I don’t believe in evolution

Reblogged from ...meie igapäevast IT'd anna meile igapäev...:

I don’t believe in evolution.

I can hear what you are thinking: Is he an idiot or something? Even though he has an MSc in animal ecology and an unfinished PhD in evolutionary ecology, he still doesn’t believe in evolution?!

But here’s the thing: evolution is a scientific theory, same as the theory of gravity, germ theory, cell theory, quantum theory, theory of relativity and many others.

Read more… 255 more words

This post reflects my sentiments exactly.

Affect and Technology: Social Motivation, Literacy, and Facebook

Quick background: I was too old to play Pokémon when it was popular.   In fact, I worked in Waldenbooks (now out of business) and sold Pokémon cards to parents when I was in my late 20’s.  Even though I don’t understand the social and cognitive complexities of playing Pokémon, I do agree with Mimi Ito: interest-driven learning with a high social component motivates children and adolescents.

In terms of adolescent learning and motivation, I see Ito’s distinction between friendship-driven and interest-driven online environments as being particularly useful.  More specifically, her distinction highlights how both of these online environments use and situate affect differently.  For example, social networking sites allow friends to chat and learn about “local peers groups, friendships, and romantic relations”(n.p.).  In other words, these sites, like Facebook, provide updated analogues of the after school hang out, like the mall, or an even older setting, the soda fountain.  In this online update of friendship-motivated, social contexts, gossiping (for both boys and girls), romantic and platonic pairings, and the comparing of garments (photo updates) keep teens in touch with each other.

On the other hand, the interest-driven sites that have teen writing with peers online repurpose their natural social motivation to focus on a topic or to reinforce a particular skill set.  Like the social networking sites, communities like Faraway Lands push peer-to-peer interaction into the foregrounded, but in a more pedagogical fashion.  For example, peer-to-peer, and adult mentor-to-student interactions motivate Clarissa to improve her writing.  As Clarissa differentiates her online, creative writing community from her school writing community, “ [Online creative writing is] something I can do in my spare time and not have to be graded on it…You know in school you’re creative, but you’re doing for a grade so it doesn’t really count?”(n.p.) It doesn’t really count?  Count for what?  Ito answers my question:  “The evaluation and appreciation by peers who share her same passionate interests feels both more authentic and consequential to her” where Clarissa gets opportunities to network and publish her work” (n.p.) like an adult writer would.  As Ito says, school would not afford Clarissa such opportunities.

As both a novice academic writer and writing instructor who is interested in online writing communities, I’ve come to realize the importance of socially motivated learning in online writing.  Additionally, I wonder how, as a novice academic writing and writing instructor I could borrow and apply what Ito discusses to my own (which I somewhat do now) and my students writing practices. For example,  I could encourage my students (maybe even require them) to respond to Facebook newsfeed posts and take screen shots of the comment thread and submit the hardcopy to me for my consideration.  On a social networking site like Facebook, I do think that Ito’s contention that “[s]kills and literacy are a by-product of social engagement” (n.p.) does have traction.  Granted, Facebook doesn’t necessarily engage teenagers (or college students) in situations that work to reinforce literacy and writing skills to the level a high school- or college-level writing class can. Nonetheless,  with the presence of New York Times, Literary Reviews, and other discourse communities available on Facebook’s newsfeeds, teens (and college students) can get updates from the stories they like or comment on. Case in point, like the community where Clarissa receives feedback for her work, teens and young adults could use the postings and comment threads as places to get feedback on their ideas; and in the case of more extended discussion, feedback on their writing. I realize that a site like Facebook doesn’t provide the close reading and peer-to-peer editing that a community like Faraway Lands provide.  However, if teens and college students are going to “play” around on sites like Facebook, then that sense of play that Ito discusses be superimposed unto learning opportunities for their writing and thinking, while also honoring the social component (gossiping, status updates) teens and college students want.

African American Online Information Access and Literacy Equality (Some Quick Thoughts)

On the morning of January 12, 2012, Lisa Nakamura’s gave a lecture to our ROPES class.  In that lecture she pointed out that online social networking sites like MySpace had a major “white-flight” when Facebook began gaining popularity five years ago.  As a result, the racial disparity between Facebook and MySpace’s reveal a virtual form of segregation. Another part of this segregation is the question of access to the Web.  Given that a majority of African Americans don’t have personal computer access and are relegated to cell phones, in school, or in public libraries, to access the Web, there are many different Internets as Nakamura pointed out.  Though I was vaguely aware of this disparity, I, as a white graduate student, have high amounts of access at home, on my phone, as well as school.  Before Nakamura’s lecture, I had never considered how segregated levels of online access were.

