The rare Amazonian DogBird: I love this photo.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Sunday, January 04, 2009
"Blind" faith vs. faith
Attacking intellectual blindness rather than faith
This cartoon posted by Cameron Reilly in his blog is on the classic theme of faith vs. science.
I appreciate jokes of this sort, although I also think they sort of miss the point. They are funny more because they play on our fear of religious fanatacism and our stereotypes of faith than because they really hit home.
I think it’s more the “blind” in blind faith that we find problematic … rather than the “faith”part. Great things as well as terrible ones are accomplished by monomaniacs with a mission driven by faith. If someone shares your own faith, you find it admirable. If they don't, it is scary, and often for good reason. We use "faith" to good effect in all areas of life. It also aligns us and sometimes kills people massively when leveraged for politics.
Attacking “faith” as such sometimes makes us sound as if we lack hope, optimism, and belief in anything in general, and for many of us who admire science, the rest of those things aren’t true.
Origin of Species is still considered a classic of science writing and theorizing because it drew observations from broad patterns of data in many fields to support its conclusions, fairly considered conflicting evidence, and suggested implications of the ideas and ways to test them. Its role in the cultural shifting of “faith” was a secondary result.
The works of "scientific" creationism are still equally great examples of quite the opposite process, selectively picking data to support its conclusions, selectively quoting authorities, and creating explanations that while they explain a lot in some sense can’t ever be tested.
We all have a tendency to see things in terms of what we already believe. We all make good use of “faith” in at least some form.
The important difference, I think, is that the ideals of inquiry teach us to make mistakes and learn from them, while a tolerance for uncertainty allows us to see our ideas as theories.
When we say that people are going overboard with “blind faith” I think what we intend to mean is that they completely reject the ideals of inquiry, which is what makes it blind. It’s the blind part and not the faith part that makes the cartoon hit home. If “design” or “creation” were really a hypothesis rather than a mythic story, it would at least potentially have a scientific form. To the degree that it has such a form, it has accumulated an enormous amount of disconfirming evidence.
That’s not an attack on faith, it’s an attack on blindness.
If we attack faith as such, it should be for its political and social abuses rather than because we ignore the value of "faith" in some form in daily life.
This cartoon posted by Cameron Reilly in his blog is on the classic theme of faith vs. science.
I appreciate jokes of this sort, although I also think they sort of miss the point. They are funny more because they play on our fear of religious fanatacism and our stereotypes of faith than because they really hit home.
I think it’s more the “blind” in blind faith that we find problematic … rather than the “faith”part. Great things as well as terrible ones are accomplished by monomaniacs with a mission driven by faith. If someone shares your own faith, you find it admirable. If they don't, it is scary, and often for good reason. We use "faith" to good effect in all areas of life. It also aligns us and sometimes kills people massively when leveraged for politics.
Attacking “faith” as such sometimes makes us sound as if we lack hope, optimism, and belief in anything in general, and for many of us who admire science, the rest of those things aren’t true.
Origin of Species is still considered a classic of science writing and theorizing because it drew observations from broad patterns of data in many fields to support its conclusions, fairly considered conflicting evidence, and suggested implications of the ideas and ways to test them. Its role in the cultural shifting of “faith” was a secondary result.
The works of "scientific" creationism are still equally great examples of quite the opposite process, selectively picking data to support its conclusions, selectively quoting authorities, and creating explanations that while they explain a lot in some sense can’t ever be tested.
We all have a tendency to see things in terms of what we already believe. We all make good use of “faith” in at least some form.
The important difference, I think, is that the ideals of inquiry teach us to make mistakes and learn from them, while a tolerance for uncertainty allows us to see our ideas as theories.
When we say that people are going overboard with “blind faith” I think what we intend to mean is that they completely reject the ideals of inquiry, which is what makes it blind. It’s the blind part and not the faith part that makes the cartoon hit home. If “design” or “creation” were really a hypothesis rather than a mythic story, it would at least potentially have a scientific form. To the degree that it has such a form, it has accumulated an enormous amount of disconfirming evidence.
That’s not an attack on faith, it’s an attack on blindness.
If we attack faith as such, it should be for its political and social abuses rather than because we ignore the value of "faith" in some form in daily life.
Friday, January 02, 2009
Preventing Injuries: Biological Robustness
Preventing Injuries: Biological Robustness
I'm a risk averse type, who happens to enjoy some slighly risky activities, so I've always had an interest in injury prevention. In the past decade I've gotten more systematic about preventing injuries. A minor pull that would have taken a few days to heal in my teens will now at 50 sideline me for weeks or even months. And after a few weeks off, I'm pretty much starting over on some aspects of my training. Rather than challenge my motivation to keep starting over and over, I've learned to greatly reduce my injury rate with a judicious little bit of extra training. If you just want to cut to the chase, you can skip down to the last couple of sections. If you want to know the background of the robustness approach , which I think is pretty interesting, then read on.
The biological robustness approach to injury prevention
The concept behind injury prevention that I've adopted is called biological robustness. Biological robustness is based on a adaptive systems approach to human movement. The essential idea is that biological systems preserve their integrity and their core functions in spite of both internal and external perturbation, and we can make use of that fact to understand how things go wrong and make ourselves more resistant tp injury.
Homeostasis has a notable pedigree in physiology, going back to the man often considered the father of modern physiology in the mid 19th century, Claude Bernard. Bernard coined the term "mileu interior" for the internal environment of living things. He wrote that "La fixité du milieu intérieur est la condition d'une vie libre et indépendante" which means:
The constancy of the internal environment is the condition for a free and independent life.
The modern slant on Selye's idea that makes it much more useful for injury prevention is that we have extended the mileu interior to a systems model of how the body operates in general, not just how the body regulates some of its interior processes. Biological robustness means the ability of the body to maintain its core functions in spite of unexpected events.
Note how much more general this is than Canon's homeostasis. The unexpected events might be inside our own body or things happening to us from the outside and they may be in many different kinds of systems. In a wide variety of cases our body strives to maintain function by adapting . Bernard's and Canon's careful observations about specific physiological processes turned out to be applicable to more systems than they first noticed.
This striving to adapt is important for a number of reasons. For example, it can mean that we will change our movement form (often without realizing it) to compensate for a stiffness or weakness in one muscle group by using other muscle groups differently. The fact that our body centrally coordinates movement as well as internal homeostasis means that problems in one place can end up being referred someplace else, a well known principle in modern physiotherapy.
