IdeaFestival

What are the digital literacies?

Initial results from one of the largest ethnographic studies of kids in their native, digital environment are now available. Could the cheap availability of media be creating a new generation of creatives?

Sure, kids have long been attracted to extracurricular activities like dance or sports. But researchers say digital media is bringing up a new generation who are creators of media rather than just passive consumers of it. Within these digital environments among peers, kids who create and evaluate media are deriving a sense of competence, autonomy, self-determination and connectedness, researchers say.

The case studies discussed last Wednesday are part of a $50 million long-range MacArthur Foundation initiative, the digital media and learning project, to study whether - and how - digital media might be changing kids. Full results will be available later in the year.

More on the results of this study can be found on C|NET.

Wayne

Podcast: Why fashion matters

IF continues to release great audio from the 2007 IdeaFestival.

The very latest podcast features New Zealand fashion designer Karen Walker discussing her creative process, design style and the meaning of fashion. Podcasts may be obtained directly via RSS or from iTunes.

Wayne

I want to be foolish like this

Writing about the death of MIT computer science professor, Joseph Weizenbaum, Harvard crank Nicholas Carr and Discover columnist Jaron Lanier use Eliza's tale to assay against errors of the computational kind.

Let me explain.

In the 1960's Weizenbaum created a program called Eliza that would rephrase statements as questions and pose them to test subjects in what became an infamous test of computer-human interaction. Some individuals came to believe that the computer program was a human and lessons drawn from the episodes found their way into Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, which Carr references in his post, Eliza's World:

Perhaps we are beginning to understand that the abstract systems — the games computer people can generate in their infinite freedom from the constraints that delimit the dreams of workers in the real world — may fail catastrophically when their rules are applied in earnest. We must also learn that the same danger is inherent in other magical systems that are equally detached from authentic human experience, and particularly in those sciences that insist they can capture the whole man in their abstract skeletal frameworks [emphasis supplied].

It's easy now to poke fun at the subjects who came to believe that Eliza was human. But the larger lesson that I take - and the one suggested by Carr - is that reason and logic are only part of the human experience.

That is particularly true when it comes to thinking because it is belief - and theatrically, the suspension of disbelief - that makes us human. Belief combined with experience holds out possible worlds for our examination; it is on the superstructure of belief that we can absorb wisdom, practice empathy, strive for justice and extend mercy where none may be merited.

As cheaply amusing as it might be in hindsight, what Eliza demonstrated was not that we can foolishly ascribe feelings to objects, but that it is the suspension of the facts that makes foolishness - as well as soul-stirring grace - possible. The rules be damned.

An interactive Web-based version of Eliza is here.

Wayne

Shakespeare, Hollywood Style

If you've never watched Kenneth Branaghs version of Much Ado About Nothing, you simply must. Catch a short piece of it here. Besides the fact that he looks a lot like my husband (:) and I think he is absolutely yummy, his is, honestly, one of the best Shakespearean actors out there. 

One really must see a Shakespearean play. Although we study the bard's language in class and watch some movies and try, oh try to help 14 year-olds understand the passion of Romeo and Juliet, it really doesn't do the plays justice unless someone with a particular talent at understanding those lines delivers them in an appropriate fashion. 

Actually, anything Branagh does is splendid but if you are sitting home one night thinking, "I really need to watch a Shakespearean play to hone my Elizabethan language skills", this movie is the one to see.  Of course if you'd rather see a tragedy and ponder the meaning of "to be or not to be", his version of Hamlet is fabulous as well. 

Tina

Pulitzers awarded

The Pulitzers have been announced. Among the winners, the recipient of the Pulitzer for feature writing asks a thought provoking question: Would passers-by on a busy street corner recognize musical brilliance when they heard it?

Wayne

Unwinding "Bolero"

What do the composer Maurice Ravel and Anne Adams, a Canadian scientist-turned-artist who died of a rare disease last year have in common? Both suffered from the same brain disorder and both produced memorable art at the age of 53 - Ravel composed "Bolero" and Dr. Adams painted it. New York Times:

'Bolero' alternates between two main melodic themes, repeating the pair eight times over 340 bars with increasing volume and layers of instruments.  At the same time, the score holds methodically to two simple, alternating staccato base lines.... [building] without a key change until the 326th bar. Then it accelerates into a collapsing finale.

