Author Archives: kim white

i want to be a machine

10036AW~Four-Blue-Andys.jpg In 1963, long before computers became part of our consciousness, before Kasparov lost to Deep Blue, before HAL took over the spaceship, Andy Warhol said, “I want to be a machine.” Andy knew that machines were things to be feared, worshiped, admired and, therefore, emulated. His artwork was about people and ideas that were, more or less, generated by the machine: the media machine, the political machine, the printing press and the television, all cranking out iconic images that were powerful, not because they were complex, nuanced, interesting or even beautiful, but because they were relentless. Warhol’s brilliance was in recognizing how deep the machine metaphor had embedded itself into our personal ambitions and our collective self-image.
Fantasies about being machine-like, however, are not unique to the quirky imaginations of artists. Warhol would have been in good company with cognitive scientists who, for many years, have theorized that our brain works like a computer. This theory/myth is currently being debunked by a new Cornell study.

The theory that the mind works like a computer, in a series of distinct stages, was an important steppingstone in cognitive science, but it has outlived its usefulness, concludes a new Cornell University study. Instead, the mind should be thought of more as working the way biological organisms do: as a dynamic continuum, cascading through shades of grey.

Our mind works like a biological organism? Complex, untamed, “cascading through shades of grey,” oh my. Does that mean there are no definitive answers, only networks of possibility, spectrums of grey? If Andy were around today, he might have something to say about this revelatory denial of black and white thinking in an age of increasing fundementalism and exponential growth in media outlets. But we can only imagine the artwork he would have made.

losing america

I still have my husband’s visitor pass for 2 World Trade Center. He had clients on the 34th floor, so he visited frequently. On the morning of September 11, 2001, after the first plane hit, he called to tell me he was safe in his midtown office. He stayed on the phone with me as I sat on the front porch of our Brooklyn apartment to watch, helplessly, as the Trade Center Towers burned and fell. In the weeks following, I walked around in a daze, overwhelmed by the grief I felt for people I did not even know and for the city itself, which seemed strangely animate in the wake of the disaster; like a wounded giant. That the nation rushed to our aid and poured out its heart to us made things easier, but not many outside the city understood how bad it was. (To get a sense of what things were like in New Orleans in the days following the hurricane, I recommend this incredible First Person Katrina Account published on “Democratic Underground.”)
In that context, I’ve been trying to understand the enormity of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, but I can’t even begin to. September 11 seems small by comparison. We didn’t lose our homes. Our city didn’t drown. Our citizens were not abandoned, starved, mistreated, and driven to despair. My heart goes out to these victims whose suffering is exacerbated by leaders who are failing them so profoundly and, in some cases, so willfully. Attempts to deliver food, water, and much-needed relief to stranded survivors were purposely thwarted by armed authorities including the National Guard. (see Boing Boing’s September 9th article Katrina: Authorities bar Red Cross from NOLA; Blackwater gets carte blanche). The Red Cross Disaster FAQ page also has this answer to the question: Hurricane Katrina: Why is the Red Cross not in New Orleans?

• Access to New Orleans is controlled by the National Guard and local authorities and while we are in constant contact with them, we simply cannot enter New Orleans against their orders.
• The state Homeland Security Department had requested–and continues to request–that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane. Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city.
• The Red Cross shares the nation’s anguish over the worsening situation inside the city. We will continue to work under the direction of the military, state and local authorities and to focus all our efforts on our lifesaving mission of feeding and sheltering.
• The Red Cross does not conduct search and rescue operations. We are an organization of civilian volunteers and cannot get relief aid into any location until the local authorities say it is safe and provide us with security and access.

The hero worship of 9/11 victims and relief workers, which bolstered morale and lent some humanity to the crisis, is almost entirely absent from the Hurricane Katrina “spin”. Katrina victims suffer the added humiliation of insensitive, uninformed, or blatently racist remarks made by elected officials who are trying to minimize the tragedy, shift blame to the victims, and deny responsibility. These quotes were selected from about.com’s 25 Mind-Numbingly Stupid Quotes About Hurricane Katrina And Its Aftermath