It may seem obvious that when your left foot is hurt, you limp on it and change your gait to adapt, but the concept has some much more subtle implications. A tight iliopsoas muscle in the front of the hip can have an effect on how you use your gluteus muscles, which in turn helps cause an injury somewhere else. And this is a relatively simple and straightforward example.
What this all means to us for preventing injury is that we can't understand the mechanics of our activities just by studying human activity and trying to figure out where the direct physical stresses on us might be. We have to understand the patterns by which our body coordinates movement and strives to adapt to unexpected stresses.
How specifically does this translate to injury prevention? Expecting the Unexpected
Physical training for performance is mostly about identifying specific requirements and training in a way customized for those specific requirements. The better we know the demands of the activity, the better we can tailor the activities and schedules to meet them. Training is specific.
The way that biological robustness affects training is that we also have to take into consideration unexpected stressors as well as expected and well known ones. The principle of robustness training is "expect the unexpected." How the heck do you do that? It's not as crazy an idea as it first sounds. Although we obviously can't prepare for anything that might happen to us, there are a range of potential unexpected stresses that are found in any given kind of activity. For example, a runner can expect to sometimes hit broken ground and turn their foot over, a wrestler can expect to sometimes have body parts pulled forcefully to the limits of movement in various directions, and so on.
So knowing these potental unexpected stresses, how do you protect yourself?
Performance training and robustness have a critical tradeoff. The more you work to prepare yourself for specific expected demands, the more vulnerable you become to unexpected ones. It isn't obvious why this should be so. What seems to happen is that all this complex adaptation your body is doing to specific training demands leaves imbalances and vulnerabilities in other areas. As you become able to push more weight in one exercise, you may be developing a weakness somewhere else that is compensating for some minor internal or external factor that you don't even know about. Over time, even relatively minor unexpected stresses can hit one of these vulnerabilities, and all of a sudden we are injured and we don't know why. We assume we just worked to hard perhaps. But in some cases it was a long developing adaptation process.
How do we minimize the risk of this happening to us?
For each specific training goal, there is a related robustness goal.
When you train for strength, you are working to improve the work capacity of specific muscles and muscle groups. When you train for strength robustness, you look to increase modularity. This means looking at the chain of movements involved and enhancing the ability to withstand stress in each part of the chain. Rather than trying to increase the amount of weight you can push or pull, when you do strength robustness work you try to expose yourself to a wider variety of stresses on the various segments of the movement. You do simple assessment tests to find basic movement weaknesses and you address those. These often reveal problems that you never knew you had because your body found ways to compensate very effectively. But that compensation had an effect elsewhere over time and made you more fragile to injury from some unexpected small stressor.
When you train for general conditioning, you are trying to increase the capacity and efficiency of your cells and tissues to utilize oxygen and utilize various energy systems for movement. When you are trying to improve conditioning robustness you are instead trying to reduce fragility by preparing for a wider range of lesser unexpected challenges rather than a greater amount of an expected challenge. You subject yourself to a wider variety of moderate stresses, particularly varying resistance levels, range of movement around joints, and multidirectional patterns of movement. You want to constantly vary the stresses from session to session and from week to week to expose you to a wider variety of stresses than you would normally get in your activity, but which you still could potentially experience.
When you train for coordination in your activity, you learn movement skills for specific kinds of responses. When you are trying to improve coordination robustness you are looking to train your nervous system to adapt to unexpected variations in movement in your activity. This is done by focusing more deliberately on the skills involved in your training while you vary it. Rather than always turning your thoughts off and running on automatic in your conditioning sessions, you focus more on the skills you are using and vary the sessions, so you can teach yourself to perform the movements in different ways with skill. If you're a runner for example, you might deliberately extend or shorten your gait for a while, concentrating on otherwise maintaining good form. You don't want to do too much of this. You aren't trying to change your gait, you're trying to teach yourself to adapt to unexpected variations in movement. In general you might try varying the speed, direction, range, or rhythm of various movements in your activity.
Finally, consider the psychological dimension of stress. Deliberately focus on small easily neglected aspects of your training to look for problems and help recognize areas where you are frustrated or not in control. Use drills to help develop a greater sense of control over your performance. If you identify specific situations that cause you problems, expose yourself to them in a controlled way in practice to help desensitize yourself to it. Simulate problem situations and rehearse the coping skills you will need in realistic simulations.
Conclusion
Beginners often get too excited and simply overreach themselves. Aside from that, most injuries result not from doing too much or training with too high an intensity level, but from increasing difficulty too quickly without preparing properly or without realizing that there is a basic movement problem being compensated for. Using a conservative progression scheme and incorporating basic assessment tests goes a long way to preventing injuries.
If you want to do even more, then find subtle variations of your training methods that impose a wider variety of moderate stresses on your body, both slight variations in functional movements and in the individual segments of movement chains, and teach your body deliberately to adapt to
variations of stresses. Don't overdo this, it isn't meant to change your basic training program or interfere with it, it is meant to expand it at the boundaries to make you better prepared for the unexpected stressors that you will eventually meet.
Much thanks to Matt Lancaster for the ideas in his article Taking a robust approach to running from P2P Publishing (2008) from which a lot of the specific ideas in the last half of this post were taken. The Peak Performance web site offers a number of good articles and books that are well researched, authoritative, and practical.
I'm a risk averse type, who happens to enjoy some slighly risky activities, so I've always had an interest in injury prevention. In the past decade I've gotten more systematic about preventing injuries. A minor pull that would have taken a few days to heal in my teens will now at 50 sideline me for weeks or even months. And after a few weeks off, I'm pretty much starting over on some aspects of my training. Rather than challenge my motivation to keep starting over and over, I've learned to greatly reduce my injury rate with a judicious little bit of extra training. If you just want to cut to the chase, you can skip down to the last couple of sections. If you want to know the background of the robustness approach , which I think is pretty interesting, then read on.
The biological robustness approach to injury prevention
The concept behind injury prevention that I've adopted is called biological robustness. Biological robustness is based on a adaptive systems approach to human movement. The essential idea is that biological systems preserve their integrity and their core functions in spite of both internal and external perturbation, and we can make use of that fact to understand how things go wrong and make ourselves more resistant tp injury.
