File under: shameless self-promotion
This year, the South by Southwest Interactive Festival is crowdsourcing its lineup of panelists by allowing people to vote thumbsup or thumbdown on panel proposals.
I recently submitted my proposal, which is on the Free / Libre / Open Education (FLOE) movement.
You guys, I really really want to get accepted. Will you go to the site and vote for me?
You can read my proposal here.
Edward Rondthaler, who died August 19 at the age of 104, was a lifelong typophilic and a champion of the movement to simply the English language by simplifying, and phoneticizing, word spellings.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTjeoQ8gRmQ&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]
In a recent post on his blog iterating toward openness, David Wiley makes a request of all adherents to the “openness” movement who read his blog:
Without any special authority to do so, may I please give you a homework assignment? Would you please blog about why you choose to be open? What is the fundamental, underlying goal or goals you hope to accomplish by being open? What keeps you motivated? Why do you spend your precious little free time on my blog, reading this post and this question? If each of us put some thought and some public reflective writing into this question, the field would likely be greatly served. The more honest and open you are in your response, the more useful the exercise will be for you and for us.
The assigmnent is the result of a previous post in which Wiley wrote:
While I think everyone in the field of “open education” is dedicated to increasing access to educational opportunity, there is an increasingly radical element within the field – good old-fashioned guillotine and molotov type revolutionaries. At the conference I heard a number of people say that things would be greatly improved if we could just get rid of all the institutions of formal education. I once heard a follow up comment, “and governments, too.” I turned to laugh at his joke, but saw that he was serious. This “burn it all down” attitude really scares me.
As you can imagine if you know even a small chunk of the history of projects like the Free / Libre / Open Source Software movement (it keeps getting more words tacked onto it for a reason), Wiley’s post generated some fierce responses. So the request, and Wiley’s decision to back away from his initial stance, appears to be an effort to consider the broad range of issues that attract people to the openness movement in general, and open education in particular.
Back in 1984, Seymour Papert said this:
There won’t be schools in the future…. I think the computer will blow up the school. That is, the school defined as something where there are classes, teachers running exams, people structured in groups by age, following a curriculum– all of that. The whole system is based on a set of structural concepts that are incompatible with the presence of the computer… But this will happen only in communities of children who have access to computers on a sufficient scale.
Twenty-five years later, we are forced to conclude that one of the following is probably true:
Either way, the results are the same: schools equip kids with a set of mindsets and skillsets that prepare them increasingly less well for the culture into which they will emerge.
Perhaps Papert’s mistake was in attributing intention to the computer; if, to further extend the metaphor, the computer really was an explosive device, then it had no ability to decide how, when, and here to detonate.
I was drawn to the open education movement because it attempts to do on purpose what we thought computers would do by default: blow wide open the walls, and therefore the constraints, surrounding education. In arguing against the binary nature of the notion of “openness,” Wiley argues that “[i]n the eyes of the defenders of the ‘open source’ brand, if you’re not open enough you’re not open at all…. It is just as inappropriate for you to try to force your goals on others as it is for others to try to force their goals on you.”
Of course he’s right, but on the other hand, things aren’t always quite so clearcut in the field of education. I shouldn’t be able to force my values on educators, researchers, and administrators who disagree with my approach to teaching and learning; but if I leave them be, then they are free to inculcate young people with exactly the wrong set of skills, ideals, and values–the kind that reify outdated, unfair, and wrongheaded assumptions about how the world can, does, and should work.
I am, as I hope I have made clear, an increasingly radical element within the field. I am a revolutionary. And this is precisely what drew me to openness as a movement. In fact, I wish the open education movement would embrace a more inclusive name, perhaps something like Free / Libre / Open Education, or FLOE. In fact, I think I’ll start calling it exactly that.
I agree with Wiley that the term “open” is problematic, but for the exact opposite reason that Wiley gives. I think people are too likely to call almost anything open, even if the door is only open a centimeter. If it’s open exactly that far, and there’s a doorstop behind it preventing it from opening any further, then that door is effectively closed.
