1,461 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2019
    1. designs ~ot to copy anything really existing, but to denominate and rank things as they come to agree with those archetypes or forms it has made

      This kinda sounds like a posthuman critique of humanism.

  2. Jan 2019
    1. Kantianism

      We just read Kant in literary theory--and Lauren Terbrock-Elmestad just told me that this class and that class would intersect nicely.

      sheknows

    2. actor network theor

      Actors (human or otherwise) function together in systems (networks), and those systems must be observed and described rather than "explained": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor%E2%80%93network_theory

      The notion that a system should be examined prior to bringing in theories and frameworks is also one held by the qualitative research approach called grounded theory (a theory grounded in observed data).

    1. By examining information as a product of people’s contingent choices, rather than as an impartial recording of unchanging truths, the critically information-literate student develops an outlook toward information characterized by a robust sense of agency and a heightened concern for justice.

      It seems like there's still a transfer problem here, though. There seems to be an assertion that criticality will be inherently cross-domain, but I'm not clear why that should be true. Why would the critical outlook not remain domain-specific. (To say "if it does, then it isn't critical", seems like a tautology.)

    1. abstract independently existing “object”

      Since forever, apparently, science has relied on Aristotle's "Unmoved Mover," in a sense. Not a god exactly, but some real or imagined unaffected observer whose presence serves as a fixed point from which to accumulate data. Why are we tempted to think this way? Aren't we all moving? What fixed point is there? I'm tempted to go back to the analogy of floating baskets tied together. There is an illusion of being grounded, but we aren't really.

    1. Constructivism and Social Constructivism

      a resource that provides an overview of key ideas to include similarities, differences, even extensions of both cognitive theories. Key theorists in these theories.

      Important points to consider when thinking about technology as a cognitive tool.

    1. there the advocate cannot prejudge the case lest he threaten both jus-tice and his own livelihood

      Proponents of legal realism would disagree. An example would be Oliver Wendell Holmes in Buck v. Bell, which decided it was constitutional for a state to sterilize purported mentally disabled people against their will, even though this has NO constitutional basis whatsoever. The outcome of the case was determined before the briefs were ever filed because Holmes and other eugenicists decided the outcome that was supposedly best for society regardless of constitutional protections for freedom, liberty, and cruel and unusual punishment.

    1. The Phases Should Reflect Social Rather Than Objective Time Giddens (I 987), although not the first, makes an important theoretical distinction between social and objective time. Giddens defines clock time as the use of quantified units. Clock time represents "day-to-day" structured activities. Typically, studies refer to disaster phases with hours, days, weeks, or years. Social time, however, is contingent upon the needs or opportunities of a society.

      Cites Giddens here to describe differences between social time (sturcturation) and clock time.

    1. Giddens’ theory of structuration explains how social structures, defined as rules and resources or transformational relations, are both the products and the pathways of human action [10]. Employing the concept of duality of structure, Giddens contends that social action both shapes and is shaped by these structures. Orlikowski [20] provides a duality of technology framework for applying structuration theory to research on the role of information technology (IT) within organizational change, whereIT is both the product of human action and a medium of human action, functioning to enable and constrain it. The communication constitutes organization perspective again extends structuration to communicative processes, claiming that communication and the organization co-produce and co-adapt[23], and provides a helpful approach for examining organizing within the virtual organization though the digital traces of its communication [4].

      Definition of structuration theory and application to using ICT digital traces as a resource for studying how digital volunteers organize themselves.

    1. n particular, we note how recent extensions to Activity Theory have addressed theoretical shortcomings similar to our five challenges and suggest directions for bridging the gap between everyday practice and systems support

      theoretical base for the case study.

      Tie this back to HCC readings/critiques by Halverson and Hutchins on distributed cognition.

    2. These extensions increase the complexity of the Activity Theory model but also help to explain tensions present in real-world systems such as when one agent plays different roles in two systems that have divergent goals. Furthermore, this approach provides Activity Theory with a similar degree of agility in representing complex, distributed cognition as competing theoretical approaches, such as Distributed Cognition (Hutchins, 1995).

      flexibility of Activity Theory over DCog

    1. We define 'reflection' as referring tocritical reflection, orbringing unconscious aspects of experience to conscious awareness, thereby making them available for conscious choice. This critical reflection is crucial to both individual freedom and our quality of life in society as a whole, since without it, we unthinkingly adopt attitudes, practices, values, and identities we might not consciously espouse. Additionally, reflection is not a purely cognitive activity, but is folded into all our ways of seeing and experiencing the world.

      Definition of critical reflection

    2. Our perspective on reflection is grounded in critical theory, a Western tradition of critical reflection embodied in various intellectual strands including Marxism, feminism, racial and ethnic studies, media studies and psychoanalysis.

      Definition of critical theory

    3. ritical theory argues that our everyday values, practices, perspectives, and sense of agency and self are strongly shaped by forces and agendas of which we are normally unaware, such as the politics of race, gender, and economics. Critical reflection provides a means to gain some awareness of such forces as a first step toward possible change.

      Critical theory in practice

    4. We believe that, for those concerned about the social implications of the technologies we build, reflection itself should be a core technology design outcome for HCI. That is to say, technology design practices should support both designers and users in ongoing critical reflection about technology and its relationship to human life.

      Critical reflection can/should support designers and users.

  3. Dec 2018
    1. Such a view of how theory functions in an interpretive science suggests that the distinction, relative in any case, that appears in the experimental or observational sciences between "descrip­tion" and "explanation" appears here as one, even more relative, between "inscription" ("thick description") and "specification" ("diagnosis")-between setting down the meaning particular social actions have for the actors whose actions they are, and stating, as explicitly as we can manage, what the knowledge thus attained demonstrates about the society in which it is found, and beyond that, about social life as such. Our double task is to uncover the conceptual struc­tures that inform our subjects' acts, the "said" of social discourse, and to construct a system of analysis in whose terms what is generic to those structures, what belongs to them because they are what they are, will stand out against the other determinants of human behavior. In ethnog­raphy, the office of theory is to provide a vocabulary in which what symbolic action has to say about itself-that is, about the role of culture in human life-can be expressed.

      The nut of Geertz' argument: Ethnographic theory building is about developing conceptual structures applicable to other settings in order to understand and analyze culture (human life, symbolic action, and beliefs). Thick description and its interpretation provides the framework for making theoretical distinctions.

    2. conceptualization is directed toward the task of generating interpretations of matters already in hand, not toward projecting outcomes of experimental manipulations or deducing future states of a determined system. But that does not mean that theory has only to fit (or, more carefully, to generate cogent interpre­tations of) realities past; it has also to survive-intellectually survive-realities to come. Although we formulate our interpretation of an outburst of winking or an instance of sheep­raiding after its occurrence, sometimes long after, the theoretical framework in terms of which such an interpretation is made must be capable of continuing to yield defensible interpretations as new social phenomena swim into view

      Cultural theory is not predictive but interpretative. Thick description helps to determine whether a theory can be further elaborated or is no longer useful for describing/interpreting behavior.

    3. The first is the need for theory to stay rather closer to the ground than tends to be the case in sciences more able to give themselves over to imaginative abstraction. Only short flights of ratiocination tend to be effective in anthropology; longer ones tend to drift off into logical dreams, academic bemusements with formal symmetry. The whole point of a semiotic approach to culture is, as I have said, to aid us in gaining access to the conceptual world in which our subjects live so that we can, in some extended sense of the term, converse with them. The tension between the pull of this need to penetrate an unfamiliar universe of symbolic action and the requirements of technical advance in the theory of culture, between the need to grasp and the need to analyze, is, as a result, both necessarily great and essentially irremovable.

      Challenges of theory development about cultural understandings. The tension between semiotic/symbolic approaches that require interpretation (grasp) versus methods that are grounded in analysis.

      "...the essential task of theory building here is not to codify abstract regularities but to make thick description possible, not to generalize across cases but to generalize within them."

    1. Ethan Zuckerman calls this the “cute cat theory” of activism and the public sphere. Platforms that have nonpolitical functions can become more politically powerful because it is harder to censor their large num-bers of users who are eager to connect with one another or to share their latest “cute cat” pictures.
  4. Nov 2018
    1. I had begun to think of social movements’ abilities in terms of “capacities”—like the muscles one develops while exercising but could be used for other purposes like carrying groceries or walking long distances—and their repertoire of pro-test, like marches, rallies, and occupations as “signals” of those capacities.