How the Body Responds to Stresses: Claude Bernard and the Inner Steady State
The central theme of biological robustness originated in the concept of homeostasis.Homeostasis has a notable pedigree in physiology, going back to the man often considered the father of modern physiology in the mid 19th century, Claude Bernard. Bernard coined the term "mileu interior" for the internal environment of living things. He wrote that "La fixité du milieu intérieur est la condition d'une vie libre et indépendante" which means:
The constancy of the internal environment is the condition for a free and independent life.
Maintaining the Internal Steady State: Extended to a General Principle
This idea was later developed by physiologist Walter Cannon in the early 20th century into the concept of homeostasis. Canon published his ideas in 1932 in The Wisdom of the Body.
Most important for our purposes, Cannon reasoned that homeostasis does not occur by chance, but is the result of organized self-government. This is a very significant observation and modern biology has recently begun to build on it increasingly to see the body in terms of more tightly interconnected systems rather than a collections of loosely coordinated individual parts.
This probably seemed to a lot of mechanically minded physiologists at the time as a rather unlikely or even an unscientific notion. Fortunately our increasing understanding of how complex systems work in general has made Canon's ideas increasingly plausible and important over time rather than relegating them to the science museum with phlogiston and luminiferous ether.
Biological Stress Challenges Our Integrity
Canon's homeostasis, derived from Bernard's mileu interior, became the foundation for the familiar notion of stress, first discussed in this context by endocrinologist Hans Selye in the 1930's. Canon was the one who first coined the popular expression "fight or flight response" in 1915 and it later figured importantly in Selye's concept of stress, along with the idea of homeostasis.
Biological stress is when our capacity to maintain our internal steady state environment is exceeded, whether it is because of real external threats or even perceived ones (which is why there are psychological components to stress as well as physical components).
In the process of preparing for and responding to threat, organisms bring all sorts of emergency mechanisms into play. Selye theorized that when stresses were extended too long, these emergency responses would eventually become exhausted, leading to illness and injury. Other theorists since then have proposed the alternate theory that stress-related illness results not so much from the exhaustion of the emergency mechanisms as from their effect itself on our tissues and organs over time.
In either case, the significance to us is the same: extended stressors without relief lead to breakdown. That becomes the model for how chronic injury occurs. It is also potentially an important factor even in acute injuries, which often occur when we are fatigued or distracted, both of which are sometimes related to the effect of stressors.
Homeostasis Expands To Biological RobustnessThe modern slant on Selye's idea that makes it much more useful for injury prevention is that we have extended the mileu interior to a systems model of how the body operates in general, not just how the body regulates some of its interior processes. Biological robustness means the ability of the body to maintain its core functions in spite of unexpected events.
Note how much more general this is than Canon's homeostasis. The unexpected events might be inside our own body or things happening to us from the outside and they may be in many different kinds of systems. In a wide variety of cases our body strives to maintain function by adapting . Bernard's and Canon's careful observations about specific physiological processes turned out to be applicable to more systems than they first noticed.
This striving to adapt is important for a number of reasons. For example, it can mean that we will change our movement form (often without realizing it) to compensate for a stiffness or weakness in one muscle group by using other muscle groups differently. The fact that our body centrally coordinates movement as well as internal homeostasis means that problems in one place can end up being referred someplace else, a well known principle in modern physiotherapy.
It may seem obvious that when your left foot is hurt, you limp on it and change your gait to adapt, but the concept has some much more subtle implications. A tight iliopsoas muscle in the front of the hip can have an effect on how you use your gluteus muscles, which in turn helps cause an injury somewhere else. And this is a relatively simple and straightforward example.
What this all means to us for preventing injury is that we can't understand the mechanics of our activities just by studying human activity and trying to figure out where the direct physical stresses on us might be. We have to understand the patterns by which our body coordinates movement and strives to adapt to unexpected stresses.
How specifically does this translate to injury prevention? Expecting the Unexpected
Physical training for performance is mostly about identifying specific requirements and training in a way customized for those specific requirements. The better we know the demands of the activity, the better we can tailor the activities and schedules to meet them. Training is specific.
The way that biological robustness affects training is that we also have to take into consideration unexpected stressors as well as expected and well known ones. The principle of robustness training is "expect the unexpected." How the heck do you do that? It's not as crazy an idea as it first sounds. Although we obviously can't prepare for anything that might happen to us, there are a range of potential unexpected stresses that are found in any given kind of activity. For example, a runner can expect to sometimes hit broken ground and turn their foot over, a wrestler can expect to sometimes have body parts pulled forcefully to the limits of movement in various directions, and so on.
So knowing these potental unexpected stresses, how do you protect yourself?
Performance training and robustness have a critical tradeoff. The more you work to prepare yourself for specific expected demands, the more vulnerable you become to unexpected ones. It isn't obvious why this should be so. What seems to happen is that all this complex adaptation your body is doing to specific training demands leaves imbalances and vulnerabilities in other areas. As you become able to push more weight in one exercise, you may be developing a weakness somewhere else that is compensating for some minor internal or external factor that you don't even know about. Over time, even relatively minor unexpected stresses can hit one of these vulnerabilities, and all of a sudden we are injured and we don't know why. We assume we just worked to hard perhaps. But in some cases it was a long developing adaptation process.
How do we minimize the risk of this happening to us?
For each specific training goal, there is a related robustness goal.
When you train for strength, you are working to improve the work capacity of specific muscles and muscle groups. When you train for strength robustness, you look to increase modularity. This means looking at the chain of movements involved and enhancing the ability to withstand stress in each part of the chain. Rather than trying to increase the amount of weight you can push or pull, when you do strength robustness work you try to expose yourself to a wider variety of stresses on the various segments of the movement. You do simple assessment tests to find basic movement weaknesses and you address those. These often reveal problems that you never knew you had because your body found ways to compensate very effectively. But that compensation had an effect elsewhere over time and made you more fragile to injury from some unexpected small stressor.
When you train for general conditioning, you are trying to increase the capacity and efficiency of your cells and tissues to utilize oxygen and utilize various energy systems for movement. When you are trying to improve conditioning robustness you are instead trying to reduce fragility by preparing for a wider range of lesser unexpected challenges rather than a greater amount of an expected challenge. You subject yourself to a wider variety of moderate stresses, particularly varying resistance levels, range of movement around joints, and multidirectional patterns of movement. You want to constantly vary the stresses from session to session and from week to week to expose you to a wider variety of stresses than you would normally get in your activity, but which you still could potentially experience.
