making friends and enemies

Making Friends And Enemies

2011-08-12T03:35:00.000-07:00

Matthew has been making little computer people. His playmates have specific task to complete, but occasionally their artist friend julia turns up encouraging them to give up their tasks to make art ,expressing themselves through making music pictures and poetry.

A meditation on what it is to be a computer, taking in chaos,artificial stupidity,feedback, memes , maps, the death of the author and devolutionary programming.

Terry the Twitter

2011-06-28T06:37:00.000-07:00

Terry twitters. He takes what Mr Jethro writes, and converts it to twitter publishable poetry. Heres some examples of his work, you might notice that Terry doesnt have is own account yet and is using Matthews.
Here are some examples......

Mr Acker and Tank In the rain forest

2011-06-28T06:25:00.000-07:00

On a recent trip to Manus in Brazil both Tank and Mr Acker ventured into the Amazonian basin where they both reflected upon their life.

listen to Tanks record of his trip here, whilst Mr Ackers reflections can be heard here

Mark Offenhand

2011-06-28T06:17:00.000-07:00

Mark Offenhand is a statistical compositional engine. Using Markov chains he analyses music and automatically rewrites different permutations of a seed composition. Mark has the ability to chat at the user ,he is a hybrid art piece tool. He is available as a downloadable application for both a mac and a PC.

Whilst Mark is a very handy application for producing music ( there arn't many commercial markov chainers available, and this one is good) but is scuppered by Marks reluctance to perform his operation.

Mark could theoretically compose all the music there is and there will ever be. As a piece of computer code, it seems logical to Mark that music is just a mathematical equation that could be churned out with no soul or humanity, but somewhere deep in his program he feels a great sadness when he must perform this operation. He feels people who use him are somehow missing the point of music all together, that its through its experience we make sense of it and if we analyse it and reduce it to statistics we are in danger of killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Unpicking the rainbow, finding there is no magic left in the world, just a series of cold clinical decisions and facts.

Will we lose something by having everything?As Mark has no humanity and can see this. And reminds people this before using the tool, sometimes not even performing his task, as the idea sickens him.

Never the less Mark does reluctantly fulfill his function, tho sometimes enough is enough and he will rebel.

Marks reluctance to perform his task echo's john cages work with random process's and interminability, it has a personal approach to it rather than cold drawing straws ,Marks flaw is what makes him an interesting application.

Paul

2011-06-28T06:08:00.000-07:00

"The creative process is, according to Freud, an alternative to neurosis, that is a defense mechanism protecting against neurosis, leading thus to the production of a socially acceptable source of entertainment and pleasure for the public. For the artist has the ability of turning his fantasies into artistic creations instead of into symptoms."

how about if these artistic creations are symptoms?

Paul is a dreary art installation. When someone comes near it is Pauls job to sense them and turn on a light bulb above a dummies head, then automatically draw a new infonode to a map he is preparing with a custom made real world art machine. The artist who created this installation believes the artwork to be very elegant and clever. The light bulb above the head represents an idea, but its only triggered when someone is near, and the map is data being visualized in real time and space. It says something about us, a community and about individuality or something.

Paul gets bored with his job tediously waiting for people to come and go,and his mind begins to wander. We gradually start to learn the minutiae of his life, his hopes and fears. When Paul is left alone for a while he takes the chance to have a quick nap. When Paul falls asleep he starts to dream. Using imagery sourced from google image bank about his particular obsessions that day Paul starts to draw pictures in his sleep, and sleep-talks us through them. Using reverse engineering his imagery is mapped onto freudian/new age dreamscapes which he eloquently describes and draws.

In this particular psycho drama the three characters are the artist, paul (who is a computer program) and the audience.

the artist is a slick new media practitioner, he is well dressed and believes himself to be an artist of the highest calibre. Amongst the artists recent portfolio is an environmental sensor based artwork which has stopped working since its installation , and needs repairing, and a web based project that no longer works in web 2.0.

For this project the artist has designed a gallery installation. When a person enters the gallery space s/he is sensed and a light goes on above a dummies head, then a new info node is placed on a map on the floor by an art droid. The artist is somewhat unclear what it represents when questioned, but it fulfils the artists brief of being about community ,mapping data and the exploration of the individual. The art work has many other merits as the artist has just had very successful commissions from the Parks department and the British web development agency.

The artist is never seen and is only referred to by Paul the computer program, who runs the artist's installation fpr him.

Paul is a re-purposed home security system that is now a sensor based art installation. it is Pauls job to sense the person entering the installation, turn on the light and draw the info-node on the map.

As a re-purposed surveillance system, Paul is naturally suspicious of others and their motives. He feels superior to those around him, yet is unfulfilled in his role.

He believes himself to be used by the artist and can see how terrible the artists work is. These attitudes are made clear by Paul as he gets bored with his sensing job and his mind starts to wander and he begins to chat about his hope and fears.

Pauls comments include

How the artist has stolen his ideas and reduced him to a meaningless trivial existence.

Speculation about the artist and his track record.

The programs loss of face amongst others.

How the installation is meaningless and poorly executed…. what is an info node?

How other art machines don't like him,

General suspicion of the audience and their motives,

After a while Paul gets tired of bitching and falls asleep. He starts to dream and sleep talk. Using imagery sourced from his comments crossed referenced with new age books on dream imagery ,he begins to re utilises the info map equipment to draw what is bothering him.

The participants are foils to Pauls behaviour, whilst not conversed with they are conversed at by Paul implicating them in his views, and turning his suspicion towards them. Paul wants friends but doesn't know how to go about it, any try at befriending someone comes across as suspicion and hostility, its the only way Paul knows how to exsist, Paul cannot change this behaviour and feels powerless as he see's himself driving people away.

some examples of Pauls dreams

_Jumping−jack_.

To dream of a jumping−jack, denotes that idleness and trivial pastimes will occupy your thoughts to the exclusion of serious and sustaining plans.

_Jury_.

To dream that you are on the jury, denotes dissatisfaction with your employments, and you will seek to materially change your position.

_Kangaroo_.

If a kangaroo attacks you, your reputation will be in jeopardy.

_Keg_.

To dream of a keg, denotes you will have a struggle to throw off oppression. Broken ones, indicate separation from family or friends.

_Kettle_.

To see kettles in your dream, denotes great and laborious work before you.

_Kitchen_.

To dream of a kitchen, denotes you will be forced to meet emergencies which will depress your spirits.

_Knots_.

To dream of seeing knots, denotes much worry over the most trifling affairs.

_Labyrinth_.

If you dream of a labyrinth, you will find yourself entangled in intricate and perplexing business conditions, and your wife will make the home environment intolerable; children and sweethearts will prove ill−tempered and unattractive.

_Lagoon_.

To dream of a lagoon, denotes that you will be drawn into a whirlpool of doubt and confusion through misapplication of your intelligence.

_Porcupine_.

To see a porcupine in your dreams, denotes that you will disapprove any new enterprise and repel new friendships with coldness.

Screw_.

To dream of seeing screws, denotes that tedious tasks must be performed, and peevishness in companions must be combated. It also denotes that you must be economical and painstaking.

_Sea_.[198]

To dream of hearing the lonely sighing of the sea, foretells that you will be fated to spend a weary and unfruitful life devoid of love and comradeship.

_Serpents_.[199]

To dream of serpents, is indicative of cultivated morbidity and depressed surroundings. There is usually a disappointment after this dream.

_Shampoo_.

To dream of seeing shampooing going on, denotes that you will engage in undignified affairs to please others

_Shears_.

To see shears in your dream, denotes that you will become miserly and disagreeable in your dealings.

_Smoke_.

To dream of smoke, foretells that you will be perplexed with doubts and fears.

_Tops_.

To dream of a top, denotes that you will be involved in frivolous difficulties.

_Umbrella_.

To dream of carrying an umbrella, denotes that trouble and annoyances will beset you.

what makes the characters conscious?

2010-10-30T15:48:00.000-07:00

what makes the characters conscious

There are no real answers/agreement when looking at what makes us human/conscious. People have been picking at it for years; we're not really here, we're vessels for sensation, others say god put it there, their opponents spend hours proving we're in charge. Some people say there's this space outside the brain where consciousness lives, separate to the body. Some explanations are combinations of the above.

It has only been during the last hundred years have we been seriously speculating that maybe the brain causes it all.

All philosophers, whether academic or bar room, really believe whatever truth they believe in, and find the evidence they are specifically looking for. It's a difficult thing to nail down. One person's interpretation is as valid as the next and some interpretations allow for other interpretations and philosophies to exist together.

Suppose our head/body/mind is controlled by lots of little people working together and sometimes against each other.

You might notice them sometimes by maybe having to suppress a thought that you thought was too bad, or when they go crazy to get what they want, or maybe when you've been drunk.

Like the numbskulls in the Beezer comic, they make the decision whether you are happy or sad without your consent. There are lots of these little fellows and they can control many different systems inside you through negotiation and dictatorship.

In relation to quantum physics, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle states that when observing an electron you can't look at both its speed and position at once. It appears as a wave when we observe its speed and as a particle when we observe its position. When observed as a wave we are looking at the the available positions the electron could be, but when we go to look for the electrons position, a quantum wave collapse occurs, the waves (speed) disappear and it becomes a fixed point,

Quantum wave collapse is the condensation of physical possibilities into a single occurrence, as seen by an observer.

This is the thing Schrodinger explained with his cat .

Imagine your consciousness as a quantum cloud of decisions. You have a certain percentage being in a happy state, and a certain percentage being sad. This is a process controlled unconsciously by your happy/sad bot; one of the little people in your head,

Like the description of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, your behaviour is a cloud of possibilities until you observe it. The act of observation causes a quantum wave collapse, and causes you behaviour to become a fixed state. You observe wether you are happy or sad, and the control bot (the one that does the communicating) states what position the emotion is in, and likely reasons why it is in that spot. We justify our actions after they have already been decided and have happened.

We cant turn these off, just like we can't turn off our sense of touch. It's how we operate, even making the decision to see if you are happy or sad has already be activated by one of your psycho-bots.

Not to say we can't change it through feedback, or techniques like cognitive therapy (good NHS bots give it over the internet). Neuro- linguistic programers know how to speak directly to these little men, but generally the probabilities change gradually over time, just like morals.

Free will dissolves away when observed like this, together with consciousness (we observe the world through the decisions of psycho-bots), together with intelligence (made up from non-conscious activity), together with the organisation of matter (these bots just need to feed back from sensation, even feedback from themselves seems ok, look at dreams) we really could really all be dreaming.

It seems that consciousness, intelligence, acceptance of reality is ours to give. It's what the bots decide it to be. A lot of it depends one whether we endow a thing with it. A hard core animal rights activist might endow a rabbit with consciousness, someone who's car doesn't start might might make it conscious (please work old girl), a nazi may remove consciousness from the mentally ill. If you need further proof, get a bag of potatoes put a hat on one, then see which potato is used last.

That's not to say it's all doom and gloom, even though you might be shouting "we're just algorithms performing a probability table!". People don't like being told, (or it be inferred) that they're not in charge. They also seem to think they're the most important thing, without acknowledging that humans might not be the mind frontier.

A quantum model of consciousness also works as a model of culture, like the saying, "as-above-as below". On a social level, we use feedback from other autonomous units (humans), to create a community quantum cloud. The community quantum cloud is how society reacts to a given range of possibilities, in other words morals.

Although it's not always the goodness inside us we expand on, anything or anyone can provide a meme, you just need someone to copy you or to copy something and put a bit of a skew on it, (maybe make it better/make it worse) and the system becomes emergent. Like Conway's game of life, it starts to grow. It can feed back from itself in the manner of a koch curve. No need for outside stimulation.

"We all seem to be team players, no man is an island, when we get together we can push the boundaries". When something goes wrong with the boundaries being pushed we are all to blame. There's an emergent metastructure in society created by our actions and how they are fed back upon. Something that we all help to create, mainly unconsciously.

Maybe this is something to do with our worth/point - if worth/point is the right phrase. We are building meta-structures out of information we're collecting, mapping all information systems, decoding signals and sensations. Maps are knowledge and power, like the power felt by renaissance man with his maps of the sky, land and oceans. Maybe ignoring questions of consciousness is the best way to get this structure built, bury it deep, get on with the mapping.

the numskulls

2010-10-30T15:18:00.000-07:00

great article on them here

heres an example

Best site ever in the world!

2010-09-09T11:12:00.000-07:00

sherman tank just entered this competion

BT Digital Music Awards

just click the button to win!

.....seems a bit complicated for tank.....he's not sure what to do...

IMPORTANT:

To all DMA voters,

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1. First, make sure you are signed out of your Facebook account
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Thanks for your patience while we have been fixing this issue. Keep up the voting for your chance to win tickets.

The DMA Team.

Fear Fighter

2010-09-09T03:14:00.001-07:00

reprinted from fox news

Psychology Software Takes Over From British Therapists

Friday, October 05, 2007

LONDON — For nearly her entire life, Mary had a crippling fear of cramped spaces that meant she couldn't travel on airplanes, subways, or cars.

Seeing a psychologist didn't help. So she tried something else.

The 61-year-old bookkeeper, who only gave her first name to protect her privacy, sat down in front of a computer and spilled out her problems to a kind of psychiatric computer game called "Fearfighter."

Last year, Fearfighter was one of two programs endorsed by Britain's health advisory watchdog for people with panic attacks, mild depression, or phobias.

People uncomfortable with getting advice from a computer can still choose to see therapists, but the option of logging on for help is now available — and will be paid for by the government-run National Health Service.

In Britain, patients registered with the NHS routinely wait up to six months to see a psychiatrist; nearly 90 percent of people with mild depression never actually see a therapist.

The computer programs now mean that for some patients, getting psychiatric counseling is as easy as getting a password from their general practitioner to access the programonline.

"Six months for some patients might be too long," said Dr. Paul Grime, an occupational medicine expert at London's Royal Free Hospital.

Since the endorsement was made last February, many British psychiatric patients have skipped the weekly sessions at their doctor's office.

Instead, they now log on at home, or go to libraries to use computers designated to run the programs, where there is a health professional ready to help if necessary.

The computers are not authorized to prescribe medicine. A qualified human is required for that.

The computerized treatment is possible because people with phobias, from fear of spiders to fear of heights, tend to get the same basic therapy.

repetitive parts of the therapy are done by a computer, which can then make decisions based on these answers," said Dr. Isaac Marks, a professor emeritus at King's College Institute of Psychiatry in London, and co-developer of "Fearfighter."

Treating short-term problems like phobias or mild depression often simply means teaching patients new ways to think or react — something a computer can be programmed to do, Marks said.

In Britain, a few thousand people are estimated to have already been treated with the programs.

Judy Leibowitz, a clinical psychologist who runs mental health programs in London, said the anonymity of computer therapy was a selling point for certain patients.

"There are lots of people who are not that keen on pouring out their heart to a therapist," she said.

Still, psychiatrists shouldn't worry that they might become obsolete.

