Bluest blue

Language reflects how we see the world, so in acient times our colour blind ancestors were describing the sea as "wine-red". Similarly, while fruit and vegetables are common categories in Western cultures, they are not universally recognised. In Norwegian Pålegg reffers to any ingredient you can add in a sandwich.

This makes one wonder what else we are not seeing? What concepts will the language of the future describe? What will be the not yet seen colours and abstractions?

Rhetorical expressions for essay writing

To express reality: it is a fact that, in effect, as a matter of fact, actually, indeed

To make partially correct statements: up to a point, to some extent, in a way

To make contrasting points: yet, but, while, however, still, nevertheless, on the other hand, at the same time, even so, regardless of the fact, in spite of the fact that

To express balance: although, yet, on the other hand, at the same time, in contrast

To express exception: but, apart from, except (for)

To clarify: in other words, that is to say, to put it another way

To conclude: finally, lastly, all in all, on the whole, all things considered, to sum up

Summarising: in short, briefly, to put it briefly

Finding your own way, Keith Stevens

Fresh after abandoning academia and siding with the "something about evil" corporations, Keith Stevens gives an interview about his choices in career and life.

"It’s easy to do something you don’t love and create excuses for why you’re doing it, life situations and what not, but if you find that inner drive, you’ll find a way to make the thing you love into something you can live off of."

"In graduate school, and my other research positions, it was sometimes really hard to get the simplest tasks done. So even if I had a really great idea, it might have been close to impossible to turn the idea into a reality."

"Sitting back and doing nothing is great when you’re sick or after a long day of doing something productive, but it’s not what I want to do full time."

Toolbox, Wittgenstein

"Wittgenstein said language was a toolbox with lots of different kinds of tools for different purposes."

From Adam's blog.

Games and Education, James Paul Gee

Art - the groundbreaking moments, Florian Heine

"He believed that one does not attain wisdom through listening to stories. He wanted to get to the bottom of things and used experiments, precise observation, description, and exact depictions of nature to this end."

Michel Foucault: Beyond Good and Evil

Criticism of positivism

"Scientific explanations do not reach the inner nature of phenomena and it is humanistic knowledge that gives us insight into thoughts, feelings and desires."

"The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can any one conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear we would probably be left with completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies."
Werner Heisenberg

More here.

The math and magic of origami, Robert Lang

Grassroots work in the Roma community

"All the Roma professionals who were interviewed had great hand-on experience working with Roma at the grassroots level, and also in international institutions. Most of us had very little or no experience with sugar-coating failures, accepting and supporting poor decisions of senior management, promoting practices that waste huge amounts of money in useless meetings, huge consultancy fees, and irrelevant trainings. In other words… none of us had worked for the European Commission.

What message did I get out of this? That if I want a job as a bureaucrat, the skills that matter are to have low energy, to accept poor decisions made by others around me, to be able to present failures as success, and to have a non-threatening personality. The glass ceiling is concrete solid when it comes to Roma. Roma participation is indeed very important as long as is done from a very safe distance." 

More here.

Lincoln's depression

"Much research suggests," Alloy has written, "that when they are not depressed, people are highly vulnerable to illusions, including unrealistic optimism, overestimation of themselves, and an exaggerated sense of their capacity to control events. The same research indicates that depressed people's perceptions and judgments are often less biased."

"Throughout his life Lincoln's response to suffering—for all the success it brought him—led to greater suffering still. When as a young man he stepped back from the brink of suicide, deciding that he must live to do some meaningful work, this sense of purpose sustained him; but it also led him into a wilderness of doubt and dismay, as he asked, with vexation, what work he would do and how he would do it."

 "Lincoln saw how man's reason could discern purpose even in the movement of a vast machine that grinds and cuts and mashes all who interfere with it. Just as a child learns to pull his hand from a fire, people can learn when they are doing something that is not in accord with the wider, unseen order."

".. he was always inclined to look at the full truth of a situation, assessing both what could be known and what remained in doubt. When faced with uncertainty he had the patience, endurance, and vigor to stay in that place of tension, and the courage to be alone."

 Full article here.

From research to product

".. the competitive advantage likely to be gained from the introduction of a new product largely depends on one's ability to create a demand for it, which usually has more to do with an ability to second-guess consumers than anything truly revolutionary in the product itself. Thus, relatively small innovations can end up making huge profits for big companies, while truly radical innovations can be easily captured or ignored."

