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White Ghost Shivers Provide Uplifting, End Of Semester Bitterness

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 17:06:11 -0800

We're locked up with with grading and prospectus work. In the meantime, here's a little Austin hot jazz. Great song, although we think we would've preferred the "nice bitter one" that she says was next in the set... ... since we suspect that it may have been this awesomeness: Sometimes we wonder how so many LA hipsters who talk about the greatness of "the Austin scene" can be so objectively right and yet so obviously wrong. Then we remember to take into account their douchebag position of enunciation and our desire to firebomb them is exonerated. Psychoanalysis is neat that way. References: * White Ghost Shivers DVD Preview, available may '07 [smokeybreak / YouTube] * White Ghost Shivers in Mama Said [NekoMouser] * Jacques Lacan [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy] Previously: * Mark Ronson And Amy Winehouse Are Very Good For Each Other [Video] * French Band Requests That You Dance, Fight [Video] * Electovamp Girls Look Like They Know Their Way Around A Club, Are Fun [Video]

We Get Visitors - IP Of The Day

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 08:17:28 -0800

Jumping directly to this post: The hit came at 7:33am - say what you will about city employees, they're not clocking in late. References: * Scientist Who Doesn't Understand How Judgment Works Tries To Persuade People To Drink Their Own Excrement - Produces Rhetorical And Psychoanalytic Train Wreck, Comedy Gold [IIS] Previously: * The History Of Hip Hop, Viral YouTube Edition [Videos] * Sigmund Freud Head Lollipops. Yes, Really. * IIS Begs Science: Please Stop Making Robots That Creep Us The Hell Out

The Things We Can Do - Best Library Facade Ever

Sat, 08 Dec 2007 19:18:43 -0800

Awesome: The books for the facade of the Kansas City Library were nominated by local residents. This is perhaps a cause for hope. Or given your opinion about some of the choices, not. Still: awesome. References: * Kansas City Public Library [Neatorama] Previously: * French Band Requests That You Dance, Fight [Video] * Giant Scorpion Provides Scientific Data, Nightmares * The Things We Can Do - Earthrise And Earthset From The Moon

Scientist Who Doesn't Understand How Judgment Works Tries To Persuade People To Drink Their Own Excrement - Produces Rhetorical And Psychoanalytic Train Wreck, Comedy Gold

Sat, 08 Dec 2007 18:08:36 -0800

Orange County has just launched a Toilet To Tap water program to reclaim flushed waste, distill it, and return it into the drinking supply after a few years. The scientific side of the debate is a crush: even ignoring the Southern California water crises, the tap water is cleaned until it's near-bottle quality and certainly better than alternative sources. OC residents have not gone as far as citizens in other areas who shut down similar programs - San Diego (twice) and Los Angeles being the two nearby examples - but objections have not exactly been muted. In a lot of cases, no amount of scientific argumentation has been able to overcome citizens' initial visceral repulsion. Among the oldest concerns of the rhetoric of science, at least the closer we get to the science literacy pole of the science-literacy vs. science-theory spectrum, is how technical-to-deliberative communication occurs and why it often fails. At least within the last half-decade - in a disciplinary turn with which issue can be taken - the pendulum has sometimes swung all the way to explicitly advocating that rhetoricians cooperate with scientists in influencing (steamrolling?) public deliberation. Viewed from a more abstract and sympathetic perspective, this might be seen as a reemphasis on the practical tradition in rhetoric. But the theoretical side of the discipline is also implicated in this controversy. Before addressing how these failed persuasive encounters can be fixed, the reasons for their failure have to be probed. The theoretical question is two-fold. First, what is the nature of the judgment, pursued argumentatively and rhetorically, that's doing the work in this particular controversy - how does individuated judgment get molded into an epistemic statement that then slips into public deliberation as a valid argument? Second, why do citizens, in the moment of deliberation, choose to emphasize that particular – visceral – register of judgment rather than a more cognitive one? Judgment turns out, for semiotic and psychoanalytic reasons, to be much more bodily than technical partisans, deliberative democrats, and epistemologists would prefer. In a neat example of how dramatically technical-to-deliberative communication can go awry, Los Angeles KROQ’s Kevin and Bean invited Shivaji Deshmukh onto their morning radio show last Tuesday to justify the program. Deshmukh is officially OC’s Groundwater Replenishment System program manager (there's actually a revelatory little bit where he tries to get Kevin and Bean to recognize that calling it Toilet To Tap program is a "misnomer" - with predictable results). Before we go on: this is one of the clearest artifacts regarding deliberative judgment in scientific controversies that we've ever come across. Everything is laid out here: the inadequate persuasive force of technical argument in deliberative controversies, the psychoanalytic links between libidinal investments and the structure of belief and then back again, and the reflexive rhetorical recuperation of what seems like vulgar anti-intellectualism but emerges as a relatively sophisticated defense of the corporeal dimensions of cognition. It's simply a wonderful artifact. After the jump, links to the podcast and a multi-page, should-have-been-working-on-our-prospectus-instead-of-this semiotic and psychoanalytic unpacking of the interview.

