provides that Darwin does not: A sense that our all-too-short lives have meaning.
A Canadian study just published in the journal PLoS ONE finds a strong link between existential angst and reluctance to embrace the theory of evolution. A team of researchers led by University of British Columbia psychologist Jessica… ]]> Thu, 07 Apr 2011 03:39:19 -0700 http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/death-anxiety-shapes-views-on-evolution-29580/ James Gleick’s History of Information http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/books/review/book-review-the-information-by-james-gleick.html Gleick makes his case in a sweeping survey that covers the five millenniums of humanity’s engagement with information, from the invention of writing in Sumer to the elevation of information to a first principle in the sciences over the last half-century or so. It’s a grand narrative if ever there was one, but its key moment can be pinpointed to 1948, when Claude Shannon, a young mathematician with a background in cryptography and telephony, published a paper called “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” in a Bell Labs technical journal. For Shannon, communication was purely a matter of sending a message… ]]> Sun, 20 Mar 2011 05:41:08 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/books/review/book-review-the-information-by-james-gleick.html Hawking contra Philosophy http://www.philosophynow.org/issue82/Hawking_contra_Philosophy Professor Hawking has probably been talking to the wrong philosophers, or picked up some wrong ideas about the kinds of discussion that currently go on in philosophy of science. His lofty dismissal of that whole enterprise as a useless, scientifically irrelevant pseudo-discipline fails to reckon with several important facts about the way that science has typically been practised since its early-modern (seventeenth-century) point of departure and, even more, in the wake of twentieth century developments such as quantum mechanics and relativity.

Science has always included a large philosophical component, whether at the level of basic presuppositions concerning… ]]> Sat, 19 Feb 2011 06:31:20 -0700 http://www.philosophynow.org/issue82/Hawking_contra_Philosophy Errors in Things and “The Friendly Medium” http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/errors-in-things-and-the-friendly-medium

What is it about a particular media that makes it successful? Drawing a mini history from printing-press smudges to digital compression artefacts this lecture considers the value of error, chance and adaptation in contemporary media. Biological evolution unfolds through error, noise and mistake. Perhaps if we want to maximise the potential of media, of digital text and compressed file formats, we first need to determine their inherent redundancy. Or, more profoundly, to… ]]> Wed, 16 Feb 2011 08:39:59 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/errors-in-things-and-the-friendly-medium The Library in the New Age http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21514 Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape? What, for example, will become of research libraries in the face of technological marvels such as Google?

How to make sense of it all? I have no answer to that problem, but I can suggest an approach to it: look at the history of the ways information has been communicated. Simplifying things radically, you could say that there have been four fundamental changes in information technology since… ]]> Wed, 16 Feb 2011 08:03:34 -0700 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21514 Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic http://www.economist.com/node/17723223?story_id=17723223 Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time:

In research the story is similar. PhD students and contract staff known as “postdocs”, described by one student as “the ugly underbelly of academia”, do much of the research these days. There is a glut of postdocs too. Dr Freeman concluded from pre-2000 data that if American faculty jobs in the life sciences were increasing at 5% a year, just 20% of students would land one. In Canada 80% of postdocs earn $38,600 or less per year before tax—the average salary of a construction worker. The rise… ]]> Mon, 20 Dec 2010 10:47:00 -0700 http://www.economist.com/node/17723223?story_id=17723223 What concepts do not exist in the English language? http://ask.metafilter.com/10490/What-concepts-do-not-exist-in-the-English-language Carl Honoré (In Praise of Slow) says Canada's Baffin Island Inuit "use the same word—'uvatiarru'—to mean both 'in the distant past' and 'in the distant future.' Time, in such cultures, is always coming as well as going."

In an essay by Louise Edrich (Two Languages in Mind, but Just One in the Heart), she writes about learning Ojibwemownin and how "nouns are mainly desginated as alive or dead, animate or inanimate...once I began to think of stones as animate, I started to wonder whether I was picking up a stone or it was putting iteslf in my… ]]> Fri, 10 Sep 2010 04:17:00 -0700 http://ask.metafilter.com/10490/What-concepts-do-not-exist-in-the-English-language Reclaiming the Imagination http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/reclaiming-the-imagination/ Imagine being a slave in ancient Rome. Now remember being one. The second task, unlike the first, is crazy. If, as I’m guessing, you never were a slave in ancient Rome, it follows that you can’t remember being one — but you can still let your imagination rip. With a bit of effort one can even imagine the impossible, such as discovering that Dick Cheney and Madonna are really the same person. It sounds like a platitude that fiction is the realm of imagination, fact the realm of knowledge.

Why did humans evolve the capacity to imagine… ]]> Wed, 18 Aug 2010 02:12:00 -0700 http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/reclaiming-the-imagination/ The illustrated guide to a Ph.D. http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ Every fall, I explain to a fresh batch of Ph.D. students what a Ph.D. is. It's hard to describe it in words. So, I use pictures. Read below for the illustrated guide to a Ph.D. ]]> Wed, 11 Aug 2010 01:47:00 -0700 http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/