I was lost, and now am found
Interesting day today, certainly one worth blogging about.
Today was the day of the Keighley mapping party, organised by Bradford Linux Users' Group. All very well, you may say, but it was my first mapping party, and with the Open Source GIS nature of my PhD, and my inability to code, it was time I learnt how to contribute something back to the community.
Those of you who work with me will know that mornings are not my forté, and having to get up at 7 on a Sunday is not the best way for me to start the day - never mind that the downstairs neighbours' burglar alarm went off at 4am - they're not around at the moment, and I was pretty sure my landlord wasn't going to answer the phone at 4am... It eventually stopped, and despite there being no signs of a break-in, the neighbours two floors down say they heard someone walking around...
So I duly went off to town, not quite bleary-eyed thanks to the espresso, to catch the 0900 train to Carlisle, getting off at Keighley. My plan was to go around with someone, using both my department's GPS unit (a Garmin eTrex Legend for the GPS-heads) and BuddyWay (which turns out to be a bad choice as it needs the phone to upload data via its mobile data connection); and record the experience with audio and possibly some photos.
...only that while checking through the stuff on the train, I happen to have left the digital audio recorder (which shares a pouch with my IrisPen) on the train. Oh dear. Carlisle is a long, long way away.
Anyway, so I went off with David Carpenter of Bradford LUG, mapping Keighley in the vicinity of North Street / Skipton Road. There's some interesting and convoluted local history to be gleaned from walking around, trying to classify streets, and occasionally getting drawn into conversations with residents (Keighley turns out to be quite a friendly place on a Sunday - even the Jehovah's Witnesses!) - and after I got back the data was unloaded via an expensive Orange data connection to the "cloud", then out again as KML files for Google Earth (and eventually for categorisation and loading onto OpenStreetMap).
We finished about 4, with one of the group suggesting that the 0900 to Carlisle ought to be making its return journey through Keighley soon. Sure enough, perusing the timetable it appeared that the next train to Leeds would be the return journey of the one I lost my voice recorder on (it takes about 3.5 hours to get to Carlisle from Leeds, and the train stays at Carlisle some 2 hours before returning... hardly the best use of resources...). I had asked at the station after realising I'd left it on the train that morning, and again about 4, but to no avail. I sat in the same location I had on the way out, and asked fellow passengers if they'd seen anything. Then I asked the conductor as he passed through. He told me to follow him, as the other conductor had had something handed in. it was a small black puch containing a voice recorder and an IrisPen. Stranger things have happened, I suppose, but I didn't get to make voice recordings, while £250 worth of my research kit went on a 200 mile round trip without me...
Back to Leeds (via reduced price items at Sainsbury's at a quarter to 5), I found a new sign had been placed outside my house. It showed the wildlife which could be found on Woodhouse Ridge (including the Tawny Owls which keep us awake some nights, and the butterflies we never see). Thanks to the Woodhouse Ridge Action Group for that - it must have been the project for this month's workday. I also asked my neighbours 2 floors down about the burglar alarm when it went off... there's no sign of our landlord by phone (we both call again), and eventually I hit on the idea of emailing him via Unipol's (the University housing office) website, which means they keep a copy. He arrives in about half an hour, and another half an hour later has sorted the problem - the alarm sounding a warning because the power's been cut as the downstairs neighbours have moved out.
So eventually, all is well with the world - apparently. It's been a strange and tiring day, so much so that I missed a very unusual gig round the corner (a Georgian folk choir at the Yorkshire School of Music and Drama) as I wasn't up to going out again. Oh well... tomorrow's another day!
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Friday, May 15, 2009
practical epistemology
or: don't let your first epistemological exploration end up in a slanging match with a mate
It's finally gone through - after a nervous night before my PhD upgrade, trying to understand this "e" word beloved of my supervisor...
Epistemology, or the theory of the nature of knowledge, is not Epidemeology (the study of disease in populations), although the words look very similar and, to be honest, theories of knowledge in a University look very much like infectious diseases you don't want to catch.
