wallpaper dinding

The Prism scandal has been portrayed as being about information. Yet it is quite clear that the menace is not 'information' itself (whatever that is!), but the unequal capacity of corporations and governments to anticipate what each of us is likely to do next. When institutions and corporations know our next move before we do then we have a fundamental problem with democracy and freedom. The right to self-expression and free will is a right to be different, to be transformative, to do our part to shape the world we live in - and to usurp power which overstretches its mandate.

Information is now much like banking. The banks invest our money organising it ways which are not available to any individual, extracting profits which are unrealisable by any individual, but only giving the customer back a tiny fraction of the rewards they have reaped: just enough to encourage the customer to keep placing their money in the bank. Google or Twitter receive a tiny piece of information from each of us. To us, that information may simply be an inconsequential message. But Google and the rest have ways of organising it which are not available to any of us, and extract from their organisation powerful properties of anticipation  which they can then sell to those organisations willing to buy their services. Information is transformed into money by way of anticipation.

Any individual is at the mercy of this. Whilst some might eschew online engagement for fear of these forces (rightly), increasingly online engagement through the internet corporations has become as essential for professional development and advancement as education. Indeed, if the bleatings of the Web2.0 mafia are to be believed, it is more important than education (but they are a naive mafia!). The more we commit ourselves to the services of internet corporations, the more the world changes to enforce engagement. Just as the car has become a machine for covering the planet in tarmac, so the internet is a machine for turning us all into 'information workers'.

But we have no concept of the freedom of information workers. We don't have a concept of information. But we can now see the asymmetry of anticipation between the giant internet corporations, governments and the people who are meant to be the ones who vote for governments. The fact that we don't vote for internet corporations must now be a massive concern.

Part of the problem is that few understand the power that can be harvested from Google accounts, Facebook, etc. The pattern matching algorithms are so sophisticated previously unknown commonalities in our psychology and biology can be revealed. Ironically, these algorithms emerged through the massive data challenge of genetic sequencing. But when we 'sequence' ourselves, we need to understand what is being exposed, and the power of revealing it.

I think the asymmetry will need to be addressed. Eventually the political scandal will be apparent to everyone. But also there is no way back. The technologies are there now. But maybe the next wave of social and technical transformation will not be about individuals submitting information, but individuals having their own means of technologically-enhanced anticipation. But in that situation, the locus of meaning, of being human and of freedom will become ever more important.

To pursue education as a science requires a particular attitude of criticality. Yet educational institutions can be remarkably uncritical of their own practices. To pursue education as a science is to attempt to change this.

The barriers to a scientific approach are very significant. Yet in a "knowledge economy" (yes, I don't know what it means either), it would at least seem that teaching and learning are of fundamental importance to healthy social ecologies of businesses, institutions, nations and the world.

To pursue education as science is to critically examine the nature of "healthy social ecologies"

These are structures existing amongst human beings which have both synchronic and diachronic dimensions. Within those dimensions are the elements which feed the continual reproduction and tranformation of those forms. It seems very likely to me that effective ways of thinking about emergent structures and processes within healthy social ecologies are fractal. Or at least, fractal thinking may be the closest we can get to an effective way of thinking in order to maintain healthy ecologies.

To understand education as science is to understand the relationship between the way we think about education and what actually happens in it. More deeply, it is to critique what we mean by thinking itself.

Much educational thought over the last 100 years (pretty much since the beginning of state-supported compulsory education) has been grounded in psychology, which itself was in its infancy. The dominant models put  forward by psychology to support education have been either essentially mentalist or behaviourist in character. These models reflect particular ways of thinking about a person and their experience which present opportunities for empirical defence of the respective models. In other words, the models have followed established methodologies. The methodologies are rarely challenged.

At issue is the relationship between cause and effect in education. Hume's regularity theory of causation is unlikely to be right, even in it's characterisation of practice in the physical sciences. But the contrived regularities of education produced through statistical analysis have meant that the deficiencies of the method have rarely been exposed, or worse, that a post-modern attitude of "the impossibility of naturalism in education" has equally been able to take root.

