Hermeneutic Heretic

Inevitability of understanding: The folk theory

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 00:00:00 GMT

The statement from Ariana Huffington (in bold below) is one of the best examples of the folk theory upon which Critical Discourse Analysis is based - namely that words influence people in certain inevitable ways. It is also a good example of the sources of disaffection with the mainstream debate experienced by US conservatives as described by Alan Brinkley. Brinkley suggests that the 50s and 60s brought a liberal mindset in which no alternative to post-Roosevelt era view of the world was possible to imagine. And this same sense of inevitability of conclusion from words still permeates the left/right divide; as a result each side views each other as either incompetent or corrupt (if not outright evil) because those are the only possible explanations of why they do not agree. Lakoff explained the source of the difference well in Moral Politics but seems not to have learned his own lesson in later work.

On The Media: Transcript of "HuffPo a Go Go" (June 6, 2008) ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: I really wrote the book not really to catalog what has happened but to understand why, because I think if we're going to put an end to this dark chapter in American history, we need to understand why. And you're absolutely right. The 28 percent of Americans who still approve of George Bush are not going to be in any way influenced by my book. But there is another 20 percent that I do want to appeal to, and that's the 20 percent of additional Americans who make the 48 percent that are considering voting for John McCain. If that 20 percent reads my book and at the end of it they are still thinking of voting for John McCain, they can have their money back. BOB GARFIELD: So the answer to my question is that you wrote this book to make sure that John McCain is defeated? ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Yes.

Blending and framing by paradox

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Google Reader (1000+) "Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking." (Clement Atlee)

There is no doubt that pithy aphorisms are an important instrument in the socialisation toolkit (construction inventory) or any group (from couples, groups of friends to political parties, nations and, these days, humanity). To describe this in a language I understand, they help the group negotiate important framings through the cognitive process of blending. They play a social role (witness the proliferation of books of quotes and RSS feeds or mailing lists with quote a day), socio psychological role (people's email signatures with quotes) and a personal psychological role (the pure enjoyment experienced upon reading a particularly well-crafted quote, or even a personal transformation if the mappings are properly generalised). The one by Atlee above is an example of a particularly interesting class of aphorism, one that involves paradox. Quite obviously discussion is impossible without talking, but also an effective government must at some point stop talking and act. Now, I think part of the power of the quote lies in the fact that it doesn't have a cognitive resolution (just like many other quotes relying on a paradox) but it points to two competing models we have of governance. 1. government needs to discuss things, 2. government needs to act. From a policy standpoint, this is a real dilemma. Each of these models are backed up by socially negotiated stories that have both practical and cognitive resolutions. But our Aristotelian instinct of the excluded middle tells us that they cannot be both true at the same time (or that they simply cannot be both true at all). This usually triggers the next step: folk reductionism (I say 'folk' but 'scientific' reductionism often has similar cognitive and social features). What happens is that we conceptualise one model in terms of the other. That's where Schonian generative metaphors come into play. We could say something like 'action is really a kind of discussion' or 'discussion is really a kind of action' and simply describe excessive discussion is bad action (professional English has lots of phrases and other cultural artefacts to support this 'paralysis by analysis', 'design by committee', Dilbert cartoons, 'just do it', etc.) or rash action was the wrong kind of discussion (again the phrases supporting deliberation are there: 'jump before you leap', 'measure twice, cut once', etc.) There's even a whole branch of psychology dealing with learning styles and personality types that maps these differences on different kinds of people. Like with a lot of science, this plays the dual role. On the one hand it reinforces the cultural framings (see multiple intelligences, 'different folks different strokes', etc.) but it also contributes to our knowledge of the human condition (what I'd like to call 'anthropology'). There's a good chance that different people actually process these models very differently at a very basic socio-cognitive level - rather than just having different opinions. Also, not everyone seems to respond to aphorisms and generative metaphors in the same way. Sure different people arrive at different mappings but there are many people who simply do not derive the same pleasure or benefit from this kind of reasoning as others. Clearly, more research is needed, as always. (BTW: Saying this is another thing in the inventory of constructions availble to us in a discussion like this.)

Unintended consequences of political correctness

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Colbert I. King - Why Obama Stands With His Church - washingtonpost.com

This history comes to mind as I listen to conservative commentators, chief among them MSNBC's Pat Buchanan, brand as "racist" the slogan adopted by Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago: "Unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian."

I am a big supporter (including in print) of political correctness as a means of challenging embedded frames of action but at the same time I'm aware of the processes of entrenchment that will lead to the creation of new frames that will determine much of the public discourse in the future. In other words, political correctness works only for a period of time before it needs a 'refresh'. The history of the appellations of African Americans is one such great example. Going from African to Negro to Black to African American it is now on its second cycle of such a refresh.

An Barack Obama and Rev Wright seem to be victims of one such particular entrenchment.

I've been reading much of the commentary on Obama's speech and collecting quotes in preparation for a conference paper and I was struck by the incessant claims of Wright's racism based on remarks that were so obviously taken out of context. This becomes even more obvious when you listen to the whole sermon. How could anyone think of him as anything else but a courageous leader of his community (who may make the occasional questionable but hardly incendiary remark) is almost inconceivable. Yet, commentator after commentator calls him racist or at least considers his remarks racially inflammatory. The quote above suggests a possible explanation. He uses the word 'black' in a positive affirmative sense. But political correctness has made a positive identification of someone as black a precarious proposition. There are many contexts in which this is acceptable but many in which it is not.

I've worked for an agency that asked its applicants to mark their ethnicity with the option of 'choose not to disclose'. With few exceptions, the majority of the people making that choice were white upper middle class people with an agenda. Most people of color took it in the spirit in which it was intended: 'If we are aware of the diversity of our constituency, we can work harder to try to support it.' If I had a choice I would have asked for sexual and political orientation, too. Sure, in most contexts, none of this should matter, but in others, knowing the make up of one's constituency, is essential. But when some of my Czech students saw a similar diversity questionnaire in the UK, they thought it was racist.

Another illustration was an example given by a black researcher in education of a white parent who was proud of his daughter for taking the more complicated route of choosing the color of a sweater over the color of the skin in pointing out her friend to him at a distance. But such color blindness is an act (brilliantly satirised by Stephen Colbert) and not a reality. But is this public act of color blindness that is the only way to signal belonging to a certain community of values that is available to the white middle-classes. To them, this leads to a puzzling and discomfiting asymmetry of reference. Calling a Church: 'Upper East Side White Congregation' is racist and 'Harlem Black Church' is not! Linguistically, this is nothing strange or unusual. Language is full of such asymmetries (see Robin Lakoff's Language and Woman's Place for examples about the descriptions of women) some working for the benefit of one group or another and some neutral. But the folk theories and the inventory of reactions available in American public discourse simply does not allow for an easy discussion of this issue.

Are US copyright laws unconstitutional: Default states semantics

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

LII: Constitution To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

I had no idea that copyright was part of the US Constitution until I read about this in an LA Times Op-Ed. The article was debating the semantics and metaphors related to filesharing on which I'll probably have more to think. But, reading the section referenced in the article reminded me of a recent talk I went to on the default states in frames. And it seems to me beyond much doubt that the framers had assumed a default state of "limited" that meant actually limited rather than potentially limited which is what the current laws enshrine. Of course, there are many other 'default' states in the constitution, for instance regarding what a 'person' is. But these defaults have been typically reset by amendments. Also, it could be more than argued that the current copyright regime does not "promote the progress" of anybody but big corporations. What about the company that owns the rights to 'Happy Birthday'? Where is progress or even the rights of authors and inventors in that? I've been following this debate from a distance for a while but haven't seen the conflict with the constitutional wording raised. But maybe I've just not been looking in the right places or am missing something.

Individual perspicacity, collective naïveté

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Nicholas Kristof is puzzled and pleased that the US electorate is keeping two individuals as front runners who are willing to express unpopular opinions:

The World’s Worst Panderer - New York Times All of this is puzzlingly mature on the part of the electorate. A common complaint about President Bush is that he walls himself off from alternative points of view, but the American public has the same management flaw: it normally fires politicians who tell them bad news.

But that is not particularly surprising. What is intriguing is the level of sophistication that a closer analysis of individuals reveals (regardless of education). This was found by van Dijk in the Netherlands and by Gamson in the US with groups under onslaught from an agenda-pushing media. However, this ability of individuals and small groups to discern the details of manipulative discourse does not always translate into collective behaviour at elections or other decision-making moments that would reveal a great independence of views. Until, one rare day it does but it then goes away. By and large political operatives' wisdom hold true for crowds even if it misrepresents the individuals comprising the crowds. This points to several avenues of inquiry. First, can we think of groups as independent agents? And if so, how can we also represent the individuals' legitimate interests and views? And second, what are the principles that constitute collective action as described by Becker and how do they form individuals' behaviours?

Two models of governance: Foundations of policy negotiation

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Lakoff in 'Moral Politics' talks about how competing models of family influence policy and politics debates in the US. This model duality is not only present in a variety of contexts but I would claim is the very foundation of all policy discourse (argument). In other words, whereever you look at a policy controversy you see a conflict of framings and foregrounding. Here's a good example I culled from two recent podcasts.

Matt Miller has a radical but simple proposal to improve the nation's public schools: federalize funding to eliminate disparities in per-pupil funding between poor and affluent communities. He also proposes a single set of federal standards for math, science and reading, instead of letting each state set its own standards. Scott Simon speaks with Miller, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
NPR: Plan Would Nationalize Schools to End Disparities

How can government create policies that interact with – rather than police - human behaviour? DAVID WILLETTS, Shadow Secretary for Innovation, Universities and Skills, argues that politicians could learn something from the recent surge in the study of human behaviour by game theorists, evolutionary biologists and neurologists. David Willetts will be delivering the Michael Oakeshott memorial lecture on The Ideas that are Changing Politics on Wednesday 20 February at the London School of Economics.
BBC - Radio 4 - Start the Week

Quite independently, the progressive Matt Miller and conservative David Willetts have provided a great example of retrenchment of two basic models of governance. 1. Local people know best and don't need interference from removed centrals of power. 2. Local people are ignorant and need central control to make sure they don't make a mess of things.

These two models are negotiated in a variety of contexts all over the place. They are given 'scholarly' support and 'narrative' support (the two being often just two sides of the same coin) on almost daily basis. We can also think of stories (real or fictional) where one or the other will apply. For instance, teachers talk about the National Curriculum in the UK today or Voter registration drives in the 1960s in the US south. Plus we could probably list several film and TV storylines that playout one or the other scenario with great conviction.

Now, both Willetts and Miller seem to make good points. How do we decide? Negotiation of framing and generative as well as constitutive metaphors.

Finally! The truth about truth: Folk foundations of scientific reductionism

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

On The Media I'm not a psychologist, but I think that at some deep level, if the situation you’re living is a lie, and the situation these boys were living was one, and, moreover, at least the father was complicit in some way in the murder of these children’s parents - that situation, I do not believe, can be healthy.

