Why it's a crime to take a phone call in the Quiet Coach on a train

I've noticed a few times now. I often travel on the quiet carriage on the trains I use regularly. I think it tends to mean I have a better place to get on with work or reading. I don't mind people having quiet conversations. I do find the leakage of tinny music from people who are likely to end up deaf by their mid-forties irritating, but I can often tune it out. However, I have been surprised at how difficult it is to tune out the person who forgets that it's the quiet coach and goes on to have a moby conversation. Now this article actually gives evidence that it really is harder not to listen to a one-sided conversation than to tune out a real two-hander. Overheard cell-phone conversations are not only annoying but reduce our attention: The researcher says: "'It's definitely changed my own etiquette,' says Emberson. 'I'm a lot more sensitive about talking on the phone in public. It has a really profound effect on the cognition of the people around you, and it's not because they're eavesdropping or they're bad people. Their cognitive mechanism basically means that they're forced to listen.'"
So I feel that I might be a bit more emboldened to ask people to do what the signs ask: take that phone call in the vestibule.

So long Bloglines, and thank for all the RSS

It is with sadness I pass onto you the news that Bloglines is ceasing to be:

As you may have heard, we are sorry to share that Bloglines will officially shut down on October 1, 2010.
More detail can be found on the Ask.com blog - http://blog.ask.com.
We want to make it as easy as possible to transport your feeds to another RSS aggregator,

I'm sad because it is/was a really helpful RSS feed aggregator. Over the last half-dozen years or so I have used Bloglines to track websites, news, breaking developments which show up in search-terms. It has enabled me to hear about certain ideas or developments that I had not come across otherwise and to come across interesting ideasfrom emerging church and theologians. So useful in fact that I have felt the need to find a replacement. Google have an aggregator, I tried it about a year back. BUT it's not as good; it doesn't organise the info and the possibilities in a way that I fund helpful. So Idid a bit of seartching around and found a couple of possibilities and looked them over and tried them out for a bit. And now I'm pleased to announce that I think that I have found my replacement.

Drum roll ... ta da ....
Netvibes, using the 'reader view'. It also has possibilities that I will be exploring in odd moments in the next few months and does a very passable rough equivalent to the service I got from Bloglines.
Bloglines | My Feeds (289) (3)

Brazil's huge new port highlights China's drive into South America

Not this about the way that China is pressing an agenda to fashion a multi-polar geopolitics (read: counterweighting the USA).

They seek to fashion a multipolar world in which no single power – read the United States – plays an overwhelmingly dominant role. To this end, they seek to bolster ties with rising regional powers like Brazil and South Africa.

Of course, the USA signs up in theory to human rights (and appears to be selective in applying or promoting them). China, on the other hand, doesn't really sign up to them ...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/15/brazil-port-china-drive

A licence for chauvinism

 This sounds, oh so plausible:

testosterone has been shown to be most effective as an excuse for social aggression rather than a cause of it. In another recent study participants performed more aggressively in a financial simulation game if they believed they had been given a shot of testosterone – even when they had been given a placebo – whereas those who had received testosterone unwittingly were in fact more likely to "play fair". "It's possible that people who are inclined towards selfish, aggressive or dominant behaviour would find it easier to rationalise their actions if they felt that they were under the spell of testosterone," says science writer Ed Yong, noting that the study suggests that "testosterone's negative stereotype" can give people a "licence to misbehave".

 Just as the myths about alcohol use legitimise all sorts of 'abandoned' behaviour which really have practically nothing to do with alcohol's effects (remember those studies with 'placebo' alcohol) and nearly everything to do with the desires and inhibitions of the drinker. In both of these cases we need to do an exposure job and not let people get away with it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/sep/17/goldman-sachs-sexism-case

