Clay Shirky: How the Internet will (one day) transform government. - How We Will Read: Clay Shirky. This post is part of “How We Will Read,” an interview series exploring the future of books from the perspectives of publishers, writers, and intellectuals. Read our kickoff post with Steven Johnson here. And check out our new homepage, a captivating new way to explore Findings. This week, we were extremely honored to speak to Internet intellectual Clay Shirky, writer, teacher, and consultant on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. Clay is a professor at the renowned Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU and author of two books, most recently Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.
Clay is one of the foremost minds studying the evolution of Internet culture. He is also a dedicated writer and reader, and it was natural that we would ask him to contribute to our series to hear what he could teach us about social reading. How is publishing changing? Publishing is not evolving. What is the future of reading? So, what is it? Really? Yes. Multitasking while studying: Divided attention and technological gadgets impair learning and memory. Photo by Louisa Goulimaki/AFP/Getty Images Living rooms, dens, kitchens, even bedrooms: Investigators followed students into the spaces where homework gets done. Pens poised over their “study observation forms,” the observers watched intently as the students—in middle school, high school, and college, 263 in all—opened their books and turned on their computers.
For a quarter of an hour, the investigators from the lab of Larry Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University–Dominguez Hills, marked down once a minute what the students were doing as they studied. A checklist on the form included: reading a book, writing on paper, typing on the computer—and also using email, looking at Facebook, engaging in instant messaging, texting, talking on the phone, watching television, listening to music, surfing the Web.
“We were amazed at how frequently they multitasked, even though they knew someone was watching,” Rosen says. The media multitasking habit starts early. World Thinkers 2013. LWRellim comments on Payed off $210,500 worth of debt! Excited to be debt free after this long journey. No Room for Non-Theists at Boston Interfaith Service. Caught between the uneven pillars of humanism and cultural pluralism - Opinion. Social movements employ several tactics to challenge prevailing power structures, including the tricky tool of provocation. Although agent provocateurs have long existed among the fringes of social movements, their effectiveness has been hard to measure. For a provocation to be helpful it has to be clever in idea and flawless in execution or risk dangerous blowback - which is precisely why the most effective provocation campaigns have been clandestine.
On the other hand, the tool of spectacle is designed to bring media attention to an issue and inflame opponents of it. The usual result of such dramatic displays is hardening of positions all around as evidenced by the explosive show that FEMEN treated us to this week. While I consider myself an active member of the women's movement, for at least two decades, apparently I have not been paying close enough attention. 'Sextremist' approach But her temperamental FEMEN sisters just could not resist organising an act of solidarity with her. ‘Pathfinder’s Project’ a first step toward a humanist peace corps - National atheism. Breakthrough in hydrogen fuel production could revolutionize alternative energy market.
BLACKSBURG, Va., April 4, 2013 – A team of Virginia Tech researchers has discovered a way to extract large quantities of hydrogen from any plant, a breakthrough that has the potential to bring a low-cost, environmentally friendly fuel source to the world. “Our new process could help end our dependence on fossil fuels,” said Y.H. Percival Zhang, an associate professor of biological systems engineering in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the College of Engineering. “Hydrogen is one of the most important biofuels of the future.” Zhang and his team have succeeded in using xylose, the most abundant simple plant sugar, to produce a large quantity of hydrogen that previously was attainable only in theory. The discovery is a featured editor’s choice in an online version of the chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie, International Edition. The U.S. Jonathan R. Mielenz said Zhang’s process could find its way to the marketplace as quickly as three years if the technology is available.
I Love You. I’m one of those people who believes that every time I inhale, something good happens. Oxygen is metabolized in my lungs sending quality blood to my heart and brain. Coleridge wrote, ‘Nothing is insignificant.’ I may not think about every breath, but I do try to take into account that every moment is an opportunity to do something good. No moment, or act, is insignificant.
Back in 2009, I had an idea – what if I said, “I Love You” in my social media streams? Yes. By the end of the day on April 4, 2009, thousands of people posted ‘I Love You’ in their social media streams; the post received eighty thousands unique views; the movement made the CNN.com blog; and ‘#ILoveYou‘ even became a trending topic on Twitter.
This year on April 4, I’ll post ‘I Love You’ into my streams again. As the digital age speeds news and information around the globe at rates we can’t even wrap our minds around, it often seems as though the negative stories get the lion’s share of attention. April 4. How the Bible was discovered to be a collection of contradictory textsContradictions in the Bible. Did Moses write the Torah? The traditional view held in both Jewish and Christian circles was that the Pentateuch, the Torah, was penned by Moses under divine inspiration. This traditional claim, however, should be tempered by a couple of initial observations. First, the Torah makes no such claim. Nowhere does the Pentateuch claim to have been written by Moses, or anyone else for that matter.
It may more appropriately be asked, then, how and why did the traditional belief of Mosaic and/or divine authorship arise in the first place. The traditional claim of Mosaic authorship for the Pentateuch first emerges in, and thus seems to have been fabricated for, a specific time—the 5th century BC religious reforms and scriptural canonization of the Torah under Ezra in the Persian period. Early evidence of post-Mosaic authorship: anachronisms An early hypothesis: Moses’ text supplemented by later writers Another attempted hypothesis: pre- and post-Mosaic sources.
Three Things Holding Humanism Back | Temple of the Future. Clay Farris Naff: Humanism's Moment of Opportunity, Going to Waste. At a time when mainline churches and other mainstream religions such as Reform Judaism are struggling with dwindling membership, some religious brands continue to flourish. In particular, those that have taken the secular science of marketing as an article of faith have done spectacularly well.
