Author: JH

Ron Paul – The Internet President

I've been hearing a lot about Ron Paul and have friends working on his campaign. I like a lot of what I'm hearing, especially about getting the Federal Govt. out of State's Rights issues, but wonder how he might implement his ideas. Here's a link to a very informative Ron Paul NPR interview (transcript here) that helped answer some of my questions.

A SHORT COURSE IN THINKING ABOUT THINKING

A "Master Class" By Danny Kahneman
Danny Kahneman along with Amos Tversky won the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics for their discovery of behavioral economics. I learned about them through reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "Fooled By Randomness" and then Daniel Gilbert's "Stumbling on Happiness" I've become very interested in cognitive biases– as I understand them, built in tendancies to make bad choices. The idea is that by studying how humans tend to make errors in judgment we can learn to make better decisions. The "Start Here" link is to a Daniel Gilbert SXSW lecture which is extremely informative and entertaining.

Decision Analysis

Alan Watts Theater

Here are six animated clips of short Alan Watts excerpts from the people at FreshMinds. If you're new to Alan Watts, chances are you'll be instantly smitten and wonder how it could be you've never heard of him. If you're an old fan of Alan's, then I'm sure you'll find these short animations to be very moving.
Alan Watts Theater

(P.S. I wonder how it could be that the wikipedia entry for Alan manged to find the ONLY shot I've ever seen of him frowning!

Media Ecology Association – 2007 Awards Announced

MEA recently announced the winners of the 2007 (for year 2006) MEA Awards.

The Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book
in the Field of Media Ecology

Peter K. Fallon for Printing, Literacy, and Education in Eighteenth Century Ireland: Why the Irish Speak English

The Walter Benjamin Award for Outstanding Article
in the Field of Media Ecology

Corey Anton for "Playing with Bateson: Denotation, Logical Types,
and Analog and Digital Communication"

The Erving Goffman Award for Outstanding Scholarship
in the Ecology of Social Interaction

Richard A. Lanham for The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information

The Susanne K. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship
in the Ecology of Symbolic Form

Martin H. Levinson for Sensible Thinking for Turbulent Times

The Dorothy Lee Award for Outstanding Scholarship
in the Ecology of Culture

David MacDougall for The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses

The Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship
in the Ecology of Technics

Timothy C. Campbell for Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi
and to
Fred Turner for From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism

The Harold A. Innis Award for Outstanding Thesis or Dissertation in the Field of Media Ecology

Adriana Braga for Feminilidade Mediada por Computador: Interação Social no Circuito-Blogue [Computer-Mediated Femininity: Social Interaction on the Blog Circuit]

The Mary Shelley Award for Outstanding Fictional Work

Janna Levin for A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

The John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis
in the Field of Media Ecology

Michael Wesch for The Machine is Us/ing Us (video on YouTube.com)

The Louis Forsdale Award for Outstanding Educator
in the Field of Media Ecology

Octavio Islas

The Jacques Ellul Award for
Outstanding Media Ecology Activism

Donna Flayhan

The James W. Carey Award for
Outstanding Media Ecology Journalism

Philip Marchand

The Walter J. Ong Award for
Career Achievement in Scholarship

Jay David Bolter

The Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement
in Public Intellectual Activity

Eric McLuhan

Kurzweil- Press ignores bias in study of multivitamins and prostate cancer

In a recent paper reporting on the National Cancer Institute study of multivitamin use and the risk of prostate cancer, the NCI authors cited several possible bias factors. An analysis by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman shows why the study's biases should be considered before drawing conclusions.
More…

Why texting harms your IQ

From The Times
April 22, 2005

Txts n emails mk ppl stupid coz they R worse than smking pot & lead 2 a st8 of 'infomania'

By Michael Horsnell
THE regular use of text messages and e-mails can lower the IQ more than twice as much as smoking marijuana.

That is the claim of psychologists who have found that tapping away on a mobile phone or computer keypad or checking them for electronic messages temporarily knocks up to 10 points off the user's IQ.

This rate of decline in intelligence compares unfavourably with the four-point drop in IQ associated with smoking marijuana, according to British researchers, who have labelled the fleeting phenomenon of enhanced stupidity as "infomania".

Research on sleep deprivation suggests that the IQ drop caused by electronic obsession is also equivalent to a wakeful night.
more…

E. Howard Hunt names the men who killed Kennedy

I'm not familiar with prisonplanet.com, but they tell the story of a recording E. Howard Hunt made on his deathbed. The tape was recently made public by Howard Hunt's son, Saint John Hunt. On the tape Howard Hunt describes a bitter LBJ and his involvement with the murder of JFK. Hunt names others who were involved in the conspiracy. Five minutes of the tape were aired recently on CoastToCoastAM.com
There is a direct link to the mp3 file here.

What's been bugging me about it is, what if it's true? I mean – just for a minute – inhabit a world where the Kennedy assassination has been solved- We know who did it, who helped who and why.
Now what?
How is justice served over 40 years later? Who's going to pay?
What does it mean? What would change?
How do I heal, or why, or who cares?
Is it just miscellaneous information?