nettime William Gibson's Pattern Recognition and Ethnomathematics
It always amazes me how we encode culture with so many layers of
meaning... this article brings home a point I think is really strong
- how we can think of a kind of intuitive mathematics -
steganography writ large, so to speak, like William Gibson's new
novel Pattern Recognition (his best book in years). Like
Bigend (marauding venture capitalist turned advertising guru in the
novel - Gibson understands ADVERTISING as a kind of Situationist
detournement - unlike so many people on the old left - here's a
blurb from his spiel on why advertising is the global vernacular for
this kind of coded language - if only the old left could get how
things change... funny how people you would expect to be
1) alot smarter
2) alot more dynamic
seem like ossified Redwood trees in this day and age where
detournement has become the global carnival of NOW. You ain't in
Kansas (or perhaps Belgrade) anymore... hip-hop has absorbed this
kind of droppin' science and made it - foregrounded, detached from
the cipha-codes that people use in everyday culture...
here's a blurb from Gibson's book that matches the article below on
Ethomathematics:
of course he says, we have no idea, now, of who or what the
inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future.
Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they
did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day,
one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course,
things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that
futures like our grandparents' have no sufficient 'now' to stand on.
We have no future because our present is too volatile. He smiles, a
version of Tom Cruise with too many teeth, and longer, but still very
white. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given
moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition.
p. 57
Paul
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/23/magazine/23CRASH.html?ex=1047027608;
ei=1en=b5465666bfebf361
Ethnomathematics
February 23, 2003
By DIRK OLIN
Mathematics is one academic subject that would seem to
reside in a world of universality, protected from competing
opinions by the objectivity of its laws. But the real
universal law is that everything is relative, even in math.
The release last month of a new math curriculum for New
York City schools by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has
elicited something just short of vituperation.
Back-to-basics advocates denounce as ''fuzzy math'' its
inclusion of so-called constructivist teaching techniques.
Critics complain that those approaches encourage
self-discovery and collaborative problem-solving at the
expense of proved practices like memorization, repetition
and mastery of algorithm.
It's all the latest in a century of American math wars. The
previous generation can remember the struggle over ''new
math'' during the 1950's and 60's. (''Hooray for new
math,/New-hoo-hoo math!'' Tom Lehrer sang. ''It won't do
you a bit of good to review math./It's so simple,/So very
simple./That only a child can do it!'') Battles flared even
earlier in the century over ''progressive'' agendas for
math education of the type pushed by John Dewey.
How tame those struggles seem, however, when compared to
the rising vanguard of self-described ethnomathematicians.
For some, the new discipline just means studying the
anthropology of various measurement methods; they merely
want to supplement the accepted canon -- from Pythagoras to
Euclid to Newton -- with mind-expanding explorations of
mathematical ideas from other cultures. For others,
however, ethnomathematics is an effort to supplant the
tyranny of Western mathematical standards.
The Postulates
Ethnomathematics has a few parents, but
most observers trace its formal birth to a speech given by
the Brazilian mathematician Ubiratan D'Ambrosio in the
mid-1980's. Now an emeritus professor of math at the State
University of Campinas outside S-o Paulo, he explained his
thinking a couple of years ago to The Chronicle of Higher
Education: ''Mathematics is absolutely integrated with
Western civilization, which conquered and dominated the
entire world. The only possibility of building up a
planetary civilization depends on restoring the dignity of
the losers.'' Robert N. Proctor, who teaches the history of
science at Pennsylvania State University, says he wants to
counter the notion ''that the West is the be all and end
all'' when it comes to mathematical studies. ''After all,''
he adds, ''all math is ethnomath -- not just African
kinship numerics or Peruvian bead counting, but also the
C.I.A.'s number-crunching cryptology and Reaganomics.''
