Strange people

From 'sociology of belief' territory, via Danijel Sinani in 10(1) Antropologija (2010) -

One of the most controversial and therefore, one of the most interesting figures in the UFO movement that appeared in public during the late forties and the fifties of the twentieth century, is certainly George Adamski, an American of Polish descent. Adamski is the prototype of the new type of contactees, and he was among the first who gained enormous popularity with his testimonies about contacts with UFOs, claiming that he was chosen to deliver important alien messages and wisdom to humanity. We don’t know much about his life before he became famous as a contactee and as an author of several books and articles on this subject. After he served shortly in the U.S. Cavalry on the Mexican border, Adamski got married and situated on a ranch in California, where, with the help of like-minded people, he later bought a piece of land and opened a cafe and an observatory.

Clearly interested in mysticism and metaphysics from the earliest age, Adamski founded the Royal Order of Tibet in 1936 and began to teach the "knowledge" of the occult nature. However, Adamski quickly shifted his interest to the ideas related to UFOs and he revealed his first contact with UFOs on October 9th 1946. Three years later he published his first book which made his way clear to a significant position in the circles of people interested in the UFO phenomena (Adamski 1949). However, Adamski gained a worldwide fame by publishing his second book in 1953. In the book he presented Orthon to the public – a tall, blond inhabitant of Venus, with whom Adamski allegedly established a telepathic connection a year earlier.

It's unclear whether that telepathy involved the notion, espoused by Ervin Laszlo of World Futures, that the brain is - or will shortly become - a 'quantum wave transceiver'.

Sinani reports that -

Through Orthon, Adamski was then given hieroglyphic, encrypted messages from the "Space Brothers" who were interested in the future of the Earth and its inhabitants.

Now of course he'd be invoking nonsense about the Mayan Calendar.

Adamski claimed that he learned, through the contact with the Venusians, whose aircraft he managed to see up close, that they have been secretly present on Earth for some time. He also stated that their mission was a peaceful one and that they were concerned about the human inclination towards war, especially the nuclear arms race, which threatened to disturb the harmony of the Universe (Leslie and Adamski 1953).

Can't have too much harmony, with or without quantum mysticism

Adamski allegedly possessed a number of photographs that were supposed to support his stories about seeing UFOs, as well as the encounters with extraterrestrial beings. In the vastness of testimonies about the contacts with aliens, Adamski became famous for claiming that the government scientists had evidence of the existence of intelligent life on other planets, that he travelled to Saturn on a space ship he boarded in a U.S. military base, that he held secret meetings with the Pope in the Vatican and the United States president John Kennedy and the people from his administration in connection with the "Space brothers" and, finally, that the Venusians, by using the flying saucers rushed to provide him with transportation even on shorter distances on Earth (O'Leary, 2000). Due to these, often extravagant and even bizarre testimonies, Adamski was suspected of fraudulence and discredited by a number of UFO researchers. He was accused of plagiarizing ideas from the old science-fiction books and movies, doctoring photographs and a few of his close associates eventually admitted that some of Adamski’s claims had been invented and redesigned (Melton and Eberhart 1995).

You don't say!

However, despite the controversies that followed him and the odium of the UFO researchers circles he brought upon himself, Adamski was able to gather a significant number of followers, forming in 1957 a club "International Get Acquainted" which brought together both those interested in UFOs and those who wanted to receive the "knowledge" and "wisdom" that Adamski, allegedly received from the "Space Brothers".

That sounds quite contemporary.

In the late fifties and early sixties, Adamski made a world tour with his lectures, he initiated a periodical, while his books became some of the most widely read books about UFOs.

Today the "Adamski Foundation" which was established in 1965 still exists and continues the tradition of his teaching and a number of individuals and smaller groups all over the world operate under the influence of the "secret knowledge" which Adamski believed he had been conveying.

Evidence Act 2008 (Vic)

An interesting experiment at http://evidenceact2008.blogspot.com/ regarding the Evidence Act 2008 (Vic) -

This is not a blog in the conventional sense, where an author's thoughts and ideas are entered as and when they think of them, like pages of a diary. Instead this site reproduces the Evidence Act 2008 section by section. Over time, it's expected that decisions in the Victorian jurisdiction and elsewhere will assist in interpreting its many provisions. As that happens, some of those decisions will be noted and discussed beneath the provisions they consider.

