I don’t agree with all her answers here, but as usual, danah boyd is asking better questions than almost anyone else, in this case about critical thinking about media in a networked age:

What’s common about the different approaches I’m suggesting is that they are designed to be cognitive strengthening exercises, to help students recognize their own fault lines, not the fault lines of the media landscape around them. I can imagine that this too could be called media literacy and if you want to bend your definition that way, I’ll accept it. But the key is to realize the humanity in ourselves and in others. We cannot and should not assert authority over epistemology, but we can encourage our students to be more aware of how interpretation is socially constructed. And to understand how that can be manipulated. Of course, just because you know you’re being manipulated doesn’t mean that you can resist it. And that’s where my proposal starts to get shaky.

Let’s be honest — our information landscape is going to get more and more complex. Educators have a critical role to play in helping individuals and societies navigate what we encounter. But the path forward isn’t about doubling down on what constitutes a fact or teaching people to assess sources. Rebuilding trust in institutions and information intermediaries is important, but we can’t assume the answer is teaching students to rely on those signals. The first wave of media literacy was responding to propaganda in a mass media context. We live in a world of networks now. We need to understand how those networks are intertwined and how information that spreads through dyadic — even if asymmetric — encounters is understood and experienced differently than that which is produced and disseminated through mass media.

Above all, we need to recognize that information can, is, and will be weaponized in new ways. Today’s propagandist messages are no longer simply created by Madison Avenue or Edward Bernays-style State campaigns. For the last 15 years, a cohort of young people has learned how to hack the attention economy in an effort to have power and status in this new information ecosystem. These aren’t just any youth. They are young people who are disenfranchised, who feel as though the information they’re getting isn’t fulfilling, who struggle to feel powerful. They are trying to make sense of an unstable world and trying to respond to it in a way that is personally fulfilling. Most youth are engaged in invigorating activities. Others are doing the same things youth have always done. But there are youth out there who feel alienated and disenfranchised, who distrust the system and want to see it all come down. Sometimes, this frustration leads to productive ends. Often it does not. But until we start understanding their response to our media society, we will not be able to produce responsible interventions. So I would argue that we need to start developing a networked response to this networked landscape. And it starts by understanding different ways of constructing knowledge.

https://points.datasociety.net/you-think-you-want-media-literacy-do-you-7cad6af18ec2

Gravitational slingshots work best around hugely massive bodies. In the 1960s, the physicist Freeman Dyson calculated that a black hole could accelerate a spacecraft to relativistic speeds. But the forces on the spacecraft as it approached such an object would be likely to destroy it.

So Kipping has come up with a clever alternative. His idea is to send photons around a black hole and then use the extra energy they gain to accelerate a light sail. “Kinetic energy from the black hole is transferred to the beam of light as a blueshift and upon return the recycled photons not only accelerate, but also add energy to, the spacecraft,” says Kipping.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613127/a-halo-drive-could-accelerate-interstellar-spacecraft-to-close-to-the-speed-of-light/

Today I experienced the Roedelius Cells installation, and I saw Joep Beving, some Coupler, Mary Lattimore, Meredith Monk (and vocal ensemble) performing ‘Cellular Songs’. And then finally danced my ass off to Jlin. Have now hauled my tired, wired corpus back to the hotel. May edit this post with richer details and discussion, but too near falling out to do that now.

Edit: whoops, forgot to mention one of the best experiences I had yesterday! Peter Gregson and five local cellists (and several synths) performing his remarkable recomposition of Bach’s cello suites. It seemed like there were a couple of small problems with the performance, but it was nevertheless absolutely transporting 💛

About 25 percent of what ends up in the blue bins is contaminated, according to the National Waste & Recycling Association. For decades, we’ve been throwing just about whatever we wanted—wire hangers and pizza boxes and ketchup bottles and yogurt containers—into the bin and sending it to China, where low-paid workers sorted through it and cleaned it up. That’s no longer an option. And in the United States, at least, it rarely makes sense to employ people to sort through our recycling so that it can be made into new material, because virgin plastics and paper are still cheaper in comparison.

Even in San Francisco, often lauded for its environmentalism, waste-management companies struggle to keep recycling uncontaminated. I visited a state-of-the-art facility operated by San Francisco’s recycling provider, Recology, where million-dollar machines separate aluminum from paper from plastic from garbage. But as the Recology spokesman Robert Reed walked me through the plant, he kept pointing out nonrecyclables gumming up the works. Workers wearing masks and helmets grabbed laundry baskets off a fast-moving conveyor belt of cardboard as some non-cardboard items escaped their gloved hands. Recology has to stop another machine twice a day so a technician can pry plastic bags from where they’ve clogged up the gear.