Megachurches, America's mall-like megachurches, complete with rock bands, food courts, and game rooms, are bringing 'em in by the thousands. Their non-theistic rivals? Not so much. The evidence is in, and it is clear: New Atheists have been a media success and a societal failure. They know how to sell books, how to debate, how to sneer, skewer, and satirize -- in short, how to use all the squabbling skills of the modern academic (cf. the letters section of the New York Review of Books) -- but the New Atheists seemingly have no idea how to build a positive social movement. The Rise of the Nones, the most dramatic modern trend in American religion, has so far passed them by.
What gives? On Atheist Janitors. The Role of Humanist Chaplains. Philosophical zombie. A philosophical zombie or p-zombie in the philosophy of mind and perception is a hypothetical being that is indistinguishable from a normal human being except in that it lacks conscious experience, qualia, or sentience.[1] For example, a philosophical zombie could be poked with a sharp object, and not feel any pain sensation, but yet, behave exactly as if it does feel pain (it may say "ouch" and recoil from the stimulus, or tell us that it is in intense pain). Types of zombie[edit] Though philosophical zombies are widely used in thought experiments, the detailed articulation of the concept is not always the same.
P-zombies were introduced primarily to argue against specific types of physicalism such as behaviorism, according to which mental states exist solely as behavior: belief, desire, thought, consciousness, and so on, are simply certain kinds of behavior or tendencies towards behaviors. Zombie arguments[edit] The above is a strong formulation of the zombie argument. Responses[edit] Private sector parasites. You don’t have to be a Tea Party conservative to believe that the economy is threatened when there are too many “takers” and not enough “makers.” The “takers” who threaten the dynamism and fairness of industrial capitalism the most in the 21st century are not the welfare-dependent poor — the villains of Tea Party propaganda — but the rent-extracting, unproductive rich. The term “rent” in this context refers to more than payments to your landlords.
As Mike Konczal and many others have argued, profits should be distinguished from rents. “Profits” from the sale of goods or services in a free market are different from “rents” extracted from the public by monopolists in various kinds. Unlike profits, rents tend to be based on recurrent fees rather than sales to ever-changing consumers. Rents come in as many kinds as there are rentier interests. This is the first in a three-part series. Human Rights Action - Amnesty International USA. March 2013 You don't have a choice when you're 8 years old and an AK-47 is forced into your hands at gun point.
Not a day goes by where I do not think of the horrors I witnessed as a child soldier in South Sudan. The irresponsible and unregulated flow of weapons made the killing and rape of millions of my people not only possible, but all too easy. In Sudan, everyone had been touched by gun violence. We all knew a loved one whose life was cut short by a bullet from a gun. Beginning today, world leaders have a second chance to make this right. My name is Emmanuel Jal and I'm joining with Amnesty International in calling for President Obama to support a strong Arms Trade Treaty. Emmanuel's story is a special one, but he is not alone. My story is different. I was there representing Amnesty International and could not believe my eyes. We can't change what happened last year, but we can fight for right now.
Thank You, Taliban victim Malala Yousafzai starts school in UK. Malala Yousafzai, the teenager who was shot in the head by Taliban gunmen in Pakistan while advocating girls' education, attended her first day of school in the UK, weeks after being released from hospital. The 15-year-old, who is among nominees for this year's Nobel peace prize, described her return to school as the most important day of her life, as she joined other students in Birmingham. "I am excited that today I have achieved my dream of going back to school. I want all girls in the world to have this basic opportunity," she said in a statement. Accompanied by her father and carrying a pink rucksack, Malala joined other pupils at Edgbaston high school for girls, close to the hospital where she underwent surgery to reconstruct her skull last month. Alongside other students in Year 9, she will be studying a full curriculum in preparation for selecting her subjects for GCSEs.
Greta Christina's Blog » Atheism, sex, politics, dreams, and whatever. Thinking out loud since 2005. “At last, something beautiful you can truly own.” This is the fictional tagline that Sterling Cooper Draper Price comes up with for the Jaguar ad campaign in “Mad Men.” (It’s in the episode The Other Woman — warning, synopsis has spoilers. Yes, I’m re-watching old episodes, it’s getting me caught up on where we are in the new season.) And it’s gotten me thinking: What does beauty mean? So the idea behind this tagline, and the ad campaign, and indeed this entire episode, is that the Jaguar XKE is like a mistress: beautiful, sexy, desirable, impractical, temperamental, unpredictable. And the tagline is, “At last, something beautiful you can truly own.” But the thing is, as Michael Ginsberg himself says (the copywriter who comes up with the campaign and the tagline): It isn’t just people who you can’t own and keep.
It’s a false promise, of course. Beauty is, literally, in the eye of the beholder. I mean that the experience of beauty is literally in the eye, or the brain, of the beholder. A snapshot of humanism in Nigeria. Here at the RA we hear regularly from humanist organisations from all over the world, and it's always interesting to learn about the work humanists are doing in the developing world, where non-believers face very different challenges to those experienced by atheists in the secular West.
With that in mind, we thought we'd share something we received by email today. It's from Marcel Iweajunwa of the New Nigeria Youth Organization, and describes the recent funeral of a well-known Nigerian humanist Eze Ebisike, who was a former Roman Catholic priest. We found it fascinating, and thought you might too. Lessons from a Humanist Funeral On Saturday 2 March 2013 Humanists, friends, family members and other well wishers gathered at Okponkume Mpam Mbaise (Imo State - Nigeria) to pay last respects to a fallen humanist and who - true to to his belief - lived for humanity.
As a person, I never met Eze Ebisike [above].