...

Argentina lived under terror. When societies emerge from these states, any society emerging has to balance truth with justice.

And then he had to say this:

Lost Children, Lost Truths - New York Times

But they had the truth, or something closer to it than a peaceful Paraguayan yard reeking of repressed crime. We journalists are intruders who move on. Was this intrusion worth it? For the dead, and for Argentina, I say yes. For the twins, I don’t know.

Truth or justice? Every society emerging from terror must choose. But truth is messier, and justice less adequate than we acknowledge. Life resides in half-tones newspapers render with difficulty, rather than in absolutes.

This folk magical assumption about the elemental and deep-rooted nature of the truth that is so essential that it seeps into our very existence no matter how much we are trying to paint a veneer of ignorance over it.

Cohen is right. He's no psychologist, but then neither are a lot of psychologists. Truth is like language. When you grow up in the context of a lie, you will speak the lie fluently and the truth will be just as disruptive as the introduction of a new language.

But this is not just a random quirk of an American journalist brought up on cultural reflections of the psychoanalytic therapeutic tradition. This is a demonstration of one folk theory of truth and it is the same one that underlies our myths about science that is most often represented through something called 'reductionism'.

And as fractals seem to indicate, this will also be part of science's undoing. Wilson's failure in Conscillience to understand science (despite his grasp of the humanities) is a great example of this. Another one is Skinner's reductionism and re-labelling of old problems with new words in Verbal Behavior which was so deftly analysed by Chomsky. And, of course, Chomsky's own insistence on limiting language description to that which is subject to reduction. And it also pertains to things like the Sokal hoax and the science wars. And it drives the search for the Unified Theory.

The problem is that the folk assumption about the fundamental nature of scientific truth forces scientists into seeking further and further underlying principles in order for it to be scientific. For instance, genes driving all morphological development of an organism. This is a bad model for science and an even worse model for social science.

An insight from fractals and chaos might help us find a better way. (The following is simply a fractal-inspired metaphor). 'Truths' exist on levels of magnification. They exist as tendencies that are exact at certain moments but sensitive to initial conditions.

This might allows us to admit that there are certain things social scientists know with just as much certainty as natural philosophers know the laws of physics. Only the numerical outcomes and predictive powers are plotted on attractors rather than linear curves. For instance, we know that depriving a group of people of resources will result in social unrest, and that not all individuals will participate in that unrest. We don't know what the breaking point is nor do we know what forms the unrest will take but that's not insignificant knowledge.

Moreover, it's knowledge similar to the knowledge of scientists. Scientists know a lot about the chemistry and physics of metals but all that knowledge is idealised (as in ideal gasses). To actually build a bridge engineers need lots and lots of manuals with translation tables that provide constants that can be plugged into equations. These constants are empirically established and can change with changing conditions.

Social engineers have history to do the same job but the translation tables have to be publicly negotiated analogy (as I've show in many other posts).

The job of the natural and social philosophers, then, should be to seek the right levels of magnification for their knowledge and proceed with extreme caution when finding causal links between layers.

[This is all very sketchy, at the moment, I suspect I will have a more to say about this later.]

Brief endorsement

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Obama has the smarts, the plans and, yes, the charisma to capably lead and transform a nation that aches for a new direction.

Editorials & Opinion | Obama for the Democrats | Seattle Times Newspaper

My voice, particularly on this blog, with no readership is of no consequence. I have no vote in American elections although I've often felt that people around the world should have at least some delegates in the US nominating conventions. Nevertheless, I cannot but endorse Obama. I've reviewed Audacity of Hope (twice, once on the radio, once in Czech press) and I've watched quite a few of his speeches; and I cannot do a better job of summarizing my impressions than the Seattle Times above.

Primogeniture: Negotiating the internal 'logic' of social change

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 00:00:00 GMT

BBC - Radio 4 Woman's Hour -Male Primogeniture Jenni discusses the law of primogeniture with Liberal Democrat MP Lynne Featherstone, who has asked the Equality and Human Rights Commission to investigate the legality of this centuries old practice, and to royal commentator and author Charles Mosley.

BBC - Radio 4 Woman's Hour -Primogeniture: Should the law be changed? Thirty years since the passage of the Sex Discrimination Act, the law that governs Succession to the Crown in Britain is also based on primogeniture: a male-preference law that dictates the throne should go to a male heir over a female. Why does the law continues to exist and is there a case for changing the law sooner than later?

The really interesting (for this analysis, not for itself) argument in this discussion of male primogeniture was made by Charles Mosley. Several times he presented two 'logical' objections (invoking the term logic) 1) "if you're interested in equality why not prefer the abolishment of monarchy which is even a more startling symbol of inequality?" 2) "if you [Lynne Featherstone] are also a spokesperson for the rights of the young, why not also include a change in the inheritance going to the firstborne?" [my paraphrases] His interlocutor responded by saying "ah, that's the old chestnut that is often used to stop change".

That fact that they were both justified in their remarks tells us something startling about public debate: logic and rationality cannot be and are not what decides the argument. At least, not in the traditional sense. The traditional view of logic is that it is independent of the matter at hand as well as of the arbiter of correctness and can be therefore used as yardstick of the validity of the argument. That's why Mr Mosley could sound a bit condescending (even though that could have been by dint of his being the 'royal' commentator) when he said something like 'then it surely follows' and 'isn't it logical'. Mr Featherstones justified objection that this was not a 'legitimate' argument did not have nearly as much weight purely because of the high regard we have for logic in these contexts.

Yet, it is 'obvious' that in this case the logic is gerrymandered and used as a rhetorical device. But is that always so? There are many times when the 'logic' applies.

Basically, the 'logic' of any argument needs to be negotiated. And any negotiation will bring with it all the factors that 'real' negotiations do. I.e. aspects of power, prestige, location, primacy and recency, ingroup/outgroup concerns, etc. In other words, it is not easy. But it is the only way it can go. This is not a suggestion as to how things should be, merely a description of how things are. There is an open question whether such debates would be more fruitful if both interlocutors were aware that they are engaged in a negotiation and subject to various influences. I'm a bit skeptical on this count but not convinced yet either way.

Let's have a look at other similar examples.

The right wing's argument that if you allow gay marriage what's to stop you from allowing zoophilic unions? Of course, there is nothing that would do that. A perfectly valid modus ponens argument can be constructed to demonstrate this entailment. Yet, intuitively, we know that such a occurrence is very unlikely.

Similarly, an argument can be (and has been) made, that if we stop abortions and outlaw prophylaxis we should also force any young heterosexual couple in an encounter to procreate. For, are they not depriving a potential human life of coming into being by avoiding copulation? Again, logic fails completely. Only negotiation of categories, concepts, and their mappings can bring any results.

Of course, it also works the other way. An fairly undisputably legitimate logic can be overriden by negotiation. The claim against the legalization of marihuana is that it is a gateway drug. Yet, the numbers of people who have smoked marihuana (almost everybody - except, for some reason, me) are so great that if there was any underlying causality significant proportion of the population would be addicted to hard drugs. Yet, that is clearly not the case. Other factors prevailed in the negotiation.

Another example is the British argument against immigration for the reason that 'Britain is a small island'. First, it is neither small nor comparatively densely populated but most significantly, its being an island doesn't make its borders any more solid than, say Germany. If, Belgium needs more space to house migrants, surely, they can't borrow a spare bit of France. Nevertheless, this is a very common argument.

And how about opponents of the smoking ban. It is quite true that smoking does not 'cause' cancer in the way that a bat causes a person to have their skull smashed in. Nevertheless, it was possible to generate a consensus of causality that overrode the logic. (I've heard a similar argument made against evolution.)

And so on, and so on.

But wait! There's more. Not only is not logic a good tool for independently judging the validity of an argument (although it is a good tool for putting an argument forth), it is not a good predictor of cognitive and social outcomes. And this applies to metaphoric implicature, as well. This is due, again, to the fact that these outcomes are negotiated. This doesn't bode well for most social commentary and a good chunk of social science. But that can be explored some other time.

The perception problem and the question of rationality in life

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Women Are Never Front-Runners - New York Times

But what worries me is that he is seen as unifying by his race while she is seen as divisive by her sex.

What worries me is that she is accused of “playing the gender card” when citing the old boys’ club, while he is seen as unifying by citing civil rights confrontations.

What worries me is that male Iowa voters were seen as gender-free when supporting their own, while female voters were seen as biased if they did and disloyal if they didn’t.

What worries me is that reporters ignore Mr. Obama’s dependence on the old — for instance, the frequent campaign comparisons to John F. Kennedy — while not challenging the slander that her progressive policies are part of the Washington status quo.

In these few paragraphs Gloria Steinem summarizes the findings of social psychology of the last forty years. Including earlier on in her column where she wonders why we consider Obama black when his mother was white so we could just as easily consider him white or mixed race.

There is little controversial both about the social psychology or politics of these statements. However, the question is what conclusions we'll draw from them. There is the rationalist approach which Steinem seems to imply assuming that this condition of assymetric perception existing in that strange space between the individual and the group. The rationalist position places the problem squarely inside the individual's cognition (brain) which of course is ultimately the only place where it can live. However, the question remains whether this is a reductionism that is descriptively and theoretically fruitful. On the political side it implies that this state of 'irrationality' is an ailment that can and should be cured. However, this discards the totality of the human condition.

An alternative position, for which there is not sufficient social scientific theory or descriptive framework, is to place the locus of this situation in the collective. This, of course, can only be a descriptive convenience, because ultimately these things exist or are reflected in the individual's brain. But looking for these effects in the brain may be as foolhardy as trying to design a bridge using solely quantum mechanics or Einsteinian physics. The descriptive advantage is obvious. Not reducing collective phenomena to the individual would make it possible to take certain phenomena at their face value. The political advantage is less obvious. Taking the individualistic reductionist perspective makes it possible to appeal to individuals to change and to reflect on their inner biases. On the other hand, it does lead to the alienation of many who cannot identify with the individual position despite the collective consequence. Of course, many if not most of these biases are individual and can be brought to our attention to be challenged but is that always the case and/or is there a situation where the collective is primary and the straightforward causality from the individual to the group and from the group to the individual does not apply. Saying "male Iowa voters were seen as gender-free when supporting their own" simply describes a fact of logic but does "male voters are supporting their own" follow from "male voters are more likely to vote for a candidate that is also male". Perhaps it does but just because these two sentences are equivalent in terms of push-and-shove container logic they may not be the same from the perspective of social psychological description. Something that will need to be investigated more.

