Month: May 2021

Liked Gentrification in Ancient Angkor by Annalee Newitz (theatlantic.com)

Klassen and her colleagues arrived at Angkor’s peak-population number by reading the landscape as a palimpsest left behind by the ancient Khmer peoples. Back in 2012, a team used helicopter-mounted lidar—3-D laser scanning—to measure minute differences in ground elevation beneath tree cover. It revealed an unmistakable grid of housing foundations, roads, farms, and canals sprawling for 1,158 square miles in what the team calls the greater Angkor region, similar to a modern-day metro area like the San Francisco Bay Area, with its multiple urban centers and low-density residential areas in between.

Read “A, S, D, F” by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh  by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh

Fiction by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh: “What I’m actually engaged in is a white-collar high-wire act without a safety net, where each typo means I have to start over.”

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh story is about the insight provided through boredom. As Sayrafiezadeh explains:

I’ve often imagined that, if my stories could be illustrated as a Venn diagram, it would depict that crucial intersection between the soul and sociology.

I was really intrigued by the discussion of titles and drafts in Sayrafiezadeh’s reflection:

I had no idea how this story would come together, considering that the early drafts were completely unrecognizable and, as I mentioned, the first scene took place in MOMA. My original title was “Now Is the Time for All Good Men to Come to the Aid of Their Country,” which I liked, and which lasted ten drafts, until I sadly saw that it wasn’t capturing what the story was actually trying to do. (The titles I use are critical, as much for me as they are for the reader—they guide me as I write, and I can generally sense when the title is not matching my intention, which is an uncomfortable feeling.) And so at some juncture, some nth iteration, the answer to your question becomes yes, I had all the major elements of the story—the art, the typing, etc.—and I could see clearly how they would eventually fit together. I knew how the “abstraction” of the home row of the typewriter keys was going to mirror the “language” of Abstract Expressionism, and how sitting in an art gallery, typing away on a manual typewriter, would dramatize this. I knew that I would have the “origin story” of the typing class, the vocational emphasis, and the essential phrase that the teacher utters, “A body never forgets,” which has darker implications. It’s at this point in the process that the story ceased being titled “Now Is the Time for All Good Men,” and became “A, S, D, F.” But this final version is so different from the story that I set out to write that I wonder if it’s even fair to say that they’re technically drafts of the same story.

Liked We Need To Get Real About How the Pandemic Will End by zeynep (Insight)

If you look at a chart of deaths from AIDS, one of the greatest moral stains from our history jumps out. More people died of AIDS after we got the triple combination drug in 1995 that turned HIV into a chronic condition for those who had access to it—but almost all the deaths happened outside the few wealthy countries that could afford it. Not until the mid-2000s, following much loss and activism, campaigns and pressure, did things finally change and drug access expand.

It should be unthinkable to repeat such a scenario, but here we are.

Liked Point of order! The use and abuse of debating (Tim Harford)

Competitive debating largely ignores the meta-debate of what motion should be debated. In 2016, the UK electorate was asked whether or not we wished to leave or remain in the EU. Prime Minister David Cameron argued that the only sensible answer was Remain, but simply asking the question implied that either answer was reasonable.

Or consider climate change. We could debate the motion “This house believes veganism is necessary to meet the threat of climate change”, or “This house believes a carbon tax is sufficient to meet the threat of climate change”, or “This house believes there is no threat from climate change”. Which motion gets attention may be more important than any debate that follows.

Debating also feeds some of our less admirable urges. It sometimes pretends to be a search for the truth, but the real goal is not truth but victory.

Liked Sleep Evolved Before Brains. Hydras Are Living Proof by Veronique Greenwood (WIRED)

This frustrated Irene Tobler, a sleep physiologist working at the University of Zurich in the late 1970s, who had begun to study the behavior of cockroaches, curious whether invertebrates like insects sleep as mammals do. Having read Piéron and others, Tobler knew that sleep could be defined behaviorally too.

She distilled a set of behavioral criteria to identify sleep without the EEG. A sleeping animal does not move around. It is harder to rouse than one that’s simply resting. It may take on a different pose than when awake, or it may seek out a specific location for sleep. Once awakened it behaves normally rather than sluggishly. And Tobler added a criterion of her own, drawn from her work with rats: A sleeping animal that has been disturbed will later sleep longer or more deeply than usual, a phenomenon called sleep homeostasis.

Listened 2021 studio album by Olivia Rodrigo from Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

Sour (stylized in all caps) is the debut studio album by American singer and songwriter Olivia Rodrigo, released on May 21, 2021, via Geffen Records. It was produced by Dan Nigro, who co-wrote the album alongside Rodrigo. Inspired by Rodrigo’s favorite genres and singer-songwriters, Sour is primarily a pop and alt-pop record that sprawls between energetic pop punk songs and bedroom pop ballads. Its subject matter centers on adolescence, failed romance and heartache.