When you train for coordination in your activity, you learn movement skills for specific kinds of responses. When you are trying to improve coordination robustness you are looking to train your nervous system to adapt to unexpected variations in movement in your activity. This is done by focusing more deliberately on the skills involved in your training while you vary it. Rather than always turning your thoughts off and running on automatic in your conditioning sessions, you focus more on the skills you are using and vary the sessions, so you can teach yourself to perform the movements in different ways with skill. If you're a runner for example, you might deliberately extend or shorten your gait for a while, concentrating on otherwise maintaining good form. You don't want to do too much of this. You aren't trying to change your gait, you're trying to teach yourself to adapt to unexpected variations in movement. In general you might try varying the speed, direction, range, or rhythm of various movements in your activity.
Finally, consider the psychological dimension of stress. Deliberately focus on small easily neglected aspects of your training to look for problems and help recognize areas where you are frustrated or not in control. Use drills to help develop a greater sense of control over your performance. If you identify specific situations that cause you problems, expose yourself to them in a controlled way in practice to help desensitize yourself to it. Simulate problem situations and rehearse the coping skills you will need in realistic simulations.
Conclusion
Beginners often get too excited and simply overreach themselves. Aside from that, most injuries result not from doing too much or training with too high an intensity level, but from increasing difficulty too quickly without preparing properly or without realizing that there is a basic movement problem being compensated for. Using a conservative progression scheme and incorporating basic assessment tests goes a long way to preventing injuries.
If you want to do even more, then find subtle variations of your training methods that impose a wider variety of moderate stresses on your body, both slight variations in functional movements and in the individual segments of movement chains, and teach your body deliberately to adapt to
variations of stresses. Don't overdo this, it isn't meant to change your basic training program or interfere with it, it is meant to expand it at the boundaries to make you better prepared for the unexpected stressors that you will eventually meet.
Much thanks to Matt Lancaster for the ideas in his article Taking a robust approach to running from P2P Publishing (2008) from which a lot of the specific ideas in the last half of this post were taken. The Peak Performance web site offers a number of good articles and books that are well researched, authoritative, and practical.
Minimalist Fitness: Wherever you go, there you are, working out!
Minimalist Fitness: Wherever you go, there you are, working out!
I just read this excellent post on the Zen Habits blog which reflects a lot of my own philosophy of minimalist conditioning as well.
Part of self-directed training is doing a little research to figure out how to get started, then getting out of analysis mode and DOING IT. It helps in making that transition to DOING IT to have someone do some of the planning for you to get started. I list several programs that I've used personally and found very helpful and very motivating. There are many others that look good as well based on similar sound principles. Remember, I'm not suggesting these in particular for veterans or elite athletes, I'm emphasizing the ones that will help a relative newbie get started fast in a solid minimalist program which they can build on themselves later.
Turbulence Training
http://www.turbulencetraining.com/
Does all of the planning for you with predetermined minimalist sessions and vaariety and progression built in. Support forums, contests, ongoing workouts available.
"Never Gymless" Workout
http://www.rosstraining.com/nevergymless.html
High-end intensity minimalist principles and program ideas, you have to do a little planning work to use this well and most of it is not really for absolute beginners but it provides superb conditioning principles.
RMAX
http://www.rmaxinternational.com/home/
This is a whole culture of programs around various aspects of fitness with a strong minimalist slant and often an interestingly unusual twist.
TorqueBlade
http://www.torqueblade.com/
A very cool approach based on swinging heavy blades around to emphasize functional movement. I mention this one mostly because it is fun, especially when you get bored with burpees and pushup varations.
As I said, I’m omitting a lot of good ones, but these I’ve actually used so far and found fun, effective, and minimalist.
I just read this excellent post on the Zen Habits blog which reflects a lot of my own philosophy of minimalist conditioning as well.
Part of self-directed training is doing a little research to figure out how to get started, then getting out of analysis mode and DOING IT. It helps in making that transition to DOING IT to have someone do some of the planning for you to get started. I list several programs that I've used personally and found very helpful and very motivating. There are many others that look good as well based on similar sound principles. Remember, I'm not suggesting these in particular for veterans or elite athletes, I'm emphasizing the ones that will help a relative newbie get started fast in a solid minimalist program which they can build on themselves later.
Turbulence Training
http://www.turbulencetraining.com/
Does all of the planning for you with predetermined minimalist sessions and vaariety and progression built in. Support forums, contests, ongoing workouts available.
"Never Gymless" Workout
http://www.rosstraining.com/nevergymless.html
High-end intensity minimalist principles and program ideas, you have to do a little planning work to use this well and most of it is not really for absolute beginners but it provides superb conditioning principles.
RMAX
http://www.rmaxinternational.com/home/
This is a whole culture of programs around various aspects of fitness with a strong minimalist slant and often an interestingly unusual twist.
TorqueBlade
http://www.torqueblade.com/
A very cool approach based on swinging heavy blades around to emphasize functional movement. I mention this one mostly because it is fun, especially when you get bored with burpees and pushup varations.
As I said, I’m omitting a lot of good ones, but these I’ve actually used so far and found fun, effective, and minimalist.
Thursday, January 01, 2009
Being fair to sociologists: is it worth the effort?
Being fair to sociologists: is it worth the effort?
In his blog Stranger Fruit, John Lynch makes the latest of his attacks on Steve Fuller, who has recently chosen to associate himself supportively with intelligent design proponents. I don't agree with Fuller in general, but I also think I understand in part why he finds his critics to be responding stupidly in many cases.
My comments:
1. Sociologists of science traditionally distinguish themselves as "objective" in part by showing their cynicism to mainstream science, illustrating that they can stand apart from it in some sense and observe it critically. I know that's a difficult idea to make consistent, since the critical examination generally itself makes use of scientific concepts. I don't agree with it, I just make an observation.
2. Controversy tends to drive people to the extremes (I suspect because it fosters the conditions for "hot" or "motivated" cognition), and people get caught up in those extremes to varying degrees.
So in being well intentioned sociologists of science, often involved in controversies, people like Fuller sometimes slide down toward the opposite pole from the people whose work they are trying to understand.
Thus polarized, it is so much work for people to understand each other that they generally don't consider it worth the effort. So Fuller is pretty much doomed to be misunderstood for the most part, and to find his critics to be rather dense.
Some of my favorite examples of the possible breaching of this polarization are found in "The One Culture" edited by Labinger and Collins. There, scientists and sociologists of science go back and forth and make sincere attempts to understand each other as if the other side actually has something worthwhile to say.