Collective cognition, culture, mind share and patterns of action

Sun, 04 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Ubuntu: Just how popular is it? - Starry Hope Productions ...Ubuntu has managed to gain a large portion of the Linux mind share , at least amongst the tech community . Wikipedia: Mind share is the amount of attention required by something and the time spent thinking about something . It can also refer to…

Negotiating radial categories: Some mothers do have them

Sun, 04 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Is It Possible To Be Half-Adopted? Imagining someone giving away semen or an egg couldn’t possibly feel the same as imagining a parent giving a way a baby. Could it? The friend who asked whether I consider Mrs. Ramirez to be adopted is adopted herself, something she doesn’t associate with rejection but rather with…

Phallic imagery in English-language comedy and the theory of image schemas

Sat, 03 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Now, there's no doubt in my mind whatsoever that George Lakoff's theory of mental imagery (usually referred to via the concept of Image Schemas) describes a phenomenon that is profoundly real. However, the question remains what kind of reality it has. It exists and we see it all the time. But is it something that…

More meaningful than what? Populations and truth in social science

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT

WHNews: Pay Gap - No Pay Day As of 30th October, if you’re a woman and you go out to work, you’re working for nothing until the 31st December. The Fawcett Society and the union Unison have declared today ‘Women’s No Pay Day.’ They’ve worked out that, given an average 17 per cent pay gap…

Convention over logic: Limits of implicature

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Evening News 24 - Refuse fire near City Hall Arsonists sparked an emergency response after setting light to a rubbish container near City Hall on Saturday evening. The suspects started the fire shortly after 7pm on St Giles Street. Two fire engines were sent to the scene and firefighters used hoses to extinguish the…

Indeterminacy in art criticism as frame negotiation

Sat, 13 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT

On The Media: Transcript of "Not So Innocent" (October 5, 2007) RICHARD HALPERN: Right. There's often a kind of loss of innocence that takes place in the paintings themselves, which reflect on a potential loss of innocence on the part of the viewer. I think an interesting example of that is Rockwell's painting called The…

Utility of prejudice: Reducing freedom to cognition and vice versa

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Quote Details: William Hazlitt: Without the aid of... - The Quotations Page Without the aid of prejudice and custom I should not be able to find my way across the room. William Hazlitt English essayist (1778 - 1830) It's always disconcerting to find that something I've been saying for years has been said a…

Perspectives, views and child cognition

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Media Blog on National Review Online What the BBC is telling children about the 9/11 attacks [Tom Gross] Here is what the BBC’s widely-read children’s section of their website (CBBC) is telling kids about the 9/11 attacks, the 6th anniversary of which falls today. It is not quite the al-Qaeda view, but it almost is…

Cognition, information, knowledge and the limits of serial computing

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT

BBC - Radio 4 - Today Programme Listen Again 11 Sept 2007 08:50 It's the 50th anniversary of the British Computer Society. But what can we expect over the next half century? Will our levels of dependence on the internet and computers change? One of the guests on the programme, Oliver Sparrow , made the…

Poetry in blogs and cognitive persistence

Thu, 06 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Just Say No "Nonetheless I took the tomatoes away." This is only partially a hermeneutic post. It's so rare to see poetry in blogs (unless they're poets' blogs which I don't read) but this last line in a post, turned it into a poem. It reminded me of my favorite poem by Vladimír Holan about…

Changes in word meaning and folk theories of reasonable mappings

Sun, 02 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT

On The Media In the parlance of Republican-primary politics, âsanctuaryâ? â as in sanctuary city â has become a bad word. ... GEOFFREY NUNBERG: Well, sometime around 2005, 2006, you begin to hear people on the right using the word, not for these cities and movements that aimed at providing specifically political asylum, but rather…

Lol cats and conventionalization of semiotic systems

Sun, 02 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Anil Dash: Cats Can Has Grammar The core behavior has existed for some time; "Image macro" is a generic term for this kind of folk art, and cats have always featured heavily in these types of Internet in-jokes. But a few distinct categories have sprung up that have helped amplify and popularize the phenomenon. Two…

Searching for coherence in high-stakes utterances

Sat, 01 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT

YouTube - Miss Teen USA 2007 - South Carolina answers a question Miss Teen USA 2007 - Ms. South Carolina answers a question http://youtube.com/watch?v=lj3iNxZ8Dww[/youtube] It is all too easy to make fun of speakers like this. But most commenters on YouTube (and elsewhere) got it wrong. ChrisKangaroo It is obviuos that she has no idea…

From culture-specific to the universal in the US counter-insurgency manual

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT

"Be polite, be professional, be prepared to kill." Lt. Col. Nagel summarizing a new US Army counterinsurgency manual (on the Daily Show ) This quote reminds of the critique of universalist pragmatics by Anna Wierzbicka. Wierzbicka and others (e.g. Goddard) points out that concepts like politeness (let alone professionalism) are extremely culture and language specific…

Paradox of the evolutionary metaphor in language death

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT

When Languages Die: Science and Sentiment : In his book When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge K. David Harrison illustrates the individual face of language loss, as well as its global scale. He shows that the disappearance of a language is a loss not only for…

Blurring the lines of folk and expert theory

Thu, 23 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Its All Semantics - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog A similarly obtuse but less jargon-laden example of unintentially comedic writing is the title of IRS form 5213, which I am convinced was penned by Terry Gilliam a la Crimson Permanent Assurance: âElection to postpone determination as to whether the presumption applies that…

Folk theories of conceptual causality and collective autonomy

Mon, 20 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Film examines Daily Mail 'diet' | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited In the footsteps of Supersize Me, a documentary-maker has attempted to find out whether we are what we read by giving up all news sources except the Daily Mail. For 28 days, Nick Angel screened out all television, radio, print and online news sources…

Girl Wars, Boy Wars

Sat, 18 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT

The Girl Wars : Terrible Mother on Offsprung.com It seems like half the interactions between women can be classified as Girl Wars. Do we ever get out of this? And why the hell are girls so vicious to each other? When did they start this? Just a few years ago, Thing One was small and…

Bill O'Reilly on the 8:05 from Brighton

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT

‘Bourne’ flick is ultimately un-American - Opinion & Editorial - BostonHerald.com I knew this movie was trouble when I read the reviews. Almost all the critics liked it. The only way American movie critics would like a violent car-chase film like this was if it bashed the USA, which, of course, it does. ... As…

Networks of trust and the newspaper business

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Virtual Economics: Why newspapers are not screwed ...newspapers' core value is not their content but their validation. Sure it's expensive to create content. In the long run this probably doesn't really matter. There's plenty of content. The value that newspapers add to the picture is verifying which of it is true. The problem with many…

Bi-furcated narrative frames in public policy debates

Sun, 12 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Confessions of a BBC liberal - Times Online There is a perfectly reasonable case for progressive liberal reform of penal policy. There is also a perfectly reasonable case for a stricter and more punitive penal policy. This programme was quite clearly on the side of the former and the producer/writer was a member of BBC…

Anecdotes, metaphors and the negotiated truth

Sat, 11 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Media Matters - "Media Matters"; by Jamison Foser "I believe in the usefulness and validity of the telling anecdote -- the seemingly small story that reveals a broader truth about a politician or other subject," Carney wrote. And who can blame him? For the reader, an anecdote -- a "short account of an interesting or…

Metaphoric inferencing in action and the negotiation of interpretive privilege

Sat, 11 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Making Light: Bookstore chain puts the screws on small publishers We have concluded that we have far too many suppliers, Malarkey again. Rimmer is inappropriately borrowing language from other industries, as though A&R were a construction firm and he’d noticed they were buying their bricks from too many different brickyards. Bricks are interchangeable. Books aren’t…

Schematic imagery as euphemistic framing in war news reporting

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Analysis: Military Shows Gains in Iraq Despite political setbacks, American commanders are clinging to a hope that stability might be built from the bottom up—with local groups joining or aiding U.S. efforts to root out extremists —rather than from the top down, where national leaders have failed to act. Commanders are encouraged by signs that…

Media and scenarios of public opinion formation

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Disfavor for Bush Hits Rare Heights - washingtonpost.com That may stem in part from the changing nature of society. When Caddell's boss was president, there were three major broadcast networks. Today cable news, talk radio and the Internet have made information far more available, while providing easy outlets for rage and polarization. Public disapproval of…

Negotiating image projections: Who has the power?

Mon, 23 Jul 2007 00:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - Who is the real Hillary? she is certainly the most extraordinarily self-disciplined politician I have ever watched in action. But then she has to be, because she must balance the projection of images of supposedly masculine US power and strength with the reality of being a woman; she must be seen as…

Walking robots and local grammars

Sat, 14 Jul 2007 00:00:00 GMT

BBC NEWS | Technology | Robot unravels mystery of walking "Babies use a lot of their brains to train local circuits but once they are trained they are fairly autonomous."Only when it comes to more difficult things - such as a change of terrain - that's when the brain steps in and says 'now we…

Atheism as religion and limits of rationality

Fri, 13 Jul 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Michael Gerson - What Atheists Can't Answer - washingtonpost.com So the dilemma is this: How do we choose between good and bad instincts? Theism, for several millennia, has given one answer: We should cultivate the better angels of our nature because the God we love and respect requires it. While many of us fall tragically…

Negotiating scenarios of democracy

Fri, 13 Jul 2007 00:00:00 GMT

OpinionJournal - Peggy Noonan President Bush was hired to know more than the people, to be told all the deep inside intelligence, all the facts Americans are not told, and do the right and smart thing in response. That's the deal. It's the real "grand bargain." If you are a midlevel Verizon executive who lives…

Sources of usage consensus in language change

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Shifting Idioms: An Eggcornucopia : OUPblog Original New sleight of hand: 85% 15%: slight of hand fazed by: 71% 29%: phased by Ben Zimmer lists the increasing changes (by 'false' analogy) in the spelling of some common English idioms. I saw his table and wondered what would happen in a Google Fight . Not only…

Collective negotiation of causal relations

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Congress must end U.S. role in a civil war nobody voted for That is why we propose to end the authorization for the war in Iraq. The civil war we have on our hands in Iraq is not our fight and it is not the fight Congress authorized. Iraq is at war with itself and…

Conservatism as part fo language competence

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Language Log: Keeping "wrong grammar" off the air A program will be assigned a "PG" rating if it shows "people speaking with wrong grammar (except for humorous effects)." The article doesn't say who gets to be the "grammar cop" -- some colonel with time on his hands, I guess, who would presumably delegate the problem…

Language Log: The Supreme Court Fails Semantics

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Language Log: The Supreme Court Fails Semantics All that the Court actually argues is that "BONG HiTS 4 JESUS" contains a reference to drug use. Gibberish is surely a possible interpretation of the words on the banner, but it is not the only one, and dismissing the banner as meaningless ignores its undeniable reference to…

Professional linguists and folk theory of language

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Language Log: The Linguistic Abilities of the Presidential Candidates For what it's worth, if we count only confirmed languages spoken fluently or reasonably well, the average number of languages other than English spoken by the Democrats is 0.83, by the Republicans 0.33, or 0.53 overall. I can't say that I'm impressed. This is a useful…

Opportunism and power of analogical mapping

Mon, 02 Jul 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Why Winston Wouldn't Stand For W - washingtonpost.com Writing about Churchill and Chamberlain, I've discovered, is like administering a Rorschach test to one's readers. People see in Churchill and Chamberlain what they want to see. They draw parallels between the 1930s and the events of today according to their own political philosophy. I've received congratulatory…

Wittgenstein and folk theories of language and intelligence

Sun, 01 Jul 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Quote Details: Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy is a battle... - The Quotations Page Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. Ludwig Wittgenstein Austrian philosopher (1889 - 1951) Two interesting things about this quote. First, that it was posted in the first place. It's on a list of quotations that…

Generative analogies as negotiation devices

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Amazon.com: Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Hegel to Whole Foods: Books: Jonah Goldberg Goldberg draws striking parallels between historic fascism and contemporary liberal doctrines. He argues that âpolitical correctnessâ? on campuses and calls for campaign finance reform echo the Nazis' suppression of free speech; and that liberals, like their fascist forebears, dismiss the democratic…

Rejection of metaphor

Sun, 17 Jun 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Metaphorically Challenged : Terrible Mother on Offsprung.com âThat is an awesome metaphor,â? I said. Because it is. Itâs funny without the use of burning children. But it isnât accurate. John isnât on some emotional island where he canât understand what heâs doing. And he isnât trying to fight, really. He doesnât want to be inconvenienced…

Havel on intertextuality

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 00:00:00 GMT

CBC.ca Arts - Retired Czech leader Havel pens new play "Living in the world of political language was quite an inspiration" he said. "I try [in my play] to reflect the automatic political language, where you say one word to which other words are immediately added and the cluster [of words] then travels from one…

Science vs. social science of the environment

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 00:00:00 GMT

FT.com / Comment & analysis / Comment - Freedom, not climate, is at risk As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to…

Mis-entrenchment of codified blendings

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 00:00:00 GMT

The Newshoggers: Jeri Thompson - asset or albatross? [Part Two] However, thanks to a commenter at my place , I see by common definition "trophy wife" is indeed considered to be an insult. All I can say is that I didn't mean it as such. I define the term to simply mean a marriage where…

Hitchens vs Hitchens | the Daily Mail

Sun, 03 Jun 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Hitchens vs Hitchens | the Daily Mail If we are weak and poor, we can all summon up self-interested decency, behaving in a kind way, in public, towards those from whom we hope for decency in return. But as soon as we have the power to do evil, we generally do. What is to stop…

Unjustified blending and the threat of terrorism

Sun, 03 Jun 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Malfunctioning fax machine prints out bomb ClipArt, forces evacuation of area - Engadget In any normal town across America there are countless faxes sent and received which feature poorly chosen ClipArt: why then must a promotional fax like the one pictured above fail to print out correctly -- leaving only a picture of a bomb…

Negotiating 'lie'

Thu, 10 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT

On The Media: Transcript of "Secrets & Lies" (May 4, 2007) BOB GARFIELD: The issue in question was Saddam's aluminum tubes and whether they were meant for centrifuges to produce nuclear fuel. If, as you say, the administration briefed the Senate Intelligence Committee that it was uncertain about those tubes but then hid that uncertainty…

The analogical instinct

Tue, 08 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Comparison To Clinton Is Dismissed - washingtonpost.com Tom Ingram, who was an adviser to Fred D. Thompson 's 1994 Senate campaign and has talked to him about a potential 2008 presidential run, said that he thought the Royal race might be good for Republicans, but not because of gender or any similarity Royal had to…

Metaphor hypostasis as a cohesive device

Fri, 27 Apr 2007 00:00:00 GMT

RealClearPolitics - Articles - Is the War on Terror Over? Do we still need to fight a war on terror? The answer seems to be no for an increasing number in the West who are weary over Afghanistan and Iraq or complacent from the absence of a major attack on the scale of 9/11. The…

Blending a life: Personal narratives of public events

Thu, 26 Apr 2007 00:00:00 GMT

On The Media: Transcript of "Me is for Media" (April 20, 2007) BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I don't want to diminish the horrific experience that those people went through, but it did seem at times as if they were reading lines from a script, almost as if they'd been through all this before. THOMAS de ZENGOTITA…

Homicide attacks and the restrictions on mapping in blending

Thu, 26 Apr 2007 00:00:00 GMT

The following segment from the Wikipedia entry on suicide attack is a good example of how the restrictions on mapping in conceptual integration can be negotiated even "against the grain" of the "logic" of some of the basic propositional structures behind the conceptual frame. So, the argument against 'homicide bombing' correctly points out that the…

Folk theory of meaning has hypostasis of reference in the Imus controversy

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Imus's last outrage? - The Boston Globe Imus apologized for his latest remark and was suspended for two weeks. But this time, his job could be on the line, said John DePetro, a radio talk show host who was fired by WRKO after calling gubernatorial candidate Grace Ross a "fat lesbian." "As much as mine…

Evidencing negotiated frames: The Pelosi debate

Sat, 07 Apr 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Nancy Pelosi, Respectfully Maintaining Her Own Image - washingtonpost.com There are few images more discomforting than public figures thrust into foreign cultures and required to wear the host's traditional attire. Almost without exception the visitors tend to look smaller and more vulnerable. They evoke the uneasiness of children who have been dressed by a parent…

Framing the frames: The Gingrich gambit

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Think Progress Â» Gingrich: When I Said âLanguage Of Living In The Ghetto,â I Meant Hebrew (Or Maybe Yiddish) Newt Gingrich said this past weekend that the U.S. should abolish bilingual education so that people arenât speaking âthe language of living in a ghetto.â? But last night on Hannity & Colmes, Gingrich claimed his statement…

Negotiating vocabulary and the logic of analogy

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Politics, Lies, and 93 v. 8 - Swampland - TIME Brooksâs distinction is between two different conceptions of the word âpolitical.â? Or rather, like most nice clear distinctions, there actually is a spectrum of meaning. US Attorneys are supposed to be political in the sense that in performing their duties they reflect the policies of…

Text worlds, anaphora and syntactic structures as spandrels

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Politics, Lies, and 93 v. 8 - Swampland - TIME David Brooks has an excellent column today, and not for the usual reasons that liberals praise Brooks (and he drives conservatives crazy): because he comes halfway toward us. It’s because, in discussing the US Attorneys story, he nails a distinction that I, at least, was…

McJobs, the Dictionary Wars and Folk Theories of Meaning

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Golden Arches Wants 'McJob' Removed: McDonald's Targets the English McLanguage - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News McDonald's Corp. on Tuesday restarted its push to get the word "McJob" removed from dictionaries -- and has set its sights on the gold standard of lexicons, the Oxford English Dictionary. " Dictionaries are supposed to be paragons…

Negotiating metaphoric mappings in advertising

Sat, 10 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMT

The metaphoric mappings that structure most of our frames are usually seen as automatic. However, more often than not, they are negotiated through discourse prior to becoming fully blended (entrenched). This image is a great example of one such mapping negotiation done almost entirely visually. This Apple Lisa ad from the 1970s has two functions…

Opportunistic blending, semantic prosody and framing in politics debate

Sat, 10 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMT

MyDD :: Direct Democracy for People-Powered Politics Roger Ailes: "And it is true that Barack Obama is on the move. I don't know if it's true that President Bush called Musharraf and said, 'Why can't we catch this guy?'" [...]Obama is a terrorist. Ha ha ha. Ailes is clearly upset that his brand is being…

Sex and race on and beneath the surface of discourse

Fri, 16 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Why I had to quit the John Edwards campaign | Salon News Even before Donohue stepped in, various right-wing bloggers were obsessed with my gender and sexuality. As I noted at the time of my resignation, the majority of the hate mail I was receiving was from men, and almost all the e-mails made note…

From surface to depth and back in discourse: A case of semantic prosody

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT

OBAMA: We ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged and to which we have now spent $400 billion and has seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted . Michelle Malkin: Obama: Soldier deaths = "Wasted" lives I could go on, but it…

Discursive diglossia and American racial politics

Sun, 04 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Eugene Robinson - An Inarticulate Kickoff - washingtonpost.com What is it, exactly, that white people mean when they call a black person "articulate"? ... Biden explained Obama's appeal as a presidential candidate by calling him "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." ... It's interesting that Obama's…

Frame negotiation through popular culture frame hypostasis

Sun, 04 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Media Matters - Conservatives continue to use Fox's 24 to support hawkish policies conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham told host Bill O'Reilly: "The average American out there loves the show 24. OK? They love Jack Bauer. They love 24. In my mind that's close to a national referendum that it's OK to use tough…

Analogy as ritually rhetorical device and 9/11 symbolisms

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Was 9/11 really that bad? - Los Angeles Times Has the American reaction to the attacks in fact been a massive overreaction? Is the widespread belief that 9/11 plunged us into one of the deadliest struggles of our time simply wrong? If we did overreact, why did we do so? Does history provide any insight?…

Cummulative identity and failed assumptions on multiculturalism

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT

BBC NEWS | UK | Younger Muslims 'more political' Young Muslims are much more likely than their parents to be attracted to political forms of Islam, a think tank survey has suggested. Support for Sharia law, Islamic schools and wearing the veil is much stronger among younger Muslims, a poll for the centre-right Policy Exchange…

What 'Hillary' should have said: Indeterminacy of metaphor integration

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT

The Politico But it wasn't revealing because she was suggesting her husband is "evil and bad." It was revealing because -- asked about dealing with evil men like Osama bin Laden -- her mind seemed to go to her domestic enemies. It's absurd to suggest that she thinks Bill is evil like Osama. But Kenneth…

Cognitive foundations of civilizations

Mon, 22 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT

iTWire - A new 'iBook' from Google?: be afraid, be very afraid Google is plotting to do for books what the iPod has done for music: make them purchasable by download to a portable access device. Could civilisation as we know it be under threat? ... The news immediately lead Sunday Times commentator, Bryan Appleyard…

Death by analogy

Wed, 17 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT

'Hold Your Wee for a Wii' Death Shuts Down Show - Gameworld Network news story Ten employees have lost their jobs over the incident, and the radio show is permanently off the air. .... 28 year old Jennifer Strange was found dead in her Rancho Cordova home on Friday. A preliminary coroner's report indicated the…

Frame-relative assessments and globally warming terrorism

Wed, 17 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Hawking says climate change poses greater threat to humanity than terrorism - International Herald Tribune LONDON: Scientist Stephen Hawking described climate change Wednesday as a greater threat to the planet than terrorism. The interesting thing here is not so much that this clearly illogical comparison is being given any credence but that none of the…

Algorithms and everything

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT

digg - The Digg Comment Algorithm Everything in this world can be shown as a flowchart algorithm. This, of course, applies to the complex and not well researched field of “Digg comments“. Here’s my humble attempt to define an algorithm which should encompass all of the many possibilities of comment development on Digg. There are…

Sources of credibility and the results of education

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT

I got an A in Phallus 101 - Los Angeles Times The problem that the Young America's Foundation list, first issued in 1995, highlights isn't simply the hollowing-out of the traditional humanities and social sciences disciplines at colleges and their replacement by crude indoctrination sessions in whatever is ideologically fashionable — although that's a serious…

Images of language and learning in mavenry

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Limp language leaves kids with an awesome paucity of speech [Teenagers on which the author eavesdrops] They've got one all-purpose word -- "awesome" -- to cover everything from mild approval to exhilaration. When they're indignant or angry, they have to fall back on clichés -- including a few tired four-letter words. ... Today, teens aren't…

New Atheism and old religions or the other way around?

