Wall hanging at St Peter's Allerton

Meant to put this up last week. There's a set of CAFOD prints on cloth from two-thirds world Christian communities. The above is a Ressurection hanging with many features of an iconic nature. The others have not come out so well but hopefully you can get the idea.

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The natural selection of human language

I found this intriguing: On the Human: Rethinking the natural selection of human language � On the Human. It's basically looking at the evolution of language and symbolising in humans both in terms of its possible precursors ('relaxation of selection' freeing up capacities for diversified uses) and that the symbolic universe (a precursor to cyberspace, let's face it) became, itself, an environment which exerts selective pressure: "because of symbols and with the aid of symbols, Homo sapiens has been self-domesticated and adapted to a niche unlike any other that ever has existed. We have been made in the image of the word."

That last sentence is particularly intriguing. I don't think the author has a theological meaning in mind, however, it does seem to fit together the evolutionary and the theological...

As with so many of these kinds of theories, you can take it two ways.

it makes sense to think of ourselves as symbolic savants, unable to suppress the many predispositions evolved to aid in symbol acquisition, use, and transmission. In order to be so accomplished at this strange cognitive task, we almost certainly have evolved a predisposition to see things as symbols, whether they are or not. This is probably manifest in the make-believe of young children, the way we find meaning in coincidental events, see faces in clouds, are fascinated by art, charmed by music, and run our lives with respect to dictates presumed to originate from an invisible spirit world.

One reading of this would say 'therefore, all talk of god and of the metanatural is just an epiphenomenon and a misleading one at that'. Another would say, 'if God creates by the use of natural, material processes such as we can infer from geology and natural history, then how else would a capacity to relate to God personally arise?'

Chicken or egg with screen time and problems?

What I can't see in this article Screen time linked to psychological problems in children is a clear sign that the alternative hypothesis has been considered: "The results showed that more than two hours per day of both television viewing and recreational computer use were related to higher psychological difficulty scores,"

This led to the statement that restricting children's screen time might be good for them. But what if the relationship between screen-time and psychological disturbance is not cause and effect but effect and cause? Or even both signs of some other (unnoticed or unconsidered) factor that effects both of those things?

Admittedly, I'm being a bit skeptical of things that look like they could feed the 'woe woe and thrice woe' attitude to ICTs, so maybe the interpretation is right. But even if it is, then the cause needs to be known and possibly the question asked whether there are carry-overs or implications for people who have to work with ICTs for 8 or more hours a day ... ? So, my verdict: more research needed ...

PS just found a comment on this research here at Neuranthropology: A way down on the page under 'Digital'; "My guess is that screen time can be a proxy for other things going on in a home, such as parental neglect, and so the real cause of the later psychological problems is not elucidated by this study."

Banking reform bill, first reading

Cross-cultural reflections on science

Having noted results of research that seemed to indicate in a prima facie interpretation that children in some developing countries are less psychologically developed in some respects, the question is posed"Are children in these non-Western nations seriously delayed in their mirror self-recognition"
The interesting thing is that there may be, as the article points out, cultural reasons why the results might come out as they do. If science is blind to cultural hermeneutics in dealing with human 'subjects', then we could end up with some misleading interpretations of data and design of experiments.

'Our impression,' the researchers said, 'was that they [the children] understood that it was themselves in the mirror, that the mark was unexpected, but that they were unsure of an acceptable response and therefore dared not touch or remove it.

'BPS Research Digest: Cross-cultural reflections on the mirror self-recognition test:

Eeh, isn't research fun?

Any way, there's a bit more of this interpretive care needed in other cases too. Take this example;

"A well-established gene variant that is supposed to predict depression seems to predict just the opposite in East Asia." Dobbs argues that, in effect, a gene that seems like a predisposition to depression is really a predisposition to being sensitive to the social world. (http://www.iftf.org/node/3603)

 Context, context, context. There's no getting away from it. MY objectivity is your cultural misunderstanding, or something ...

Commonplaces of technology critique

This is a really nice round-up of what I've tended to call the 'moral panic' approach to new technology -specially the internet and all its works: Eurozine - Commonplaces of technology critique - Kathrin Passig It identifies with some examples lending plausibility, several predictable phases of reaction to new-fangled jeejaws and thingummibobs: it starts with downright dismissal, moves through "It'll never catch on" then it'll be dismissed as something that "people like us" wouldn't be seen dead with" and "It's just a fad", then once it becomes obvious that it's settling in we get onto the "end of civilisation" jeremiads (which is where we're at with the internet just now: using the internet rots minds)... And so on ...

I loved this (one of many examples of the persistence and antiquity of the cycle of responses) in this case in the early stages of 'negotiation' about the etiquettes of new technologies:

In the early days of the printing press it was seen as bad manners to give a printed book as a gift; until the 1980s there was a stigma of rudeness attached to typed private letters. The criticism of the use of mobile phones in public deems a conversation with an invisible partner – as opposed to one with a third party who is physically present – to be an unacceptable lack of respect for the people in one's vicinity. Sitting in cafés with one's laptop open is something that restaurateurs do not like to see – it gives an antisocial impression and reduces takings – yet sitting around in public with a book or an open newspaper has not caused any offence for quite some time. The unspoken thrust of these complaints is ultimately that opponents of an innovation do not want to be confronted with it without their consent.

Oh, and do have a look at this to get a further sense of perspective:

"For critics around 1870, the postcard sounded the death-knell for the culture of letter-writing, while in February 1897 the American Newspaper Publishers Association discussed whether "typewriters lower the literary grade of work done by reporters"."

This is a must-read article to put beside all those books that seem to be coming out to alarm us about the brain-rotting, civilisation-threatening effects of search-engines and blog-reading.

Chris Anderson’s prezi on Crowd Accelerated Innovation

This is a kind of BOGOF (buy one get one free): the video, like many of TED's offerings, is very interesting and stimulating. In this case the reflection on the coming together of some facets of human nature with the technology of internet-shared video. Anderson makes the comparison to Gutenburg and he may be right.

The other reason is the technology he uses to structure the visuals of his presentation, he does a nice job of showing what Prezi can do.
Watch TED head Chris Anderson’s prezi - Prezi.com Blog