Related posts by other writers:
David Wiley: A few notes about openness (and a request)
Jeremy Brown: Bard Quest 2: Wiley’s motivation, Tomaševski’s motivation, and the real reason people get into Open Education
Jared Spurbeck: Why my creative work is “open”
davidp:Optimal, not ideal
I’m fascinated by danah boyd’s recent post intended for the New Media Consortium’s upcoming Symposium for the Future. In her post, she cautions new media theorists to avoid what she labels “technological determinism.” She explains:
Rejecting technological determinism should be a mantra in our professional conversations. It’s really easy to get in the habit of seeing a new shiny piece of technology and just assume that we can dump it into an educational setting and !voila! miracles will happen. Yet, we also know that the field of dreams is merely that, a dream. Dumping laptops into a classroom does no good if a teacher doesn’t know how to leverage the technology for educational purposes. Building virtual worlds serves no educational purpose without curricula that connects a lesson plan with the affordances of the technology. Without educators, technology in the classroom is useless.
boyd’s point is well taken, though I’d be hard pressed to find a single new media scholar who embraces the kind of technological determinism she describes in the above passage. There may have been a time when the “if we build it, they will come” mindset was commonplace, but virtually no serious thinker I have encountered, either in person or in text, actually believes that new media technologies can or should offer quick fixes to society’s ills.
The problem, as I see it, is a two-part one. The first issue is one of terminology: Increasingly, we talk about “technology” as this set of tools, platforms, and communication devices that have emerged from the rise of the internet. This is useful insofar as it allows new media thinkers to converge as members of a field (typically labeled something like digital media and learning or the like), but it does so at the expense of the deep, complicated and deeply intertwined history of technologies and what we call “human progress.” In truth, social media platforms are an extension of communications technologies that reach back to the beginning of human development–before computers, television, motion pictures, radio, before word processing equipment, to telegraphs, typewriters, Morse code, pencils, paper, the printing press…all the way back to the very first communication technology, language itself.
“Technology” is not a monolith, and there is a distinct danger in presenting it as such, as boyd does in her final paragraph:
As we talk about the wonderfulness of technology, please keep in mind the complexities involved. Technology is a wonderful tool but it is not a panacea. It cannot solve all societal ills just by its mere existence. To have relevance and power, it must be leveraged by people to meet needs. This requires all of us to push past what we hope might happen and focus on introducing technology in a context that makes sense.
The second problem is a rhetorical one. New media theorists have found themselves engaged in a mutually antagonistic dance with those who prefer to focus on what they see as the negative cultural effects of digital technologies. For better or worse, people engaged directly in this dance find themselves coming down more firmly than they might otherwise in one of these camps and, because the best defense is a good offense, staking out a more strident position than they might take in private or among more like-minded thinkers. Thus, those who dislike Twitter feign disdain, repulsion, or fear and are labeled (or label themselves) luddites; and those who like Twitter find themselves arguing for its astronomical revolutionary potential and are labeled (or label themselves) uncritical utopianists.
In fact, media theorists have been targets of the “technological determinism” accusation for so long that they refuse to acknowledge that technologies actually can and often do determine practice. Homeric verse took the structure it did because the cadences were easy for pre-literate poets and orators to remember. The sentences of Hemingway, Faulkner, and many of their literary contemporaries shortened up because they needed to be sent by telegraph–leading to a key characteristic of the Modernist movement. The emergence of wikis (especially, let’s face it, Wikipedia) has led to a change in how we think about information, encyclopedias, knowledge, and expertise.
A more accurate–but more complex and therefore more fraught–way to think about the relationship between humans and their technologies is that each acts on the other: We design technologies that help us to communicate, which in turn impact how we communicate, and when, and why, and with whom. Then we design new technologies to meet our changing communications needs.
Again, virtually no media theorist that I know of would really disagree with this characterization of our relationship to technologies–yet say it too loudly in mixed company, and you’re likely to get slapped with the technological determinism label. I say this as someone who has been accused more than once, and in my view wrongly, of technological determinism.
