Re: [FRIAM] help with memory

[Russell Standish]

I know ... I know ! 

MOOC - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course

On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 06:04:38PM -0700, Nick Thompson wrote:
> Hi, Everybody, 
> 
>  
> 
> Does anybody remember from the 90's (yes, the 90's!) a computer web thing,
> VERY primitive, that tried to imitate a university with class rooms, and
> discussion groups.  It had a cheesy graphic interface you could "move around
> in"  I think it was called moo doo, but I possibly have it confused with the
> Vermont Fertilizer company of the same name.  I don't know if it bears any
> relation to the educational software Moodle.  
> 
>  
> 
> Ring any bells?
> 
>  
> 
> Have done some poking around on the web but I can't find anything, possibly
> because of people using the same or similar names for other things. 
> 
>  
> 
> Nick 
> 
>  
> 
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> 
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
> 
> Clark University
> 
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
> 
>  
> 

> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove


-- 


Dr Russell StandishPhone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Senior Research Fellowhpco...@hpcoders.com.au
Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au



FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[FRIAM] help with memory

[Nick Thompson]

Hi, Everybody, 

 

Does anybody remember from the 90's (yes, the 90's!) a computer web thing,
VERY primitive, that tried to imitate a university with class rooms, and
discussion groups.  It had a cheesy graphic interface you could "move around
in"  I think it was called moo doo, but I possibly have it confused with the
Vermont Fertilizer company of the same name.  I don't know if it bears any
relation to the educational software Moodle.  

 

Ring any bells?

 

Have done some poking around on the web but I can't find anything, possibly
because of people using the same or similar names for other things. 

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[FRIAM] FW: trump/Ford

[Nick Thompson]

Hi, everybody, 

 

Here is the second shoe.  I asked Jonathan to comment on trump on the basis
of his experience with the Mayor of Toronto, a man named Ford, who managed
to get himself reelected despite the fact that it was pretty clear he was a
coke head . and a fool.  I asked him how was that possible and how do we
fight it. 

 

See below.  I particularly urge you to "stay for " the newspaper article at
the end.  Both Jon's letter and that article provide ground truth about the
difficulties of extracting oneself from such a regime, once it has been
stabled. 

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Jonathan Barker [mailto:jsheddbar...@gmail.com] 
Sent: Saturday, February 18, 2017 8:30 PM
To: Nick Thompson 
Subject: Re: trump/Ford

 

The appeal to the anger of those who feel sidelined and ignored is is
similar. They both attacked "the gravy train." They both had great need for
popular approval and held the aim of limiting government and taxes. Ford in
office was undisciplined and not very effective. He did not systematically
attack all city services, but did cut their funding. He had links with shady
operators, attacked the media, cared nothing for facts, stuck to a simple
message. And his supporters stuck with him despite all the criticism and
investigative reporting. Ford had a genuine affection for regular people,
answered their calls, and even went to their houses to look after complaints
about city services. He also had serious addictions to alcohol and other
drugs.  

Opposing him had some similarities to opposing Trump. He did not have firm
control of city council and the city is highly dependent on the province.
There was room to stymie some of his efforts.  And after he admitted to
substance abuse most power was stripped from his office. (There was no
provision for removing him from office.) To get him out of power, like for
Trump, required grass roots action: organize and get out the vote. But city
politics has no organized parties in Toronto which means there were no party
organizations to mobilize or to pry supporters from. The seeming futility of
well-informed reporting and opposition arguments seems similar in the two
cases. In his second election Ford might well have won because the non-Ford
vote was split between two strong candidates, but cancer sidelined Ford
before election day.

Lessons: Use all available institutional weapons and reach into the places
supporting Trump to organize and activate and inform the many people there
who oppose him. The key problem is addressing the issues in the Trump voters
minds in a convincing way. There are many strands here to think through.
What can government and citizens do to reduce inequality and reverse the
cultural and physical separation of class and identity groups? How to
rehabilitate the reputation of government as a problem solver? And serous
media as sources of true information? What groups and places to target
first? 

Daniel Dale covered Ford and then Trump for the Toronto Star. Here are his
thoughts about similarities and differences from an interview after the
Republican convention.

The nuclear codes are a worry...

 

Jonathan

=

Daniel Dale
  on Donald Trump and Rob Ford

Towards the beginning of Trump's campaign, a lot of people drew connections
between his political rhetoric and rise in popularity and that of Rob Ford.
What's diverged since - or only gotten bizarrely more similar?