Oxford scientist calls for research on brain change

This seems to be a further chapter opening in the debate about what the internet etc might be doing to our minds, brains and culture. I have blogged about this before (and here) and my big concern continues to be that much of what is reported is of the alarmist, moral panic sort of thing which assumes that any change in this respect is by definition a bad thing. Missing, of course, that all technology changes us in various ways. The thing to recall is that the changes are normally for good and ill, and what is good and ill may vary and the issue is not to stop the change but to understand the effects and work to optimise the effects for human welfare (yes we need to question that 'meme' that demonises technological change and places it in the Frankenstein mold). Examples of tech changing us? Fire enabling cooking of food which was probably responsible at least in part for freeing up metabolic resources to enable social and brain development and my perennial favourite: moveable type and rag-paper enabling cheap books and which Walter Ong (Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New Accents)) would argue has a profound effect on the way we think (and a bit later in the article we read this: "Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at Tufts University in Massachusetts and author of Proust and the Squid, said that brain circuits honed by reading books and thinking about their content could be lost as people spend more time on computers.")...
So ...

Lady Greenfield has coined the term "mind change" to describe differences that arise in the brain as a result of spending long periods of time on a computer.

And as we think about this, of course, I agree that research on what the changes might be is therefore a good idea so that we can debate what would be the best way to respond and optimise things. However, I think that it would be really unhelpful just to go into 'woe to us' hand-wringing. So I started to get concerned when I read that Ms Greenfield (incidently, as a republican, I mislike those aristocratic titles) said the following I started to smell the odour of the sweaty fear of a moral panic.

For me, this is almost as important as climate change. Whilst of course it doesn't threaten the existence of the planet like climate change, I think the quality of our existence is threatened and the kind of people we might be in the future

You see, it's that default to seeing it as threat rather than 'threat' and 'opportunity'. Of course some may argue that this is a function of the fact that it was delivered at a Tory party conference, you might say that, I couldn't possibly comment. :p And to be fair she does appear to have mentioned some potential advantages:

She said possible benefits of modern technology included higher IQ and faster processing of information, but using internet search engines to find facts may affect people's ability to learn. Computer games in which characters get multiple lives might even foster recklessness

And so we should support research to find out just what effects are playing out. But we should recall that there are likely to be upsides and downsides and that we may be able to mitigate the latter. Let's recall too that, arguably, the cultural support and background abilities we routinely rely on for scientific advance are the products of the way that reading books has taught and formed us to think. But as Einstein is supposed to have said, solution are rarely produced by the same mentality as created the problem ... it may be no bad thing at that level if we find that our mentalities are being changed; let's face it, there are huge problems facing us and it may be that what happens to our thinking in synergy and symbiosis with the internet and it's postgenitors turns out to offer possibilities for solutions.
So let's be a little cautious of the rhetorical game being played when Greenfield says

Every single parent I have spoken to so far is concerned. I have yet to find a parent who says 'I am really pleased that my kid is spending so much time in front of the computer'

That may be true, but what does it really tell us apart from that a lot of parents have concerns. Does it tell us that they are well founded? No. Remember the scare about MRSA vaccine? Many parents can be mistaken and led into a mistaken alarmist concern. In addition, does it tell us that their concern is the same as Greenfield's? No, again, their concern (as mine would be) is more likely to be that kids spending a lot of time in front of a screen may be storing up physical problems such as ill-health, overweight or eye-strain.

About the only thing I would say may have some initial plausibly validity would be the concern about fostering recklessness, though to be honest, I'm not sure that would pass muster either.

A bit further on in the article comes the sense, in line with what I've been trying to say. Step back from the alarmist hype and do some good research.

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London ... agreed that more research was needed ... "We know nothing at all about how the developing brain is being influenced by video games or social networking and so on. We can only really know how seriously to take this issue once the research starts to produce data. So far, most of the research on how video games affect the brain has been done with adult participants and, perhaps surprisingly, has mostly shown positive effects of gaming on many cognitive abilities,"

So, in fact, what evidence we do have would rather indicate potential benefits rather than harms. Funny that.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/sep/14/oxford-scientist-brain-change

The price of happiness? £50,000pa

I've blogged on this topic before (here, here and here, then here, and some other research which gives a much lower figure to the plateau here.)