Given what Nakamura mentioned, I began to think of online access and African American users relationship to online information.  When I read Everett’s article, I found something compelling.  Everett’s research in African and African-American online communities revealed that African Americans use the Internet differently than white populations.  He cites the L.A. Times research that discovered that African Americans are more likely to use the Internet as a tool of information than whites (151).  Even though the African American population generally uses modem (dial-up) access (which puts them behind technologically), they utilize on-line information services more. What compels me to comment on this particular finding: the stereotype of the African American as missing out on what the Internet has to offer: in other words, the digital divide many people see as a site of racial disparity. It’s not that “technological distribution isn’t uneven,” according to Everett. Instead, Everett asserts that part of the focus on the digital divide diverts attention from the fact that “significant technomastery” and “online activism” exists in the African American population, despite limited access (149).

Though Everett goes into more detail about online diaspora and the ways in which African American technomastery is so widespread and pervasive, I’m more interested in looking Stephanie Browner’s article, in light of Everett’s findings.  Considering how African American populations utilize the Internet for information more than the middle-and upper-middle class whites (the presumed majority of online users with unlimited access) Browner’s article brings up how American Literary scholars are posting more online African-American literary scholarship and literature. Three of the African American literary scholarship sites Browner mentions are The Revised Dred Scott Case, Digital Schomburg African American Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century and Chris Mulvey’s Clotel: An Electronic Scholarly Edition. Both of these projects make public previously unpublished or out-of-print 19^th century African American literature.  If we couple these archiving and publishing projects with the fact that Everett found African Americans use their technomastery to procure information, couldn’t that be a way in to level out the some of the disparities in literacy?

I realize solving the literacy disparity will take more than educators and progressive public figures encouraging primary, secondary, postsecondary, and working class African Americans to look into these projects.  However, these archiving projects (among others) could be instrumental in equalizing the problem of online access by providing a wealth of information about African American cultural heritage (Our Cultural Heritage Commonwealth: The Report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities and Social Sciences, as qtd. in Browner).  In terms of promoting literacy among African Americans and given that these users already use the Internet primarily for information, these large database-sized digital archiving sites could start eliminating disparities in literacy rates, and continue to increase African American’s online use of information.

 

“Sermons” on the Dismount

Introduction

My deconversion from theism (Christianity and less specific beliefs in a higher power) motivates this series of writings I’ve titled “Sermons” on the Dismount.  The title operates as an ironic misnomer.  I only want to write about my experience, not preach on the advantages of having a naturalistic view of the universe, nature, and phenomenon; that’s why I put the word sermons in quotes.  But like a sermon, I will write what I feel and how I slowly dismounted from the belief in a God, or gods, the supernatural, and other religious and mythical explanations for the world.

These “sermons” operate within and from a naturalistic point of view.  In other words, I subscribe to the theories of evolution, the big expansion, and abiogenesis.  To me, science explains how the world (and all of its phenomenon-natural or otherwise) works.  I state this at the outset of this series for one reason.  I hypothesize that many readers, sympathetic and empathetic to the theistic vantage; will attempt to debate my point of view.  I realize that this series invites debate and emotional responses. Despite that, I am still going to post this set of writings, and I will decide who I debate to whom I respond.

My Slow and Certain Deconversion (part 1)

 After my second divorce, I moved in with my parents.  Two years before my divorce I went to church twice a week: on Mondays to rehearse my bass playing and harmonies with the church band and on Sundays to play in the contemporary service.   Once I recovered from the initial shock of the breakup, I began working a minimum of forty hours a week.  Inevitably I worked on Sundays–particularly when I was a team leader at AWS. None of the personal assistants working under me willingly worked on Sundays.  If going to church and playing in the its band really meant so much to me, I would have tried harder to get one of my subordinates to cover my Sunday shift.

I still believed in the Christian God and prayed in the morning, in the evening, and when I felt uneasy or anxious. Not going to church and band practice (which included a prayer group before we began to practice) gave me a chance to start questioning organized religion and theology in general.  Though I had read about evolution in college, on my own, and believed it to be a plausible, I started seeing that evolution couldn’t be reconciled with the Genesis account.  With more and more space between the Lutheran church, and myself I began forging my own relationship with God, as I understood him.

