I was using Flash back at the end of the second millennium when it was still called ‘FutureSplash’ (and was identified by the visionaries at CodeMonkey as a “Plugin that Sucks”). Now it is often buggy and crash-prone and Apple is trying to kill it, but I wouldn’t count it out by any means yet. So although I haven’t used it in a long time I may check out this Flex in a Week video training from Adobe Developer Connection.
Archive for February, 2011
Flex in a Week video training | Adobe Developer Connection
Monday, February 28th, 2011Kenny Felder
Monday, February 28th, 2011Kenny Felder who I “met” as an appreciative user of my GraphExplorer applet has written a number of Essays and Commentaries that I find quite interesting.
Origin of Religion
Monday, February 28th, 2011How Did God Get Started? by Colin Wells in Boston University’s ‘Arion’ magazine gives a part of the story but fails to address some key questions.
Value of Religion
Sunday, February 27th, 2011The great debate between Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens was a bit of a bust – with Blair citing the roles of moderate religious leaders in “bringing together” Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland (without any acknowledgement of the fact that religion itself was the defining characteristic of the warring classes).
Other discussions such as this one may have a bit more depth, but the real question is not what value religion may or may not have had in the past but whether it has any positive net utility going forward – and either way on that, whether there is anything useful to say or do about it.
Was Montaigne the First Blogger?
Saturday, February 26th, 2011Ian Brunskill’s review of Sarah Bakewell’s recent book about Montaigne ends with “Montaigne was happy in a way that no blogger ever could be. There is, in the end, something to be said for the little room behind the shop.” This seems to me exactly wrong (not to mention being insufferably presumptious about the feelings of others). In fact thousands of bloggers like me are quite happy in our own little rooms with neither expectation nor fear of being heard by others. (more…)
Algorithmic Babies and the Chinese Room
Thursday, February 24th, 2011I commented at Stephen Downes’ website on Patricia Kuhl’s TED talk about “The Linguistic Genius of Babies”. My quibble was less with the content than with the sentimentalized headline, because, although the babies’ brains do appear to implement a sophisticated statistical algorithm (to identify the phonemes of relevance to the language of their community), there is of course no serious suggestion that they actually understand the process any more than our immune system understands the “algorithms” by which it operates or snowflakes and other crystals understands the symmetry groups which govern the way they construct themselves. (more…)
Defining Evolution
Monday, February 21st, 2011
When I read the title of this piece (Theologians Lobby Successfully to Change Definition of Evolution | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine)I was prepared to get angry. But instead I am embarrassed on behalf of those who are complaining about the change (which happened more than ten years ago).
Apparently the US National Association of Biology Teachers was persuaded to delete the word “unsupervised” from the following statement:
The diversity of life on earth is the result of evolution: an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process of temporal descent with genetic modification that is affected by natural selection, chance, historical contingencies and changing environments.
Now apart from its awfulness as a bit of language this is indeed wrong on several counts.
Perhaps most importantly, it appears to deny the predictive capacity that is essential for a “scientific” theory. In fact, the theory of evolution does have some predictive capability (though albeit of a stochastic nature). So the unqualified use of “unpredictable” must be inappropriate.
Also, although it does not require supervision or purpose, the theory of evolution makes no statement regarding their absence. So to include the word “unsupervised” was indeed just plain wrong. (more…)
The Case for Play
Monday, February 21st, 2011The Case for Play – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.
“OK kids, you can stop your creative paper folding exercise now and the monitor will collect your products for evaluation. And now, let’s take a break from all that with a quick game of Drill’nKill!”
Many traditional children’s games have a high level of rote learning and/or rule-based behaviour.
Most scientists consider their nominal work to be a form of play.
It’s all in the attitude (which is hard to define and quantify), and I suspect that a lot of educational “research” is confounded by subtle infections of attitude which dominate whatever effect is purportedly being observed.
“The Belief Instinct”
Monday, February 21st, 2011Jesse Bering’s “The Belief Instinct” is described as an exploration of possible sources of religion in cognitive tendencies towards a sense of being observed even when we have no evidence for it. To support this idea he reportedly both cites experimental evidence and postulates evolutionary explanations – which lead him to identify “adaptive illusion” as being behind the development of religion in our species (but I suspect what he means is that it is just a susceptibility to illusions of being monitored rather than any specific illusion itself that may be innate).
Apostate Theocon Damon Linker, writing in The New Republic, finds all this “marvelously informative and endlessly infuriating“. He says he does not like the mix of “experimental data about modern civilized human beings and groundless speculation about our evolutionary ancestors“, but what he is most upset about is his belief that if we accept Bering’s thesis then a “possible consequence is that we will take his arguments to heart and seek to live truthfully, without illusions—which in this case is to say, without shame.” And by the end of the review has worked himself up into quite a state of angry confusion and despair. But I think he misunderstands the implications. Giving up and/or resisting the illusion of oversight by an external god-like being does not mean giving up the moral values that entity is presumed to enforce (or the fear of incurring our own self-disapproval and/or of having bad behaviour noted and reported to our peers). So there is no reason to believe that we must either “begin shamelessly shitting on ourselves in public” or be subject to “sustained, ongoing, irredeemable self-deception“. There really is an honourable and moral alternative.