“I have not heard a report of thousands of people in the convention center who don’t have food and water.” -Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” Sept. 1, 2005
“I mean, you have people who don’t heed those warnings and then put people at risk as a result of not heeding those warnings. There may be a need to look at tougher penalties on those who decide to ride it out and understand that there are consequences to not leaving.” -Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), Sept. 6, 2005
“I don’t make judgments about why people chose not to leave but, you know, there was a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans.” -FEMA Director Michael Brown, arguing that the victims bear some responsibility, CNN interview, Sept.
1, 2005
“Now tell me the truth boys, is this kind of fun?” -House Majority Leader Tom Delay (R-TX), to three young hurricane evacuees from New Orleans at the Astrodome in Houston
We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.” -Rep. Richard Baker (R-LA) to lobbyists, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal
“I also want to encourage anybody who was affected by Hurricane Corina to make sure their children are in school.” -First Lady Laura Bush, twice referring to a “Hurricane Corina” while speaking to children and parents in South Haven, Mississippi, Sept. 8, 2005

And this from the Louisiana Senator:

“Thank President Clinton and former President Bush for their strong statements of support and comfort today. I thank all the leaders that are coming to Louisiana, and Mississippi and Alabama to our help and rescue. We are grateful for the military assets that are being brought to bear. I want to thank Senator Frist and Senator Reid for their extraordinary efforts. Anderson, tonight, I don’t know if you’ve heard – maybe you all have announced it — but Congress is going to an unprecedented session to pass a $10 billion supplemental bill tonight to keep FEMA and the Red Cross up and operating.” -Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA), to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Aug. 31, 2005, to which Cooper responded:
“I haven’t heard that, because, for the last four days, I’ve been seeing dead bodies in the streets here in Mississippi. And to listen to politicians thanking each other and complimenting each other, you know, I got to tell you, there are a lot of people here who are very upset, and very angry, and very frustrated. And when they hear politicians slap – you know, thanking one another, it just, you know, it kind of cuts them the wrong way right now, because literally there was a body on the streets of this town yesterday being eaten by rats because this woman had been laying in the street for 48 hours. And there’s not enough facilities to take her up. Do you get the anger that is out here?”

I can sympathize with the incredulity expressed by the writer of yesterday’s post on Daily Kos “The Conscious Decision to Let People Die”. I’m not naíve, I know that poor and middle class people are at the mercy of the rich and powerful and that if the rich don’t feel like helping, nobody can make them. But I was under the impression that some things are sacred, and that in America we don’t take food and water away from starving thirsty people. We don’t abandon our people to certain death, and we don’t sneer at those who are suffering. The way I understood it, American Freedom (with a capital F) had to do with the powerless having at least enough power to demand fair and humane treatment. I thought it meant that the hardworking tax-paying public could expect help in a time of dire crisis. I thought our Democracy had checks and balances to minimize corruption and incompetance. I thought America (even under the current administration) had something to do with being civilized, humane and fair.
I don’t anymore.
(The above has nothing and everything to do with the future of the book.)

using the web to teach tolerance

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Teachers brave enough to tackle incredibly complex and sensitive issues, like the Arab-Israli conflict, may find some useful material on Eye to Eye. The site describes the conditions in refugee camps through the eyes of Palestinian children. The project was carried out by “Save the Children UK,” which conducts photo workshops for children in the camps and publishes the resulting photographs on the Eye to Eye site. While the site does not offer a comprehensive history of the situation, it does provide a perspective often missing from mainstream media coverage. The site goes to great pains to avoid bias. On the “Palestinian History” page, it provides this disclaimer, apologizing in advance for any offence their description may cause.

Save the Children UK recognises the political issues and sensitivities surrounding the current crisis in the Middle East and does not take a partisan view on these issues. Our sole concern is to protect the rights and lives of all children wherever they live and we believe that the Eye to Eye project can play an important role in building understanding and respect of this need during the current conflict.
For the benefit of the teachers and children using the Eye to Eye website, we have attempted in the following chronology to describe as objectively as we can, the historical context of the current situation of children in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. However this chronology does not claim to be comprehensive, and we apologise in advance if we inadvertently cause offence by the way we have described historical events.

Though the site does not entirely succeed at remaining impartial, the project seems worthy of attention, perhaps for that reason alone. The problem of how to teach these very emotional and inflammatory topics remains. Can one be impartial in this conflict? How do you sort through history and contemporary politics without taking a side? Is there a way to get past our emotional biases and political loyalties in order to find an objective “truth”? Is there an objective truth? These are the kinds of questions students should be confronted with; Eye to Eye offers one pathway into this contentious issue.