My problem, as well as mixing up words and not understanding many of the concepts, is that I am very poor at explaining myself
Explain yourself
The way you explain yourself is really very simple. Your thoughts exist as electrical impulses in your brain, darting around neurons. That's all very brilliant, and many amazing fantasy worlds, views of what's outside and fantastic theories dwell within (unless you're me, in which case you're thinking about trains, coffee, muscle pain and the constant battle against fatigue). Turning all the wonderful stuff inside someone's head into wonderful stuff inside another person's head is the difficult part.
Whether you believe it or not, we are all visually led (unless we're blind), as over 50% of the brain exists purely to process visual information, so naturally, we turn the thoughts in our heads into abstract symbols that we can see. So far, so good? well, not quite, because, as amazing as that sounds, and as useful as it has been in developing civilisation as we know it, it's flawed. These words are not the contents of my head, but an approximation that I happen to be able to make at the time... and in contrast to people who can use the media of language and words to tell wonderful stories and share amazing ideas, I suck at this.
Even worse, once someone's approximation of what's in their head comes out, it then falls to soem poor recipient to turn those abstract symbols or sounds back into electrical impulses in the right places. We spend a lot of our lives, from a very early age, learning how to do this. The result is that we have a form of "chinese whispers" that we manage, with a lot of training, to make work. The alternatives are telepathy (which has little proof of its existence in the real world) and neural transmission, which is the subject of esoteric, and frankly, quite scary experiments (see Doctor Frankenstein about that, he's down the hall)
Theories of knowledge and wisdom
Yes, so let's leave the psycho-physiology behind, and talk about fluffy abstract things. Everyone understands them, right?
Anyway, everyone knows what knowledge is, which is why the field of epistemology is so confusing. We can call it the learned ability to be able to turn memories into something useful, but that would be oversimplifying it (note also, that I'm being a bit slack by referring to Wikipedia), and everyone knows what wisdom is, right? Well, no; and since there seems to be no physiological basis for wisdom in the brain, it appears to either be a social construct (something we've developed a "feel" for in our societal groups), or it's something spiritual (which means it transcends other things, and only means anything to other people because we're told to value it). Either way, there's no way of turning it into something we understand... which is a problem.
Just as there aren't actually 5 senses (really: you didn't count kinaesthesia, hunger, intuition or temperature, did you? ...and that's not all of them), wisdom is probably something we sense more in others, either as a direct intuitive process, or by deduction. Certainly in European and Asian cultures, we would not be comfortable with someone identifying themselves as wise. Wisdom is elusive - perhaps it doesn't actually exist at all and we form the concept in our heads to praise others? There are people I would describe as wise, but then you might not agree; but one thing I can tell is that knowledge of wisdom does not make someone wise themselves. If that were the case I should have been wise by now, but that's obviously not the case (see the messes I keep getting myself into, for example). Wisdom is surely ethereal, no?
Smashing the world into pieces
I bear some responsibility for the argument which followed, on what the relationship between knowledge, wisdom and personality type might be, and how open or closed my mind might be, or how much what I say is bullshit. I won't go into that - this text is essentially either bullshit, or what will eventually become bullshit when a bull eats it.
Epistemology is big picture stuff, and big picture stuff is what I'm doing now. I can't pretend to be any good at it (as I mentioned, I keep mixing it up with epidemeology), but it's what I'm doing now. I'm trying to model the connections between human knowledge and society to the buildings we build and inhabit, and how we do that. We embed information about our society in the cities we build, and layer other pieces of information on that over time (creating a palimpsest, or a book of many layers, one on the other). People read this as they move and live in the urban area, being dictated to in a game of chinese whispers which goes back over centuries, and only from the past to the present. How do we react to this? How can the layers we lay down in the future produce more positive and favourable reactions?