This personal relationship focused on a god I could talk to and his name was not Jesus. Another newer feature of this personal relationship included getting to know myself better: what I thought and felt without the filter of Christianity.  In other words, instead of praying away my doubts about religion, myself, and praying away my problems, I began to see myself as an individual who could solve my own problems, or go to someone else–whether they were believers or not.  Case in point, I began talking to an old friend of mine who was (and is) not affiliated with any organized religion.

I started to find my own way in the same way he had found his.  He lived (and lives) by his own spiritual principles, many of which he formulated after reading myriad books and contemplating those principles for many years.  Similarly I began listening to his experiences and how he applied his principles to those experiences.  At first I adopted some of his viewpoints and applied them to my own life and “spiritual journey”. I started drinking kumbucha and green tea, eating better (high diary fats, olives, leafy greens), weaning myself off of psych meds, and following a more predictable sleep routine.  I was still doing God-centered twelve-step work; but all the while I questioned if there was an actual higher power.  I questioned it because I believed I was doing the spiritual recovery, not some bigger, immaterial and invisible force.

(End of Part 1)

The problem of slippage in digital, Web-based and Multimedia research and publishing

The problem of slippage in digital, Web-based and Multimedia research and publishing.

The problem of slippage in digital, Web-based and Multimedia research and publishing

Web-based and Multimedia research involves a flattening out differences among disparate media (text, image, video, etc.), as well granting quicker and greater access to these media.  The convenience of quick and easy access in digital publishing and research brings legal and ethical issues to the fore.  One of those issues is the slippage of attribution and citation in the academic tradition, according to the Janice McIntire-Strausburg article. Ease and speed of digital access can also cause another slippage, in terms of “text rights” (Berger, 155) and authorship. A final slippage that arises from quick and convenience access is the linguistic or cultural context brought up in Iswari P. Pandey’s “Researching (With) the Post-National ‘Other’”.  Pandey finds that meanings can get lost between subjects and researchers in a Web-based environment, such as email.

As Janice McIntire-Strasburg states, “digital media encourage convergence—of audio, video, and other digital media…across networks” the phenomenon of copy and pasting for student research or other types of commentary makes easy access a slippery issue, in terms of attribution to an author (McIntire-Strasburg, 295-6).  The tradition and copyright laws allow fair use for educational purposes; students using digital and Web-basted media can easily appropriate these media for their own purpose, without attribution. Part of the loosening of the definition of authorship is the fluidity that Web-based publishing and research encourages.  In other words, because it’s so easy for students to “right click” or download an image, text, etc. from the Web, which is done in the absence of strict control or monitoring, it makes current copyright laws impossible to enforce. The current law protects “original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, form which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device” (McIntire-Strasburg, cited as Hefter &Litowitz, 1999).  In other words, attribution of authorship gets loosened when student (or any person) is able to use copyrighted materials any way they see fit, and then get credit for their work, as in the example on page 292.

With the loosening of traditional ideas about authorship that digital research and publishing can cause also comes the loosening of “text rights,” as they relate to the author and publisher.  Considering the easy and quick access students have to copyrighted material, a pertinent question arises. As Sidney Berger offers, “Who owns a picture, a musical composition, or a sentence on the Web?” (155).  Students can freely, quickly, and easily use digital media and thus reduce the “status of text ownership” (ibid).  Granted, the reason for publishing digitally based texts is the economic practicality of “speed and ubiquity” (Berger, 150).  However, enforcing the laws that protect the text rights of authors is impractical, in terms of close monitoring on the Web, and economically prohibitive, as Berger also points out.  “But it takes a great deal of money to do this [legally pursue illegal appropriations of copyright materials on the Web], and few parties can afford such vigilance and the costs of prosecution (155).  When the law can’t be enforced and the author or publishers can’t pursue legal action, the author’s or publisher’s rights to the text also slip away.