".. the expansion of the arts and sciences faculties in the universities in the 19th and 20th centuries had been nation-building exercises motivated by the prospect of citizen mobilisation in time of war. The humanities provided instruction in the values that needed to be upheld; the social sciences taught the relevant mechanisms of social control; and the natural sciences contributed to the consolidation and upgrading of the nation's infrastructure and defense system. However, in times of peace, these disciplines potentially created obstacles to commerce by reifying differences that could otherwise be negotiated away in the free exchange of goods and services."

Steve Fuller, Knowledge Management Foundations

"Pedro Cuatrecasas states, “during the R&D of acyclovir (Zovirax), marketing [department of Burroughs Wellcome] insisted that there were ‘no markets’ for this compound. Most had hardly heard of genital herpes...” Thus marketing the medical condition – separating the ‘normal cold sore’ from the ‘stigmatized genital infection’ was to become the key to marketing the drug, a process now known as ‘disease mongering’."
...
Much of the hysteria and stigma surrounding herpes stems from a media campaign beginning in the late 1970s and peaking in the early 1980s. There were multiple articles worded in fear-mongering and anxiety-provoking terminology, such as the now ubiquitous "attacks," "outbreaks," "victims," and "sufferers." At one point the term "herpetic" even entered the popular lexicon. The articles were published by Reader's Digest, U.S. News, and Time magazine, among others."

Wiki article

Pushing boundaries

"Boundary pushing is more likely to occur when there is a balance between ability and challenge, otherwise frustration and disappointment may set in."

Bereiter and Scardamalia, Surpassing Ourselves: An inquiry into the nature and implications of expertise

I have a dream

"We know that we will be able to do tomorrow what we barely dreamed of yesterday, and that successful innovations will be assimilated rapidly into the texture of our society to become part of our everyday routines and expectations."

Brian R. Gaines

"humans became behaviourally modern when they could reliably transmit accumulated informational capital to the next generation, and transmit it with sufficient precision for innovations to be preserved and accumulated."
Kim Sterelny

"the compulsion to know is a mania, just like dipsomania, erotomania, homicidal mania: it produces a character out of balance. It is not at all true that a scientist goes after the truth. It goes after him. It is something he suffers from."
The Man Without Qualities, Musil

"The first major library of which we have detailed accounts are those of Aristotle some 2,400 years ago, collected despite the sarcastic comments of his peers because he regarded it as important to understand the ideas of others in developing his own."

Research tensions in NLP

"There seems to be kind of Boyle-Mariotte Law (volume times pressure is constant) in operation: at one end of the scale, researchers apply a lot of “pressure” (deep analysis) to a few dozen to few thousand items; at the other end, they apply analytic techniques that are a great deal shallower, but the volume of items is considerably larger, often in the millions to hundreds of millions of items."

Andras Kornai and Beth Sundheim
In the introduction of a workshop.

Social aspects of knowledge

"Values and norms are also formed within cultures and this affects the way people classify, e.g. fruit and vegetables are common categories in Western cultures, but are not universally recognised and Western language and culture is sometimes characterised as encouraging people to think in categories, whereas Eastern cultures are described as promoting thinking in terms of concepts."

 

"If it is accepted that knowledge is a social process, affected by issues of power and dominance, it follows that the powerful do not merely dominate how knowledge is represented or used, but what counts as knowledge at all. Political philosophers such as Foucault claim that what is considered true by any community at any time is dependant on a dominant discourse influenced by socio-political or cultural factors."

Assessing information taxonomies using epistemology and the sociology of science, Fran Alexander

Consequences of the fall of Constantinople

1. The influx of Greek scholars into the West propelled further the Renaissance.
2. European military advances were fuelled by constant Ottoman threat.
3. As the main overland trade link between Europe and Asia was severed, more Europeans began to seriously consider the possibility of reaching Asia by sea.

Christianity - language and culture schism

"Many other factors caused the East and West to drift further apart. The dominant language of the West was Latin, whilst that of the East was Greek. Soon after the fall of the Western Empire, the number of individuals who spoke both Latin and Greek began to dwindle, and communication between East and West grew much more difficult. With linguistic unity gone, cultural unity began to crumble as well. The two halves of the Church were naturally divided along similar lines; they developed different rites and had different approaches to religious doctrines. Although the Great Schism was still centuries away, its outlines were already perceptible."

More here.

Decline of an empire

As one Ummayad chieftain responded to a question about the reasons of the decline of their empire: 

"Rather visiting what needed to be visited, we were more interested in the pleasure and enjoyment of life; we oppressed our people until they gave up and sought relief from us, [...] we trusted our ministers who favoured their own interests and kept secrets from us, and we unhurriedly rewarded our soldiers that we lost their obedience to our enemies."

On language, Max Weinreich

"A language is a dialect with an army and navy."