Nice Shout Out

Looks like someone in Baltimore caught my NDSU magazine article. It's nice to see some of my hunches about the feedback speed of social media play out in the blogosphere. I'll be honest, I'm thrilled when I get ANY feedback on what I write, so it's nice to have such a rapid response (and positive!) in such a public space.

It's Out

The email that turned into a mini essay is now online. I think the picture makes me look a bit psycho (there are two other, better, ones in the print magazine). Laura, thanks for giving me a chance to throw some thoughts out there.

The Problem with Normal

WIRED Magazine has an interesting, and semi-provocative essay on how medical science does little to distinguish between "normal" and illness by only focusing upon the latter.

Medicine has become all about finding a problem — a tumor, a heart attack, a failing kidney — and deploying advanced treatment technologies. In the process, we seem to have given up on measuring and tracking what constitutes normal.

Thomas Goetz asserts, I think correctly, that this results in overmedicalization (something sport's research uncovers as often being hyper-gendered).

Imaging and scanning tools are now so good at peering inside our bodies, they've surpassed our capacity to interpret the results. Many findings are what doctors call "incidentalomas," smudges that look like cancer but turn out — often after surgery — to be benign.

The article goes awry in two ways. The logical leap at the end of the article ("all [NIH] grants are given a "priority score," an indication of a project's novelty, originality, and "scientific merit." Normal need not apply") is poorly teased out. The NIH may consider the massive effects of a change of perspective as nonmeritorious, but that needs to be more firmly established. More important, there are many, MANY problems with linking boundary conditions of health with "normal." I don't have time to list them all here now (although I will try to write more on this later), but I will say that a more productive line of inquiry might emerge from embodied or phenomenological examination of these things. We should let people define what is livable and help them (as well as the experts) understand what lies ahead and give them the tools to make the most informed choice.

The Powerful Stay Powerful

The RIAA has stepped up its subpoena's to Midwestern universities by about 3000%, despite no reported spike in filesharing traffic. Meanwhile, Harvard hasn't received a single subpoena or letter of inquiry from the RIAA (at least according to WIRED magazine). What do YOU make of that?

Battlestar Acapella

True That

"Google does a great job of monetizing intent," says Ray Valdes, an analyst at Gartner Research. "It knows what I'm searching for and it can show me relevant ads. But social networks are not about intent."

I could not have said it any better. Burke, my friends, not Aritstotle rules in the social media realm.

A Short Message

I would just like to say something brief to both of the Democratic Presidential candidates. (work safe, but salty language--beware tender hearts)

The Definition of Optimism

The guy at the bottom of this photo created this sortashocking ode to the guy at the top of the photo. I actually went to school with Halcyon Styn, the pink-perched and camera-bedecked compiler of the diptych (we graduated the same year, and were fellow members in the UofR Yeomen).

Here's the punchline. When I look at the guy at the top, I think "problem." When Halcyon sees the picture, he thinks "passion" and makes the diptych. Halcyon, my friends, demonstrates what we call optimism.

Information Bombing

It looks like Apple and/or Radiohead might be gaming popular music algorithms. While the masters of payola may be crying foul, I say w00t yet again to the surfers of the information economy. I, for one, welcome our new overlords...

Telling the Stories that Need Telling

My colleague and friend, Dr. Christina Weber does work on women soldiers' experiences in war. Her work was featured on National Public Radio story this morning. I'm really glad her work is getting wide coverage, and proud that she is one of us North Dakotans.

Fatigue

In case you haven't noticed, I'm pretty infatuated with Twitter. Unfortunately, I'm getting a bit fatigued with the demands of my constant life-stream.

I'm catching a Twitter cramp. Perhaps that makes me a "twamp."

I'll be here all week...

The Shame of North Dakota

Pathetic show of bigotry. Yes, this is my campus.

The Foolishness of Crowds

Flash mobs meet crowdsourcing.

Embodied Beauty

Defying gravity.

Do You Know What Today Is?

International Women's Day.

Now get out there and fight for justice!

Um...good point!

What he said.

Raiders of the Lost Art

Last night, sport and I went to the opening event of the Fargo Film Festival, a screening of the now-legendary fan homage to filmmaking, Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation. The two directors were in attendance and taking questions, which I suppose is pretty nice.

I have one problem with these events. These SoCal visitors always come off a tad...well...snooty. I'm pretty sure I spent just about as much of my life in Southern California as these guys have. I'm also pretty sure that between my New Media and Old Media experience making films, music, soundtracks, podcasts, and other assorted goodies makes me more than qualified to ask some craft questions (like about their storyboarding, production decisions, etc.) as well as more general life questions. Still, I don't like the way these events frame audience members as local rubes who MUST ask questions like "aw shucks, how do you feel being so durn inspire-ational?"

The really poor-quality fan tribute was amazingly watchable and fun. Too bad the Q&A session wasn't nearly as fun.

Hacking Democracy

Apparently, Comcast understands how to crudely exercise political manipulation by blocking out dissenting views with the "sleeping dwarves" strategy. Political hacking is pretty common (we call it "forum control" in rhetoric), but this is a pretty transparent and crude form.

The Re-vision of Experience

The Mississippi's mighty, but it starts in Minnesota
At a place that you could walk across with five steps down

From "Ghost," by Indigo Girls

I've recently walked across these headwaters at Lake Itasca. To be honest, I am more impressed with the concept than the experience. What impresses me even more than the almost-Zeno's-paradox of striding over the mighty Mississippi in "five steps down" is the experience of finding new meaning in familiar words and lyrics with the addition of experience. This constant destruction and re-constitution of life's details is what I always imagined infuriated a too literal Bishop Berkeley. Life seems haunted with these re-creative acts of perception.

Fun with Science!

What ELSE do you do on the coldest day of the year?

You boil water and throw it in the air to see it freeze before it hits the ground.



Negative thirty degrees can be deadly AND fun!