      I find it interesting that she's using words from information theory like "capacities" and "signals" here. It reminds me of the thesis of Caesar Hidalgo's Why Information Grows and his ideas about links. While within the social milieu, links may be easier to break with new modes of communication, what most protesters won't grasp or have the time and patience for is the recreation of new links to create new institutions for rule. As seen in many war torn countries, this is the most difficult part. Similarly campaigning is easy, governing is much harder.

      As an example: The US government's breaking of the links of military and police forces in post-war Iraq made their recovery process far more difficult because all those links within the social hierarchy and political landscape proved harder to reconstruct.

    1. 2.1.1 Cognitive and psycholinguistic theories of SLA One of the main theoretical frameworks on the cognitive side is the input–interactionist paradigm (Long, 1996), and the early research on online interaction in FL/SL contexts focused on the development of linguistic competence in in-class interaction, e.g., comparing online synchronous interaction with face-to-face student interaction. Many of these studies used a quantitative methodology, involving control groups of students engaged in face-to-face interaction that were compared to experimental groups of learners participating in online interaction or intra-class studies in which the same students took part in both face-to-face and online interaction (Warschauer, 1996b). What was often counted and categorized were linguistic features and language functions (e.g., Chun, 1994; Kern, 1995), and researchers showed how negotiation for meaning occurs in intra-class online chat (e.g., Blake, 2000). Similarly, studies of online interaction based on psycholinguistic theories of SLA (e.g., Ellis’ (2006) Associative Cognitive CREED and Schmidt’s (1990) Noticing Hypothesis) have found that text-based chat promotes noticing of grammatical and lexical features or errors (e.g., Lai & Zhao, 2006; Lee, 2008). Other studies of interclass interactions between learners and native speakers (Tudini, 2003) or tandem learning partnerships (Kötter, 2003; O’Rourke, 2005) have investigated form-focused interaction, negotiation of meaning and code switching, primarily linguistic aspects of SL/FL learning.

    1. Understanding Individual Neuron Importance Using Information Theory

      前几天也发现了这个文,果断收藏下载了!

      在信息论下,讨论互信息和分类效率等在网络内部的影响~

    2. Understanding Convolutional Neural Network Training with Information Theory

      要认真读的文,从信息论观点去理解 CNN。

    1. Psycholinguistics, SLA, and Technology (Scott Payne): Investigating second language acquisition and CALL from a psycholinguistic perspective entails examining how language learners process, store, and retrieve information from memory and how cognitive capacity impacts acquisition and influences performance. This paper will provide an overview of psycholinguistic approaches to SLA research highlighting research findings relevant to the field of CALL. This discussion will include some of the challenges and opportunities for researchers interested in employing psycholinguistic methods for studying SLA in classroom and computer-mediated contexts.

      (https://paperpile.com/view/d6077af8-b494-0c5b-bcbe-71ea1d198029)

    1. This article suggests that perhaps keeping updated and informed on technology can prevent the shut-down and closure of specific degrees and the departments they come from. Technology is constantly changing, and it is expected that institutions will change with it. Rating: 7/10

    1. This is scholarly article that shares research findings in questions such as, to what extent is there a relationship between faculty's comfortableness with technology and perception of technology integration and student success? The data is very interesting, including the fact that students in the sample reported being most proficient with a printer and least proficient with a smarboard. This definitely indicates a shift in what technological knowledge a professor will need verses their students.

      Rating: 9/10

    1. Instructional Design Strategies for Intensive Online Courses: An Objectivist-Constructivist Blended Approach

      This was an excellent article Chen (2007) in defining and laying out how a blended learning approach of objectivist and constructivist instructional strategies work well in online instruction and the use of an actual online course as a study example.

      RATING: 4/5 (rating based upon a score system 1 to 5, 1= lowest 5=highest in terms of content, veracity, easiness of use etc.)

    1. Transformation for adults in an Internet-based learningenvironment—is it necessary to be self-directed?

      REDIRECT to this URL Tranformation for adults

      This study explores transformative learning theory (TLT) for adults in the Internet-base learning environment and questions the need for students to be self-directed. The study also includes the Constructivist Internet-based Learning Environment Scale (CILES). The Self-directed Learning Readiness Scale(SDLRS) as modified by Chang (2006) was used to meet the cultural needs of the participants. In conclusion, the results have a high reliability factor and add quantitative research to previous qualitative studies.<br> Further discussion is suggested regarding the technical and emancipatory learning interests on adult online learners.

      RATING: 8/10

    1. there appears to be a theoretical shift more often than not from Behaviorist learning practices to Constructivist learning practices because of the increased use of educational technologies, and stemming from the fact that many available technologies support Constructivist learning platforms.  However, there are still many learning practices that focus on more Behaviorist learning techniques, and there are arguments in support of their validity as well.  That with the most support currently is more of a blending of the two theories, for they can be used in conjunction as well while utilizing educational technology.

      Two educational theories that form the basis of many of today's educational technology: behaviorism, and constructivism. This article explores the foundations of behaviorism and constructivism in education, and brings the current trends and future implications for these two theories in the educational technology.

      Rating: 7/10

    1. Distance Education Trends: Integrating new technologies to foster student interaction and collaboration

      This article explores the interaction of student based learner-centered used of technology tools such as wikis, blogs and podcasts as new and emerging technology tools. With distance learning programs becoming more and more popular, software applications such as Writeboard, InstaCol and Imeem may become less of the software of choice. The article looks closely at the influence of technology and outcomes.

      RATING: 4/5 (rating based upon a score system 1 to 5, 1= lowest 5=highest in terms of content, veracity, easiness of use etc.)

  5. Oct 2018
    1. In computer programming, it doesn’t have a very complex definition. It just means that you represent a thing as part of your data model.

      definition of reify in compsci

    1. In computer science and logic, a dependent type is a type whose definition depends on a value. A "pair of integers" is a type. A "pair of integers where the second is greater than the first" is a dependent type because of the dependence on the value.

      this is not the most impressive defitnition but it does the job ;) it's more like "relational types" where type definitions include relations between potential values

    2. On the flip side, it can go further than mere types, including emulating dependent types and programming-by-contract.

      spec though it's used at runtime (not compile time)

      • hence: not a replacement for types as such BUT
      • enables dependent types
      • programming by contract
    1. Sum-of-product-of-function pattern - objects are (in effect) restricted to be functions that take as first argument a distinguished method key argument that is drawn from a finite set of simple names.

      fwiu: the "finte set of simple names" are all the objects defined in the codebase e.g. in java there are no functions as such just methods attached to classes i.e. "their key argument"

    2. All you can do is send a message (AYCDISAM) = Actors model - there is no direct manipulation of objects, only communication with (or invocation of) them. The presence of fields in Java violates this.

      from what I understand in Java... there are some variables on classes (class instances) that are only acessible through methods and for those the "only send message" paradigm holds but there are also fields which are like attributes in python which you can change directly

    3. Parametric polymorphism - functions and data structures that parameterize over arbitrary values (e.g. list of anything). ML and Lisp both have this. Java doesn't quite because of its non-Object types.

      generics so you've got a "template" collection e.g. Collectoin<animal> and you parametrise it with the Animal type in this example how is that broken by "non-Object types" in java</animal>

    4. Ad hoc polymorphism - functions and data structures with parameters that can take on values of many different types.

      does he mean that list in python is polymorphic because it can be list of integers or string or ... ?

    1. Following Christopher Strachey,[2] parametric polymorphism may be contrasted with ad hoc polymorphism, in which a single polymorphic function can have a number of distinct and potentially heterogeneous implementations depending on the type of argument(s) to which it is applied. Thus, ad hoc polymorphism can generally only support a limited number of such distinct types, since a separate implementation has to be provided for each type.

      kind of like clojure multimethods but those can dispatch on arbitary function hence arbitrary "property"

    2. In programming languages and type theory, parametric polymorphism is a way to make a language more expressive, while still maintaining full static type-safety. Using parametric polymorphism, a function or a data type can be written generically so that it can handle values identically without depending on their type.[1] Such functions and data types are called generic functions and generic datatypes respectively and form the basis of generic programming.

      so essentially this is just a way to escape the contrains of types--overspecifying the type of argument for e.g. append function

      I guess the behaviour implement cannot really implement on the type of value

    1. Critical Instructional Design is new, and as such is grounded in the work of a very few people.

      I'm interested if the conception 'Critical Instructional Design' is truly new or mere interpolation of a native concept. As far as my understanding of critical theory, from lit crit readings and study, a theory can be molded to fit any necessary unnamed reality-from the nature of the TV War... Baudrillard's 'The Gulf War Did Not Take Place' to Freudian psychoanalysis "Neuroticisms of Computer A.I." This is an excellent article to discuss critical theory in the light of a new, online iteration of the learning space meriting further research.

