wallpaper dinding

I had a fascinating and wide-ranging chat to Rom Harré over lunch on Thursday at the LSE. We started talking about bureaucracy and the inauthenticity of governance in educational institutions, and (what I took to be) the relationship between the social structural conditions for governance and the agency of those who are responsible for it. In a way, this set the scene for a broader discussion...

Following my previous post about the problems inherent in attributing behaviour (e.g. birdsong) to mental phenomena, there is something I want to explore further.Artistotle says in the Posteria Analytics that to know something is to know its cause. For him, that would mean to know its material nature, its form, the agency which brought it into being and its purpose. For Aristotle, cause is a real...

I saw an interesting article on research that had been done to uncover the neural cause of bird song. The song could be attributed to a 'domino effect' of neural firings. Quite convincing... so why am I sceptical? I could just be being bloody minded in the face of strong evidence (heaven forbid!), except that I think there is a philosophical error being made which says sonething like 'the music is...

Poverty is often associated with the absence of something in someone in comparison to others' possession of it. Causal connections are then made between the absence and the social and physical ills that are caused by it: starvation, stigma, crime, unrest, etc. What tends to happen in this chain of thinking is that an attempt is made to identify the absence, and measures are taken to remedy it. But...

What is Diachronic symmetry? We might see it in the way we tell historical narratives about something... In biology it would be a way of telling the ontogenetic story of an organisism, or the phylogenetic story of  a species. In economics, it might be the emergence of relations of production. But diachronic symmetry is also something we feel. We feel it's time for change ("and now for...

In my thinking about symmetry and proportion, I was playing around with logarithmic spirals and the golden section proportions that sit behind them. This might provide a different way of presenting the regulating functions of the VSM rather than Beer's diagram. Basically, I'm concerned to show the relative proportion of the regulatory mechanisms, and the fact that at any point we may be 'damping'...

What sort of evidence is being produced for the efficacy of e-learning project interventions? How is the evidence interpreted? How is it gathered? What does it mean? In fact, is it evidence at all?One perspective, which I find interesting, is that what is touted as evidence is in fact narrative. Projects are 'participative story generators'. This is not to take anything away from much of the value...

One of the most fascinating aspects of fractal images is the extent to which they display similar proportionality to natural objects. In the Mandelbrot set, for example, we can see the golden-section ratios (Phi) clearly. Such symmetry exists temporally too, most notably in music. I was always fascinated by Lendvai's analysis of Bartok:At the moment, I'm wrestling with the idea of proportion and symmetry...

I'm making progress on creating a 'flight simulator' for the University. The idea is to create an agent-based simulation which allows for the realistic modelling of the dynamics between diverse individuals and the social and material structures they inhabit. This would allow for the dry-running of interventions and observation of likely effects, which would in turn allow for deeper planning for mitigation...

MacIntyre's recent charting of the relationship between catholic thinking and universities provides a powerful platform for a deep critique of where we are now. Much in line with his thinking about ethics, he identifies an 'un-tethering' process which has led to the current obsession with specialisation and professionalisation, whilst losing sight of anything 'universal'. "Research universities in...

I was thinking about the interview I did with Scott the other day. When we think of amplifying our teaching online, why do we think of one teacher talking to class or one teacher talking to camera? Is it because our face-to-face practice has led us to think of the 'efficiency' of teaching as being one-teacher-per-class? But online, this really doesn't make sense, since the scale of what might be achieved...

I'm thinking about a 'wild' university, as opposed to the 'cultivated' (and genetically-engineered) variety that we are so familiar with. Following yesterdays thoughts about custodianship, the implications of a wild university are interesting. The value systems of governments which determine 'fairness', 'fitness', 'rigour', 'value for money' and whose value is transferred to students through qualification...

With all the talk of tuition fees rising, I've been thinking about different ways of viewing the problem of the funding of education. In particular, I'm wondering about whether we have to see this through the lens of the 'benefits' of learning? What about the benefits of 'institutional membership' and participating in the maintenance of cultural institutions? Why not see students as shareholders in...

Scott Wilson and I made this video discussion yesterday to introduce Open Source Software to students.Introducing Open Source Software Development from Strategy Workshops on Vim...

This was an attempt this evening to make my daughter's maths tables fun. In fact I think we succeeded in making it hilarious! Whether the exercise did any good I'm not sure (she still struggles with a few of them..) But it gave us all a very warm feeling. Will that warm feeling now over-ride some of the negative emotion she has experienced with relation to her maths in future? I don't know, but everything's...

I found Hermann Weyl's 'Symmetry' in the library, sought out via a circuitous route by way of Stafford Beer's 'radar' reading list and a fascinating discussion yesterday. It's beautiful. What's interesting is the two uses of the word 'symmetry' - one for proportion, the other for mathematical bilateral symmetry, and the way the two forms of usage relate. Symmetry and pattern are related. Musical forms...

Astrid and I spent much of today visiting my dad in a 'respite' home. He didn't really want us to leave - but we're powerless to do anything else. Despite the best efforts of the staff (some of whom were very caring), it was full of desperately confused people: "Do you know where I am?" came one somewhat existential refrain from a lady who continued to ask this question even if you attempted to answer...