Brandymore Castle

"The idea that something that appeared in print is automatically worth paying for is nonsense." says Mark Coatney in Evaluating Time Magazine's New Online Pay Wall This is an example of thinking from the traditional publishing world, where if something made it into print or was "published" it meant the content with through a lengthy process of adding value and checking quality, through the editorial, fact-checking and proofreading process. This was thought in the olden days to mean something. Yes, it did, but not always. That editors and fact-checkers were available or that they had a hand in content did not necessarily mean puff-pieces, fabricated stories, falsehoods, mistakes, typos never made it into that published content polished to shine like your grandmother's counter tops. Publishing was a measure of trust and quality from the pre-network world. The network has a new set of criteria and indicators of trust and quality. I find that often writers who ...

Veteran users of Digg are upset with changes to the site aimed at reducing their influence. They have begun gaming the "voting" system Angry Digg users flood home page with Reddit links What is interesting about this is: When I first encountered and thought about sites using voting systems to surface desirable information, I understood that all algorithms for voting can be gamed. That to deter gaming, very sophisticated and arcane algorithms were required. That these discourage contribution because contributors never know where their work will rank nor why it ranks low or high (this is similar to authors puzzling over Amazon's ranking system). I was surprised when sites based on user voting systems began to succeed by simplifying their voting to the thumbs up/down basic counts or other simple and easily gamed voting systems. I believe that when users are satisfied with outcome of their vote, which for Digg means, contributors get their links or comments surfaced and reade...

When I was about five years old I began having experiences of things that stuck in my mind. I would see something, encounter something, and I would freeze for a moment. When I think of it now, I realize this was "noticing" the whatever-it-was, but very intensely, compared to other things, for a moment. I noticed the freshly washed sheets my grandmother had hung on the clothesline to dry, billowing in the breeze. I saw this from my vantage point sitting in the sandbox. It was memorable for some reason I did not consciously think about then. I was never bored riding in the car on family trips because I was constantly entertained by noticing all the details of everything along the road, there were always things that raised interesting questions in my mind, drew out my curiosity, such as the light on the window in a shop in a strip mall, or the neon lights at night, the stars reflected in the window, the hum of the tires on the highway. On one of my first trips to the beach, I ra...

To those of us who are blind to the night sky, and deaf to the language of clouds, currents and ocean swells, it seems like a mystical or superhuman act. I've always been fascinated by the ideas involved in Polynesian wayfinding. The idea of moving the island to you instead of you moving toward the island is so novel to anyone raised on Western thinking. We take so much of our rational, reductionist scientific beliefs for granted, our coordinates and maps, and compasses, as if they are the only way to navigate. While we ignore the most powerful navigational "computer" of all, the human brain. We forget in our "rationality" that there are other equally valid ways of "reasoning" about the world, coping with the world around us, that do not involve precise "facts", numbers and reasoning, but that use our powers of observation, pattern and cleverness. The NY Times has an article on the passing of an important Pacific traditional navigator, who...

I am disappointed by seeing a significant number of articles (mostly in the blogs, such as this article that makes an assertion and then follows with several anecdotes about mental patients to justify the assertion) on Psychology Today where the author is: employing psychology to support negative characterizations of persons holding political views different from the author's own; employing psychoanalysis at a distance to explain the political beliefs and policy opinions of others; using psychology to support speculation about the intentions of others whose beliefs about the world and policy differ from the author's; the labeling of people with opposing views as suffering from diagnosable mental illness, arguing or implying those views are a result of mental illness. Doing so without holding the same mirror of analysis up to their own self seems hypocritical and intellectually sloppy on the face of it. I prefer inquiry that follows the rule of curiosity. Instead of characteriz...

I find the criticisms of Twitter, especially by literate people or authors tiresome. They are so wrapped up in their own cherished conception of what literacy, writing and authorship is, they can't see the creativity and value of Twitter's social sharing mechanism. At its best, Twitter is like the game of telephone. That is where a child tells the child next to them something, then that child tells the next child, and after going through several children, a slightly different story emerges. I believe this is a _good_ thing. What I loved about "retweeting" when I first discovered it on Twitter, was how it was a editorializer's paradise. Tweets in the process of being retweeted simply begged me to rewrite them, reorganize them, expand or comment on the idea, adding my own ideas and thoughts to the original tweet. Perhaps even shifting it entirely into my own framework. I posted my retweet in the glorious knowledge that someone else might take my words and reformulat...