Overly deterministic or not, however, I agree with boyd that technologies do not offer a panacea. More importantly, she argues against the use of terms like “digital natives” and, presumably, its complement, “digital immigrants.” These are easy terms that let us off the hook: people under 30 get something that people over 30 will never understand, and there’s nothing you can do about this divide. As boyd explains,
Just because many of today’s youth are growing up in a society dripping with technology does not mean that they inherently know how to use it. They don’t. Most of you have a better sense of how to get information from Google than the average youth. Most of you know how to navigate privacy settings of a social media tool better than the average teen. Understanding technology requires learning. Sure, there are countless youth engaged in informal learning every day when they go online. But what about all of the youth who lack access? Or who live in a community where learning how to use technology is not valued? Or who tries to engage alone? There’s an ever-increasing participation gap emerging between the haves and the have-nots. What distinguishes the groups is not just a question of access, although that is an issue; it’s also a question of community and education and opportunities for exploration. Youth learn through active participation, but phrases like “digital natives” obscure the considerable learning that occurs to enable some youth to be technologically fluent while others fail to engage.
The key question on the minds of researchers in digital media and learning is not (or should not be) how we can get computers in the hands of every student but how we can support participation in the valued practices, mindsets, and skillsets that go along with a networked, digital society. To get this question answered right requires an ability to engage in the complex, thorny, and socially charged issues that boyd and others have identified in their research and writings. It requires development of a common language within the broad digital media and learning community and an ability to communicate that language to the vast range of stakeholders who are paying attention to what we say and how we say it.
Related posts by other writers:
danah boyd: Some thoughts on technophilia
Kevin Kelly: Technophilia
Recently, media scholar (and, full disclosure, my former boss) Henry Jenkins published a new post on his always-mind-blowing blog, Confessions of an Aca/Fan. This post focuses on the affordances and, in his view, the limitations of Twitter.
The post itself is the result of a Twitter exchange wherein one of Henry’s followers, @aramique, wrote: “you theorize on participatory models over spectatorial but i’ve noticed your whole twitter feed is monologue.” Ultimately, Henry responded with this: “yr questions get Twt’s strengths, limits. but answer won’t fit in character limits. Watch for blog post soon.” Then, in his blogpost, he begins with this:
I will admit that there is a certain irony about having to refer people to my blog for an exchange that started on Twitter but couldn’t really be played out within the character limits of that platform. But then, note that armique’s very first post had to be broken into two tweets just to convey the emotional nuances he needed. And that’s part of my point.
From the start, I’ve questioned whether Twitter was the right medium for me to do my work. I’ve always said that as a writer, I am a marathon runner and not a sprinter. I am scarcely blogging here by traditional standards given the average length of my posts. Yet I believe this blog has experimented with how academics might better interface with a broader public and how we can expand who has access to ideas that surface through our teaching and research.
Jenkins, who makes it clear that his blog is his primary focus for online communication and that Twitter is a space for him to both direct traffic to his blog and track who follows his links, and when, and how, argues that though Twitter has its value as a social media platform, it has resulted in some losses. His main concerns are linked to a core issue with the key feature of Twitter: its brevity. As it grows in popularity, he explains, deep, thoughtful commentary on his blogposts has decreased:
Most often, the retweets simply condense and pass along my original Tweet. At best, I get a few additional words on the level of “Awesome” or “Inspiring” or “Interesting.” So, in so far as Twitter replaces blogs, we are impoverishing the discourse which occurs on line.
“[I]n so far as people are using (Twitter) to take on functions once played on blogs,” he writes, “there is a serious loss to digital culture.”
I guess I’m approximately as serious about blogging as a medium as the next guy who posts tens of thousands of words each month, but I’m not sure I share Henry’s concern. There were, after all, those who worried that blogs would lead to the decline of serious and thoughtful intellectual conversation. But as Henry’s blog (and hundreds or thousands of others like it) demonstrates, blogs can in fact afford both a higher level of expression and a greater capacity for circulation of those ideas. The phenomenon of the blog also–and this was a key element of the initial concern about the decline and fall of civilization at the hands of the weblog–means anybody with internet access, basic typing skills, and a couple of ideas about anything at all can express, post and circulate them. Blogs even support cirulation of the most ignorant, repulsive claptrap a person can imagine. The onus is therefore on the consumer, and no longer the producer, to filter out the white noise in search of real music. The fear, real or imagined, was that the general public would not be able to filter intelligently and would therefore accept any nonsense they read online.
Actually, this fear is not a new one. The same anxiety was prevalent among educated elites when the universal literacy movement began to take hold. It was the same fear that gripped members of “high culture” when movies, then radio, then television, then YouTube became increasingly popular and available. See, that’s the peculiar feature of democratizing technologies: Elites no longer get to decide what’s culturally valuable and filter it out before it reaches the unwashed masses. Now we all get to decide, and that’s precisely what leads the privileged class–even members of this class who are pro-democracy–to react so strongly that they try to stamp it out.
It’s the same cry I hear from people who oppose Twitter: There’s so much meaningless noise. It’s leading to a decline in critical thinking. Jenkins writes that
there is an awful lot of relatively trivial and personal chatter intended to strengthen our social and emotional ties to other members of our community. The information value of someone telling me what s/he had for breakfast is relatively low and I tend to scan pretty quickly past these tweets in search of the links that are my primary interests. And if the signal to noise ration is too low, I start to ponder how much of a social gaff I would commit if i unsubscribed from someone’s account.
Twitter, for all its seeming triviality, is one of the most complex, nuanced social media environments I’ve ever participated in. It’s layered over with the kind of community expertise required for authentic, valued participation in a vast range of social networking sites, both online and offline. Add to that the fact that Twitter users bring to their engagement with the site any number of social motivations; multiply that by the nearly limitless number of possible subsets of Twitter followers the typical user might communicate with; and square that by the breathtaking creativity that the 140-character limit both supports and fosters.
This is what’s most difficult to explain to a new Twitter user, and what’s nearly intuitive for those who have internalized the tacit norms of the space: No tweet can be interpreted in isolation. No Twitter stream exists wholly independently of any other. Twitter’s depth exists precisely in the delicate intertwining of inanity with complexity. Yes, most of the time I skip over people’s breakfast tweets. But I don’t always skip over them. Much of the time I click on the links Henry posts. But I don’t always click on them.
Sure, Twitter is no substitute for a series of deep, thoughtful blogposts. But my sense is that the vast majority of Twitter users know this, and don’t bother trying to turn Twitter into a blog, or even a microblog–though it may seem like it on the surface.
And even if some users really are trying to do exactly that, it’s much easier to focus on Twitter’s constraints than on the deep, breathtaking creativity it affords. I follow lots of Twitter users who are very good at linking to interesting, useful websites; and I follow a smaller number of users who are very good at the more difficult work of leveraging the technology in infinitely creative ways.
I wanted to offer an example of this creativity, but it’s impossible to demonstrate outside of its context. You’d have to follow users’ hashtags, or see how they fit an idea into 140 characters, or read a surprising tweet exactly in context.
Here’s the closest I can come:
@jennamcjenna can someone link me to an article that tells me something completely mind-blowing? It doesn’t matter what topic.8:52 PM Jun 16th from web@dizzyjosh: @jennamcjenna try http://bit.ly/eQf3m http://bit.ly/zCUQM http://bit.ly/Sh06v
http://bit.ly/Ks9qG http://bit.ly/PgNqT http://bit.ly/PgNqT
Related posts by other writers:
danah boyd: Twitter: “pointless babble” or peripheral awareness + social grooming?
Henry Jenkins: The Message of Twitter: “Here It Is” and “Here I Am”
I hate grammatical redundancy. Some of the best examples of this are:
There’s actually a term for this: RAS syndrome, or Redundant Acronym Syndrome syndrome.
“But,” said my buddy Dan, with a look of pure glee, “you say ATM Machine like everyone else, right?”
“I do not,” I answered. And I don’t.
“That’s a dilemma,” Dan said, still gleeful. “The English major part of you conflicting with the participatory culture theorist, who says that whatever the people decide is right.”