Conclusion: Sometimes in the end it is worth the effort to try to understand each other, sometimes not. We don't always know which is true from our initial appraisal, and that's the point.
In his blog Stranger Fruit, John Lynch makes the latest of his attacks on Steve Fuller, who has recently chosen to associate himself supportively with intelligent design proponents. I don't agree with Fuller in general, but I also think I understand in part why he finds his critics to be responding stupidly in many cases.
My comments:
1. Sociologists of science traditionally distinguish themselves as "objective" in part by showing their cynicism to mainstream science, illustrating that they can stand apart from it in some sense and observe it critically. I know that's a difficult idea to make consistent, since the critical examination generally itself makes use of scientific concepts. I don't agree with it, I just make an observation.
2. Controversy tends to drive people to the extremes (I suspect because it fosters the conditions for "hot" or "motivated" cognition), and people get caught up in those extremes to varying degrees.
So in being well intentioned sociologists of science, often involved in controversies, people like Fuller sometimes slide down toward the opposite pole from the people whose work they are trying to understand.
Thus polarized, it is so much work for people to understand each other that they generally don't consider it worth the effort. So Fuller is pretty much doomed to be misunderstood for the most part, and to find his critics to be rather dense.
Some of my favorite examples of the possible breaching of this polarization are found in "The One Culture" edited by Labinger and Collins. There, scientists and sociologists of science go back and forth and make sincere attempts to understand each other as if the other side actually has something worthwhile to say.
Conclusion: Sometimes in the end it is worth the effort to try to understand each other, sometimes not. We don't always know which is true from our initial appraisal, and that's the point.
The concept of motivated cognition: its uses and abuses and its application to rationalism
Two Kinds of Scientific Rationalists: The Influence of Motivated Cognition
The concept of motivated cognition: its uses and abuses
There is a growing body of evidence that human abstract cognition is motivated, something that has been studied recently and somewhat infamously with regard to politics. The scientific concept has also been abused for political purposes, so for good context on the technical side check out this great article on the Mixing Memory cognitive science blog, which describes the basic concept and also its limitations:
Theories of motivated cognition have recently emphasized its apparent link with what is often called "hot cognition," which for example means that we particularly tend to use this mode of thinking in situations such as where:
Motivated cognition and science
The point I've been preparing for here is that philosophical discussions over human reason aren't all that different, from the standpoint of cognitive science, from political opinions. The fact that we are starting with the assumption that humans are rational doesn't mean we aren't typically affected by the conditions that lead to hot cognition.
The classic difference is of course that in the philosophical tradition of modern science, we are supposed to consider all ideas tentative, assume that our own ideas may be biased or wrong, and then are strongly encouraged seek out disconfirming evidence and to consider it when it is found. So in principle, at least, we should already be aware of something like the phenomenon of motivated reasoning, be aware that it affects ourselves as well as others, and actively work to compensate for it. The tradition emphasizes the uncertainty of knowledge at a given time in history, and so encourages an important attitude of active open-mindedness in its conception of scientific inquiry. This is notoriously taken too far at times to encourage premature and unwarranted "paradigm shifts", but the basic underlying principle continues to be sound and consistent with current cognitive science.
When scientific rationalists write about how great science is and how religion is largely silly superstition, I think they often seem largely unaware that they are not representing a single body of opinion but are themselves split by the effects of motivated cognition.
Motivated cognition and rationalism
In the opening of his wonderful book, The Ancestor's Tale, Richard Dawkins discusses two temptations he feels are worth avoiding, but which he he is compelled to flirt with for the purpose of narration: (a) our appetite to find patterns in history even when they aren't there and (b) the vanity of the present, seeing the past as if it were aimed at our own time.
Discussions over what is rational for human beings to believe based on science are in general forced to flirt with these temptations as well. The concept of what is rational has a history and we want to see patterns in it. At the same time, we also want to see the current worldview as being the end result that all of history has led up to.
I see people who consider themselves scientific rationalists (steadfast followers of the ideals of reason and the process of scientific inquiry) as falling mostly toward the extremes on a spectrum with the following poles which I think are the result of motivated cognition and reflect different approaches to addressing the two temptations:
1. those scientific rationalists who are motivated by a desire and need for a sense of certainty leading to a great faith in logic and current best knowledge and believe that we can know the outcomes of our actions with great confidence because science is self-correcting over time and has led up to the present day knowledge in a persistently cumulative way,
2. those scientific rationalists who are more motivated to embrace the unknown and to think of current best knowledge as more transient and have less confidence that we can know the outcomes of our actions because they see the history as contingent, they recognize that knowledge accumulates, but are also more motivated to think of any given theory as tentative at a given time
Similarly to the philosophers foxes and hedgehogs or the lumpers and splitters, these stereotyped views of scientific rationalism are just a tool for helping to understand how our motivations influence the worldviews we adopt and support.
The varieties of scientific rationalism
So I finally come to my point, the different sub-species of scientific rationalists. By the way, like those of us who are diametrically opposed on political ideology, the different scientific rationalists at the extremes don't really see those at the other extreme as scientific rationalists at all.
To make the point more concrete, at one extreme for example we have the people who are committted to preserving science and preventing irrationality and superstition from corrupting the body of accumulated well-tested knowledge. These are the "skeptics" and for historical reasons they are closely related to the almost ironically titled "freethinkers." I don't say this in a demeaning way, because these are really my intellectual mentors and inspire me. I say it is almost ironic because I truly think the motivation for this form of "skepticism" and "freethought" is at its root more about preserving something valuable than inquiring freely. It just happens to be the scientific tradition that they are preserving rather than the traditions of the Crown and Church altar.
At the other extreme we have the people who are committed to questioning and addressing the frontiers of knowedge more aggressively, who want to test the more wacky and more unpopular ideas, who are most motivated to feel that we don't really know how our actions will turn out but we have to act anyway. They are the people motivated to truly embrace the unknown rather than minimize it to help solidify our current knowledge.
The first extreme considers the second one to be irrationalists because they are so quick to dive into things that we have only clues about and not a stable research platform. Their motivation to aggressive "demarcation" of science and superstition leads them to consider ideas that have not yet been validated and well tested to be not only of low confidence but superstitious in principle as well. People who emphasize the contingent nature of history seem to this first extreme to be deliberately ignoring the important patterns and how much we have already accomplished.