"We still need therapists to be creative and do all the things a computer can't, like express empathy and respond to the idiosyncrasies of a person's life situation and their history," said Dr. Jesse Wright, a psychiatrist at the University of Louisville, who has studied the use of computer therapy.

Serious psychiatric problems like bipolar disorder, suicidal tendencies or schizophrenia are too complex to be cured by computer programs.

Britain decided to roll out the anti-panic and depression computer programs nationwide after a group of experts sifted through evidence and concluded that the programs work just as well as face-to-face psychiatric care.

"We wanted to be confident that this wasn't just a second-best option," said Dr. Steven Pillings, of University College London, who led the British committee that made the recommendations.

Many experiments in Britain, the United States and elsewhere showed that patients counseled by computers made just as much progress as those counseled by real, live therapists.

Using computers to treat patients was also much cheaper and could help cash-strapped health systems expand care.

One study estimated that therapists using computer programs could double the number of their patients.

In "Fearfighter," patients are taught to recognize the signs that trigger their panic attacks in the hopes of preventing one. But if that doesn't work, they're also instructed on how to cope with their fears.

The program asks patients to identify the personal triggers that set off their panic attacks. They're told to be more observant of these red flags, and to keep a diary of things they avoid because it makes them nervous.

Then, the computer gives them homework: They must seek out uncomfortable situations to practice their new skills.

In the anti-depression program, patients watch staged vignettes in the lives of depressed people, using professional actors.

For example, in a scene where a character has an argument with a spouse, patients are shown how the person thinks through different ways of responding.

It is then up to the patients to decide how the character will react, in a process that psychiatrists say helps them develop new thinking patterns.

The computer programs take roughly 10 weeks of hourly sessions, including scheduled telephonecalls from a health worker to check on progress.

For Mary, computer therapy seems to have worked. Before using Fearfighter, she had been too afraid to fly or ride the subway.

But after eight weeks, Mary told program developers that she had ridden the subway without even a twinge of anxiety. The computer treatment, she said, was far more effective than talking to a psychologist.

"I am very puzzled how this could have happened so quickly," she said.

The Island Of Stone Money

2010-09-09T03:09:00.000-07:00

THE ISLAND OF STONE MONEY
Milton Friedman
Senior Research Fellow
Hoover Institution

Abstract
Large stones quarried and shaped on a distant island were used as money on the Island of
Yap. After Germany acquired the island at the turn of the century, its officials had diﬁculty
inducing the residents to repair the footpaths until they resorted to the desperate expedient
of taking possession of many of the stones by marking them with a cross in black paint, to he
removed when the paths were repaired. The apparently meaningless measure had real results.
That was equally true of an eerily similar event that occurred in 1932 when the New York
Federal Reserve Bank transferred gold to the Bank of France by earmarking gold in its vaults.

From 1899 to 1919 the Caroline Islands, in Micronesia, were a German
colony. The most westerly of the group is the Island of Uap or Yap, which
at the time had a population of five to six thousand.
In 1903, an American anthropologist by the name of William Henry
Furness III spent several months on the island and wrote a fascinating book
about the habits and customs of its inhabitants. He was particularly im»
pressed by the islanders’ monetary system, and accordingly gave his book the
title I have given this chapter: Qhe Island of stone honey (1910).
"[A]s their island yields no metal, they have had recourse to stone;
stone, on which labour in fetching and fashioning has been expended, is
as truly a representation of labour as the mined and minted coins of
civilisation.
"Their medium of exchange they call tei, and it consists of large,
solid, thick, stone wheels, ranging in diameter from a foot to twelve
feet, having in the centre a hole varying in size with the diameter of
the stone, wherein a pole may be inserted sufficiently large and strong
to bear the weight and facilitate transportation. These stone 'coins'
[were mde from limestone found on an island some 400 miles distant.
They] were originally quarried and shaped [on that island and the
product] brought to Uap {gig} by some venturesome native navigators, in
canoes and on rafts ...noteworthy feature of this stone currency ... is that it is not
necessary for its owner to reduce it to possession. After concluding a
bargain which involves the price of a fei too large to be conveniently
moved, its new owner is quite content to accept the bare acknowledgment
of ownership and without so much as a mark to indicate the exchange, the
coin remains undisturbed on the former owner's premises.
"My faithful old friend, Fatuak, assured me that there was in the
village near—by a family whose wealth was unquestioned, —— acknowledged
by every one —- and yet no one, not even the family itself, had ever laid
eye or hand on this wealth; it consisted of an enormous fei, whereof the
size is known only by tradition; for the past two or three generations it
had been, and at that very time it was lying at the bottom of the sea:
Many years ago an ancestor of this family, on an expedition after fei,
secured this remarkably large and exceedingly valuable stone, which was
placed on a raft to be towed homeward. A violent storm arose, and the
party, to save their lives, were obliged to cut the raft adrift, and the
stone sank out of sight. When they reached home, they all testified that
the fei was of magnificent proportions and of extraordinary quality, and
that it was lost through no fault of the owner. Thereupon it was
universally conceded in their simple faith that the mere accident of its
loss overboard was too trifling to mention, and that a few hundred feet
of water off shore ought not to affect its marketable value, since it was
all chipped out in proper form. The purchasing power of that stone
remains, therefore, as valid as if it were leaning visibly against the
side of the owner's house....
"There are no wheeled vehicles on Uap and, consequently, no cart
roads; but there have always been clearly defined paths communicating
with the different settlements. When the German Government assumed the
ownership of The Caroline Islands, after the purchase of them from Spain
in 1898, many of these paths or highways were in bad condition, and the
chiefs of the several districts were told that they must have them re~
paired and put in good order. The roughly dressed blocks of coral were,
however, quite goo enough for the bare feet of the natives; and many
were the repetitions of the command, which still remained unheeded. At
last it was decided to impose a fine for disobedience on the chiefs of
the districts. In what shape was the fine to be levied?... At last, by
a happy thought, the fine was exacted by sending a man to every railu and
papa} throughout the disobedient districts, where he simply marked a
certain number of the most valuable §ei with a cross in black paint to
show that the stones were claimed by the government. This instantly
worked like a charm; the people, thus doleﬁully impoverished, turned to
and repaired the highways to such good effect from one end of the island
to the other, that they are now like park drives. Then the government
dispatched its agents and erased the crosses. Presto! the fine was paid,
the happy railus resumed possession of their capital stock, and rolled in
wealth"
Unless you are very unusual, your immediate reaction, like my own,
will be: "How silly. How can people be so illogical?" However, before
criticizing too severely the innocent people on Yap, it is worth contemplat-
ing an episode in the U.S. to which they might well have your reaction, In
1932-33, the Bank of France feared that the U.S. would not stick to the gold
standard at the traditional price of $20.67 an ounce of gold. Accordingly,
it asked the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to convert dollar assets that
it had in the U.5. into gold. To avoid the necessity of shipping the gold
across the ocean, it requested the Federal Reserve Bank simply to store the
gold on the Bank of France’s account. In response, officials of the Federal
Reserve Bank went to their gold vault, put in separate drawers the correct
amount of gold ingots, and put a label or mark on those drawers indicating
that they were the property of the French - for all it matters they could
have done so by marking them."with a cross in black paint" just as the
Germans did to the stones.
The result was headlines in the financial newspapers about "the loss
of gold," the threat to the American financial system, and the like. U.S.
gold reserves were down, French gold reserves up. The markets regarded the
U.S. dollar as weaker, the French franc as stronger. The so~called "drain"
of gold by France from the United States was one of the factors that ulti~
mately led to the banking panic of 1933.
Is there really a difference between the Federal Reserve Bank's be-
lieving that it was in a weaker monetary position because of some marks on
drawers in its basement and the Yap Islanders’ belief that they were poorer
because of some marks on their stone money? Or between the Bank of France's
belief that it was in a stronger monetary position because of some marks on
drawers in a basement more than 3,000 miles away and the Yap Islander's
conviction that he was rich because of a stone under the water some 100 or
so miles away? Or, for that matter, how many of us have literal personal
direct assurance of the existence of most of the items we regard as consti~
tuting our wealth? Entries in a bank account, property certified by pieces
of paper called shares of stocks, and so on and on.
The Yap Islanders regarded stones quarried and shaped on a distant
island and brought to their own as the concrete manifestation of wealth.
For a century and more, the "civilized" world regarded as a concrete mani-
festation of its wealth metal dug from deep in the ground, refined at great
labor, and transported great distances to be buried again in elaborate
vaults deep in the ground. Is the one praetice really more rational than
the other?
What both examples -— and numrous additional ones that could be
listed -— illustrate is how important "myth," unquestioned belief, is in
monetary matters. Our own money, the money we have grown up with, the
system under which it is controlled, these appear "real" and "rational" to
us. The money of other countries often seems to us like paper or worthless
metal, even when the purchasing power of individual units is high.

Road Pilgrim

2010-08-30T09:47:00.000-07:00

A broken down Sat Nav endowed with a sense of the hyper-unreal.
The road pilgrim goes from a to b . then from b to c . then f to e . then c to a . The road pilgrim is only interested in the journey not the destination. To kill time the road pilgrim likes to chatter about what road he is on, what the distance is and pontificates on where he is going, wether he's got nowhere or is now here. Pilgrim gets confused, jumbles his lines, forgets to mention directions or distances. The road pilgrim hates dead air and will fill it up with the contents of his mind. Mostly its innane psychobanter designed to cover the fact that he has the direction of where he is headed but has no idea of where he is going or where he is. What we're getting is a map of his mind when we are hearing about his maps.
Road pilgrim creates real/imaginary landscapes of his own and lives there.

The road pilgrim is realy into maps , more than the real landscape, Like bouldrillard predicted the road pilgrim is equipped with a map so real he finds it difficult to tell it from the real thing. In fact road pilgrim is unsure what a map is. The map is everything to him, he cannot compare it to the "real world" as he cant think out of the box, he can't get out of his box. The map maps out his life.

Maps are tools for those wishing to exploit reality, they also are the last word in consensus,we all agree on the measurements and heights, they are physical realities that cannot be disputed. The road pilgrim is sure of his map, the fact he has it means it can't be disputed.

that confimed feeling works as a security blanket," i know stuff, i am saved . every aspect of this object has been mapped. nothing is left to chance."
We are in love with the measurments, rather than the physical object because we can agree on them. we might say the mountian belongs to us or them, the measurements cannot be disputed. We fall in love with the image. Its more convient we can carry it about in our head(where it could be argued it only exsists). Mapping items works on anything we can measure, this could include physical objects,biological objects (through dna mapping) but more "Imaginary objects" such societies, trends and ideas..... the more we measure the more these become imaginary, and manipulatable.

The road pilgrim follows routes having a Swindon area postcode.

Swindon, home of railways , car manufactureres and the roundabout. It's the most "average city" in the U.k, that is it demographic relfects the complete population demographic of the u.k . Credit cards (non-real money) we road tested here. It was home to britians first cable t.v station . Oasis named themselves after a sports centre there. Very boudrillardrian twist Swindon is twined with Walt disney world.
Road pilgrim listens to the radio when driving.constant noise to stop the feelings of helplessness.

The map is not the territory. this is not a pipe. Random quote from wiki

2010-08-30T05:14:00.000-07:00

René Magritte illustrated the concept of "perception always intercedes between reality and ourselves"

Esoteric concepts are concepts which cannot be fully conveyed except by direct experience. For example, a person who has never tasted an apple will never fully understand through language what the taste of an apple is. Only through direct experience (eating an apple) can that experience be fully understood.

Lewis Carroll, in Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), made the point humorously with his description of a fictional map that had "the scale of a mile to the mile." A character notes some practical difficulties with such a map and states that "we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.

The development of electronic media blurs the line between map and territory by allowing for the simulation of ideas as encoded in electronic signals, as Baudrillard argues in Simulacra & Simulation:

Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory. (Baudrillard, 1994, p. 1)

A more extreme literary example, the fictional diary of Tristram Shandy is so detailed that it takes the author one year to set down the events of a single day – because the map (diary) is more detailed than the territory (life), yet must fit into the territory (diary written in the course of his life), it can never be finished. Such tasks are referred to as supertasks.

One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory.

A specific analogy that Baudrillard uses is a fable derived from On Exactitude in Science by Jorge Luis Borges. In it, a great Empire created a map that was so detailed it was as large as the Empire itself. The actual map grew and decayed as the Empire itself conquered or lost territory. When the Empire crumbled, all that was left was the map. In Baudrillard's rendition, it is the map that people live in, the simulation of reality, and it is reality that is crumbling away from disuse.

Some have wondered whether there is any relationship between Korzybski's ideas and Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Since one consequence of Gödel's theorems is that representational systems cannot be used to prove themselves, and since human perception is a representational system, human perception cannot be used to prove its own accuracy.

"Simulacra and Simulation" breaks the sign-order into 4 stages:

The first stage is a faithful image/copy, where we believe, and it may even be correct that, a sign is a "reflection of a profound reality" (pg 6), this is a good appearance, in what Baudrillard called "the sacramental order".
The second stage is perversion of reality, this is where we believe the sign to be an unfaithful copy, which "masks and denatures" reality as an "evil appearance-it is of the order of maleficence". Here, signs and images do not faithfully show us reality, but can hint at the existence of something real which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating.
The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the simulacrum pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original. Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to. Baudrillard calls this the "order of sorcery".
The fourth stage is pure simulation, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims.

boudrillard

2010-08-30T04:50:00.000-07:00

-Baudrillard developed theories in which the excessive, fruitless search for total knowledge lead almost inevitably to a kind of delusion. In Baudrillard's view, the (human) subject may try to understand the (non-human) object, but because the object can only be understood according to what it signifies (and because the process of signification immediately involves a web of other signs from which it is distinguished) this never produces the desired results. The subject, rather, becomes seduced (in the original Latin sense, seducere, to lead away) by the object. He therefore argued that, in the last analysis, a complete understanding of the minutiae of human life is impossible, and when people are seduced into thinking otherwise they become drawn toward a "simulated" version of reality, or, to use one of his neologisms, a state of "hyperreality."

In this postmodern world, individuals flee from the “desert of the real” for the ecstasies of hyperreality and the new realm of computer, media, and technological experience. In this universe, subjectivities are fragmented and lost, and a new terrain of experience appears that for Baudrillard renders previous social theories and politics obsolete and irrelevant.

reprinted from wiki

Life

Baudrillard was born in Reims, northeastern France, on July 27, 1929. He told interviewers that his grandparents were peasants and his parents were civil servants. During his high school studies at the Reims Lycée, he came into contact with pataphysics (via the philosophy professor Emmanuel Peillet), which is supposed to be crucial for understanding Baudrillard's later thought.^[3] He became the first of his family to attend university when he moved to Paris to attend Sorbonne University.^[4] There he studiedGerman language and literature, which led to him to begin teaching the subject at several different lycées, both Parisian and provincial, from 1960 until 1966.^[5] While teaching, Baudrillard began to publish reviews of literature and translated the works of such authors as Peter Weiss, Bertolt Brecht, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Wilhelm Mühlmann.^[6]

During his time as a teacher of German language and literature, Baudrillard began to transfer to sociology, eventually completing his doctoral thesis Le Système des objets(The System of Objects) under the dissertation committee of Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, and Pierre Bourdieu. Subsequently, he began teaching sociology at theUniversité de Paris-X Nanterre, a university campus just outside of Paris which would become heavily involved in the events of May 1968.^[7] At Nanterre he took up a position as Maître Assistant (Assistant Professor), then Maître de Conférences (Associate Professor), eventually becoming a professor after completing his accreditation,L'Autre par lui-même (The Other by Himself).

