emotions and pro-social and religious sentiments during the September 11 disaster

Abstract:

Analysing emotional states under duress or during heightened, life-and-death situations is extremely difficult, especially given the inability of laboratory experiments to adequately replicate the environment and the inherent biases of post event surveys.  It is in this  area that  natural experiments  come to the fore by combining the randomization that comes from natural data with an experimentally realistic event. The pager communications from September 11th, made publicly 

available by Wiki Leaks (Wiki Leaks, 2009), provide exactly the kind of natural experiment emotion researchers have been seeking.  We have  analysed the pager messages by applying an absolute count methodology and by presenting both positive and negative emotive categories as well as the development of  pro-social and religious sentiment. Providing  behavioural evidence on how people communicate under  extreme circumstances and offers valuable insights into human nature. We demonstrate that positive and pro-social communications are the first to emerge followed by the slower and lower negative  communications. Religious sentiment is the last to emerge, as individual attempt to make sense of event. 

we no longer believe in the solitary mind. If the Romantics had Hume and the modernists had Freud, the current psychological model — and this should come as no surprise — is that of the networked or social mind. Evolutionary psychology tells us that our brains developed to interpret complex social signals. According to David Brooks, that reliable index of the social-scientific zeitgeist, cognitive scientists tell us that “our decision-making is powerfully influenced by social context”; neuroscientists, that we have “permeable minds” that function in part through a process of “deep imitation”; psychologists, that “we are organized by our attachments”; sociologists, that our behavior is affected by “the power of social networks.” The ultimate implication is that there is no mental space that is not social (contemporary social science dovetailing here with postmodern critical theory). One of the most striking things about the way young people relate to one another today is that they no longer seem to believe in the existence of Thoreau’s “darkness.

 William Deresiewicz

The end of Solitude

the clocks were striking thirteen: Another example of a bogus trend story from NYT. Shocking it's from a newspaper?

aprado:

This is another example of a bogus trend story from The New York Times, with the headline “Facebook Exodus,” based on the unsupported assertion that people are leaving Facebook in droves.

As a newspaper editor, I’m guessing, but again, this is just a guess here, that this kind of story plays…

(via aprado-deactivated20120722)

In the 1950’s, when Jane Jacobs fought against running a road through Washington Square Park, she was fighting to save nineteenth century sprawl from twentieth-century sprawl.

Edward Glaser

Triumph of the City

Innovation Essentials – Think Emergent

Innovation is an inherently emergent process. It’s not just about where we want to end up; it’s highly dependent on where we are. Where we begin has a profound impact on where we can go.

For some four decades now, chaos theory and the science of complexity have had a growing influence on diverse fields ranging from weather forecasting to organizational development, and from astrophysics to network theory to leadership. The crucial importance of emergence, or what is often called “dependence on initial conditions” is one of the key characteristics of complex systems. And so it is with innovation.

The universe is emergent. Galaxies and stars and planets formed based on prior conditions; they didn’t just appear. Life is emergent; it doesn’t just happen. Certain conditions need to be present for it to occur and survive and flourish. It has continuity; dogs give birth to puppies, not kittens. And, each of our lives is emergent. Where we’ve been before to a significant degree determines where we are able to go, what limits and opportunities we face.

Successful innovators understand the importance of emergence. They realize that having a compelling vision is not very helpful if we can’t somehow connect it to current realities and find a way to get from here to there. This is especially true of successful entrepreneurs. They know they need more than a great idea; they need to figure out how to make that idea real. That may require capital, expertise, market research and finding the right people. It may also require a strong stomach and more than a little staying power to survive the inevitable setbacks and disappointments. Entrepreneurs ask very pragmatic questions like: Who will value this new offering and what are they willing to pay? What should the business model be in order to capture some of the value we create?

A smart early stage investor takes emergence into account, evaluating not just how good an idea may be, but how feasible it may be, at what cost, in what time frame, and whether the right people are in place to make it happen. “Can you get there?” is just as important as, “Where do you want to go?” The lion’s share of early stage investment is emergent, focusing on the leading edge of technology and trying to exploit what is newly possible without pushing too far too fast.

Innovative companies challenge themselves but only so far. Even a company like Apple is cautious about not straying too far from its main competencies and the state of the art. Steve Jobs has explained that the idea of an iPad preceded the iPod, but it was held back because of how they saw the critical factors of its success emerging, both in terms of the technology and the market. Steve Jobs felt that the iPod should come first. Judging by the success of both products, apparently he was right.

