A place to be this First Friday – see Albert Yee’s “Hands That Feed Us”

Albert Yee’s latest project, “Hands that Feed Us: A Peek Inside Our Foodshed” will be on display this First Friday, July 1st, 2011 from 6:30PM to 10PM at Gravy Studio.

Like Howard Hall, I’m a long time admirer of Albert’s work. He is, like Howard notes, an artist, and his photography has lit my imagination time and again over the years. Not only that, he’s one half of the great food blogger team “Messy and Picky”. Some of the more recent posts here on paradox1x.org have been influenced by Albert’s advice to me to share more of my own story, and his involvement at Philly Future way back when was crucial to it becoming the service it was at the time. I’m so thankful for connecting with him over this half a decade and am very excited to share this event. Get out to this and go folks.

Joy bigger than the universe, and sorrow for a lifetime

Absolute must read – Jennifer Lawler: “For Jessica”.

The latest: “A vigil for Jessica”:

Now, between the crisis and the catastrophe, you know you should lift a glass of champagne, but you have failed to lay in supplies yet again. Maybe next time you will remember.

Tonight there is just a long time till morning, and your lost saints can give no comfort. So you pick up your pen instead and you pin the terror to the page, and you hope it does not get loose. And a circle of women who have sat this vigil themselves seem to surround you, echoing back so many generations you cannot begin to count, and you know you are not alone, and you never have been, even in that hardest part before dawn.

(via Susie Madrak)

Some Father’s Day thoughts

I really don’t think of Father’s Day as most do. Knowing me you’d understand why. I think of it as a day for thanks giving. For those with child and without, who try and leave in a better state what they’ve came to. For those who take responsibility as a blessing and not as a weight. For those willing to mentor and friend those who need it. Guys like that exist. I didn’t think so as a kid. But in adulthood I found out otherwise and have great examples in my life and my daughter’s. And it is truly fantastic.

I am so thankful to be part of the family I am part of. Love you all and have a great day everyone.

(Note, this was originally posted to Facebook and to my friends and family there, apologies for the double post. On my blog I own my words. I should have posted from here first.)

Program or be Programmed at Webvisions 2011

Programming, along with critical thinking skills, should be taught in K-12 along side reading, writing and arithmetic. Douglas Rushkoff has been making the case, not for jobs, or for just economic concerns, but for a healthy society.

Webvisions 2011: “Douglas Rushkoff: Program or be Programmed”:

If you have a child in Kindergarten, up to grade 12, who has never experienced programming, download MIT’s Scratch. It is free and it opens the gate.

Jonah Lehrer on IQ and boosting it through exercise

WSJ: Jonah Lehrer:“Boot Camp for Boosting IQ”:

Our IQ scores may be bounded by our genes, but it looks as if it’s possible to significantly increase measured intelligence after only a few hours of training. “Intelligence is a lot like height,” Prof. Jonides says. “We know that how tall you are is largely determined by the height of your parents. But we also know that better nutrition can make everyone a lot taller. Perhaps the n-back task is just an ideal form of mental nutrition.”

More from Jonah Lehrer on his Wired blog, “Frontal Cortex”.

Is this “Brain Workshop” a good open source implementation of n-back?

Some JavaScript and Node.js starter links

O’Reilly Radar: Mike Loukides: “Why a JavaScript hater thinks everyone needs to learn JavaScript in the next year”: If you have avoided JavaScript, this is the year to learn it. There’s no excuse — and if you don’t, you risk being left behind. (I hate statements like this, but if it encourages more back end folks to get familiar with a language that applies everywhere, it is a good thing.)

I hope to have a simple little project that parses SVN logs and produces visualizations up on github soon.