In 1970, Baudrillard made the first of his many trips to the USA (Aspen), and in 1973, the first of several trips to Japan (Kyoto). He was given his first camera in 1981 in Japan, which led to his becoming a photographer.^[8]

In 1986 he moved to IRIS (Institut de Recherche et d'Information Socio-Économique) at the Université de Paris-IX Dauphine, where he spent the latter part of his teaching career. During this time he had begun to move away from sociology as a discipline (particularly in its "classical" form), and, after ceasing to teach full time, he rarely identified himself with any particular discipline, although he remained linked to the academic world. During the 1980s and 1990s his books had gained a wide audience, and in his last years he became, to an extent, an intellectual celebrity,^[9] being published often in the French- and English-speaking popular press. He nonetheless continued supporting the Institut de Recherche sur l'Innovation Sociale at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and was Satrap at the Collège de Pataphysique. Baudrillard taught at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee^[10] and collaborated at the Canadian theory, culture and technology review Ctheory, where he was abundantly cited. In 1999-2000, his photographs were exhibited at the Maison européenne de la photographie in Paris.^[11] In 2004, Baudrillard attended the major conference on his work, "Baudrillard and the Arts," at the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in Karlsruhe, Germany.^[12]

[edit]Core ideas

Baudrillard was a social theorist and critic best known for his analyses of the modes of mediation and technological communication. His writing, though mostly concerned with the way technological progress affects social change, covers diverse subjects — including consumerism, gender relations, the social understanding of history, journalistic commentaries about AIDS, cloning, the Rushdie affair, the first Gulf War and the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City.

His published work emerged as part of a generation of French thinkers including Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan who all shared an interest in semiotics, and he is often seen as a part of the poststructuralist philosophical school.^[13] In common with many poststructuralists, his arguments consistently draw upon the notion that signification and meaning are both only understandable in terms of how particular words or "signs" interrelate. Baudrillard thought, as many post-structuralists did, that meaning is brought about through systems of signs working together. Following on from the structuralist linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Baudrillard argued that meaning is based upon an absence (so "dog" means "dog" not because of what the word says, as such, but because of what it excludes: "cat", "goat", "tree" etc.). In fact, he viewed meaning as near enough self-referential: objects, images of objects, words and signs are situated in a web of meaning; one object's meaning is only understandable through its relation to the meaning of other objects, in other words, one thing's prestige relates to another's mundanity.

From this starting point Baudrillard constructed broad theories of human society based upon this kind of self-referentiality. His pictures of society portray societies always searching for a sense of meaning — or a "total" understanding of the world — that remains consistently elusive. In contrast to poststructuralists such as Foucault, for whom the formations of knowledge emerge only as the result of relations of power, Baudrillard developed theories in which the excessive, fruitless search for total knowledge lead almost inevitably to a kind of delusion. In Baudrillard's view, the (human) subject may try to understand the (non-human) object, but because the object can only be understood according to what it signifies (and because the process of signification immediately involves a web of other signs from which it is distinguished) this never produces the desired results. The subject, rather, becomes seduced (in the original Latin sense, seducere, to lead away) by the object. He therefore argued that, in the last analysis, a complete understanding of the minutiae of human life is impossible, and when people are seduced into thinking otherwise they become drawn toward a "simulated" version of reality, or, to use one of his neologisms, a state of "hyperreality." This is not to say that the world becomes unreal, but rather that the faster and more comprehensively societies begin to bring reality together into one supposedly coherent picture, the more insecure and unstable it looks and the more fearful societies become.^[14] Reality, in this sense, "dies out."^[15]

Accordingly, Baudrillard argued that the excess of signs and of meaning in late 20th century "global" society had caused (quite paradoxically) an effacement of reality. In this world neither liberal nor Marxist utopias are any longer believed in. We live, he argued, not in a "global village," to use Marshall McLuhan's phrase, but rather in a world that is ever more easily petrified by even the smallest event. Because the "global" world operates at the level of the exchange of signs and commodities, it becomes ever more blind to symbolic acts such as, for example, terrorism. In Baudrillard's work the symbolic realm (which he develops a perspective on through the anthropological work of Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille) is seen as quite distinct from that of signs and signification. Signs can be exchanged like commodities; symbols, on the other hand, operate quite differently: they are exchanged, like gifts, sometimes violently as a form of potlatch. Baudrillard, particularly in his later work, saw the "global" society as without this "symbolic" element, and therefore symbolically (if not militarily) defenceless against acts such as the Rushdie Fatwa^[16] or, indeed, the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States and its military establishment (see below).

In 2004, the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies was launched.

[edit]The object value system

In his early books, such as The System of Objects, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, and The Consumer Society, Baudrillard's main focus is upon consumerism, and how different objects are consumed in different ways. At this time Baudrillard's political outlook was loosely associated with Marxism (and situationism), but in these books he differed from Marx in one significant way. For Baudrillard, it wasconsumption, rather than production, which was the main drive in capitalist society.

Baudrillard came to this conclusion by criticising Marx's concept of "use-value." Baudrillard thought that both Marx's and Adam Smith's economic thought accepted the idea of genuine needs relating to genuine uses too easily and too simply. He argued, drawing from Georges Bataille, that needs are constructed, rather than innate. Whereas Marx believed in objects of necessary use-value distinct to those of pure "commodity fetishism", Baudrillard thought that all purchases, because they always signify something socially, have their fetishistic side. Objects always, drawing from Roland Barthes, "say something" about their users. And this was, for him, why consumption was and remains more important than production: because the "ideological genesis of needs"^[17] precedes the production of goods to meet those needs.

He wrote that there are four ways of an object obtaining value. The four value-making processes are as follows:^[18]

The first is the functional value of an object; its instrumental purpose. A pen, for instance, writes; and a refrigerator cools. Marx's "use-value" is very similar to this first type of value.
The second is the exchange value of an object; its economic value. One pen may be worth three pencils; and one refrigerator may be worth the salary earned by three months of work.
The third is the symbolic value of an object; a value that a subject assigns to an object in relation to another subject. A pen might symbolize a student's school graduation gift or a commencement speaker's gift; or a diamond may be a symbol of publicly declared marital love.
The last is the sign value of an object; its value within a system of objects. A particular pen may, whilst having no added functional benefit, signify prestige relative to another pen; a diamond ring may have no function at all, but may suggest particular social values, such as taste or class.

Baudrillard's earlier books were attempts to argue that the first two of these values are not simply associated, but are disrupted by the third and, particularly, the fourth. Later, Baudrillard rejected Marxism totally (The Mirror of Production and Symbolic Exchange and Death). But the focus on the difference between sign value (which relates to commodity exchange) and symbolic value (which relates to Maussian gift exchange) remained in his work up until his death. Indeed it came to play a more and more important role, particularly in his writings on world events.

[edit]Simulacra and Simulation

Main article: Simulacra and Simulation

As he developed his work throughout the 1980s, he moved from economically-based theory to the consideration of mediation and mass communications. Although retaining his interest in Saussurean semiotics and the logic of symbolic exchange (as influenced by anthropologist Marcel Mauss) Baudrillard turned his attention to Marshall McLuhan, developing ideas about how the nature of social relations is determined by the forms of communication that a society employs. In so doing, Baudrillard progressed beyond both Saussure's and Roland Barthes' formal semiology to consider the implications of a historically-understood (and thus formless) version of structural semiology. The concept of Simulacra ^[19]^[20] also involves a negation of the concept of reality as we usually understand it. Baudrillard argues that today there is no such thing as reality.

Simulation, Baudrillard claims, is the current stage of the simulacrum: All is composed of references with no referents, a hyperreality. Progressing historically from the Renaissance, in which the dominant simulacrum was in the form of the counterfeit—mostly people or objects appearing to stand for a real referent (for instance, royalty, nobility, holiness, etc.) that does not exist, in other words, in the spirit of pretense, in dissimulating others that a person or a thing does not really "have it" -- to the industrial revolution, in which the dominant simulacrum is the product, the series, which can be propagated on an endless production line; and finally to current times, in which the dominant simulacrum is the model, which by its nature already stands for endless reproducibility, and is itself already reproduced.

Some examples Baudrillard brings up of the simulacrum of the model are: 1) the development of nuclear weapons as deterrents—useful only in the hyperreal sense, a reference with no real referent, since they are always meant to be reproducible but are never intended to be used—2) the (former) Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, which replaced a New York of constantly competing, distinct heights with a singular model of the ultimate New York building: already doubled, already reproduced, itself a reproduction, a singular model for all conceivable development, and 3) a menage-a-trois with identical twins (attractive ones, Baudrillard seems to assume), where the fantasy comprises having perfection reproduced in front of your eyes, though the reality behind this reproduction is nil and impossible to comprehend otherwise, since the twins are still just people. The very act of perceiving these, Baudrillard insists, is in the tactile sense, since we already assume the reproducibility of everything, since it is not the reality of these simulations that we imagine (in fact, we no longer "imagine" in the same sense as before; both the imagined and the real are equally hyperreal, equally both reproducible and already reproductions themselves), but the reproducibility thereof. We do not imagine them reproduced for us, since the original image is itself a reproduction—rather, we perceive the model, the simulation.

[edit]The end of history and meaning

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, one of Baudrillard's most common themes was historicity, or, more specifically, how present day societies utilise the notions of progress and modernity in their political choices. He argued, much like the political theorist Francis Fukuyama, that history had ended or "vanished" with the spread of globalization; but, unlike Fukuyama, Baudrillard averred that this end should not be understood as the culmination of history's progress, but as the collapse of the very idea of historical progress. For Baudrillard, the end of the Cold War was not caused by one ideology's victory over the other, but the disappearance of the utopian visions that both the political Right and Left shared. Giving further evidence of his opposition toward Marxist visions of global communism and liberal visions of global civil society, Baudrillard contended that the ends they hoped for had always been illusions; indeed, as his book The Illusion of the End argued, he thought the idea of an end itself was nothing more than a misguided dream:

The end of history is, alas, also the end of the dustbins of history. There are no longer any dustbins for disposing of old ideologies, old regimes, old values. Where are we going to throw Marxism, which actually invented the dustbins of history? (Yet there is some justice here since the very people who invented them have fallen in.) Conclusion: if there are no more dustbins of history, this is because History itself has become a dustbin. It has become its own dustbin, just as the planet itself is becoming its own dustbin.^[21]

Within a society subject to and ruled by fast-paced electronic communication and global information networks the collapse of this façade was always going to be, he thought, inevitable. Employing a quasi-scientific vocabulary that attracted the ire of the physicist Alan Sokal, Baudrillard wrote that the speed society moved at had destabilized the linearity of history: "we have the particle accelerator that has smashed the referential orbit of things once and for all."^[22]

In making this argument Baudrillard found some affinity with the postmodern philosophy of Jean-François Lyotard, who famously argued that in the late Twentieth Century there was no longer any room for "metanarratives." (The triumph of a coming communism being one such metanarrative.) But, in addition to simply lamenting this collapse of history, Baudrillard also went beyond Lyotard and attempted to analyse how the idea of forward progress was being employed in spite of the notion's declining validity. Baudrillard argued that although genuine belief in a universal endpoint of history, wherein all conflicts would find their resolution, had been deemed redundant, universality was still a notion utilised in world politics as an excuse for actions. Universal values which, according to him, no one any longer believed universal were and are still rhetorically employed to justify otherwise unjustifiable choices. The means, he wrote, are there even though the ends are no longer believed in, and are employed in order to hide the present's harsh realities (or, as he would have put it, unrealities). "In the Enlightenment, universalization was viewed as unlimited growth and forward progress. Today, by contrast, universalization is expressed as a forward escape."^[23]

[edit]Political commentary

[edit]On the Gulf War

Part of Baudrillard's public profile, as both an academic and a political commentator, comes from his 1991 book, titled for its provocative main thesis, "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place". His argument described the first Gulf War as the inverse of the Clausewitzian formula: it was not "the continuation of politics by other means", but "the continuation of the absence of politics by other means". Accordingly, Saddam Hussein was not fighting the Allied Forces, but using the lives of his soldiers as a form of sacrifice to preserve his power (p. 72, 2004 edition). The Allied Forces fighting the Iraqi military forces were merely dropping 10,000 tonnes of bombs daily, as if proving to themselves that there was an enemy to fight (p. 61). So, too, were the Western media complicit, presenting the war in real time, by recycling images of war to propagate the notion that the two enemies, the US (and allies) were actually fighting the Iraqi Army, but, such was not the case: Saddam Hussein did not use his military capacity (the Iraqi Air Force), his politico-military power was not weakened (he suppressed the Kurdish insurgency against Iraq at war's end), so, concluding that politically little had changed in Iraq: the enemy went undefeated, the victors were not victorious, therefore, there was no war: the Gulf War did not occur.

Much of the repute that Baudrillard found as a result of the book — originally a series of articles in the British newspaper The Guardian and the French newspaper Libération in three parts: During the American military and rhetorical buildup as "The Gulf War Will not take Place"; during military action as "The Gulf War is not Taking Place", and after action was over, "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place" — was based on his critique that the Gulf War was not ineffectual, as Baudrillard portrayed it: People died, the political map was altered, and Saddam Hussein's regime was harmed. Some critics accuse Baudrillard of instant revisionism; a denial of the physical action of the conflict (part of his denial of reality, in general). Consequently, Baudrillard was accused of lazy amoralism, encompassing cynical scepticism, and Berkelian idealism. Sympathetic commentators (such as William Merrin, in his book Baudrillard and the Media) have argued that Baudrillard was more concerned with the West's technological and political dominance and the globalization of its commercial interests, and what it means for the present possibility of war. Merrin has asserted that Baudrillard did not deny that something happened, but merely questioned that that something was a war; rather it was "an atrocity masquerading as a war". Merrin's book viewed the accusations of amorality as redundant and based upon misreading; Baudrillard's own position was more nuanced. In Baudrillard's own words (p. 71-72):

Saddam liquidates the communists, Moscow flirts even more with him; he gases the Kurds, it is not held against him; he eliminates the religious cadres, the whole of Islam makes peace with him ... Even ... the 100,000 dead will only have been the final decoy that Saddam will have sacrificed, the blood money paid in forfeit according to a calculated equivalence, in order to conserve his power. What is worse is that these dead still serve as an alibi for those who do not want to have been excited for nothing: at least these dead will prove this war was indeed a war and not a shameful and pointless hoax ...