He was ribbing me, but in truth it’s a fair enough critique. After all, some of the most influential books on participatory culture and the social revolution include the following titles, all of which intentionally fly in the face of common attitudes toward morality, ethics, and human progress:
Here Comes Everybody (Clay Shirky)
The World is Flat (Thomas Friedman)
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (Don Tapscott)
Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us (Seth Godin)
And, I’ll just admit it, my blog is absolutely peppered with sweeping declarations: Print journalism isn’t viable. Young people are leading the social revolution. The question isn’t ‘is it moral?’, but ‘is it popular?’
Why, after all, isn’t the question ‘is it moral?’ Simply put, most of the time when people ask that question about aspects of the social revolution, what they’re actually asking is more along the lines of ‘is this better or worse than the experiences and culture I’m used to?’ This is a matter of personal preference, and there’s no accounting for taste.
Some of my friends think wearing a wristwatch makes it easier for them to make it to their meetings on time; some of my friends think watches just make them more time-conscious and anxious. If suddenly a critical mass of people started wearing watches and pressuring the rest of their culture to wear watches too, some of my friends would be thrilled (everybody will have to be on time now!), some would be upset (we’re all going to start caring more about the time than about each other!), and some wouldn’t care at all (*shrug* it’s just another tool to help me get through my day.).
Some people think online social networks signal the decline of community. Some people think new, valuable community structures have emerged around these networks. And some people just think online Scrabble is a fun way to spice up a boring work day. All of these people are right, but arguing about whether we’re better or worse off (or the same) is pointless, because is a wristwatch-bearing culture better than one that uses sundials? Your answer depends on a lot of things, like: whether you make your living off of sundial manufacturing; whether you can personally afford a watch; whether you were someone who cared a lot about keeping track of the time in the first place; and whether you think a watch looks good on your wrist.
Please don’t accuse me of absolute moral relativism, though; even participatory culture theorists have their limits. It’s wrong to force everyone to wear wristwatches, for example, just as it’s wrong to ban sundials. If democracy, freedom of the press, or free speech falter when print journalism hits its death throes, I will be among the throngs calling for social change. Participatory media platforms tend, as all previous platforms have, to silence certain groups (nonwhites, nonstraights, older participants, less educated [formally or informally] participants); this is painful and wrong.
And RAS syndrome will always be wrong, no matter what percentage of the population adopts the phrase “ATM machine.”
and if the flies wore clothes on their
backs
and all the buildings burned in
golden fire,
if heaven shook like a belly
dancer
and all the atom bombs began to
cry,
some people would be young and nothing
else and
some people old and nothing
else,
and the rest would be the same
the rest would be the same.
the few who are different
are eliminated quickly enough
by the police, by their mothers, their
brothers, others; by
themselves.
all that’s left is what you
see.
it’s
hard.
(Charles Bukowski, The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses over the Hills, 1969)
“The message of Wikipedia,” writes Michael Wesch, “is not ‘trust authority’ but ‘explore authority.’ Authorized information is not beyond discussion on Wikipedia, information is authorized through discussion, and this discussion is available for the world to see and even participate in.”
This comes from Wesch’s January 2009 Academic Commons article, “From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments.” The piece is part of an issue dedicated to exactly this problem: How do we teach and learn in a cultural moment where even the very definition of “knowledge,” “teaching,” and “learning,” and even of “information” is being called into question?
Wesch focuses in on the brick-and-mortar university, arguing that despite growing recognition among higher-ed faculty and administration that university teaching and learning desperately needs to shift away from its authoritarian roots, a series of physical, social, and cognitive structures stymie this effort at nearly every turn. The physical deterrents are, Wesch argues, the easiest to recognize, and they
are on prominent display in any large “state of the art” classroom. Rows of fixed chairs often face a stage or podium housing a computer from which the professor controls at least 786,432 points of light on a massive screen. Stadium seating, sound-absorbing panels and other acoustic technologies are designed to draw maximum attention to the professor at the front of the room. The “message” of this environment is that to learn is to acquire information, that information is scarce and hard to find (that’s why you have to come to this room to get it), that you should trust authority for good information, and that good information is beyond discussion (that’s why the chairs don’t move or turn toward one another). In short, it tells students to trust authority and follow along.
