Do We Need A SETI For the Human Mind?

The Swedish author Henning Mankell has written a reflection on the nearly forgotten art of listening, which is published in today's New York Times. His piece comes only a couple of days after Maureen Dowd's column Silence is Golden, which discusses Michel Hazanavicius' new movie The Artist, and laments "'the loss of silence,' once as natural as the sky and air." Mankell suggests that African storytelling is less linear than the European, and stands ready

"to burst onto the world scene — much as South American literature did some years ago when Gabriel García Márquez and others led a tumultuous and highly emotional revolt against ingrained truth. Soon an African literary outpouring will offer a new perspective on the human condition. The Mozambican author Mia Couto has, for example, created an African magic realism that mixes written language with the great oral traditions of Africa." 

Mankell contrasts that with our mostly linear Western literature.

"That’s not the case in Africa. Here, instead of linear narrative, there is unrestrained and exuberant storytelling that skips back and forth in time and blends together past and present. Someone who may have died long ago can intervene without any fuss in a conversation between two people who are very much alive. Just as an example."   

This reminds me of a review I read in 1986 of Timothy Mo's novel An Insular Possession, where the reviewer claimed that Chinese literature was like a lake, while Western literature was like a river. It was a beautiful allegory, but I suspect that it had something to do with the fact that I never read the book. Like so many other books I have bought over the years, it just stands there squeezed in between strangers on a shelf, sometimes making me feel guilty, often reminding me of how short life is.

But back to listening. Maybe we need a SETI for the human mind in this age of mostly mindless chatter and widespread sharing of the inconsequential and mundane.

Sometimes, when something big and sad happens, we gather for a moment of silence. But there is no silence. You can always hear the (lack of) silence. The noise is always there and technology has made us humans capable to produce more noise than ever. If the superstring theory is right - and the world consists of vibrations of tiny supersymmetric strings - then it might end (somehow) not with a bang, but with an overload of microwave emissions that causes the music of existence to stop.

Hans Sandberg

        

Computers and the Near Future of Education

New York Times published an impressive special issue of Science Times today, dedicated to The Future of Computing. One of the columns discusses the role of technology in improving U.S. education. Death Knell for the Lecture: Technology as a Passport to Personalized Education is written by Daphne Koller, a professor at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. She highlights the Khan Academy, and Stanford's recent experiment with placing three computer science courses online, which attracted 300,000 non-credit students.

Lee Fang, an investigative reporter and blogger, presents a radically different and much more skeptical perspective on online education in a very interesting essay for The Nation magazine. How Online Learning Companies Bought America's Schools

NYT Columnist Gail Collins also discussed online education in her recent column Virtually Educated.

Add to that the fact that the information divide in the U.S. (see Susan Crawford's essay in the NYT Sunday Review) is starting to look like a virtual Grand Canyon, and the whole discussion about online education becomes deeply troubling.

What to do?

"We can hardly stop the adoption of mobile Internet and mobile devices, and they will revolutionize all aspects of education and learning, but what we can do is to help frame the development and create access ramps for those socially and economically disadvantaged. As the delivery of education becomes more and more fragmented, the need for standards and a reasonable amount of fair and independent evaluation becomes critical.

On the Rim of the Information Chasm

The New Digital Divide

Ayn Rand and her followers would dance on the rim of the Grand (information) Canyon, celebrating their privileged status, claiming it was all due to their cleverness and uninhibited drive for individual success. They wouldn't even bother looking down into the chasm. Behind the mores of today's conservatives is fear of falling, not fear of flying.

Dithering On the Brink Of Disaster

The tepid stimulus package got us out of the hole that Bush-Cheney dug, but we have since been dithering on the bring of disaster thanks to protracted Republican intransigency and Presidential naïveté.

The Bush-Obama unemployment story so far

Taxation Is A Good Thing Says Sweden's Conservative Finance Minister

Sweden's house of finance is in order, despite the recession and economic troubles in Europe and the world. Anders Borg, the conservative Minister of Finance, said in an interview for Swedish TV that Sweden needs the taxes it levies on the population ant that it is a good thing.
"It is my belief that it is basically a good thing that we collect tax revenues in Sweden. It is a good thing that we have our welfare system, social security, foreign aid, education and healthcare. In order to have that, we need taxes," Borg told SVT.

Worst Thing Since the New Coke - Flat-Packed Swedish Food at IKEA

I picked up Lisa at Newark Airport, and then we headed over to Ikea for a romantic dinner with a gorgeous view of the Turnpike (well, it was dark so all we could see through the panorama windows was the lights of cars, streetlights and incoming airplanes). We had stopped at Ikea in Elizabeth to pick up some Swedish food in the mini market, but we came away pretty disappointed. Ikea is doing the "New Coke" thing, phasing-out the good old Swedish brands and replacing them with Ikea-branded food. Flat-packed chocolate doesn't look as appetizing as the Marabou's we used to buy, and they had signs warning us that we better buy the Siljans knäckebröd now, because soon you will have to make do with Ikea branded bread. For ex-patriots like myself, a visit to Ikea is a visit to the old country, and it is nice to be able to buy Kalles kaviar, Västerbottensost and Lingonsaft, but that will soon be history.
Not only that. Ikea is now selling half-size packages of soft tunnbröd for the same price as the full sized bread I used to buy, and the substitute for the "Hönökaka" is not only square, but nouveau in size, or approximately one third of what it used to be.
I left Ikea sad and disappointed. Is it good business? Well, everytime I visit Ikea to pick up Swedish food, I usually spend a couple of hundred dollars in the store. Without the food, I won't bother to drive to Ikea anytime soon.

Krugman Honored With Prize and a Cool Video

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) honored Princeton's Nobel Laureate economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman with a new prize for a distinguished economist and a video on its 25th anniversary.

A Crazy Idea That Makes Sense: Let the Uneducated Educate

I happened upon a TED video this morning. The email arrived; I browsed, clicked and couldn’t stop watching until it was over. Here was this Indian gentleman telling the story of how he left his elite school to found a university among the poorest of the poor. It’s a school where no one with a title or a Ph.D. is allowed to teach, and where no exam is given. And yet, it works. And the movement has spread to Afghanistan, Africa and other places, where poor grandmothers are now building schools and installing solar panels. It is a revolution of sorts.

Bunker Roy - the founder of the movement - realized that uneducated people sit on vast knowledge resources, an idea that Jared Diamond touched upon in the beginning of his book “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies” (1997). There is knowledge and there is knowledge. I’m not convinced that barefoot universities would work in modern, middle class societies, but I do believe that we have a lot to learn from them. One of the main problems with modern education is that we separate and isolate learning from doing. Another is that we focus on a narrow band of knowledge. The British Studio School movement has taken on these issues, seemingly successful among children that the current school system has failed.

Bunker Roy: Learning from a barefoot movement

Listening to the Republican Debate

Listening to the Republican debate... what a bunch of losers - all thinking they are winners. Rick Perry is a bad joke. So is Bachmann. Herman Cain is a shrewd salesman - a male Sarah Palin of sorts - but his business is not power, but selling books and promoting his consulting business. Mitt Romney has that Mormon look and hedgefund mindset that gives his ego the necessary boost, but is not going to win enough evangelical votes to enter the White House. Ron Paul is a cranky old man with even older ideas, kind of like Ross Perot without the charts. The rest of the gang are not even worth mentioning. (Jon Huntsman - the only zane Republican candidate - decoded to not participate in this debate. Who can blame him?)