SCOPHY

Wikinomics explores how the emergence of particpatory communities on the internet is changing business.

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For anyone who has enjoyed watching a game of pong being played on the windows of a table building, Space, Time, Play is an insightful collection of articles examining the relationship between architecture and computer games.

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New Media Design maps out the emerging combinations of new technology and art.

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Review From Publishers Weekly

Best-selling author Gladwell (The Tipping Point) has a dazzling ability to find commonality in disparate fields of study. As he displays again in this entertaining and illuminating look at how we make snap judgments—about people’s intentions, the authenticity of a work of art, even military strategy—he can parse for general readers the intricacies of fascinating but little-known fields like professional food tasting (why does Coke taste different from Pepsi?). Gladwell’s conclusion, after studying how people make instant decisions in a wide range of fields from psychology to police work, is that we can make better instant judgments by training our mind and senses to focus on the most relevant facts—and that less input (as long as it’s the right input) is better than more. Perhaps the most stunning example he gives of this counterintuitive truth is the most expensive war game ever conducted by the Pentagon, in which a wily marine officer, playing “a rogue military commander” in the Persian Gulf and unencumbered by hierarchy, bureaucracy and too much technology, humiliated American forces whose chiefs were bogged down in matrixes, systems for decision making and information overload. But if one sets aside Gladwell’s dazzle, some questions and apparent inconsistencies emerge. If doctors are given an algorithm, or formula, in which only four facts are needed to determine if a patient is having a heart attack, is that really educating the doctor’s decision-making ability—or is it taking the decision out of the doctor’s hands altogether and handing it over to the algorithm? Still, each case study is satisfying, and Gladwell imparts his own evident pleasure in delving into a wide range of fields and seeking an underlying truth.

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The Impact of the Highly Improbably - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

From Booklist

In business and government, major money is spent on prediction. Uselessly, according to Taleb, who administers a severe thrashing to MBA- and Nobel Prize-credentialed experts who make their living from economic forecasting. A financial trader and current rebel with a cause, Taleb is mathematically oriented and alludes to statistical concepts that underlie models of prediction, while his expressive energy is expended on roller-coaster passages, bordering on gleeful diatribes, on why experts are wrong. They neglect Taleb’s metaphor of “the black swan,” whose discovery invalidated the theory that all swans are white. Taleb rides this manifestation of the unpredicted event into a range of phenomena, such as why a book becomes a best-seller or how an entrepreneur becomes a billionaire, taking pit stops with philosophers who have addressed the meaning of the unexpected and confounding. Taleb projects a strong presence here that will tempt outside-the-box thinkers into giving him a look. Gilbert Taylor

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Review from Booklist:

All the qualities that make Saunders’ bristling, inventive short stories distinctive and affecting are present in his rollicking yet piercing essays: droll wit, love of life, high attention to language, satire, and “metaphorical suppleness,” which is what he credits Mark Twain with in his penetrating homage “The United States of Huck.” A MacArthur fellow whose fiction includes In Persuasion Nation (2006), Saunders also pays tribute to another guiding light, Kurt Vonnegut. A number of essays explicate Saunders’ predilection for acrobatic parody and attunement to language’s moral dimension, including the exhilarating title essay, which uses an ingenious analogy to explain the precipitous dumbing down of the media and the pernicious results. Saunders is also uncommonly funny, dynamic, and incisive in his reporting on his adventures on the border with a group of quirky and inept Minutemen, his visit to the spanking-new and massively opulent city of Dubai, and his participation in a mystifying vigil in Nepal. With a keen sense of the absurd, incandescent creativity, and abiding empathy, Saunders catapults the essay into new and thrilling directions.

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Excerpt from 30 Years: Interviews and Outtakes

A book by MAMFW chief curator Michael Auping which contains interviews with an impressive list of artist.

In this particular excerpt, Michael talks to Louise Bourgeois.  As mentioned in a previous post, Louise currently has a giant spider installation outside the London Tate Modern Museum.

Michael Auping: Did [Marcel Duchamp] ever say anything [about the sculptures of yours on view at the Peridot Gallery in 1949, 1950 and 1953]? What did he think about them?

Louise Bourgeois: Well, he didn’t say much. He was a man of few words. But he would say, ‘Louise, tell me about it, what does that mean?’ Duchamp sent Pierre Matisse to see these early works. he also sent Alfred Barr. Barr, who was quite a card — that one, you know, I could write a book about Alfred Barr — he came into the room, and he looked very detached, very museum-like, un gros legume. He pretended that he was not overly interested, that he had come because Marcel had told him. Very detached, you know. So I didn’t know what to say about that.

And then, I noticed that he approached a particular piece that was full of little pieces hanging from it — Persistent Antagonism. So, he stood along time in front of this piece and he touched those little hanging things. I was watching, I didn’t say anything. I always say the wrong thing. But I was watching him, and he took them like this and he lifted them. He was having a lot of fun. Then he said, ‘This is very erotic.’

I didn’t answer. Better not to answer, right? And he went all around the room, and he made believe that he was interested in one piece, when actually he had the intention of buying another piece, right. Finally, he decided. I’ll have to make the story short — but finally he bought one piece for The Museum of Modern Art, Sleeping Figure [at right]. It’s totally anti-erotic. Even though he was a Puritan, he did not deny to himself the fact that genitals gave him a kick. And he paid $400 for Sleeping Figure. Alfred Barr was a fantastic buyer. He knew how to bargain.

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Excerpt from the latest book by John Gray entitled Black Mass

Quotes Maximilien Robespierre on page 146

“The most extravagant idea that can be born in the head of a political thinker is to believe that it suffices for people to enter, weapons in hand, among a foreign people and expect to have its laws and constitution embraced.  It is in the nature of things that the progress of reason is slow and no one loves armed missionaries; the first lesson of nature and prudence is to repulse them as enemies.  One can encourage freedom, never create it by an invading force.”

Maximilien Robespierre

Speech to the Jacobin Club, Paris, 1792

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