A very big difference is that Ford managed to stay on his best behaviour
during his first campaign, in which he managed to convince people he wasn't
quite the erratic, angry, scary man that people had said he was. Trump just
doesn't care. His behaviour has only gotten more concerning to a lot of
people, but he's unwilling to modify it.

Another is that [Trump] has explicitly used racial or ethnic division in an
attempt to fuel his popularity with a small segment of the population. Ford
may have benefited from the homophobia of the part of the electorate who
didn't like George Smitherman [in 2010], or from blurting out in debates
where he didn't want immigrants coming to the city. But that type of
fear-based appeal wasn't something that he did.

Early in the campaign there were eerie similarities. But the more it's
continued, the more they've diverged. Trump has gone beyond.

I think it's hard in general to compare a Canadian municipal campaign to a
U.S. presidential one. But what we saw in Trump's very dark, angry,
fear-mongering speech at the Republican convention last week is nothing like
what we saw from Ford. Trump is trying to make crime and law and order
central to his campaign. That's something that's more often central to
municipal campaigns, but it's not somet

[FRIAM] FW: Grasping the scary, shaping local action

[Nick Thompson]

Hi, everybody.

 

Some of you might remember my friend Jonathan Barker, a political scientist 
from the University of Toronto, who came to visit with us a few years back.
I have turned to him to help me think about how much danger we are actually in, 
fascism-wise.  I think the short answer he would give is that the danger is 
substantial.  

 

Here are some materials he has forwarded to me to prod me along in my thinking  
(links below).  

 

There is one more I will send in a separate message. 

 

Nick  

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

  
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Jonathan Barker [mailto:jsheddbar...@gmail.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, February 22, 2017 2:21 PM
To: Nancy Barker 
Subject: Grasping the scary, shaping local action

 

Greetings from Toronto,

Here are four sources for understanding what US politics is in for and one very 
promising path of effective resistance and redirection. I read a lot on the new 
administration and these pieces, I find, throw a bright light on the unfamiliar 
events spilling out every day. Thanks to friends and relatives who signaled 
them to me.  But let me add that (the late) Sheldon Wolin in his 2008 book 
Democracy Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism 
shows how thoroughly the ground was prepared for the current corruption and 
strangulation of the political sphere of Democracy.

Three to read, one to watch for a deeper and deeply disturbing exposure of the 
Trump phenomenon. You may have seen one or more of these. 

They complement, but do not duplicate, one another.

 

All best,

Jonathan

 

(1)  
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n04/sidney-blumenthal/a-short-history-of-the-trump-family
   [Sidney Blumenthal, A Short History of the Trump 

Family, London Review of Books]

(2)  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GAw6dvh8v4  [Masha Gessen on the 
Trump-Putin relationship - the fifth estate]

(3)  
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/how-to-build-an-autocracy/513872/
  [David Frum, How to build and autocracy. the Atlantic]

(4)  https://www.indivisibleguide.com/about-us/  [About the Indivisible Guide 
and the thousands of groups taking action to reclaim the public sphere in the 
U.S]







 

 


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] Meet the Math Professor Who’s Fighting Gerrymandering With Geometry - The Chronicle of Higher Education

[Merle Lefkoff]

Interesting.  I posted on my Facebook page this morning an article about
the federal court in Wisconsin questioning gerrymandering there--new
precedent.  Wonder if this group was involved in this important court
decision.

On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 1:35 PM, Tom Johnson  wrote:

> Meet the Math Professor Who’s Fighting Gerrymandering With Geometry
> http://www.chronicle.com/article/Meet-the-Math-Professor/239260/
>
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
>



-- 
Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
merlelef...@gmail.com
mobile:  (303) 859-5609
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[FRIAM] Meet the Math Professor Who’s Fighting Gerrymandering With Geometry - The Chronicle of Higher Education

[Tom Johnson]

Meet the Math Professor Who’s Fighting Gerrymandering With Geometry
http://www.chronicle.com/article/Meet-the-Math-Professor/239260/

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

[Robert Wall]

Hi Vladimyr,

Nice to chat with you on the glen-channel. :-)  I guess I came late to the
chat without fully understanding the how it was vectored.  It happens ...
age ...