    1. Calculations of Σ are unfortunately very difficult even for the electrongas. We must resort to approximations and this review describes theGWapproximation (GWA)(Hedin 1965a) which is the simplest working approximation beyond the HFA that takes screeninginto account.

      This is a good explanation of what GW really does. It calculates the self energy.

    2. Recent reviews on DFT may be found in Jones and Gunnarsson (1989) and Dreizler andGross (1990)

      This is before the PAW method came along (Blochl '94), so probably nothing method-specific.

    1. A theory, in short, is some-thing a practitioner consults when he wishes to perform correctly, withthe term "correctly" here understood as meaning independently of hispreconceptions, biases, or personal preferences.

      Fish's definition of a theory.

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. From reading this I'm left with the impression that the housing boom was just a housing boom, not a general long-term projects boom, as you would expect from the ABCT.

      Why was housiing and just housing the epicenter of the boom and bust? Or wasn't it?

      If it was just housing, couldn't we explain it (or at least conceive of a different hypothetical scenario) without interest rates even changing? Imagine that the government prints money and uses it to pay companies to build houses -- or creates a special lending program just for houses, but don't messes up with the general interest rate -, wouldn't that have basically the same effect?

      If so, perhaps we should start considering a new ABCT version that just talks about new money being created and going to specific sectors, instead of the whole interest/intertemporal adjustments/hayekian triangles talk. Why is this wrong?

    2. It's not that people switched from buying hot dogs to hamburgers; instead they switched from buying "present consumption" to buying "future consumption."

      What if we said that people switched from buying hot dogs to bonds? Not anything "future", just a bond, today.

      If they switched to hamburgers, that would increase investment in the hamburger industry in expense of the hot dog industry.

      In the same way, if they switch to bonds, that will increase the investment in the "bonds industry", which is basically lending money.

    1. Because the capital structure of the economy becomes internally inconsistent, eventually some entrepreneurs must abandon their projects because there are insufficient capital goods to carry them all to completion.

      This argument have confused me my entire life in all explanations of the Austrian Business Cycle Theory. It is the core of the most famous of all, that Mises story about the master builder who doesn't have enough material to finish the house he's building.

      It is misleading and ultimately wrong because economic goods (in the Menger definition) are always insufficient. In simple terms, given the market price, every good can be obtained.

      What happens after the economy realizes it was in a malinvestment boom, prices of capital goods adjust in a way that they can become too expensive for some projects to be completed profitably.

  6. Sep 2018
  7. Aug 2018
    1. Hegel believed that history culminated in an absolute moment - a moment in which a final, rational form of society and state became victorious.

      and probably not a bad outcome in an earlier era that thought of things in terms of clockwork and lacked the ideas of quantum theory and its attendant uncertainties.

    1. Yet, strategic games look for equilibrium in the formation and dissolution of ties in the context of the game theory advanced first by (Von Neumann et al. 2007), and later by (Nash 1950).
    1. Thissupported the common claim that, in organizationalresearch, time usually remains hidden or implicit andis seldom discussed explicitly (Roeet al. 2009).

      Similar to Nowotny's argument that theory doesn't break through in empirical work.

    2. From these readings, a com-mon and persistent claim centred on the general ab-sence of conceptual thinking about time and tempo-rality (Berends and Antonacopoulou 2014; Dawsonand Sykes 2016)

      Argues that there is a research gap about conceptual thinking about time and storytelling in the organizational studies literature.

      More broadly in other disciplines, Nowotny counters that there is plenty of time/temporal theory but a lack of empirical work that engages it.

    1. mporal features. We have then to consider how organizational participants are affected by situations containing temporal features, but also how these actors shape, by their behavior and beliefs, local context according to their needs.

      This provides a good framework for the SBTF study that social coordination practices can sometimes be at odds with the "structures that bear significant temporal features."

      Could this mean data as well as events?

      Is this passage invoking activity theory, if it were an HCI study?

    2. To this extent, we have made tremendous advancements but we are still lacking reliable findings of the consistency and magnitude of the time effects at each level of an organization and on individuals. Perhaps, the last progresses that drawn upon the sructuration theory (Gomez, 2009; Kaplan & Orlikowski, 2013; Wanda J. Orlikowski & Yates, 2002; Reinecke & Ansari, 2015; Rowell, Gustafsson, & Clemente, 2016) has suffered the same faith of being judged as too notional and not providing enough guidance on how to conduct empirical studies based on this conception.

      Brunelle identified same gap as Nowotny, some 30 years later that theory is not serving empirical research.

    1. While Activity Theory provides a useful lens for understanding users’ work practices and a language for communicating models of users’ behavior, there are some aspects of work practice that have been shown to be critical for knowledge work but are not captured in the Activity Theory framework. For example, knowledge workers have been shown to rely on the organization of information used in ongoing activities to accomplish their work, particularly when the value or role of that information has not yet been fully determined (Kidd, 1994; Malone, 1983; Mynatt, 1999). Activity Theory alludes to the fact that tools reflect the history of their use, but does not place a strong emphasis on this critical component of knowledge work.

      limit of activity theory

    2. s a means for coordinating action among groups of users (e.g., Bardram, 2005, this volume)

      social coordination and activity theory

      get this paper

      Bardram, J.E. (2005, September). Activity-based computing: Support for mobility and collaboration in ubiquitous computing. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 9(5), 312–322.

    3. The hierarchical structure of the Boer et al. adaptation of the Activity Theory model can help to reconcile the differences in granularity and the difficulties of supporting collaboration identified in our work; future activity-centered user interfaces might take advantage of the zoomable user interface paradigm or feature control over the level of detail (LOD) represented in the interface to more accurately reflect the depth at which a given user conceptualizes their own tasks or the tasks of their colleagues.

      Boer extension attends to some of the challenges which began this paper

    4. Activity Theory casts a wide but well-defined net around the multifaceted nature of activity, suggesting that the user’s colleagues and the object of the activity are of the utmost importance, but that the tools, social rules, and roles of collaborators within the community must also be reflected back to the user as critical components of that activity. The idea that components of activity reflect their history of use through time suggest several ways for activity-centered systems to support a dynamic working landscape; for example, they might capture past activities in an archive for quick—and potentially automated—reference during related tasks in the future, and that the tools used in previous and ongoing activities (e.g., documents and information resources) both be available at all times and tagged with meta-information about how they have been used in the past

      Further description of how activity theory could incorporate temporality through history (past), dynamic (tempo), automated references (future), and toolsets (past, previous).

    5. Engeström (1987) provides a classic visualization summarizing the structure of an activity (figure 3). This model is based around three mutual relationships: that between the actor (subject) and the community (other actors involved), that between subject and the object (in the sense of objective) of the activity, and that between the object and the community. These mutual relationships are mediated by the other components of activity.

      Engeström definition of Activity Theory

    6. Activity Theory is described both as a guiding framework for analyzing observations of work practice and a language for communicating those findings within the community of practitioners (Halverson, 2001).

      description of Activity Theory

    7. Nardi (1996) argues that one of the inherent strengths of Activity Theory is in its ability to capture the idea of context in user models for HCI, a notion that is gaining momentum particularly with respect to the ubiquitous computing paradigm and as its own design movement, so-called activity-centered design (Gay & Hembrooke, 2003). The world that Gay and Hembrooke envision relies upon design that is not user-centered (which is currently the dominant view in the HCI community) but activity-centered, since Activity Theory provides the right “orientation” for future classes of interactions mediated by ubiquitous computing devices.

      activity-based design -- a companion to user-centered design

    8. Besides the fact that an activity is situated in a network of influencing activity systems, it is also situated in time....In order to understand the activity system under investigation, one therefore has to reveal its temporal interconnectedness....Rather than analyzing an activity system as a static picture of reality, the developments and tensions within the activity system need to be

      extension of Activity Theory with a temporal dimension

      Boer et al quote continues on next page but not picked up in annotation.

      Cites Giddens' structuration theory

    9. However, Gay and Hembrooke point out a weakness in the original formulation of Activity Theory: “The model of activity theory...has traditionally been understood as a synchronic, point-in-time depiction of an activity. It does not depict the transformational and developmental processes that provide the focus of much recent activity theory research” (Gay & Hembrooke, 2003).

      criticism of Activity Theory -- as point-in-time and missing transformational/developmental processes.