To redress their pedagogical grievances, these
ethnomathematicians want math curriculums that place
greater emphasis on the systems of previous civilizations
and certain traditional cultures. Studies of state
civilizations might focus on Chinese or Arabic math
concepts. One study, for example, has shown how the Chinese
Chu Shih-chieh triangle
Re: nettime William Gibson's Pattern Recognition and Ethnomathematics
DJ Spooky - WHAT are you talking about??? Gibson understands ADVERTISING as a kind of Situationist detournement detournement has become the global carnival of NOW. (I'm sitting here with a scowl, lookin like Tricky Dick Cheney trying to take a dump) NOW is all vended, Spooky (and at a very arbitary market value)... If you've read Thomas Frank (I'm assuming you have), but didn't appreciate him on the first go-round--then crack him back open! Advertising works to reify false value--nothing more. The détournable bloc is co-extensive with the sum of all ranging, grassy corporate parks; and is integral with corporate policy and corporate lingo...Advertising détournement devolves to the Taco Bell chihuahua selling Geico insurance. ...leaving the imbeciles to their slavish reference to 'citations.' sez the User's Guide to Détournement; but the PRACTICE - or, at least, simulation - of détournement in advertising (vending n'importe quoi) is all archly allusive, all deafening resonant feedback of savvy, without caesura in which to nest CRITICAL REFLECTION... It is the most distant détourned element which contributes most sharply to the overall impression... sez the User's Guide; but if the metastatic, colonial forces of the market have surveyed assessed every last corner of the Territories - urban to shitheel - whence the force of the détourne, Spooky? Coke a smile, - Greg Little __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, more http://taxes.yahoo.com/ # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime Creation Myths: Does innovation require intellectual propertyrights?
http://www.reason.com/0303/fe.dc.creation.shtml Reason March 2003 Creation Myths Does innovation require intellectual property rights? By Douglas Clement The most forceful performance at last year's Grammy ceremony was a speech by Michael Greene, then president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. Speaking not long after the 9/11 attacks, Greene gravely warned of a worldwide threat -- pervasive, out of control, and oh so criminal -- and implored his audience to em-brace this life-and-death issue. Greene was not referring to international terrorism. The most insidious virus in our midst, he said sternly, is the illegal downloading of music on the Net. Greene's sermon may have been a bit overwrought, but he's not alone in his fears. During the last decade, the captains of many industries -- music, movies, publishing, software, pharmaceuticals -- have railed against the piracy of their profits. Copyright and patent protections have been breached by new technologies that quickly copy and distribute their products to mass markets. And as quickly as a producer figures a way to encrypt a DVD or software program to prevent duplication, some hacker in Seattle, Reykjavik, or Manila figures a way around it. The music industry has tried to squelch the threat, most conspicuously by suing Napster, the wildly popular Internet service that matched patrons with the songs they wanted, allowing them to download digital music files without charge. Napster lost the lawsuit and was liquidated, while similar services survive. But the struggle over Napster-like services has accented a much broader issue: How does an economy best promote innovation? Do patents and copyrights nurture or stifle it? Have we gone too far in protecting intellectual property? In a paper that has gained wide attention (and caught serious flak) for challenging the conventional wisdom, economists Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine answer the final question with a resounding yes. Copyrights, patents, and similar government-granted rights serve only to reinforce monopoly control, with its attendant damages of inefficiently high prices, low quantities, and stifled future innovation, they write in Perfectly Competitive Innovation, a report published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. More to the point, they argue, economic theory shows that perfectly competitive markets are entirely capable of rewarding (and thereby stimulating) innovation, making copyrights and patents superfluous and wasteful. Reactions to the paper have been mixed. Robert Solow, the MIT economist who won a Nobel Prize in 1987 for his work on growth theory, wrote Boldrin and Levine a letter calling the paper an eye-opener and making suggestions for further refinements. Danny Quah of the London School of Economics calls their analysis an important and profound development that seeks to overturn nearly half a century of formal economic thinking on intellectual property. But UCLA economist Benjamin Klein finds their work unrealistic, and Paul Romer, a Stanford economist whose path-breaking development of new growth theory is the focus of much of Boldrin and Levine's critique, considers their logic flawed and their assumptions implausible. We're not claiming to have invented anything new, really, says Boldrin. We're recognizing something that we think has been around ever since there has been innovation. In fact, patents and copyrights are a very recent distortion. Even so, they're working against a well-established conventional wisdom that has sanctioned if not embraced intellectual property rights, and theirs is a decidedly uphill battle. The Conventional Wisdom In the 1950s Solow showed that technological change was a primary source of economic growth, but his models treated that change as a given determined by elements beyond pure economic forces. In the 1960s Kenneth Arrow, Karl Shell, and William Nordhaus analyzed the relationship between markets and technological change. They concluded that free markets might fail to bring about optimal levels of innovation. In a landmark 1962 article, Arrow gave three reasons why perfect competition might fail to allocate resources optimally in the case of invention. We expect a free enterprise economy to underinvest in invention and research (as compared with an ideal), he wrote, because it is risky, because the product can be appropriated only to a limited extent, and because of increasing returns in use. Risk does seem a clear roadblock to investment in technological change. Will all the hours and dollars spent on research and development result in a profitable product? Is the payoff worth the risk? The uncertainty of success diminishes the desire to try. Much of Arrow's article examines economic means of dealing with uncertainty, none of them completely successful. The second problem, what economists call inappropriability, is the