Happiness rose with income too, but plateaued when people reached an annual salary of $75,000. For those on more, happiness appeared to depend on other factors... the emotional strain of negative experiences, such as getting divorced or being ill, appear to be exacerbated by being poor. "More money does not necessarily buy more happiness, but less money is associated with emotional pain,"

As I mention above there is some evidence to put the figure lower. The other things I blogged about suggest there are nuances, as does the second part of the quote above. Some of that is to do with the wealth that society holds in common: infrastructure, health care, parks, working week, stress and so forth. Some of that has to do with issues of goals and fulfilment. I wonder about the methodologies. The older study was a correlation of a number of studies, and so I'd tend to trust it. I wonder whether the newer study used a different sort of definition. In the older studies a lot seems to depend on things like equality and participation, so maybe the newer study is showing the effects of studying people whol are aware of differentials and feeling disempowered ...? I think that the issues in the Spirit Level are relevant here.
The price of happiness? �50,000pa | Science | guardian.co.uk:

Qur’an burning: “an unnecessary, offensive and dangerous gesture”

On this I definitely agree with Patrick Sookhdeo:
"...the biblical and Christ-like way to [protest Muslim injustices] is by speaking the truth in the power of God’s love, and by extending that love to Muslim people even when they are hostile to us. In that context it can never be justified to destroy a book that Muslims regard as sacred, however firmly and profoundly we may disagree with its contents. The effect of the proposed action on Christians in Muslim-majority contexts is likely to be extremely serious. Already Muslim militants in Indonesia have promised to kill Indonesian Christians if Qur’ans are burned in Florida, and the history of anti-Christian violence in the country suggests that this is not an idle threat. Barnabas partners in Iraq have expressed concern at the probable Muslim backlash against an already beleaguered Iraqi Church. And Christians in numerous other places who live in daily fear of potentially deadly attacks will at once be placed in much greater danger. It cannot be right to exercise our freedom to protest in a way that puts at risk the lives of our brothers and sisters, for whom Christ died."
See here for the whole open letter to Dove World Outreach Centre and its supporters. Hope and aid for the Persecuted Church | Persecuted Christians : Qur’an burning: “an unnecessary, offensive and dangerous gesture”:

Straddling bus: replacement concept for trams?

I wonder whether this could be a more attractive idea to some cities and towns than tram systems ...
"Beijing’s Mentougou District already has plans to build 186km of infrastructure for the new system with construction starting at the end of the year."
Worldchanging: Bright Green: Bus to the Future: Inventor Song Youzhou Presents the 'Straddling Bus':

Eighteenth-Century Studies

Basically a collection of texts from the 1700s: Locke, Hume, Kant ...

Eighteenth-Century Studies

Eta's ceasefire statement decoded

As someone who has lived in the Basque Country (Euskadi), I am still concerned for the resolution of the long-standing issues in that country. It has some similarities to the NI situation in that there are areas claimed by the hard line separatists which the majority in those areas don't appear to want:

Eta believes that Navarre, now one of Spain's 17 autonomous regions and previously a medieval kingdom that covered much of the Basque-speaking lands in Spain and France, should form part of the Basque Country. Most people in Navarre disagree.

I well remember being in a stadium ringing to the chant "Naparroa Euskadi da!" and even then feeling that perhaps the Navarronese didn't agree, being as how they seemed not to have been a Basque-speaking area for many centuries. Also, given that Navarre appears to have conquered Euskadi rather than the other way round ... (or have I missed something here?) ...
Anyway, it is clear to all but the most hard-line, that depriving a majority of people of liberties because they have the wrong ancestry (is this not racism?) or because they don't speak a particular language is not the way forward. I write as someone who is very sympathetic to linguistic minorities, cultural diversity and greater local autonomy. A negotiated settlement and a modus vivendi is what is needed. Anything else really is an alibi for murder: it's not freedom-fighting it's bullying and murder and it is profoundly anti-democratic. The recent moves by Batasuna to embrace democracy and distance themselves from violence are to be welcomed.
Eta's ceasefire statement decoded | World news | The Guardian:

'Cannibal cafe' in Berlin = a vegetarian campaign

You may have heard of this and though various things. It would certainly make for an interesting ethical discussion. It now turns out it was a ploy by a German vegetarian group (Vebu):

"Vebu wants to draw attention to all of us who are affected by the worldwide consumption of meat,'

And the reason for doing this is something that we should all, indeed, consider:

It pointed out that every 3.6 seconds somebody dies in the world due to undernourishment, while the majority of grain production is used for the feeding of farm animals."