An example of associated commentary is the post on DPP v Nicholls [2010] VSC 397.

I see with my little eye

From Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research an article by Kelly Gates on 'The Tampa Smart CCTV Experiment'. [PDF].

Gates indicates that -

In June 2001, a neighborhood in Tampa, Florida called Ybor City became the first urban area in the United States to be fitted with a "Smart CCTV" system. Visio-nics Corporation began a project with the Tampa Police Department to incorpo-rate the company's facial recognition technology (FRT), called FaceIt, into an existing 36-camera CCTV system covering several blocks along two of the main avenues. However, this "smart surveillance" experiment did not go as smoothly as its planners had hoped. After a two-year free trial period, the TPD abandoned the effort to integrate facial recognition with the CCTV system in August 2003, citing its failure to identify a single wanted individual. This essay chronicles the experi-ment with FRT in Ybor City and argues that the project's failure should not be viewed as solely a technical one. Most significantly, the failure of the Ybor City "Smart CCTV" experiment reveals the extent to which new surveillance technol-ogies represent sites of struggle over the extent and limits of police power in ad-vanced liberal democracies.

Her article is complemented by Toby Miller's overview on 'Surveillance: The "Digital Trail of Breadcrumbs"' [PDF] in the same journal.

There is somewhat more bite in articles in 3(1) Identity in the Information Society (2010) ('The Diversity of National E-IDs in Europe: Lessons From Comparative Research').

The introduction by James Backhouse comments that -

When change in eIDs is initiated, rarely is there a completely fresh departure, but instead there is found incrementalism which builds gradually on the previous infrastructure of technology, but also of regulation and cultural norms. Great strides in the adoption of technologies such as the esignature or qualified certificates do not appear to have happened, rather the picture seems still to be of gradually setting in place the groundwork for future more sophisticated applications.

Finland was the first country in the world to introduce an electronic identity card in 1999, but their card has not progressed towards replacing other online authentication devices such as bank ID cards. It serves as a travel document and is intended to aid access to eGovernment services and for electronic signing. Even in states such as Belgium, the relatively strict privacy framework ensures the use of data is not accessible through the eID. Belgium has however achieved complete rollout but still experiences low usage rate for e-government services perhaps because its eID solution offers weaker authentication procedures. Some states, such as Sweden, have worked hard at integrating a market-based initiative within the eID creation and development. Others, such as Denmark, have developed the card largely from health-sector beginnings, with a gestation period of nearly 20 years. Still others, such as Estonia, are seeing ID cards used in connection with e-ticketing and as a partial replacement for driving licences, but interestingly as a support for voting through the Internet. As in other EU states the card is used to aid online tax declaration.

Many European states have developed electronic ID cards with a host of mechanisms for the increased security and protection of personal data. With these cards, authentication requires possession of a physical eID card AND knowledge of a PIN code—hence two-factor authentication. In both Belgium and Spain authentication allows the service provider to check the identity of citizen using the digital certificate on the card by means of the card reader and PIN.

But in Germany authentication is double-sided—the citizen can check the identity of the service provider as well. The service provider must get an access certificate from a federal agency in order to access the eID data on the card. In line with data minimization, the access rights granted only cover the data required for that particular service: say citizen’s name, age or address. The card is also an electronic travel document (e-pass), an alternative to a passport, that holds biometric data including a mandatory photo while fingerprints are optional. Each ID card has a registered serial number but this number cannot be used to identify the holder in any other administrative procedure. The prize for data minimization must go to the Austrian Citizen Card (Burgerkarte) which carries no personal data at all, only a personal link used to produce sector-specific PINs for the respective service in each transaction. In effect, the Austrian system provides technical means against merging citizens’ data from different sectors of government. ...

Two further papers mine the material brought together by these diverse studies focusing on the path dependency questions introduced in the framework and exercising them on selected groups of country cases. One entitled The path dependency of national electronic identities contrasts four national eIDs (Austria, Belgium, Germany and Spain) highlighting the differences between these systems conceived as socio-technical systems with regard to the eID itself, the eID cards as tokens, the authentication processes as well as the procedures for distribution and personalisation, the support provided for installing the technology and any provider-related regulation. ...