This is a message that very few faculty could agree with, and in fact some may use the room to launch spirited attacks against it. But the content of such talks are overshadowed by the ongoing hour-to-hour and day-to-day practice of sitting and listening to authority for information and then regurgitating that information on exams.
These are a key feature of the social structures that work against change in higher education: The ongoing pressure to standardize curriculum and use (easily quantified) standardized assessments for accountability purposes. Wesch writes:
When I speak frankly with professors all over the world, I find that, like me, they often find themselves jury-rigging old assessment tools to serve the new needs brought into focus by a world of infinite information. Content is no longer king, but many of our tools have been habitually used to measure content recall. For example, I have often found myself writing content-based multiple-choice questions in a way that I hope will indicate that the student has mastered a new subjectivity or perspective. Of course, the results are not satisfactory. More importantly, these questions ask students to waste great amounts of mental energy memorizing content instead of exercising a new perspective in the pursuit of real and relevant questions.
This is, perhaps, one of the most significant dangers inherent in re-mediating assessment: The risk of re-mediating the wrong aspects of current assessment strategies. Rewriting a multiple-choice test is surely not the answer, but it’s often, and understandably, what innovative and new media-friendly educators do. The results of this effort may not be satisfactory, after all, but they’re better than nothing. And short of overhauling an entire course, it’s often a useful stopgap measure.
And what of overhauling an entire course? Wesch, recognizing that “our courses have to be about something,” argues for a shift away from “subjects” (English, History, Science) and toward “subjectivities”–ways of approaching and thinking about content. One simple way of thinking about this shift is by thinking about the difference between learning the steps of the scientific method and developing the mindsets embraced by a profession that embraces the scientific method as a useful approach to experimentation.
The “subjectivities” approach is, in fact, the favored approach of many graduate programs. My sister, who is beginning law school this fall, is immersed in a cognitive apprenticeship designed to make her think, act, and speak like a lawyer. As a new doctoral student in Indiana University’s Learning Sciences program, I’m undertaking the same apprenticeship. A series of courses, including IU’s Professional Seminar in the Learning Sciences and Theory and Method in the Learning Sciences, are intended to equip new grad students with the Learning Sciences mindset.
This approaches, however, gives rise to a key question: If the “subjectivities” approach is intended to is intended to help learners think, act, and speak like a {fill in the blank}, then who decides how a {fill in the blank} is supposed to think, act, and speak?
Jim Gee offers a fascinating critique of “learning to think like a lawyer” in his book Social Linguistics and Literacies. He argues that success in law school is slanted toward people who think, act, and speak like white, middle-class men, explaining that:
[t]o write a competent brief the student has to be able to read the text being briefed in much the same way as the professor does…. Students are not taught these reading skills—the ones necessary to be able to write briefs—directly. Briefs are not, for instance, turned in to the professor; they are written for the students’ own use in class…. One of the basic assumptions of law school is that if students are not told overtly what to do and how to proceed, this will spur them on essentially to teach themselves. Minnis argues that this assumption does not, however, work equally well for everyone. Many students from minority or otherwise non-mainstream backgrounds fail in law school.
(A female friend who recently completed law school agrees with this argument, and struggled mightily with the inequities inherent in her program and inside the field of law in general. I’ve written about her experience here.)
This issue is certainly not limited to law school; it’s a thorny problem in every program designed to help students think like a {fill in the blank.} I understand that this is an issue that IU’s Learning Sciences program has grappled with recently, and I imagine this is the reason that the Professional Seminar in the Learning Sciences, previously a required course, has now been made optional.
What do I know, right? I haven’t even started my first semester in the program yet. But it seems to me that if this issue is worth grappling with (and I believe it is), it’s worth grappling with alongside of the program’s apprentices. I’m for making the course mandatory and then using it to expose, discuss, and clarify the very issues that led to the faculty’s decision.
