Please see new blog at: http://earlab.org/serendipity.

As of Saturday, April 18, 2009, this blog has moved to: http://earlab.org/serendipity.
Please update your bookmarks.

The reason for the move is that (a) I like the user interface of Serendipity better than that of WordPress, (b) the fresh Serendipity install supported unicode, and (c) I liked the templates of Serendipity.

All entries from the present blog have been imported to the new blog.

Reblogging from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/sciencenews/5149195/Twitter-and-Facebook-could-harm-moral-values-scientists-warn.html:

Twitter and Facebook could harm moral values, scientists warn

Using Twitter and Facebook could harm moral values, as they don’t allow time for compassion or admiration, scientists have warned.

Last Updated: 9:05PM BST 13 Apr 2009

Today’s fast-paced media could be making us indifferent to human suffering and should allow time for us to reflect, according to researchers.

They found that emotions linked to moral sense are slow to respond to news and events and have failed to keep up with the modern world.

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In the time it takes to fully reflect on a story of anguish and suffering, the news bulletin has already moved on or the next Twitter update is already being read.

As activities such as reading books and meeting friends, where people can define their morals, are taken over by news snippets and fast-moving social networking, the problem could become widespread, researchers warn.

Children could be particularly vulnerable because their brains are still developing.

“If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people’s psychological states and that would have implications for your morality,” said Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, from the University of Southern California, and one of the researchers.

Their work, published next week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online Early Edition, involved studying the response of volunteers to real-life stories to induce admiration for virtue or skill, or compassion for physical or social pain.

Using brain imaging, they found that humans can sort information very quickly and respond in fractions of a second to signs of physical pain in others, but admiration and compassion - two of the social emotions that define humanity - take much longer.

The volunteers needed six to eight seconds to fully respond to stories of virtue or social pain, but once awakened, the responses lasted far longer than the volunteers’ reactions to stories focused on physical pain.

Ms Immordino-Yang said: “For some kinds of thought, especially moral decision-making about other people’s social and psychological situations, we need to allow for adequate time and reflection.”

She also said that the study raises questions about the emotional cost - particularly for the developing brain - of heavy reliance on a rapid stream of news snippets obtained through television, online feeds or social networks such as Twitter.

Digital media may direct users away from traditional avenues for learning about humanity such as literature or face-to-face social interactions, said Ms Immordino-Yang.

She added: “We need to understand how social experience shapes interactions between the body and mind, to produce citizens with a strong moral compass.”

Manuel Castells, a leading sociology expert at USC said: “The study has extraordinary implications for the human perception of events in a digital communication environment.

“Lasting compassion in relationship to psychological suffering requires a level of persistent, emotional attention.”

He said he was most concerned about fast-moving TV or virtual games, adding: “In a media culture in which violence and suffering becomes an endless show, be it in fiction or in infotainment, indifference to the vision of human suffering gradually sets in.”

Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, who led the research said: “What I’m more worried about is what is happening in the abrupt juxtapositions that you find, for example, in the news.

“When it comes to emotion, because these systems are inherently slow, perhaps all we can say is, not so fast.”

He said the research was vital because admiration, “gives us a yardstick for what to reward in a culture, and for what to look for and try to inspire”.

Mr Damasio said that Barack Obama, who was inspired by his father, showed how admiration could drive a person onto great things, adding: “We actually separate the good from the bad in great part thanks to the feeling of admiration. It’s a deep physiological reaction that’s very important to define our humanity.

Batuuhan Bozkurt has as website with an interesting blog, containing news and notes about the world of music and sound art.

http://www.batuhanbozkurt.com/home/index.php

Batuhan lives in Istanbul and works with SuperCollider. Besides his pieces he has also developed some highly original and extensive tools.

I found Batuhan from the Google map of SuperCollider users.

(During a session for 3d year project involving multitouch surface)

•  Xcode vs gcc
• GNU, Richard Stallman, Free Software Foundation, Mozilla, Mitch Kapor, Electronic Frontiers Foundation, Creative Commons, Linus Thorvalds, Linux, Creative Commons
• PHP, Ruby (+ Ruby on Rails), Haskell, Horde, Blender3D, Python
• TiddlyWiki, PMWiki, AMP, MAMP
• CMS Plone, Zope, PMWiki, TextMate

For the past 2 weeks I have been evaluating TiddlyWiki as an alternative to PMWiki. I like the idea of being able to work offline. So when I have collected enough material, I will switch the earlab website from PMWiki to TiddlyWiki.