The resources and people below have been helpful on my journey into JavaScript and Node.js:

Eloquent JavaScript

Douglas Crockford

The Node Beginner

reddit: node.js

Felix’s Node.js Guide

Node Tuts

What is “Fast Fashion”, how it relates to big data, Facebook and us

Speed. Data. Lack of security. Encouraged anxiety. What makes a self-identity? And… fashion, clothing retailers and social media. n+1 has an interesting read in: The Accidental Bricoleurs:

…As the fast in fast fashion implies, the companies’ comparative advantage lies in speed, not brand recognition, garment durability, or reputable design. They have changed fashion from a garment making to an information business, optimizing their supply chains to implement design tweaks on the fly. Zara “can design, produce, and deliver a new garment and put it on display in its stores worldwide in a mere 15 days,”2 and this flow of information is by far the most significant thing the company produces, far more important than any piped pinafore, velveteen blazer or any of its other 40,000 yearly items. The company’s system of constant information monitoring allows it to quickly spot and sate trends and at the same time largely avoid overproduction boondoggles and the need for heavy discounting.

Unlike earlier generations of mass-market retailers, like the Gap’s family of brands (which includes, in ascending order of class cachet, Old Navy, Gap, and Banana Republic), companies like Zara and Forever 21 make no effort to stratify their offerings into class-signifying labels. They also don’t adopt branding strategies to affiliate with particular luxe or ironic lifestyles, à la Urban Outfitters or Abercrombie & Fitch. Instead they flatter consumers in a different way, immersing them in potential trends on a near weekly basis and trusting them to assemble styles in their own images. Clothes reach stores with practically unspoiled semiotic potential, and consumers are invited to be expressive rather than imitative with the goods, to participate more directly in fashion. We become the meaning makers, enchanting ordinary cardigans and anoraks with a symbolic significance that has only a tenuous relationship to the material item. We work in lieu of advertisers to reconfigure trends and remix signifiers, generating new and valuable meanings for goods. The more new clothes come in, the more creative we can be.

Fast-fashion retailers reap the fruits of that creativity by capturing our preferences in successive generations of products and nearly synchronizing to our whims. Thanks to the rich data we generate as we select, reject, and recombine the items fast fashion offers, the companies need not develop their own brands so much as seize upon customers’ ingenuity, distilling their choices into easily replicable trends and rushing the resulting products to market. If fashion functions like a language, then the fast-fashion firms are mainly interested controlling the underlying system and leave the meaning of the “words” to interchangeable designers and individual consumers. As long as customers are willing to speak fast fashion’s language, the companies aren’t particular about the specifics of the vocabulary. They are concerned only with the rate and volume of change.

…Like fast fashion, social media have brought with them a profusion of means and ways to reshape and display our identity. Constantly given new tools to share with, always prompted to say something new about ourselves (“What’s on your mind?” Facebook asks thoughtfully), we are pressured to continually devise ingenious solutions to our identity, which suddenly appears to be a particular kind of recurring problem: one that can be solved by replenishing social media’s various channels with fresh content. Just as fast fashion seeks to pressure shoppers with the urgency of now or never, social media hope to convince us that we always have something new and important to say—as long as we say it right away. And they are designed to make us feel anxious and left out if we don’t say it, as their interfaces favor the users who update frequently and tend to make less engaged users disappear. One can easily fall out of fashion with the algorithms Facebook uses to select which content users see out of the plethora of material friends in their network contribute.

…In social media, where everyone can employ design ideology, the persistent messages of advertising—that magical self-transformation through purchases is possible, that one’s inner truth can be expressed through the manipulation of well-worked surfaces—become practical rather than insulting. Not only do the methods and associative logic of advertising become more concretely useful, but its governing ideology no longer seems conformist but radically individualistic. Social media encourage us to appropriate whatever we want and claim it as our own without feeling derivative or slavishly imitative. On Facebook, if I link to, say, a YouTube video of Bob Dylan singing “I Threw It All Away” on the Johnny Cash Show in 1969, I am saying something particular about myself, not merely consuming the performance. I am declaring that video clip to be essentially equivalent to an update I may have written about a trip to Philadelphia or to pictures of me at a party that someone might have tagged. It is all bricolage for personal identity building.

It is a long, but thought provoking read. Go read it.

Related Metafilter thread: “The Total-Corporate State May Have Arrived”.