Christopher Norris Defends Philosophy
Sunday, February 20th, 2011Christopher Norris has written an article in Philosophy Now defending the Philosophy of Science from allegations of its irrelevance by scientists (most recently Stephen Hawking for example). Norris alleges the existence of “scientists’ need to philosophize and their proneness to philosophize badly or commit certain avoidable errors if they don’t take at least some passing interest in what philosophers have to say“, and he asserts that modern theorists “appear unworried – blithely unfazed, one is tempted to say – by the fact that their theories are incapable of proof or confirmation, or indeed of falsification…” and further that “scientific theories – especially theories of the ultra-speculative kind that preoccupy theoretical physicists like Hawking – involve a great deal of covert philosophising which may or may not turn out to promote the interests of knowledge and truth“. All of these claims might be considered plausible on the basis of attempts to “explain” quantum physics (and beyond) in popular literature, where analogies (which often really are used by physicists, but just to help guide their intuition) are often all that is provided. It is true that some of these accounts can be faulted for not admitting that that is what they are doing, and perhaps that needs pointing out. But Norris seems to be doing the opposite by confusing the intuition-guiding analogies with the theories themselves.
Learning Theories
Thursday, February 17th, 2011In all of my efforts to participate in Connectivist MOOCS (#CritLit2010, #PLENK2010, #CCK11) I have run into a roadblock when discussion turned to “Learning Theories” and I have found myself unable to express (or perhaps even determine) what I want to say on this topic. My instinct is just to shout that the emperor has no clothes because none of the proposed “theories” make well-defined testable predictions, but I realize that this would be unduly dismissive of something that a lot of serious people take seriously.
Notwithstanding several helpful posts outlining the basic principles of the various “theories”, I can’t let go of those scare quotes because they don’t seem like true theories to me.
Apostolos Koutropoulos’ post on learning theories links to a video by Ian Robertson whose quick summary descriptions of various learning theories somehow caused the penny to finally drop in my mind. (more…)
This Must be Said
Thursday, February 17th, 2011In the light of the apparent opinion of Conservative MP Ed Fast that the mere presence of a digital lock trumps virtually all other copyright rights it must be said that the only appropriate response to passage of Bill C-32 without a Fair Dealing Circumvention Exception is to advocate and support widespread defiance of the law. It needs to be made clear that if the public is expected to support the law and facilitate or at least not obstruct its enforcement then that law needs to be fair and to be seen to be fair. In its presently proposed form it meets neither of those conditions.
Obama Leadership “Tested” by Egypt
Tuesday, February 15th, 2011A good part of my recent visit to Toronto was spent glued to the news coming out of Egypt. Then on Thursday, Mubarak finally addressed the nation – and failed completely to satisfy the demonstrators. But by the time I read the headline in the Globe and Mail on Friday announcing that he would stay, the announcement that he would actually quit had already been made (sometime while I was in the air the previous evening and apparently too late to make the morning paper). Subsequent news stories were all about the celebrations and implications of the “new regime” with surprisingly little about the timing and process of the change of heart – though I eventually did find a blow by blow account on the BBC website.
Of course, any enthusiasm for the result must still be tempered by uncertainty about what will really happen and whether or not the democratic spirit will survive the stresses of inevitable failure to fully meet the expectations of all and to actually solve the structural economic problems (many of which are due to external causes beyond any national control).
But what does not need to be tempered is our admiration for the way the people of Egypt have handled themselves so far. The thuggery that has occurred has been little beyond what one would expect of disappointed British soccer louts or Canadian hockey fans, and the restraint of the military (both soldiers and leaders) has provided a model that could improve the behaviour of our own guardians of “order” at events like the G20 last year.
A couple of factors worth noting by way of partial explanation (but without significantly detracting from the huge amount of credit due to both protesters and militars in Egypt) is the almost complete absence of serious weaponry outside the control of the military and the dependence of that military on American approval for funding. Despite appearances (and his last ditch attempt at defiance), Mubarak’s power has always been subject to military approval and the military has always been highly dependent for both resources and training on its American counterpart. And so Obama’s pleas for restraint on all sides may well have helped ensure the victory of progressive elements in any debates that occurred within the regime side of things. An anti-colonial cynic might say that Obama was “running” the military and Google was “running” the protesters, but I prefer to believe that they were all just significantly more humane and enlightened than some of their contemporaries in other places.
Remarkably some idiots in the US media are now second-guessing the public pronouncements of the Obama administration (notwithstanding their complete ignorance of whatever was being said in private) – even to the extent of believing in some cases that he had “told” the Egyptian administration to have Mubarak to resign (or for those who did not hear him that way wishing that he had been firmer about it). Of course any such “telling” would have been totally inappropriate and an almost inevitable cause of future resentment, so anyone who thinks he did so would actually be best advised to say as little as possible about it.
Many Views on UBB
Monday, February 7th, 2011Michael Geist provides some useful links to opinions about the “Usage-Based Billing” issue, and has just expanded on his own view, as has also Teksavvy’s Rocky Gaudrault.(More here, here, and here.)
My take on all this is that it is not the principle of UBB but rather the specific implementation and lack of transparency that are the problem – and that the objections to UBB per se are misguided and actually harmful because they identify legitimate objections to current billing practices with the ill-founded and selfish demands of a greedy minority. (more…)
Collapse of Trade as a Phase Transition
Thursday, February 3rd, 2011Prompted by our visiting friend Geoff (the ‘lucky Geologist’ and author of ‘Green Figs’ and other essays), I have recently finished reading ‘The Fall of Rome – and the End of Civilization’ by Bryan Ward-Perkins (OUP2005), wherein the author responds to a recent trend amongst historians to view the fall of Rome as a largely peaceful transition to Germanic rule within a period of positive cultural evolution. (more…)