Wrt conflating the two models of "being in the groove," y' all seem to be
focused on the, perhaps, unintentional fusing of the real with the symbols
we assign to the real for analysis or other purposes.  This issue works on
many levels.  Csikszentmihalyi discusses this "being in the zone" in a
positive way where creativity happens and what is really lost is our sense
of self in the process.  Whitehead writes about this as a continuous
process change that largely is motivated by "feeling."  But there is
another side that you and Glen seem to be discussing that presents a more
destructive side, where one loses the understanding that the
representational is not the represented. We give too much meaning to the
symbols such that they migrate from epistemological to ontological.  The
question becomes are the symbols real?  So this is more one of delusion.
Okay ... I think I am "in the groove" now. :-)

You draw an interesting distinction between war-oriented computer games and
real war engagements.  The distinction, however, seems to be fading away in
the drone-engagement wars.  The representational becomes the grounded
reality.  An emulation and not a simulation.  One of the combatants--the
targeted--are but mere symbols, like on a heads-up display in a military
fighter plane or just images on a computer monitor. Empire can go to war
without actually going to war ... at least not until you have to own and
occupy what Empire has destroyed: the livelihoods of the newly-minted
refugees and the newly-minted enemies.  Killing becomes painless and
remorseless and danger-free.  It becomes like a war-oriented computer game
in that no one is shooting back at the guy who is pulling the trigger or at
the "joy" stick.

For a time, I used to build educating simulators for propositional war
games that were used tactically in the field and strategically in a
so-called war college. But these were still the kind where the assets and
weapons were symbolic and just representational of possible eventualities.
The goal was war training with only cyber-oriented risk ... kind of like a
flight simulator.  But now, these simulators seem to have been weaponized
and the risk all but eliminated.

When you finally remove all the meaning from the math notation and just
> manipulate the markings, it can be very hypnotic.


Yes. For the triggermen, the process is kind of like the one Glen describes
where the symbols have become ungrounded, valueless, meaningless. But, in
reality, the "game" is no longer a simulation (a model) but an emulation (a
surrogate for something real) operating in real time. And, for the targets,
the process is the opposite of the one Glen describes where the symbols are
very much grounded. Is the corollary that the triggermen are Platonists and
the targeted combatants are Constructivists?

Most of my time working under the rubric of systems engineering, though,
was in building simulators for decision support.  This I much preferred.
This seemed more constructive than destructive or combative, even if still
only a simulator. But are we deluded to believe these models, or any model,
to be reasonable facsimiles of the modeled, at least in the context of its
range of applicability? Is *face validity* enough?  I mentioned some issues
concerning this in the previous post.

With the FEM and CAD background, I suspect you were or are a structural
engineer by profession.  In fact, educationally, FEM is being used to
analyze Minecraft structural models.  But, these FEM models--like with,
say, NASTRAN--are quite accurate at predicting the behavior of mechanical
or structural devices under the expected stresses.  We could predict where
they would break.  Had to be accurate to have any value.

So I guess the point of all of this is that there is quite a spectrum of
simulators to consider. In turn, there is a spectrum of the strength of
binding between the representational and the speculative or represented.
Analytical simulators are of no value if they are not believable, which
comes about through the rigor of verification and validation.

On the other hand, computer games are inherently unbelievable as they are
just for entertainment. But, I have known some folks who get totally lost
in cult-like internet games like Dungeons and Dragons, which is what ...
forty-years old now?  Yeah, this is loopiness and possibly dangerously
tautological. But delusions can be fun. An escape to an alternate reality.
Good that Frank limits this to an hour/day for his grandson. :-)

As for being in the zone socially, I disagree, though I don't particularly
> care about any jargonal co-option of the term.  During hearty arguments,
> mostly with religious people, I definitely lose myself in exactly the same
> way I lose myself after that 3rd mile when running.  I have no illusions
> 

Re: [FRIAM] FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

[┣glen┫]

I don't know anything about Minecraft.  But I do play some video games.  And 
although I dig the "strategy" games most, I also like those with lots of side 
quests and territory to explore.  The main reason is because I enjoy estimating 
the underlying axioms.  E.g. I recently found a cool bug in Assassin's Creed 
Rogue where you can fall through the ground and swim to any place on the map.  
I liken that to a singularity in our world.  If I could just find that sliver 
where the tilings don't quite match up, I could slip through the cosmic egg and 
become a demigod. 8^)  This is, of course, why the squares made the 
psychedelics illegal ... they don't want you wandering around exploring the 
cracks in the cosmic egg.

On 02/21/2017 03:05 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> My almost five-year old grandson definitely likes being deluded in that 
> sense, I think, when he plays Minecraft.  The appeal is obvious:  he can 
> wander around the world without adults saying "don't go there", he acquires 
> and manages his "inventory", he can build amazing structures, he can dig deep 
> into the earth, he can explode huge quantities of TNT.  We limit him to about 
> an hour a day.

-- 
␦glen?


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove