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Pencil Literacy: A Framework — Civics of Technology
Marie Heath, Civics of Technology, 2024/08/13

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This - "A framework for the ethical, equitable & meaningful integration of transformative graphite technology" - is pretty funny, especially where the 'literacy' component overlaps into 'ethics' (as it so often does in digital or AI literacy): "in the realm of pencil ethics, students must be taught the paramount importance of not utilizing the sharpened end for unauthorized data extraction or non-consensual mark-making." Also, "Consider the risks involved in having poky-pointy things in the hands of children." Via Lance Eaton.

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Reckoning
Alex Russell, Infrequently Noted, 2024/08/13

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This is the first of a four part series on slow public service websites and the Javascript frameworks that drag them down. It brings to mind this post from Marco Rogers: "Phanpy has a page that presents just the ui for composing a new message.https://phanpy.social/compose/ The react component for just this compose box is 3400 lines of code. There is no way that this is where we wanted to end up." All this is interesting to me because I would like to build an application that mostly lives in the browser, so the user isn't dependent on a specific server. But how, without bloating the script? Though I've resolved to keep it framework-free.

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Things I was Wrong About Pt3 - The democratisation of social media
Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, 2024/08/13

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Another of Martin Weller's "I was wrong" posts (and as long as he keeps posting them, I'm going to keep linking to them). This one is on social media. "When it's just a bunch of nerds talking to each other, no-one cares, but when it's everyone, then it becomes worth subverting and controlling." Now I think we need to distinguish between web 2.0, which encouraged user-created content, and social media, which encourages texting and following. They are two very different things. The latter (as seen in TikTok, Facebook and Twitter) is easy to co-opt and control. The former is a lot harder - indeed, it was and is our only response to the co-option and control of both traditional media and social media. We need a web where people have a voice. That was never wrong. Putting that voice in billionaire-controlled silos was.

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Toxicity and Responsibility: Is it time to reassess institutional engagement with Twitter (X)
Lawrie Phipps, lawrie : converged, 2024/08/13

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People can use whatever platform they want, but institutions, as Lawrie Phipps writes, "institutions have a duty of care towards our students, staff and communities." Recommending that they use toxic services to access important information appears to be a violation of that duty of care. "Colleagues," writes Phipps, "Twitter is not going to get less toxic (and) your use of it supports it. We need to reconsider our engagement with platforms that compromise the well-being and safety of our communities."

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New earbuds detect when you're dozing off
Kara Manke-UC Berkeley, Futurity, 2024/08/13

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The obvious application for such a product is protection from falling asleep while driving or opwerating machinery. But being able to track when people are falling asleep in class might also help educators! OK, I'm kidding, a bit, though I will say that I have a tough time staying awake in classrooms and lectures - I'm not sure what it is, whether it's the content or the heat of the room or the many people using all the available oxygen. And it's not simply because I'm old - ever since I was a student I've had trouble with this. There have been some studies on this phenomenon - I know I'm not alone - but I've never seen anything definitive.

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More than argument, logic is the very structure of reality
Timothy Williamson, Aeon, 2024/08/13

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This is an introductory post on logic, the main point of whioch is to show that "what is characteristic of logic is not a special standard of certainty, but a special level of generality. Beyond its role in policing deductive arguments, logic discerns patterns in reality of the most abstract, structural kind." Patterns, sure, but I don't think logic reflects some sort of reality. But I digress. I'm posting this item because, on looking at the recent list of the 378 Most-Cited Contemporary Authors in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, I was surprised to find the author, Timothy Williamson, in 6th place, because I had no idea who he was. Reading through the list, I see I'm familiar with or have read the majority of them, met a substantial number, and been taught by two. But it's also important to note that it is a very idiosyncratic list - " a moment in one particular academic philosophical culture." In addition to Foucault, people like Seymour Papert, Hubert Dreyfus, Marvin Minsky and many other absolutely essential thinkers are not included. Still, it captures an important part of my own history - the next highest on the list I hadn't read was John Hawthorne at 32 (somehow ranking above Nelson Goodman and Karl Popper!).

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When do neural representations give rise to mental representations?
Kevin Mitchell, The Transmitter: Neuroscience News and Perspectives, 2024/08/13

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OK, I'm not a neuroscientist. But I really don't think this is true: "The basic premise of neuroscience is that patterns of neural activity carry some information — they are about something." I don't think you need 'aboutness' to do neuroscience, no more than you need it to do physics or chemistry. The need for 'aboutness' comes up only when you're trying to make the (to my mind unjustified) leap from neural phenomena to cognitive phenomena, instantiated in the current article by the leap from neural to mental representations. Kevin Mitchjell here makes use of the device of the 'umwelt' to make his point: "the umwelt also crucially entails valence, salience and relevance —  it is a self-centered map of things in the environment that the organism can detect and that it cares about." That may be so - it may be that valence, salience and relevance are necessary for an umwelt, but not (I would argue) sufficient to entail it.

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