As I keep saying: the world can't sustain our western meat addiction. Reduce or remove meat from your diet!
'Cannibal cafe' in Berlin a vegetarian campaign hoax | World news | The Guardian

Kindle -ready for action?

I've been keeping an eye on this e-reader malarkey. As much because I spend about 7 hours a week on trains and don't want to carry more weight in books than I have to; this kind of device would seem to be a potential help in my on-train reading to weight ratio! I am also keen on the e-ink idea because back-lit screen can't do well in very well lit positions and sometimes a train seat by the window is exactly that! I'm also of an age when holding a book's weight for extended periods can give rise to concerns about carpel-tunnel problems and RSI, so a lighter device with no concerns about positioning oneself to hold pages open is a definite plus.

However, I have other concerns. Ones I think are probably shared be those involved in scholarly pursuits. I need a device that allows me to annotate the text, highlight stuff for later retrieval and in general enable me to re-cycle stuff into further articles and arguments. It seems that the Kindle would enable this to happen: : "using the QWERTY keyboard, you can add annotations to text, just like you might write in the margins of a book. And because it is digital, you can edit, delete, and export your notes. You can highlight and clip key passages and bookmark pages for future use."

What I don't know, though, is how many formats of e-books there are and how versatile the Kindle might be with regard to them, and whether there are other devices that would get a greater thumbs up ... Anyone got any suggestions or any more thoughts?
Kindle Wireless Reading Device, Wi-Fi, 6" Display, Graphite - Latest Generation: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store

Just published: Before the Ending of the Day

Just published:

Blending ancient and modern, these brief services of night prayer, otherwise known as 'compline', draw our day to a close with God. Comforting ancient words combine with more recent insights and concerns to produce orders of service with variety and spaciousness. The set prayers help us to pray when we are tired and provide a framework to cradle times of reflection on the day that has passed. In these services of prayer, the order of compline has been reorganised to better reflect the pattern of the Lord's prayer

Available both as paper and electronic versions.

Before the Ending of the Day

Metaphysics and the limits of science

Mary Midgley is often good value. And this article is certainly thought provoking, closing with:

Our problem here is to understand the relation between these two things – between our inner and outer life, between consciousness and its objects, between the vulnerable self and the world it has to deal with. This is not a physical problem. It is a problem about how to understand and face life as a whole. And it is not about to go away.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/aug/28/philosophy-science

Why would a solar physicist embrace the non-rationality of religion?

It turns out that the guy who has done a very thorough job of rebutting climate-change denialist claims, is an active Christian and a good scientist. This seems to worry the author of the article:

How can a rational mind like Cook's – a solar physicist by training – also embrace the non-rationality of religion, if indeed he even accepts the premise? Predictably, he uses evolution as an example. "I hold much store in empirical evidence ... There are multiple lines of evidence that humans evolved from lower life-forms. However, there are questions where a little more humility is required."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/aug/25/solar-physicist-religion

Liberal guilt and the real political division in Britain

 An interesting idea from Theo Hobson. One which makes some kind of sense to me, though I'd never named it this way.

A basic British political division is not between left and right, or liberal and conservative, but ... between [those who] worry about how to make the world fairer, with occasionally embarrassing consequences, [and those who] worry about their stocks and shares.

The article is a defence of 'liberal guilt'; interesting attempt at rehab.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/29/liberal-guilt-good-for-you

Pope should resign

 Sinead O'Connor, that is. We should recall that she is an ordained catholic woman. Yes; that tells you that she is officially excommunicated because she has attempted to take holy orders from a 'wondering bishop'. So we should hear what she says as not being without sympathy to the Christian faith (her album Theology which is mostly soulful musical renderings of various of the Psalms helps demonstrate that).

"'Catholic' has become a word associated with negativity, with abuse, with violence, but the essence of Catholicism is beautiful. The fact is, tragically, it's been brought into disrepute by the people running it."

