First SWITCH, now IFS. I love how the more I follow your tips Ben I think about how to clean up and consolidate some of my existing formulas.
Month: July 2021
I too studied at Latrobe, but that feels like an eternity ago. Was a great place at the time. As a side note, I did read a piece in The Age from their archaeology department on the rewriting of human history.
Beastie Boys Story involves Michael Diamond and Adam Horovitz remembering and reimagining the history of the Beastie Boys. The documentary/presentation felt like as much a story about how they got to where they did as it was about redeeming past ills.
In one of the filmās most powerful moments, Ad-Rock and Mike D discuss how they have been confronted by the sexist aspects of their rise to fame leading to accusations of hypocrisy later in life and Diamond quotes his BFF: āIād rather be a hypocrite than the same person forever.ā Amen. The Beastie Boys grew musically, creatively, and personally, and the reason āBeastie Boys Storyā is so powerful is because it doesnāt just put pieces on a line of history chronologically but it charts actual growth in every way
One of the interesting things that I was not really aware of was their frail relationship with Rick Rubin. Certainly not the image of the producer presented in the Soundbreaking documentary. I imagine that Rubin too was different back then too.
In a time that no longer forgets, it feels like an exercise that many are grappling with.
The COVID crisis ended in June 2020, it has now moved into a battle of attrition.
Congratulations Audrey, great achievement. Can’t wait to read my copy.
Navigating social systems efficiently is critical to our species. Humans appear endowed with a cognitive system that has formed to meet the unique challenges that emerge for highly social species. Bullshitting, communication characterised by an intent to be convincing or impressive without concern for truth, is ubiquitous within human societies. Across two studies (N = 1,017), we assess participantsā ability to produce satisfying and seemingly accurate bullshit as an honest signal of their intelligence. We find that bullshit ability is associated with an individualās intelligence and individuals capable of producing more satisfying bullshit are judged by second-hand observers to be more intelligent. We interpret these results as adding evidence for intelligence being geared towards the navigation of social systems. The ability to produce satisfying bullshit may serve to assist individuals in negotiating their social world, both as an energetically efficient strategy for impressing others and as an honest signal of intelligence.
A team of Canadian researchers have presented some preliminary findings associated with ability to bullshit and its association with intelligence. Through their study, they found that the ability to bullshit was an honest signal of a persons ability to ‘successfully navigate social systems’:
Overall, we interpret these results as initial evidence that the ability to bullshit well provides an honest signal of a personās ability to successfully navigate social systems, fitting the current work into existing frameworks whereby human intelligence is geared towards efficiently navigating such systems
The researchers were mindful to point out that the inability to bullshit was not a sign of a person being unintelligent.
By analogy to humor, a person who is funny is likely to be rather intelligent, however one can identify many brilliant people who are profoundly unfunny.
Interestingly, they found that you can indeed “bullshit a bullshitter.”
we find that those more willing to bullshit were also more likely to be receptive to pseudo-profound bullshit (i.e., rate pseudo-profound bullshit items higher on profoundness) … Thus, contrary to the common expression, it may indeed be possible to ābullshit a bullshitter.ā
It is an intriguing idea, especially when you consider the fine balance of buying into the lie.
į„ in Honest Signals of Intelligence ā Digitally Literate ()
What I donāt understand is the motivation behind these otherwise intelligent people choosing to talk about science fiction and call it science? Whatās the benefit? Who gains from this? Conspiracy theories depend on so many people acting in bad faith, people across the globe in different countries colluding and keeping secrets, all for the purpose of maintaining a narrative that makes no sense.
That is a fascinating question David. Here in Victoria, we have had people protesting in the middle of a lockdown to hammer the Delta breakout. The lockdown is meant to expire on Tuesday, yet with the hoards of people gathering, I doubt that will be the case. We live in strange times.
Dale, glad I am not the only one experiencing this strange irony.
I will be sharing more details soon but be on the lookout for “Uncommon Ground” at Amazon or one of your other favorite book retailers. Happy reading!
Thank you for the update Bob. Sounds like an exciting side hustle. Look forward to reading it.
Congratulations Cameron. I have learnt so much from listening to TER Podcast across those 8 years. A priceless resource!
I feel that SWITCH is a cleaner option than a series of IF statements that I have been using.
Developing your writing capabilities is an important part of your study at university. You need to understand the different types of academic writing youāre required to use and how to plan and structure your work and appropriately acknowledge your references.