This is big picture stuff - too big. The only way to understand a problem like this is to smash it into little pieces. There is no magic here: what this does is turn alchemy into chemistry. My supervisor will (rightly) claim that it's reductionist to break these things into little pieces, are we not trying to understand the human mind here? Yes.
The only reason we know anything of the way the brain and the mind work is by looking at what's wrong with broken ones. From brain injuries to mental illnesses, broken brains tell us what's gone wrong with unbroken ones, and therefore gives us insight into what processes go on in there. In the same way, we are only beginning to understand climatic systems as they break down, and well, broken hearts tell us most of what we know about love (and cardiology). The only hope is that when you put the pieces back together, it works - which is very much like putting a dissected rabbit back together and expecting it to jump off the table. Breaking things irreperably helps us fix other things (which doesn't do us much good with the climate, but I digress).
We're never going to know everything, but we'll damn well try... and if your way is to collect and distribute sayings from other people, or if your way is to break cities into little pieces and put them back together, then fine... but it's not going to make any of us any wiser.
or: don't let your first epistemological exploration end up in a slanging match with a mate
It's finally gone through - after a nervous night before my PhD upgrade, trying to understand this "e" word beloved of my supervisor...
Epistemology, or the theory of the nature of knowledge, is not Epidemeology (the study of disease in populations), although the words look very similar and, to be honest, theories of knowledge in a University look very much like infectious diseases you don't want to catch.
My problem, as well as mixing up words and not understanding many of the concepts, is that I am very poor at explaining myself
Explain yourself
The way you explain yourself is really very simple. Your thoughts exist as electrical impulses in your brain, darting around neurons. That's all very brilliant, and many amazing fantasy worlds, views of what's outside and fantastic theories dwell within (unless you're me, in which case you're thinking about trains, coffee, muscle pain and the constant battle against fatigue). Turning all the wonderful stuff inside someone's head into wonderful stuff inside another person's head is the difficult part.
Whether you believe it or not, we are all visually led (unless we're blind), as over 50% of the brain exists purely to process visual information, so naturally, we turn the thoughts in our heads into abstract symbols that we can see. So far, so good? well, not quite, because, as amazing as that sounds, and as useful as it has been in developing civilisation as we know it, it's flawed. These words are not the contents of my head, but an approximation that I happen to be able to make at the time... and in contrast to people who can use the media of language and words to tell wonderful stories and share amazing ideas, I suck at this.
Even worse, once someone's approximation of what's in their head comes out, it then falls to soem poor recipient to turn those abstract symbols or sounds back into electrical impulses in the right places. We spend a lot of our lives, from a very early age, learning how to do this. The result is that we have a form of "chinese whispers" that we manage, with a lot of training, to make work. The alternatives are telepathy (which has little proof of its existence in the real world) and neural transmission, which is the subject of esoteric, and frankly, quite scary experiments (see Doctor Frankenstein about that, he's down the hall)
Theories of knowledge and wisdom
Yes, so let's leave the psycho-physiology behind, and talk about fluffy abstract things. Everyone understands them, right?
Anyway, everyone knows what knowledge is, which is why the field of epistemology is so confusing. We can call it the learned ability to be able to turn memories into something useful, but that would be oversimplifying it (note also, that I'm being a bit slack by referring to Wikipedia), and everyone knows what wisdom is, right? Well, no; and since there seems to be no physiological basis for wisdom in the brain, it appears to either be a social construct (something we've developed a "feel" for in our societal groups), or it's something spiritual (which means it transcends other things, and only means anything to other people because we're told to value it). Either way, there's no way of turning it into something we understand... which is a problem.
Just as there aren't actually 5 senses (really: you didn't count kinaesthesia, hunger, intuition or temperature, did you? ...and that's not all of them), wisdom is probably something we sense more in others, either as a direct intuitive process, or by deduction. Certainly in European and Asian cultures, we would not be comfortable with someone identifying themselves as wise. Wisdom is elusive - perhaps it doesn't actually exist at all and we form the concept in our heads to praise others? There are people I would describe as wise, but then you might not agree; but one thing I can tell is that knowledge of wisdom does not make someone wise themselves. If that were the case I should have been wise by now, but that's obviously not the case (see the messes I keep getting myself into, for example). Wisdom is surely ethereal, no?
