Information theory, privacy, East Asia…
Belief Systems
Does Twitter = Democracy?
03 months ago
A study released in September by the project on Information Technology and Political Islam at the University of Washington argues that social media including Facebook, Twitter and Youtube played a “central role” in the Arab Spring. They find that a spike in the volume of Tweets in Egypt, for example, anticipated the high volume of physical presence in Tahrir Square just prior to Mubarak’s resignation. There is some very interesting data and analysis here. It is clear that the autocrats in Tunisia and Egypt did not have the technological resources to combat Twitter’s obvious value as a tool for the political opposition. And Twitter’s de-centralized implementation makes it particularly difficult for governments to censor. We must be careful, however, not to read too much into these findings.
There were complaints early this fall among members of the Occupy Wall Street movement that Twitter has been censoring the #occupywallstreet hashtag, not allowing the term to reach the highly visible trending topics section. While Twitter has dismissed these claims, it is important to remember that it’s a private company whose interests do not necessarily resonate with those of the OWS movement. J.P. Morgan reportedly has a 10% stake in Twitter (also, see this and this), though indirectly via the Chris Sacca managed Digital Growth Fund. There is no law preventing Twitter from interfering with Tweet traffic.
Jonathan Albright at the University of Auckland has poked holes in Twitter’s argument that people simply do not understand how their proprietary algorithm works. And there has been enough suspicion on the ground to prompt adoption of Twitter-alternative Vibe. Unlike Twitter, Vibe “tweets” disappear after a fixed time and can be limited to a specific physical radius. Trust doesn’t (and shouldn’t) always scale.
MD Researchers on Time Travel, Big Bang
010 months ago
by admin
in Belief Systems
Recently published at PhysOrg.com, suggesting that the widely accepted Big Bang origin theory precludes time travel.
Science, concepts and the cognitive toolkit
01 year ago
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in Belief Systems
From the world question center at edge.org: “What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?” Interesting contributions from Howard Gardner, George Lakoff and others. Below is from experimental psychologist Bruce Hood:
Haecceity
Understanding the concept of haecceity would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit because it succinctly captures most people’s intuitions about authenticity that are increasingly threatened by the development of new technologies. Cloning, genetic modification and even digital reproduction are some examples of new innovations that alarm many members of the public because they appear to violate a belief in the integrity of objects
Haecceity is originally a metaphysical concept that is both totally obscure and yet very familiar to all of us. It is the psychological attribution of an unobservable property to an object that makes it unique among identical copies. All objects may be categorized into groups on the basis of some shared property but an object within a category is unique by virtual of its haecceity. It is haecceity that makes your wedding ring authentic and your spouse irreplaceable, even though such things could be copied exactly in a futuristic science fiction world where matter duplication had been solved.
Climate Change vs. Global Warming
01 year ago
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in Belief Systems
Google has a very interesting new service, the Ngram Viewer, which lets you graph out the frequency of particular words and phrases (in many languages) over the last 500 years, via a databases Google says covers some 4% of the world’s books. It is not clear exactly how this sample is derived (though I read it is a subset of their larger database) so its validity remains an open question, but it looks to be a very useful tool for content and discourse analysts of all stripes.
I decided to graph the terms “climate change” vs. “global warming” from 1800 to the present (you can click on the image for a clearer view) Interesting to see the sudden appearance and then dying out of the term “climate change” at the dawn of the 20th century and the distancing of its lead over the term “global warming” beginning in the mid to late 90s. One wonders whether this dynamic reflects any change in core propositions of the climate change discourse. Is it still the core argument that the planet overall is warming at an accelerating and unnatural rate? Or is it that CO2 somehow disrupts the earlier stable climate system, increasing the likelihood of all forms of extreme whether conditions from hot to cold?
European scientists publish evidence challenging Big Bang
01 year ago
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in Belief Systems
One topic I will be writing about in this more general blog project will be how beliefs tend to cluster and what happens when certain “core beliefs” are challenged with what one might call “disconfirming evidence.” I haven’t seem much coverage of this yet, but a recent journal article publication provides evidence, that, if true, would fundamentally challenge the dominant origin theory of the universe. Scientists at the INAF-Brera Astronomical Observatory in Italy and the Astronomical Observatory of Paris-Meudon found a cluster of galaxies that appears to be several billion years older than possible under the evolutionary timetable that follows from the Big Bang model. The full article, Red sequence determination of the redshift of the cluster of galaxies JKCS 041: z ~ 2.2, in Astronomy & Astrophysics, is intended for a specialized audience. A press release at the INAF web site, makes the significance of their finding much clearer for the layperson, but only if you speak Italian. Here is a quote from the press release, courtesy of google translate:
It is the farthest cluster of galaxies ever observed. Thus, the oldest. A record. It is not just a record. To get an idea of the implications of the discovery of Stefano Andreon and Marc Huertas-Company (INAF-Brera Astronomical Observatory of the former, the Astronomical Observatory of Paris-Meudon second), we try to think of the babies. And how, slowly, begin to speak. They begin to stutter the first words within the year. To compose the two already know a few words, those who after the first. Every so often there will certainly be someone who started before everyone else, setting a new record.
But suppose that an infant, we have made a child of just six months, he leaps out with a “Mom, let’s stop here for today’s milk I guess I’ve had enough.” We would be dismayed. Are not merely the killing of a new record: a child would mean that radical rethinking. Would force us to reconsider from scratch all the models available to us of neurology, linguistics and developmental psychology. How can know when to make complex sentences would still be barely able to put together a simple syllable?
If true, this will be a very interesting case to watch.