hive mind

escher.gif I spend a lot of time looking for specific resources on the web. That means sifting through Google search results and following links that seem promising. A semi-interesting link may take me to an article with another semi-interesting link; that link takes me to another, and so on. As I progress, the articles become more thinly related to the topic, but I pursue them anyway, hoping they will lead me on a trajectory I hadn’t thought of, to a great idea that I couldn’t have anticipated.
During the whole process, however, I can’t shake the unpleasant sensation that I am not the master of my own destiny. I come out of a Google session with a wrung-out feeling, like I’ve just been lead along a path that was not entirely of my own choosing, marching behind an army of web searchers carving networked pathways into the information landscape, but not necessarily finding that unique morsel that will knit my ideas together. Lee Bryant explains this phenomenon as entaglement in the complex systems addressed by complexity theory. “Complexity theory,” says Bryant, “shows us that from the seeds of such small inter-connected actions, large trees of system behaviour can grow. These physical phenomena are reflected online as well, where the emergence of the Wiki movement and the growing cult of Google both display a simple form of collective intelligence.” He gives us this metaphor to consider:

The classic pop-science example that illustrates the point is the way in which ants forage for food. Ants display a kind of collective intelligence (described by some as a “hive mind” ) that is based on apparently dumb rules, repetitively followed by thousands of individual insects. Each ant forages for food in an apparently random manner, but when it finds food it marks a pheromone trail back to its colony. Trails fade over time, but positive feedback means that well-travelled paths will attract more and more ants until the particular food source is exhausted. The system works because there are enough ants each following the same rules to ensure comprehensive coverage of any given area.

The fact that my participation in the web, even at the browsing level, means that I will be drawn, unavoidably, into the group effort evokes a mixed response. My independent artistic sensibility hates anything that erases the individual voice and immerses me in a placid groupthink. But my social human sensibility sincerely wants to know what everyone else is doing; it makes me want to dive in, pitch in, follow along, and celebrate the complex social web we are weaving.

the virtual library: lending audio books online

This past year, most of my reading (for better or for worse) has been done online. When I visit my local library it is to check out DVDs, or to take my son to story hour, or to use the library’s free wireless. When I am there, I notice that many of the other patrons are there for the same reason. There’s always a waiting list for the computers and a line of patrons with arms full of DVDs waiting to check out.
It’s no surprise that libraries are looking for ways to extend these popular digital offerings in order to better serve their patrons and to stay relevant in the digital age. A recent article in Technology Review by Michael Hill reports that libraries have, “considered the needs of younger readers and those too busy to visit,” and are beginning to offer downloadable digital audio books. “This is a way for us to have library access 24/7,” says Barbara Nichols Randall, director of the Guilderland Public Library in suburban Albany. As an added bonus, you never have to worry about late fees. Here’s how it works:

A patron with a valid library card visits a library Web site to borrow a title for, say, three weeks. When the audiobook is due, the patron must renew it or find it automatically “returned” in a virtual sense: The file still sits on the patron’s computer, but encryption makes it unplayable beyond the borrowing period.
“The patron doesn’t have to do anything after the lending period,” said Steve Potash, chief executive of OverDrive. “The file expires. It checks itself back into the collection. There’s no parts to lose. It’s never damaged. It can never be late.”

penguin classics, the complete collection…if only

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I was listening to a story on NPR called “Loading Up on Penguin Classics”. My son was running around the living room screaming, so I didn’t hear most of the broadcast. In my digital thoughtspace, I assumed “loading up” referred to software. Imagining an entire library, 1,082 classic titles, as electronic objects, stored neatly on my hard drive, is enormously appealing to my minimalist aesthetic and my nomadic digital worklife. However, as it turns out, the Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection is being offered as a 700 lb. load of paperback books (delivered free to anyone who can afford the shelf space and the $7,989.50 price tag). If only Penguin could catch a vision of THIS century and start making digital versions of the classics. I need screen-based books, audio books, lower pricetags, and I don’t think I’m alone. Penguin, are you listening? I’m clearing out virtual shelf space now, make me some ebooks!

“talkr” lets you listen to your favorite blogs

Talkr, a new online software, transforms your favorite blogs from text to spoken word and provides downloadable podcasts for your mp3 player. I listened to a few free samples provided on their site and was pleasantly surprised by the non-robotic voice. I love this software not only for the convenience, but also for the accessibility it will offer to sight-impaired users.

continuous computing: backchannels as impromptu textbooks

“Continuous computing is an emergent phenomenon–a complex pattern of social behaviors that arises from the use of a variety of simpler digital tools. It advances in unexpected directions as people find innovative ways to put these commercial and open-source technologies to use in their social lives.”