Cleaning up recycling means employing people to slowly go through materials, which is expensive. Jacob Greenberg, a commissioner in Blaine County, Idaho, told me that the county’s mixed-paper recycling was about 90 percent clean. But its paper broker said the mixed paper needed to be 99 percent clean for anyone to buy it, and elected officials didn’t want to hike fees to get there. “At what point do you feel like you’re spending more money than what it takes for people to feel good about recycling?” he said.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/china-has-stopped-accepting-our-trash/584131/

From a modern perspective, “Functional finance” is really cavalier in its discussion of monetary policy. Lerner says that the interest rate should be set at the level that produces “the most desirable level of investment,” and that fiscal policy should then be chosen to achieve full employment given that interest rate. What is the optimal interest rate? He doesn’t say – maybe because through the 30s the zero lower bound made that point moot.

Anyway, what actually happens at least much of the time – although, crucially, not when we’re at the zero lower bound – is more or less the opposite: political tradeoffs determine taxes and spending, and monetary policy adjusts the interest rate to achieve full employment without inflation. Under those conditions budget deficits do crowd out private spending, because tax cuts or spending increases will lead to higher interest rates. And this means that there is no uniquely determined correct level of deficit spending; it’s a choice that depends on how you value the tradeoff.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/opinion/whats-wrong-with-functional-finance-wonkish.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/opinion/how-much-does-heterodoxy-help-progressives-wonkish.html

https://twitter.com/ThingsWork/status/1108073217199992832

https://twitter.com/i/status/1108073217199992832

One hypothesis for how knowledge is organized in the brain proposes that representations of the things we know are optimally connected to other parts of the brain that are necessary for processing that information.

“For example,” Caramazza said, “knowledge of something I can see will be organized in a part of my brain that is easily connected with the visual system. But what about color in the blind? It cannot be represented in an area that’s connected to visual processing. Because they learn about it through language, it will be organized in an area that is especially well-connected with language processing. So if the question is where does a blind person store a representation of a rainbow in their brain, they store it in the same area where a sighted person would store a representation of a concept like justice or virtue.”

To see that process in action, Caramazza and his colleagues recruited both blind and sighted volunteers and used fMRI scanners to track activity in their brains as they performed various tasks, including answering questions about rainbows and colors.

“We found that, in the congenitally blind, the neural responses for red were in the same areas as the neural responses for justice,” he said. “The abstractness of something like red in the blind is the same as the abstractness of virtue for the sighted, and in both cases that information is represented in a part of the brain where information is obtained through linguistic processes.”

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/02/making-sense-of-how-the-blind-see-color/

Faba bean necrotic stunt virus, or FBNSV for short, infects legumes, and is spread through the bites of aphids. Its genes are split among eight segments, each of which is packaged into its own capsule. And, as Blanc’s team has now shown, these eight segments can reproduce themselves, even if they infect different cells. FBNSV needs all of its components, but it doesn’t need them in the same place. Indeed, this virus never seems to fully comes together. It is always distributed, its existence spread between among capsules and split among different host cells.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/03/the-revolutionary-discovery-of-a-distributed-virus/584884/

If, in the wake of our utter failure to reduce emissions, we fail to agree on geoengineering because of political squabbling, with the consequence that we all just bake slowly, I will just give up on everyone forever. Not that that will matter much at that point…

On the other hand, unlike emissions reduction, geoengineering can at least in theory the executed unilaterally. Wouldn’t surprise me if that’s what it comes down to in the end.

Not, mind you, that I think geoengineering is a great idea. I just think it will turn out to be the least bad of several lousy alternatives.

The idea of cooling the climate with stratospheric sunshades that would shield the planet from the sun’s warming rays moved up the international agenda this week, with mixed results. On the one hand, new research suggested that it is theoretically possible to fine-tune such a shield without some of its potentially damaging consequences. Publication of this work coincided with a proposal at the biennial un Environment Assembly (unea), held in Nairobi, Kenya, for an expert review of such geoengineering methods. This was the highest-level discussion of the topic so far. On the other hand, the more than 170 nations involved could not arrive at a consensus. In a fitting illustration of the heat surrounding geoengineering, the proposal was withdrawn at the eleventh hour.

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/03/14/countries-look-at-ways-to-tinker-with-earths-thermostat