Tuesday Random Anger - Self-Congratulatory Nonsense In The Academy Edition

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 00:43:11 -0800

IHE has an article suggesting that we can improve goverment deliberation by modeling it on university and departmental meetings:

Civilized political behavior needs to be learned. And that's where universities come in, Mallory suggested, as nascent laboratories of democratic engagement. "I think ... the fundamental principles are [a commitment] to civil discourse, and listening, and speaking. Oppositional or special-interest democracy degenerates to adversarial [politics], in the sense that there’s a win-lose kind of goal," he explained. "A university is a good place to experiment with that."

Yeah. Let's find a large English department and give them a new job line. Now let's bring together a Marxist, a postmodern queer theorist, and a second wave feminist and have them hash out the job description. That way we can all watch them and learn fundamental principles of civil discourse. For fuck's sake. References: * A More Deliberative Democracy [IHE] Previously: * Anger Helps You Think * The Lacanian Unconscious Vs. Pop Second-Wave Feminist Psychology That Ruins Peoples Lives * Don't Read Your Goddamn PowerPoint Slides Out Loud [Video]

The History Of Hip Hop, Viral YouTube Edition [Videos]

Sat, 01 Dec 2007 23:08:59 -0800

It turns out that, contra Tricia Rose, hip hop actually originated in an obscure Mongolian farming village in the 1960s. MC Farmer on the mic: The genre then mutated (metastasized?) into nerdcore, giving rise to MC Frontalot's utterly brilliant "It Is Pitch Dark": "The voices in your head said the dwarf shot first... but doctors with needles posit repeatedly that you knocked down that midget in the park unneededly." We have that problem all the time. References: * Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Wesleyan, 1994. [Amazon] * True origin of Hip-Hop music, English subtitles [NumeroEight / YouTube] * MC Frontalot - It Is Pitch Dark [tubist / YouTube] Previously: * Mickey Avalon Embraces Rock And Roll Lifestyle With Something Less Than Ironic Distance [Video] * Anger Helps You Think * Engineer Builds Self-Aware Robots That Learn And Self-Replicate. Umm... What? [Video]

Hey Real Quick, What's 29 Plus 4?

Sat, 01 Dec 2007 22:32:52 -0800

The spread at the beginning of the game was 29.5. You people can have your "ancient religions". We have found a new object of worship, and his name is LeSean McCoy. References: * Pitt throws curveball at BCS with win over No. 2 WVU [ESPN] Previously: * Mark Ronson And Amy Winehouse Are Very Good For Each Other [Video] * French Band Requests That You Dance, Fight [Video] * Electovamp Girls Look Like They Know Their Way Around A Club, Are Fun [Video] [Cross-posted to Mere Rhetoric]

Wednesday Link Dump - Screaming Chimps, Powerpoint Poisons Everything, Rhetorical Advertising, Etc

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 09:17:18 -0800

We're trying to come to grips with four or five months of unread academic blogs, so instead of fleshed out posts you get link dumps. We, in turn, get the marginal satisfaction of cleaning out dozens of haphazardly saved, unfiled bookmarks. Or as we like to call it, "the highlight of our week." * We went back and forth about whether advertising data about the persuasive role of imperfection justifies its own post. The upshot for rhetorical practice is the old rhetorical insight, which goes back at least as far as Vico, that being too polished makes the audience distrust the speaker. The theoretical upshot might be something about how human sensibilities are deeply anti-utopian at just about every register. But that's pretty thin, so no full post. * Powerpoint poisons everything, Lincoln at Gettysburg edition. * Chimps scream for help. They also change their screams based on the amount of danger they're in and whether a more powerful chimp is around who can help: "This shows there is more flexibility in their vocal communication than previously thought" * Asking readers to vote on top 10 lists has to be the hackiest way of generating blog traffic known to man or angel. And yet - as Lacan tells us - knowing how a trick works does nothing to undermine its effectiveness. PsyBlog's got a poll on the 10 most brilliant social psychology studies ever. Sigh. * Grading with a red marker is our passive-aggressive way to get back at students. Previously: * The Lacanian Unconscious Vs. Pop Second-Wave Feminist Psychology That Ruins Peoples Lives * Anger Helps You Think * Neural Nets See Things The Way We Do, Vulnerable To Basic Optical Illusion