      Not discussed here but those deveopmental processes have temporal qualities and attributes

    10. In their well-known “activity checklist,” Kaptelinin, Nardi, and Macaulay (1999) identified five basic principles of Activity Theory: 1.Hierarchical structure of activity In Activity Theory, the unit of analysis is an activity which is directed at an objectthat motivates the activity. Activities are composed of conscious, goal-directed actions; different actions may be taken to complete any given goal. Actions are implemented through automatic operations, which do not have goals of their own. This hierarchical structure is dynamic and can change throughout the life of an activity. 2.Object-orientedness Activity Theory holds that humans exist in an broadly-defined objective reality, that is, the things around us have properties that are objective both to the natural sciences and society and culture. 3.Internalization/externalization Activity Theory considers both internal and external actions and holds that the two are tightly interrelated. Internalization is the process of transforming an external process into an internal one for the purposes of planning or simulating an action without affecting the world. Externalization transforms internal actions into external ones and is often used to resolve failures of internal actions and to coordinate actions among independent agents. 4.Mediation A central tenet of Activity Theory is that activity is mediated by tools, and that these tools are created and transformed over the course of the activity so that the culture and history of the activity becomes embedded in the tools. Vygotsky’s definition of tool is very broad; one of the tools he was most interested in was language. 5.Development Activity Theory relies upon development as one of its primary research methodologies; that is, “experiments” often include consist of a subject’s participation in an activity and observation of developmental changes in the subject over the course of the activity. Ethnographic methods that identify the cultural and historical roots of activity are also frequently used.

      Nardi definition of Activity Theory

      Also: INFO 6101 paper

      https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uefIe_9c-ZLuTsMPGGV5iyKQsteeEA8vR405S7vYK_0/edit

    11. Activity Theory places a strong focus on the mediating role of tools and social practices in the service of accomplishing goals

      activity theory focus

    1. Time' and time research is not ·an institutionalized subfield or subspeciality of any of the social sciences. By its very nature, it is recalcitrantly transdisciplinary and refuses to be placed under the intellectual monopoly of any discipline. Nor is time sufficiently recognized as forming an integral dimension of any of the more permanent structural domains of social life which have led to their institutionalization as research fields. Although research grants can be obtained for 'temporal topics', they are much more likely to be judged as relevant when they are presented as part of an established research field, such as studies of working time being considered a legit-imate part of studies of working life or industrial relations.

      Challenges of studying time and avoiding the false claim that is a neglected subject.

    2. Studies of time in organizations have long since recognized the importance of 'events' as a complex admixture which shapes social life inside an organiz-ation and its relationship to the outside world. 'Sociological analyses', we are told, 'require a theory of time which recognizes that time is a socially constructed, organizing device by which one set, or trajectory of events is used as a point of reference for understanding, anticipating and attempting to control other sets of events. Time is in the events and events are defined by organizational members' (Clark, 1985:36).

      Review how this idea about events in organizations as a way to study time is used by Bluedorn, Mazmanian, Orlikowski, and/or Lindley.

    3. The tension between action theory (or the theory of structuration) and sys-tems theory has not completely vanished, but at least the areas of dis-agreement have become clearer. The 'event' structure of time with its implicit legitimization through physics, but which is equally a central notion for historians (Grossin, 1989) holds a certain attraction for empiri-cal studies and for those who are interested in the definitional

      Nowotny revisits Elias' idea about the relationship between time and events as a framework that is multidisciplinary, complex, integral to sensemaking, and appeals to empirical research.

    4. The formation of time con epts and the making of time I measurements, i.e. the production of devices as well as their use and social function, become for him a problem of social knowledge and its formation. It is couched in the long-term perspective of evolution of human societies. Knowledge about time is not knowledge about an invariant part or object of nature. Time is not a quality inherent in things, nor invariant across human societies.

      Combine this with the notes on Norbert Elias above.

    5. As can be seen by these and other theor~tical formulations, the prob-lem of time in social theory, while gradu~ ly coming to new terms with social action, does not lend itself easily 'to providing bridges for the agents behind human agency, the social actors, nor to those who do empirical research in order to understand the world from an actor's perspective.

      Nowotny again raising the concern that social theory on time/temporality doesn't bridge well with the concreteness needed to apply it to empirical research.

    6. The gulf separating social theory from its concretization in specific empirically accessible situations is therefore still a wide one.

      Is this still true? Very relevant to the SBTF time study.

    7. Action is but the constant intervention of humans into the natural and social world of events. Giddens adds that he would also like to make clear the constitutive relation between time and action. 'I do not' he says, 'equate action with intentionality, but action starts always from an intentionally-oriented actor, who orients him/herself just as much in the past, as he/she tries to realize plans for the future. In this sense, I believe, action can only be analyzed, if one recognizes its embeddedness in the temporal dimension' (Kiessling, 1988:289).

      Giddens' structuration theory accounts for how social action/practices over time and space.

      Structuration theory = "the creation and reproduction of social systems that is based in the analysis of both structure and agents"

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuration_theory

      Both Adam and Nowotny engage quite a bit with Gidden's structuration theory/time-space distanciation concept, though sociologists are quite critical of the theory. Why?

    8. To show 'how the positioning of actors in contexts of interaction and the interlacing of those contexts themselves' relate to broader aspects of social systems, Giddens proposes that social theory should confront 'in a concrete rather than an abstractly philosophical way' the situatedness of interaction in time and space (Giddens, 1984:110)

      further description of time-space distanciation

    9. It may well be, as Edmond Wright has pointed out (personal communi-cation) that by leaving sui generis time to the physicists, i.e. by leaving it out of social theory altogether, there is the risk of losing sight of the 'real' temporal continuum which serves as standard reference for all other forms of times. It also impedes coming to terms with 'time embedded' in natural objects and technical artifacts, as Hagerstrand (1974, 1975, 1988) repeatedly emphasized.

      Nowotny argues that social theory is reduced to a narrow, dualistic society vs nature perspective by focusing on symbolism in social time and failing to consider other (sui generis) types of time.

      This is especially problematic when exploring how time is embedded in "natural objects and technical artifacts".

    10. The fundamen-tal question for Giddens then becomes how social systems 'come to be stretched across time and space' (i.e. how they constitute their tempor-ality (Giddens, 1984).

      Space-time distanciation theory.

      See also: Adam - 1990 - Time for Social Theory

    11. quite different and much more radical approach is followed by Niklas Luhmann, who proposes to replace the subject/ action scheme by a time/action scheme, thus eliminating the actors alto-gether and replacing them with expectations and attributions.

      Luhmann is a social systems theorist, whose work is not widely adopted in the US for being too complex. His work was also criticized by Habermas.

      Esoteric. Not worth mentioning in prelim response.

    12. To introduce time into present-day social theory means at its core to redefine its relation to social action and subsequently to human agency. It is there that the central questions arise, where differences begin to matter between action theory, structuration theory and system theory with regard to time.

      Nowotny outlines the basic friction points for updating the prevailing social theories.

    13. Martins draws a distinction between two criteria of temporalism and/or historicism. One he calls 'thematic tem-poralism', indicated by the degree to which temporal aspects of social life, diachronicity, etc., are taken seriously as themes for reflection of meta theoretical inquiry. The other criterion is the degree or level of 'substantive temporalism', the degree to which becoming, process or diachrony are viewed as ontological grounds for socio-cultural life or as methodologically prior to structural synchronic analysis or explanations.

      Difference between "thematic temporalism" and "substantive temporalism."

      Thematic = "issues of time, change and history being taken seriously as objects of study" Substantive = "issues of becoming, process and change viewed as essential features of social life which help explain social phenomena"

      This book provides a better description:

      https://books.google.com/books?id=_kPswElSFRoC&lpg=PA165&ots=WgjNWOhNWk&dq=%22thematic%20temporalism%22%20&lr&pg=PA165#v=onepage&q=%22thematic%20temporalism%22&f=false

    14. The demise of structural-functionalism, he argues, has not brought about a substantial increment in the degree of temporalism and historicism in the theoretical constructs of general sociology, even though this was one of the major goals announced by the critics of functionalism, paramount to a meta-theoretical criterion of what an 'adequate' theory should con-sist of.

      Contested area for early social theorists -- suggested that "temporalism" should be a criterion for future social theory as a successor to structural-functionalism.