I was intrigued to hear this album. I think Chris Deville captures it best:

It feels like one of those albums that, while too flawed to be hailed as a masterpiece, will linger as a generational touchstone, a time capsule from an era when blockbuster pop music veered toward folk, rock, and searing vulnerability.

Place between Lorde and Amy Shark.

Liked Mitch Tambo delivers plea to Australia on Indigenous issues during Reconciliation Week on Q+A (ABC News)

We hear the term all the time that you’re resilient. It doesn’t mean we want to be resilient. We want to be free, we want to be trauma-free.

This transgenerational trauma stuff, it is scientifically proven it can be passed on through the DNA, it is real.

I just hope, I hope with all of my heart that we are coming to a position in this nation where we can stop turning our head away, open our hearts and just grow a little bit of capacity for our story.

Because the truth is the stolen generations, the majority of it — when I say these words, it’s not to trigger any of the old people that were taken — they weren’t necessarily birthed out of love.

Our women were raped and bastardised and here we sit today with our women 30 to 80 times more likely to be hospitalised due to domestic violence.

That’s our women, there’s nothing more royal or sacred on this planet than our women.

We’re from the oldest living continual culture on the planet and so over-represented in this hell of domestic violence.

It starts as a root where we have to go to.

In order to face that root we have to hit it front on and go “I didn’t do it”, but rather than turn away and say “that’s not my fault, I’m not sorry”, it’s like a brother’s, sister’s, auntie’s, uncle’s passed away and you heard about it and you go, “Are you OK? I’m sorry that happened. I will empathise with you and open up my heart and give you a hug, because I’m sorry”.

Let’s talk about it.

Replied to Data isn’t oil, so what is it? by Matt Locke (How To Measure Ghosts)

Perhaps then we’d understand how we can handle this data in a more responsible way. A metaphor that puts our personal experience at the forefront will help us find out where to draw lines in how our lives are stored and processed, and to understand that the lines will need to be different for different people. I don’t know what the right metaphor is – memory and history are the concepts I’ve been mulling over, but they have already been used in computing in ways that blur and dull them.

Matt, I am really intrigued your point about effective metaphors. I really liked John Philpin’s suggestion of data as energy:

Imagine if every single person on the planet had their own dashboard that allowed them to indicate their needs, desires, wants and flag it so that anyone who felt that they could satisfy those needs, desires and wants could respond with an offer human-readable terms of the contract, pricing, expected timelines, etc.

However, the problem with ‘energy’ as a metaphor is that it just does not stick. I think that data as people struggles in the same way.

All these metaphors imagine public data as a huge, passive, untapped resources – lakes of stuff that only has value when it is extracted and processed. But this framing completely removes the individual agency that created the stuff in the first place. Oil is formed by millions of years of compression and chemical transformation of algae and tiny marine animals (sorry, not dinosaurs). Data is created in real time, as we click and swipe around the internet. The metaphor might work in an economic sense, but it fails to describe what data is as a material. It’s not oil, it’s people.

I therefore wonder what the ‘hole in the ozone layer’ might be?

Replied to Remember the Days When People Commented on Blog Posts? (Activate Learning Solutions)

So from a blog post that started about re-introducing the comments section for my blog post, I realise that maybe we need to review our “why” of using social media.

Is it to simply “push” our articles, blog posts, thoughts and reflections. (The bombardment approach and hope that something sticks). Or, can we have more meaningful responses and conversations in our blogs in exchange with our readers who took the time to respond to our posts?

In the past, I would have stuck to my guns with social media but now I’ll take meaningful interactions any day.

What do you think?

Helen, this reminds me of a post I wrote a few years ago unpacking what actually makes a comment.

After unpacking all of the options, it makes me wonder if maybe the comments never left, but rather have become dispersed across various spaces. Maybe the answer is that everyone moves their content and conversations to Medium, but what happens when that space changes and folds under the pressure of investors. Maybe as Martin Weller recently suggested, “Blogging is both like it used to be, and a completely different thing”. Rather than a call to go back to basics, to a time when commenting seemed to be simple, what I think is needed is a broader appreciation of what constitutes a ‘comment’. As with the discussion of digital literacies, maybe we should focus on the act of defining, rather than restrict ourselves with concrete definitions.

Personally, I have taken to the world of webmentions where comments are first written on your own site. I have found this useful as it means I can come back to these ideas, also I feel that I actually own these ideas a bit more. When a corresponding site does not support webmentions, I just cut and paste.

In regards to social media, I have stepped away from broadcasting everything. Now I share out my posts and newsletter, and sometimes respond there depending on the context. I am still intrigued by Micro.Blog as a platform in that the only way an interaction is shown is if it is a comment. Although you can like, this is not presented to the other user. I think that this is a better model, just does not completely fit my own workflow at this point in time.

