30 MAY 2016 by ideonexus
Co-veillance
At first sight, things seem quite similar in City Number Two. Again, there are ubiquitous cameras, perched on every vantage point. Only here we soon find a crucial difference. The devices do not report to the secret police. Rather, each and every citizen of this metropolis can lift his or her wristwatch/TV and call up images from any camera in town.
Here, a late-evening stroller checks to make sure no one lurks beyond the corner she is about to turn.
Over there, a tardy young man dials to s...Folksonomies: surveillance panopticon
Folksonomies: surveillance panopticon
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notes
notes20 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
It is Impossible to Keep Up with New Knowledge
No man's model of reality is a purely personal product. While some of his images are
based on firsthand observation, an increasing proportion of them today are based on
messages beamed to us by the mass media and the people around us. Thus the degree of
accuracy in his model to some extent reflects the general level of knowledge in society. And
as experience and scientific research pump more refined and accurate knowledge into society,
new concepts, new ways of thinking, supersede, contradict... 1 notes
notesThe growth of knowledge is too fast for anyone to keep on top of it, even in specialized fields. Is the solution for everyone to become generalists?
07 OCT 2013 by ideonexus
Imagining the Primitive Mind
AND now let us indulge in a very interesting speculation; how did it feel to be a man in those early days of the human adventure? How did men think and what did they think in those remote days of hunting and wandering four hundred centuries ago before seed time and harvest began. Those were days long before the written record of any human impressions, and we are left almost entirely to inference and guesswork in our answers to these questions.
[...]
Primitive man probably thought very much ... 1 notes
notesAs evolution tends to build in lairs, the primitive mind must have been much like that of a child.
18 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
Supernatural Concepts Worthy of Further Inquiry
At
the time of writing there are three claims in the ESP field which, in
my opinion, deserve serious study: (1) that by thought alone
humans can (barely) affect random number generators in computers;
(2) that people under mild sensory deprivation can receive
thoughts or images 'projected' at them; and (3) that young
children sometimes report the details of a previous life, which
upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not
have known about in any other way than reincarnation...Folksonomies: science supernatural
Folksonomies: science supernatural
1 notes
notesCarl Sagan lists three seemingly supernatural concepts worth investigation.
23 JAN 2011 by ideonexus
Experienced Becoming Replaced with Facsimile
Art objects contain a dynamism based on scale and physicality that produces a somatic response in the viewer. The powerful visual experience of art locates the viewer very precisely as an integrated self within the artist’s vision. With the flattening of visual information and the randomness of size inherent in reproduction, the significance of scale is eroded. Visual information becomes based on image alone. Experience is replaced with facsimile.
As admittedly useful as the Internet is, ea... 1 notes
notesWe are replacing the real world, real experience, with images and film, replicating it, but the experience is degraded in the replication.
02 JAN 2011 by ideonexus
The Web is More Than Text
Nevertheless, the next generation Web should not be based on the false assumption that text is predominant and keyword-based search will be adequate for all reasonable purposes [127]. Indeed, the issues relating to navigation through multimedia repositories such as video archives and through theWeb are not unrelated: both need information links to support browsing, and both need engines to support manual link traversal. However, the keyword approach may falter in the multimedia context becaus... 1 notes
notesAll of our search technologies, semantic explorations, and other online conversations are all dependent on text, but they must grow to be able to read images, audio, and video as well.