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT

On The Media: Transcript of "God No!" (December 15, 2006) In response to the global challenge posted by religious extremism, a small group of impassioned atheists has taken a new approach. They target the tolerant with both reason and ridicule. "The New Atheists", as they were dubbed by Gary Wolf in a recent article in…

Libraries, freedom and the limits of free-market electoral logistics

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT

OpinionJournal - Leisure & Arts A software program developed by SirsiDynix, an Alabama-based library-technology company, informs librarians of which books are circulating and which ones aren't. If titles remain untouched for two years, they may be discarded--permanently. "We're being very ruthless," boasts library director Sam Clay. ... But this raises a fundamental question: What are…

Limits of social cognition research as a basis of policy

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Foreign Policy: Why Hawks Win Why are hawks so influential? The answer may lie deep in the human mind . People have dozens of decision-making biases, and almost all favor conflict rather than concession. This is an interesting blend of folk psychology and 'professional' psychology. The first part if completely within the realm of sensationalist…

Logic and conceptual frames

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Amazon Online Reader : Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage p. 82 The sexual double standard was so completely accepted by Romans that the educator Quintilian used the notion of a sexual single standard as the perfect illustration of an illogical proposition : "If a relationship between a mistress…

Elites as maintainers of conservative values

Mon, 01 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT

BBC - Radio 4 - Today - 20006 Vote The Hunting Act with 52.8% Dangerous Dogs Act: 1.6% Serious Organised Crime and Police Act : 6.2% Human Rights Act: 6.1% European Communities Act : 29.7% The Act of Settlement: 3.6% Radio 4 is listened to by British political and cultural elites and could be thought…

Marriage and the impact of scholarship on society

Mon, 01 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT

BBC - Radio 4 Woman's Hour -Has Love Conquered Marriage? For the first time ever, married-couple households are in the minority both in the UK and the US, outnumbered by single-person households and cohabiting couples. Whilst many blame the stresses of modern life and the failure of couples to invest enough time in their relationships…

New societies and old societies

Thu, 28 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT

TIME.com: Time's Person of the Year: You -- Dec. 25, 2006 -- Page 1 America loves its solitary geniuses—its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses—but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working…

Free Market Doctrines: From analogy to ritual

Sun, 17 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT

A Renaissance of the Commons | Nick Lewis: The Blog Cultures, like people, can run out of ideas. They can exhaust themselves in the face of events and ideas they can no longer predict, explain or control. When they do, they revert to the repetitive assertion of the simplest and most soothing of their founding…

Left Behind Games: The moral frames of evangelical Christianity

Sun, 17 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Left Behind Games The storyline in the game begins just after the Rapture has occurred â when all adult Christians, all infants, and many children were instantly swept home to Heaven and off the Earth by God. The remaining population â those who were left behind â are then poised to make a decision at…

Framing the Civil War

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT

On The Media: Transcript of "Paper Wait" (December 1, 2006) BROOKE GLADSTONE: So why not then stick to âsectarian violenceâ?? What changed? BILL KELLER: You know, itâs kind of emerged as an issue, and then last Sunday we ran a story about one of our reporters in Baghdad, Ed Wong, who surveyed a number of…

Image schemas blends and new technologies

Sun, 03 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Column by PC Magazine: Our Modern World—Weirder by the Minute DIGITAL CAMERA ARM STRETCH. Okay, let's get to the meat of this essay. Perhaps the weirdest societal change has to do with digital cameras and the practice of framing shots in the preview window by holding the camera out in front of yourself. Even ten…

Images of cummulative causation and a theory of education

Wed, 29 Nov 2006 00:00:00 GMT

November 17, 2006, Hour Two: The Family that Couldn't Sleep / The Artist and the Mathematician Starting in the 1930s, Nicolas Bourbaki published dozens of papers, becoming a famous mathematician. There was just one problem: he didn't exist. Join Ira in this hour on Science Friday for a conversation with Amir Aczel about the genius…

On making sense of

Wed, 29 Nov 2006 00:00:00 GMT

On The Media: Transcript of "The Power of Myth" (November 24, 2006) ANA MARIE COX: Well, I think that Joe is a provocative thinker and a great reporter. He was really early out of the gate t rying to put a narrative around this election . There was a very unusual mid-term. There were races…

Education reform, memory, skill and secondary socialization

Sat, 04 Nov 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Malaysian National News Agency :: BERNAMA PEKAN, Nov 4 Bernama -- Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak has called for the countrys memory-based education system to be replaced with one that promotes mind development so that the students become more creative and critical. The Deputy Prime Minister said the education system was currently directed towards memorisation…

Accepted, the review - Images of the educational process in popular culture

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT

From the Wikipedia entry : Accepted is a 2006 comedy motion picture about a group of high school seniors who, after being rejected from all colleges to which they had applied, create their own college. ... At one point Bartleby [the main character] wants to end the charade before it begins, but is overcome with…

Wikipedia - the Original Encyclopedia

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT

BBC - Radio 4 In Our Time - Home Page the mammoth undertaking that was the Encyclopédie – one of its editors, D’Alembert, described its mission as giving an overview of knowledge, as if gazing down on a vast labyrinth of all the branches of human knowledge, observing where they separate or unite and even…

Of dicks and doves: Team America cognitive semireview

Sun, 29 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT

YouTube - Team America Finale Speech PhatGun (3 months ago) HAHAHAHAHHAHAHA SO TRUE!!! Tomster22 (19 hours ago) Neo-Cons = Dicks, Peacenicks = Pussies, Islamo-Fascists = Assholes AerisRocks (2 months ago) lol! Thats a great metaphor they used...assholes want us to shit on everything and dicks fuck assholes lmfao, great scene. This post has been brewing…

Tom Waits and the surface of text

Sun, 29 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT

ANTI- Album - Orphans What’s Orphans? I don’t know. Orphans is a dead end kid driving a coffin with big tires across the Ohio River wearing welding goggles and a wife beater with a lit firecracker in his ear. Just like true mythopoeic narrative is returning to its roots through TV series after a brief…

Trouble in Ambridge: Optical illusions and hypostesized narratives

Fri, 27 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT

BBC - Radio 4 - Feedback Love quadrangle Things have been getting very steamy in the cowshed at Brookfield lately and Archers listeners who've written to Feedback talk of sensationalism and complain that some of the main characters seem to have had personality transplants. After David Archer's flirtation with his old flame Sophie, his wife…

Revenge of the Nerds (1984) - Review 1

Tue, 24 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Revenge of the Nerds (1984) They've been laughed at, picked on and put down. But now it's time for the odd to get even! I decided it's time to start keeping track of my frequent encounters with popular culture - in other words, I'm adding a new category: Reviews . I'm going to try to…

Analogies in public discourse: Negotiation of Frames and Hypostasis of Channels

Sat, 21 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Buzz Out Loud: CNET's podcast of indeterminate length on CNET.com [ click here to listen to clip ] recently featured this fascinating discussion of analogies. A caller suggests an analogy and the hosts discuss both the aptness of the analogy itself as well as the medium of analogies for elucidating certain issues. The combination of…

Localized textual performance in everyday narrative

Sat, 21 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT

14 WFIE, The Tri-State's News Leader: Manhunt Ends, Baby Found Safe A fugitive couple who hid in a camper are now behind bars. The kidnapped baby is safe, and the funeral for the social worker who cared the baby is over. It's been a busy and emotional 24 hours. What a great little example of…

YouTube of the 1890s

Sat, 21 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT

BBC - Radio 4 - Archive Hour - 21 October 2006 Matthew Parris uncovers the remarkable story of the Electrophone, the first sound broadcasting service to operate in Britain. Electrophone (information system) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The name Electrophone was used for a telephone-distributed audio system which operated in the United Kingdom between 1895…

Psychological violence, cuts, bruises and world peace

Fri, 20 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Evening News 24 - Cyclist attacked by An N&N spokesman said: âAccording to sources this gang has been doing this for a while - stopping people at the bridge and demanding money to get across. âBut this was the first time they have actually attacked anyone and he has been not only harmed, but also…

Is mathematics an empirical science?

Thu, 19 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Maths has the reputation of a a 'pure' discipline which sets both the practice and essence of mathematics apart from all other fields of inquiry. Mathematicians often use this 'axiom' to remind other academics of their superiority. Many people mention Gödel's incompleteness theorems as a proof to the contrary but given that his is a…

Local grammars and space exploration

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT

One small word is one giant sigh of relief for Armstrong âThatâs one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,â? they heard him say as he dropped from the ladder of his spacecraft to make the first human footprint on the lunar surface. But from the moment he said it, and for 37…

Frame negotiation on the media

Tue, 03 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT

On The Media-- The War in Iraq = Iraqi Civil War ETHAN BRONNER: Our policy is not to label it a civil war. We recognize and describe elements of civil war in what's going on in Iraq. We tend to call it sectarian conflict, sectarian violence. Civil war, to us, feels like a stage of…

Accuracy of metaphor and debates

Sat, 16 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

On The Media-- Eau-Stained Wretch BOB GARFIELD:: He describes another perfume as, quote, "sweeping over you like the silent, massive shadow of an Airbus A340, and yet another is "like looking down into a well of cool, black water." I told Burr he had a real knack for turning a phrase, but that I had…

Scenarios behind education

Thu, 24 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Bearing witness to a teacher's task - The Boston Globe Many people believe they know what makes effective schools because they have attended school. This is akin to saying I am a physician because I've been in a hospital. I challenge any of this group to spend a week teaching in a public school classroom…

Scenarios behind technology and education debate

Tue, 22 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT

The Books Google Could Open The nation's colleges and universities should support Google's controversial project to digitize great libraries and offer books online. It has the potential to do a lot of good for higher education in this country. ... This powerful tool will make less well-known written works or hard-to-find research materials more accessible…

Framing in perceptions of news bias

Fri, 11 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT

On The Media-- I Know You Are But What Am I? SHANKAR VEDANTAM: [The study] just showed six television clips of the conflict to 144 observers, some of whom were pro-Israeli and some of whom were pro-Arab and some of whom were neutral. And pro-Israelis found that the clips had an astonishing number of anti-Israel…

Jazz in America/Classical in Europe: Functional equivalence

Fri, 11 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT

NPR : Roundtable: The Future of Jazz Radio News & Notes with Ed Gordon, August 10, 2006 · Some experts say the jazz radio format is in crisis. Some of the few stations devoted to jazz may soon change format. Guests: Suzan Jenkins, president of Jazz Alliance International, an industry group; Tom Thomas, president of…