Adams translated the music thusly:

Dr. Adams, who was also drawn to themes of repetition, painted one upright rectangular figure for each bar of 'Bolero.' The figures are arranged in an orderly manner like the music, countered by a zigzag winding scheme.... The transformation of sound to visual form is clear and structured. Height corresponds to volume, shape to note quality and color to pitch. The colors remain unified until the surprise key change in bar 326 that is marked with a run of orange and pink figures that herald the conclusion.

Because of the way one variant of the disease progresses, some individuals develop artistic talents as the brain literally reorganizes. For Adams that meant an area of the brain known to be responsible for the integration of perception such as color, sound, touch and space took on a larger role to compensate for the diminished capacity of the frontal cortex, resulting in an overwhelming creative urge and an ability to cross-scribe sense. Over a ten year period, Adams gave medicine unprecedented insight into that urge by undergoing periodic scans that documented the changes in her brain.

Her art may be found here and here.

Wayne

Wikipedia: Synesthesia

IF Conversations - Ruby Lerner

President of the Creative Capital Foundation, Ruby Lerner describes how the IdeaFestival helps her business. Creative Capital is an arts foundation modeled on venture capital concepts.

The IdeaFestival Conversations series, featuring such people as Michio Kaku and Nicholas Kristof speaking on issues of interest to them, may also be found at IFTV.

Wayne

Dith Pran

Dith Pran the Cambodian-born journalist whose life under the Khmer Rouge-led Cambodian revolution in the 1970's became the subject of the award-winning film "The Killing Fields," has died in New Jersey.

I had the honor to meet and talk with Dith when he was a presenter at the 2004 IdeaFestival. He was an amazing individual. His inspiring story of survival and courage was clearly one of the most moving and meaningful talks in the history of the Festival. His relentless search for the truth under the most horrendous circumstances was - and I don't use this word often anymore - heroic. My life is richer for having briefly known him.

Kris

Worlds from algorithms

Characterizing it as the "science design movement," the current issue of SEED features a number of articles related to the convergence between disciplined observation - science - and design.

While fractal art has gained popularity, the use of the term "fractal architecture" in a Salon video featuring Paola Antonelli, the senior curator of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art, and Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractal geometry, attracted me.

Paola Antonelli:

What is really amazing to me right now is how contemporary architects are using the idea that is behind fractals, the idea of a rule that lets them work at different scales indifferently, at least until the moment when the real design application, the reality of the client or manufacturer wanting a building or a toaster, sets in. I am thinking, for instance, of Ben Aranda and Chris Lasch, who you may remember spoke right after you when we had the salon at MoMA. They are two architects that have founded their practice on understanding algorithms and finding ways to take scientific concepts and translate them for architecture's benefit and evolution. So, it seems to me that it is not only and simply about the formal beauty of fractals, it is the idea of growth that your theory has really given to architects and designers. And now we're seeing the algorithm become the principle, and the subject of research, for so many architects today. They're hoping that they can ultimately input an algorithm, give it a push, and then all of a sudden an object, a building, a city, and a world will grow out of it.

I'll add a couple of thoughts:

Natural objects such as ferns and blood vessels can be described in the language of fractals, which means that their unfolding can be described as an algorithmic progression. Fractals, interestingly, can produce nearly limitless two-dimensional shapes, but a finite number of things in three dimensions.

Secondly, I really appreciate Mandelbrot's description of the movement of a cognitive discipline like math toward its biological and physical roots, a point recently driven home in Pulse, a book about the "coming age" of biologically inspired design, which makes just that point about economics. There is no denying the essential natural processes that can be found in presumptively cognitive pursuits.

A transcript of the Antonelli-Mandelbrot exchange is here.

Paola, by the way, also created the MOMA exhibit, "Design and the Elastic Mind," mentioned previously.

Wayne

Wikipedia: fractals

Growing compassion

Having first read a story about how experiments with the cooperation of Bhuddist monks had shown a marked change in brain structure as a result of meditative practices - particularly those areas thought responsible for compassion and consciousness -I was gratified to see that Newsweek's Sharon Begley recently brought the story forward.

New research demonstrates that the voluntary generation of compassion thought and feeling can result in long lasting changes for the better in our brains. We can indeed grow the areas of our brain responsible for compassion.

Cool, isn't it?

Similarly, UCLA psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz touched on the idea last September in Louisville while arguing that practiced "reframing" can curb obsessive-compulsive behavior.

Wayne