[from julienorvaisas] Stephen Hawking’s Radical Philosophy of Science [Big Questions Online] – [Mental models are described as quantifiable manifestations of various interpretations of reality. There can be more than one, but some more closely represent reality.] Model-dependent realism argues that there is no privileged position in the universe — no Archimedean point outside of our brain that we can access to know what reality really is. There are just models. It is not possible to understand reality without having some model of reality, so we are really talking about models, not reality. The tools and methods of science were designed to test whether or not a particular model or belief about reality matches observations made not just by ourselves but by others as well…nearly all scientific models — indeed, belief models of all sorts — can be parsed in such a manner and, in time, found to be better or worse than other models. In the long run, we discard some models and keep others based on their validity, reliability, predictability, and perceived match to reality.
[from steve_portigal] Reclaiming the rainbow [OneNewsNow.com] – [The battle for meaning: the dispute over who defines and controls a symbol as a stand-in for the larger debate. This about taking ownership of the story away from the other side. The irony of the rainbow as symbol of diversity and inclusion appears to be lost, however.] An activist fighting for traditional marriage in California is urging Christians to reclaim the rainbow from homosexual-rights activists who have hailed the symbol as their icon of "gay" pride. Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse of the San Diego-based Ruth Institute rightly argues that the rainbow is a sign of God's covenant with man, and she says "We are the real rainbow coalition. The gay lobby does not own the rainbow."
(Updated to include slideshow with synchronized audio track)
We’re very excited today to be posting our findings from the Reading Ahead research project.
Lots more in the deck below, but here’s the executive summary
Books are more than just pages with words and pictures; they are imbued with personal history, future aspirations, and signifiers of identity
The unabridged reading experience includes crucial events that take place before and after the elemental moments of eyes-looking-at-words
Digital reading privileges access to content while neglecting other essential aspects of this complete reading experience
There are opportunities to enhance digital reading by replicating, referencing, and replacing social (and other) aspects of traditional book reading
We sat down yesterday in the office and recorded ourselves delivering these findings, very much the way we would deliver them to one of our clients.
Usually, we deliver findings like these to a client team in a half day session, and there’s lots of dialogue, but we tried to keep it brief here to help you get through it. (The presentation lasts an hour and twenty minutes.)
It’s been a great project, and we’ve really appreciated hearing from people along the way. We welcome further comments and questions, and look forward to continuing the dialogue around this work.
We’ve been hard at work synthesizing the Reading Ahead data. There’s a great deal of writing involved in communicating the results, and sometimes it makes sense to develop a visual model that represents a key idea.
Here are several partial models evolving through paper and whiteboard sketches, and finally into digital form.
We’ll be finishing synthesis soon, and publishing our findings on Slideshare, with an audio commentary.
All This ChittahChattah is the Portigal blog, bringing you observations of daily life, disdainful snark over bad design, updates on my activities, and info about user research since 2001.