      Definition: Structural Functionalism is a sociological theory that attempts to explain why society functions the way it does by focusing on the relationships between the various macro-social institutions that make up society (e.g., government, law, education, religion, etc) and act as a complex system whose parts work together to promote solidarity and stability. Robert Merton was a proponent of structural-functionalism.

    15. The question is, rather, why the repeated complaint about the neglect of time in social theory or in the social sciences in general?

      Nowotny lists a number of possible reasons for inaccurate complaints that time has been neglected in social theory or it has not been taken seriously despite the large body of literature.

      I would offer a simpler reason: The prior work is incredible dense, very abstract, and hard to relate to lived/social experience.

    1. Similarly, the moral foundations theory originally put forth by Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham purports that humans have (in the most common and widely discussed versions of the theory) five innate moral building blocks: care/harm; fairness/cheating; loyalty/betrayal (associated with in-group/out-group consciousness); authority/subversion; and sanctity/degradation (“sanctity” is also often referred to as “purity” in the relevant discussions). Liberals are highly attuned to care/harm and fairness/reciprocity, but conservatives, while valuing care, also emphasize authority and purity, which means that their approach to care/harm will be very different from that of liberals. (In fairness, many on the far Left also emphasize purity and fall into authoritarianism.)

      This could be worth a read as well.

  8. Jul 2018
    1. A concept in Anthony Giddens’s structuration theory explains how pat­terns like these are maintained with such regularity and precision. The concept is “duality of structure,” by which Giddens meant that “the structured proper­ties of social systems are simultaneously the medium and outcome of social acts(Giddens’s emphasis; 1995, p· 19)·

      Sensemaking wrt time can be explained through structuration theory. Cites Giddens' quoted definition.

      Duality of structure applies to temporality when people follow rules/set patterns that in turn convey new socially constructed meanings.

      I'm a little uncertain about this. Look at the Structuration Theory cheat sheet in Mendeley

    1. Facebook isn’t a mind-control ray. It’s a tool for finding people who possess uncommon, hard-to-locate traits, whether that’s “person thinking of buying a new refrigerator,” “person with the same rare disease as you,” or “person who might participate in a genocidal pogrom,” and then pitching them on a nice side-by-side or some tiki torches, while showing them social proof of the desirability of their course of action, in the form of other people (or bots) that are doing the same thing, so they feel like they’re part of a crowd.

      Similar to the riot theory...

    1. Kahneman concluded his aforementioned presentation to academics by arguing that computers or robots are better than humans on three essential dimensions: they are better at statistical reasoning and less enamoured with stories; they have higher emotional intelligence; and they exhibit far more wisdom than humans.

      A little over-the-top?

    2. But, while Kahneman calls for large-scale replications of priming studies, the argument here is not that we need more studies or data to verify that people indeed miss blatantly obvious gorillas. Instead, we need better interpretation and better theories.

      More data vs more theories

      Humans are biased by our theories (though not totally). But isn't that the goal of science, to collectively question our assumptions and experiments? We need to attempt to falsify our theories not only by questioning the experiments and repeating them, but also by questioning the theories used to interpret data.

    1. “pulls it back”

      minor quibble, maybe this should be surrounded by parantheses

  9. Jun 2018
    1. there have always been far more users/consumers than suppliers, which means that in a world where transactions are costly owning the supplier relationship provides significantly more leverage.
    2. The value chain for any given consumer market is divided into three parts: suppliers, distributors, and consumers/users. The best way to make outsize profits in any of these markets is to either gain a horizontal monopoly in one of the three parts or to integrate two of the parts such that you have a competitive advantage in delivering a vertical solution. In the pre-Internet era the latter depended on controlling distribution.
    1. Exercise1.75.Doesbù3chave a right adjointR:N!N? If not, why? If so, does itsright adjoint have a right adjoint?
    2. Remark1.73.IfPandQare total orders andf:P!Qand1:Q!Pare drawn witharrows bending as in Exercise 1.72, we believe thatfis left adjoint to1iff the arrows donot cross. But we have not proved this, mainly because it is difficult to state precisely,and the total order case is not particularly general
    3. The preservation of meets and joins, and hence whether a monotone map sustainsgenerative effects, is tightly related to the concept of a Galois connection, or moregenerally an adjunction.
    4. Galois connections between posets were first considered by Évariste Galois—whodidn’t call them by that name—in the context of a connection he found between “fieldextensions” and “automorphism groups”. We will not discuss this further,
    5. In his work on generative effects, Adam restricts his attention to maps that preservemeets, even while they do not preserve joins. The preservation of meets implies that themapbehaves well when restricting to a subsystem, even if it can throw up surpriseswhen joining systems
    6. n [Ada17], Adam thinks of monotone maps as observations. A monotone map:P!Qis a phenomenon ofPas observed byQ. He defines generative effects of such a mapto be its failure to preserve joins (or more generally, for categories, its failure topreserve colimits)
    7. Example1.61.Consider the two-element setPfp;q;rgwith the discrete ordering.The setAfp;qgdoes not have a join inPbecause ifxwas a join, we would needpxandqx, and there is no such elementx.Example1.62.In any posetP, we havep_pp^pp.Example1.63.In a power set, the meet of a collection of subsets is their intersection,while the join is their union. This justifies the terminology.Example1.64.In a total order, the meet of a set is its infimum, while the join of a set isits supremum.Exercise1.65.Recall the division ordering onNfrom Example 1.29: we say thatnmifndivides perfectly intom. What is the meet of two numbers in this poset? Whatabout the join?

      These are all great examples. I htink 1.65 is gcd and lcm.

    8. These notions will have correlates in category theory, called limits and colimits,which we will discuss in the Chapter 3. For now, we want to make the definition ofgreatest lower bounds and least upper bounds, called meets and joins, precise.
    9. Ifxyandyx, we writexyand sayxandyareequivalent. We call a set with a preorder aposet.
    10. Example1.49.Recall from Example 1.36 that given a setXwe defineEXto be theset of partitions onX, and that a partition may be defined using a surjective functions:XPfor some setP.Any surjective functionf:X!Yinduces a monotone mapf:EY! EX, going“backwards”. It is defined by sending a partitions:YPto the compositef:s:XP
    11. Example1.42 (Opposite poset).Given a posetπP;∫, we may define the opposite posetπP;op∫to have the same set of elements, but withpopqif and only ifqp.
    12. Example1.40 (Product poset).Given posetsπP;∫andπQ;∫, we may define a posetstructure on the product setPQby settingπp;q∫  πp0;q0∫if and only ifpp0andqq0. We call this theproduct poset. This is a basic example of a more generalconstruction known as the product of categories
    13. Contrary to the definition we’ve chosen, the term poset frequently is used to meanpartiallyordered set, rather than preordered set. In category theory terminology, therequirement thatxyimpliesxyis known asskeletality. We thus call partiallyordered setsskeletal posets
    1. Jonathan Evans suggested dual process theory in 1975. In his theory, there are two distinct types of processes: heuristic processes and analytic processes. He suggested that during heuristic processes, an individual chooses which information is relevant to the current situation. Relevant information is then processed further whereas irrelevant information is not. Following the heuristic processes come analytic processes. During analytic processes, the relevant information that is chosen during the heuristic processes is then used to make judgments about the situation.
    1. Condorcet, whose "jury theorem" states that if each member of a voting group is more likely than not to make a correct decision, the probability that the highest vote of the group is the correct decision increases with the number of members of the group (see Condorcet's jury theorem).
  10. May 2018
    1. Harding argues that standpoint theory imposes a rigorous logic of discovery involving a strong demand for ongoing reflection and self-critique from within a standpoint, enabling the justification of socially-situated knowledge claims. This critical approach, Harding asserts, results in a stronger notion of objectivity than that achieved by traditional approaches to enquiry. The traditional starting point for knowledge is the position of the dominant and, despite assumptions to the contrary, that position is ideologically permeated. This results in partial and distorted accounts of reality, which thereby fail to live up to modernistic standards of impartiality, neutrality and universality associated with a commitment to epistemic objectivity.
    1. Students excitedly worked together, solved each others problems, and made suggestions to each other of how to improve their designs.

      This shows how students do have the skills to troubleshoot and work together as a large team. I also see Vygotsky's ZPD here.

  11. Apr 2018
    1. he first seven major shooting cases—Loukaitis, Ramsey, Woodham, Carneal, Johnson and Golden, Wurst, and Kinkel—were disconnected and idiosyncratic.

