“Our milieu is fantastically expanded in every direction and there is crisis on every side. Our horizons for comprehension, for planning, for control, are receding faster than we can conceive. No wonder that I see red: it must be a Doppler effect.” – Stafford Beer

Yes, I know the old saw that when you point your finger there are three pointing back at yourself.

Yes, I’ve tried to think in a more forgiving way.

Tags: change, Dogma, feeling, Fundamentalism, Ideology, models, Reality, teaching

WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING?

“What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?”

Tags: change, complexity, knowledge, tools

These are my links for December 15th from 20:44 to 20:44:

• WorldChanging: Award-Winning Solutions Journalism – About Worldchanging
• Worldchanging is a 501(c)3 media organization that comprises a global network of independent journalists, designers and thinkers covering the world’s most intelligent solutions to today’s problems. We inspire readers around the world with stories of the most important and innovative new tools, models and ideas for building a bright green future. Our readers are ready to change the world, and Worldchanging links them to the first steps.

Tags: Breadcrumbs, change, stories

Image via Wikipedia

These are my links for November 20th from 15:18 to 15:24:

• Planning to Share versus Just Sharing at EdTechPost – This is a long post, born out of years of frustration with ineffective institutional collaborations. If you only want the highlights, here they are: grow your network by sharing, not planning to share or deciding who to share with; the tech doesn’t determine the sharing – if you want to share, you will; weave your network by sharing what you can, and they will share what they can – people won’t share [without a lot of added incentives] stuff that’s not easy or compelling for them to share. Create virtuous cycles that amplify network effects. Given the right ’set,’ simple tech is all they need to get started

Tags: change, education, learning, tagging

These are my links for November 14th from 22:29 to 22:29:

• Changethethought™ | Shop Changethethought – Change the thought and the feeling must go (posters)

Tags: change, feeling

in Pharyngula [Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal] PZ Myers writes about a recent press release from Princeton:

“Unfortunately, the puff piece writer and the scientists involved seem incapable of actually explaining what they found, which makes me extremely suspicious.

….

Anyway, I’ll be looking for the paper. My bet would be that it says nothing like the claims made for it by the press release, or that it will be an embarrassing error of interpretation by the authors.:

The target of his disbelief was also discussed in a recent thread on friendfeed:

Geoff Schultz (friend of Louis Gray) posted a link

Princeton Team Challenges Darwin: Evolution Not Random?

3 hours ago – via Bookmarklet

Sally Church, Darren Heydon, Derrick, Morton Fox and Mo Kargas liked this

I can’t really understand what their theory actually is, but I’m skeptical that it

presents a challenge to our understanding of the role of randomness is evolution.

Randomness is just supposed to describe some of the ways DNA changes over time,

not the way the organism works. – j1m

.

.

I had asked Jonathan Eisen about this http://phylogenomics.blogspot…., who pointed me

to the discussion at Pharyngula http://scienceblogs.com/pharyn… The consensus appears

to be that it’s unsupported hype. – Ruchira S. Datta

This key sentence seems nonsensical to me: “The discovery answers an age-old

questionthat has puzzled biologists since the time of Darwin: How can organisms be

so exquisitely complex, if evolution is completely random.” Evolution is anything but

random. Mutation is random, but evolution is directed by differential fitness, which is

definitely not random.- Benjy Weinberger

Yeah, that’s the basic mistake as I understand it. – j1m

I would assume the creationism vs. evolution debate is not either/or. For those who

have some religion, it can be safely assumed that evolution could be directed -

essentiallyas a tool of creation. – Louis Gray

I suspect that PZ Meyers (in the second piece referenced by Ruchira) is correct in

saying; “The other problem that often occurs is that one of the investigators opens his

mouth and reveals that he is completely out of his depth, and that the team has absolutely

no conception of how evolution actually works. This time, there is no exception.” – You

The researchers should perhaps go have a look at some of Chilean biologists

Humberto Maturana & Francisco Varela (circa 1973) on Autopoiesis [structures,

based on an externalflow of molecules and energy, produce the components which,

in turn, continue to maintainthe organized bounded structure that gives rise to these components]. Nor is it any surprise that a viable system exhibits homeostasis. – You

Tags: autopoiesis, change, error, ignorance, predictions, presentations, religion, systems

These are my links for November 13th from 22:43 to 23:00:

• Personal VSM – If one wishes to change the world, one must first change oneself. This was one of Heinz von Foerster’s profound teachings and one that has great applicability today as it seems that many aspects of our lives threaten to spiral out of control. Here in Ontario, which is one of the more tranquil areas on earth, we have had continuing security fall-out from the World Trade Center attack, the Walkerton water system’s e-coli contamination, SARS, a computer leasing scandal in city government and the electricity black-out in August. All appeared to be catastrophes or anomalies but, upon examination, all have been found to be events that we could have, and should have, been better prepared to meet. All the subsequent examinations exposed failures to see the whole picture and to respond with requisite variety when the first sign of trouble appeared.

Tags: change, control, experience, ignorance, predictions, teaching, thinking, VSM

These are my links for November 13th from 21:06 to 21:29:

• Happiness as the Ultimate Goal of Cybernetics – There are two basic problems to be solved — “What has caused these problems and how can they be solved?” and, “If solutions do exist, are they compatible with humankind’s happiness?”
  Both of these problems must be analyzed based upon the careful analysis of human nature. This paper first discusses the problem of what aspect of human nature is relevant to the ceaseless increase of energy use and how such aspects can be utilized to evade the problem. The analysis of the human feeling of happiness will then be presented to examine if the life of decreased use of energy is compatible with the human nature.

Tags: astronomy, change, cybernetics, feeling, goals, knowledge, management, models, systems

These are my links for November 12th from 22:34 to 22:38:

• POSIWID: Purpose of Reading 3 – If you search for the “Purpose of Books” you will find dozens of websites repeating (with small variations) a quotation from Christopher Morley stating that the real purpose of books is to trap (or perhaps to inspire) the mind into doing its own thinking.
• POSIWID: The Purpose of Reading 2 – But I still want to quibble with the way this “Bad-Dads-Don’t-Read” agenda is being presented, because it is confusing about the true purpose of bedtime reading. If the purpose of (bedtime) reading is defined solely in terms of the educational benefit to children, this is not sufficient reason why it has to be the father who does the reading.

Tags: Books, change, education, POSIWID, presentations, systems, thinking