The question of causality goes right to the heart of the nature of education. When we think that the cause of engineers is engineering courses, the cause of physicists is courses in physics, and so on, we miss something fundamental about the real practice and experience of physicists and engineers. What are the causes of a physicist? or a doctor? or a lawyer?

That is the scientific question.

To establish an institution which addresses this question is perhaps where education should go next...

I was getting tired by the end, and a failed attempt to link up to an iTEC workshop in Bolton meant that I had to go over some of the exercises that I had done over the two days (this time with volunteers from the audience to help me out). Everyone seems to have got the hang of it.

My next stop in the week was Marseille for a conference on "Ethics and responsibility in economics and business studies” (http://philo-eco.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Ethics-Responsibility-in-Economics-and-Business-Studies.pdf), where I was delivering a paper on George Bataille's economic theory. This is a small group that I weirdly found myself involved with through the Cambridge Social Ontology Group who first introduced me to Critical Realism more than 10 years ago. It was rich, intimate and profound event, with contributions ranging from Social Ontology and Ethics (with particular focus on a critique of Sen), the nature of the person,  business coaching, Corporate governance, and numerology. Marseille was beautiful.

On the saturday I delivered remotely a session for Bolton's new EdD course on "Education and Reality". It was interesting the extent it was possible to stimulate rich discussion amongst the students, despite the fact that I wasn't there. I think I also managed to upset them with an awkward statement: "science teachers are not really scientists - if they were, they'd be doing science"... an audible gasp! Maybe I should have rephrased it... but hurling a few unintentional insults into lessons at least gets peoples' attention (although I don't want to end up like Niall Ferguson!)

I've had a strange experience in my attempts to multitask and be in three places at once (In these days of scarce resource, such measures become necessary).

I was hoping to give a presentation at my University's research conference on my work on metagames, information and music. Unfortunately, on the day of the conference I found myself in Turkey talking to Turkish teachers  about the iTEC project, and trying to coordinate a testing session for iTEC in Bolton. So my talk became a video.

Videos are much more difficult to create than powerpoint talks. And I thought very carefully about how I was going to present what are pretty complex ideas. They are, I think, ideas that merit some attention because they deal with information as experience, rather than information as abstraction. So I sent a colleague who was also presenting in the same session to show the video.

Of course, one is always at the mercy of session chairs. But I haven't yet come across one who says "I'm not watching a video. I'm going to get an early lunch!" I think at the very least this shows a lack of awareness of the effort it takes to produce the thing - a kind of technological prejudice. Given that my presentation was about decision, it is an interesting decision!

Our abstractions of information (including those surrounding academic practice) lead us to certain expectations which in turn blind us to the constraining effects of the information we're not directly aware of (or don't want to think about). The experience of sitting in a room listening to an argument is a convivial experience whether or not there is a real person there doing the talking. To suppose that only valid information is conveyed in the presence of the talking person is clearly nonsense. But we don't really have a theoretical apparatus to explain the experience of sitting in a room with other people listening to an argument. That's the gap I am trying to address in my work.

There's something here about marking certain types of informative practice as valid, and others not. To admit other things as equally valid sources of "information" which we might consider invalid is to poke absences within ourselves which we would rather not be poked. The stick that Wikipedia still comes in for is a good example. These are the result of personal 'taboos' of academics - the things we bracketed-out from our experience because we found a way to exist by leaving them alone. And yet, we have forgotten that any way of life is ultimately framed by the things that we don't think about.

Considering music as 'information' is about as close as we get to saying "there's no such thing as information". Really, I think information is simply 'absence', or constraint (following Terry Deacon). Wiener thought that information was an ontological category of its own. But the ontological category is not Wiener's 'negentropy': it's 'neg'.

And perhaps the conference chair's desire for an early lunch was the most informative thing that could have occurred!

For those interested, the video is available here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13531449/information_0001.wmv

I am working on a framework for understanding educational institutions as 'ecologies' and this is the first of a number of posts which will develop the idea. As managerial interventions (from Vice Chancellors and ministers) slash institutions, there have been profound effects (many of which unforeseeable) on the culture and operations within those institutions. Yet, we have little understanding of how institutional culture is shaped, the relationship between the functions of individuals, their job roles, the students, formal procedures, governance, etc. Present attempts at institutional reform feel like medieval dentistry and a more sophisticated understanding of institutions seems much needed.