The post print project is thinking about how mobile devices and networked media "could redefine how we do a couple of very basic things: how we tell stories and how we learn ." ( postprintproject.com ) I'm fascinated with this. I believe story telling is bound to the way our brains evolved and isn't really going to change much no matter what technology does. The networked and mobile space we inhabit could change how we learn and use information. I think it already has. I've been reading Jane Austen's novels as Gutenberg etexts on the iphone. The iphone is passable as a reader. I've not got eyestrain yet. I find it hasn't done anything new, but it has restored reading as a regular activity for me. I hate reading at the computer. I'm too lazy to go to the library (I'd have to drive across town to the central library where all the really good books are). Its just too easy to pick up the iphone, download a new book and start reading. That is dif...

People want their life to tell a story. When life diverges from the story they wish it to tell, they become anxious and frustrated. Zen Buddhism teaches desire is the cause if suffering. When we as the fulfillment of the desire us threatened. By avoiding attachment to the story our life tells, we can be free of suffering caused by our life failing to live up its story. We are then able to enjoy our real life, the one that just happens, without requiring it to tell a story. This is the true story of our life. This is not a passive attitude toward life. Life happens to us and we make life happen through what we do and our choices. Life happens, we make things happen, and chance and the cards we are dealt govern our life.

Although I doubt prosecution will do any good, that is not the real question, it is just the only response a failed society has to clean up the mess its made, to lessen the shame of failing to provide a safe learning environment for Phoebe. Stalking, assaulting and verbally abusing an adult is a crime. It ought to be treated seriously when one child commits violence on another. Bullying is a serious violation of human and civil rights of the individual. Those rights do not disappear just because a person is a child. Ensuring the right of an individual to autonomy and safety requires greater vigilance when a child is concerned, because they are less capable of defending their self or even prohibited from self-defense by school rules, which the bully does not care to follow, but the victim must to avoid being doubly victimized, first by the bully and second by the clueless school administrators. The bullied child is often put in a situation with no way out. They are forced by law to atte...

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When I went to Twitter today, it displayed a dialog We were hoping you could help us make it easier for people to discover their friends and colleagues on Twitter. Review your settings below to make sure the people you care about can easily find you. asking me to update my name, bio, location and email fields. This suggests that both Twitter and Facebook are insecure about each other, seeing strengths in the other and weaknesses in their own service. Twitter feels threatened by Facebook's focus on a true circle of friends and colleagues. Facebook feels threatened by Twitter's capacity for marketing and building followers in public. It suggests they may eventually become very similar in the features they offer, with Twitter integrating photos, video, circles of friends and Facebook making their content more public (which they are doing). Perhaps both sites will give users more control about who can see what content.

The blacksmith knows, when you have too many irons in the fire, the iron you leave in the fire will burn before you have time to hammer the iron you're working on. The expression 'having too many irons in the fire' comes from blacksmithing and stands for having too many tasks competing for your attention. I just realized how accurately it describes being overwhelmed by stressful commitments. The trouble is, in life, we often need to put several irons in the fire. For example, you may need to go back to school for continuing education, but you can't go right away, so you make plans, you make an appointment for the required tests and schedule of classes, you anticipate months of class work. This one task, going back to school, becomes an 'iron in the fire.' While you're anticipating going back to school, other things will come up, daily life, a new person, a new project, but all the worries of going back to school will still be on your mind. As life goes on, w...

I'm not going to name the site that got me starting writing this post. Its a sentiment I've seen on many sites with a traditional publishing orientation. They follow the old tradition from the age of print, where all submitted works are required to be "not published elsewhere," requiring "first print" rights and demanding every "reprint" (copy) should cite the publisher as place of first publication (what is this, vanity?). These guidelines ignore the reality of the new age of immediacy, of information abundance, of venue abundance, the network. There is no scarcity in publication, there is no value in "first publication" or artificial scarcity on the network. The document is the conversation the conversation is the document. The old publishing world is gone, stop trying to hang on. The attitude simply does not fit with a universe of networked information being shared and reshared by millions of people, winding its way in bits and pieces ...

"Tyler Cowen: I don't think it's a useful description to say autistics are only focused on on thing, but I would say there's a lot of tasks you can give autistics, like picking out small details in locked patterns, or picking out different musical pitches, where autistics seem especially good at attention to small detail. So if you think of the web as giving us small bits, like a tweet or a blog post is shorter than a novel, if you think of that as the overall trend, like an iPod, a song is shorter than an album. It seems that we're now all living in a world where we manipulate small bits effectively, it doesn't mean any of us is just interested in one thing, but we manipulate these small bits to create bigger ideas that we're interested in, and those bigger ideas are synthetic, and I think it's another way in which we are using information technology to mirror or mimic capabilities of autistics without usually people knowing it. " http://www.wrong...