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Just heard about a new feature in Twitter that lets you ignore the noise and get alerted to the signal, albeit a signal you choose.
In my ramble on noise, this is the kind of thing I was thinking about, but this is the current digital version of it, whereby you still need to specify the filter, so nothing new there.
Alas, the signal comes in the usual form - a Twitter message. I wonder how that could come a different way.
Also, if everyone understood that their Twitter streams were being watched, how long before folks modified how they 'tagged' their twits to be caught by these filters (ugh, maybe even causing signal spam)?
It'd be interesting to get some stats on this after a while.
Link: [hat tip, alexdc] Twitter Blog: Tracking Twitter:
You can create as many of these as you want, so send "track drinking tea", "track iphone", "track walking san francisco" and you'll receive matches for all. Want to get a list of what you're currently tracking? Send "track" alone (or "stats"). Turn them all off by sending "track off".
I thought this was funny - a 'Web' tab. It leads to iGoogle.
It was funny, because we have an Internet group (that deals with Internet enablers on our devices) and we all thought it odd to extend their offering to the Web. I mean, who would offer an 'Internet' tab on a service that is offered via a Web browser?
I guess Google does. So it must be good. Nobody got fired for buying Google.
Anyway. I just thought it funny to see that tab there.
As some of my regular readers might know, I find it useful to 'pause for station identification' so that it's clear who I am and what I do.
We be jammin'
My name is Charlie Schick, I am a product manager for Ovi.com, by Nokia (see details for more).
For the past few years I have used this site mostly to philosophize on the fusion of Internet and mobile devices. Hopelessly peripatetic, my thoughts and actions have lately been wandering farther afield (sorry folks) ranging from biomedicine, molecular manipulations, indiscriminate writing, the long now and a post-electronic age, various forms of performances thespian and corporate, and forcing myself to be more creative and do the story telling I want to do.
In the past, I've tried to not put too much of this other stuff here on this site. But, as I've hinted a few times in the last few months, I expect my writing and links of interest (found in my side bar) to start reflecting these interests.
Thanks
As I've said before, thanks for reading my stuff. That so many keep coming back to this site, suggest that I do have something of value to you all. I hope that does not change as I drift from the topics that originally brought us together.
Standard Disclaimer (riffing off of Cringley)
Everything I write here on this site is an expression of my own opinions, NOT of my employer, Nokia. If these were the opinions of Nokia, the site would be called 'Nokia something' and, for sure, the writing and design would be much more professional. Likewise, I am an intensely trained professional writer (heh), so don't expect to find any confidential secret corporate mumbo-jumbo being revealed here. Everything I write here is public info or readily found via any decent search engine or easily deduced by someone who has an understanding of the industry.
On the flip side, this is my personal site. Please don’t flood me with ideas that you think Nokia might be interested in. Better to leave a comment or trackback relevant to one of my posts (emphasis: relevant). Or go visit one of the Nokia blogs.
The Boston Globe has this great essay, by Yale Professor Anthony Kronman, about the teaching of the meaning of life in US colleges and universities. It's long, but an excellent read.
Link: Why are we here? Colleges ignore life's biggest questions, and we all pay the price (registration may be required)
The essay was prompted in part by the start of the school season in the US. The author ponders the history of the teaching of the meaning of life, tracing the history of upper education in the US in the process.
"In a shift of historic importance, America's colleges and universities have largely abandoned the idea that life's most important question is an appropriate subject for the classroom."
The author goes on to describe how the focus on research, while bringing great benefits, also seemed to give the humanities short shrift. I was once part of this focused research world. But, as one may be able to guess after being with me for a bit, or reading my stuff, it wasn't enough for me - there was always a part of me that had questions outside my domain. In college, I tried hard to get as much exposure to things like philosophy, art, history, often with more interest than my major subject (of which I took the minimum requirements).
The author makes a great comment:
"In the humanities, however, the legacy of the research ideal has been mixed. We know vastly more today than we did even 50 years ago about the order of Plato's dialogues, the accuracy of Gibbon's citations, and how Benjamin Franklin spent his time in Paris. But the research ideal has excluded the question of life's meaning from serious academic concern as a question too large, too unformed, too personal, to be a subject of specialized research. A tenure-minded junior professor studying Shakespeare or Freud or Spinoza might re-inspect every scrap of his subject's work with the hope of making some small but novel discovery - but would be either very brave or very foolish to write a book about Spinoza's suggestion that a free man thinks only of life, never of death; or about Freud's appealing, if enigmatic, statement that the meaning of life is to be found in work and love."
Heh, that's something I can sink my teeth into.
It was interesting to learn that in the 20s, the president of Amherst College, Alexander Meiklejohn, "defended the idea of spiritual seriousness in a nonreligious age, and thought it could be studied without dogmatic commitments". I agree with the author that we need more programs that do this, and the author lists a few. Indeed, my freshman year (the one year I was at Allegheny College), I was fortunate to take a humanities course that I can say significantly shaped the way I think, learn, and interpret the world.
And the author makes no bones about the complexity of the question. But it is the complexity that enriches the student:
"The first is that there is more than one good answer to the question of what living is for. A second is that the number of such answers is limited, making it possible to study them in an organized way. A third is that the answers are irreconcilably different, necessitating a choice among them. A fourth is that the best way to explore these answers is to study the great works of philosophy, literature, and art in which they are presented with lasting beauty and strength. And a fifth is that their study should introduce students to the great conversation in which these works are engaged - Augustine warily admiring Plato, Hobbes reworking Aristotle, Paine condemning Burke, Eliot recalling Dante, recalling Virgil, recalling Homer - and help students find their own authentic voice as participants in the conversation."
The author points out that in many ways, education has split long dogmatic lines, such as race and gender, and all that comes with political correctness. But my feeling is summed up as in the essay:
"There is an increasing demand among undergraduates for courses that address the big questions of life, in all their sprawling grandeur, without reticence or embarrassment."
Complexity and honesty are critical here. And this is about spiritual direction, a spiritual direction that the simplification of religion and belief have usurped.
"What it needs is an alternative to religion, for colleges and universities to become again the places they once were - spiritually serious but nondogmatic, concerned with the soul but agnostic about God."
And my thoughts echo what the author thinks, that this kind of education could go far in fixing the dogmatic thinking that now pervades the US.
"A richer and more open debate about ultimate values; an electorate less likely to be cowed into thinking that only the faithful have the right to invoke them; a humbler regard for the mystery of life in a world increasingly dominated by technocratic reason."
It's long, but a good read.
Incidentally, the author has also written a book (drink!) on the subject: "Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life."
