Archive for Academic Life
Posted in Academic Life, Blurb, Philosophy
April 8, 2010 at 8:16 am
Fiction writers, artists, and directors create works generally outside of the academy, for audiences outside its walls. That work is studied inside the academy by humanists seeking to gain an understanding of the period, place, or identity it reflects. Like the fiction writer or the artist, and unlike her fellow humanists, the philosopher is focused on creating her own body of work, ideally a novel attempt at a solution to the on-going philosophical problems. But unlike the fiction writer or the artist, there is hardly an audience anymore for philosophy outside of the academy… Link to The Crisis of Philosophy by Jason Stanley at Inside Higher Ed.
Posted in Academic Life, Artificial Intelligence, Critical Thinking?, Digital Culture, Evolution, Extended, Feminism, Philosophy, Science, Technology, ethics, literature
March 30, 2010 at 5:28 pm
I’ll be asking this repeatedly via all of my web-presences, but since this one sits idle these days I probably won’t have to ask more than once here; it’ll just stay on top since I never blog.
I’m teaching a First Year Initiatives course in the Fall. These are basically first-year seminar classes designed to teach college- and learning-based skills to incoming students. The content is meant to be highly interdisciplinary, but the content is also secondary in these courses. The primary goal is to give them training in critical reading and writing, public speaking, etc., as well as get them introduced to the college environment and the surrounding community and its needs.
I’m teaching a class with a cyborg theme, because the knitting theme I wanted to do just seemed too tough to sell (I wanted to attract the right sorts of students and I haven’t figured out how to do that with a knitting-themed course yet). I’ll be working on my syllabus once the semester is over (May) and I hope to have a sizable list of books, stories, and articles, both fiction and non-fiction, to examine and consider for the class by then. I have a few non-fiction items already to look at, but I don’t have many fiction pieces (aside from “The Girl Who Was Plugged In”). I welcome recommendations, and the ideal pieces will examine multiple facets of the cyborg concept (Hayles, Haraway, Stelarc, for example). The fiction pieces should do more than look only at the human-machine blending, although good fiction will always deal with more than one dimension. The social aspects, the economic aspects, and the philosophical aspects are all as important as the biological.
Please leave comments with recommendations, or also feel free to email me if you’d prefer that. And thanks in advance if anyone is still reading here and has something to contribute!
Posted in Academic Life, Artificial Intelligence, Digital Culture, Evolution, Extended, Philosophy, Science, Technology, ethics
March 17, 2010 at 5:06 am
So, you want to take the reporting on this with the usual “science-writing caveat,” (which I don’t normally have to give for Wired Science, but I think this time it’s necessary). I’m not thrilled with the methodology of the study itself, as there have been abundant rigorous studies done that already show the effects being described are real. I’m more intrigued by the fact that the scientific community is starting to take seriously some of the philosophical phenomenological arguments, which is what I’ve been basically yelling my head off about for the last 8 or 9 years.
An empirical test of ideas proposed by Martin Heidegger shows the great German philosopher to be correct: Everyday tools really do become part of ourselves.
The findings come from a deceptively simple study of people using a computer mouse rigged to malfunction. The resulting disruption in attention wasn’t superficial. It seemingly extended to the very roots of cognition.
Link to article at Wired Science, with the title “Your Computer Really Is a Part of You.”
Posted in Academic Life, Blurb, Evolution, Science
March 3, 2010 at 4:19 pm
“Trouble resisting a late night dessert or shutting out distractions to finish up a project at work? The blog New Value Streams points to an interesting new study suggesting a pretty simple solution to help with either problem: Go for a walk in a park or among some trees.” Link to blog post at Institute for the Future.
Posted in Academic Life, Democracy, Extended, Science
December 28, 2009 at 6:05 pm
I don’t use traditional textbooks in most of my classes. I try really hard to be sensitive to the fact that textbooks are obscenely expensive, and work around it with chapters and journal articles compiled in various ways.
This semester, I’m teaching a really generic psychology course, with a $95 textbook. I really want to supplement it with a software package of experiments, which costs an additional $42. The software cannot be sold back at all (and in fact, you can buy a registration code and get all of the software and the documentation entirely online). This seems annoying expensive for something that I’m still not even sure how I’ll integrate into the course.
If anyone is still reading here, I’m interested in perspectives from both students and professors on how to deal with not only the cost of textbooks, but the software that cannot be resold. Do you use anything like this in your classroom? How do you feel about it? Is the hands-on learning worth the price of admission?