The second extreme considers the first one to be irrationalists because they are so loathe to walk on the wild side and don't seem to them to embody much at all of the spirit of active open-mindedness that allows science to revise its mistakes over time. People who emphasize the cumulativeness of scientific knowledge seem to this second extreme to be deliberately ignoring the role of accidents and how much is still unknown, or what might be overturned.
I think the philosopher/logician Susan Haack captured this distinction very well in her book Defending Science Within Reason. She refers to the first category as deferentialists, and the second as cynics. I think that captures the spirit of the distinction very well overall. I strongly empathize with her efforts to steer between them.
The Mixing Memory blog has another fascinating post where a similar kindof distinction is applied to atheism, something commonly associated with scientific rationalism. The author (someone who identifies themself only as "Chris") cleverly divides atheists into skeptical atheists and suspicious atheists. Skeptical atheists are said to adhere strongly to rationalism, while suspicious atheists are more skeptics in the classical sense and question even the scientists' version of reason as well as religious faith.
This is similar to the tradition that considers Haack's cynics and my second category of rationalists to actually be irrationalists, which I tend to disagree with. True, they do put less emphasis on achieving closure through systematic logic, but in many notable cases they are just as opposed to superstition and irrationalism in spirit as the deferentialists.
The cynics are less confident that we really know what we think we know, they don't embrace superstition or revelation or acts of faith.
So I'd put a slightly different slant on that, and say that the cynics really are scientific rationalists of a kind, who have a different slant on reason, emphasizing its limitations while recognizing that it remains our best tool and that we still need to act on it.
To illustrate this important point, my best current example of someone I currently consider a scientfic rationalist cynic is Stuart Kauffman. His conception of how biological phenomena are epistemologically emergent in nature for example truly questions the classical physicalist picture, but it is consistently scientific and rationalist. His consideration of the issues is sophisticated enough that in their online article on emergent properties, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy suggests that (referring to kauffman's Home in the Universe):
The concept of motivated cognition: its uses and abuses
There is a growing body of evidence that human abstract cognition is motivated, something that has been studied recently and somewhat infamously with regard to politics. The scientific concept has also been abused for political purposes, so for good context on the technical side check out this great article on the Mixing Memory cognitive science blog, which describes the basic concept and also its limitations:
In motivated reasoning, memory searches, interpretations of incoming
information, evaluations of arguments, and even perception, are biased in such a
way that we will be more likely to arrive at a desired conclusion ...
...biasing the information available for supporting or evaluating
conclusions and arguments, as well as interpreting incoming information...
...as long as we can, we'll only deal with that information that is
consistent with our conclusion... continually confronted with information that conflicts with that conclusion, we will be forced to deal with it
Theories of motivated cognition have recently emphasized its apparent link with what is often called "hot cognition," which for example means that we particularly tend to use this mode of thinking in situations such as where:
- our attitudes are challenged
- an emotional judgment is called for
- there are relatively small consequences for being wrong
- the judgmental task is complex
- "Objective" information is not readily available or the evidence is ambiguous
- disconfirming evidence is not highlighted
- counter-arguments come easily to mind
- we are distracted or under time pressure
Motivated cognition and science
The point I've been preparing for here is that philosophical discussions over human reason aren't all that different, from the standpoint of cognitive science, from political opinions. The fact that we are starting with the assumption that humans are rational doesn't mean we aren't typically affected by the conditions that lead to hot cognition.
The classic difference is of course that in the philosophical tradition of modern science, we are supposed to consider all ideas tentative, assume that our own ideas may be biased or wrong, and then are strongly encouraged seek out disconfirming evidence and to consider it when it is found. So in principle, at least, we should already be aware of something like the phenomenon of motivated reasoning, be aware that it affects ourselves as well as others, and actively work to compensate for it. The tradition emphasizes the uncertainty of knowledge at a given time in history, and so encourages an important attitude of active open-mindedness in its conception of scientific inquiry. This is notoriously taken too far at times to encourage premature and unwarranted "paradigm shifts", but the basic underlying principle continues to be sound and consistent with current cognitive science.
When scientific rationalists write about how great science is and how religion is largely silly superstition, I think they often seem largely unaware that they are not representing a single body of opinion but are themselves split by the effects of motivated cognition.
Motivated cognition and rationalism
In the opening of his wonderful book, The Ancestor's Tale, Richard Dawkins discusses two temptations he feels are worth avoiding, but which he he is compelled to flirt with for the purpose of narration: (a) our appetite to find patterns in history even when they aren't there and (b) the vanity of the present, seeing the past as if it were aimed at our own time.
Discussions over what is rational for human beings to believe based on science are in general forced to flirt with these temptations as well. The concept of what is rational has a history and we want to see patterns in it. At the same time, we also want to see the current worldview as being the end result that all of history has led up to.
I see people who consider themselves scientific rationalists (steadfast followers of the ideals of reason and the process of scientific inquiry) as falling mostly toward the extremes on a spectrum with the following poles which I think are the result of motivated cognition and reflect different approaches to addressing the two temptations:
1. those scientific rationalists who are motivated by a desire and need for a sense of certainty leading to a great faith in logic and current best knowledge and believe that we can know the outcomes of our actions with great confidence because science is self-correcting over time and has led up to the present day knowledge in a persistently cumulative way,
2. those scientific rationalists who are more motivated to embrace the unknown and to think of current best knowledge as more transient and have less confidence that we can know the outcomes of our actions because they see the history as contingent, they recognize that knowledge accumulates, but are also more motivated to think of any given theory as tentative at a given time
Similarly to the philosophers foxes and hedgehogs or the lumpers and splitters, these stereotyped views of scientific rationalism are just a tool for helping to understand how our motivations influence the worldviews we adopt and support.
The varieties of scientific rationalism
So I finally come to my point, the different sub-species of scientific rationalists. By the way, like those of us who are diametrically opposed on political ideology, the different scientific rationalists at the extremes don't really see those at the other extreme as scientific rationalists at all.
To make the point more concrete, at one extreme for example we have the people who are committted to preserving science and preventing irrationality and superstition from corrupting the body of accumulated well-tested knowledge. These are the "skeptics" and for historical reasons they are closely related to the almost ironically titled "freethinkers." I don't say this in a demeaning way, because these are really my intellectual mentors and inspire me. I say it is almost ironic because I truly think the motivation for this form of "skepticism" and "freethought" is at its root more about preserving something valuable than inquiring freely. It just happens to be the scientific tradition that they are preserving rather than the traditions of the Crown and Church altar.