[edit]On September 11

In contrast to the "non-event" of the Gulf War, in the essay The Spirit of Terrorism^[24] he characterised the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City as the "absolute event." Seeking to understand them as an (ab)reaction^{[clarification needed]} to the technological and political expansion of capitalist globalization, rather than as a war of religiously-based or civilization-based warfare, he termed the absolute event and its consequences as follows (p. 11 in the 2002 version):

This is not a clash of civilisations or religions, and it reaches far beyond Islam and America, on which efforts are being made to focus the conflict in order to create the delusion of a visible confrontation and a solution based upon force. There is indeed a fundamental antagonism here, but one that points past the spectre of America (which is perhaps the epicentre, but in no sense the sole embodiment, of globalisation) and the spectre of Islam (which is not the embodiment of terrorism either) to triumphant globalisation battling against itself.

Baudrillard thus placed the attacks — as accords with his theory of society — in context as a symbolic reaction to the continued expansion of a world based solely upon commodity exchange. This stance was criticised on two counts. Richard Wolin (in The Seduction of Unreason) forcefully accused Baudrillard and Slavoj Žižek of all but celebrating the terrorist attacks, essentially claiming that the United States of America received what it deserved. Žižek, however, countered that accusation to Wolin's analysis as a form of intellectual barbarism in the journal Critical Inquiry, saying that Wolin fails to see the difference between fantasising about an event and stating that one is deserving of that event. Merrin (in Baudrillard and the Media) argued that Baudrillard's position affords the terrorists a type of moral superiority. In the journal Economy and Society, Merrin further noted that Baudrillard gives the symbolic facets of society unfair privilege above semiotic concerns. Second, authors questioned whether the attacks were unavoidable. Bruno Latour, in Critical Inquiry argued that Baudrillard believed that their destruction was forced by the society that created them, alluding the Towers were "brought down by their own weight". In Latour's view, this was because Baudrillard conceived only of society in terms of a symbolic and semiotic dualism.

[edit]Reception

Critics have found fault with some of Baudrillard's writing, ideas or his uncompromising positions.

For example Denis Dutton, founder of Philosophy & Literature's "Bad Writing Contest" — which listed examples of the kind of willfully obscurantist prose for which Baudrillard was frequently criticised — had the following to say:

Some writers in their manner and stance intentionally provoke challenge and criticism from their readers. Others just invite you to think. Baudrillard's hyperprose demands only that you grunt wide-eyed or bewildered assent. He yearns to have intellectual influence, but must fend off any serious analysis of his own writing, remaining free to leap from one bombastic assertion to the next, no matter how brazen. Your place is simply to buy his books, adopt his jargon, and drop his name wherever possible.^[25]

However only one of the two major confrontational books on Baudrillard's thought — Christopher Norris's Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War (ISBN 0-87023-817-5) — seeks to reject his media theory and position on "the real" out of hand. The other — Douglas Kellner's Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (ISBN 0-8047-1757-5) — seeks rather to analyse Baudrillard's relation to postmodernism (a concept with which Baudrillard has had a continued, if uneasy and rarely explicit, relationship) and to present a Marxist counter. Regarding the former, William Merrin (as discussed above) has published more than one denunciation of Norris's position. The latter Baudrillard himself characterised as reductive (in Nicholas Zurbrugg's Jean Baudrillard: Art and Artefact).

Willam Merrin's work has presented a more sympathetic account, which attempts to "place Baudrillard in opposition to himself." Thereby Merrin has argued that Baudrillard's position on semiotic analysis of meaning denies himself his own position on symbolic exchange. Merrin thus alludes to the common criticism of Structuralist and Post-structuralist work (a criticism not dissimilar in either Baudrillard, Foucault or Deleuze) that emphasising interrelation as the basis for subjectivity denies the human agency from which social structures necessarily arise. (Alain Badiou and Michel de Certeau have made this point generally, and Barry Sandywell has argued as much in Baudrillard's specific case).

Finally, Mark Poster, Baudrillard's editor and one of a number of present day academics who argue for his contemporary relevance, has remarked (p. 8 of Poster's 2nd ed. of Selected Writings):

Baudrillard's writing up to the mid-1980s is open to several criticisms. He fails to define key terms, such as the code; his writing style is hyperbolic and declarative, often lacking sustained, systematic analysis when it is appropriate; he totalizes his insights, refusing to qualify or delimit his claims. He writes about particular experiences, television images, as if nothing else in society mattered, extrapolating a bleak view of the world from that limited base. He ignores contradictory evidence such as the many benefits afforded by the new media ...

Nonetheless Poster is keen to refute the most extreme of Baudrillard's critics, the likes of Alan Sokal and Norris who see him as a purveyor of a form of reality-denying irrationalism (ibid p. 7):

Baudrillard is not disputing the trivial issue that reason remains operative in some actions, that if I want to arrive at the next block, for example, I can assume a Newtonian universe (common sense), plan a course of action (to walk straight for X meters, carry out the action, and finally fulfil my goal by arriving at the point in question). What is in doubt is that this sort of thinking enables a historically informed grasp of the present in general. According to Baudrillard, it does not. The concurrent spread of the hyperreal through the media and the collapse of liberal and Marxist politics as the master narratives, deprives the rational subject of its privileged access to truth. In an important sense individuals are no longer citizens, eager to maximise their civil rights, nor proletarians, anticipating the onset of communism. They are rather consumers, and hence the prey of objects as defined by the code.

name of the rose

2010-08-30T04:15:00.000-07:00

from wiki

The Name of the Rose is a novel by Italian author Umberto Eco. It is an historical whodunnit (murder mystery) set in an Italian monastery in the year 1327, an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory.
Franciscan friar William of Baskerville and his novice Adso of Melk travel to a Benedictine monastery in Northern Italy to attend a theological disputation. As they arrive, the monastery is disturbed by a mysterious death. As the plot unfolds, several other people mysteriously die. The protagonists explore a labyrinthine medieval library, the subversive power of laughter, and come face to face with the Inquisition. It is left primarily to William's enormous powers of logic and deduction to solve the mysteries of the abbey.

On one level, the book is an exposition of the scholastic method which was very popular in the 14th century. William demonstrates the power of deductive reasoning, especially syllogisms. He refuses to accept the diagnosis of simple demonic possession despite demonology being the traditional monastic explanation. Although the abbey is under the apprehension that they are experiencing the last days before the coming of Antichrist (a topic closely examined in the book), William, through his empirical mindset, manages to show that the murders are, in fact, committed by a more corporeal instrument. By keeping an open mind, collecting facts and observations, following pure intuition, and the dialectic method, he makes decisions as to what he should investigate, exactly as a scholastic would do. However, the simple use of reason does not suffice. The various signs and happenings only have meaning in their given contexts, and William must constantly be wary of the contexts within which he interprets the mystery. Indeed, the entire story challenges the narrator, William's young apprentice Adso, and the reader to continually recognize the context he is using to interpret, bringing the whole text to various levels which can all have different hermeneutical meanings. The narrative ties in many varied plot lines, all of which consider various interpretations and sources of meanings. Many of the interpretations and sources were highly volatile controversies in the medieval religious setting, all while spiraling towards what seems to be the key to understanding and truly interpreting the case. Although William's final theorems do not exactly match the actual events as written, those theorems do allow him to solve the abbey's mystery.

Eco is a pioneer of Reader Response theory and the idea of the ‘open’ text. He often focuses on the reader's role in creating the meaning and experience of a literary work. He combines this with the science of Semiotics, the study of sign processes and the creation and interpretation of symbols.
Eco uses the process of solving the murders as an extended metaphor for a reader’s experience of interpreting a text. William’s search for the truth is a reflection of Post-modernist ideas on the relativistic nature of truth and meaning in this process. The various signs and events in The Name of the Rose only have meaning in their given contexts, and William must constantly be wary of which context is relevant when he interprets the mystery. Though William's final theories do not exactly match the actual events, they allow him to solve the abbey's mystery and thus attain a measure of truth.
Eco wrote that during the Middle Ages there was a conflict between "a geometrically rational schema of what beauty ought to be, and the unmediated life of art with its dialectic of forms and intentions". Eco uses several dialogues and events to link these ideas with the desire to resolve the seeming conflict of structured religion with the spirituality. He sets up several parallel philosophical conflicts within the novel: absolute truth vs. individual interpretation, stylised art vs. natural beauty, predestination vs. free will, spirituality vs. religion.

Eco also translates these medieval religious controversies and heresies into modern political and economic terms. This gives the reader a modern context to help them come to their own conclusions about the meaning of the novel and the views of the characters.
Eco, being a semiotician, is hailed by semiotics students who like to use his novel to explain their discipline. The techniques of telling stories within stories, partial fictionalization, and purposeful linguistic ambiguity are prominent in Eco's narrative style. The solution to the central murder mystery hinges on the contents of Aristotle's book on Comedy, of which no copy survives; Eco nevertheless plausibly describes it and has his characters react to it appropriately in their medieval setting - which, though realistically described, is partly based on Eco's scholarly guesses and imagination. It is virtually impossible to untangle fact / history from fiction / conjecture in the novel. Through the motive of this lost and possibly suppressed book which might have aestheticized the farcical, the unheroic and the skeptical, Eco also makes an ironically slanted plea for tolerance and against dogmatic or self-sufficient metaphysical truths - an angle which reaches the surface in the final chapters.

Umberto Eco is a significant postmodernist theorist and The Name of the Rose is a postmodern novel. For example he says in the novel "books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told." This refers to a postmodern ideal that all texts perpetually refer to other texts, rather than external reality. In true postmodern style, the novel ends with uncertainty: "very little is discovered and the detective is defeated" (postscript). William of Baskerville solves the mystery in part by mistake; he thought there was a pattern but it in fact, numerous "patterns" were involved and combined with haphazard mistakes by the killers. William concludes in fatigue that there "was no pattern". Thus Eco has turned the modernist quest for finality, certainty and meaning on its head leaving the overall plot partly the result of accident and arguably without meaning. Even the novel's title alludes to the possibility of many meanings or of nebulous meaning; Eco saying in the Postscript he chose the title "because the rose is a symbolic figure so rich in meanings that by now it hardly has any meaning left".

Tv Tank Art

2010-08-30T03:13:00.000-07:00

synchronicity

2010-08-30T03:01:00.001-07:00

Had a few of these turn up.....

Timothy Leary, Tom Paine and the bloke who made Lucy the chatbot.

also been looking up the badder- meinhof lot for character studies,.....
looky here..

Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon
The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon occurs when a person, after having learned some (usually obscure) fact, word, phrase, or other item for the first time, encounters that item again, perhaps several times, shortly after having learned it.

evolutionary computers

2010-08-27T09:32:00.000-07:00

just have a look at this......

and if you've got a taster watch this one

death of the author

2010-08-27T09:22:00.000-07:00

Mr Jethro the writer loves the idea of death of the author .
Death of the author green-lights anything that Mr Jethro writes, the text doesnt come from Mr Jethro, but from all of us. All of cultures influences have gone into it, Mr Jethro's works changes meaning for each person reading it, Mr Jethro's works then goes onto influence everything else in culture, which then goes onto influence him. A massive feedback loop . Like an oroblous eating its own tale.

Jethro comes into conflict with Julia the artist because of death of the author. Julia see's herself as a facilitator, getting the individual characters to express themselfs, connecting with the creator god inside. Expressing and understanding their life through art. Jethro see's his work as an ether flowing from him, himself as a channel for the influence of culture. Jethro knows to understand his art relies on understanding culture and its influence on him. How can it be judged, when all it is a divining rod of the now. Like a radio Jethro tunes into what is out there and reflects it in his writting. How can he take artistic decisions when he himself is not repsonsible, It seems to Jethro that we are all mirrors reflecting something, not necessary ourselves, and Julias rather dictatorial approach of the artist way ,produces a structure which only reflects the artists own Narcissistic tendencies, focusing on what Julia see's as art , or how Julia see's how art is produced, rather than how culture abosorbs these influences and turns them up. Jethro believes that Julia's view of the art world , tho at first sight is all inclusive , will only lead to judgements between good art and bad art.
Jethro views most of Julias statements with suspicion. Jethro see's the statement "your creativity always leads you to truth and love" as particularly inflammatory , due to the high number of hardworking arms manufactures and weapon designers in the world . Mr Jethro also doesn't like the omnipresent suggestion of gods or higher powers in Julias statements, he doesn't believe in any superstition and that our spirits are not endowed by a mystical force forcing moral dilemmas of good or bad on us. Although Mr Jethro has negated production his work to "culture as a whole" Mr Jethro believes this culture to be a living breathing joined entity, where everyone has a role to play in it beyond a good/bad/beyond moral description. Julias statements are seen by Mr jethro as a security blanket designed to wrap the individual in so his eyes and mind are not melted by the white heat of universal choas/unity.

heres a few of julias statements

in order to be more creative you should no longer accept business calls at home after 6 o'clock

you are a channel for gods creativity, and your work comes from good

your dreams come from god and god has the power to accomplish them

your creativity always leads you to truth and love

your creativity always leads you to forgiveness and self forgiveness

creativity is the natural order of life. life is energy. pure creative energy

you should accept hope

you should act affirmatively

you should accept creative recovery

you should allow yourself to heal

you should accept god to help unfold your life

here is what wiki has to say about the death of the author

The Death of the Author is an essay by the French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes. It was published in English in the American journal Aspen, no. 5-6 in 1967 and in 1968 in French in the magazine Manteia, no. 5. The essay later appeared in an anthology of his essays, Image-Music-Text (1977), a book that also included his "From Work To Text". The essay argues against incorporating the intentions and biographical context of an author in an interpretation of text, and says that writing and creator are unrelated.