A second comparison examines the cases of Denmark, Finland, Estonia and Sweden in order to check the validity of generalisations derived from the first four cases.

No junk, no emos

From the great Edward Mendelson's Literary Humanities, Fall 2010, Section 46 unit guide at Columbia (via Matthew Rimmer) -

Absolutely no laptops, iPads, tablets, cell phones, messaging devices, personal information managers, digital assistants, iPods, MP3 players, CD players, video players, game devices, satellite or other radios, portable televisions, still cameras, video cameras, sound recorders, headphones, virtual-reality headsets, or global positioning devices; absolutely no electronic devices of any kind unless required for medical reasons. No texting. Silent wristwatches only. Absolutely no baseball caps; no head coverings of any kind unless required by your religion or for medical reasons. No passive-aggressive questions (for example, the kind that begin "My problem with this book is" or "Speaking as a"). Bathroom visits during class are strongly discouraged.

breaking up and credulity

Ilana Gershon's 214 page The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media (Cornell University Press, 2010) describes US college student use of Facebook and other 'new media' to "communicate important romantic information - such as 'it's over'".

The publisher characterises The Breakup as opening up -

the world of romance as it is constructed in a digital milieu, offering insights into the ways in which different media influence behaviour, beliefs and social mores. Above all, this full-fledged ethnography of Facebook and other new tools is about technology and communication, but it also tells the reader a great deal about what college students expect from each other when breaking up - and from the friends who are the spectators or witnesses to the ebb and flow of their relationships. The Breakup 2.0 is accessible and rivetting.

In my opinion it is also poorly edited and somewhat thin. The book would have greater authority if the author had interviewed more than 72 people. Call me a grinch but infelicities such as the following could be fixed before the book went out into the 1.0 world -

As Lisa Gitelman, a historian of media, points out, things we now take for granted about the telephone took a while to be established.

[quote from Gitelman]

As Gitelman explains, much of what we take for granted about older communicative technology like the telephone had to be established.

I preferred the more modest 135 page Kids and Credibility: An Empirical Examination of Youth, Digital Media Use and Information Credibility (MIT Press, 2010) by Andrew Flanagin & Miriam Metzger, which draws on representative sample of 2,747 US minors (ages 11 to 18) with internet access plus a survey of one parent of each child to obtain household indicators of digital media use, parental involvement and various demographic factors.

The researchers conclude that -

+ The vast majority of children began using the net between 2nd and 6th grades, with a majority online by 3rd grade. 97% are online by 8th grade. Children use the net ("not including email") for an average of almost 14 hours per week. Usage generally increases with age, from an average of 8 hours weekly among 11yr-olds to 16 hours per week for 18yr-olds.

+ Overall, the US children rely fairly heavily on the net, with the most important general uses include social networking, "virtual usage" ("gaming and the like") and "information contribution" in various forms (eg file sharing or creating personal sites and blogs). Although the children generally acknowledge that information overabundance might pose a problem, nearly two-thirds report that their life would be either a little or much worse overall if they could not go online again, which is more pronounced with age. The children believe that they are highly skilled net users, with "even 11-year-olds believ[ing] that their technical skill, search skill, and knowledge about Internet trends and features are higher than other Internet users".

+ 75% of the parents control their child’s access and use of the net by placing the computer in a certain location in the home, limiting sites the child can visit, limiting the time spent online or controlling access in other ways. Parental oversight decreases as the children get older, with each method of control reported about half as frequently by parents of older children compared to parents of younger children.

In relation to 'information credibility' (a matter that would, alas, not be wasted on some grownups who confuse correlation with causation or go into a trance when encountering pseudo-scientific jargon) the authors report that -

+ Young people are concerned about credibility on the net, yet they find online information to be reasonably credible, with 89% reporting that "some" to "a lot" of information online is believable. Although the amount of information they find credible increases with age, their concern about credibility does not. That concern could stem from the fact that 73% of children have received some form of information literacy training, and the majority of parents report that they talk to their kids about whether to trust internet information.