The Things We Can Do - Earthrise And Earthset From The Moon

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 09:16:30 -0800

The Japanese took some time off from creating the freakiest robots known to humanity to create this gorgeous video, a scaled down version of the hi-def version that they're promising to release soon: The real downer? It was done in a Burbank studio. References: * Earthrise video [Pink Tentacle] * Earthrise, Earthset [pinktentacle3 / YouTube] Previously: * Second Life Brain-Computer Interfaces And The Fermi Paradox [Video] * Humanity Now Actually Begging To Be Destroyed By Robots [Video] * The Things We Can Do - 3D Images Of The Brain's Architecture

Electovamp Girls Look Like They Know Their Way Around A Club, Are Fun [Video]

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 23:52:33 -0800

These are the times that we wish we had an mp3 blog, because as near as we can tell the British hotties from Electrovamp are still nowhere to be found on Hype Machine. We would post them and then the Internets would belong to us. Alas we run an academic blog frequented by a half dozen or so humanities scholars, so all we can really expect is schoolmarmish tsk-tsk'ing: After the jump, the third wave feminist version of the song. Don't load this up at work. Seriously.

"People Are Really Smart" Not The Most Compelling Explanation For Why Rank Propaganda Fails

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 23:37:45 -0800

PsyBlog calls out Fahrenheit 9/11 for being bad argumentation and open propaganda, and then goes on to ask why Bush still lost:

Some saw it as a brilliant indictment of the lead-up to an unjust war. Others saw it as unfounded liberal/left-wing propaganda designed to give the Democrats a boost in the lead-up to the 2004 US presidential elections. At the time Dr Kelton Rhoads, an expert in the psychology of persuasion, wrote a piece detailing the psychological techniques of persuasion used by Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11. Although I wrote a summary of Rhoads' article, due to website re-organisations it got lost so I'm reposting it here as it provides a good introduction to propaganda techniques... "...is Fahrenheit documentary, or is it propaganda? Call it as you will. For my part, I see a consistent, effective, and clever use of a range of established propaganda tactics. If only a few of these tactics were used, or if the attempt to deceive weren't as apparent, I might equivocate...I feel safe in applying the rule: if it flies, walks, swims, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck."... So if Fahrenheit 9/11 was such a successful piece of propaganda, how come George Bush went on to win the 2004 presidential election?

In a different post the suggestion is made that Moore failed because he wasn't subtle enough. That's probably part of the answer. Rank propaganda is probably not effective for capturing undecided citizens in the context of deliberative controversies (and there's an interesting rhetorical analysis to be done about battles to label argumentative texts as "propaganda"). But agitprop is still wildly effective for rallying people around the flag when they want to be rallied - Hitler's Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl was effective and not exactly subtle. So why didn't F9/11 manage to rally the Democratic troops to go out and outvote the Republicans? It seems at least part of the answer has to be that both sides had unreformed propaganda working to get voters to the booths. Goodnight has been pushing this line for at least a couple of years in the context of his broader work on celebrity advocacy in deliberative politics. His paper in the American Behavioral Scientist on F9/11 as the mirror-image of The Passion of the Christ is to the point here, and the PDF of his presentation at the Lear Center is here. So there are at least a few reasons to be suspicious of PsyBlog's potentially heartening "people will see through bad propaganda" declaration. References: * 9 Propaganda Techniques in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 [PsyBlog] * The backlash against Fahrenheit 9/11 [PsyBlog] * The Passion of the Christ Meets Fahrenheit 9/11 [G. Tom Goodnight] * Previously: * What Isn't Argument? * Habermas: The Ideal Speech Situation Is A Bad Model For The Ideal Speech Situation * Social Science Partisan Attacks Critic For Lack Of Social Scientific Rigor

Giant Scorpion Provides Scientific Data, Nightmares

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 01:58:11 -0800

Yowsers:

The immense fossilised claw of a 2.5m-long (8ft) sea scorpion has been described by European researchers. The 390-million-year-old specimen was found in a German quarry, the journal Biology Letters reports. The creature, which has been named Jaekelopterus rhenaniae, would have paddled in a river or swamp. The size of the beast suggests that spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were much larger in the past than previously thought, the team says. The claw itself measures 46cm - indicating its owner would have been longer even than the average-sized human. Overall, the estimated size of the animal exceeds the record for any other sea scorpion (eurypterid) find by nearly 50cm.