      Seven though? In such a short time period? These must have known about prior ones or else perhaps the theory doesn't hold as much water.

      Similarly suicide could be added as a contagion that fits into this riot model as well.

    2. “But group interaction was such that none could admit this without loss of status; in our terms, their threshold for stealing cars is low because daring masculine acts bring status, and reluctance to join, once others have, carries the high cost of being labeled a sissy.” You can’t just look at an individual’s norms and motives. You need to look at the group.

      This might also be the same case with fraternity shenanigans and even more deplorable actions like gang rapes. Usually there's one or more sociopaths that start the movement, and then others reluctantly join in.

    1. That there are such things as rights anterior to the establishment of governments: for natural, as applied to rights, if it mean anything, is meant to stand in opposition to legal—to such rights as are acknowledged to owe their existence to government, and are consequently posterior in their date to the establishment of governmen

      Useful to ask students to examine this paragraph and compare it to Locke & his version of social contract or natural rights theory. Also useful in AP government when exploring elite, pluralist and super-pluralist models and of course, ask students to apply those understandings to analyze where Bentham may fit according to this passage.

    1. veridical

      Theory of planned behaviour by Ajzen; veridical here means truthful. Three factors:

      1. What is my attitude to the behaviour?
      2. What do others think or I think others think towards my behaviour (normative belief)?
      3. How much control I think or I believe I have towards my behaviour or what factors either make it easy or make it difficult for me to conduct my behaviour?

      These will determine my intention to actually act my behaviour, and then intention precedes my actual conduct.

  12. Mar 2018
    1. Neither the “Jews cause all my problems” claim nor the “racial/gender oppression is everywhere” claim is a literal conspiracy theory. Most people who buy into them don’t think Jews or white men (respectively) secretly meet in smoke-filled rooms and devise sophisticated strategies for dominating the world. Instead, these theories resemble traditional conspiracy theories in sealing themselves off from any possible counterevidence.

      Audacious...

    1. "This kind of analysis is characterized, first, by anti-atomism, by the idea tht we should not analyze single or individual elements in isolation but that one must look at the systematic relations amongst elements; second, it is characterized by the idea that the relations between elements are coherent and transformable, that is, that the elements form a structure." (Mason, 2008: 105)

    2. "It is complexity theory more broadly, however, that has drawn off poststructural methods, and establishes them as a form of critical realism" (Mason, 2008: 102)

    3. "Whereas Marxists like Althusser adopted a totalistic programme of seeking to explain the whole by understanding the interrelations between its component parts, for Foucault the totality always eluded analysis or understanding in terms of structure, but rather was characterised by incompleteness, indeterminacy, complexity and change. This was the core of his pluralism. As Foucault says, 'though it is true that these discontinuous discursive series each have, within certain limits, their regularity, it is undoubtedly no longer possible to establish links of mechanical causality, or of ideal necessity between the elements which constitute them. We must accept the introduction of alea (chance) as a category in the production of events' (1981: 69)" (Mason, 2008: 95)

    4. "Nietzsche's importance to Foucault can be seen as 'correcting Marx', especially in relation to the linkage between power-knowledge-truth, and the functioning of knowledge as an instrument of power. As Alan Schrift (1993, p.40) notes, Nietzsche's influence drew attention away from 'substances, subjects and things, and focussed attention instead on the relations between these substantives'. In a related way, Foucault 'draws our attention away from the substantive notino of power and directs our attention instead to the multifarious ways that power operates through the social order'. For Nietzsche, such relations were relations of forces. Foucault thus focussed on new relations as the relations of forces that existed and interacted within social systems as social practices. These were forces of repression and production that characterised the disciplinary society: forces that enable and block, subjugate and realise, and normalise and resist. In this model, power is not a thing, but a process, a relation of forces." (Mason, 2008: 92)

    5. "It was in terms of the philosophy of difference and Nietzsche's conception of multiplicities through a rejection of Platonic hierarchies that Foucault enunciates a theory of discursive formations, rejects Marxist and Hegelian conceptions of history and establishes an approach which broadly parallels contemporary complexity theories. The utilisation of Nietzsche signalled a rupture from Marxism in relation to a series of interrelated conceptual, theoretical and methodological precepts, including power, knowledge and truth, the subject, and the nature of historical change and determination." (Mason, 2008: 91)

    6. Foucault as Complexity Theorist in Education in the book Complexity Theory and the Philosophy of Education

      See also Research Methods in Education, which first introduced me to Complexity Theory as a method for research

    7. Mason perceives Foucault as a complexity theorist, and he believes he is relevant today in this capacity.

    1. Complexity Theory - Dynamical Systems Theory

      If we want to make change we should come at a problem from as many different areas as possible.

      We should be wary of the magic bullet. Complexity theory may be seen as post-structuralist or even further?

      This is part of an agency structure debate.

      There are varied factors that contribute to change.

      The connections of neurons are more important than the number of cells are more important for consciousness or the mind. This is a good analogy for why complexity theory is so essential.

      Consciousness emerges when critical mass is reached in a system.

      It's hard to know how much of a factor something can be in a causal system. For example, how much do we cause do we attribute to butterfly wings causing a storm in India.

      What causes change in the education system?

      We need to use words like compounding effects to explain change.

      We need to conceive of change in terms of speed and direction, like a mathematical function.

      We need to be wary of one dimensional change or one kind of initiative. You need to think of multiple factors.

      Effective intervention means intervention from every possible angle.

      We need to pump resources until we have autocatalysis.

      International Journal of Education Development Mark Mason

    1. Complexity Theory replaces simple causality with an emphasis on networks, linkages, holism, feedback, relationships and interactivity in context, emergence, dynamical systems, self-organization and an open system, rather than the closed world of the experimental laboratory. Even if we could conduct an experiment, its applicability to ongiong, emerging, interactive, relational, changing, open situations, in practice, may be limited. It is misconceived to hold variables constant in a dynamical, evolving, fluid, open situation.

    1. positive semidefinite, but not positive definite, then it is singular

      正半定矩阵是奇异的 $$ \begin{array}{rl} f(t) =& (x-tAx)^TA(x-tAx)\ =&-2t\Vert Ax\Vert^2 + t^2x^TA^3x \end{array} $$

  13. Dec 2017
  14. Nov 2017
    1. Innovation involves the acceptance of the goals of a culture but the rejection of the traditional and/or legitimate means of attaining those goals. For example, a member of the Mafia values wealth but employs alternative means of attaining his wealth; in this example, the Mafia member’s means would be deviant.
  15. Oct 2017
    1. the idea as a ‘Theory of Ruin-Value’, henceforth taking care only to use building materials that would crumble picturesquely (Speer, 1969). I offer this uncomfortable story, like the irradiated Strahlenkatze of nuclear semiotics, as an instance of our common drive to communicate across millennia—whether we grasp the fact, or not, that what we speak may be our darkest sin.

      I cannot but see the egotism it must take to plan for 'Ruin-Value'. Given the example of who we are dealing with here, it is particularly appalling.

  16. Sep 2017
    1. How would their analysis of social networks and social capital change if they were here today?

      This is a new line of research and theory!!

    1. It is useful if interventions, and their evaluations, draw explicitly on existing social science theories, so that findings can add to the development of theory. However, evaluators should avoid selecting ‘off-the-shelf’ theories without considering how they apply to the context in which the intervention is delivered. Additionally, there is a risk of focusing narrowly on inappropriate theories from a single discipline; for example, some critics have highlighted a tendency for over-reliance upon individual-level theorising when the aim is to achieve community, organisational or population-level change (Hawe et al., 2009).

      Potential limitations of framework approach to synthesis

  17. Aug 2017
    1. Ehrenfeld (2008) concurs with McDonough and Braungart, in his plea for a holistic approach towards sustainability: “Our society is addicted to reductionist ways of solving virtually all our problems. ... Over time, as we engage more and more in this practice, society’s (as well as individual’s) competence to address the complicated, messy problems we confront has diminished. Unsustainability is just such a messy problem. Reductionism will not make it go away.” (Ehrenfeld, 2008, p. 11-12)

      This reminds of the constant attempt of Complexity Theory to push for Systems analysis and Synthesis in contrast to Newtonian, reductionist analysis.

    1. when big pharma kills off enough UK folks and bankrupts its government.

      I'm struggling to understand how killing off large numbers of its citizens, sufficient to bankrupt the Government (if that even is possible), sits with the conspiracy theorist's oft-spouted claims that 'Big Pharma' simply wants to make as much money as possible. If it kills vast numbers, who will fund Big Pharma's shareholders. Mind you, I find it very difficult to get into the mind of a conspiraloon.

