Category: John

Seminars About Long Term Thinking

I've mentioned this before, but these lectures are just SO GOOD I think it worth repeating.
http://www.longnow.org/projects/seminars/

And check out what's coming up.

  • 02007
    • Dec. 14 (Friday) – Jon Ippolito & Joline Blais, "The Edge of Art"
  • 02008
    • Jan. 11 (Friday) – Paul Saffo, "Embracing Uncertainty: the secret to effective forecasting"
    • Feb. 4 (MONDAY) – Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "The Future Has Always Been Crazier Than We Thought"
    • Feb. 25 (MONDAY) – Craig Venter, "Joining 3.5 Billion Years of Microbial Invention"
    • Apr. 25 (Friday) – Niall Ferguson & Peter Schwartz, "Historian vs. Futurist on Human Progress"
    • May 21 (WEDNESDAY) – Iqbal Quadir, "Technology Empowers the Poorest"
    • Jul. 23 (WEDNESDAY) – Edward Burtynsky, "The 10,000-year Gallery"

2007 Women's Visionary Congress Audio Recordings

2007 Women's Visionary Congress Audio Recordings

womensvisionarycongress

The Women's Visionary Congress is a gathering of healers, activists, researchers and artists who are redefining the use of entheogens in contemporary society. This Congress will address the traditional uses of these substances and investigations into their therapeutic applications. Read more…

Favorites:
Annie Sprinkle
Adele Getty
Kat Harrison
Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Garcia

See Also:
SheShamans

A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

Keynote Clay Shirky gave on Social Software at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference in Santa Clara on April 24, 2003

Good morning, everybody. I want to talk this morning about social software…there's a surprise. I want to talk about a pattern I've seen over and over again in social software that supports large and long-lived groups. And that pattern is the pattern described in the title of this talk: "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy." more…

And a fun way to read it!   Copy and paste the text into Spreeder and speed read it! You can also change the prefs to suit your speed reading tastes.

Michael Silverblatt, 'Bookworm', Interviews William Gibson

Unfortunately I can't link directly to the audio. You can subscribe to Bookworm in iTunes (and I highly recommend it). You can listen from this KCRW link to the Gibson interview page.

Spook Country (Putnam)
What's happened to William Gibson? Along with the most sophisticated future-predictions, speculations about the sociology of cities, and adventures in virtual post-realities, he has finally learned how to get his characters from one room to another. We explore this accomplishment (in which he takes a good deal of pride)

Asylum Street Spankers – Ribbons On Your SUV

Viral political satire in a musical theater setting!

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/KmsOIjzQ1V8" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Or here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/v/KmsOIjzQ1V8

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