In other news, we're never leaving our studio again. We don't trust these scientist people. Today they say "extinct." Tomorrow they say "yeah, our bad - turns out it was just unextinct enough to eat a large child." References: * Man-sized sea scorpion claw found [BBC] Previously: * The Things We Can Do - Science Photography Awards Announced * The Things We Can Do - 3D Images Of The Brain's Architecture * IIS Begs Science: Please Stop Making Robots That Creep Us The Hell Out

Open Knowledge Roundup - Google Good, Google Bad, Etc

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 01:55:24 -0800

We didn't really know that there was a good criticism of Google Books, but apparently there is. Is it anywhere as good as what Google's doing to promote open knowledge? Not so much, no. * Did you know that Google has a YouTube channel with almost 200 videos of authors, politicians, and innovators that have given talks on their campus? The most viewed video is that of a vulgar anti-Semitic populist, but the rest are pretty money. E.g. Steven Pinker: * Robert B. Townsend at the American Historical Association blog unloads on Google Books for a lot of reasons that seem nit-picky to us. But he's writing on the AHA blog and we're not, so what do we know? * The online International Literary Quarterly has published their first issue. It appears to have some sort of Scottish theme, if you're into that sort of thing. * We've been remiss in not posting Lifehack's list of their favorite TED presentations earlier. We're probably going to have to post something about that Chris Anderson long tail talk the next time we do a "structure of the blogosphere" post. But in the meantime, there's nothing on this page that is not filled with pure awesomeness. Previously: * Open Knowledge Roundup - Cal And MIT Have How Many Lectures Up Now? * Engineer Builds Self-Aware Robots That Learn And Self-Replicate. Umm... What? [Video] * Rhetoric Not So Much With the Revolution Thing

Two-Thirds Of Americans Are Retards

Sun, 25 Nov 2007 10:12:15 -0800

You have got to be fucking kidding us:

Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the federal government had warnings about 9/11 but decided to ignore them, a national survey found. And that's not the only conspiracy theory with a huge number of true believers in the United States. The poll found that more than one out of three Americans believe Washington is concealing the truth about UFOs and the Kennedy assassination - and most everyone is sure the rise in gas prices is one vast oil-industry conspiracy. Sixty-two percent of those polled thought it was "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that federal officials turned a blind eye to specific warnings of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Only 30 percent said the 9/11 theory was "not likely," according to the Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll.

Retards. Conspiracy theories are parasitic on sound epistemic and deliberative norms. Persuasive conspiracies that have gotten some social traction are marks of cultural and deliberative degeneration, a particularly dangerous detour in Burke's guilt-purification-redemption cycle. The pomo defense of conspiracy theories - that they're disruptive intrusions into hegemonic discourse that work by "just airing some questions" - was already untenable theoretically. Following Burke, persuasion simply doesn't work that way. It works through a relatively well-described process of attempted identification and then - when that identification fails - either scapegoating or self-mortification. Perusasion through disidentification is a contradition in terms. Now that one of the dumbest conspiracy discourses ever is the hegemonic discourse, the already untenable defense of conspiracy theorization has also become empirically incoherent.

The Things We Can Do - 3D Images Of The Brain's Architecture

Sat, 24 Nov 2007 21:43:32 -0800

Scientists are so adorable when they produce something stupefying and then reveal their over-enthusiastic muffin-like geekiness by giving it a really corny name:

Researchers at Harvard University have taken an important step to mapping the detailed architecture of the brain - the fantastically complex 3D atlas of connections between individual cells in the brains of mice. Using genetic tricks and flourescent proteins they have individually labeled hundreds of individual nerve cells with 90 different colour combinations. The end result they call a 'brainbow'.

Four more images, plus expalatory captions, at the Guardian's site. References: * Brainbow mice [Guardian] Previously: * Arnold Pouteau's View Of NYC Is Much Better Than Yours * The Things We Can Do - Science Photography Awards Announced * Underwater Photographer Having A Lot More Fun Than Us, Also Producing Gorgeous Photos