  18. Jul 2017
    1. Because it is so important to be seen as competent and productive members of society, people naturally attempt to present themselves to others in a positive light. We attempt to convince others that we are good and worthy people by appearing attractive, strong, intelligent, and likable and by saying positive things to others (Jones & Pittman, 1982; Schlenker, 2003). The tendency to present a positive self-image to others, with the goal of increasing our social status, is known as self-presentation, and it is a basic and natural part of everyday life.

      A short film captures how social interactions influence our complex relationships between self-presentation, self-esteem and self concept in a unique way.

    1. elop a multi- dimensional analysis of modern society; one which would not just describe the ways things appear to be but would penetrate beneath accepted views and offer a decisive challenge to the most powerful beliefs and values of early capitalist socie

      With the goal of uncovering the power structures in society and the true meanings of "common knowledge", Marx did a historical analysis of the society with consideration of the physical, social, political and economic environments in that society.

    2. evelopan ·overall theory of the history, politics and economy of modern capitalist socie

      Taking into consideration the specific historical moment, its political, economic and social process and accompanying structures and relations when considering an event, phenomena, action etc.

    1. Reciprocity now becomes a matter of at once mutually preserving the other’s distinctness while interdependently fashioning a bigger context in which these separate identities interpenetrate…are co-regulated, and to which persons invest an affection supervening their separate identities. Reciprocity now becomes a matter of both holding and being held, a mutual protection of each partner’s opportunity to experience and exercise both sides of life’s fundamental tension.”

      Lv5 reciprocity: Maintaining individual's distinctness while together create a bigger context so that these separate identities interpenetrate.

    2. As the institutional balance breaks, the person becomes more available to and interested in a kind of sharing and intimacy with others. But intimacy in the next balance is the self’s aim, rather than its source. It involves a self that travels between systems, or exists in the dynamism between them, not in the dynamism between individuals.

      The self exists in the dynamism between systems, not between individuals

    1. Postmodernism (or “poststructuralism”), in its denial of the possibility of judgement and rejection of all “metanarratives” (grounded systems), corresponds to the stage 4.5 nihilistic gap.

      Post-modernism: stage 4.5 nihilistic gaps aka the "sadness" after seeing the truth in Plan B by Charles Inouye

    2. All ideologies are relativized as tools rather than truths. Fluidity treats rationality as a valuable tool that is not always applicable; non-rational ambiguity and paradox become non-problematic. Stage 5 can, therefore, conjure with systems, as animated characters in a magical shadow-play drama.

      All ideologies are relativized as tools rather than truths. "Conjuring" with systems, shadow-play drama.

    3. To stage 3, that sounds cold and distant, but for stage 4, it means seeing the other person for who they really are. Emotions are just something people have, from time to time. Those need to be dealt with, but should not be taken too seriously. Relating to the other person’s principles, projects, and commitments means supporting what they most care about in the longer run. A romantic relationship between systematic people not only tolerates, but respects, and actively supports, their differing values and projects. That is what it means (for stage 4) to be actually in a relationship with another person, rather than losing both your selves in a warm bath of shared feelings.

      Being in relationship for Stage 4: dealing with but not taking emotions seriously. Must support differing values & projects.

    1. Legitimate peripheral participation is a more powerful motivation for accurate feedback than money. If a student’s labor contributes to the success or failure of your project, you want to be sure they are doing it right—and so you will scrutinize their work carefully, and give detailed corrective advice.

      Why does boss care about giving feedback in Legitimate Peripheral Participation? Coz it's success or failure! (FAIL = For All I Learn)

  19. Jun 2017
    1. For instance, a set of stairs does not just afford climbing, but based on the angle of construction, may facilitate an easy climb, pose challenges to climbing, or be unclimbable entirely

      Ah so an object may have a property that gives clues to people to do something, but do it so poorly that it may appear that the object doesn't have the affordance

  20. May 2017
    1. The source material (mostly Malory's Le Morte D Arthur) is treated in a very syncretist kind of way, merging many characters, events and elements. This arguably allows the movie to display many more Arthurian motifs than would have been possible to show in a two-hour movie by staying truer to the original story, all while cleverly avoiding the Compressed Adaptation effect.

      This seems like an interesting option for people who are adapting a book into a film themselves.

  21. Apr 2017
    1. This is why people can play the piano with their fingers but not with their toes.

      That does not really explain why there are very talented musicians that have limb defects, but I suppose that similar to a blind person being able to hear better, their brains adjust (like complex-adaptive systems do) and reassign a new input-element (e.g. the feet) to a left-over motoric system(e.g. the hands).

    2. Two people can have one conversation. Three people have four unique conversation groups (three different two-person conversations and a fourth conversation between all three as a group). Five people have 26. Twenty people have 1,048,554.

      what's the equation for that?

    1. Complexitytheorists

      Based on my extremely in-depth Wikipedia-ing, complexity theory not only proposes that systems are unpredictable but also that these systems are still constrained by rules. That seems like an interesting tension.

  22. Mar 2017
    1. When we speak, we stand somewhere, and our standing place makes both known and silent claims upon us

      This seems like an interesting contribution to standpoint theory. I think of standpoint theory as being about the political/social circumstances that form our perspectives, but this is almost a reversal--when we speak our perspectives, we create our standpoint.

    1. Basically, an organism experiences too much or too little of something either within them or around them in the environment (i.e. something deviates from neutrality or optimum balance), which is then detected by our brains (i.e. via neural maps of the body).

      That reminds me of a complex-adaptive system and an external condition or intervention that makes the resilience of the system kick in to cope with the threat to have its system functions remain intact. So emotions could be the body-mind-soul complex's defense mechanism.

    1. ccording to Dobrin, without theory, "composition scholarship will stagnate, and composition as a field will be defined within the narrow confines of a service orientation" (23). We risk invisibility and illegiti macy, and those attributes would have dire consequences for the field as a whole.

      True.

    1. The themes or language and meaning, ethics and ideology. and argument and knowledge recur and overlap al each stage in the formulation of rhetorical theories during the twentieth century.

      Not to belittle anything that people did for rhetoric during the 20th century, but weren't these the same ideas present in rhetorical form during the height of the Greek philosophers? Is the difference in the theory rather than the practice?

      It reminds me of earlier point Raj made about the difference between rediscovery and reinventing; was this the rediscovery aspect?

  23. Feb 2017
    1. studio is coming to terms on new contracts with the show’s five core cast members: Jim Parsons, Johnny Galecki, Kaley Cuoco, Kunal Nayyar and Simon Helberg. The current contracts expire at the end of this season, the show’s 10th,

      I hope so!

    1. but this edu-cation did not include classical learning, literacy in Greek and Latin, or formal training in rhetoric, except in a few elite schools for boys destined for the univer-sity

      I do wonder what the reasoning was for this (I mean, besides the blatant "women and the lower class are too stupid to understand our Great Books and/or will lead lives that do not require a 'polite' education"). We've already read arguments that the "polite" education supposedly improved the virtues as well as the mind, right? Wouldn't all of society benefit if women and the lower class were virtuous, as much as possible?

    2. Apparently no new theory was needed; certainly none was forthcoming.

      The theory/practice divide still occasionally surfaces in contemporary rhet/comp.

    1. This shift of weight is always in the opposite direction that you will ultimately be moving in. This is called anticipation.
  24. Jan 2017
    1. understanding of how computer useshapes and is shaped by the organization of work

      Study believes that our relationship with tech is interactional=it shapes us and we shape it by the nature of our work

    1. Anderson's theory of Faulting explains some of the faults found in nature but fails to find all types of fault and fault system.

      Parabolic failure envelope again as it gets into negative stresses.

      At high stresses( opposite of tensile stresses) plastic deformation occurs at high normal stress, shear stress would be independent here. if the differential stress is known you can start to form a composite failure envelope in which the 5 fault types occur at different differential stresses

    1. The so-called ‘cultural’ turn in literary studies since the 1970s, with its debt to postmodern understandings of the relationship between power and narrative, has pushed the field away from such systematic, semi-mechanistic ways of analysing texts. AI remains concerned with formal patterns, but can nonetheless illuminate key aspects of narrative, including time, space, characters and plot.
    1. The second, you have to live with for a while, before you can hear where it wants you to go. But for that, you need time and attention and effort, resources that are deeply endangered, in the era when all music is available to anyone from anywhere all the time.

