Friday, May 18, 2001

redux [09.13.00]
Scientific American A New Paradigm for Thomas Kuhn
"Kuhn wrote: "The very existence of science depends upon vesting the power to choose between paradigms in the members of a special kind of community." Fuller has confidence in the intelligent good sense of ordinary folks and properly calls for "the right to be wrong." But do statements such as "the universe is light-years wide," "the earth is billions of years old," "all life is related by common descent," "organisms are composed of cells that contain double-helix DNA," and so on really have no greater claim on "reality" than the Genesis stories of creationists or the popular consolations of astrology? If the answer is no, as Fuller comes dangerously close to asserting, then most scientists would throw in the towel and get jobs flipping burgers.

Fuller underestimates the highly evolved "fitness" of the methodologies, sociologies and conceptual paradigms of normal science. The deprofessionalization of science and the establishment of a citizen marketplace of ideas are not likely to happen without the sociopolitical equivalent of an asteroid impact, and no such potential upheaval looms on our intellectual radar screens. Certainly, science studies lacks the weight to do it."

redux [06.05.00]
The New York Review of Books Sign Language
"The idea that reality itself is brought into being by acts of interpretation is clearly wrong, but there is another thesis—often confused with it—which is not similarly absurd, and to which Eco also assents. This is the thesis that all awareness of the world is mediated by interpretation—that there is no such thing as direct, interpretation-free cognition of reality. We impose categories on the world as we interpret the signs all around us; it is not that the world simply reveals its categories to us. We are always taking one thing to be a sign of another, performing an act of symbolic inference, decoding something.

This process is to be clearly distinguished from merely bringing things under some general category, as when you perceive an apple as red or think of an acquaintance as untrustworthy. It is a virtual truism that all mental representation is "aspectual," in the sense that it cannot represent everything about an object but only some aspects of it; but this is quite different from saying that all mental representation involves interpreting one thing as a sign of another."

"Of course, to be aware of signs, as of anything else, involves classifying the sign in some way, perceiving it as having certain properties: for example, one hears the sound of the word "London" as having a certain auditory quality. But it is a mistake to refer to this mental act as interpretation, since interpretation must always involve interpreting one thing as a sign of another, and not merely seeing an object under a certain aspect. Conflating the latter with the former converts a truism into a highly controversial and (as I have argued) self-defeating theory about how cognition of objects is achieved. The culprit in all this is a loose and ambiguous use of the word "interpretation," probably one of the most misused words in the contemporary humanities."

The ThreePenney Review The Social Construction of What?
"For the point is, to see a lamp is itself an act of interpretation, and this is true of all seeing. Seeing is a matter of classification and recognition. What we see is not a colored patch but a lamp or a house or a table. Admittedly, we sometimes say that we cannot make out what something that we are looking at is. (Is it a haystack or a castle? We cannot be sure, because we cannot determine how far away, and therefore how big, it is.) But this merely goes to confirm the crucial point that all seeing is a matter of “seeing as.” Thus Kuhn’s analogy of the Gestalt switch—“the duck-rabbit shows that two men with the same retinal impression can see different things”—is beside the point. Equally he is surely wrong to suggest that, even hypothetically, one might get behind mental “paradigms” to the “raw data” of experience and construct some neutral observation language, “designed to conform to the retinal imprints that mediate what the scientist sees.” Retinal imprints or images cannot come into the matter; they are no doubt the precondition of seeing, but they play no part in the experience of it. It was Kuhn’s triumph to explain how it is that scientists on one side of a revolutionary paradigm shift cannot, and cannot be expected to, communicate fully with those on the other. But in this, the metaphor of seeing is more of a hindrance to him than a help."

"Feed Yield. Merge. Exit. Freak Out.
"Even the simplest symbol, the most streamlined dot head, becomes inseparable from a distinct historical moment. The modernist impulse towards universality was always dubious. Visual language is nothing more than the wreckage left when concept and technology collide, and those pedestrian signs are a perfect example. No matter how pure your intentions, the tools used to produce icons end up dating them. Go look at one of those school-crossing signs. See what you see. It probably won't be what you remembered, but it'll look a lot like us. "

redux [04.21.00]
George Lakoff The Metaphorical Structure of the Human Conceptual System
"The way ordinary people deal implicitly with the limitations of any one metaphor is by having many metaphors for comprehending different aspects of the same concept. As we saw, people in our culture have many different metaphors for IDEAS and the MIND, some of which are elaborate in one or another branch of Psychology and some of which are not. These clusters of metaphors serve the purpose of understanding better than any single metaphor could-even though they are partial and very often inconsistent with each other."

"If Cognitive Science is to be concerned wtih human understanding in its full richness, and not merely with those phenomena that fit the MIND IS A MACHINE metaphor, then it may have to sacrifice metaphorical consistency in the service of fuller understanding."

Thursday, May 17, 2001

Doc Searls Bet on nature
"Infrastructure has three fundamental characteristics:

1. Nobody owns it
2. Everybody can use it
3. Anybody can improve it

We need free & open source geeks to generate more infrastructure. We also need commercial and closed source geeks to do the same, contributing as much as they can, to the ubiquitous infrastructure that makes our new world."

"The free software and open source movements, for example, love to talk about licensing, which is really a set of social contracts that attempt to reconcile ideas about the nature of software with ideas about the nature of business."

News.Com Singing hosannas for Linux
"Open source is good for business. Now I should add that open source is not for everything in software. We have a very large and successful software business, and we're going to retain that. But open source is great for infrastructure code. The reason is that to make open source work, there has to be an overlap between the people who care about the software and the people who make the software better."