That's a wake up call to all institutional church, I think.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/05/pope-benedict-xvi-channel4

Are we there yet? Chinese Gridlock

I started to realise that this incident could be a kind of emblematic event for technological society.

vehicles bound for Beijing were sitting in a queue of 62 miles, and that some of them had been there, moving around half a mile a day, since mid-August. Stranded drivers were passing the time playing cards, sleeping in their vehicles or on the asphalt, and being preyed on by merciless local opportunists along the route, who saw a captive, hungry audience to whom they could flog water and wildly overpriced bowls of rice.

In fact, it occurred to me, that it is the kind of thing of which interesting plays are made. It could have been done well by Samuel Beckett, I suspect.

We hate memes, pass it on…

Quite a long post, this, but a useful handy reference as to why we should be wary of 'memes' as an idea for interpreting and discussing culture (which, it is argued, is already something of a reification, though I'd dispute that as the last word). The headline reason: "memetics sucks the air out of the room for a serious consideration of the ways that culture, knowledge, technology, and human evolution might be interrelated. That is, like a theory of humours and vapors in illness, it provides pseudo-explanations in place of just getting the hell out of the way of serious thought"
Check out the whole thing here: We hate memes, pass it on… � Neuroanthropology

The reasons given for skepticism:

• reify the activity of brains
• Attributing personality to the reification of ideas
  Doesn’t ‘self-replicating’ mean replicating by one’s self?
• Moreover, ‘self-replicating’ means, by definition, replicating by itself. Has anyone, ever, anywhere, seen an idea ‘replicate’ itSELF?
• The term ‘meme’ applied to divergent phenomena 
• A host will not evolve traits in order for parasite to benefit
  Gradual cultural transmission not like infection
• Objective ‘science’ inconsistent with normative judgments about memes
• Resistance to memetics is not ‘anti-Darwinism’; Darwinism not a religion

The latter, of course, is a statement of intent: in effect it adds up to an accusation that some Darwinists have become religion-like in their thinking and behaviour.

Christianity, the Enlightenment and Islam

I've already noted a while back that this whole thing with "Three Faiths' fora" and Abrahamic religions is not something we, as Christians, should jump at, in fact we should suspect, perhaps, the Islamic theological perspective that they favour. So it's a bit interesting to have a different kind of 'co-belligerency' proposed here: Christianity, the Enlightenment and Islam - ABC Religion & Ethics - Opinion:

"Ayaan Hirsi Ali ... concluded her recent article on the ABC's Religion and Ethics website, 'Seeking God, but finding Allah,' by praising Pope Benedict XVI's stance on Islam and calling for an alliance between atheists and what she calls 'enlightened Christians' in their struggle against a common foe."

It's interesting to see such a proposal from an Atheist camp. However, despite my skepticism about Abrahamic faiths as a way of divvying up the religious universe, I'm not so sure about this one. I'm not sure that 'co-belligerency' is a good way to go. It smacks of Girard's mimetic violence thing and I think that it probably is not the way of Christ.

The article itself -which simply starts with Ayaan Hirsi Ali as a foil- goes on to give a lot of good reasons why we should both look askance at the proposal and also give it some consideration. Perhaps we should expect that from the likes of John Millbank. There's also some good observations about the similarities and differences between Christianity and Islam which are the kind of thing that 'beginners' in the endeavour would do well to look over. Altogether a nice, brief and helpful reflection.

 

Losing our minds to the web -actually it's not so simple.

http://nouslife.blogspot.com/2009/12/what-web-is-teaching-our-brains.htmlI wondered whether this was going to be another rather shallow moral-panic-style denunciation of the internet. I've written about that kind of thing before. So it's good to report a refreshing change in the form of this article: Losing our minds to the web – Prospect Magazine � Prospect Magazine
It's refreshing because it looks at one of those moral-panicky books and does a nice reasonably balanced crit:

"Yet how similar are a clock and the internet? The former is a tool; the latter is more like a new dimension in public life. It is a trap fallen into by the Spectator 120 years earlier, when it conflated the telegraph—the tool—with the electricity that powered it. While the telegraph may have shortened attention spans, this judgement needed to be balanced against the many positive effects of electricity on public life—from electric lights in libraries, to the cinema, to spreading knowledge across the globe. The intellectual effects of a new technology must be judged on what it does to social organisation, not just on how it affects our brains. Carr’s argument implies that something drastic must be done about the internet, but glosses over the obvious objection that “shallower” individuals may be the price to pay for a deeper public discourse."