      Attention / Rock n roll

    1. Fiction is a spreading, polysemous, relational network that captures the way that we and our worlds create each other.
  25. Dec 2016
    1. If you make it so that future consequences exist in any of these various ways, it makes people more inclined to cooperate.
    1. The acceptance of doing something different has to do with the understanding of a former experience in which there were subjects that were discussed.

      Very important construct in change - central to Cultural Historical Activity Theory - Engstrom.

  26. Oct 2016
      • 5:48 Expert Political Judgment

        • Discusses the concept of Integrative Complexity
          • People with a lot of integrative complexity are more capable of reasoning about complex issues, distinguishing between facts and opinions, and seeing the world clearly as it is.
            • People who lack this quality tend to think in terms of black-and-white, and to have an arrogant and antagonistic attitude.
            • Fame is inversely correlated with integrative complexity
      • 11:29 The Big Sort by Bill Bishop

        • There is an ongoing trend, especially on the Internet, but also geographically, for people to cluster based on their own worldview, while they become less and less open to different ideas.
          • The content filtering mechanisms of Tumblr and other social media websites, where you can simply unfollow whoever you disagree with, are the reason why this phenomenon is so prevalent on the Internet.
    1. the elements—tools and community—seemed to mediate stu-dents’ active participation and motivation in the process of achieving their (subject) learning objectives (object). Tool mediation, which is a key principle of Activity Theory, highlights that human activity is mediated by various tools

    Tags

    Annotators

  27. Sep 2016
    1. They knew that the story mattered; that people in the real world looked up to Superman, even though he was fictional, and could thus be persuaded to use him as a moral compass
    1. hat use-value the curriculum may ultimately have for them in their particular contexts

      I see how this is problematic.

    2. As a result, students will begin to see rhetoric as an adaptive process that requires a proliferation of methods at every instant. Instead of pre-ordained processes or methods, students would “start with experience, generalize a pattern or schema from that experience, turn that pattern on future experience, and then adapt the pattern to devise a new schema

      Yes!

    3. Hawk’s emphasis on ecology and immersion promises to counter-act such hyper-disciplinarity and ossification.

      Yes: this is so key.

    4. s. It is no surprise then that institutionalized writing is steadily moving away from the essay as the universal proving ground for student writers, and towards teaching to write effectively in a variety of genres students can expect to work in as they leave college for the workforce. This shift from writing as a single, universal skill to writing as multiple and genre-based is both potentially liberating and potentially disenfranchising.

      Yes.

    5. as the ability to think of different ways of locating themselves within complex human-technological networks, the emergence of students’ own purposes for using rhetoric, and along with that, their own methods of rhetorical invention.

      The real purpose of Hawk's pedagogy.

    6. Instead of a pedagogy of heuristics, which presupposes interiority, Hawk argues for the importance of “ecology and immersion,” in which students gain a greater understanding of their rhetorical presence as multivalent, existing from moment to moment, in connection with other bodies and technologies

      As opposed to "synchronic."

    1. A network perspective not only lays bare the various stakeholders with a vested social, economic, and political interest in what happens within schools and colleges, but also the ways agency for what happens within classrooms at my institution extends beyond the students and educators charged with constructing learning.

      Useful approach (reminiscent of ANT), especially if paired with a community-based approach.

    1. addressing their tasks clearly, placing calls to action up front and center. Highlight your app’s key and new features in context at the appropriate place

      Make clear from the start what can they do by putting in their face the means to achieve what the site offers.

    1. First, according to Trumbull, Olson underestimates diffuse groups’ ability to develop compelling narratives about how they serve the public interest. In fact, weak, diffuse groups have a paradoxical political advantage: precisely because they are weak and diffuse, the public sees them as less self-interested and thus comparatively trustworthy. Second, Olson also underestimates the power of ideological motivation, rather than just money and concentration, to spur activism. Third, “diffuse interests can be represented without mobilization,” thanks to activism by politicians and government officials who take up their cause. (FDR started a federal pension program at a time when “retirees,” as a self-identified social class, did not yet exist. The program created the constituency, rather than the other way around.) Fourth, weak or diffuse interests can link up with concentrated groups to amplify their effectiveness, as when consumers align with exporters to oppose trade protections or when free-speech advocates join with political parties to oppose campaign-finance limits.
  28. Aug 2016
    1. play to their strengths while mitigating their weaknesses

      It might be a difficult balancing act and it sounds a bit like the recipe for optimal experience, but it can help situate education models in a more appropriate way.

    1. Theory of Mind tests: reading the mind in the eyes (RMET)

      You can take a sample RMET test here, but this does not seem to directly apply to literature as Davies argues. This article does a better job of explaining.

    1. The problem, as Taylor explained, is that the rise of e-commerce and social media has lowered the cost of entry for new competitors.

      Sounds like a very quick summary of what Ben Thompson was saying two weeks ago. But, in this case, it’s from “the horse’s mouth”.

  29. Jul 2016
    1. MOOCs hold potential benefit for many in the developing world

      Especially if we hold a view that the developing world’s ultimate goal is to become exactly like the developed world.

    2. “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” 

      Been having issues with the ways this quote has been handled in various contexts, but it’s quite fitting here. One potential issue, though, is in the embedded assumption that the future is a solid. Goes so well with Modernization Theory that the focus on global inequalities can be skipped over.

  30. Jun 2016
    1. fine solution is .

      So, if samples is enough, PAC-learnable, machine could learn!

    2. concept class

      Concept class(maybe, version space) is a set of concepts, which satisfy the map between given samples and their corresponding given labels(i.e. target concept).

      Means concept is just a mapping function. But, every concept belong to concept class is a target class.

    1. It’s a human/machine partnership that works as follows.

      Sounds like there’s been a bit of a move towards partnership, recently. But much discourse on automation is about the complete exclusion of human intervention.

    1. Whilecriticaltheoristsmayquestionthe“prestigeofauthorship”and“allmanifes-tationsofauthor-ity”(Birkerts,1994,pp.158–159)—whichhelpsexplainthepredilectionforpostmodernistandeschatologicaltitlessuchasTheDeathoftheAuthor(Bar-thes,1977),WhatisanAuthor?(Foucault,1977),andTheDeathofLiterature(Kernan,1990)—thereislittledoubtthatboththesymbolicandmaterialconsequencesofauthor

      Critical theorists may question the "prestige of authorship," but there is little doubt that the material consequences are more far reaching than they were in ancient times.

      Actually, this is a misreading of Foucault, who discusses the economic implications of authorship.

    1. In a 1992 paper in Organizational Science titled “The Duality of Technology: Rethinking the Concept of Technology in Organizations,” Wanda Orlikowski applied the structuration theory of sociologist Anthony Giddens to technology use and reached a similar conclusion. Giddens argued that human agency is constrained by the structures around us—technology and sociocultural conventions—and that we in turn shape those structures. Software, malleable and capable of representing rules, is especially conducive to such analysis.

      Love this paper!!!

    1. This basic process has implications for rhetorical heuristics: (1) students need to develop their own schemata to fit their particular topics/situations, and (2) if we give them schemata first, their goal should be to revise those schemata as a part of the invention process rather than follow them prescriptively

      Repurposing Taylor's Complexity Theory to Comp.

    1. As a context, we must understand that there are four major types of these "technologies," each a matrixof practical reason: (I) technologies of production, which permit us to produce, transform, or manipulatethings; (2) technologies of sign systems, which permit us to use signs, meanings, symbols, orsignification; (3) technologies of power, which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them tocertain ends or domination, an objectivizing of the subject; (4) technologies of the self, which permitindividuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on theirown bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform I themselves in order toattain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.

      It's great to ask what are the trends? How are we working on ourselves? Is their a role capitalism plays in what is currently being "valued"? Where's the profit?

  31. May 2016
    1. nalogies between teaching and various aspects of show business or guidance counseling are more often than not excuses for having abdicated the task

      On why showy teaching is bad teaching p.3

      De Man, Paul. “The Resistance to Theory.” Yale French Studies, no. 63 (1982): 3–20. doi:10.2307/2929828.

  32. Apr 2016
  33. Mar 2016
    1. New property of prime numbers discovered. Primes greater than 5 can end with 1, 3, 7, or 9. The next prime is less likely to end with the same digit, and biased toward one of the remaining three. For instance, a prime ending in 3 is most likely to be followed by a prime ending in 9. The bias evens out as the primes get larger, but only very slowly.

      http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.03720