Accountability lies at the heart of any viable operation. Yet it's real function is difficult to pin down. Totalitarian regimes appear viable - for a while. But they usually collapse eventually. I was thinking this looking at the news from Turkey (where I'm giving an ITEC presentation next week). Accountability is not just about engineering 'participation' from the electorate (holding a referendum about real-estate development seems inappropriate), it is about having 'trusted mechanisms' of critique and inspection (in the UK, we would probably hold a public inquiry, not just into the park development, but into the actions of the authorities). Deep down, these mechanisms serve to make explicit the connection between information and decision, where sources of  information upon which decisions are based are revealed, and the mechanisms of decision-making in the light of information are inspected and challenged. Within educational ecology, an equivalent question which relates to the Turkish situation is "what are the mechanisms for holding Vice Chancellors to account? How are sources of information exposed and decision-making processes inspected?"

Notionally, there are at least three mechanisms.

1. the academic senate (or sometimes called the academic board)
2. the governors
3. the unions

The world of computer science today has been transformed by the vast quantities of data that we are all continually contributing to. Where the challenge to computer scientists might once have been to create machines that store, organise, calculate and retrieve data in the light of clear intentions of managers, governments and corporations, the challenge now in the face of such vast data resources and the sheer overwhelming difficulty of making decisions is to work out what any of it means. From assemblages of calculating functions which start from nothing and create data resources, we move towards creating assemblages of filters and masks to render the informational complexity of world manageable to us.

The difference between these two situations is fundamental. In the early days of computing, individual human intention and engineering expertise could be married where intentions could be realised and amplified. Now, the unforeseeable complexities of amplifying intentions make us doubt any individual perspective as we look to make a distinction between what is and isn't important. Where we saw a division between man and machine, or at least only a kind of isomorphism, now we see no separation: the world is man, matter and information. Where before computation was an intended function applied by man to matter to produce information, now computation lies in the unintended mechanisms that relate intention to man, machine and information.

So is the concept of a "computer" today the same as a "computer" in the 1950s? I think the answer is clearly not. And this means that we need to think about our relationship with technology and in what ways our calculating machinery might best be thought to work for us now. To think differently means to think back to the conceptual basis of computers so that we might see what's different now.

The Turing Machine is a conceptual model of a very rudimentary computer, and most of our computing equipment can be viewed as elaborated Turing Machines at a deep level. But it is, like all computers, a bottom-up device. Emergent behaviour arises from simple principles which are executed over time.

The thing that fascinated Turing towards the end of his life was that this emergent behaviour in its most basic state did not describe emergent forms. Turing believed that it ought to be possible to describe emergent forms from basic principles, and he made a fascinating suggestion in his late paper "A chemical basis of morphogenesis". But that paper was largely ignored (it's only beginning to spark new interest now as we face the problem of morphogenesis in a variety of ways, including the 'Symbol Grounding Problem' in Information Science). But I think the reason for it being ignored or seen as irrelevant was that the basic computer didn't have to create social form. Social form occurred around it. The computer might have operated on basic principles, but the combination of computer + society unleashed mechanisms whose complexity was even more baffling than the complexities which had led to the development of the computer in the first place.

I remember as a 13-year-old playing with my ZX Spectrum that it was the thrilling effects of the computer on me and my friends that made the whole thing magic (computing has never been able to recapture this). Basic principles led to unforeseeable consequences amongst us. It was fascinating.

But what now? The truth is, those effects are everywhere. Do we need more machines working from basic principles?

I'm going to suggest that we don't, and that we look elsewhere for effective computing.

