Category: culture

Open Science and Its Discontents

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My first post on the Ronin Institute blog:

Open science has well and truly arrived. Preprints. Research Parasites. Scientific Reproducibility. Citizen science. Mozilla, the producer of the Firefox browser, has started an Open Science initiative. Open science really hit the mainstream in 2016. So what is open science? Depending on who you ask, it simply means more timely and regular releases of data sets, and publication in open-access journals. Others imagine a more radical transformation of science and scholarship and are advocating “open-notebook” science with a continuous public record of scientific work and concomitant release of open data. In this more expansive vision: science will be ultimately transformed from a series of static snapshots represented by papers and grants into a more supple and real-time practice where the production of science involves both professionals and citizen scientists blending, and co-creating a publicly available shared knowledge. Michael Nielsen, author of the 2012 book Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science describes open science, less as a set of specific practices, but ultimately as a process to amplify collective intelligence to solve scientific problems more easily:

To amplify collective intelligence, we should scale up collaborations, increasing the cognitive diversity and range of available expertise as much as possible. This broadens the range of problems that can be easy solved … Ideally, the collaboration will achieve designed serendipity, so that a problem that seems hard to the person posing it finds its way to a person with just the right microexpertise to easily solve it.

Read the rest at the Ronin Institute blog…

Hollywood’s take on Wall Street: The Big Systemic Corruption

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The Big Short is just about the best film I’ve seen in quite a while. It’s as if Guy Ritchie and Michael Moore took some coke together and decided to make a film about the almost-complete financial meltdown of the world.  Based on Michael Lewis’ 2010 bestseller, it delves deeply into both the mechanics of the crash and the mentality that drove us there.  It doesn’t pander, isn’t emotionally overwrought and gives just about the best explanation that I’ve heard of a synthetic CDO thanks to Selena Gomez and behavioural economist Richard Thaler.

THE BIG SHORT

The casting is spot on with Steve Carrell giving an amazing career-defining performance.  It has a fast-based, but not overly hyper-kinetic style, and is leavened through with a kind of gallows-humour, as expected given director Adam McKay’s background in comedy.  It’s also a film that treats the underlying ideas seriously, but it also never feels too complicated and plot-driven, no mean feat for a director. 

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From The Secret River to Stan Grant’s debate

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The current longest non-stop flight in the world is the Qantas route from Sydney to Dallas: 14.5 hours in the air in an Airbus A-380.  A couple of weeks ago I was sitting on  that Airbus flipping through the inflight entertainment system in that semi-catatonic state that all long-haul flights seem to induce, when I stumbled across an intriguingly-titled television series: The Secret River.  It turned out to be a two-part mini-series originally broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation based on a novel by author Kate Grenville.  The blurb promised an exploration of an emancipated convict in the early days of the colony of New South Wales, carving out a new life on the Hawkesbury River (the Secret River of the title).

I thought to myself, this seem promising, and settled back expecting a mildly diverting period piece about early Australian history that I had never seen dramatized.  I imagined it might be a little dry and slow, but would have great images of the bushland that I was familiar with growing up (the Hawkesbury is just a 20-30 minute drive away from where I grew up), I was interested to see how the producers recreated the early Australian colony, and at the very least it would while away about 3 of the remaining hours until touchdown in Dallas.  Instead I found myself watching a graphic and unsentimental depiction of the often brutal confrontation between the early European settlers and the indigenous people, the Australian Aborigines.Read More »

Brian Eno on the vital role of the arts and humanities

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There’s quiet, but steady, drumbeat of pushing children and college students into narrow STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) fields, and away from anything that doesn’t contribute to the (narrowly defined) “economy”. The UK Education Secretary said in 2014 that choosing to study arts or humanities could “hold them back for the rest of their lives”.  Being trained in both science and engineering, I’m the first to agree that a well-informed scientific and technically literate citizenry is of utmost importance, but it doesn’t follow that we should be just shovelling people into STEM.  It’s short-term thinking at it’s worst and is born of the idea that the purpose of education is to train people to contribute to the global neoliberal corporate state, rather than a process of becoming a complete, well-rounded human being.

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A US Election Creed?

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Recently I stumbled across an old 2014 interview on Moyers & Company between Sherrilyn Ifill of the NAACP and Ari Berman of The Nation  about the increasing attempts to suppress voting in many red states, through adding ever more onerous and complicated so-called “voter ID” laws.  During the discussion they lay out all the details of why this disadvantages many people who have been voting using student IDs or other forms of ID for years.  And with only 31 cases of in-person voter fraud ever documented in one billion of votes cast in all elections since 2000, it’s a solution in search of a problem.  However it was this exchange near the end of the program that really stood out:

Ifill: ….The thing that is the coin of the realm for the common man, we’re coming for that too. we’re going to create this obstacle course that you have to go through in order to exercise this right that should come automatically with your citizenship.

Berman: We have a Supreme Court that wants to make it easier to buy an election than for everyday people to vote in one.
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Framing climate change as a national security issue has it’s perils

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It’s good to see that climate change as a serious issue has returned to US electoral politics (albeit completely on one side of the aisle at this point). However it’s return is being framed in a particular way: using the language of national security.  After past efforts to use environmental, public health and economic security arguments have failed to gain the necessary amount of traction to change policy, supporters of action on climate change believe they may be now on to a winner.  In the recent Democratic primary debate, Senator Bernie Sanders suggested that climate was not just a “national security” issue, but the biggest national security issue.  While framing climate change this way has clear advantages: it gives the issue a sense of urgency and purpose, and it can perhaps convince more hawkish types to take the issue seriously, it is not without certain perils.

