wallpaper animals

Ibn Khaldun was a remarkable 15th century social theorist and early economist whose ideas foreshadow those of Durkheim, Marx, Bourdieu and Giddens. His work was based on a close examination of desert societies in the 15th century, highlighting the processes of development of rich and poor. Khaldun has been on my mind following my return from Ras Al Khaimah. His concept of Asabiyyah describes the emergent processes of social transformation following invasion by nomadic groups, and the gradual assimilation of the dominant 'culture'.

Whilst there are don't appear to be any immediate parallels between a medieval context of frequent invasion and decay of civilisations, the processes Khaldun describes have modern counterparts in terms of social capital and social networks. But what I am part of (and practically every other UK and US university at the moment) is some sort of incursion (although of course, welcomed!) into Arab culture with a European model of education. How might Khaldun see this?

Education is welcomed into the culture as a way of diversifying an economy: as a service industry, education is big business. Students for foreign universities are spread between the native populations and migrant workers (or offspring from them). There are more native students for more prestigious universities, whereas for less prestigious institutions, there are more migrants. There are often significant differences in political power between migrant workers and natives: but the power imbalances can often serve as a motivator which drives individuals towards increased capability and education. Foreign educational institutions similarly find themselves as migrant institutions with fewer rights to property and disadvantaged legal status.

Bearing in mind the contrast between these different social groups, the distinctions that Khaldun draws on to highlight the relationship between urban civilisation (kingdoms) and Bedouin civilisation (nomadic) may be a useful starting point. One of the principal questions is to examine the viability of this situation, and the viability of 'nomadic' educational businesses. Political imbalance and injustice acts to adjust the distribution of risks in society, and the anxiety that results focuses on education to manage it. The principle political inequalities are often not inequalities of wealth, but of risk. This suggests a more general point that increasing wealth in a super-rich country does not bring increasing political power or more even distribution of risk.

In a society of unequal risk distribution, education is attractive because only education and the capability that can arise from it can give increased flexibility in response to managing risk. Increases in capital in terms of property are less possible (housing, for example, is only available for rent): what counts is the increase in social capital - particularly the ability to influence the ruling power; this depends on property relations to ideas and skills.

However, there's a catch here. Good education depends on good teaching. If teachers do not have sufficient educational capital to maintain their own wellbeing and flexibility in an unequal society, they will not be happy: and it's rare for an unhappy teacher teach well. The status of migrant teachers is the same as for other migrant workers. In this way, what appears as education might not be able to deliver in terms of the increase in personal and social capital. I suspect this is the case for most educational incursions in unequal societies, however prestigious.

This is not insoluble. It requires a rethink as to how education might be organised. The fundamental issue is to treat the doctor at the same time as the patient. To do this, I think that learning activities, particularly those involving overseas contacts (from more equal societies) can work magic. Activity constrains communications; but it does so to enable them. Global coordination of activity is now possible.  It means organising education around tools and scenarios rather than curricula. With this, a viable future for nomadic educational  incursions
might be a possibility.

i saw this picture on brooke's blog and i immediately saved it for what i wanted our back area to look like.  i want to add a window box and do a bricked- in grilling station!!  

warren painted the swing and hung it.  i got a cushion from world market...it will do for now but i would love to eventually recover it in a trina turk fabric.  please excuse the ADT sign and the lack of plants....one day we will get there!!  it's always a work in progress.  i would also love to cover the chain w/ rope.  

last but not least, i wanted to show y'all taylor's window treatment.  i showed y'all the inspiration:

and here it is in her room.....i think it turned out really cute!  now if i can just get the rest of her room together that would be great!!

i hope y'all have a wonderful mother's day!!  mom- thanks so much for being my best friend!  i love you :)  see y'all next week!

Critical Realism, the philosophy of Roy Bhaskar, Margaret Archer and a number of acolytes is a philosophical critique of the nature of causation. It is grounded in a re-examination of scientific knowledge and asks the question "given that we have scientific knowledge of the world, what must the world be like?" In responding to this, it argues that Hume's theory of causation (that scientists construct causes in the light of reproducible experiment) is wrong. Bhaskar is not the only person to say this: his supervisor, Rom Harre said much the same thing in his "Causal Powers". Bhaskar argues that the Humean mistake has had knock-on effects on the social sciences, where social science has tried to compensate for the lack of reproducible experiments (with statistics, probabilities, textual analysis, etc) so as to similarly facilitate a process of 'constructing causes' in an attempt to make defensible claims about the social world. A variety of social science methodologies do this - for example, the Grounded Theory of Glaser and Strauss.

I think Bhaskar's argument here is pretty solid, and it has led to some practical innovations like Pawson and Tilley's Realistic Evaluation, which I find far more sensible than most of the available social science methods. But my concern recently has been with the arts, not science. How does Bhaskar's argument transfer to the arts?

Where scientists concern themselves with cause, I think artists concern themselves with form. Form and Cause are related - at least for Aristotle, and I think both are related to knowledge. Artistic knowledge is different from scientific knowledge: but Shakespeare will still leave us astounded at insights into human nature and life that the most penetrating scientists barely touch.