A third slippage that quick and easy access in digital researching creates is not tied to the legal aspects of authorial attribution or textual rights, but a slippage in linguistic and cultural context between researcher and research subject.  In “Researching (with) the Post National ‘Other’”, Iswari P. Pandey does discuss authorship (particularly co-authorship with research subjects); the problem of slippage comes in another form.  Pandey sees both the post national individual and digital technology being similar and thus “share a common fate: They are both often seen as decontextualized…” (112).  Though the Web and its digital technology almost erase the idea of nationhood or ethnicity (because there is such ease and speed of access), this decontextualizing effect can have produce problems for the digital researcher.  Pandey was researching digital literacy and gaming with two subjects from Nepal.  She conducted this research over emails and sent them a questionnaire in this way. Contrary to her idea that the subjects close familiarity with the English language would make it easier for her to interview them, she later reflected and found problems with her questionnaire. She realized that her questions “assumed a more western, American bias…” that created “slippages and misunderstandings”(119).  Despite the participants’ knowledge of the English language and their understanding of digital media, the slippages in linguistic meaning and cultural context became factors that slowed down the research process for Pandey.  In other words, despite Web-based and digital technology and supposedly post-national identities being decontextualized, cultural context ended up causing a slippage in understanding between research subjects and researcher.

If monitoring and preventing the slippage in attribution, authorship and text rights are costly and impractical and misunderstandings in language cause slippages between cultures slows down the research process, is it possible that quick and easy access in digital publishing and research is neither.  At this point a question of just how quick and easy digital access arises.  At this point there is no clear answer, but it is important to keep interrogating this newer process and media of digital research and publishing.

The merger and connection between seemingly disparate academic subjects and my affective reaction

Before I started to study with the English Department at UC, I held to a particular paradigm within which I saw English studies fitting. Grammar, literature, foreign language study, writing workshops, and literary theory seemed like the courses I would exclusively encounter.  I saw these courses as strictly relevant to English studies and believed that other subjects (such as computer science, philosophy, psychology, and the natural and social sciences) didn’t line up with English scholarship in any way, other than by analogy.

I was wrong.  As N. Katherine Hayles states in her conclusion of her first chapter, “Toward Embodied Virtuality”, she wants to “demonstrate how crucial it is to recognize interrelations between different kinds of cultural productions, specifically literature and science” (24).  The interrelation includes her use of terms like “posthuman,” “cybernetic,” “informational pattern,” and “autopoeisis”. Before I considered her definitions for these words, I had approximately this affective reaction. Posthuman?  That sounds like something from a sic-fi novel; cybernetic feels like computer science; and informational pattern reminds of terms I’ve found in cognitive science, Kantian philosophy, and computer science.  Autopoeisis has the sound of a Greek, rhetorical term, while still maintaining a connection to computer science.

I wouldn’t call Hayles use of this terminology a threat (challenge) to the my academic path in English studies. As it turns out, these terms do relate to my course of study–particularly autopoesis. Hayles uses these terms, in relation to the move of humanities (including English) to the digital domain.  But the stretching of English studies (and humanities) into scholarly concerns such as autopoeisis (which she defines as self-fashioning, a New Historic lit crit concept) shows a connection between old and new fields of study within English. My interest in American Rhetorical slogans ( like self-made man “rugged individualism) are also relevant to the concept of autopoeisis, which relates to the evolution of cybernetic studies.

Hayles work and use of this terminology convinces me that the separation between academic fields (such as science and literature)  is artificial, though Hayles doesn’t say that directly.  Her first chapter has made me readjust my paradigm of what English studies should and can include.  Instead of being just an English student or a comp/rhet scholar-in-training, I can use her terminology and concepts as methods of inquiry, which spans seemingly disparate fields of my own interests like Rhetoric, American History, consciousness and science (and science fiction). In other words, instead of discord between the subject areas, I can recognize that all subject areas can come together in the context of this moment of digital archiving and humanities.

Precisely because the digital humanities archiving doesn’t have the sense of place as a traditional hard copy archive, a term like virtual reality is necessary.

Questions from Atheism 1:1 (Genesis 1:1-4)

Ken Ham’s “Answers in Genesis” inspires a counter idea in me. If Ham’s fundamentalist Christianity claims to offer definite answers to all the “big questions” such as “how did we come into existence, or “what happens when we die,” then I will offer clear and specific questions and skepticism to fundamentalist Christianity.
For this particular article, I will consider the following passages from Genesis 1:1-4: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.” (biblegateway.com) In this passage that claims God created matter I ask where God fits into a much simpler scientific phenomenon like a combustion reaction. Could scientists measure and verify God as an agent or participant in a combustion reaction?

