Charlatans and Experts in The Wall Street Journal on Climate Change, Thoughts on This by Isaac Asimov and Me February 1, 2012
Posted by Jason W Ellis in Personal, Science.Tags: climatechange, experts, isaacasimov
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The Wall Street Journal recently published two letters regarding global climate change.
The first letter, Sixteen Concerned Scientists: No Need to Panic About Global Warming, argues that the clarion call that human beings play a significant part in the warming of the Earth is a conspiracy fueled by money-grubbing alarmists. It is signed by sixteen engineers and scientists–none of whom are scientists who research Earth’s climate.
The second letter, Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate, challenges the first on three grounds: 1) listen to people who are experts (e.g., do you want your dentist working on your heart), 2) non-experts shouldn’t misquote experts (the first letter takes a quote out of context of the second letter’s primary author to support the first letter writers’ claims), and 3) “Research shows that more than 97% of scientists actively publishing in the field agree that climate change is real and human caused.”
I strongly side with Isaac Asimov’s position on this kind of debate–where non-specialists feel self-important enough to pontificate in an expert manner on something that they might know the generalities about but obviously do not know as well as the experts. Asimov writes in his essay, “The Literature of Ideas,” republished in Today and Tomorrow and . . . :
To be sure, when a scientist ventures outside his field and pontificates elsewhere, he is as likely to speak nonsense as anyone else. (309)
I am confident that the signers of the first letter, all sixteen of them, are likely very good at what they do. However, their expertise in their businesses or fields of study do not make them good climate experts. To rephrase Asimov: By going outside their field and pontificating elsewhere, they are as likely to speak nonsense as anyone else.
This is one of the running punch lines of the television show The Big Bang Theory–Dr. Sheldon Cooper is a theoretical physicist and he believes that he knows everything about everything else. Unfortunately for him, this is not the case. His character knows a lot about quantum mechanics and m-theory, but he doesn’t know Radiohead. Sheldon’s attempts at being a know-it-all often backfire and reveal how little he actually knows outside his own specific domains of knowledge.
Similarly, I am earning my PhD in 20th century American literature with specializations in science fiction, new media, and neuroscientific topics. With these fields, I am carving out a very small niche for myself where I am creating new knowledge based on my research in a very small space. When I am done, I will know more about my specific focus of study than anyone else. However, I will not know more about neuroscience than my outside reader, Dr. Eric Mintz. I will be good at talking about neuroscience and integrating neuroscientific findings into my writing, but I will not a neuroscientist and you would certainly not want me working on your brain.
Thus, the experts should be the ones doing the expert work and informing the rest of us about what their findings suggest. The rest of us should consider their findings and discuss how their findings should inform our social and political decisions. Those are things that we all take part in. However, experts in other fields should not muddy the waters of public discourse by acting the part of experts while attempting to undercut the importance of an entire field of study based on hard science by real experts. There is another word that comes to mind about the behavior of the so-concerned sixteen so-called experts in the first letter: charlatans.
International Authors Builds New Connections to the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center in Brooklyn, NY January 23, 2012
Posted by Jason W Ellis in Announcement.Tags: internationalauthors, williamsburgcircle
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International Authors is building connections with the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center in Brooklyn, NY. Three IA board members joined the Williamsburg Circle of International Arts and Letters, and the WAH Center is interested in carrying IA publications in their bookstore.
STRIKE AGAINST SOPA and PIPA, Do Not Stand for Internet Censorship January 18, 2012
Posted by Jason W Ellis in Computers, Rights, Technology.Tags: freedom, internet, sopa, strike, yro
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Today, we are striking against censorship. Join us in this historic moment: tell Congress to stop this bill now!
Go to the SOPAStrike.com website by clicking here to send an email to your representatives in Congress. While it only takes a moment of your time, you will see continuing rewards from helping to maintain a free and open Internet experience for yourself, your friends, your family, and all other netizens.