+ A third of the minors reported that they, or someone they know, had a bad experience due to false information found on the net or through email. Nearly two-thirds said that they had heard a news report about someone who had a bad experience because of false information online. These experiences affect the extent to which minors are sceptical of online information.

+ Among several options, the net was rated as the most believable source of information for schoolwork, entertainment and commercial information, as well as second most believable source for health information and third most believable
for news information. Notably, the children report that the internet is a more credible source of information for school papers or projects than books.

+ Kids are not very trusting of blogs, but they do find Wikipedia to be "somewhat believable". Many children report believing information on Wikipedia substantially more than they think other people should believe it.

+ The children differentiate in reasonable ways among entertainment, health, news, commercial, and school-related information online when deciding which credibility assessment tools to use and with how much effort to employ them. Although this is generally encouraging, children also report finding entertainment and health information to be equally believable online, suggesting a suboptimal degree of skepticism between information types that have potentially quite different consequences. Older minors also show greater diversity and rigor in assessing the credibility of online information. Moreover, young people who are less analytic in their processing of information report trusting strangers online more and are more likely to be fooled by false information online.

+ Children’s concerns about credibility appear to be driven largely by analytic credibility evaluation processes, which involve effortful and deliberate consideration of information. By contrast, actual beliefs about the credibility of information they find are dictated by more heuristic processes, by which decisions are made with less cognitive effort and scrutiny. This suggests that while most kids take the idea that they should be concerned about credibility seriously (by invoking a systematic and analytical approach), many also exhibit a less rigorous approach to actually evaluating the information they find online.

The authors go on to report that -

+ There was no clear evidence of a "digital divide" in terms of the credibility beliefs and evaluations of kids from different demographic backgrounds. Instead, the rigor with which kids evaluate information they find online drives much of their credibility beliefs and concerns.

+ A majority of children displayed an appropriate level of skepticism when presented with hoax sites, a trend that contradicts prior research about this type of site. Nonetheless, approximately 10% still believed hoax sites either "a lot" or "a whole lot", indicating some lingering and important concerns.

+ Children found encyclopaedia entries that they believed originated from Encyclopedia Britannica to be significantly more believable than those they believed originated from either Wikipedia or Citizendium. The actual source of an online encyclopedia entry (ie from Wikipedia, Citizendium or Encyclopaedia Britannica) was irrelevant to the credibility of the entry However, encyclopaedia entries were assessed as less believable when placed on Wikipedia than when placed on the other sites. Entries actually originating from Wikipedia were perceived as more believable when they appeared on Citizendium than if they appeared on Wikipedia and even more believable if they appeared to have originated from the Britannica. Thus, ironically, while children find the content of Wikipedia to be most credible, they find the context of Wikipedia as an information resource to be relatively low in credibility.

banging on pots

From a new book by Stephen Hawking on God, Science and the Origins of the Universe -

According to Viking mythology, eclipses occur when two wolves, Skoll and Hati, catch the sun or moon. At the onset of an eclipse people would make lots of noise, hoping to scare the wolves away. After some time, people must have noticed that the eclipses ended regardless of whether they ran around banging on pots.

Ignorance of nature's ways led people in ancient times to postulate many myths in an effort to make sense of their world. But eventually, people turned to philosophy, that is, to the use of reason — with a good dose of intuition — to decipher their universe. Today we use reason, mathematics and experimental test — in other words, modern science.

Some of us, of course, want to appropriate the authority of 'modern science' for a mysticism that features claims that we can communicate with the dead via valve radios, deal with bodily ills through 'remote healing', have precognition (aka fortune telling) and prove the reality of reincarnation through reports from people who have been administered LSD.

Those claims would be derided if made by a practitioner of Scientology or Theosophy and aren't different to past nonsense about witches or hobgoblins but gain credibility when packaged with terms such as mesodomain, supervening and interstitiality. Very sad, very sad.