Gender models and types of evidence for them

Wed, 02 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT

MercuryNews.com | 07/31/2006 | Internet raises gender gap This gender gap, which affects everything from the marketing of new technology to attracting more women for engineering careers, is elegantly illustrated in an academic study just published by a researcher from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. Eszter Hargittai tested and interviewed 51 women and 49 men…

Values and statements about education

Mon, 24 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT

BostonHerald.com - Opinion & Editorial: Education studies show: $$ wasted on them Choice, competition and freedom are core values that define what we are about as a nation. The Bush administration proposal to appropriate $100 million in opportunity scholarships for poor kids in failing schools is a needed program. Let’s use our limited taxpayer dollars…

Language awareness as part of linguistic competence

Sun, 09 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT

'Google' becomes an official verb - ZDNet UK News Though you may have been "googling" people for years, the verb you were using was technically slang, until recently. In fact, many regularly used tech words are just now getting the official stamp of approval from English-language dictionaries. On Thursday, Merriam-Webster announced its latest update, and…

Rationality and immigration

Tue, 23 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT

English is Spoken Here - Yahoo! News The second dumbest statement in the debate over Senate legislation establishing English as the national language came from Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.), who said it was needlessly divisive. ADVERTISEMENT Wait. A law that unifies a country under a single language is divisive? What kind of logic is that?…

Limes Americanum - the symbolic and the practical in US foreign relations

Mon, 22 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Czech lobby in Washington takes a second seat to Poland - 22-05-2006 - Radio Prague There are three criteria that countries must fulfil in order to qualify for the proposed amendment to the U.S. Visa Waiver Program. The first is membership in the European Union; secondly, they must be allies in the war in Iraq…

Linguistic nationalism and the USA

Sat, 20 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT

CNN.com - 'National' or 'common'? Senate ponders what to call English - May 19, 2006 WASHINGTON (AP) -- Whether English is America's "national language" or its national "common and unifying language" was a question dominating the Senate immigration debate. The Senate first voted 63-34 Thursday to designate English as the "national language" after lawmakers who…

Role of examples in social debate and research

Wed, 17 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Cartoon Warfare (Ann Applebaum, WP) In recent years "the personal is political," a phrase whose origins are lost deep in the history of the women's movement, has among other things come to mean that just about anyone is allowed to transform her personal experience into a political program. Writing about oneself has a long history…

Beginning of History

Sun, 14 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Liberalism and Western style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today these two concepts have failed. Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems. When Fukuyama was toying with the Hegelian notion of the…

Feminism as Islam

Thu, 11 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Feminismus jako islÃ¡m MuslimovÃ© majÃ obecnÄ rÃ¡di feministky asi stejnÄ jako feministky muslimy. PÅesto je feminismus jako islÃ¡m. ProÄ?? ProtoÅ¾e: a) islÃ¡m je hlubokÃ½m a vÃ½znamnÃ½m myÅ¡lenkovÃ½m hnutÃm s ustavenou, zajÃmavou tradicÃ. b) islÃ¡m je pestrÃ½ a mnohorozmÄrnÃ½, nabÃzÃ spoustu cest a smÄrÅ¯. c) islÃ¡m klade otÃ¡zky, kterÃ© nikdo jinÃ½ neklade, a bez nÄj by…

Extension of 'diversity' as a conservationist metaphor

Thu, 27 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT

CBC Radio | Quirks & Quarks | April 8, 2006 Heading into the 21st Century, our planet is undergoing rapid change. Species are disappearing daily, and along with them human languages and cultures. Terry Glavin, a conservationist and writer, set out to document these changes in his new book, Waiting for the Macaws. Along the…

Research-generated assonant symmetries, equal gender rights and global sexual satisfaction

Thu, 27 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT

NPR : Global Sex Survey: Satisfied in the West A groundbreaking international sex survey reveals that couples in Western countries are the most sexually satisfied, while countries in the East appear to be less satisfied. The reporter commented that it is ironic, that in societies where men were the dominant gender, they also tended to…

Feminism and computer gaming

Mon, 24 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Wired News: How Lara Croft Steals Hearts I think young boy gamers loved Lara for reasons that were considerably stranger. They weren't just ogling her: They were identifying with her. Playing the role of a hot, sexy woman in peril -- surrounded by violence on all sides -- was, unexpectedly, a totally electric experience for…

Cadences and harmonies of verbal and dramatic narratives

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Several years before his death, the famous Estonian semiotician Yuriy Lotman came to Prague and the thing that I still remember from his talk is an admonition that boundaries are the places to study because that's the most interesting phenomena happen (or come to the surface) at the border between two stereotypes (my words not…

Periodicity of nationalist conservatism: A hypothesis to be tested

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I was just listening to the UK Prime Minister's Question Time. I don't do it very often, because the questions and answers are predictable in content and not particularly informative, but maybe I should tune in more often to get a sense of the tone of the exchange. As I was listening, I was struck…

Multiple perspectives-models-stories in fiction and science

Tue, 24 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

AfterEllen.com - The L Word's Vanishing Bisexual The L Wordâs representation of bisexuality reflects popular and sometimes opposing ideas about bisexuality. One belief--represented best on the series by Jenny--is that those who identify as bisexual are merely experimenting with their sexuality before they choose to identify as strictly heterosexual or homosexual, thus suggesting that a…

Geena Davis and the importance of individual role-model narratives

Tue, 17 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

CNN.com - Quotes from the Golden Globes - Jan 16, 2006 "As I was coming in, I felt a little tug at my skirt. And I looked, and there was a little girl maybe 8 or 10 in her first party dress, and she said, 'Because of you I want to be president someday.' And…

Semantic prosody of web design

Tue, 17 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Technology News: E-Commerce: Study: Poor Web Design Alienates Customers One twentieth of a second. That's about how long it takes for a Web site Get Linux or Windows Managed Hosting Services with Industry Leading Fanatical Support. to make a first impression on an Internet user, according to researchers at a Canadian university, whose findings could…

Prejudice, shared meanings, local grammars and Google as a resource for research

Mon, 16 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

The Prejudice Map The Prejudice Map According to Google, people in the world are known for... Here's an interesting 'mash up' of Google's API that supposedly answers the question above. It uses a very simple Google query as in http://www.google.com/search?q="germans+are+known+for+*" to create a graphical overview of the different 'prejudices' about various cultures in the world…

Franklin and the complexities of American national identity

Sun, 15 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

January 13, 2006, Science Friday = Franklin at 300 Franklin as inventor, socialite and statesman, and take a look at the Tercentenary Exhibition in his honor, now open in Philadelphia. America is often said to be an experiment in new national identity (or something along those lines). However, any closer examination of American national identity…

Wired News: Military Women Can Hack It

Fri, 13 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Wired News: Military Women Can Hack It Female soldiers have long fought off perceptions that their bodies just aren't equipped to handle the rigors of training and warfare. But a decade's worth of research suggests that women are hardly as fragile as critics once thought. A new study by military researchers found that many assumptions…

Self-organization of iconic linguistic items

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

The Aargh Page # Not surpisingly, "argh" is much more frequent than any of the alternatives, and the items with fewer 'a's or 'r's are more frequent than their longer neighbors. # However, there are high-frequency islands , even way out in the long-word planes. For example, "a17r23gh" (17,23) occurs in 171 pages, even though…

Nature of the predictions genre

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

On The Media-- NAMING RIGHT The key variables that differentiated the titles that had been number-one bestsellers from the titles that had failed to be were whether the title was literal or figurative, the word type of the first word, although it was interesting that the word type of the second word didn't matter, and…

News reporting as a cognitive (speech) act

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

ABC News: Sharon Reportedly Moves One of His Hands The headline is the only thing of interest here. It is an example of several things. On the one hand, it shows how easily a person's personal tragedy can be abstracted away from the larger symbolism (Terry Shiavo last year and Charles Kennedy this are other…

Public interest, public interestedness and the self-organization of need

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

ABC News: Sharon Reportedly Moves One of His Hands One headline, two blog posts. What value! There seems to be a fine line between what is in the public interest and what the public is interested in. Personally, I find every mention of the story compelling but its information content is of no consequence to…

Social hypostasis of linguistic items

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

The GIF Pronunciation Page The GIF graphics file format was invented by CompuServe in 1987. In the years since, a debate has been raging as to the correct way to pronounce "GIF": like "jif", or with a hard 'g' as in "gift" as a majority of Mac users seem to prefer. With this page I…

Transformation of symbols across cultural borders

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

NPR : Muslim Migrants, 'Embracing the Infidel' Author Behzad Yaghmaian spent two years traveling with Muslim migrants and collected their stories on safe houses, bribes, police custody, and human trafficking. He talks about his book, Embracing the Infidel: Stories of Muslim Migrants on the Journey West. An interesting podcast about a book illustrating the transformation…

Urban Legends as examples of folk theories and cognitive models

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Urban Legends Reference Pages: College (The Unsolvable Math Problem) This legend combines one of the ultimate academic wish-fulfillment fantasies — a student not only proves himself the smartest one in his class, but also bests his professor and every other scholar in his field of study — with a "positive thinking" motif which turns up…

City as metaphor for visual aspects online design

Fri, 06 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

A List Apart: Articles: Thinking Outside the Grid Because Iâd been thinking about this article for some time, the aerial view of these cities struck me as an apt metaphor for grid design on the web. With todayâs technologies and techniques, we are free to create grid designsâor we can choose to break out of…

Discover Music through The Music Genome Project by Pandora

Fri, 06 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

There are two analogies in this post! What great value. Discover Music through The Music Genome Project by Pandora Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes…

Florida high court kills school voucher program

Fri, 06 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Florida high court kills school voucher program In a ruling expected to reverberate through battles over school choice in many states, the Florida Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a voucher program for students attending failing schools, saying the state Constitution bars Florida from using taxpayer money to finance a private alternative to the public…

Are printed books dead? God I hope so!