What matters are the priorities of man, not the capabilities of machines. Actions result from decisions, and decisions are taken in an environment of information, matter and other people. If there are basic principles, they are not about writing symbols to a tape; they are key questions: "What is out there?", "How might we look at it?", "What ways of looking at it help us to make decisions?", "What are the implications of those decisions?" These are critical questions as basic principles. To each of these questions, technologies must be brought to bear. "What is out there?" invites a consideration of the sum-total of all information about a domain. "How might we look at it?" invites a consideration of available filters. "What ways of looking at it help us to make decisions" invites a consideration of ways of interacting with different filters and different models. "What are the implications of those decisions?" invites a consideration of available predictive models.

This is 'negative' computing.

A negative computer is a data-immersed computer. The operations of a negative computer are to filter-out what is not deemed necessary. A negative computer is entirely entwined with its interface: there is no 'separable' CPU: the negative computer works through human participation.

Imagine a kind of Turing machine where the symbols on the tape magically appear at all positions. The machine seeks meaning, meaning it must decide strategies for moving through the tape which will give it some predictive capabilities as to where the next symbols will appear. It can only move towards this through trial and error. But the complexity of the tape is too great for one machine. But if other machines are faced with the same problem, with the same tape, and they are connected for coordination purposes with their own tape (independent of the main tape), then there is some hope that together they might get there.

This isn't quite a negative computer, despite it having the basic function of 'filtering'. It cannot be because it is still cast as an abstract entity. A proper negative computer is not separable from the humans who engage with it. They are more than the collaborative negative Turing machines described above. With the negative computer, there may be an objectively observable "shared tape" at the deepest level (ethics or conscience?). But the filters and the complexity contribute to a 'tape universe' much more stratified and constellated. It is within that world that the negative computer operates.

Yeats said "Measurement began our might". To measure something (certainly in Yeats's sense) is to understand something of its meaning.

Computation isn't measurement. Computation - when treated sensibly - serves to help us discover the limits of our abstractions. We put a formula into the computer, we explore the parameters.  We notice when interesting things happen. By 'interesting', we look for those things which we couldn't have anticipated.

When we measure we bring tools and ideas to bear on the world which is seen to be independent of the measuring act. Measurement is often seen as a means of observing what is there. The fact that our act of measurement changes the world as every act does is a complexity which the scientists of the enlightenment hadn't grasped. When we measure, we look simply look to gather things together.

Measurements produce data. Data can be fed into a computer whose algorithms produce effects, some of which we may find 'interesting': things we couldn't have anticipated. But because those algorithms operate on what we believe to be "measurements" we have a tendency to forget that the interesting things we see are the product of the limits of our abstractions. Instead we believe them to be isomorphic to the world which we measured. We then attribute meaning to phenomena in the world which we have gained through our computer screens. The world is changed as a result - but not in ways we can imagine.

The deep problem here is that whilst out conception of finding something interesting in computation revolves around finding something we couldn't anticipate, we do not accept that measuring something isn't also an act related to anticipation as well. Yet to believe something to be measurable is the result of a way of looking at the world where the phenomena look stable, countable, regular, etc.

But there are many lenses through which to view the world, and each lens produces its own kind of stability, and consequently, a different kind of measurability. Which measurement? Which lens? Which computation?

A typical trick in the social sciences is to use computation to produce the illusion of measurability. Statistics flatten experiences to data which can then be compared. In our financial institutions, the same thing happens: trading systems use prices as cyphers standing for real substances and qualities.

Consequently we are in a mess.

But only because we have forgotten what we are looking at. What we look at are things which we couldn't anticipate; things which are the limits of our abstractions. The obvious thing, given this, is to develop our abstractions! In social science, this rarely happens.

Instead, new policies are created to make observed phenomena fit the existing abstractions. Data operates as a kind of currency, with everyone competing to have the 'best data', everyone trying to implement the policies to produce the best outcomes within the current abstract frame. In the heat of this competition, changing the frame is practically impossible.

The question is "where does the real meaning lie?" Anticipation in daily life requires deep knowledge of each other. It requires the kind of knowledge that doesn't come through computer-processed measurements. It comes through lived experience.

Perhaps not until we see our computation processes and measurements as part and parcel of a lived experience rather than abstract entities, will we be able to situate the power computation and technology within the context of well-lived and dignified lives.