The above quote is from Social Machines, an article by Wade Roush, recently published in Technology Review. According to Roush, wireless devices have created a “virtual information field” that allows us to “both pull information about virtually anything from anywhere, at any time, and push their own ideas and personalities back onto the Internet — without ever having to sit down at a desktop computer.” This phenomenon of constant connectivity is changing the way we learn and the way we participate in classroom environments.
In classrooms and lecture halls with open access to wireless networks, students can use cellphones, laptop computers, and other wireless devices to silently converse (via text or instant messaging systems) with one another or to surf the net during class. This secondary layer of classroom communication is known as the backchannel. Some instructors recognize the inevitability of the backchannel and are experimenting with how to organize these activities in a productive manner.
The key characteristic of the back channel is that it allows students to participate in the “push/pull” of constant connectivity that Roush speaks of. Students can “pull” supplementary information from the web and “push” their interpretation of the facts or their ideas and queries about the ongoing lecture into the backchannel social space. The University of Southern California’s Interactive Media Division has experimented with multimedia back, front, and side channels. Here is a brief description of the Backchannel options for USC IMD Speakers outlined by Justin Hall.

We have three primary areas of backchannel work. Speakers, participants, feel free to review these various scenarios and let us know what you think. We have fourteen screens up on the walls of the lab, so these various functions typically share visual space with a speaker’s own supporting visual materials.
Backchannel During a speaker’s presentation, students with laptops will chat about the topics at hand. Typically, we post the thread of comments on two-to-three of the fourteen screens.
Frontchannel We can provide a special area just for questions for the speaker. Then, during the talk, if someone has a clarification they’d like, or a question they want to ask, the speaker can see that question pop up on a small monitor at the front of the room. The speaker can answer it when they feel ready!
Sideshow We have several students who are trained expert Google Jockeys. If a speaker would like to have their own presentation supplemented by a stream of images, statistics, background articles, as they talk, they should let us know and we will arrange for students to run the sideshow presentation on their research.
These various areas represent experiments in collaborative multimedia-internet enhanced learning. We welcome your suggestions! And if you feel that these might be too distracting, we’re happy to reign in some of our participation during the presentation. The intent is to involve students in the lecture and to allow people to use the tools at their disposal to engage a speaker’s research in real time.

A variety of responses to the backchannel were expressed in a January 2005 online discussion entitled “is the backchannel working.” Some students found it “useful (for keeping track of the points, for cross reference, and for fact checking), immersive, stimulating and engaging;” while others found it, “distracting, unnecessary, detrimental, irrelevant, pointless, alienating,” and even “rude” as evidenced in this exchange:

What ever happened to giving your full attention to the guest speaker? Since when is carrying on a side conversation an acceptable thing to do? What happened to our manners?
I wish I had saved the logs from last semester. But I recall several presentations where the speaker stopped and asked the group what was going on with that back channel that is so funny. I wonder how the professors who presented last semester feel about this.
Posted by: Shelby at January 31, 2005 07:38 PM
I believe that we are ALL here (professors included) because we were the really smart kids that stared at clouds, wrote stories, drew, and made up games during class. That’s how I feel when my peers are obviously multi-tasking during class or during a presentation. I don’t think it’s rude to multi-task.
I do think it’s rude to type up really dumb jokes or ASCII pictures on the backchannel that are unrelated to the presentation. However, I think it’s really awesome that our professors and our presenters are open to our experiments in multi-tasking and over-stimulation. Especially in the age of the internet, the next gen behind us are going to be so savvy at carrying on multiple conversations and multiple lines of thought simultaneously, I think it’s good to experiment with this instead of putting “miss manners” restrictions on the class.
Posted by: kellee at February 2, 2005 03:37 PM


Although this form of collaborative learning is still in the experimental stage, it seems to have a great deal of potential. Well-run backchannels could serve as improptu, collaborative textbooks. Students and so-called “Google Jockeys” could gather, present, and discuss the supplementary information as the instructor lectures. This process would be inspired by the instructor, but not directed by the instructor.

the digital novelist

cover-madame.jpg “Print publishing has had a great 500 year run,” says 77 year old novelist Warren Adler, “but the print book is morphing into the screen book.” Mr. Adler, who has published 27 print novels including “War of the Roses,” is publishing his 28th, “Death of A Washington Madame,” electronically and e-mailing it for free to anyone who asks.
In an article in Sunday’s New York Times, he tells reporter Claudia Deutsch that, “the big publishing houses just don’t get it.” So Mr. Adler has taken matters into his own hands. According to the official Warren Adler website, he has:

required the English language and foreign rights to his entire backlist of 25 novels and has made them available in ebook formats and Print-on-Demand formats in trade and hardcover. They are available on the web through all bookselling sites and can be ordered through chain and independent bookstores.