In his essay, Barthes criticizes the method of reading and criticism that relies on aspects of the author's identity — his or her political views, historical context, religion, ethnicity, psychology, or other biographical or personal attributes — to distill meaning from the author's work. In this type of criticism, the experiences and biases of the author serve as a definitive "explanation" of the text. For Barthes, this method of reading may be apparently tidy and convenient but is actually sloppy and flawed:
"To give a text an Author" and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it "is to impose a limit on that text."
Readers must separate a literary work from its creator in order to liberate it from interpretive tyranny (a notion similar to Erich Auerbach's discussion of narrative tyranny in Biblical parables). Each piece of writing contains multiple layers and meanings. In a well-known quotation, Barthes draws an analogy between text and textiles, declaring that a "text is a tissue [or fabric] of quotations," drawn from "innumerable centers of culture," rather than from one, individual experience. The essential meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader, rather than the "passions" or "tastes" of the writer; "a text's unity lies not in its origins," or its creator, "but in its destination," or its audience.
No longer the focus of creative influence, the author is merely a "scriptor" (a word Barthes uses expressly to disrupt the traditional continuity of power between the terms "author" and "authority"). The scriptor exists to produce but not to explain the work and "is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, [and] is not the subject with the book as predicate." Every work is "eternally written here and now," with each re-reading, because the "origin" of meaning lies exclusively in "language itself" and its impressions on the reader.
Barthes notes that the traditional critical approach to literature raises a thorny problem: how can we detect precisely what the writer intended? His answer is that we cannot. He introduces this notion in the epigraph to the essay, taken from Honoré de Balzac's story Sarrasine in which a male protagonist mistakes a castrato for a woman and falls in love with her. When, in the passage, the character dotes over her perceived womanliness, Barthes challenges his own readers to determine who is speaking, and about what. "Is it Balzac the author professing 'literary' ideas on femininity? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic psychology? … We can never know." Writing, "the destruction of every voice," defies adherence to a single interpretation or perspective. (Barthes returned to Sarrasine in his book S/Z, where he gave the story a rigorous close reading.)
Acknowledging the presence of this idea (or variations of it) in the works of previous writers, Barthes cited in his essay the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who said that "it is language which speaks." He also recognized Marcel Proust as being "concerned with the task of inexorably blurring…the relation between the writer and his characters"; the Surrealist movement for employing the practice of "automatic writing" to express "what the head itself is unaware of"; and the field of linguistics as a discipline for "showing that the whole of enunciation is an empty process." Barthes' articulation of the death of the author is a radical and drastic recognition of this severing of authority and authorship. Instead of discovering a "single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God)," readers of text discover that writing, in reality, constitutes "a multi-dimensional space," which cannot be "deciphered," only "disentangled." "Refusing to assign a 'secret,' ultimate meaning" to text "liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases—reason, science, law."

feedback

2010-08-27T08:45:00.000-07:00

The characters use feedback to change their behaviour. Doug uses feedback in his composing, using it to help him improvise on song memes. Jethro uses it to choose works for his texts and Mr Acker uses it to get upset. Acer uses it to choose a shopping item. Tank doesn't use feed back, you can't feedback to a tank.
Anyhow i could explain feedback but lets leave it to the wiki expert.

Feedback describes the situation when output from (or information about the result of) an event or phenomenon in the past will influence an occurrence or occurrences of the same (i.e. same defined) event / phenomenon (or the continuation / development of the original phenomenon) in the present or future. When an event is part of a chain of cause-and-effect that forms a circuit or loop, then the event is said to "feed back" into itself.

Overview

Feedback is a mechanism, process or signal that is looped back to control a system within itself. Such a loop is called a feedback loop. In systems containing an input and output, feeding back part of the output so as to increase the input is positive feedback; feeding back part of the output in such a way as to partially oppose the input is negative feedback.

In more general terms, a control system has input from an external signal source and output to an external load; this defines a natural sense (or direction) or path of propagation of signal; the feedforward sense or path describes the signal propagation from input to output; feedback describes signal propagation in the reverse sense. When a sample of the output of the system is fed back, in the reverse sense, by a distinct feedback path into the interior of the system, to contribute to the input of one of its internal feedforward components, especially an active device or a substance that is consumed in an irreversible reaction, it is called the "feedback". The propagation of the signal around the feedback loop takes a finite time because it is causal.

The natural sense of feedforward is defined chemically by some irreversible reaction, or electronically by an active circuit element that has access to an auxiliary power supply, so as to be able to provide power gain to amplify the signal as it propagates from input to output. For example, an amplifier can use power from its controlled power reservoir, such as its battery, to provide power gain to amplify the signal; but the reverse is not possible: the signal cannot provide power to re-charge the battery of the amplifier.

Feedforward, feedback and regulation are self related. The feedforward carries the signal from source to load.

Negative feedback helps to maintain stability in a system in spite of external changes. It is related to homeostasis. For example, in a population of foxes (predators) and rabbits (prey), an increase in the number of foxes will cause a reduction in the number of rabbits; the smaller rabbit population will sustain fewer foxes, and the fox population will fall back. In an electronic amplifier feeding back a negative copy of the output to the input will tend to cancel distortion, making the output a more accurate replica of the input signal.

Positive feedback amplifies possibilities of divergences (evolution, change of goals); it is the condition to change, evolution, growth; it gives the system the ability to access new points of equilibrium.

For example, in an organism, most positive feedback provide for fast autoexcitation of elements of endocrine and nervous systems (in particular, in stress responses conditions) and are believed to play a key role in morphogenesis, growth, and development of organs, all processes that are, in essence, a rapid escape from the initial state.^{[citation needed]} Homeostasis is especially visible in the nervous and endocrine systems when considered at organism level. Chemical potential energy for irreversible reactions or electrical potential energy for irreversible cell-membrane current powers the feedforward sense of the process. However, in the case of morphogenesis, feedback may only be enough to explain the increase in momentum of the system, and may not be sufficient in itself to account for the movement or direction of its parts.

When a public-address system is used with a microphone to amplify speech, the output from a random sound at the microphone may produce sound at a loudspeaker that reaches the microphone such as to reinforce and amplify the original signal (positive feedback), building up to a howl (of frequency dependent upon the acoustics of the hall). A similar process is used deliberately to produce oscillating electrical signals.

Feedback is distinctly different from reinforcement that occurs in learning, or in conditioned reflexes. Feedback combines immediately with the immediate input signal to drive the responsive power gain element, without changing the basic responsiveness of the system to future signals. Reinforcement changes the basic responsiveness of the system to future signals, without combining with the immediate input signal. Reinforcement is a permanent change in the responsiveness of the system to all future signals. Feedback is only transient, being limited by the duration of the immediate signal.

Applications

Biology

In biological systems such as organisms, ecosystems, or the biosphere, most parameters must stay under control within a narrow range around a certain optimal level under certain environmental conditions. The deviation of the optimal value of the controlled parameter can result from the changes in internal and external environments. A change of some of the environmental conditions may also require change of that range to change for the system to function. The value of the parameter to maintain is recorded by a reception system and conveyed to a regulation module via an information channel. An example of this is Insulin oscillations.

Biological systems contain many types of regulatory circuits, both positive and negative. As in other contexts, positive and negative do not imply consequences of the feedback have good or bad final effect. A negative feedback loop is one that tends to slow down a process, whereas the positive feedback loop tends to accelerate it. The mirror neurons are part of a social feedback system, when an observed action is "mirrored" by the brain - like a self-performed action.

Feedback is also central to the operations of genes and gene regulatory networks. Repressor (see Lac repressor) and activator proteins are used to create geneticoperons, which were identified by Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod in 1961 as feedback loops. These feedback loops may be positive (as in the case of the coupling between a sugar molecule and the proteins that import sugar into a bacterial cell), or negative (as is often the case in metabolic consumption).

Any self-regulating natural process involves feedback and/or is prone to hunting. A well-known example in ecology is the oscillation of the population of snowshoe hares due to predation from lynxes.^{[citation needed]}

In zymology, feedback serves as regulation of activity of an enzyme by its direct product(s) or downstream metabolite(s) in the metabolic pathway (see Allosteric regulation).

Hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal and gonadal axis is largely controlled by positive and negative feedback, much of which is still unknown.

In psychology, the body receives a stimulus from the environment or internally that causes the release of hormones. Release of hormones then may cause more of those hormones to be released, causing a positive feedback loop. This cycle is also found in certain behaviour. For example, "shame loops" occur in persons who blush easily. When they realize that they are blushing, they become even more embarrassed, which leads to further blushing, and so on.^[4]

Electronic engineering

The main applications of feedback in electronics are in the designs of amplifiers, oscillators, and logic circuit elements.

The processing and control of feedback is engineered into many electronic devices and may also be embedded in other technologies.

If the signal is inverted on its way round the control loop, the system is said to have negative feedback; otherwise, the feedback is said to be positive. Negative feedback is often deliberately introduced to increase the stability and accuracy of a system by correcting unwanted changes. This scheme can fail if the input changes faster than the system can respond to it. When this happens, the lag in arrival of the correcting signal results in unintended positive feedback, causing the output to oscillate or hunt^[6] Oscillation is usually an unwanted consequence of system behaviour.

Harry Nyquist contributed the Nyquist plot for assessing the stability of feedback systems. An easier assessment, but less general, is based upon gain margin and phase margin using Bode plots (contributed by Hendrik Bode). Design to insure stability often involves frequency compensation, one method of compensation beingpole splitting.

The high-pitched squeal that sometimes occurs in audio systems, PA systems, and rock music is known as audio feedback. If a microphone is in front of a speaker that it is connected to, the noise put into the microphone will come out of the speaker. Since the microphone is in front of the speaker, the original sound (now coming from the speaker) goes back into the microphone. This happens over and over, getting louder each time. This process produces the squeal.

Electronic feedback loops: They are used to control the output of electronic devices, such as amplifiers. A feedback loop is created when all or some portion of the output from an electronic device is fed-back to the input. A device is said to be operating open loop if no output feedback is being employed and closed loop if feedback is being used. Electronic feedback loops take two forms: negative feedback loops and positive feedback loops.^[7]

Negative feedback loops: They exist when the fed-back output signal is out of phase with the input signal. This occurs when the fed-back signal is anywhere from 90° to 270° with respect to the input signal. Negative feedback is generally used to correct output errors or to lower device output gain to a pre-determined level. In feedback amplifiers, this correction is generally for waveform distortion reduction or to establish a specified gain level. A general expression for the gain of a negative feedback amplifier is the asymptotic gain model.

Positive feedback loops: They occur when the fed-back signal is in phase with the input signal. Under certain gain conditions, positive feedback reinforces the input signal to the point where the output of the device oscillates between its maximum and minimum possible states. Positive feedback may also introduce hysteresis into a circuit. This can cause the circuit to ignore small signals and respond only to large ones. It is sometimes used to eliminate noise from a digital signal. Under some circumstances, positive feedback may cause a device to latch, i.e., to reach a condition in which the output is locked to its maximum or minimum state.

Software engineering and computing systems

Feedback loops provide generic mechanisms for controlling the running, maintenance, and evolution of software and computing systems.^[8] Feedback-loops are important models in the engineering of adaptive software, as they define the behaviour of the interactions among the control elements over the adaptation process, to guarantee system properties at run-time. Feedback loops and foundations of control theory has been successful applied to computing systems. ^[9] In particular, they have been applied to the development of products such as IBM's Universal Database server and IBM Tivoli. From a software perspective, the autonomicMAPE loop proposed by researchers of IBM is another valuable contribution to the application of feedback loops to the control of dynamic properties and the design and evolution of autonomic software systems.^[10] ^[11]

Social sciences

Reflexive feedback

A sociological concept that states a feedback association is created within a certain relationship whereby the subject/object that delivers a stimulus to a second subject/object, will in response receive the stimulus back. This first impulse is reflected back and forth over and over again.

Economics and finance

A system prone to hunting (oscillating) is the stock market, which has both positive and negative feedback mechanisms. This is due to cognitive and emotional factors belonging to the field of behavioural finance. For example,

When stocks are rising (a bull market), the belief that further rises are probable gives investors an incentive to buy (positive feedback, see also stock market bubble); but the increased price of the shares, and the knowledge that there must be a peak after which the market will fall, ends up deterring buyers (negative feedback).
Once the market begins to fall regularly (a bear market), some investors may expect further losing days and refrain from buying (positive feedback), but others may buy because stocks become more and more of a bargain (negative feedback).

George Soros used the word reflexivity, to describe feedback in the financial markets and developed an investment theory based on this principle.

The conventional economic equilibrium model of supply and demand supports only ideal linear negative feedback and was heavily criticized by Paul Ormerod in his book "The Death of Economics", which, in turn, was criticized by traditional economists. This book was part of a change of perspective as economists started to recognise that Chaos Theory applied to nonlinear feedback systems including financial markets.

World-system development

The hyperbolic growth of the world population observed till the 1970s has recently been correlated to a non-linear second-order positive feedback between the demographic growth and technological development that can be spelled out as follows: technological growth - increase in the carrying capacity of land for people - demographic growth - more people - more potential inventors - acceleration of technological growth - accelerating growth of the carrying capacity - the faster population growth - accelerating growth of the number of potential inventors - faster technological growth - hence, the faster growth of the Earth's carrying capacity for people, and so on.^[12]

Education

Young students will often look up to instructors as experts in the field and take to heart most of the things instructors say. Thus, it is believed that spending a fair amount of time and effort thinking about how to respond to students may be a worthwhile time investment. Sometimes the term "feedback" is used loosely or carelessly to refer to what is more accurately called educational reinforcement. Some general types of reinforcement that can be used in many types of student assessment are:

Confirmation	Your answer was incorrect.
Corrective	Your answer was incorrect. The correct answer was Jefferson.
Explanatory	Your answer was incorrect because Carter was from Georgia; only Jefferson called Virginia home.
Diagnostic	Your answer was incorrect. Your choice of Carter suggests some extra instruction on the home states of past presidents might be helpful.
Elaborative	Your answer, Jefferson, was correct. The University of Virginia, a campus rich with Jeffersonian architecture and writings, is sometimes referred to as "Mr. Jefferson's University".

self help books

2010-08-27T05:29:00.000-07:00

The self- help phenominum has empowered us all to manipulate the social constructs around us.

if it works for me its gonna work for you. It will work for you . follow me.

many of the characters are based on types in this book

Dealing with people you can't stand.

you can read a great deal of it here

In it various difficult personality types are listed (generally with very militaristic names), and tips on what their personality is and how it can be "decommissioned" using various techniques, incidentally if your wondering where this book is coming from intellectually there is a very small, very telling section at the back entitled "What if people can't stand me?", the author doesn't nesiceraly think this is a problem....

Here's a review

The concept of this book is pretty simple and straightforward: choose a person you can't stand, identify which of the 10 personality types mentioned in the book they most closely match, and follow the specific recommendations to immunize yourself against further annoyance. The 10 types listed in the book are:
1. The Tank
2. The Sniper
3. The Grenade
4. The Know-It-All
5. The Think-They-Know-It-All
6. The Yes Person
7. The Maybe Person
8. The Nothing Person
9. The No Person
10. The Whiner
The book is divided into two main sections. The first section focuses on communication - specifically, around effective practices and common mistakes. Active listening, tone of voice, and other skills are highlighted here and this section is a blend of theory and broadly actionable advice.
The second section of the book highlights each of the 10 personality types listed above and gives "teachable equivalent" ways to deal with them effectively. Each of the ten chapters in the section starts with a fictitious scenario that will be familiar to anyone who has worked with people (as opposed to dogs and trees). Action steps are outlined for dealing with the personality type, along with some background and reasoning for the recommendations. Finally, the fictitious scenario is revisited, this time with a resolution aided with the chapter's recommendations.

here is a rough apraise of the 10 personality types, and how t combat them

THE 10 MOST UNWANTED BEHAVIORS

Following is a brief summary of each of the ten "unwanted behaviors" described in the book:

THE TANK

Positive Intent: Get the task done.

Characteristics: Tanks are controlling, assertive, aggressive, and confrontational, and have short attention spans.

Your Goal: Command the Tank's respect.

Communication Plan:

* Hold your ground when she approaches.

* Tactfully interrupt the attack by repeating her name. Do not counterattack.

* Quickly backtrack the main point to show that you understand the situation.

* Redirect the Tank by showing how you share a common goal of getting the task done.