UPDATE: Below are screenshots of some of the protest home pages by companies against SOPA/PIPA:
Google.com
Reddit.com
WordPress.com
Firefox Start Page
Notes from MLA 2012 Session 15: Useful Fictions? A Cognitive Perspective on the Utility of Emotions, Imagination, and Long Novels January 11, 2012
Posted by Jason W Ellis in English Studies, The Brain.Tags: cognitivescience, literature, mla, mla2012, neuroscience
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On Thursday, January 5, I suited up and made my way to this session at the annual Modern Languages Association convention in downtown Seattle:
Useful Fictions? A Cognitive Perspective on the Utility of Emotions, Imagination, and Long Novels
Thursday, 5 January, 12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., 606, WSCC
A special session
Presiding: Lisa Zunshine, Univ. of Kentucky
1. “Falling in Love Unnoticed: Emotional Structures and Literary Analysis,” Patrick Colm Hogan, Univ. of Connecticut, Storrs
2. “Cognition, Dreaming, and the Literary Imagination,” Alan Richardson, Boston Coll.
3. “Do We Want to Use Cognitive Science to Make a Case for Teaching Literature?,” Lisa Zunshine
I typed up my raw notes from the session’s presentations and q&a session below:
Patrick Colm Hogan’s presentation
Begin with summary of novel, Rabindranath Tagore
Protostories
Literary work from protostories
Emotion and secure attachment in adult relations
Potential for disruption
“basic explanatory structure”
caregiver and children attachment relations
attachments work both ways—have to exist both ways
two ethical attitudes: 1) attachment sensitivity and 2) attachment openness
ethical dilemma, obligations—emotional obligations
secure attachment
liberate herself from the systems of oppression—suicide is self-liberating?
Marx—internalization of external forces including those of economics
Ingroup/outgroup categorization
Second story—enforce gender role, malevolent teacher > gives student nickname “housewife”
Narratives of understanding
Systematic approach to Tagore’s works
Teaching his fiction could have effects on emotional sensitivity—the “so what”
Alan Richardson’s presentation
Study of imagination in cognitive science, now a hot topic in neuroscience research
Interdisciplinary approach to imagination
Romanticist by training
Interested in cognitive neuroscience
Sleep, meaning, dreams, and literature
Brain’s default mode—includes creativity in dreams
Categorization, meaning making processes
Bottom-up methods (dreams) and top-down methods (literature)
Narrative and emotionality
REM—recruits same areas as ?
When we are not on-task
Daydreaming
Stickle (sp?)—dream research
Neuroscience returns to imagination in the same way appreciated by the high romantics
Novel and creative associations—sought out during REM, not as accurate, but creating loose associations
Science of dreaming via Stickle
Imagining the future worlds and scenarios—sounds a lot like science fiction—will need to contact Richardson to find this work
Stickle’s work already considered in the romantic period
Shelley and Keats—two poems
Keats’ “The Eve of St. Agnes”, Shelley’s ?
Dark-haired girl, think about Philip K. Dick
Personal meaning making
Divergence between literature and neuroscience
What is the dream characterized as?
Shelley—notcurnal dreaming as lucid experience?
Dream is a waking experience
Blurring between supposed divisions between dreaming/waking/daydreaming
Imaginative creation of memory
Private dreaming and public discourse | personal and private
Made out of larger social networks of meaning
Keats actually says “brain” when Madeline enters the church
“the exotic is the erotic” –cultural studies shorthand
Shelley poem ?
Gendered empire
Same circle: What can imaginative research do for literary studies and what can literary research on imagination do for neuroscientific research?
Dreaming and literary production
Historicist turn
Zunshine’s presentation
Cognitive science—case for teaching literature
“What to expect when you pick up a graphic novel” in Substance
Pride and Prejudice
Prove added value for the literature over other media
We cannot continue to argue that fiction makes better people
Suzanne Keen, “Empathetic Hardy,” Poetics Today, Summer 2011
No research demonstrates correlation
Jesse Prinz, “Is empathy necessary for morality?” Empathy, Oxford, forthcoming
Texts that differ between what we teach in college and don’t teach in college
Cognitive psychology—mind reading—TOM
Why we read fiction
Zunshine’s term: sociocognitive complexity—a mind within a mind within a mind
Third level embedment—baseline for fiction
Pride and Prejudice graphic novel by Marvel
Simplification of cognitive reasoning/thinking of the characters
Austen goes into detail about TOM, 4th level embedments in the novel
Graphic novel downgrades the sociocognitive complexity
Third-level mental embedments, different styles
“Style brings in mental states,” Style 2011
Tom Jones, Da Vinci Code, Dostoevsky
What do we/readers add to mental states of a book?