Bookmarked Victor Brombert: “On Rereading” (The Yale Review)

Rereading is subject to fortuitous circumstances, and remains a strictly personal affair. But the act of rereading, especially of books that have had a transformative effect, illustrates a wider common experience: the continuous shuttle, or to-­and-­fro movement, between art forms and lived life. It is a creative weaving, a process by which we are ceaselessly shaped. This to-­and-­fro motion between artifact and so-­called reality takes various forms. It can occur between a given novel and specific urban setting, or between an admired painting and a geographic region. One might see the San Frediano district of Florence through a previous encounter with Vasco Pratolini’s fiction, discover Petersburg through exposure to Gogol and Dostoyevsky, or grow fond of the Umbrian countryside through earlier views of the delicate trees in the background landscapes of Perugino’s compositions.

Victor Brombert reflects upon rereading texts during the pandemic and the strange experience of discovering a past self written in the margins. With this, he reflects upon the different forms of rereading:

voluntary rereading, the result of a willful decision to revisit a book one has admired, or a book that has left one with some unanswered questions.

…

subconscious rereadings, those that occur without the specific act of reading, much as the memory of a tune can haunt the mind without its actually being heard again.

…

quite precious experience that might be called “pre-­reading,” when certain dispositions in our character, coupled with circumstances, make us receptive in advance to an author we have not yet encountered.

Whatever the form, each of these acts of rereading changes us as readers.

Books can transform us. They can determine a mental landscape, remake our vision of things in much the way the advent of impressionism made people see both cityscape and landscape afresh.

This reminds me of J. Hillis Miller’s President’s Column in his book Theory Now and Then, in which he talks about the joy of reading and the subsequent obligation to write:

Miller argued that we have an obligation to write. He suggested that reading and teaching are completed by writing, that it is a core element to our transaction with language. As he stated:

As we read we compose, without thinking about it, a kind of running commentary or marginal jotting that adds more words to the words on the page. There is always already writing as the accompaniment to reading.

To me, Miller’s writing refers to an action where we make meaning out of the text, where we gain a subjective mastery over what it is we are reading. This may not always be a physical act and often doesn’t even reach the page. The challenge as I see it is to follow through with these commentaries. That is why blogging is so powerful.

Bookmarked How early Australian settlers drew maps to erase Indigenous people and push ideas of colonial superiority (theconversation.com)

So the next time you find yourself in front of a historic map, make sure you ask what details have been included, which have been excluded and — most importantly — why?

Imogen Wegman discusses the way in which early maps of Australia portrayed Australia in a particular manner. This reminds me Simon Ryan’s book The Cartographic Eye. Although she suggests we need to be critical of old maps, I wonder about modern maps and what is included and/or excluded or does the advent of satellite imagery and so forth provide an exact science?
Replied to The coded messages in hit songs (bbc.com)

Generations of musicians have employed innuendo and ambiguous lyrics to subversive effect. The 1990s yielded rave pop tunes that toyed with an establishment keen to clamp down on club culture and drugs references – take The Shamen’s 1992 chart-topper Ebeneezer Goode (with its “Eezer Goode! Eezer Goode!” chant seizing the mainstream) or Madonna’s intoxicating 1995 single Bedtime Story (co-written with Bjork). In the 21st Century, coded lyrics also still convey sexual identity and liberation, whether or not the mainstream immediately picks up the message. When Lil Nas X faced criticism for the “inappropriate” content of his gay serenade Montero (Call Me by Your Name) earlier this year, he called out conservative hypocrisy via his Twitter account, with a nod to his 2019 breakthrough hit, Old Town Road: “I literally sing about lean and adultery in old town road. u decided to let your child listen. blame yourself.”

I find symbolism and hidden meaning so intriguing at times. It reminds me of Damian Cowell’s discussion of adding in the anchovies. I just wonder where the line is drawn. I remember growing up with rumours that AC/DC stood for Anti-Christ, Devil’s Child and backmasking. I think that sometimes such interpretations are not code, but more likely BS.
Bookmarked ‘Have you met the Whitlams?’: growing up as Gough’s neighbour by Christine Sykes (The Sydney Morning Herald)

She didn’t know it at the time, but an eight-year-old’s life was set to change irrevocably when Gough Whitlam moved into her south-western Sydney street in 1957.

Christine Sykes reflects on growing up with the family of Gough Whitlam down the road.
Bookmarked Not singing, but being a singer • Andrew Ford (Inside Story)

In the early 1980s, bands like Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Adam and the Ants and the Human League were at the forefront of a second “British invasion” of the United States, rivalling the one led by the Beatles two decades earlier. It seems all the more odd, then, that it should be so hard to say what the New Romantics’ music consisted of.