It was Niccolo Machiavelli, who wrote, “There is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new order of things.” When we strive to innovate, we need to be pushing the envelope and breaking new ground. But we also need to be highly sensitive to initial conditions, so that our ideas can emerge successfully.

Interlude: The Emergence of Cities in Books

On a particularly foggy Friday evening in San Francisco (with nothing to do but putter about indoors), I sat down to watch a TEDx talk on the Ngram Viewer by Harvard University researchers Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel. Now under the auspices of Google Books, Ngram Viewer allows users to search for words in a database of five million books from across centuries.

While fiddling around with Ngram Viewer myself, I thought it would be interesting to look into the emergence of the word “cities” — and thus the emergence of the idea itself — in the canon of English books. Here’s asnapshot of the results, juxtaposing a search for “cities,” “pollution” and “industry” across Google Books’ digitized repository of English books published from 1700 to 2000:

As it turns out, references to “cities” started showing up in the canon of English books in the early 1700s,  permeating rapidly until the beginning of the 1800s before plateauing. References to the term — and presumably its popularity as a topic of interest — picked up again between 1880 and 1920, and have since been in gradual decline. At the same time, we see a rapid increase in references to “industrial” from 1880 to 1920, with a precipitous decline from 1980 onwards (perhaps we have become inured to the concept). References to “pollution” spiked only from 1960 onwards, interestingly enough, coinciding with the publication of Jane Jacobs’ “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”in 1961.

To put one’s finger on the pulse of the human zeitgeist from 2000 onwards, a comprehensive scouring of books wouldn’t be complete without a search through blogs, news and media on the Web. I suspect that references to “cities” aren’t in sharp decline within the online corpus — if anything, the grand undertaking of global human migration, along with a proliferation of digital literature on its delights and discontents, has only just begun.

Get ready for the global brain

Yuri Milner predicts “the emergence of the global brain, which consists of all the humans connected to each other and to the machine and interacting in a very unique and profound way, creating an intelligence that does not belong to any single human being or computer.” (File photo)

By Cynthia Freeland
Reuters

Get ready for the global brain. That was the grand finale of a presentation on the next generation of the Internet I heard last week from Yuri Milner. G-8 leaders had a preview of Milner’s predictions a few months earlier, when he was among the technology savants invited to brief the world’s most powerful politicians in Deauville, France.

Milner is the technology guru most of us have never heard of. He was an early outside investor in Facebook, sinking $200 million in the company in 2009 for a 1.96 percent stake, a decision that was widely derided as crazy at the time. He was also early to spot the potential of Zynga, the gaming company, and of Groupon, the daily deals site.

His investing savvy propelled Milner this year onto the Forbes Rich List, with an estimated net worth of $1 billion. One reason his is not yet a household name is that he does his tech spotting from Moscow, not a city most of us look to for innovative economic ideas.

Milner was speaking in the Ukranian city of Yalta, at the annual mini-Davos hosted by the Ukrainian pipes baron and art collector Victor Pinchuk (disclosure — I moderated at the event). What was striking about Milner’s remarks was how sharply his tone differed from that of the other participants.

The Americans – among them the economists Lawrence H. Summers and Paul Krugman – were glum about their country’s economic stagnation and its political inability to adopt policies that could end it. The Europeans – a group that included the foreign ministers of Sweden and Poland, and Jürgen Fitschen, who has been named co-chief executive of Deutsche Bank – were worried about the sovereign debt crisis.

Even the Turks and the Indians, whose economies grew more than 8 percent last year, were anxious about uneven development at home, and the threat of economic tsunamis coming from abroad.

Milner’s perspective was entirely different. For one thing, at a time when where you sit so often determines where you stand, Milner almost perfectly represents a global technology elite whose frame of reference is planet Earth. He mostly lives in Moscow, but has recently purchased a palatial home in Silicon Valley. He addressed the Ukrainian conference by video link from Singapore.

From that vantage point, the most pressing issue in the world today isn’t recession and political paralysis in the West, or even the rapid development and political transformation in emerging markets, it is the technology revolution, which, in Milner’s view, is only getting started. Here are the changes he thinks are most significant:

• The Internet revolution is the fastest economic change humans have experienced, and it is accelerating. Milner said that 2 billion people are online today. During the next decade, he predicts that number will more than double.