And so it goes on; have a look. This may go on a reading list for our 'Virtual Worlds' module.

Festival des Erreurs

Not very long back I blogged about a workshop in which mistakes would be shared (in this case by people involved in development) in order to enable learning more widely. I remarked that we could possibly do with having a go at this in church. Well, I'm considering how best to dip the toe into the water on this. Meanwhile I've come across a Festival of Errors which occured in July in Paris. It hase strengthened my resolve to see whether we can't do something about recogising error as a potential blessing...
Edition 2010 | Paris-Montagne: "Alors, n�gative, l'erreur ? R�solument pas ! L'erreur a pour racine latine l'errance... Et s'�garer, sortir des sentiers battus : n'est-ce pas la voie de la cr�ativit� ? Osons donc explorer les chemins broussailleux o�m�nent les errances... Pour mieux rebondir, prenons le risque de nous tromper !" (Error, negative? Absolutely not! ... wandering off, leaving the beaten track ... [is] the path of creativity ... let's take the risk of being wrong).
The Guardian article reporting this also lists a bunch of magnificent errors including the experiments that gave us vaccination and antibiotics ....

I think that this is another dimension of the phenomenon of obliquity.

Blogging, formation and theological writing

I'm quite interested in how blogging becomes part of the way we write, reflect and grow. I'm also interested when I get a mention in someone's posting! Here's a note with a bit of both: "I could never have recreated this dynamic record of my thoughts and other people's responses to them with a conventional diary. Let's just hope our academic institutions are up to speed with the way that their students do their theology these days, Andii Bowsher's blogs are perhaps indicative that they certainly are." see at Re-vis.e Re-form: Blogging as formation.
I think that I'm one of only a few regularly blogging academics in UK theological colleges -so perhaps Rachel is being a bit optimistic (?) to see me as an indicator that academics are blogging in theology; some do, most don't. I'd have to say that for me it is a kind of reflection/research tool. There are blogs I use to collect things that I may later use in writing, I make brief comments on whatever it is to help me later on orientate whatever it is to the main area of thinking. Then there is blogging I do more widely where it may not be directly theological (ie work) oriented but related to my wider interests (though even here I note that nothing truly escapes theological interest completely) and even amusement; this is about feeding my curiosity and thinking out loud. I think the latter is related to being an 'E' in Myers-Briggs terms; ie I tend to find that I discover my own thinking/ideas by externalising it or them.

I think that the other reason I blog is to keep me writing. However, it is this that I have to consider: does it get in the way of more 'serious' writing? That is to say, the kind of writing that 'counts' in RAE, for example and goes down on CVs as 'publication'. And perhaps in that we name one big reason that perhaps more academics don't blog. For me it's a shift of paradigm which may, or may not, take hold. In the inherited academic paradigm 'worthy' writing is recognised as such by passing through the filters of peer-review in 'recognised' journals. In the possibly-emerging way-of-things, worthiness is recognised by hits, citations and commendations. The good stuff snowballs into something with lots of links and comment.

However, I have to say that all is not as simple and rosy as that schema might make it. In both worlds there are the vagueries of 'reputation' and some good stuff is missed because either the author is not known, not known by the 'right' people, is diffident about putting themselves forward, mistimes their contribution so it cannot be 'heard' for the noise or in the unpreparedness of the audience or simply it is in the wrong place to catch the attention of a wider audience perhaps because it's a blog hosted by the 'wrong' company because the fashion is for certain kinds of writing to use particular platforms.

So you see, in both worlds/paradigms, there are gatekeepers. In one formally appointed (and prey to the dangers of being self-perpetuating hierarchies and group-think), in the other informally grown but not less prey to distortions. The ideological justification for the blogging model is the Wisdom of Crowds. The reality is that the conditions for the 'wisdom'is don't always exist and we have an informal reproduction of the same-old-same-old. It remains to be seen whether web3.0 with its more semantically-aware algorithms and bots might help to change that, or whether such changes will act to reinforce the brakes on crowd-wisdom emerging.