Andrew Ford dives into Dylan Jones’s book, Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics to unpack the question, who exactly were the New Romantics? Ford suggests that it is often easier to say what the movement was not, however at the same time it often borrowed from these various genres. For example, the New Romantics was not punk, but definitely borrowed the posing part:

The clothes might have been brighter, cleaner and less torn, the pose more a sulk than a sneer, but New Romanticism was as much an attitude as punk ever was.

In many respects, the catalyst for the new romantics were Roxy Music and David Bowie.

Peter York, one of Jones’s talking heads, says of Roxy Music’s “Virginia Plain” that Ferry’s voice was “the natural antithesis of Joe Cocker.” Here was “a singer whose whole approach said, ‘I’m not singing, I’m being a singer.’”

Ford also spoke with Jones about the book on The Music Show:

Bookmarked Mapping Assessment by Written By RON RITCHHART (ronritchhart.com)

I propose that we think of assessment as occurring on two dimensions. The first dimension (let’s set this on a horizontal continua) is the degree of evaluation in which we engage. At the far end of this continua (we’ll place it on the right), we are highly evaluative, desiring scores and measures that quantify outcomes in a fairly precise way. Here, we judge work against clearly defined criteria that we apply to see just how close to the mark a student gets. Such evaluation can produce ranks and comparisons. On the other end of this continua (we’ll place it on the left) we might seek to understand students where they are, making sense of their actions and respond through our grounded interpretation. Here, rather than come with predetermined criteria, we open ourselves to the possibilities and variations in both learning styles and outcomes that a close examination of our students’ learning might provide.

“With this map of the terrain in hand, we can begin to place our various assessment practices in the appropriate quadrant. ”
The second dimension (let’s set this on a vertical continua) is the extent to which our assessments are integrated in our instruction and part of the ongoing learning of the classroom. At one end (we’ll place it at the top) we have assessment that is highly embedded in our teaching and students’ learning. That means that we don’t stop or pause our instruction in order to assess but instead embed it as a regular part of our practice. At the other end of the continua (placed at the bottom) we have assessment that is set apart from instruction and student learning. Here, we declare a formal end to our instruction and move into a deliberate assessment phase that we hope will reveal something about students’ learning. A basic graph of these two dimensions produces four quadrants that we might use to map the terrain of assessment (see Figure 1).

Ron Ritchhart provides a model for mapping assessment based on two dimensions: integration and evaluation. He provides examples for each of the quadrants, including providing feedback on performance (Quadrant A), checking for understanding and misconceptions (Quadrant B), examination of teacher’s documentation of learning (Quadrant C) and formal summative assessments (Quadrant D). In the end, the purpose of the map is to ‘to know where we are, and where we might go or want to be’.
Bookmarked Australian curriculum review: strengthened but still a long way from an amazing curriculum for all Australian students (aare.edu.au)

A greater emphasis on the basics in the curriculum might produce a small bump in test results, but the effects of an impoverished curriculum will be much longer lasting, especially for those students who are most marginalised and disadvantaged.

As such, we need to shift the debate away from one that engages in endless cultural and ideological dispute, or one which focuses on the lowest denominators of basic literacy and numeracy, to one that asks how we can meaningfully ensure that all young people, but especially those least advantaged, have access to an engaging, high-quality and rich curriculum.

Stewart Riddle discusses the push for dumbing down the curriculum and explains that the biggest consequence is in regards to inequality. Riddle also discusses this on the TER Podcast.
Replied to

Living the boring side of this debate these days working on the admin side of things, what intrigues me is how various applications help or hinder any sorts of change to timetables etc and sometimes it is not just the application, but the resourcing associated with maintaining such applications. In addition to this, it would seem that the standards are moving to student-based fluidity, it will be interesting to see how this is then implemented. I would be intrigued to see what you found.
Bookmarked How to deconstruct the world by Peter Salmon (Psyche)

Derrida saw this kind of reading as reading against the grain. Take a text, find what it seems to advocate, and look in the opposite direction. G W F Hegel wrote about spirit, untainted by the mess of life – so Derrida explored his relationship to family. Husserl wrote about subjectivity by describing the surrounding world, so Derrida looked for moments where Husserl invoked God. This doesn’t eliminate the text or the thinking, but it problematises them, it finds the limits. In a sense, we’re to treat every text with suspicion, although Derrida himself called this an act of ‘hospitality’. To read a text this closely is to treat it with seriousness, to really look at what’s going on.

Peter Salmon provides an introduction into the work of Jacques Derrida, one pipe at a time.
Bookmarked To navigate the dangers of the web, you need critical thinking – but also critical ignoring (theconversation.com)

Unless you possess multiple Ph.D.’s – in virology, economics and the intricacies of immigration policy – often the wisest thing to do when landing on an unfamiliar site is to ignore it.