Bhaskar's argument for scientists is that they do not construct causes, they discover them. Similarly, I think artists do not construct forms, they discover them. Picasso's famous comment "I do not seek, I find" would bear this out I think. But in much contemporary art (and particularly music) there is a tendency to focus on abstract phenomena and discover forms: mathematical series, formulae, concepts. I wonder if this is the analogue of the 'reproducible experiment' in the sciences. Are artists drawn to these things because the possibility of discovering universal form is questioned? It is as if the discovery of abstract form is used as a way of making artistically defensible claims about the world. This seems to me to be a methodological (or technical) error.

The question for the arts is "What is the form discovered by art delimited by?" Those artists who focus on abstract forms consider that the abstraction is the delimitation. I think the delimitation is always the world, and the challenge for artists is to find a way of discovering the form of our world today. This is a related enterprise to social science, for understanding the causes of our world is inextricably entwined with understanding its form.

My only reservation with this position is that artistic technique is always a delimitation of sorts: artists work by restricting themselves. But this restriction serves to control the form that they deal with and their own agency in manipulating it. That is technique: a necessary attenuation. But the challenge is to ensure that technique serves the discovery of form, rather than merely reveal itself.

There's something fascinating about Axelrod's model of cultural diffusion - particularly if you select the 'bubble mode' in the applet below (which I stuck into the Wookie widget server). It has a particularly realistic biological quality which I've always missed in most cellular automata models. However, there are still a great many questions where I think Luhmann and Beer's thinking might provide some deeper insights.


Some of Axelrod's most significant work stems from his examination of the Prisoner's Dilemma. He famously challenged a number of computer scientists to come up with algorithms which could deal with the repeated prisoners' dilemma. He identified that ultimately, cooperative 'altruistic' strategies seemed to be more effective in the long term, and that an evolved approach might lead to these sorts of strategies. Whilst I find this fascinating, I'm tempted to remark that a strategy isn't 'forgiving' or 'altruistic'; people are. And what goes on in people is rather more than the calculation of next moves in the prisoners dilemma. Tooth ache or an annoying twitch is more likely to sway things one way or another.

The fundamental issue relates to the locus of rationality. If a strategy is rational then it's locus is in someone's head, and that head causes the strategy to be rational because the head processes the available data and produces a logical conclusion. However, rationality may not be quite like this. With a distributed cognition approach, rationality (or what we think rationality is) exists in communications. The extent to which communications can be successfully made, we can deem these to be rational. In this sense, it is not whether someone wins or loses the prisoner's dilemma, but whether the move that a person makes can be deemed 'within the game'. Attributing mental causes to that rationality is inevitably an act of conjecture.

If rationality is simply about making successful communications (communications which are understood), then the question is not about the causes of rational behaviour, but about the causes of communication. With regard to communication, and thinking about Luhmann, I think there is a secondary mechanism at work which relates to sensuality, and this works hand-in-hand with communication processes. When we consider the full complexity of this, rational strategies for the prisoners' dilemma (altruistic, greedy, etc) seem a bit shallow.

The cultural diffusion model has, I think, gone down a similar path to identifying mental causes for strategy. The boundaries in the model reflect degrees of cultural affinity. But cultural affinity depends on the extent to which people can have conversations, and that depends on their ability to make communications at a number of levels. Are cultural boundaries in the world or are they in people? I think this is where we need Positioning Theory!

I presented an agent-based model of communication the other week at the CAL11 conference in Manchester. The construction of agents in this model is one where each agent has three levels of personal regulation which relate to three types of communicative act that they can make: Exhortation, Disruption and Coercion. The communications that an individual makes are probabilistically related to their individual state at any point in time (whether their regulation is focused on Disruption, Coercion or Exhortation). This is a simple choice determined by the relative values of their communication.

To run the model, select the number of starting people (the first slider which says 'starting-...'), and click setup, then click go. You can change the transparency of communication by altering the comms-r slider. When people are red, they are unhappy! You can add individual people by clicking 'add person'. Clicking 'disrupt-every...' is interesting. You can click and drag people from one part of the screen to another (this is like building teams). And obviously you can slow it down.


Internal regulation is affected by the communications they receive from others, and there is a need (in order to remain happy and viable) to make communications which will result in communications which will continue the maintenance of wellbeing. Thus agents 'position' themselves with one another.

In my model at present, each regulating mechanism is basically a type of 'random walk' where, on perceiving new communications, the regulation of each individual at each level is adjusted by various 'deltas' (values which are added or taken away from the current value). Each adjustment to each regulating level has a consequent effect on other regulating levels, and furthermore on future communication.

In my presentation, I demonstrated how this setup could demonstrate some 'critical incidents' in the university e-learning strategy, like the use of champions to stimulate new practice, or the increase in transparency of communication to stimulated richer activity and greater cohesion amongst staff, or the effects of large-scale disruptions like changing the platform. But I think the reaction of individual agents is at the moment too 'quick' to adjust to new circumstances.

This is why I am asking whether my agents could instead have regulating systems which were based on waves rather than random walks. This might introduce new elements of unpredictability into their behaviour, and would also introduce some degree of latency in their responses, but I think all of these things are real: we have to wait for colleagues to 'come round' to new ways of thinking. In such cases, something is going on inside them... is it that they have to wait for cyclic (harmonic) functions to reach particular points before they feel able to change?

Another way of thinking this through is to think that each communication we make has a 'resonance' - past echoes in the environment have some bearing on what happens in the present. Echoes may decay according to harmonic rules... Sugata Mitra wrote a paper where a similar idea of playing with time with cellular automata produced some fascinating results... (see http://www.complex-systems.com/pdf/16-3-1.pdf)