At the other extreme we have the people who are committed to questioning and addressing the frontiers of knowedge more aggressively, who want to test the more wacky and more unpopular ideas, who are most motivated to feel that we don't really know how our actions will turn out but we have to act anyway. They are the people motivated to truly embrace the unknown rather than minimize it to help solidify our current knowledge.
The first extreme considers the second one to be irrationalists because they are so quick to dive into things that we have only clues about and not a stable research platform. Their motivation to aggressive "demarcation" of science and superstition leads them to consider ideas that have not yet been validated and well tested to be not only of low confidence but superstitious in principle as well. People who emphasize the contingent nature of history seem to this first extreme to be deliberately ignoring the important patterns and how much we have already accomplished.
The second extreme considers the first one to be irrationalists because they are so loathe to walk on the wild side and don't seem to them to embody much at all of the spirit of active open-mindedness that allows science to revise its mistakes over time. People who emphasize the cumulativeness of scientific knowledge seem to this second extreme to be deliberately ignoring the role of accidents and how much is still unknown, or what might be overturned.
I think the philosopher/logician Susan Haack captured this distinction very well in her book Defending Science Within Reason. She refers to the first category as deferentialists, and the second as cynics. I think that captures the spirit of the distinction very well overall. I strongly empathize with her efforts to steer between them.
The Mixing Memory blog has another fascinating post where a similar kindof distinction is applied to atheism, something commonly associated with scientific rationalism. The author (someone who identifies themself only as "Chris") cleverly divides atheists into skeptical atheists and suspicious atheists. Skeptical atheists are said to adhere strongly to rationalism, while suspicious atheists are more skeptics in the classical sense and question even the scientists' version of reason as well as religious faith.
This is similar to the tradition that considers Haack's cynics and my second category of rationalists to actually be irrationalists, which I tend to disagree with. True, they do put less emphasis on achieving closure through systematic logic, but in many notable cases they are just as opposed to superstition and irrationalism in spirit as the deferentialists.
The cynics are less confident that we really know what we think we know, they don't embrace superstition or revelation or acts of faith.
So I'd put a slightly different slant on that, and say that the cynics really are scientific rationalists of a kind, who have a different slant on reason, emphasizing its limitations while recognizing that it remains our best tool and that we still need to act on it.
To illustrate this important point, my best current example of someone I currently consider a scientfic rationalist cynic is Stuart Kauffman. His conception of how biological phenomena are epistemologically emergent in nature for example truly questions the classical physicalist picture, but it is consistently scientific and rationalist. His consideration of the issues is sophisticated enough that in their online article on emergent properties, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy suggests that (referring to kauffman's Home in the Universe):
Kauffman (1993b) is an important and influential assessment of current
scientific theories lending themselves to epistemological emergentist
ideas.
Since I consider philosophy to be for the most part a reason-motivated endeavor and the SEP to be relatively authoritative, I think their mention in this context lends support to my contention that Kauffman provides a data point for scientific rationalist cynics.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Todd the Fervent Public Audodidact
My sub-species has finally been identified: fervent public autodidact
I was honestly very touched by this comment from Alexander Iwanow on my FaceBook page. I just had to save it here so I can look back on it on those days when I wonder whether anyone reads those reviews that I sometimes put so much into.
"Mr. Stark, I've been an admirer of your fervent public autodidactism for years now. You've turned me on to many great books (and off of many bad ones). You are among the most vibrant, reliable, and judicious voices to gift himself on a public website. (Jeff Bezos should give you a plaque for helping him to sell so many books!) I mean hell, man, you even got me to look into YOGA...!!! Thank you for responding warmly to my somewhat rude and impulsive kamikaze invite, and I look forward to whatever twists, turns, and elegant refinements your consciousness opts to undertake."
I was honestly very touched by this comment from Alexander Iwanow on my FaceBook page. I just had to save it here so I can look back on it on those days when I wonder whether anyone reads those reviews that I sometimes put so much into.
"Mr. Stark, I've been an admirer of your fervent public autodidactism for years now. You've turned me on to many great books (and off of many bad ones). You are among the most vibrant, reliable, and judicious voices to gift himself on a public website. (Jeff Bezos should give you a plaque for helping him to sell so many books!) I mean hell, man, you even got me to look into YOGA...!!! Thank you for responding warmly to my somewhat rude and impulsive kamikaze invite, and I look forward to whatever twists, turns, and elegant refinements your consciousness opts to undertake."
Functional Training and Corrective Exercise
Functional Training and Corrective Exercise
In his T-Nation article, trainer Mike Robertson addresses the concept of functional training in terms of the popular trend toward using devices like BOSU balls, wobble boards, etc., that are said to help develop better stability and prevent injuries. Mike discusses why the current trend to using instability devices isn't always productive and how it actually gets away from the concept of functional training. I highly recommend Mike's article, and I want to give some additional context for it here.
The idea of "functional training" was originally to move away from isolation exercises like leg extensions and curls and instead have people do things that were more like the specific challenges they expect to face, forcing them to support, move, and stabilize themselves in controlled ways to prepare to handle real physical challenges better without injury, and in the process, correct more basic weaknesses.
Trainers began to notice that people don't use their bodies in the way that an isolation mentality would predict; the parts are interdependent in important ways when we move. Various neural and connective tissue mechanisms linkn our body parts together to stabilize them as they move through space and exert force against resistance. This led to increasing use of exercises emphasizing multi-joint movements that more closely mimicked real sports movements and real life movements, and led to a growing distinction between training specifically to lift heavy weights in particular ways, training to build big muscles, and training to perform better and avoid injury in other activities. "Corrective" and "functional" training came to increasingly mean doing exercises on unstable surfaces or training the abs, and this starts to drift away from the original concept.
Why is this a drift away from true functional training? ...
Two very important concepts underlie this trend: the "core" and the "kinetic chain."
When someone gets hurt, especially repeated patterns of injury that don't have another obvious cause, it is currently "best practice" to try to track this down to a problem somewhere stabilizing the body properly during movement. Particularly when someone experiences a range of different injuries on the same side of the body, trainers will tend to suspect a problem with the "core." This refers to the central trunk stabilizing muscles and structures.
The "core" obviously doesn't do all of the work of movement. You can think of it as like a platform that we push off in order to move. Actual movement occurs when muscles contract in a precisely timed sequences, where movement at one joint decelerates followed by acceleration at the next joint in the sequence. Thus a "kinetic chain" or simply chain of movements.
