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The rise of the new agnostics. – By Ron Rosenbaum – Slate Magazine. is a childish rant against the so-called “New Atheists” based on the canard that

Atheists display a credulous and childlike faith, worship a certainty as yet unsupported by evidence—the certainty that they can or will be able to explain how and why the universe came into existence. (And some of them can behave as intolerantly to heretics who deviate from their unproven orthodoxy as the most unbending religious Inquisitor.)

Faced with the fundamental question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” atheists have faith that science will tell us eventually.

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This “review” by Alex Moskalyuk of Goldstein,  Martinand and Cialdini’s Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive is rather more of a summary athan a review – and by being so it demonstrates both why reading books isn’t necessarily all it’s cut out to be, and why including links in web pages is not a bad idea.

It may be that the book amplifies on how to implement each technique, and if so and if I was interested in actually going into sales then the book might be useful to me. But all I really care about is not getting tricked, and for that the brief summaries provided by Moskalyuk are in most cases all I need to “get the point”. (In fact much of what is published in books these days deserves little more than scanning so I don’t agree with those that complain about the web as encouraging that as opposed to “deeper” reading.)

But in some of the cases where I might be inclined to doubt the “research” quoted, a link to where I could check it out would have been most useful, and for that matter a well designed e-version of the book would probbaly better serve both my needs and those of the wannabe salespeople.

Stephen Downes and Rita Kop are running an online course on  Critical Literacies ( CritLit2010 ). This appears to be partly an experiment in the open-format self-defining student-driven connectivist type of course pioneered over the past couple of years by Downes and George Siemens.

The main focus of the curent course apears to be identifying and discussing a number of basic skills needed to be effective in the modern world. (I say “appears to be” only because I guess it’s in the nature of such a course that the emphasis evolves according to the needs and actions of the participants.)

In its first week the course focused on the topic of ‘Cognition’ and the readings dealt with some ideas related to ‘Critical Thinking’, including its history and struggle towards recognition as an actual independent discipline, as well as some items which should perhaps be included in any Critical Thinking program – namely a look at the process of peer review and various faulty but persistent patterns of mind that can confound our critical faculty (and which are promoted as tools of  “persuasion” in one of the readings – which I expect is being presented to us as a cautionary tale).

In this second week the theme is ‘Change’ – both how to describe it and how to deal with it.  Stephen’s introductory blog posting deals mainly with how we describe change and in fact it would (with some minor edits) be the basis of a good motivational piece for the introduction to a calculus course, and the other proposed readings deal with various skills needed to deal with change – such as the concept of ‘capacity building’

Stephen’s piece in particular makes me wonder about those who are inclined to regret the dominant role of calculus in the undergraduate mathematics curriculum.  For although there are undoubtedly many other important themes in mathematics I do believe that an understanding of the language and concepts of calculus is so important for anyone who wants to have anything useful to say about many of the issues that face us today to public life that it deserves to be listed as a Critical Literacy in its own right.

In fact I think this last point is important enough for me to say it again.

Nicholas Carr’s  ‘Experiments in delinkification’ includes (and depends for its rationale on) the following statement: “People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form”.

But this deserves (needs!) at least a footnote (and a hyperlink would have been much better!).

The phrase “studies show” always sets off alarm bells in my mind because it doesn’t take much cleverness to design a “study” which will “show” just about anything. Regarding the issue in question, it would be easy to make up a document in which links are obstructive, but it seems that Carr has just demonstrated by example that it is equally possible to make one in which the absence of links is even more so (since I will not have been able to “comprehend” his post until I have had a chance to look at the sample documents used in those “studies”).

And when Carr says “The link is . . . a more violent form of a footnote” I agree instead with Crawford Killian who says that ” I increasingly find footnotes in print text to be ‘more violent’: those tiny little superscript numbers tell me the real information is buried in the back of the book, but I’m too lazy to keep flipping back and forth. If I did flip to the back of the book, I’d find a reference to an unobtainable book or article—or to a URL that I would have to painstakingly type in to my computer.”

Killian concludes in the end that “-wherever the hell he wants to put his links. Nicholas Carr is a guy worth knowing”, and that may be true, but I stand by my earlier opinion on the value of this antiweb stuff.