Contexts of discourse
Comic panel (Miss Bingley wants to make Elizabeth feel bad)
Comic panel | writer (2 levels)
Comic panel | writer | theorist (3 levels, make graphic novel subject of research paper)
Northanger Abbey
A reader unfamiar with free direct discourse
Sociocognitive complexity? Sociocognitive literacy?
2 level, not good grade, 3 or 4 levels, better
If our texts do not have higher levels of sociocognitive complexity
Think and write in sociocognitive complex ways
Our (those who read it and teach lit) seek out new TOM challenges for rich stimulation
Lit courses—historical origins of literature teaching artifact of the past
Personal happiness of TOM practitioners perhaps not the best argument employing cog sci to teach literature
Q&A
Q: Damasio and others talk about the concept of sociocognitive complexity, remembering stories are on the page, not real
Z: We do treat characters as real people. Reminder questioner that she came up with the term sociocognitive complexity (staking her claim, though the concept seems obvious). No matter the context, we add other mental states (e.g., what might Judith Butler say in a given case).
H: Authorial, adaptive, bearing on reality, what we think others might think, simulated processes, TOM and imaginative embedded in fiction is same as our own real life mental states, TOM thinking itself is a fiction
Q: empathy and TOM elaboration
Z: different schools of thought, TOM for Zunshine is used in a very broad sense—empathy is a subset of TOM, TOM makes empathy possible
Q: dreaming and metaphor, can neuroscience study this?
R: Stickle mentions this, but he may be loose about talking about metaphor and dreaming. Not anywhere in his work that addresses this. Freud. Stickle tries to eliminate secondary revision by just waking up people and having them talk, unlike Freud who analyzes later.
Q: embeddedness of dreams, away from clearcut meaning or connection to reality. Is this a level of cognitive complexity?
R: thinking about dreams we all know—nested folly. Shelley, taxonomy of dream types. He talked about representation of dreams today. Not all romantic dreams belong in the same category. Kubla Khan gets us closer to historical idea about what dreaming is.
Z: embedded mental states area not the same thing as embedded narratives. Story world created in each level. Is there a confluence between them? Perhaps.
Q: Pleasure and complexity and simplicity.
H: Recurring structure of pleasure and complexity. E.g., pattern recognition. Most intense pleasure from immediately recognizable patterns.
Z: Not necessarily most complex is most pleasurable. Lists or experimental texts (e.g., 3rd level pattern there).
Looking Forward to 2012, But No More Post-A-Day January 2, 2012
Posted by Jason W Ellis in Personal.Tags: writing
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This past year, I wrote over 500 posts for dynamicsubspace.net. My primary goal by posting something every day was to write at least one post per day as part of #postaday2011. There were some that were substantial, but the majority were shorter re-postings with only a tiny bit of addition on my part. In 2012, I won’t be doing this.
It was an exhilarating run this past year generating that much content, but I cannot realistically sustain it another year at this point in my life. I am finishing my dissertation, I am looking for work, and I am an officer in an important organization. Also, I tried to post things that I thought were interesting or important, but the need to write something every day meant that I often did not have the time to write a fully fleshed out post. I would like my writings to be more developed than the majority of my posts were this past year.
The thing that I relearn again and again is that I have to prioritize. Dynamicsubspace.net is important to me, but there are more important things in my life right now. Therefore, I am going to return to my earlier schedule of writing a post roughly once per week. These might be intensive writings about a particular piece of news, a review of a book, or a digest of things that I have been up to.
So, there won’t be as many posts as there were in 2011, but I will try to make up for it in greater substance in each post.
Now, back to writing the dissertation and waiting for a call back.
Happy New Year! January 1, 2012
Posted by Jason W Ellis in Personal.Tags: happynewyear
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Dear friends, I wish you all a very festive and successful 2012!
Good Luck to Us All in 2012, Here’s a Look Back at 2011 December 31, 2011
Posted by Jason W Ellis in Personal.Tags: 2011, 2012, goodluck, newyearseve, postaday2011
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Google put together a video snapshot of 2011. It’s embedded below.
Good luck to everyone in 2012!