As noted earlier this year, it is difficult to see an Australian barrister getting very far in the High Court with claims that people actually do get messages from the dead via valve radios (irrespective of whether they're wearing an alfoil beanie or a bone through the nose), that mass meditation changes the weather, that the adept can levitate (particularly when the gurus continue to fly first class in a conventional aircraft rather than floating into the aether while seated on a tea towel or prayer mat or pile of hundred dollar bills from their acolytes), or that the brains of true believers have indeed become "quantum wave transceivers" attuned to the Akashic Field. (The requisite "health warning" regarding that scepticism is here.)

I'm reminded of the virtue of occasionally questioning whether emperors have new clothes, Akashic or otherwise, in reading Jane Smiley's tribute to Jessica Mitford's Poison Penmanship, which notes that Mitford's -

weapons of choice were factual accuracy and a tone of amazement.

As the great and underappreciated Julien Benda noted in La Trahison des clercs, who would have thought clever people could believe such silly things. It is amazing and more than a little downheartening in world where, as one reader pointed out, nonsense kills and where scholars or journalists have spent a century debunking nonsense from gurus such as Cayce and Blavatsky.

Smiley rightly describes Mitford as -

a toiler in the muck who cared about facts and believed in the idea that her fellow citizens were generally honest and expected the same of business and government.

Would that we held each other to Mitford's standard.

Jonathan Mirsky, in a LR review of Frank Dikötter's Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62 (London: Bloomsbury 2010) highlights why truth may be more useful for law reform and for the advancement of human rights than fantasies regarding communication with Cleopatra (reincarnated or otherwise).

Mirsky notes that Edgar Snow's The Other Side of the River featured the statement that "I saw no starving people in China ... Considerable malnutrition undoubtedly existed. Mass starvation? No. ... Whatever he was eating, the average Chinese maintained himself in good health, as far as anyone could see." Perhaps people chose not to see very far.

In brutal fact, between 1959 and 1962, at least forty-three million Chinese died during the famine Snow didn't bother to see. Most died of hunger, over two million were executed or were beaten or tortured to death, the birth rate halved in some places, parents sold their children, and people dug up the dead and ate them.

The cause of this disaster, the worst ever to befall China and one of the worst anywhere at any time, was Mao, who, cheered on by his sycophantic and frightened colleagues, decreed that before long China's economy must overtake that of the Soviet Union, Britain and even the US. Mao suggested that 'When there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill,' and declared that anyone who questioned his policies was a 'Rightist', a toxic term eventually applied to thirteen million Party members.

Facical

Warwick Mules in the latest issue of Transformations -

'This Face: a Critique of Faciality as Mediated Self-Presence'

In this paper I develop a concept of the face that begins with a simple idea: the face is that which withdraws from self-presence, thereby enabling the possibility of self-relation with others. The face is the mark of the self in the sense proposed by Walter Benjamin, as the medium that manifests the sign by withdrawing from it (“Painting”), thereby opening up possibilities in the materiality of the medium itself for future self-configurations unseeable in current forms of self-identity. This idea, I argue, leads to an affirmation of the self as other, as the self “to come,” opening up possibilities for critique from the place where the face withdraws. My aim here is to counter two tendencies in theoretical work: one in which the face is taken to be the sign of simple self-presence, and the other where, in its withdrawal from self-presence, the face disappears into a system or conceptual scheme, losing its singular specificity as this face, and hence its potential for being something other than what it is.

To make my case I offer an analysis of the conventional face-to-face situation of direct communication with another (the I-you relation), showing how it necessarily depends on a mediation that retreats as it makes this relation possible. I argue that this retreating mediation is the face in its withdrawal and hence resistance to self-identity and conceptual determination. Furthermore, I will demonstrate that the withdrawing face cannot be elided or sublated into an idea or material affect without losing sight of the fact that it happens. My argument counters the material-idealist concept of faciality proposed by Deleuze and Guattari as a “redundancy” within a field of pure material affectivity (A Thousand Plateaus 168). Instead, I argue for a situated critique (critical praxis) of the face opened to otherness in the finite place where it happens — as the mark of withdrawal from self-presence. To demonstrate this, I will discuss photographic work as a creative political art practice that makes a face appear as such, thereby enabling new self-relations motivated by renewed democratic concerns for global “matters of concern.”

Theory is the opiate of the academics?