An unfortunate link from Arts&Letters Daily led to this silly article by David B Hart in First Things. The article presents itself as a review of the recently published 50 Voices of Disbelief but after briefly dismissing a number of the contributions to that effort it goes on to become a general polemic against the so-called “New Atheists”. Not that I hold any brief for any of these worthies in particular (in fact I do often find them smug though I seldom agree with the common charge of outright brutish rudeness), but Hart’s article is full of derisive snorting about failings which he does not substantiate (and which I know are often unfairly ascribed).
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Stephen Downes endorses Hillary Clinton’s recent comments on internet freedom. I especially appreciate his reminder that the value of the internet arises from the participation of all of us, both individually as users and contributors of content, and collectively through the publicly funded research which made it all possible

From the MathForum newsletter:
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David Crockett Johnson was perhaps most famous for his children’s book Harold and the Purple Crayon. From 1965 until his death in 1975, Crockett Johnson painted over 100 works relating to mathematics and mathematical physics. Of these paintings, eighty are found in the collections of the National Museum of American History. They are presented on this site, with related diagrams from the artist’s library and papers.
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Media Democracy Day Vancouver – November 7, 2009 | Media Democracy Day.

xkcd – A Webcomic – Locke and Demosthenes.

Copyright/ Fair Dealing | DOC | Documentary Organization of Canada

How to Find Your Facebook Status RSS Feed

Speak Out On Copyright is a new forum initiated by Michael Geist to encourage and support responses to the current Canadian consultation process re copyright law revisions.

Reason vs. Faith: the Battle Continues – ChronicleReview.com

Find broken links on your site with Xenu’s Link Sleuth TM
Links for further reading

• Wired article: Rotten
  Links Hamper Learning
• The study: Broken
  Links: Just How Rapidly Do Science Education Hyperlinks Go Extinct?
• Another study: Digital
  libraries and World Wide Web sites and page persistence

At course.downes.ca Stephen Downes is discussing and experimenting with delivery of on-line courses via Serialized RSS.
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Philosophy Talk: The Blog: William James and the Squirrel Example.
Yes, James does seem to be confounding a number of issues in that lecture
His resolution of the squirrel dispute (“Which party is right,” I said, “depends on what you practically mean by ‘going round’ the squirrel”) looks more like linguistic analysis than anything else, and his description of of the ‘pragmatic’ principle in the second paragraph as ‘If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle’ sounds more like a version of positivism.

It is only later in the piece that he identifies pragmatism with the kind of provisionalism that most scientists take towards their theories as being useful pro tem until they need to be refined in order to accommodate further observations ‘less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed’.

Freeman Dyson’s HERETICAL THOUGHTS ABOUT SCIENCE AND SOCIETY as expressed in “the Edge” are a source of some disappointment and frustration to me. Skepticism about a bandwagon is always appropriate, and even more so is it about the various claims for proposed solutions. But to require a rigorous standard of proof in the face of a possible threat that is great enough to merit the precautionary principle and to present spurious “solutions” like adding .01inches of topsoil on every sqare foot of exposed land on earth (when in fact worldwide wherever we live we do many times the reverse of that) are just irresponsible.

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Take Action: Say NO to Corporate Control

Open Letter to CRTC Chair Konrad von Finckenstein:

Dear Sir,

Canadians rely on the CRTC, as the federal communications regulator, to act in the public interest, which in this case means ensuring we have an open and neutral Internet.

Due to the limited number of connectivity options, the providers of internet service share an effective monopoly on public access to a global resource (which includes a large amount of publicly funded physical and conceptual infrastructure). This affords those few connectivity providers with the opportunity of hijacking a general public good and diverting its value to their own interests (for example by engaging in media production and sales as well as transmission and then favouring their own content by “throttling” the transmissions of their competitors). Such behaviour is unacceptable and it is your responsibility to ensure that it does not happen.

Corporations like Bell and Rogers must not be allowed to control our access to the Web or degrade the quality of service we receive from our internet service providers.

I therefore submit that the CRTC should order Bell to stop its Internet traffic-shaping practices.

Please protect Canada’s level playing field for free speech and innovation by ordering Bell to cease and desist its “throttling” practices, and be sure to take similar action against any other service provider or other entity which threatens the right of Canadians for equal access to all parts of the internet.

A Washington journalist announces that for a period of over 24 hours the only person who chose to read his free on-line bio with any care was a “self-appointed hall monitor”. If someone was paying me in the hope that others cared enough about my thoughts to buy papers to read them I might be less sanguine about drawing attention to this apparent lack of interest in me and my work.