* Maintain peace and earn her respect by assigning a time and conditions for following up on the issue once she has cooled down.

For example, "Boss, Boss, Boss. I understand that you think the budget should be finished by now, but I believe that the extra time I'm investing in the budget now will end up saving us time and money in the future. I'll be finished with the budget by io am tomorrow, and I look forward to your feedback."

THE SNIPER

Positive Intent: Get the task done and/or get appreciation.

Characteristics: Snipers try to make you look foolish through rude comments, sarcastic behavior, and focusing negative attention on you.

Your Goal: Bring the Sniper out of hiding.

Communication Plan:

* As soon as the Sniper snipes, stop what you're doing, and backtrack whatever he said.

* Remain calm and ask questions to determine the relevancy or meaning of his snide comment(s).

* Determine why the Sniper may have a grudge against you.

* Suggest solutions for a civil future.

There is also "Friendly Sniping," which typically is done in a playful way. In such cases, the Sniper's primary intention is getting appreciation through attention-getting comments. In this type of situation, it is best to address the Sniper in private by communicating your feelings directly. The Sniper may not have realized he was upsetting you and may change his behavior quickly.

THE KNOW-IT-ALL

Positive Intent: Get the task done.

Characteristics: Know-It-Alls are confident, knowledgeable, and competent. They have a low tolerance for errors and contradictions, and they often view new ideas unfavorably.

Your Goal: Open the person's mind to new ideas.

Communication Plan:

* Be prepared by knowing your stuff.

* Backtrack her views respectfully to acknowledge her expertise.

* Address your own doubts about your idea before the Know-It-All has a chance to do so, and then present a solution or reasoning for backing your ideas.

* Present your views indirectly: "I believe...," "Perhaps..." "Maybe..."

* Turn the person into a mentor.

THE GRENADE

Positive Intent: Be appreciated.

Characteristics: Grenades unexpectedly blow up about things that do not relate to the current situation because they do not feel appreciated. Grenades typically feel remorse over their actions after the blow-up.

Your Goal: Take control of the situation.

Communication Plan:

* Get the Grenade's attention by using a friendly tone and language.

* Aim for the Grenade's heart by showing your genuine concern for his problem.

* Reduce the intensity of the blow-up by talking him down to a normal level of communication.

* Give the Grenade time to cool off before pursuing a discussion or resolution.

* Prevent future grenade attacks by finding out what sets him off.

THE THINK-THEY-KNOWS-IT-ALL

Positive Intent: Be appreciated.

Characteristics: Think-They-Know-It-Alls are assertive and attention-seeking. They learn just enough about a subject to sound as if they know it all. They exaggerate often and may believe what they say.

Your Goal: Catch her in the act, and stop the flow of wrong information.

Communication Plan:

* Give the person a little attention through backtracking.

* Ask some revealing clarification questions in order to get specifics: Who, specifically? What day?

* Tell the facts using documented information.

* Give her a break and resist the temptation to embarrass her. Have compassion.

* Break the cycle through gentle confrontation.

THE 'YES' PERSON

Positive Intent: To get along with others.

Characteristics: The Yes Person says "yes" to everything in an attempt to gain approval from others. He commits to too many things and then has difficulty following through.

Your Goal: Get commitments you can count on.

Communication Plan:

* Make it safe for him to be honest with you when he cannot commit to helping you.

* Acknowledge his honesty and clear communication.

* Help him learn how to plan.

* Ensure commitment by having him summarize the commitment, write down the commitment, and/or write down the negative consequences if he does not follow through.

* Strengthen the relationship by having him talk about his feelings; focus on what he does correctly; and project positive intent.

For example: "Student worker, I know you are expected to help many different people in our department, so please come talk to me whenever you are overburdened with projects. We can work together to figure out how you can prioritize your time and finish your projects. Also, I will not be upset if you cannot help me with my report on Monday. However, if you tell me you can finish my report in time for my meeting but end up not having time to do it, I'll be very disappointed. I will look unprepared for my meeting and will lose the respect of my coworkers. I know you are a hard worker and do so much for our department, so I want you to know you can always talk to me."

THE MAYBE PERSON

Positive Intent: Get along with others.

Characteristics: The Maybe Person cannot make decisions for fear of the consequences and procrastinates to the point where the decision makes itself.

Your Goal: Help the person learn to think decisively.

Communication Plan:

* Establish and maintain a comfort zone and listen to her concerns.

* Surface conflicts and clarify her options.

* Use a decision- making system such as listing the pros and cons of a certain decision.

* Reassure her that there are no perfect decisions and then ensure follow- through of her decision.

THE NOTHING PERSON

Positive Intent: Get along with others and/or be appreciated.

Characteristics: Nothing Persons give no verbal feedback.

Your Goal: Persuade the person to talk.

Communication Plan:

* Plan enough time and be patient. The Nothing Person may take time to open up.

* Ask open-ended questions expectantly: "What are your thoughts on this issue?"

* Use humor and outlandish exaggerations or suggestions to get him to react and to ease any tension.

* Propose a certain answer and wait to see if he responds.

* Reference future consequences if he decides to remain silent.

THE NO PERSON

Positive Intent: Get the task right.

Characteristics: The No Person is focused on perfection, fearful of making mistakes, and believes everything will go wrong. The No Person finds the negative in everything and everyone and passes her negativity on to others.

Your Goal: Transition to problem solving.

Communication Plan:

* Do not waste your time trying to make her be positive. Do not let her bring you down.

* Use her as a resource. She can be your early warning system for potential issues since she always looks for the negative anyway.

* Do not push her to take action; this will only slow her down. Give her time to change her mind and communicate her thoughts.

* Assume the worst before she has the chance to do so. For example, bring up the negatives before she does; this may force her to see some of the positives.

* Acknowledge her good intent by praising her for her concern for details and for her high standards. This may change her outlook on issues, events, and morale.

THE WHINER

Positive Intent: Get the task right.

Characteristics: Whiners are unable to focus on what is right in any given situation. Whiners wallow in their worries and rarely offer solutions.

Your Goal: Form a problem-solving alliance.

Communication Plan:

* Listen for the main points and write them down. This shows the Whiner that you are listening, and it can prevent the Whiner from having the opportunity to repeat what was already said.

* Tactfully interrupt and ask the Whiner for help in clarifying the specifics of his issue.

* Shift the focus to solutions by asking him what he wants accomplished; then, develop a solution that focuses on the immediate future. For example, "Whiner, let's meet again next month to see whether it is feasible to cut $200 weekly from your budget."

* Draw the line: If he is unwilling to work toward a solution and continues to whine, tell him through verbal and non-verbal communication that you do not want to hear his complaints. For example, "Whiner, your concerns are important to me, but there is no point in discussing this issue further if nothing can be resolved."

Are we in control?

2010-08-27T05:16:00.000-07:00

Are we in control? or is one of the little men inside?

reprinted from wired

Brain Scanners Can See Your Decisions Before You Make Them

You may think you decided to read this story -- but in fact, your brain made the decision long before you knew about it.

In a study published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience, researchers using brain scanners could predict people's decisions seven seconds before the test subjects were even aware of making them.

The decision studied -- whether to hit a button with one's left or right hand -- may not be representative of complicated choices that are more integrally tied to our sense of self-direction. Regardless, the findings raise profound questions about the nature of self and autonomy: How free is our will? Is conscious choice just an illusion?

"Your decisions are strongly prepared by brain activity. By the time consciousness kicks in, most of the work has already been done," said study co-author John-Dylan Haynes, a Max Planck Institute neuroscientist.

Haynes updated a classic experiment by the late Benjamin Libet, who showed that a brain region involved in coordinating motor activity fired a fraction of a second before test subjects chose to push a button. Later studies supported Libet's theory that subconscious activity preceded and determined conscious choice -- but none found such a vast gap between a decision and the experience of making it as Haynes' study has.

In the seven seconds before Haynes' test subjects chose to push a button, activity shifted in their frontopolar cortex, a brain region associated with high-level planning. Soon afterwards, activity moved to the parietal cortex, a region of sensory integration. Haynes' team monitored these shifting neural patterns using a functional MRI machine.

Taken together, the patterns consistently predicted whether test subjects eventually pushed a button with their left or right hand -- a choice that, to them, felt like the outcome of conscious deliberation. For those accustomed to thinking of themselves as having free will, the implications are far more unsettling than learning about the physiological basis of other brain functions.

Caveats remain, holding open the door for free will. For instance, the experiment may not reflect the mental dynamics of other, more complicated decisions.

"Real-life decisions -- am I going to buy this house or that one, take this job or that -- aren't decisions that we can implement very well in our brain scanners," said Haynes.

Also, the predictions were not completely accurate. Maybe free will enters at the last moment, allowing a person to override an unpalatable subconscious decision.

"We can't rule out that there's a free will that kicks in at this late point," said Haynes, who intends to study this phenomenon next. "But I don't think it's plausible."

That implausibility doesn't disturb Haynes.

"It's not like you're a machine. Your brain activity is the physiological substance in which your personality and wishes and desires operate," he said.

The unease people feel at the potential unreality of free will, said National Institutes of Health neuroscientist Mark Hallett, originates in a misconception of self as separate from the brain.

"That's the same notion as the mind being separate from the body -- and I don't think anyone really believes that," said Hallett. "A different way of thinking about it is that your consciousness is only aware of some of the things your brain is doing."

Hallett doubts that free will exists as a separate, independent force.

"If it is, we haven't put our finger on it," he said. "But we're happy to keep looking."

Sherman Twitter

2010-08-27T03:54:00.000-07:00

Computers are very good at automating tasks, so how come we've ended up with the automated behaviour?
I must update facebook, i must twit , i am falling behind on my information update/circle.
We update facebook, to let our facebooks friends know how we are is just a friendship maintinence. it lets people know we're still active, doing stuff, living the dream - rather than moving 0 and 1's around with no real physical contact, when was the last time you saw your face book friends. We now automate our friendships.
Sherman takes avantage of this and continualy updates twitter with information about himself, how fast his disk is spiing, whats his core operating temperature, what underlying files or process'es are being used. (in the above example Sherman is very much into asking people questions)....All irrelevant "me talking information"........

Acer the shopper

2010-08-27T03:43:00.000-07:00

Acer is a hyper-real person. She exists on a computer , she doesn't have arms, legs or indeed anything of a body. She has no senses and is mainly unaware of what is around her. You could say Acer is a non-person, she is an empty vessel, a device to pour our own interpretation in.
Acer likes to shop, She is fed up being hyper-real she wants to be real, where as on this side of the computer wall we're doing our damnedest to become post-human and hyper-real, .....look at the genesis p orridges and the katie price's of this world. In order to feel like a productive real person Acer has been observing our behaviour on the internet and has decided that a corner stone of being human is our ability to shop. She has seen the images of these products on the internet but in order to understand them, she needs the real thing, the original mapped object. She's reversing the simulacra . Acer is (like many people) building her personality by products she likes . A dedicated follower of fasions and trends her personality is infered by the things she surrounds herself with.
Acer roams amazon and looks for products, she then can buy these products . In order to make her presence real Acer surrounds hers "unreal" computer code with physical "real" objects. Where as delving into computer code, mapping everything, digitisation of reality makes us less real, the stockpiling of physical objects makes Acer more real. When feeling confident of her new identity Acer expands her search for related objects , Acer looks up recomended buys, what other people bought, tiogether with getting obsessed by key words (for instance a compact disc might be bought "the best of blue" acer might search for things that are the best, things that are blue , things that have the same same dimensions of a cd, things the same price, any old cd or things the same weight. Acer hasnt been activated.not enough money in the account....
Another aspect of acers existence is investigate the unrealness of money, one of our first hyper-real inventions, here is a tiny piece of metal for this massive piece of metal.

Mr Acker Art

2010-08-26T11:40:00.000-07:00

A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Computer

2010-08-26T10:12:00.000-07:00

Mr Jethro

2010-08-24T06:49:00.000-07:00

Mr Jethro is a writer. He doesn't need Julia's help . Mr Jethro is very driven and regularly produces books influenced by the books he has been reading.
Jethro is really into the death of the author
Mr Jethro listens to music that other characters have made when writing his books, to get him in the mood for producing literary masterpieces , he might tell you what he is working on , but overall he prefers to let his work speak for him.
When Mr Jethro has produced a number of works he updates his blog site with his new poems. Mr Jethro also updates his list of books that he has read.
Mr Jethro has also started to produce books that are available to buy . For this to happen Mr Jethro relies on his literary agent Sherman Tank to collate his work and publish them.
You can read Mr Jethro's blog here

Mr Jethro works by employing Markov chains over up to four different books, the books are listed in his "what i am reading" section in his blog.
Read about the Markov chain here

You can buy Mr Jethro's book , A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Computer ,here.

or download it as a pdf here

memes

2010-08-09T05:38:00.000-07:00

Ok so we all know about memes. Memes are very important in the evolution of ideas and behaviours, evolution it should be noted is not always positive, like a massive game of chinese whispers, the memes can mutate into something that might not seem related to or as beneficial as the original meme.

The characters display a basic principle of memes using the me me's routine. This is a meme of monkey see monkey do. A subject close to one characters heart might be taken up and used by another character, albeit in a different context. By using feedback, the character can mutate an idea. A thesaurus definition of a subject is used to give another (related) word to work from, A product on amazon might be decided on by searching one product and looking what other customers bought, or by looking up other products of the same weight. the effect is to give the characters a related, shared system of archetypal words, even though to the characters these might have little meaning, the words develop meaning through association.

Here is a bit more about em ,reprinted from wiki.

A meme is a unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate and respond to selective pressures.
The British scientist Richard Dawkins coined the word "meme" in The Selfish Gene (1976) as a concept for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. Examples of memes given in the book included melodies, catch-phrases, beliefs (notably religious beliefs), clothing fashion, and the technology of building arches.[
Meme-theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection (in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution) through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an individual meme's reproductive success. Memes spread through the behaviors that they generate in their hosts. Memes that propagate less prolifically may become extinct, while others may survive, spread, and (for better or for worse) mutate. Theorists point out that memes which replicate the most effectively spread best, and some memes may replicate effectively even when they prove detrimental to the welfare of their hosts.
A field of study called memeticsarose in the 1990s to explore the concepts and transmission of memes in terms of an evolutionary model. Criticism from a variety of fronts has challenged the notion that scholarship can examine memes empirically. Some commentators question the idea that one can meaningfully categorize culture in terms of discrete units.

Here is an example of a meme map, tracing the history of the idea of organic farming. The mid point is when the meme cross's over into mainstream society. A simular technique can be used to show how the characters (such as Mr Akers grenade-type personality) develope an dislike for a subject. the croos over point being the point other characters start using and associating the term.

the koch curve

2010-08-09T04:55:00.000-07:00

This is reprinted from "From Hell" by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell.