Smashing the world into pieces
I bear some responsibility for the argument which followed, on what the relationship between knowledge, wisdom and personality type might be, and how open or closed my mind might be, or how much what I say is bullshit. I won't go into that - this text is essentially either bullshit, or what will eventually become bullshit when a bull eats it.
Epistemology is big picture stuff, and big picture stuff is what I'm doing now. I can't pretend to be any good at it (as I mentioned, I keep mixing it up with epidemeology), but it's what I'm doing now. I'm trying to model the connections between human knowledge and society to the buildings we build and inhabit, and how we do that. We embed information about our society in the cities we build, and layer other pieces of information on that over time (creating a palimpsest, or a book of many layers, one on the other). People read this as they move and live in the urban area, being dictated to in a game of chinese whispers which goes back over centuries, and only from the past to the present. How do we react to this? How can the layers we lay down in the future produce more positive and favourable reactions?
This is big picture stuff - too big. The only way to understand a problem like this is to smash it into little pieces. There is no magic here: what this does is turn alchemy into chemistry. My supervisor will (rightly) claim that it's reductionist to break these things into little pieces, are we not trying to understand the human mind here? Yes.
The only reason we know anything of the way the brain and the mind work is by looking at what's wrong with broken ones. From brain injuries to mental illnesses, broken brains tell us what's gone wrong with unbroken ones, and therefore gives us insight into what processes go on in there. In the same way, we are only beginning to understand climatic systems as they break down, and well, broken hearts tell us most of what we know about love (and cardiology). The only hope is that when you put the pieces back together, it works - which is very much like putting a dissected rabbit back together and expecting it to jump off the table. Breaking things irreperably helps us fix other things (which doesn't do us much good with the climate, but I digress).
We're never going to know everything, but we'll damn well try... and if your way is to collect and distribute sayings from other people, or if your way is to break cities into little pieces and put them back together, then fine... but it's not going to make any of us any wiser.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
so where have you been?
Just getting a small push back to the blog, it's easy to forget that I posted nothing for over a month, which of course is not to suggest that nothing's happened - quite the reverse in fact...
Having passed my Upgrade to PhD status, I am now desperately trying to work out how to rectify the major failings with my methodology - namely a complete inability to say what I want to say in a way that other people can understand me.
Green Drinks Leeds' relaunch went well, and we're looking forward to the next event on the 19th. It wasn't the best attended ever, but certainly the best attended for the last 3 years or so. We're hoping to see more new people there on Tuesday, so if you're around, look us up... if not, support your local Green Drinks.
Otherwise, I gave a pretty poor talk last week at the Climate Chaos Café in Leeds, mainly because I didn't give myself enough time to put it together. Never mind... If you actually wanted to know about the New Mobility Agenda, you'd visit the website and not ask me, wouldn't you?
Just getting a small push back to the blog, it's easy to forget that I posted nothing for over a month, which of course is not to suggest that nothing's happened - quite the reverse in fact...
Having passed my Upgrade to PhD status, I am now desperately trying to work out how to rectify the major failings with my methodology - namely a complete inability to say what I want to say in a way that other people can understand me.
Green Drinks Leeds' relaunch went well, and we're looking forward to the next event on the 19th. It wasn't the best attended ever, but certainly the best attended for the last 3 years or so. We're hoping to see more new people there on Tuesday, so if you're around, look us up... if not, support your local Green Drinks.
Otherwise, I gave a pretty poor talk last week at the Climate Chaos Café in Leeds, mainly because I didn't give myself enough time to put it together. Never mind... If you actually wanted to know about the New Mobility Agenda, you'd visit the website and not ask me, wouldn't you?
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