Posted in Academic Life, Democracy, Evolution, Extended, Philosophy, Science
November 12, 2009 at 4:56 pm
150 Years After Origin: Biological, Historical, and Philosophical Perspectives
Victoria College, University of Toronto, November 21-24, 2009
Darwin wrote in his autobiography, “In July [1837] I opened my first notebook for facts in relation to the Origin of Species, about which I had long reflected, and never ceased working for the next twenty years.” In 1842, he wrote a “very brief abstract” of his theory (35 pages), which in the summer of 1844 he expanded to 230 pages. Beginning in September 1858, after receiving an essay from Alfred Russel Wallace, “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type,” which outlined the central mechanism of evolution on which Darwin had been working, he began work on completing the manuscript of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. John Murray, the publisher, launched the book on November 24, 1859 by releasing 1,250 copies. The impact of The Origin of Species has equalled the impact of Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. It is the unifying theoretical framework for all modern biology.
November 24, 2009 marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin and The Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and the Department of Philosophy at University of Toronto are mounting a Gala Celebratory Conference. The conference will culminate in a gala dinner on November 24 at which participants will toast the tremendous achievement of Charles Robert Darwin.
Five multi-disciplinary symposia have been organized. For each symposium, the panel consists of a biologist, a historian of biology and a philosopher of biology.
The Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology is located on the elegant, historic Victoria University campus (one of the University of Toronto’s federated universities) and the conference will be held in that location.
Say hello if you’re in the area!
Posted in Academic Life, Blurb, Science
October 13, 2009 at 12:44 pm
The hard sciences are interpenetrating the social sciences. This isn’t dehumanizing. It shines attention on the things poets have traditionally cared about: the power of human attachments. It may even help policy wonks someday see people as they really are. Great (quick, short, shallow but interesting) Op-Ed at The NY Times.
Posted in Academic Life, Artificial Intelligence, Extended, Philosophy, Technology
July 27, 2009 at 11:04 am
This article in the NY times was sent to me by a colleague in the Computer Science department yesterday. It makes me want to pull my hair out and shove it down the throats of either the reporter, or maybe Ray Kurzweil.
It has a sensationalized headline “Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man” (I suppose us women are totally safe, although the article is silent on that matter…)
While trying to scare us into believing the Robot Apocalypse is RIGHT! AROUND! THE CORNER! the author also writes:
While the computer scientists agreed that we are a long way from Hal, the computer that took over the spaceship in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” they said there was legitimate concern that technological progress would transform the work force by destroying a widening range of jobs, as well as force humans to learn to live with machines that increasingly copy human behaviors.
Oh, gee, you think? Look, people have been saying this for centuries. This has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with automation. Samuel Butler, in 1863, wrote “Darwin Among the Machines” to basically argue that if you can’t imagine life without your automation right now, we’ve already lost, and are already on an inevitable slide into machine domination over humankind. This argument goes back further, but Butler gives a great “inevitable doomsday” reading of the situation.
Dr. Horvitz said he believed computer scientists must respond to the notions of superintelligent machines and artificial intelligence systems run amok.
So, the current president of AAAI, a professional organization I’ve belonged to for the last 11 years (although it’s possible my membership has lapsed since I haven’t gotten an AI Magazine to laugh at in the mail lately) is happily jumping on the singularity nonsense bandwagon. Depressing enough, but then we get:
“Something new has taken place in the past five to eight years,” Dr. Horvitz said. “Technologists are replacing religion, and their ideas are resonating in some ways with the same idea of the Rapture.”
So he isn’t ignorant of the fact that this is the age-old doomsday-cult business, but somehow he still thinks we need to take it seriously?
Members of my field (leading members, in title at least) need to take their collective heads out of their collective asses and get back to work. I’m way too young to be this disillusioned over my work and my passions already.
Link to the NY Times article, if you’ve got a stronger stomach or less stake in this academic community than I do.
Posted in Academic Life, Extended, Philosophy
June 22, 2009 at 11:19 am
Who teaches from Rosenthal’s “The Nature of Mind” and who uses Chalmers’ “Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings” instead? Why do they have to be so similar without either one being complete? Textbook decisions are a royal pain.
Posted in Academic Life, Extended
June 17, 2009 at 11:35 am
Don’t get really sick during a global pandemic while you’re in Hong Kong. I basically hid in my hotel room for 4 days so that they wouldn’t quarantine me and the entire conference AND hotel. I had to skip 2 of my own talks at the second conference because I could barely get out of bed. I have no idea what I had, but it kicked my ass.
I’m home now, but I wouldn’t expect much blogging to occur, since I’m still at the bottom of a mountain of work. Slowly uploading photos from Beijing and Hong Kong to Flickr. I’m reachable in all the usual places.