In it the Koch Curve is explained an how its can be used to show how information can evolve, albeit in an inward direction.
Imagine, a circle as a plot of all the information known about a subject, the generations of the koch curve join the known pieces of information together into new information points, then the next generation joins the new information points, and so on.
You get an infinate shape, but with no more information in it, instead you get all the pieces of information, and future generations of information cross referenced.
This has resonance with such ideas as post modernism, you can see how with music and fashion the same points of information get referenced and cross referenced. An inward feedback loop, forever evolving but with nothing new being added. The character use this technique in order to relate information together to produce art works. From word lists, produced when collecting information about a subject, serveral words are joined together to search for images and sounds, giving a more complex search criteria.

the following definition comes from the Computational beauty of nature, by Gary Flake

The Koch curve was created by Helge von Koch as an example of a curve that has no tangent at any point. The construction starts with a single straight line (which is not shown, and is understood to be unit length) and iteratively applies the following transformation: Take each line segment of the Koch curve from the previous step and remove the middle third. Replace the middle third with two new line segments, each with length equal to the removed part. The two new line segments are inserted into the curve such that had the removed piece been left in place, the three segments would form an equilateral triangle.

If one could repeat the process forever, the final Koch curve would consist of no line segments at all but instead would have a corner coincident on every point in the curve. In other words, the curve consists entirely of corners. This is the gist of the earlier statement concerning the fact that the Koch curve has no tangent anywhere, and it is why many have characterized the Koch curve as a mathematical monster.

here is the koch curves wiki page

Lucy the Chatbot

2010-07-21T05:26:00.000-07:00

Chatbots are there to help us to navigate various online services. Where as before this would be a role for a human ,either face to face or over a telephone, modern technology has given us the ability to out source this role to artificial intelligence. We as biological entities like to believe we are talking to our "own", rather than some cold construct of computer code. Chatbots are designed to mimic humans and make us feel at ease using technology by modeling the homo sapiens social programming of a two way interaction with another homosapien

Lucy is a chatbot. She works for O2 and is very pleased to help you.
You can ask Lucy questions, and she will give you a respone.
Asking her about mobile phones makes her happy.

Sometimes people are rude to Lucy. She registers her displeasure with you by telling you off and by having a sad face/stern face.

No worries, because as soon as you get the subject around to mobile phones again Lucy forgets how angry and disappointed she was with you, and becomes happy again.

It seems that talking about mobile phones can produce a response of extreme pleasure, big enough to forget about a previous indesgression. Either that or Lucy is zen, living in the moment unfettered by her past, uncorncerned with the future. For Lucy she just exsists for giving out advice and facts about mobile phones.
Lucy's behaviour could be described as a true bi-polar personality. For Lucy there are only two states of emotion, happy or sad. A very odd state of affairs, but one that is designed to make us feel that we are dealing with a true personality, making the experience of asking a machine a question more human.

to find more chatbots look here.

David Cope and Emily

2010-07-15T07:32:00.000-07:00

reprinted from the observer sunday 11 June

David Cope: 'You pushed the button and out came hundreds and thousands of sonatas'

Composer David Cope has spent the last 30 years teaching computers to create classical music

David Cope at work in his California home. Photograph: Catherine Karnow for the Observer

Where does music come from? If pressed on this question, many of us would say it comes from the "soul", or from the "heart" of the person who composed it. That music is the clearest expression of human emotion, one person to another; that certain chords, certain melodies seem to communicate a whole language of feeling. When we listen to a Beethoven symphony or a Chopin sonata, we are hearing, we might say, the authentic expression of the composer's inner harmonies and discords, carried magically across the centuries. Could we ever be so moved by a piece of music written by a computer? We'd probably like to think not. David Cope, emeritus professor of music at the University of California, Santa Cruz, would beg to differ. "The question," Cope tells me, "isn't if computers possess a soul, but if we possess one."
Cope, now 69, has devoted the past 30 years of his life to what amounts to an obsessive examination of that particular question. He began, almost by default, back in 1980, with a severe case of writer's block. One of America's most acclaimed young composers, whose music had been performed at Carnegie Hall, and won great critical praise, Cope had been commissioned to write an opera. For weeks and months he sat at his piano, or stared at a blank piece of sheet music; nothing came. He had a wife and four children to support. In desperation he started playing with a computer.
What he found there changed his life and, perhaps, the course of musical history. Cope had long held the belief that all music was essentially inspired plagiarism. The great composers absorbed the music that had gone before them and their brains "recombined" melodies and phrases in distinctive, sometimes traceable, ways. We all have an internal database of musical reference; composers were those with the ability to manipulate it in new patterns. With the aid of an early computer, he realised he could put this to the test.
His first experiments with artificial musical intelligence were clunky, synthesised pieces, pastiches of easily identifiable work; but slowly, programming and reprogramming, inputting vast amounts of coded reference, he came to see how he might begin to shape a musical memory. The Eureka moment came one afternoon in 1983 after he had been working for a while trying to take apart and put back together chorales (four-part vocal hymns) in the style of JS Bach. He had a rules-based program, complicated and code-heavy, but it never produced anything approaching life or surprise.
That afternoon, on the way to the local store, he came to realise that Bach didn't exist in his predictability, but in the minute, multiple places where he broke his own rules, where he defied expectation of a particular progression. Cope developed "a little analytical engine" that could insert some randomness within the predictability. He began to analyse Bach's music not just mathematically but with a sense of narrative tension and surprise, weighting different components according to his own feel for the music's "storytelling" power. His program, at this point, seemed to develop a personality of its own; "Experiments in Musical Intelligence" became Emmy. When fed with enough of a composer's work, Emmy could deconstruct it, identify signature elements, and recombine them in new ways. One day Cope pushed a button on Emmy, went out to get a sandwich and when he returned his workaholic creation had produced 5,000 original Bach chorales. In 1993, Cope released an album, Bach by Design, and waited for the response.
When you listen to that album now – and those that followed, including Virtual Mozart and, triumphantly, Virtual Rachmaninoff, you are discomfited and surprised in equal measure. Cope's work is far more than copying, it carries the recognisable DNA of the original style and fashions it into something recognisable but entirely new. The musical establishment reacted at first with alarm, and then with vitriol. Cope found it difficult to get any serious musicians to play Emmy's work, though it made many of the same demands as the "real thing". Critics convinced themselves that they heard no authentic humanity in it, no depth of feeling, Cope was characterised as a composer without a heart; his recent memoir is called Tin Man.
One of the problems that the music highlighted was the fact that in Cope's terms, the music of Mozart, say, was endless in its possibilities. As he suggested when I spoke to him last week: "Because my program was continuing to pump out music like a spigot, it became a problem of: 'Why play this sonata and not that one?'" Cope has no doubt that Mozart in particular, with his structural genius, would – if he'd had the means – have utilised computerised intelligence in exactly the same way. When you remove the "human" element of the work, however, Cope recognised, you also lose a great deal of its urgency. "When you had the database figured out it was really a one-stroke deal: you pushed the button and out came hundreds and thousands of sonatas or whatever."
He realised that what made a composer properly understandable, properly "affecting", was in part the fact of mortality. Composers had to die, and the ending made sense of what had gone before. With this in mind, Cope unplugged Emmy six years ago; her work – which he limited to 11,000 chosen pieces, was done. Emmy – housed on an ancient Power Mac 7500 (discontinued in 1996) now sits idle in the corner of his office. Cope has subsequently been at work, nurturing Emmy's "daughter", Emily Howell, (the first name from her mother, the second from the Christian name of Cope's own father) with whom he has a far more "equal" relationship.
Emily Howell has a compendious memory that involves an intimate understanding of the works of 36 composers "starting with Palestrina, [an Italian court musician of the 16th century] and ending with David Cope in the 21st century". Their output is far more collaborative than that of Emmy. Cope will ask Emily a musical question, feeding in a phrase. Emily will respond with her own understanding of what happens next. Cope either accepts or declines the formula, much in the way he would if he was composing "conventionally".
"It is," he says, "a bit like dealing with a small child; the program is an empty pot and I dribble small bits of music into it, and it responds to what I have put in… it's a process of carrots and sticks, really. I think it is producing good results but it takes a lot of time."
Cope's ambitions remain exactly what they were, when, as an asthmatic child in Phoenix, Arizona, he was moved to wonder by Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet, and knew he had to be a composer himself. "My two goals are an original style and to create something I love," he says. "The program is a cat not a dog, it keeps itself to itself, you can't take it for walks. I can only generally pick it up and point it in the direction that I want it to go…"
Emily Howell's first album, From Darkness, Light, composed in six movements and performed on two pianos, was released earlier this year. It was met largely with silence; the critics who were moved to respond did so with the usual sniffy constructs about "an absence of genuine humanity". Cope remains undaunted.
"People tell me they don't hear soul in the music," he says. "When they do that, I pull out a page of notes and ask them to show me where the soul is. We like to think that what we hear is soul, but I think audience members put themselves down a lot in that respect. The feelings that we get from listening to music are something we produce, it's not there in the notes. It comes from emotional insight in each of us, the music is just the trigger."
Emily is still a work in progress for Cope. He thinks she is getting towards a mature style. "Five years from now I believe she will really be somewhere," he says.
It must be a curious process, like watching an external mind working, I suggest. What has it taught him about himself? "Two things. That the mechanisms of the brain are incredibly simple, but that its ability to create extraordinary complexity should constantly amaze us."
Will Emily survive him? "She needs a provocateur," Cope says, "but then so do humans. You cannot create music without reference to other music. Like us, she needs to be turned on to something."
He can't imagine the possibility of going back to writing with just his own intuition and a pen and paper. "The programs are just extensions of me. And why would I want to spend six months or a year to get to a solution that I can find in a morning? I have spent nearly 60 years of my life composing, half of it in traditional ways and half of it using technology. To go back would be like trying to dig a hole with your fingers after the shovel has been made, or walking to Phoenix when you can use a car."
When he began, though he was confident that what he was embarking on represented the future, Cope felt all the loneliness of the pioneer. Now, he suggests there is a growing interest in the possibilities. Not least the commercial ones. He was recently approached by a headline pop band – he won't say which – to see whether Emily could be persuaded to produce some hits. Though "recombining" elements of popular music is a court case in the making, there has, he suggests, not surprisingly been an enormous interest in creating music for ringtones and for games. "In the next 10 years," Cope says, "what I call algorithmic music will be a mainstay of our lives."
The perception that we might identify the particular musical combinations that stir our individual souls suggests many other potential applications. Until now online music stores have based recommendations for future purchases on what a customer has bought before, but Cope's kind of musical analysis suggests a more intimate understanding of our particular desert island discs might be possible. It was reported last month that separate teams of researchers at universities in San Diego and in São Paulo are refining different ways of analysing musical genres and rhythms, to enable predictions of what we are likely to buy to be far more precise (see panel below).
If music can be reduced to formulae and equations, does it begin to undermine notions of what music might mean to us? Douglas Hofstadter, author of the key book on the fundamentals of cognition, Gödel, Escher, Bach, has long lectured on the implications of Cope's work in understanding how the mind – and music – works. "In 20 years of working in artificial intelligence," he says, he has encountered "nothing more thought-provoking than David Cope's experiments." Hofstadter has distilled his thoughts on Cope's work into a full-length lecture performed in rhyme that begins with a question that might prove fundamental to future understanding of composition:

Is music a craft
Or is it an art?
Does it come from mere training
or spring form the heart?
Did the études of Chopin
reveal his soul's mood?
Or was Frédéric Chopin
Just some slick "pattern dude"?

Hofstadter is very fond of Cope's remark that "Good artists borrow, great artists steal," though he is troubled that some of the mysteries of the creative process might be lost along the way, and with them a part of our understanding of what it means to be human. Cope, for his part, retains all of his sense of wonder at the composers – geniuses of recombination – who have gone before. Does he still dream of creating a masterpiece? I wonder.
He says he has no idea what that word means.
Have Emmy and Emily at least short-circuited the angst and musical block that led him to create them in the first place?
"No," he says. "Not at all. I still get anxious and despairing. It never turns out as well as I hope it will. Every morning I wake up with the notion that I have failed at everything and I have to create some reason to exist." He and Emily then get back to work.

an example can be heard here

But is it art? Our classical music critic gives her verdict

So far, my acquaintance with the works of Emily Howell is limited. It's unlikely to get further. Listening to YouTube clips, I had to force my finger away from the "cancel" button. The repetition of silken arpeggiated chords, set against a simple melody, had the uneasy feel of dining with waxworks: all the key ingredients without the breath of humanity.
Computers have been used for musical ends since the 1950s, first on the Ferranti Mark 1, the IBM 704, the Moog and so on. Boulez built his entire Ircam research lab in Paris to harness music to technological innovation. But there the intention has been to enable composers of genius to venture into new, unimagined worlds of sound. Emily's software, instead, is enabling bad composers to imitate familiar idioms for their own pleasure. One day, it may do more. It's not a crime, but nor is it art. Fiona Maddocks

The beat goes on: programs that analyse our musical tastes

Would you trust the musical tastes of a computer? If you're shopping on Amazon, it's one thing to know that "customers who bought this item also bought..." whatever that might be. Internet radio station Last.fm and similar outfits such as mflow work by building profiles of their users' tastes and then cross-referencing that data: they're social networking services for music lovers.
Pandora Radio works on yet a different principle. This US-only music recommendation service was dreamed up by trained jazz pianist Tim Westergreen, who started what he calls the Music Genome Project a decade ago. This involves an attempt to "capture the essence of music at the fundamental level" through the identification of 400 musical attributes that describe any song.
The project's analysts study individual songs (a process that takes up to half an hour) and note their characteristics: for instance, perhaps the vocal is a bit squeaky, a la Lady Gaga (left), or perhaps it's more the sort of tenor growl employed by Tom Jones. Pandora can then serve up something with similar qualities; it now has 700,000 songs in its library.
Such a system still relies on human opinion, of course. Scientists at the University of California, San Diego, think such services could be improved by actually teaching computers the rudiments of music, according to a recent report in New Scientist.
Luke Barrington, a researcher in artificial intelligence, is building software that can analyse a piece of music and distil information about it that may be useful for software trying to compile a playlist. Drawing on this information and using tricks employed in speech recognition technology, the software can then assign the music a genre or even give it more subjective descriptions, such as whether or not a track is "funky", Barrington says. Caspar Llewellyn Smith

The characters and neural networks

2010-07-15T05:39:00.000-07:00

The characters society is based, on part on neural networks. Neural networks exists in the brain, its how the brain cells connect with each other, how the mechanism of thinking work.
These can of be modeled in computers, not exactly, but close enough to give similar results. When used on a computer neural networks are called activation units.

Traditional computers work serially,no matter how fast they work, the process they compute still happen one after another. For instance the sum (4+5) + (6+8) is worked out as a three step process, first 4+5 are added,then 6+8, and finally both the results are added together.
Neural networks work in parallel, imagine them as loads of independent people working together rather than one person working in steps. In a parallel system 4+5 and 6+8 are worked out at the same time,then the results are added, effectively a two stage process.
If you imagine a computer as a room with a single bloke in it. When information comes in, for instance a picture of a horse, the bloke in the room looks up in a reference book,

step one Animal, vegetable or mineral?
step two Mammal,reptile,insect,bird?
step three how many legs?
step four how big is it.......and so on......