In an interesting piece by in Wired, dissecting this new approach, one professor of public policy notes that using national security metaphors:

…reinforces nationalistic responses to solving the problem, as opposed to collective efforts that might be mutually beneficial to the world

In a sense climate change is the ultimate collective action problem, and piecemeal national security responses are likely to run more towards local (or national) mitigation of the effects of climate change, rather long-term systemic changes in the global economy that will be needed to effectively tackle the problem.  So if the “national security” rhetoric takes off, environmentalists, politicians and scientists will want to be sure that the other dimensions of climate change policy aren’t abandoned or ignored.

Read more at Wired

(h/t to Tim De Chant of Per Square Mile)

From the vault: interview with Australian group Boxcar

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Having started seeing some more live music again recently, I was inspired to repost some music-related stories from the vault (originally on my old, now defunct, website).  The first is an interview from back in the 1990s with the then Brisbane-based electronica act, Boxcar (they since changed their line-up and moved to Sydney).  Boxcar went on to release a follow-up album Algorhythm in 1996 and reformed around 2007 for some live dates.   Boxcar’s current activities can be found at their website.  It’s interesting to see how much has changed, back then there was a real divide between “dance music” and “rock” in popular music, which seems to have been entirely erased.

Techno grooves downunder

boxcarAn Australian dance band? That actually play live? I don’t believe it! A common reaction when people hear about Boxcar. Alex Lancaster recently spoke with vocalist and guitarist David Smith and keyboardist Brett Mitchell.

This Brisbane four-piece (Carol Rohde and Crispin Trist complete the line up) are making a niche for themselves in a genre that has spawned a host of sound-a-like, fly-by-night acts and they certainly don’t fit into that moribund format of “Oz rock”. This a point which Brett Mitchell brings up: “You can see rock bands getting desperate by those Choirboys posters.” “Have you seen those posters?”, adds Smith, “Classic. ‘Fuck Dance, Let’s Rock’. I mean how many dance acts do you see saying ‘Fuck Rock, Let’s Dance’? They don’t seem to feel threatened by rock music.”

we were saying things like ‘you like AC-DC?’, ‘yaaah’, ‘well we’re not going to play any crap like that’ – and there were threats at the mixing desk”

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Playing, imagination and the great outdoors

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I have noticed that in the park outside our daycare, our 5 year-old likes to spend at least as much time in the long narrow garden on the side, with a large tree, flower beds, grass and other fun things, and not just in the more “ordered” gym area surrounded by wood chips. It seems to make intuitive sense that this would be so, and indeed Llewellyn Wishart’s published research found that young kids gain a lot more from environments with higher levels of biodiversity. Much of the built environment and workplaces are sterile enough, so it’s really important to have spaces where kids can be free to play with more interesting natural elements than bolted-down gym. The Finnish seem to understand this more than the United States.

Llewellyn Wishart

Biodiversity in early childhood spaces The biodiversity principle in practice in an early childhood space in rural Australia

Our recently published research sheds light on what young children might need more of in their outdoor learning environments.

How do we stimulate well rounded play, physical activity, motor development and simply the joy of being outdoors? In a word think “diversity”. Built and natural design elements with variable surfaces, inclines, levels and terrain make for varied and heightened physical activity and movement experiences. These diverse elements in turn bring challenge and delight.

Parents, early childhood administrators, educators, designers and builders of children’s outdoor spaces should be encouraged to embrace the biophilic design principle of “Biodiversity”. All too often monocultures prevail and children are left with safe, sanitized and flattened outdoor environments lacking in vegetation, imagination and challenge. Biodiversity in plant life, natural elements and materials offers the potential for enriched multi-sensory learning and spaces children and…

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“It’s Time”: remembering modems, BBS, Telecom, Gough and The Dismissal in Peter Carey’s Amnesia

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Author Peter Carey, one of Australia’s best known literary exports (he has lived in New York City for the past 20 years) is probably most identified with novels such as The True History of the Kelly Gang, Illywhacker, and Oscar and Lucinda which all draw heavily on Australian history and mythology of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Oscar and Lucinda  was also made into 1997 film film of the same name featuring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchette.  Despite this reputation, Carey has written novels that deal with more contemporary life, including the darkly comic Bliss, in which bored advertising executive, Harry Joy, is briefly clinically dead, but upon returning to life, finds himself in a reality that may, or may not, be a version of hell.   (Bliss was also made into a highly underrated film, with the peerless Barry Otto as Joy).  Carey’s most recent effort, Amnesia, delves into the very present day concerns of technology and surveillance.  Largely split between a present-day “thriller” narrative and a slightly disheveled and cut-up history of both 1950s and 1980s Melbourne life as seen through the lens of politically active family, Amnesia fuses Carey’s brilliant use of language, with more overt political undertones.

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“Hey Peter, I’m gonna need you to come in all the time. Does all the time work for you?”

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Fans of the 1999 movie Office Space will have surely noticed the recent front page above-the-fold article in last Sunday’s New York Times on working conditions at Amazon has stirred up a lot of interest, including a response from Jeff Bezos himself (who states, somewhat incongruously, that he has “zero tolerance for lack of empathy”).   One of the reasons that this article gained so much traction (as opposed to the steady drip-drip of articles about work conditions at it’s warehouses), is that it focused on the changing work environment of many upper-middle-class white-collar workers all over the country (which is, let’s face it, the readership of the New York Times).   The rise of the 24/7 work culture, constant e-mail, tethering to our smartphones, and now the micro-surveillance of work “productivity” has now passed some kind of rubicon, where more and more people are increasingly asking, like the Peter Gibbons character in the film: what’s the whole point of it?

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