Wednesday, May 16, 2001

Slashdot U.S. Intellectual Property Law Goes Global
"Toward the end of the day Jamie Love said, "There hasn't been a single American newspaper article about this treaty, and here you are getting ready to create the Magna Carta of cyberspace."

Love didn't blame the people on the U.S. delegation for working in comparative secret. "I've called reporter after reporter [about this] and their eyes glaze over," he said."

The Tech Lessig Examines Law And Freedom Online
"Technologists are to blame for passively allowing freedom on the Internet to fade, Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig told a crowd of technologists in 34-101 yesterday.

And now the only way to keep that freedom from disappearing entirely, he explained, is for technologists to speak up and teach the lawyers (and everyone else) why the Internet was created the way it was.

“Teach us, in terms you know, of the justice, or freedom, that was imbedded in the code you built,” Lessig said, “and show us how the changes that code is now undergoing will quickly erase that same justice or freedom.”"

redux [07.27.00]
Free Software Advocacy Against intellectual property
"The original rationale for copyrights and patents was to foster artistic and practical creative work by giving a short-term monopoly over certain uses of the work. This monopoly was granted to an individual or corporation by government. The government's power to grant a monopoly is corrupting. The biggest owners of intellectual property have sought to expand it well beyond any sensible rationale."

"This chapter outlines the case against intellectual property. I begin by mentioning some of the problems arising from ownership of information. Then I turn to weaknesses in its standard justifications. Next is an overview of problems with the so-called "marketplace of ideas," which has important links with intellectual property. Finally, I outline some alternatives to intellectual property and some possible strategies for moving towards them. "

"Intellectual property is supported by many powerful groups: the most powerful governments and the largest corporations. The mass media seem fully behind intellectual property, partly because media monopolies would be undercut if information were more freely copied and partly because the most influential journalists depend on syndication rights for their stories."

"Another problem in developing strategies is that it makes little sense to challenge intellectual property in isolation. If we simply imagine intellectual property being abolished but the rest of the economic system unchanged, then many objections can be made. Challenging intellectual property must involve the development of methods to support creative individuals."

Tuesday, May 15, 2001

MSNBC Sony, AOL to put PS2 online
""There will be a whole new generation of games that will take advantage of these features, which are unique. It’s not just adding a commodity connection to a game. (This) deal takes it beyond that,” said Peter Ashkin, AOL president of product strategy, in an interview."

The Register Sony, AOL to bring Net to PlayStation 2
"Sony is also preparing a hard drive, XGA LCD panel, mouse and keyboard, all of which will help turn console into a computer. All that's missing is an operating system, and we can't help but wonder if Sony might end up buying Be after all. The OS vendor is certainly looking for a buyer or a white knight, and its BeIA Net appliance-oriented OS is already being used by Sony for the consumer electronics giant's eVilla appliance.

Whatever, with Microsoft now defecating on Sony's digital doorstep, we'd be surprised if Sony doesn't line up other anti-Microsoft partners."

Gaming Age Sony and AOL Join Forces!
"Underlying the alliance between Sony and AOL Time Warner is a coming collision among the personal computer, online and video game industries that will tend to blur the lines between the different markets in the home.

"Both of these technologies are running into each other pretty hard," said Rob Enderle, a vice president at the Giga Information Group, a market research firm based in Cambridge, Mass. "Sony dominates the game market, but Microsoft has the channel to take it in the future.""

Monday, May 14, 2001

redux [08.13.00]
The Standard Deconstructing the Web
"The Web is disintegrating into bits. When the dust settles, what's important for a successful long-term strategy is not Web site design but the flexibility of your information architecture."

"New Internet devices and applications are different not only because they are designed to do different things, but also because the mindset of the person who uses them influences the kind of interaction that makes sense. You cannot shove a Web page onto a cell phone's tiny screen. Even if you could, it wouldn't make sense from the user's point of view. The information I want delivered to my cell phone is different from what I want on my home computer. Web pages are designed for sedentary, reflective use. The phone is for urgent, short communications."

redux [06.15.00]
Fast Company Design Vision
""We know how to do amazing things," [Thackara] says, "and we're filling the world with amazing devices. But we cannot answer the most important question: What is this stuff really for?""

"The time has also come, he says, to shift some of the focus of innovation away from work and toward everyday life. The early users of digital devices are almost always business users, so product designers have a natural inclination to create and design products with the workplace in mind. But that tendency can make for bad design, especially when those products migrate beyond business. People put up with technical difficulties in their work lives that they would never tolerate in their personal lives. So forget "personal" computing, Thackara says, and embrace "social" computing. "As computing migrates from ugly boxes on our desks to something that suffuses everything around us, a new relationship will emerge between what's real and what's virtual, what's mental and what's material. There are few limits to the number of services that we could develop if we simply took an aspect of daily life and looked for ways to make it better.""

redux [02.03.00]
NetFuture The Trouble with Ubiquitous Technology Pushers (Part 2)
"In part 1 of this series I voiced my first complaint against the ubiquitous technology pushers: by letting their work develop out of a one-sided preoccupation with the technological milieu rather than immersion in the meaningful contexts affected by their inventions, they inflict technological "answers" upon us without any serious reference to the supposed problems."

"The subtitle of this series of articles is "Why We'd Be Better Off without the MIT Media Lab". Let me broaden that here. What we'd be better off without is every organization that pushes purely technological "solutions" as if they were what could make us better off.”