• The Internet is not just about connecting people, it is also about connecting machines, a phenomenon Milner dubbed “the Internet of things.” Milner said that 5 billion devices are connected today. By 2020, he thinks more than 20 billion will be.

• More information is being created than ever before. Milner asserted that as much information was created every 48 hours in 2010 as was created between the dawn of time and 2003. By 2020, that same volume of information will be generated every 60 minutes.

• People are sharing information ever more frequently. The pieces of content shared on Facebook have increased from 140 million in 2009 to 4 billion in 2011. We are even sending more e-mails: 50 billion were sent in 2006, versus 300 billion in 2010.

• The result, according to Milner, is the dominance of Internet platforms relative to traditional media. “The largest newspaper in the United States is only reaching 1 percent of the population.” he said. “That compares to Internet media, which is used by 25 percent of the population daily and growing.”

• Internet businesses are much more efficient than brick-and-mortar companies. This was one of Milner’s most striking observations, and a clue to the paradox of how we find ourselves simultaneously living in a time of what Milner views as unprecedented technological innovation but also high unemployment in the developed West. As Milner said, “big Internet companies on average are capable of generating revenue of $1 million per employee, and that compares to 10 to 20 percent of that which is normally generated by traditional offline businesses of comparable size.” As an illustration, Milner cited Facebook, where, he said, each single engineer supports one million users.

• Artificial intelligence is part of our daily lives, and its power is growing. Milner cited everyday examples like Amazon.com’s recommendation of books based on ones we have already read and Google’s constantly improving search algorithm.

• Finally – and Milner admitted this was “a bit of a futuristic picture” – he predicted “the emergence of the global brain, which consists of all the humans connected to each other and to the machine and interacting in a very unique and profound way, creating an intelligence that does not belong to any single human being or computer.”

More than most of us, Milner understands that changes in what he calls “the offline world” can have real bite: He lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the politics and economy of Russia today are no cakewalk. But, in a year that has seen the Arab Spring and the threat of the collapse of the euro, Milner’s predictions are an important reminder that the most significant revolution may be happening in cyberspace.

musicfortorching: Actor-Network Theory “can more technically be described as a “material-semiotic” method. This means that it maps relations that are simultaneously material (between things) and semiotic (between concepts). It assumes that many relations are both material and semiotic. For example, the interactions in a school involve children, teachers, their ideas, and technologies (such as tables, chairs, computers and stationery). Together these form a single network. Actor-network theory tries to explain how material–semiotic networks come together to act as a whole (for example, a school is both a network and an actor that hangs together, and for certain purposes acts as a single entity). As a part of this it may look at explicit strategies for relating different elements together into a network so that they form an apparently coherent whole. According to actor-network theory, such actor-networks are potentially transient, existing in a constant making and re-making. This means that relations need to be repeatedly “performed” or the network will dissolve. (The teachers need to come to work each day, and the computers need to keep on running.) They also assume that networks of relations are not intrinsically coherent, and may indeed contain conflicts (there may be adversarial relations between teachers/children, or computer software may be incompatible). Social relations, in other words, are only ever in process, and must be performed continuously.” - Wiki. More at Actor-Network Theory and Communication Networks: Toward Convergence by Felix Stalder.
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musicfortorching:

Actor-Network Theory “can more technically be described as a “material-semiotic” method. This means that it maps relations that are simultaneously material (between things) and semiotic (between concepts). It assumes that many relations are both material and semiotic. For example, the interactions in a school involve children, teachers, their ideas, and technologies (such as tables, chairs, computers and stationery). Together these form a single network.

Actor-network theory tries to explain how material–semiotic networks come together to act as a whole (for example, a school is both a network and an actor that hangs together, and for certain purposes acts as a single entity). As a part of this it may look at explicit strategies for relating different elements together into a network so that they form an apparently coherent whole.

According to actor-network theory, such actor-networks are potentially transient, existing in a constant making and re-making. This means that relations need to be repeatedly “performed” or the network will dissolve. (The teachers need to come to work each day, and the computers need to keep on running.) They also assume that networks of relations are not intrinsically coherent, and may indeed contain conflicts (there may be adversarial relations between teachers/children, or computer software may be incompatible). Social relations, in other words, are only ever in process, and must be performed continuously.” - Wiki.

More at Actor-Network Theory and Communication Networks: Toward Convergence by Felix Stalder.

(via musicfortorching-deactivated201)