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

iRex : The iLiad Digital written content can now be read as easily and conveniently as the printed word on paper. The iRex Technologies E-reader provides true reading comfort, flexibility and versatility. It can be read outdoors, in sunshine or shadow. As well as reading you can also write comments, mark or underline sections, for…

Analogies and blends - new category old ideas

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I thought, I might add another category for the new year. analogies. This springs from two separate and seemingly conflicting tendencies in my intellectual life. One is to expose potentially harmful and disparate analogies and the other is to create new analogies to illuminate similarities otherwise unnoticed. I use these strategies in teaching, popular writing…

Conceptualizing gender differences in behavior

Thu, 29 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

ABC News: Male Domination of the Internet Is Over, Study Finds The study says 68 percent of men and 66 percent of women now go online. Since women make up a larger portion of the population, that means they outnumber men in cyberspace. ... Although a similar percentage of men and women use the Internet…

Towards a cognitive morphology of the folktale

Thu, 29 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Propp and other formalists had many things figured out quite right. Then the structuralists came and elevated emergent properties to the level of meaning creation. This post is an analogy in the sense that it compares the idea of the 'morphology of the folktale' but takes the source domain from cognitive morphology rather than traditional…

Complexities of representation of women in traditional narrative

Sun, 25 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Christmas season's TV brings a lot of classic stories back to people's narrative environment. Many of these contain complex and multilayered representations of humanity's quest for self-understanding. These narratives play other roles, as well, connected to the psychological well-being of individuals. They are broadcast in moments of communal and familial rituals designed to promote group…

Creation of meaning and music analogies

Sun, 25 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Now, here's an analogy that occured to me as I was pondering the indeterminacy of the meaning of some technical term in social science (I think it was metaphor). But it occurred to me that creating meaning (in the Brunerian sense) is very much like playing certain instruments (such as slide guitar). With slide guitar…

New category: Feminism

Sun, 25 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

I realized that I needed another category dealing with issues related to the position of women in society and cognition. I decided to call it feminism in protest against the frequent dilution of the concept by labeling it 'gender studies' or 'women's lib'. Now, I very much agree that to understand the way our brains…

Individuality and culturality of psychotherapeutic needs

Tue, 20 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

BBC - Radio 4 - All in the Mind It's just under a year since the Tsunami devastated coastal communities around the Indian Ocean . Raj reports from his recent visit to the Tamil Nadu region of India with the charity Action Aid, where he met some of the people affected, and observed the work…

Parents' role in education - framing in practice

Tue, 20 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

BBC - Radio 4 - Woman's Hour -Phone-in: parents and schools A recent survey from the Department of Education shows that parents are increasingly unhappy with their local schools. Satisfaction levels have fallen by 10% during the past year and more than half of parents saw no change in the quality of schooling or thought…

Determinism and evidentiary value of belief based on personal experience

Mon, 19 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

BBC - Five Live - Mark Kermode film reviews included this and last week an interesting exchange. First, the reviewer claimed that watching the film The March of the Penguin makes it possible to assume some level of intelligent design (while criticising some American views stating essentially the same thing). Predictably, in the subsequent program…

Expertise and suitability for policy responsibilities

Mon, 19 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Another great interview on onthemedia.org. This one dealing with the reliability of expert predictions (in the media and in general). On The Media-- THE GUESSING GAME PHILIP TETLOCK: When an expert has very, very strong opinions on an issue, when the expert places a high value on simplicity and has little patience with contradictions or…

New home

Sun, 18 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

My Week in Thought has found a new home right here.

CADAAD - Conference on Discourse Analysis

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

I am coorganizing a conference Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines (CADAAD) to be held at the University of East Anglia on June 29-30, 2006. The first call for papers goes out today. More on http://discourse.uea.ac.uk .

Consequences of video games - and the cognitive aspects of data interpretation

Wed, 14 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

The Video Game Revolution: "Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked" by Henry Jenkins | PBS The availability of video games has led to an epidemic of youth violence. According to federal crime statistics, the rate of juvenile violent crime in the United States is at a 30-year low. Researchers find that people serving time for…

My Week In Thought and Hermeneutic Suspicion

Wed, 14 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

My Week In Thought This PBS essay neatly summarizes almost all the arguments I would ever make - or in some cases have made - in defense of video gaming. OK, there may be a fine line between vanity and self-referentiality but here we go. It struck me how powefully I was affected by this…

There's no Wikipedia entry for 'moral responsibility' | The Register

Mon, 12 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

There's no Wikipedia entry for 'moral responsibility' | The Register The first, and the most immediately absurd of these two defenses, is that since nothing at all can be trusted, er, "definitively", then Wikipedia can't be trusted either. This is curious, to say the least, as it points everyone's expectations firmly downwards. If you recall…

Perspective and data in historical analysis

Sun, 11 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Introduction Imagine that two millenia or so in the future, literary experts attempt to collect the glories of our literature. Most of our paper writings have crumbled into dust or used for kindling; all our digital files are long gone or indecipherable. English is a dead language and many of the cultural references are a…

Online scholarship

Sat, 10 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

"I've read the internet, and it's rubbish" - a comedian on a BBC Radio 4 show. In this essay, I will diagram exactly how this happened, but also include some speculation as to how things could have turned out differently, though it is no way intended as a work of "fan fiction". By highlighting how…

Complexities of women's rights

Thu, 08 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

BBC - Radio 4 - Today Programme Listen Again David Cameron promised to tackle the lack of women MPs from his party. What can he do? Audio here An interesting discussion of three conservative MPs each arguing a different position. 1. women shortlists are necessary, 2. more older women (of non-child bearing age) should be…

Conceptual integration and the creation of news

Thu, 08 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

On The Media-- OFF-YEAR COVERAGE The President gave a major speech on Wednesday, and TV news reacted. For every story there's a formula, whether earthquake, missing child, sex scandal or State of the Union, but this event was none of those. So the anchors reached into their bags and pulled out the mode that fit…

Cultural images of the powerless

Thu, 08 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

One article, two thoughts . Good going! TPM Online Article One of the things you notice, both as a skeptic and as an American in the UK , is that according to the British media â and a lot of non-media folks, too, I might add â pretty much all foolishness comes from the US…

How we should judge torture - Los Angeles Times

Thu, 08 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

How we should judge torture - Los Angeles Times Naturally, human rights groups are appalled by the suggestion that harsh treatment is ever justified. Similarly, blogger Andrew Sullivan dismisses the ticking time bomb as a "red herring" and argues that "you cannot raise or lower the moral status of mass murderers with respect to torture…

Reliability of common wisdom - models and power

Thu, 08 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

TPM Online Article So: whom to believe? There seems to be no doubt, as these authors and recent research suggest, that there's a genetic component to obesity. Nor is there any doubt that obesity, like alcoholism before it, seems to bring out the self-righteous moralist in people; fat means you've been greedy, gluttonous, or slothful…

Salient cases and social causality

Thu, 08 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

The great 'On the Media' had an interview with 'the devil' - Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard. But he did bring up an interesting point regarding the actual influence of the magazine in particular and the media in general. On The Media-- OLD STANDARD BROOKE GLADSTONE:: What do you think the world would be…

Navigating the 'human terrain' - Los Angeles Times

Wed, 07 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Navigating the 'human terrain' - Los Angeles Times THE U.S. ARMED forces have a problem. They have the technical capability to hit any target on the planet. But which targets should they hit? Unfortunately, our enemies in the war on terrorism don't operate tanks or warships that we could blow up. They lurk in the…

Universal preschool's and cause and effect in education

Wed, 07 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Universal preschool's big payoff - Los Angeles Times IT HAS LONG been an American article of faith that early schooling for poor children can work wonders. A word-rich classroom gives poor 3 and 4-year-old kids the basic tools for learning and for sharpening their talents for solving problems. A nurturing environment teaches children, many of…

Anthropology.net | Beyond bones & stones

Mon, 05 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Anthropology.net | Beyond bones & stones Anthropology is defined as the study of humankind and their origins throughout different places and times. The study focuses in detail on cultural, biological, linguistic, and archaeological research. Anthropology.net's mission statement is to expand understanding and appreciation of humanity by way of creating a cohesive online community of individuals…

'Gay weddings' become law in UK

Mon, 05 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

BBC NEWS | UK | 'Gay weddings' become law in UK Hundreds of gay couples are preparing to form civil partnerships in the coming weeks as the law changes after decades of campaigning. Finally! But a discussion on the Today programme, well, today, was interesting in its focus on the word marriage. It turns out…

Kazakhstan and the principles of democracy

Mon, 05 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

World News Article | Reuters.co.uk Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbayev won re-election by a landslide on Monday, official preliminary results showed, but the opposition in the former Soviet republic alleged vote-rigging. The result means Nazarbayev will rule for another seven years in the vast Central Asian state, a reassuring signal to big oil investors in the…

Authors and texts

Sun, 04 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Narnia's lion really is Jesus - Sunday Times - Times Online AN unpublished letter from the novelist C S Lewis has provided conclusive proof of the Christian message in his Narnia childrenâs books. In the letter [to be published in a new collection of Lewis' letters], sent to a child fan in 1961, Lewis writes…

Common sense vs.hypocrisy

Sun, 04 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Be realistic about death penalty: PM - National Breaking News - Breaking News 24/7 - NEWS.com.au "But I think we have to be a little bit realistic in suggesting that the Government should complain as loudly as a death sentence being carried out on Saddam Hussein as we did in relation to Nguyen [Australian citizen…

Identity and modularity

Sun, 04 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

news @ nature.com - Mind trick 'whittles the waist' - Illusion helps scientists to spot brain regions that shape our body image. Scientists have harnessed a perceptual trick known as the 'Pinocchio illusion' to help pinpoint the brain regions that control how we view our bodies. They made the discovery by scanning the brains of…

Challenges facing feminism in post-communist Czech Republic

Sat, 03 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

iDNES.cz - NovÃ½ zÃ¡kon pÅesnÄ urÄ?uje, co je sexuÃ¡lnÃ obtÄÅ¾ovÃ¡nÃ NovÃ½ trestnÃ zÃ¡kon, kterÃ½ pÅijali poslanci tento tÃ½den, zavÃ¡dÃ trestnÃ½ Ä?in, kterÃ½ pÅesnÄ definuje sexuÃ¡lnÃ obtÄÅ¾ovÃ¡nÃ. Od ledna 2007 bude za sexuÃ¡lnÃ obtÄÅ¾ovÃ¡nÃ bude hrozit od 6 mÄsÃcÅ¯ do 8 let vÄzenÃ. ... New law outlines clearer guidelines for the police and prosecutors and introduces…

Digitizing literature and styles of reading

Sat, 03 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Digitizing literature - The Boston Globe But the act of reading a great book requires something of the reader: time. A book must be ''read," it can't be background noise nor can it be understood from a page. If books are reduced to just another streaming media, how does an author foreshadow an event or…

Fiction as a resource for academic inquiry

Sat, 03 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

John Grishamm, The Broker Sure, this is a great book that fulfills all the prerequisite of its genre in a way that allows the reader to probe some of the possibilities of depth. The writing is taut (although I've only listened to it as a book on tape) and reminds me of the masters: Elmore…

A Man's Right to Choose - A Feminist Issue?