Thank You to My Friends and Readers, Looking Back at Dynamicsubspace.net Site Stats for 2011 December 30, 2011
Posted by Jason W Ellis in Personal, Technology.Tags: postaday2011, reflection, Review, statistics, writing
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First, I would like to thank all of my readers. I appreciate your taking the time to see what I am thinking or working on, and I am also grateful for the comments that I have received from my readers. I enjoy writing on dynamicsubspace.net, and I am thankful that my friends, colleagues, and others find my writing worth spending a little of their time reading.
WordPress.com logs the visits of readers to my blog. I like to reflect on my writing and how it corresponds to these statistics. Below, I present a summary of the site’s statistics with some thoughts about the increase in visits that I received in 2011.
I was particularly interested in seeing how this year’s numbers compared to previous years, because I endeavoured to post more content this year than in any previous year as part of WordPress.com’s postaday2011 project.
My attempt at posting one new item each day has been a phenomenal success. I successfully posted one item each day save once. However, there were many days when I posted two or more items. By month in 2011, I posted 56 times in January, 42 times in February, 55 times in March, 47 times in April, 53 times in May, 42 times in June, 36 times in July, 42 times in August, 35 times in September, 43 times in October, 42 times in November, and finally, 39 times in December 2011. Each month, I consistently exceeded the number of days by the number of posts for a total of 532 posts in 2011. Since I began dynamicsubspace.net in 2007, I have written 1,239 posts.
In the chart above, you can see the number of unique page visits by month and year since I moved the blog from Apple’s mac.com to WordPress.com in March 2007. During the very first month of being hosted on wordpress.com in March 2007, I received 29 visits. So far, I have received 8,191 visits during December 2011. This is a tremendous increase in page views!
Considering the number of visits that I have received from year to year: dynamicsubspace.net received 3,772 visits in 2007, 27,882 in 2008, 32,458 in 2009, 48,245 in 2010, and approximately 76,121 in 2011. This translate to a 639% increase from 2007 to 2008, 16% increase from 2008 to 2009, 48% increase from 2009 to 2010, and 58% increase from 2010 to 2011. I believe that the increased content generation that I have done during 2011 has made the site more interesting to regular readers, and it has also created more content that non-regular readers find via search engines, social networks, and link sharing sites.
Further breaking down the visits to dynamicsubspace.net, the site has consistently increased its average visits per day. On average, the site received 14 daily visits in 2007, 76 visits in 2008, 89 visits in 2009, 132 visits in 2010, and 209 visits in 2011. This translates to a 443% increase in daily visits from 2007 to 2008, 17% from 2008 to 2009, 48% from 2009 to 2010, and finally, 58% from 2010 to 2011. These daily visit increases also, I believe, correspond with the increased content output that I have accomplished this past year.
One thing that I wonder though is how spammers influence these numbers. As you can see in the graph above, my spam filter has caught a substantial rise in attempted spam comments during 2011. It is because of this increased spam over the past two years that I began moderating all comments to dynamicsubspace.net. I would prefer to not moderate on the site, but I don’t want my noncommercial site to become a huge billboard that generates money for others (copiers of my content on other sites present a whole other problem). Also, Symantec reports here that email spam is the lowest in years, but I wonder if spammers are shifting their tactics to plaster the web instead of inboxes.
Here is to another successful year of dynamicsubspace.net. I have hinted at some lose ends that I will write more about in the near future. These will appear as I have the time to think about and write more about them.
Tom’s Hardware Review Site is Against SOPA, Too December 29, 2011
Posted by Jason W Ellis in Computers, Rights, Technology.Tags: censorship, postaday2011, rights, sopa, yro
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Tom’s Hardware posted the following message today on their website (click the link to read all of the reasons why a hardware and software review site would be against the Stop Online Piracy Act):
Here at Tom’s Hardware, you know we don’t typically get political because with the heated debates between AMD vs. Intel who needs Donkeys vs. Elephants?
We’ve got no agenda beyond providing the best hardware news and reviews we can dig up. But here at Year’s end, there’s a subject we want to share with you that may come to affect how you experience us and the rest of the internet. It’s called SOPA, or the “Stop Online Piracy Act”, and it is headed through U.S. Congress with its sister bill PROTECT-IP in the Senate. SOPA threatens to fundamentally change the way information is presented online by placing massive restrictions on user-generated content like posts to forums, video uploads, podcasts or images.
We have to work together to stop this terrible legislation. Go here to find out how you can help by alerting your elected representatives to the problems that this kind of over broad and misguided legislation.
