Tag: society

Scientific language

When talking amongst ourselves we should also be more careful what words we use. Otherwise we might slip when talking to the public, and say we believe something when we mean something quite different from the everyday usage of the term — and the trouble begins. If scientific belief is set against other beliefs, what differentiates it from them — are we not then just arguing matters of faith?

no more “we believe” and other words that confuse the unwashed

Transparent Kids

As younger people reveal their private lives on the Internet, the older generation looks on with alarm and misapprehension not seen since the early days of rock and roll. The future belongs to the uninhibited.

it was about time for a discontinuum

Today’s social technologies are creating the biggest generation gap since rock and roll — with younger people having radically different ideas than their parents about what’s public and what’s private

Bono Bust

The disproportionate ratio between the marketing outlay and the money raised is drawing concern among nonprofit watchdogs, cause-marketing experts and even executives in the ad business. It threatens to spur a backlash, not just against the Red campaign — which ambitiously set out to change the cause-marketing model by allowing partners to profit from charity — but also for the brands involved.

stupid and overblown. bono is a washed-up tool.
2015-08-01:

The problem with U2—with Bono, really, I mean c’mon, who the fuck are the rest of them anyway?—is not that their shit is repetitive, but what they are repeating (neutered khaki wussbag crap designed to make you proud of yourself for being capable of feelings) and how they are repeating it (with the pomp, grandiosity, and embarrassing self-seriousness of a 14-year-old Redditor telling you he doesn’t see race, man), and to whom they are repeating it. U2 is the world’s foremost creator of Oh Man, So Deep faces—furrowed brow, closed eyes, overbite—on dudes who tuck in their T-shirts.

No one thing encapsulates The Bono Experience better than the fact that U2’s last album, Songs of Innocence (barf), was released in the form of malware forcibly uploaded to every goddamn iTunes account in the world. The megalomania and cluelessness and howling bottomless smarm: Here, jaded inhabitants of the post-industrial world, I, the Bono, bestow upon you the gift of free U2 music you didn’t even know you wanted.

Transformative Approaches Project

When dealing with networks consisting of 1000s of entities and relationships, it is extremely difficult for an editor to detect redundant links. Routines can be designed to analyze the network around an anchor point for different types of redundancy, but the results to date have proved difficult to interpret because they cannot as yet be related to a visual map.

3.1 Network analysis (text)
An increasing number of applications of graph theory have emerged in the social sciences. GRADAP is an especially powerful package for the definition and analysis of large networks of social entities. Many other packages exist but few are able to handle more than a few 100 nodes or relationships between them. Like all of them, however GRADAP offers no means of actually mapping the networks in a visually comprehensible form. The results are presented as indicators or tables.

3.2 Identification of vicious and serendipitous loops (text)
There has long been recognition of how one problem can aggravate another and of how several problems can reinforce each other. There has been no attempt to identify systematically the existence of vicious loops or cycles through which 4 or more problems constantly reinforce one another. A computer program has been developed to explore the many pathways amongst the world problems documented in this Encyclopedia and isolate such loops. This suggests the possibility of moving from a focus on problems as though they were isolated, of which few are, to one in which the focus is on the many vicious loops of which a problem may be a member. See also examples of loops.

3.3 Q-Analysis (text)
This technique gives precision to understanding of the challenges of comprehensibility amongst communities of people or organizations. Specifically it shows how more complex patterns of understanding, or concepts of greater complexity, can only be communicated with great difficulty by losing important dimensions, or not at all, through certain patterns of relationship. It demonstrates how complex messages can only be usefully communicated through communication channels that can handle such complexity. In the absence of adequate channels, complex notions do not “travel well”. It raises the question of how to design communication networks adequate to integrative communications of any kind.

if i understand this correctly, this is a list of approaches to cope with societal challenges (ala engelbarts intelligence augmentation)