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

A Man's Right to Choose - New York Times NOBODY is arguing that we should let my friend who impregnated his girlfriend off the hook. If you play, you must pay. But if you pay, you should get some say. If a father is willing to legally commit to supporting and raising the child himself…

Conceptual consequences

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Nature or nurture? - The Boston Globe Well, it turns out that the more you believe homosexuality is innate, the more accepting you are of gay rights. A full 79 percent of people who think human beings are born with a sexual orientation support gay rights, including civil unions or marriage equality. But only 22…

Culture wars and personal identity

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Conservative U. -- in cyberspace - Los Angeles Times FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, conservatives saw a country that was split about 50-50 between the left and the right, as it is today and will continue to be for a long time. But the country's main cultural institutions were nearly all liberal — making conservatives rage and…

Death penalty: Time to rethink? :: The Daily Herald, Provo Utah

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Death penalty: Time to rethink? :: The Daily Herald, Provo Utah Capital punishment does send a message that society will not tolerate brutal murders. Some killers, certainly, would kill again if given the chance. Even in prison, many sociopaths pose a threat to others. Death may be the only way to ensure that their criminal…

Why is the 'new' UK drive toward synthetic phonics ridiculous

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

BBC NEWS | Education | Primary reading set for overhaul The way children are taught to read in primary schools in England needs to be changed, says a government review. It has backed the method synthetic phonics, which teaches children the sounds of letters and combination of letters before they move onto books. ... Many…

Some remarks on individualism and collectivism

Wed, 30 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

BBC - Thought for the Day, 29 November 2005 Should the aid workers [recently kidnapped] still have been in Iraq? I was struck yesterday by the different perspective of those commenting on the kidnapping. The spokesman for Care International, another aid agency, was quite clear. For him, the answer was "No". His priority in a…

Why school achievement isn't reaching the poor - The Boston Globe

Wed, 30 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Why school achievement isn't reaching the poor - The Boston Globe Other research in places like Dallas and Houston that show how high-poverty students are so much more likely to receive ineffective teachers repeatedly confirm how the nation's school children suffer from a ''crushing impact of maldistribution" of teachers, according to the Education Trust. In…

Labor's Lost Story

Tue, 29 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

A column about labor relations and automotive job losses. Labor's Lost Story Almost everybody right of center sees the job losses as inevitable, the result of the American auto industry's failure to meet foreign competition and the "excessively" generous wages, health benefits and, especially, retirement programs negotiated by Reuther's union. The believers in inevitability inevitably…

Terror's stealth weapon: women - Los Angeles Times

Tue, 29 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Terror's stealth weapon: women - Los Angeles Times The stereotype exploited by terrorists is that women are gentle, submissive and nonviolent. Women evade most terrorist profiles because they are perceived as wives and mothers, victims of war-torn societies, not bombers. But terrorist organizations are increasingly employing women to carry out the most deadly attacks. Based…

Managing social processes vs. managing the context of social processes

Mon, 28 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

The Very Foundation of Conservatism - New York Times The Olin Foundation's leaders understood that success is often unplanned, and so they focused on creating the conditions for success rather than thrusting a set of detailed agendas and goals upon grant recipients. Nobody, for example, expected that Allan Bloom's "Closing of the American Mind" would…

Real literacy?

Mon, 28 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Killing the written word by snippets - Los Angeles Times Students are trading in books for search-and-seizure learning on the Internet, and real literacy is getting lost along the way. ... One memorable freshman sagely informed me that people shouldn't be reading entire volumes these days anyway. ... Many of this generation are aliterate —…

Speed of technological progress and social effects

Mon, 28 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

iDNES.cz - Å est Å¡kÅ¯dcÅ¯, kteÅÃ zaruÄ?enÄ zniÄ?Ã vÃ¡Å¡ poÄ?ÃtaÄ? Pokud nenastane zvrat v pouÅ¾itÃ½ch technologiÃch, za 15 let budou procesory a grafickÃ© Ä?ipy vyzaÅovat na centimetr Ä?vereÄ?nÃ½ stejnÃ© teplo jako sluneÄ?nÃ povrch. Now here's an interesting throwaway line in an article about protecting hardware: "Unless there is a change in the technologies used, in…

There's no 'good' divorce - The Boston Globe

Mon, 28 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

There's no 'good' divorce - The Boston Globe Many experts and parents embrace the idea, confident that it's not divorce itself that harms children but simply the way that parents divorce. If divorced parents stay involved with their child and don't fight with each other, they say, then children will be fine. There's only one…

Models in professional knowledge

Sun, 27 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Unexpected countenance of change - The Boston Globe SOMEONE, a psychiatrist, discouragingly once said that people don't change very much, but the little ways they change, when they do change, are enormous. It seemed a dour but accurate assessment. It was practical wisdom -- the kind someone would acquire after being in the business many…

Discrepancies in Testing

Sat, 26 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Students Ace State Tests, but Earn D's From U.S. - New York Times A comparison of state test results against the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal test mandated by the No Child Left Behind law, shows that wide discrepancies between the state and federal findings were commonplace. In Mississippi, 89 percent of…

"Intellectual defense of xenophobia"

Sat, 26 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

www.lidovky.cz - IntelektuÃ¡lnÃ obrana xenofobie Podle Huntingtona dezinterpretovali liberÃ¡lnÃ multikulturalistÃ© 70. a 80. let povahu Ameriky, kdyÅ¾ ji lÃÄ?ili jako kulturnÄ otevÅenÃ½ prostor vymezenÃ½ pouze univerzÃ¡lnÃmi zÃ¡sadami lidskÃ½ch prÃ¡v a demokracie. Na rozdÃl od identit evropskÃ½ch nÃ¡rodÅ¯, kterÃ© jsou uzavÅenÃ½m dÄdictvÃm minulosti, byla podle nich identita Ameriky otevÅenÃ¡ do budoucnosti - mÄla totiÅ¾ povstÃ¡vat ze…

The American Dream and varieties of national self-esteem

Fri, 25 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Replant the American Dream When I lived abroad, Thanksgiving was always my favorite holiday. It was a chance to scrounge up a turkey, gather foreign and American friends, and celebrate what America represented to the world. I liked to give a sentimental toast when the turkey arrived at the table, and more than once I…

They Held Their Noses, and Ate - New York Times

Thu, 24 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

They Held Their Noses, and Ate - New York Times Proper notions of English husbandry generally demanded that flesh be domesticated, grain neatly planted and fruit and vegetables cultivated in gardens and orchards. Given these expectations, English migrants recoiled upon discovering that the native inhabitants hunted their game, grew their grain haphazardly and foraged for…

Values, rules, patterns and theories of social causation

Wed, 23 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

BBC NEWS | Politics | 'A third of pubs' to open longer About one-third of all the pubs, clubs and shops in England and Wales licensed to sell alcohol are to get longer opening hours, BBC research suggests. Now, this news is really interesting because of the folk-models of social causality that get employed on…

On some mental representations of personal identity

Wed, 23 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Who would have thought that a simple misspelling of a person's name would cost me so much time. But it did happen and it was an entirely my fault. A friend whose name is pronounced by all and sundry Maia or Myra, spells her name (as a consequence of Welsh blood in her East Anglian…

Turning academia into a cafeteria - Los Angeles Times

Wed, 23 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Turning academia into a cafeteria - Los Angeles Times DECADES AGO, I clutched an official New York state examination booklet as a proctor threatened me and hundreds of my nervous schoolmates with a felony conviction if we cheated. We dutifully signed a statement that declared we would not. Students still sign declarations on examination booklets…

Ad-hoc metaphors as cohesive devices

Tue, 22 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Bring Democracy to Congress Perhaps we should redeploy the democracy experts we have sent to the Middle East and ask them to work on our Congress. The past few days have confirmed that our national government is dysfunctional. ... Which brings us back to those democracy experts we are sending around the world. Let's bring…

Laws of social and natural sciences

Tue, 22 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Senators are blowing smoke on gas - Los Angeles Times Unless they can repeal the law of supply and demand, they can't do a thing about prices. ... Gas, like everything else, has its price set by supply and demand. No company charges what it thinks is fair. They charge as much as they can…

Marx's and Darwin's accomplishments: Finding the mechanism of evolution and social change?

Tue, 22 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Here's definitely a podcast worth listening to ! Niles Eldredge and Edward J. Larson discuss the upcoming Darwin exhibit and Darwin's legacy. Particularly their discussion of Darwin's contribution of the mechanism of 'natural selection' to an existing idea of 'evolution' is illuminating. As an essentially social scientist, it reminded me (again) of Engels' words at…

Possible cognitive and affective implications of the new media paradigm shift

Tue, 22 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

A Library for The New World Digitized, instant communication is the great technological revolution of our time. It has streamlined business and delivered more information more quickly to more people than ever. And it has accelerated basic and applied research. Both the problems and the researchers who work on them are scattered around the world…

Socio-economic trends in interaction

Tue, 22 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

BBC NEWS | In Depth | The Thatcher years in statistics It is 15 years since Margaret Thatcher resigned as prime minister. Use this graphical guide to see how life in Britain changed during her time in power. A great interactive toy to contrast certain trends during Thatcher's reign. I found particularly the interpolation of…

Thatcher's role for women and the influence of women in politics on women's rights

Tue, 22 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

BBC NEWS | Politics | Thatcher's role for women Patricia Hewitt, a minister Tony Blair's Cabinet, told the BBC News website: "Margaret Thatcher broke through the glass ceiling in politics. But it is a tragedy that, having become the UK's first women prime minister, she did so much to undermine the position of women in…

Access vs. close-reading journalism as a metaphor for educational standards

Mon, 21 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Access Holy Wood - On the Media BROOKE GLADSTONE: Ah, Watergate, the gift that keeps on giving. But aside from Woodward's access to well-placed anonymous sources, there's little resemblance between Watergate Bob and White House Bob. Watergate Bob used disgruntled mid-level bureaucrats to tunnel his way into the bowels of a White House scandal. White…

More on theory and fact (medicine and ritual)

Mon, 21 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

There was an interesting discussion on the BBC's Today Programme (click for audio) over some recent Lancet-published study doubting the efficiency of homeopathic treatments vs. a study conducted at the Bristol homeopathic hospital showing that about 70% of patients report some improvement in how they feel. Since many educated, and otherwise critical, people of my…

Oral vs. written tradition and new technologies

Mon, 21 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Portable Media Expo and Podcasting Conference Saturday Sessions Audible's CEO Don Katz's keynote address at the Podcast Expo brought together very many interesting points regarding the relationship of the oral and written tradition and the role of new technologies in giving new importance to the ultimate pre-technological medium: storytelling. ( Audio here ) He reminded…

The Bosnian Example for Iraq

Mon, 21 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

It's hard to avoid the comparison between the country [Bosnia] deemed a quagmire in the 1990s and the one where the United States is bogged down today. Start with the U.S. and other NATO troops who began arriving in Bosnia shortly before Christmas 1995. There were 60,000 of them at first in a country of…

The rituals and mythic nature of democracy and the press

Mon, 21 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

The fall of Bob Woodward - The Boston Globe The free press is an absolute value not only because the unfettered flow of information is essential to the republican system, nor only because the fourth estate serves as a check on the power of the other three, but because public expression is necessary for the…

Some misconceptions by the defenders of the Theory of Evolution

Fri, 18 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Evolution is, in fact, the foundation of the entire science of modern biology and much of modern medicine. No, there is no absolute ''proof" of evolution, but that's not how science works. The evolutionary theory of origin of species is supported by abundant evidence from the fossil record and genetics research—indicating, for instance, that both…

Welcome to Dominik's Week in Thought

Thu, 17 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

This is a blog (with the prospect of a podcast) that will track my thoughts on a variety of subjects as they come to me in my online life.