ABC Education has 5000+ educational games, videos and teaching resources for schools and students. Free Primary and Secondary resources covering history, science, English, maths and more
Collection of resources associated with Archie Roach, including a reading of the song-come-book, Took the Children Away.
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Alannah & Madeline Foundation are seeking the perspectives of young people to help guide the future of the organisation:
In planning for the future, weāre commencing an exciting project that works alongside kids aged between 4 – 18 years of age to understand their perspectives, ideas and desires in order to better inform the way in which we represent and protect them today and into the future.
I remember wondering what the future of things like eSmart would be.
In planning for the future, weāre commencing an exciting project that works alongside kids aged between 4 – 18 years of age to understand their perspectives, ideas and desires in order to better inform the way in which we represent and protect them today and into the future.
I guess it starts with asking those it is designed for to help write the next chapter.
Streaming servicesā playlists make it easier for listeners to find music worth playing. But experts say theyāre also breaking fansā relationships with artists.
Charlie Harding discusses how the focus with music has moved from the album to the song.
It also presents a paradox of choice: What should you listen to when you can hear nearly any song thatās ever been recorded? With more and more songs released by more and more musicians on more and more platforms ā and less emphasis on traditional media to tell listeners what to like ā the sprawl of streaming has upended what it means to be a pop star. For an artist like Daniels, streaming both gave him the opportunity to break out from obscurity and made it exponentially more difficult to have a follow-up hit. Thatās because like so many other viral hits, the song, not the artist, became the asset.
Where the focus in the past was on radio, nowadays it is on social media platforms and playlists.
Now songs develop on social media platforms, and grow on playlists, before making it to radio. Music marketers have repositioned themselves to build influence over TikTok feeds. PR firms market their ability to get their clients on playlists, though Spotify maintains a stance of editorial independence.
This reminds me of Matthew Ball’s piece on audio innovation. He explains how these days it is about algorithms and the measurement of attention. This has led to a focus on limiting the length of songs.
Tech is the logical place to start, not just because everyone is fed up with tech, but because tech is so central to everything else we do ā it provides the communications and coordination that are at the heart of every mass movement. And techās flexĀibility ā that protean, foundational ability to plug everything into everything else ā means that tech trustbusters have a uniquely suitable tool for prying apart monopolies: interoperability.
Forcing interop back into tech wonāt be the end of the anti-monopoly fight, but itāll be the end of the beginning ā the necessary but insufficient step weāll take before moving on to far more ambitious projects.
Cory Doctorow continues his discussion of anti-trust and the break-up of monopolies. He argues that the place to start is with technology companies. Using the example of the challenge of Australian railways to demonstrate what interoperability would mean for technology companies.
Despite all the handwringing over the inaccessibility of old digital data, the reality is that new computers can emulate old computers and run the programs that were used to create and read that data in the deep past of computing (getting the data off of old storage media that is physically deteriorating is another story). If AustraĀliaās middle-gauge muddle were a matter of digital incompatibilities, some programmers could whip up a ātranslation layerā that mediated between different tracks and cars and unify the system. If we can connect billions of devices running millions of versions of scores of operating systems to each other via the internet, getting six Australian statesā railcars to connect to each othersā (digital) tracks is a piece of piss.
Although we need to do more than open platform capitalism up in regards to interoperability, it is the start that has the potential to get the ball rolling in regards to change.
One of the interesting points that Docotorw made was that in the end the companies are really all the same, just with different flavours.
Maybe large companies all have the same ideology (āprofitā). Maybe the distinctions between their characters are as meaningful as the āflavorsā of the different marshmallows in a box of Lucky Charms. Maybe the reason John Legere worked at AT&T and Sprint before going to T-Mobile is that they are interchangeable monopolies whose top ranks all came up together, know each other, take vacations together, and are godparents to one-anotherās children. Maybe they arenāt really rivals.
Maybe monopolists have class solidarity, is what Iām saying.
A close cousin of sampling, interpolation is less of a direct copy-paste of a song and more the borrowing of melodies and lyrics to create a new tune that sounds… wow, just so familiar.
There seems to be a fine line between interpolation and inspiration. There are so many songs that are inspired, but go without recognition.
This might seem painful right now (and frankly, it is), but it’s also a very exciting time in IoT. It feels like the very early days of the web where everything was a bit of a kludge we hacked together but we made things work and it turned into something amazing. That’s where I think we are now with IoT and as infuriating as it often is, it’s an exciting time to be a part of it and well and truly worth a few lighting problems here and there.