Here we can take a page out of the Wikipedia lesson book. There’s no point in simply trusting authority when the social revolution supports not just questioning, not just opposing, but actually exploring authority. After all, thinking like a good {Learning Scientist} is about much more than embracing a set of approaches to teaching, learning, and knowledge; it’s also about questioning, contesting and exploring the very foundation of the field itself.
Regular readers of this blog know what a fan I am of comedian Daniel Tosh and his new show, Tosh.0. My love is simple and pure: The show culls the most humiliating moments from millions of online videos, and Tosh exercises the most exacting wit in elaborating on the humiliation.
Here’s something else Tosh does well: cultivating his twitter presence. He livetweets during his show each week, responding to viewer questions and proddings, and during and in between he uses twitter not like many celebrities do but exactly like normal people do.
Recently, he posted a twitpic of his summer haircut:
I’m fairly certain he’s making fun of twitpic users here, with the wood-paneled cabinets, the slightly tilted head, the direct, semi-flirty eye contact. But, see, he’s not just making fun of twitpic; he’s also using it with sincerity, for exactly the purpose god vested it with.
Here’s what his livetweets look like:
And here’s a sample of toshtweets during his off hours:
You guys, this is a comic who’s in full command of his medium. It’s a bonus for me that his medium happens to be the internet, of which I am a fairly big fan.
If you’re interested, the show’s on Thursday night at 10 PM Eastern Time on Comedy Central.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqbwfHm3WvE&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]
You may have seen this already:
Embedded video from CNN Video
It’s true what Frank says, that it’s a tribute to the First Amendment that this kind of vile, contemptible behavior is not only completely legal but easily disseminated.
At the same time, even though Barney Frank is right to refuse to engage with a disruptive public, he still kinda looks like a big jerk. When you have the floor like he does, you really do need to hold yourself to a higher standard. You don’t get to use the platform to insult the public, even if they’re trying to do it to you.
the second in a two-part series on how to survive a zombie invasion
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts (here, here, here, and here), I believe that an all-out zombie apocalypse is likely to wipe out the vast majority of humanity, with the exception of those armed with guns, food, and new media.
Forewarned is forearmed, I always say. Which is why it’s worthwhile to examine a recent article that considers various zombie survival scenarios through a mathematical lens.
The article, “When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection,” argues this:
An outbreak of zombies infecting humans is likely to be disastrous, unless extremely aggressive tactics are employed against the undead. While aggressive quarantine may eradicate the infection, this is unlikely to happen in practice. A cure would only result in some humans surviving the outbreak, although they will still coexist with zombies. Only sufficiently frequent attacks, with increasing force, will result in eradication, assuming the available resources can be mustered in time.
Further, the authors agree with my argument that previously successful responses to widespread and contagious infectious diseases will be ineffective against a zombie invasion.
You have to have some basic expertise in reading mathematical equations to parse the results of the various models the authors present, as the article is populated with such arguments as this:
In fact, while the models presented are intended to offer realistic analyses of efficacy of various zombie-attack responses, the authors point out that the odds of a widespread zombie infection are fairly low. Still, they argue that this article does have its value even given the low risk of zombie attack. First, they write, “possible real-life applications may include allegiance to political parties, or diseases with a dormant infection.”
Additionally, the authors explain:
This is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the first mathematical analysis of an outbreak of zombie infection. While the scenarios considered are obviously not realistic, it is nevertheless instructive to develop mathematical models for an unusual outbreak. This demonstrates the flexibility of mathematical modelling and shows how modelling can respond to a wide variety of challenges in ‘biology’.
It’s a pity these mathematicians, who have clearly completed some of the best scientific work to date on the zombie apocalypse, fail to recognize the plausibility of a zombie invasion. Still, despite their cavalier approach to the subject matter, they are willing to end with this:
In summary, a zombie outbreak is likely to lead to the collapse of civilisation, unless it is dealt with quickly. While aggressive quarantine may contain the epidemic, or a cure may lead to coexistence of humans and zombies, the most effective way to contain the rise of the undead is to hit hard and hit often. As seen in the movies, it is imperative that zombies are dealt with quickly, or else we are all in a great deal of trouble.
"you don't just give up / you don't just let things happen / you make a stand / you say no //"
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