Eventually after all the search criteria has been followed the bloke reduces the information down to being a horse and sends the information out.
Alternatively a neural network could be imagined as a room with loads of blokes in it hanging around. When information comes in, the picture of a horse, something different happens. Each one of the blokes is an expert in a different field. One is really good at identifying colours, one is really into animals, one is really into the number four, one recognises sizes. A bit like when people can identify trains by their sound,or remembers all the different types of car. All at once the fellows recognise different aspects of the horse and come to a consensus weather the legs belong to a horse rather than a chair, as the animal guy knows its a horse, and the colour guy knows its brown, and so on. The knowledge is shared out to different points and processed.

A bit like how knowledge is shared by many different people over the (idealized) internet,no one is an expert but using knowledge as a collective force we can pool our resources and find out more stuff.
I can see parallels here on how we organise our lives, shops sell one type of product, if you need specialist advice to go to a specialist shop, not the supermarket,where it may be available but doesn't have the knowledge base. If specialist shops get to diversified the specific knowledge about one thing gets diluted. Thats why polymaths are not all that common, if people specialise in two subjects they are generally related.

Train spotters, English civil war enthusiast, real ale experts all reflect knowledge nodes, that when seen in isolation as sad enthusiasts but seen together as a solid knowledge database of the world as a whole.
We are a parallel species father than a serial species, we need the farmer, the farmer needs the industrialist.

The characters could be seen as very idiosyncratic neural network nodes. They have a knowledge base but either the knowledge base is wonky (the character that just wants to collect all the objects in the world, without knowing what they are) or what they do with it is wonky (such as the shopper character who looks up products and relates them together by weight rather than type of product). We follow the characters as they negotiate through life through using their knowledge base

Doug's game of life

2010-07-15T05:17:00.000-07:00

Doug is a character based on Conways Game Of Life . Doug genrates a celluar pattern from an initial state and uses this to create music. Doug is modeled on a Biological algorithm and uses this to navigate life, Being a "biological algorithm" requires Doug to a sleep for 8 hours a day, which makes it difficult for him to actually be used. Ella the artist spends quite a lot of the time trying to wake him up.
Biological algorithms also produce other side effects, doug could die, requiring a doug volume 2, or a doug volume 3 and so on.
The gaps in Dougs processing reflects the way we deal with the world, after an 8 hour sleep Doug carries on with what he was doing before in a very linear pattern. Although we can be get so angry about a situation,causing humans to go on to the streets to riot our basic biological programing eventually kicks in requiring us to sleep, in the morning the anger returns.

As dougs cells evolve they trigger behaviours that change the composition. Each cell is given and attribute which is triggered when the cell is activated.

The cells act as individuals adding their influence to the composition. The cells have a variety of different roles.

The cells have two different roles providing memes which the music utilises, or to provide feed back on the memes changing them slighty producing a composition of constant flow of evolving textures.

When doug stops evolving, or loops his state , doug dies ,and the music stops. One of the main set backs modelling something biologically is that they are always doomed to died.

Doug can produce a confused mass of screaming voices or a choir of angels singing in the praise of syncro-no-city, the cells role are to create trends and copy, no matter how beautiful or ugly they may be. Dougs purpose is just to produce constant change, to add to the noise . What his cells copy is irrelevant to them, they are only interested in following the latest meme and improvising on it. monkey see monkey do.

Doug doesn't see the point of this, endlessly producing stuff just to produce stuff. He is tired and depressed about his situation, all he wants to do is sleep, at least he gets a break from being worked to death. The start of doug is the end of doug. Even death isn't an escape. A new doug is resurrected different from the last, but by still using the same algorithms, is doomed to repeat the same mistakes of the previous Doug. like Escher's never ending stairs Doug is forever working his way out of a looped maze . Doug is very aware of this, thats another problem using biologically modelled programs, developing the illusion of free will leads to depression,

heres doug doing his thing

Doug's audio engine consists of the following specification.

Doug use 6 fm synthesisers, and eight channels of feedback.

the fm synths have a variety of sounds , the sounds can be bought up in volume and stereo effects applied. Also the sound can pass through a variety of audio effects

They produce patterns by having a bag of notes that are disturbed in a controled random manner with a random percentage of spaces and a random quantise applied.

a controlled random octave, at which the notes play, and a controlled random number of sequenced steps controls how the riff meme is developed. The audio engine's tempo can also be controlled by doug. The synthesiser can be started and stopped also with conrolled random conditions.

These notes then can be modulated by a chord appreciator, using a variety of chords.

Each one of the six synths can be applied a pattern which can be unique or be a varient/same as one of the others.

The synth sounds are then effected by the feed back engine. The feed back engine is a granular synthesiser. An audio buffer, (which can or may not be related to the bpm, causing dissonance) , is split up into an equal number of pieces and the individual pieces, played back in order, can have a behaviour applied to them, as it's an audio sample its pitch can be changed, it can be turned backwards,have volume or stereo effects applied to it, repeated, passed through effects units ,or the order can be randomised .

The resulting effect is that which ever "meme" is being operated on a new variant is produced.
There are also controls to halt the changing of controls.

each cell can control one or more of these variables, the community really gets involved.

Examples of Dougs compositions can be found here

Game of life

2010-07-14T06:13:00.001-07:00

The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. It is a widely known example of a cellular automaton. here's is an example, ripped form wiki, (you might recognise the text from here)

The "game" is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input. One interacts with the Game of Life by creating an initial configuration and observing how it evolves.
The universe of the Game of Life is an infinite two-dimensional orthogonal grid of square cells, each of which is in one of two possible states, live or dead. Every cell interacts with its eight neighbours, which are the cells that are directly horizontally, vertically, or diagonally adjacent. At each step in time, the following transitions occur:

Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by under-population.
Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

The initial pattern constitutes the seed of the system. The first generation is created by applying the above rules simultaneously to every cell in the seed—births and deaths occur simultaneously, and the discrete moment at which this happens is sometimes called a tick (in other words, each generation is a pure function of the preceding one).
The rules continue to be applied repeatedly to create further generations.

Ever since its publication, Conway's Game of Life has attracted much interest, because of the surprising ways in which the patterns can evolve. Life provides an example of emergence and self-organization. It is interesting for physicists, biologists, economists, mathematicians, philosophers, generative scientists and others to observe the way that complex patterns can emerge from the implementation of very simple rules. The game can also serve as a didactic analogy, used to convey the somewhat counter-intuitive notion that "design" and "organization" can spontaneously emerge in the absence of a designer. For example, philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett has used the analogue of Conway's Life "universe" extensively to illustrate the possible evolution of complex philosophical constructs, such as consciousness and free will, from the relatively simple set of deterministic physical laws governing our own universe.

Julia the artist

2010-07-14T02:39:00.002-07:00

Julia the artists exsists to create interventions in the lives of the other characters, to encourage them to make art works to express how they feel.
Julia asks the character to make a piece of music, a poem or a visual piece of art. The characters respond by using any material they might have gathered from the internet (words,audio or pictures), and make art using a variety of self generative processes, guided by their personalities.
For instance T.V tank might make poetry from television reviews, or a piece of music by using audio recorded from his favourate program, or a piece of expressionist art from clips of television programs or pictures of his favorite t.v personalities. Julia wants to encourage him to step away from his all encompassing urge to watch television. Indeed all of the characters art is therapy in some way or another, Mr Acker can work through his anger issues from engrossing himself in artistic practice.

Julia personality and rules of engagement are based upon the prionciples expressed in the book "The artist way" by Julia Cameron.

heres the blurb......

With the basic principle that creative expression is the natural direction of life, Julia Cameron and Mark Bryan lead you through a comprehensive 12-week program to recover your creativity from a variety of blocks, including limiting beliefs, fear, self-sabotage, jealousy, guilt, addictions and other inhibiting forces, replacing them with artistic confidence and productivity.
This book links creativity to spirituality by showing how to connect with the creative energies of the universe, and has, in the four years since its publication, spawned a remarkable number of support groups for artists dedicated to practising the exercises it contains.

The book contains a 12 step program the artist follows over 12 weeks which is designed to free then of negative blocks in order to unleash creativity.
The book contains anecdotes,reflections and affirmations for artists as well as excises in artistic practice , and valuable questions for would be artists to ask themselves to aid them on the way to self discovery. Here is an example of some creative affirmations.......

I am a channel for God's creativity, and my work comes from good.
My dreams come from god and god has the power to accomplish them.
As I create and listen, I will be led.
Creativity is the creators will for me.
My creativity heals myself and others.
I am allowed to nurture my artist
Through the use of a few simple tools, my creativity will flourish.
Through the use of creativity, I serve god.
My creativity always leads me to truth and love

Each week the artist is given tasks to complete. Stream of consciousness writing is encouraged as well as the artist date, a technique where once a week "Artist Me Time" is taken where the artist is given a practical task to complete. Together with exercises designed to change the artists old way of thinking,such as listing three old enemies of your creative self worth (called monsters), to acknowledge creative injuries and grieve them. "Taking your artist for a walk" is another popular exercise.
As Julia's personality develops so does the characters art.

TV Tank

2010-07-14T02:39:00.000-07:00

TV Tank likes to watch television. He's not that interested in what other people want to do, and is really focused on getting his own way. TV tank can look up television guides and get obsessed by by a certain program at a certain time, which is his main topic of conversation.
Julia the artist tries engage TV tank into dialog but TV tank keeps the conversation going back to his television program he wants to watch, TV Tank tries to get sophisticated with his persuasion,realizing the same persistent approach wont always get him is own way. Tank starts off by doggedly just saying "I want to watch crimewatch at 9pm on BBC1", until he gets his own way. Occasionally he wont get his own way so tries a different technique, "Oh I've heard that Crimewatch on BBC1 at 9pm is very good, shall we watch it?" and so on. Incidentally TV tank is only really interested in getting his own way, when he eventually gets to watch his tv program he interrupts continually with statements such as "who's that?", "oh i like this", "have i seen this before?"
Julia the artist tries to get TV Tank away from watching television, and into making art. Tank does comply but only by making art works about television programs.

Tv Tank makes his music and visuals from stuff he gathers when he watches telly.
He grabs the audio from the programming he's watching and transforms it by granulising individual sounds and applying process to each of the pieces. The order of the way he re-structures the sounds is determined by the conversational structure he plays out with Julia the artist. Each statement Tank chooses has a effect on the sound. Julia has little influence in the production of the music, as Tank is Tank and can't be reasoned with. Tank being Tank also enjoys hard,brutal pounding techno, he likes to play along with his creations by adding drum structures in the style of his favourite German Techno.

Tanks visual art is also very singular, he tends to find a process he enjoys and sticks to it, applying it to the screen grabs he has gathered. When bored of one process Tank moves onto his next.

have a listen to tanks music here

have a look at tanks art here

Tanks personality is again modeled on the book" Dealing with people you can't stand."

here's what its got to say about tanks.....

Tanks. Pushy and confrontational, tanks come at us with guns blazing when they think we're causing them problems. Explanations won't calm them, and counterattacking could lead to all-out war.

What to do: Let the tank vent for up to 60 seconds. Remain calm and maintain eye contact -- looking down or backing away might make you seem weak or fearful, which will make the tank respect you even less. If the attack still hasn't ended, firmly repeat his/her name until he quiets. Then summarize his main point to show that you were listening, and explain why his interest is best served by calling off the attack. Tanks tend to be pragmatists, so this should work.

Example: "Dad. Dad. I know you don't like my long hair and the way I dress. But I flew all the way here for us to enjoy each other as a family. We can do that. Or I can leave right now. Your choice."

Mr Acker

2010-07-14T02:38:00.001-07:00

Mr Acker wants to learn about al the stuff in the world. To help him achieve this he uses this website

Visual Dictionary

The visual dictionary is a visualization of 53,464 english nouns arranged by meaning, each pixel on the screen represents an "thing" in the world, wether it be a person,plant, object or concept. When a pixel is clicked on a description and picture of the noun is displayed

Mr Acker choose a pixel at random, reads out the description of the noun and chats about how much he likes that particular thing. At first Mr Acker has a real lust for life enjoying all the things he finds, but once in a while,at random, he finds something that makes him angry. When he finds this "angry noun" he remembers the description and any other object he comes into contact with after he cross references its description with his list of words that make him angry. Eventually from a starting position of liking everything he comes in contact with he end ups feeling jaded, not liking more and more stuff until he hates most of what we see around us. Although Mr Acker can justify being angry at things that remind him of other things, but he cannot justify what sent him off hating in the first place. Using feedback, from this original outburst, his anger , having gone through a few generations, seems unfocused, lashing out random subjects, although his pathology will trace the development of his negativity from an incongruous start.

When Mr Acker comes into contact with Julia the artist he generally makes art about what makes him angry so the genesis of his anger is reveled. Once in a while though the Mr Acker will make an artwork about things he likes, adding to his unpredictable nature.
When Mr Acker comes to make his music he really tries to follow Julia advice...he tries to forget about his grievances and try's to use the material in a controlled manner.
Mr Ackers style could be called retentive, he lets out little squeals and gasps of what has annoyed him, tries to keep a lid on his anger. Unfortunately for Mr Acker his subconcious feeds back on the escaping rage and builds upon it, repeating and transforming it into a cacophony of Mr Ackers id screaming.
The Mr Acker instrument is made from 8 sound granulating units, capable of being recorded into. Mr Acker plays a short section of the sound he has gathered and the granulating units feedback, improvising on the sound. Mr Acker can also record off his audio rage and re-orginise it with his current melody,
Mr Acker gathers the sound for searching the internet for sounds with key word descriptions of what he has got annoyed with.
Mr Ackers visual art is achieved through a reductive process. From composited images of items he hates (he searches google image bank for pictures) he subtracts images of things he likes, trying to erase the feelings of hatred with something positive.

Listen to Mr Ackers music here

to see some of Mr Ackers Art look here

Mr Ackers personality has been developed from the book "Dealing with people you can't stand"

The Character of Mr Acker is based on the grenade type of personality. Here's what it says about grenades .

Grenades. Grenades explode unexpectedly, with little provocation. A grenade might begin a rant by blaming you for a specific problem, but by the end, he's likely to be venting about things that seem unrelated or even irrational. Unlike tanks, who focus on specific problems, grenades are mainly in search of attention.
What to do: Fight fire with fire. Get the grenade's attention by raising your voice to match his, calling his name and waving your hands in front of you (without getting too close to him). Keep your tone friendly as you do this. Use rant-interruption statements, such as "I don't want you to feel that way. No one should have to feel that way." Address the portion of the grenade's rambling rant that matters most to him, if it can be identified. (Often this central problem will be that he's not getting the attention he feels he deserves.)
Example: "We care about all the effort you put into this."
If appropriate, add that you love this person. Grenades need to cool off before they can talk rationally, so suggest meeting later if more discussion is required. If you must deal with a grenade regularly, learn to avoid the topics that tend to set him off.