My first question: What answers does Genesis actually provide? While Genesis does mention that the earth came into existence,does saying “God did it” actually give us an answer; or does that answer shut down all further inquiry? Sure, we could say “God did it” and then use the scientific method in physics and chemistry to explore how God did it, but there are possible complications if we assume God exists without first measuring or verifying his existence.

If we say God did it, and then say science figures out how God, for example, willed us into being, how do we measure God? Both physicists and chemists base their data on calculations and measurements and conclude their results from that calculated and measured data. How does a finite being like a scientist measure an infinite being like God? With the example of fire, or a combustion reaction, one answer could be that God can be equated to a given or an assumption, like all combustion reactions in nature happen in air unless otherwise noted. For this discussion, air is the chemical mixture composed of nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor, argon, and carbon dioxide. (About.com, http://chemistry.about.com/od/chemistryfaqs/f/aircomposition.htm)
A problem with comparing God to air as an assumption is that air can be measured and verified by scientists all over the world. The different scientists that do fire experiments will not spend any time debating what air is. Unlike air, God cannot be tested through experimentation which makes God problematic as a part of the given conditions. What one scientist assumes about what God is or is not may contradict what another scientist claims God is. Without verifiable measurement, the scientists would be debating the God-given at length, nullifying the universal applicability of the assumption, and thus nullifying the assumption.

A more general problem with God’s immeasurable and unverifiable presence in scientific phenomenon is questioning God’s interaction in these natural events. If we assume the God-given in combustion but cannot measure or verify God’s action in this reaction, then how can we know if God is actually a part of the phenomenon? The “God did it” answer turns to a “how do we measure and verify God’s interaction in combustion” question in chemistry and physics. Scientists can agree upon and verify air’s existence and measure how much a specific reaction consumes; and as a result, they can discern how air interacts with combustion before, during and after it happens.

“God did it” or “God willed it to be” is not an answer; it only raises more questions. How can a scientist measure God in simple, combustion reactions if God is an immeasurable assumption? Scientists would consume their time with debating God’s exact role in combustion as well what they can and cannot assume what God is. Air, though invisible like God, can be measured and thus verified. Contemporary scientists spend little or no time measuring and verifying air in combustion reactions. Unlike God, air is quantifiable, and verifiably functional. Though the specific theoretical mechanisms of air’s participation in combustion reactions may raise debate, each scientist would have experimental data, documentation, and test data that they could physically and visually share with their colleagues. The God-given assumption works on a non-physical and visual called faith. Air’s existence and participation in scientific phenomenon doesn’t require faith, just verification. Air, not God, works as a given condition in a simple combustion reaction. If scientists can’t measure or verify God in something as simple as fire, how God could exist, participate, or cause the heaven’s and the earth to come into existence? How could a non-existent and immeasurable being interact with existent and measurable phenomenon? That is the question for the next article.

Her Savage Orange Shape

It isn’t your face that always inspires me;
it’s the oceans I imagine your soul sailing
when your heart storms in passion.

It isn’t your shape
walking in a short skirt;
it’s your back
fitting with my front.
I wake up unrested
yet happy next to you.

You’re more than a muse
that makes me scratch the itch
a poet gets when I bubble think love.

Your blue eyes open
the nimbus canopy
in the imagined love land.
Bird songs and jazz guitar chords
pulse the wind
and trees play their brush tops
and snare the autumn gusts.

I curl my pen to carve out
our home in that land.
Strong shouldered walls
standing firm in the jazz wind.
Our night sky runs
savage orange
before the close of day.

You turned into fire when I kissed you.
My denial kisses me back now,
puckers its lips,
and blows on the candle
I write this poem by.
The flames still consume me
when I open my mouth
with your name.

4.11.10

Copyright 2010

One Time

When we have no second life,
only one that wakes us in the morning,
is the same one in the afternoon
and the evening; when we finally
rest.

All the second chances
happen with skin and bone,
covering muscle and the soft heart
Life’s harsh light won’t blind us,
we’ll only feel warmth of blood that breaths,
not a ghostly wind from nowhere.

Here now, the bridge wobbles,
the teeth grow crooked
and the roots twist wildly:
While the flower lives;
until the flowers dies.

When beauty fades,
we remember beauty,
awhile. But as water
evaporates in the sun;
all that’s natural parishes.

It’s our pathology of perfection:
pressing petals into scrap books
past the age of 10,
that chokes life
away from growth–not the sun,
that wilts the beautiful petals
in due time.

end part 1