QTalks

What is Pecha Kucha? Go to Pecha-Kucha.org and see superb Stockholm Design Lab prez!

We kick off this week’s look at online presentations with a candid look at some of the iconic work of Stockholm Design Lab, as told by the studio’s Björn Kusoffsky and Thomas Eriksson. The presentation is originally from last month’s Tokyo Design Week edition of PechaKucha Night in Tokyo, with a bit of Swedish Style love thrown in for good measure.

via pecha-kucha.org

Don't start at these words. Go see the presentation by clicking on Pecha-Kucha.org.

Posted via web from qviews's posterous

Evolving the news

In this post, Doc Searls compares the Internet to the telephone system and notes that the phone system is dumb at each end with the system intelligence in the middle--the phone company makes the design decisions. In contrast, the Internet was designed for the intelligence to be at each end, and all that is in the middle are dumb pipes. Which is the modern newspaper more like? The outmoded phone system, of course. Publishers and editors make the decisions, underpaying the journalists and talking down to their audience. Not likely to continue, is it?

Doc Searls Weblog · Toward post-Journalism journalism.2009-Oct-31

Think of today as a moment in the early paleozoic, say in Cambrian time. In that context Facebook is a trilobite. Twitter is a bryzoan. The Huffington Post is a primitive sponge. For small-j journalism, this is not the End of Time, but the beginning of it. Will big-J journalism survive? Only if it adapts. While some of that adaptation will be corporate, the leadership won’t be in the corporate system. It will be among the journalists themselves. Just as it was, and still is, with technology companies and the geeks they employ.

Know where term 'liberal arts' came from? Fun to find out...

Times Higher Education: The unholy market kills divine life of the mind, 2003-May-30, by Andrew Louth (via Nicholas Carr’s Rough Type blog)

The evolution of the university took the pattern of learning that characterized monastic life - reading, meditation, prayer and contemplation - out of the immediate context of the monastery. But it did not fundamentally alter it. At its heart was the search for knowledge for its own sake. It was an exercise of freedom on the part of human beings, and the disciplines involved were to enable one to think freely and creatively. These were the liberal arts, or free arts, as opposed to the servile arts to which a man is bound if he has in mind a limited task.

Posted via email from qviews's posterous

The Explanation Compulsion

Nonsense, contradictions, and complexity don't just frustrate us, they actually frighten us on an unconscious level. This tendency explains a lot of the nonsense going on around the healthcare debate. We know that it's impossible to predict ALL the results of our actions, and we can't handle it. The solution? I think it's the recommendation of the White Queen in Alice:

Alice laughed. `There's no use trying,' she said `one can't believe impossible things.'`I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. `When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'

Mind - How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect - NYTimes.com, 2009-Oct-5, by Benedict Carey

“We’re so motivated to get rid of that feeling that we look for meaning and coherence elsewhere,” said Travis Proulx, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and lead author of the paper appearing in the journal Psychological Science. “We channel the feeling into some other project, and it appears to improve some kinds of learning.” Researchers have long known that people cling to their personal biases more tightly when feeling threatened. ... In a series of new papers, Dr. Proulx and Steven J. Heine, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, argue that these findings are variations on the same process: maintaining meaning, or coherence. The brain evolved to predict, and it does so by identifying patterns.