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WARNING! WARNING! DANGER WILL ROBINSON!

Hmmm…Blogger seems to be in rebellion against the Grazr. *&%#@!& ! Atom feed!

Hey Critt -where do I load the data for this thing ?

RECOMMENDED READING

Federalist X (finally) has his third installment of his Liberal Education series. (Worth waiting for, so go read it !)

Dan of tdaxp’s excellent profile and analysis of the creativity of Coming Anarchy ( two of my favorite blogs), part of Dan’s SummerBlog ’06:

Coming Anarchy 1: Introduction
Coming Anarchy 2: Methods and Analysis
Coming Anarchy 3: Identity
Coming Anarchy 4: Failure
Coming Anarchy 5: Obsession
Coming Anarchy 7: Humility
Coming Anarchy 8: Geography
Coming Anarchy 9: Recognition
Coming Anarchy 10: The Gap
Coming Anarchy 11: Conclusion

Stephen DeAngelis of ERMB was invited to speak at The State Department on the topic of “Resilience and WMD Threats“- resilience as a concept is now at the level of the policy makers! Also commentary on Steve and his post/speech by Dr. Barnett.

That’s it !

A VETERAN OF THREE SERVICES AND THREE TOURS OF DUTY IN THE WAR ON TERROR

Courtesy of Jedburgh of The Small Wars Council, I bring you the remarkable Army Reserve Colonel Dr. William Bernhard, age 75 – yes, that is correct, 75 years old – also a veteran of the U.S. Navy and the Marine Corps. Colonel Bernhard is about to deploy to Afghanistan.

“…Having joined the Marine Corps in 1950, Bernhard was soon discharged due to a knee injury, which he said was a major disappointment. He joined the Navy as an anesthesiologist and served 10 years on active and reserve duty, then switched to the Army Reserve for 22 more years. When Bernhard leaves his home tomorrow, he will spend about five days at Fort Benning, Ga., before traveling to Ramstein Air Base in Germany. From there he’ll fly to Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan, then convoy into Kabul, where he will connect with the Oregon Army National Guard’s 141st Support Battalion.

“I don’t sign up when I go overseas for anesthesia because I’ve done all that,” he said. “I’d much rather sign up to be a field surgeon, which means that I can work at a battalion aide station and at a trauma station, and I sign up to work also as a flight surgeon, and that gets me flying a lot of missions and taking care of aviators.” Last year, he deployed to Iraq with the Mississippi Army National Guard’s 155th Brigade Combat Team. He took charge of medical facilities at five forward operating bases west and south of Baghdad… “

Wow !

THE MODULARITY MOVEMENT REVISTED

Dan of tdaxp has added an interesting counterpoint to my last post on modularity where he expands the concept with a look at research into brain physiology and cognitive function in “Evolution Away From Modularity“. An excerpt:

“[Evolutionary Psychologists interpret the] Watson selection tasks [as meaning] subjects appear to reason more effectively about social contracts than about non-social contracts… subjects ignore the logical properties of the condition they’re evlauation and focus exclusively on whether someone is receiving a benefit without playing the correspond cost… subjects… focus on whether someone has taken a benefit from them without paying a cost to them.” (Buller 171)”The theory behind the cheater-detection mechanism module should lead us to expect a mechanism that is specialized in detecting cheaters in the domain of social exchanges. But the experimental results that purportedly support the existence of a cheater-detection module involve detecting cheaters int eh domain of social contracts.” (Buller 172) (a problem for EP or a distinction without a difference?)”

Interestingly enough, I’ve found out from Dan’s post that there is a “Massive Modularity Thesis” about the brain but I’m not sufficiently well informed here to evaluate the pro and con positions ( a good question for the Drs. Eide !). My intuitive guess is that modularity is a meta-principle and wherever you have complex systems you will also have some evidence of modularity and that the human brain will be no exception. That is however, only a guess.

I’d love to have any experts with a medical, psychological or scientific background, who might be reading this, to weigh in on this question.

ON ATTENTION

One of the great difficulties in effective communication is that to be a great messenger you need more than something important to say or the capacity to say something well. Your most important act is to win the attention of those who you want to receive the message. Without that, your effort goes for naught.

Attention is actually a scarce commodity. While we like to attribute that to living in an age of cell phones, PDA’s, the internet, 500 channel cable TV, video games, treos, blackberries ad nauseum, I suspect that we are exaggerating their collective effect and that inattentiveness and a proclivity to distraction is our natural state. We like to imagine that in the past, we had a simpler, more solemn and focused age. Well, at the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas spoke before crowds of up to 20,000 – who milled about, coughed, laughed, cheered, jeered, engaged in conversation, hollared, smoked, spat, ate food, held wailing babies, argued, fought with fists, tended horses and meandered about drunk. As one historian put it:

“At some of the debates there were no ladies present, but at others, they were there and given the only seats that were available except for the Conestoga wagons and the covered wagons that some of the people arrived on. People sat on their wagons. It makes one wonder how many people actually heard the speeches and how many people were out for the celebration. You know, you had ice cream being consumed and picnic barbecues, liquid refreshment — a lot of liquid refreshment — fights breaking out in the back of the auditorium, the back of the crowds, a cannon being fired off. Douglas traveled with his own cannon. That was the only amplification around. He traveled with a brass cannon, and his supporters were instructed to fire it every time he got off a good point against Lincoln. So there was lots of noise, lots of crowd yelling and cheering and booing and talking back, nothing like the debates today where our candidates make such an intentional and careful effort to take the high ground and to be very calm and not answer. Negatives and fighting and audience attacks were part of the game.”

Not quite the school textbook image. I have to wonder how many people heard even half of what was said, given that these debates ran for three hours straight. Lincoln’s propensity for jokes, irreverence and colorful stories for which he was sometimes criticized, as unbefitting the dignity of his office, were learned on the stump as devices to entertain and win the crowd’s attention. The fact that sound bites on TV have grown more effective as they have been made shorter is a poor indication of what the actual average American attention span might be.

As poorly as we sometimes are at paying attention extrospectively – we could benefit far more by greater attention or some old fashioned Zen “mindfulness” being directed inward. Metacognitive regulation requires an introspective monitoring of one’s thoughts and ideas, which means active, conscious, effort to pay attention. This requires practice to sustain for any length of time though on the other extreme, master Yogis and Zen monks have exhibited the ability to effect significant physiological changes through meditative concentration. Having acquired sufficient attention to engage in metacognition, we can begin to select our cognitive frames and approach problems with greater discrimination and conscious choice, rather than being driven frantically by events, simply reacting.

It pays to pay attention.