RE: [xmca] Deb Roy: The birth of a word Discussion

[Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu>]

Interesting how things change in translation. I googled the Goethe quote below and came up with something that seems to have a different meaning:
441. There's nothing clever that hasn't been thought of before - you've just got to try to think it all over again. 
http://wolfenmann.com/goethe-maxims-and-reflections-full-text.html

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of mike cole
Sent: Sunday, March 20, 2011 9:16 AM
To: vwilk@inf.shizuoka.ac.jp; eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] Deb Roy: The birth of a word Discussion

V W: "the real trick is to use what you have when you need it."

Goethe: ""*Everything has been thought of before*; *the task is to think of
it again in ways that are appropriate in one's current circumstances.*"

On Sun, Mar 20, 2011 at 4:25 AM, vwilk <vwilk@inf.shizuoka.ac.jp> wrote:

> Hello, Xmca-ers,
> Vandy Wilkinson from Japan.
> It seems to me that suddenly technology is on the table, with this
> discussion, re: now Larry Purss' comments.
> What I have to say that seems to me urgently connected to our present here
> in Japan, where we catch scenes of people in shelters, two elderly people
> suddenly being found yesterday, still alive,  And these clips are beyond
> "journalism".  There is more information for those with eyes trained to see.
>  So how can one, then,  access stored information and present an edition to
> show what needs to be shown and demonstrated.
> I just saw a clip of Rachel Maddow introducing a clip (
> http://crooksandliars.com/karoli/rachel-maddow-what-survival-looks) which
> shows people in a taxi, ditching the taxi and running for it, and getting up
> the stairs of a concrete building just as the tsunami smashed into it.  This
> clip from a hand held camera somehow got onto national no, international, TV
> and had NO funding.  Research that can be done from that short clip! If you
> add up the clips and put them together,with a narrative idea and this
> digitized material, both from the sky and the ground, everything that
> happened here, even if we can't get a complete picture of it, it is logged,
> filed, and searchable. At this point, various academics, geographers,
> communication experts, psychologists, community workers, sociologists,
>  social workers, with their various frames of reference (strategic choices,
> scanning information, making expedient choices, and witnessing group action
> and so on, plus what can be seen from the higher perspective of the upper
> floor  will sort out what there is to be learned from this.
>
> So much was learned from the Sumatra 2004 earthquake and it made a big
> difference now in Japan.  Clearly understanding the advances in early
> warning systems, the patterns of what happens, geographically and socially,
> the 250,000 who perished then did not die in vain.
>
> In research, it is the level of attention which guides the eye to see, and
> the patience to edit.  Technology has advanced to rapidly so as to put very
> high level equipment in the hands of ordinary people, for example, running
> from a tsunami (that was not ordinary, by any evaluation).  Piaget altered
> the course of his study with the addition of his own children to the
> research mix.  That must be relevant to the passion to study and the
> intention to follow a thread.    What I am saying is that very powerful
> technology is already in the hands of ordinary untrained people who see
> extra-ordinary things, but trained experts can then see what was going on
> and make informed sense of it.   There is much, very much available without
> simply enormous budgets to record, describe, analyze, and present very
> subtle and advanced knowledge.  I hope this makes sense.
>
> So much focus on budget and technology, when the real trick is to use what
> you have when you need it.  To see what you have when it is being used as
> something else/ for something else, but can be turned to another immediate
> purpose.
> I can see that technology is so very very valuable and has a price.
> But we already have so much digitally stored and so much access to so much
> material,
> so that the time to ponder and study and present it is somehow more
> necessary.
> Vandy
>
>
>
> (2011/03/20 10:30), Martin Packer wrote:
>
>> Andy,
>>
>> The 2011 budget request for the US National Institute of Child Health and
>> Human Development is $1,368,894,000. That's one fancy basement you have!
>>
>> Martin
>>
>> On Mar 19, 2011, at 7:59 PM, Andy Blunden wrote:
>>
>>  Well it was great viewing, Deb Roy's presentation certainly spurred me to
>>> improve my own presentation style. But it didn't test any claim about speech
>>> development, and was surely never intended to prove or discover anything
>>> about speech development. Except that to do any work in this area you need a
>>> vast array of expensive audio-visual and computer equipment and a team of
>>> dozens of research assistants. Gone are the days when a hand-held video
>>> camera would let you do meaningful research into child development.
>>>
>>> Note that this reinforces the major malady of our times: the conception
>>> that on one hand there is little individual me with no capacity to do
>>> anything except massage my own preferences, and on the other hand the mighty
>>> institutions and forces of society with their billion-dollar machines and
>>> vast organisations, who decide everything .
>>>
>>
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