The motor cortex in the brain appears to be organized to coordinate muscles in terms of these sequences rather than to fire individual muscles, so this is considered a very fundamental idea. The constant alternation and interplay between producing force at one joint and reducing force at another is coordinated by complex neural mechanisms that are considered an important aspect of proprioception, a general term for our inner body sense.
A synopsis of this topic would be remiss if I didn't mention the first widely read book on the topic, and the one that first fascinated me with it: Total Body Training by Richard Dominguez and Bob Gajda. Many of the concepts that are now widely taken for granted in functional training originated in that very book which is now somewhat hard to find. In fact, this book appears to be the first place where the now ubiquitous late-night infomercial term "core" was used seriously to mean the stabilizing platform for movement. Dominguez is a sports medicine orthopedist and Gajda did his Ph.D thesis in biomechanics. Total Body Training was the result of that work. It is also worth noting that Gajda was a very successful bodybuilder before his work in functional training, having once beaten Arnold for the Mr. Universe title.
The trend toward using wobble boards and such to improve performance and prevent injury begins with Gajda and Dominguez's ideas and is based on improving proprioception skills. The idea is that weaknesses in "core" strength are transmitted by means of the "kinetic chain" to become problems that don't bear any obvious relationship back to the "core."
It's a little like the medical notion of referred pain. Problems in stabilizing the trunk get "referred" to injuries in more remote places in the body. When people try to correct for problems with their gait, their posture, and their basic movements, they compensate by using other muscles and end up with patterns that induce strain and eventually injury.
So one of the ideas is to improve proprioception by exercising on unstable surfaces, forcing us to develop better stabilization skills rather than overcompensating with the wrong muscles. Especially if we lack adequate balance, which isn't uncommon.
The problem is that while stabilization by learning balance skills is important, it is only part of the problem and not neccessarily the best focus for remediation. One of the most common "core" problems appears to be when certain tight core muscles inhibit other muscles through a neural mechanism called reciprocal inhibition. This causes a deep inefficiency that is transmitted to other areas of the body. One common example is when a tight muscle on the front of the hip diminishes hip extension and inhibits the use of the glutes. This imbalance is transmitted through the movement chain to cause problems with other parts of the leg during activity.
The point is that you won't neccessarily best fix this kind of problem by wobbling on a board or a ball. You have to assess the problem and come up with movements that help address the imbalance. Assessment isn't black magic, there are some basic tests that are widely used by therapists and trainers. It does take a little experience to watch a movement and recognize problems with it, but the assessment tests are designed to amplify the basic problems so you can see them better. If you don't have a trainer handy and want to know more about assessment, Gray Cook's book The Athletic Body in Balance is a good start. His "functional movement screen" is a good example of a simple assessment tool.
There's nothing wrong with doing work for proprioception skills and limb stabilizing strength, but it shouldn't be your primary focus since injuries are more likely to be the result of underlying deeper stabilizing muscle imbalances, somewhat obscured by the actions of the kinetic chain.
If you remember that movement starts from a platform, and operates through a chain, it makes sense to assess the integrity of the platform first rather than trying to adjust the wobbling at the end of the chain.
That's why I think Mike's approach to training with functional corrective exercise is so helpful.
In his T-Nation article, trainer Mike Robertson addresses the concept of functional training in terms of the popular trend toward using devices like BOSU balls, wobble boards, etc., that are said to help develop better stability and prevent injuries. Mike discusses why the current trend to using instability devices isn't always productive and how it actually gets away from the concept of functional training. I highly recommend Mike's article, and I want to give some additional context for it here.
The idea of "functional training" was originally to move away from isolation exercises like leg extensions and curls and instead have people do things that were more like the specific challenges they expect to face, forcing them to support, move, and stabilize themselves in controlled ways to prepare to handle real physical challenges better without injury, and in the process, correct more basic weaknesses.
Trainers began to notice that people don't use their bodies in the way that an isolation mentality would predict; the parts are interdependent in important ways when we move. Various neural and connective tissue mechanisms linkn our body parts together to stabilize them as they move through space and exert force against resistance. This led to increasing use of exercises emphasizing multi-joint movements that more closely mimicked real sports movements and real life movements, and led to a growing distinction between training specifically to lift heavy weights in particular ways, training to build big muscles, and training to perform better and avoid injury in other activities. "Corrective" and "functional" training came to increasingly mean doing exercises on unstable surfaces or training the abs, and this starts to drift away from the original concept.
Why is this a drift away from true functional training? ...
Two very important concepts underlie this trend: the "core" and the "kinetic chain."
When someone gets hurt, especially repeated patterns of injury that don't have another obvious cause, it is currently "best practice" to try to track this down to a problem somewhere stabilizing the body properly during movement. Particularly when someone experiences a range of different injuries on the same side of the body, trainers will tend to suspect a problem with the "core." This refers to the central trunk stabilizing muscles and structures.
The "core" obviously doesn't do all of the work of movement. You can think of it as like a platform that we push off in order to move. Actual movement occurs when muscles contract in a precisely timed sequences, where movement at one joint decelerates followed by acceleration at the next joint in the sequence. Thus a "kinetic chain" or simply chain of movements.
The motor cortex in the brain appears to be organized to coordinate muscles in terms of these sequences rather than to fire individual muscles, so this is considered a very fundamental idea. The constant alternation and interplay between producing force at one joint and reducing force at another is coordinated by complex neural mechanisms that are considered an important aspect of proprioception, a general term for our inner body sense.
A synopsis of this topic would be remiss if I didn't mention the first widely read book on the topic, and the one that first fascinated me with it: Total Body Training by Richard Dominguez and Bob Gajda. Many of the concepts that are now widely taken for granted in functional training originated in that very book which is now somewhat hard to find. In fact, this book appears to be the first place where the now ubiquitous late-night infomercial term "core" was used seriously to mean the stabilizing platform for movement. Dominguez is a sports medicine orthopedist and Gajda did his Ph.D thesis in biomechanics. Total Body Training was the result of that work. It is also worth noting that Gajda was a very successful bodybuilder before his work in functional training, having once beaten Arnold for the Mr. Universe title.
The trend toward using wobble boards and such to improve performance and prevent injury begins with Gajda and Dominguez's ideas and is based on improving proprioception skills. The idea is that weaknesses in "core" strength are transmitted by means of the "kinetic chain" to become problems that don't bear any obvious relationship back to the "core."
It's a little like the medical notion of referred pain. Problems in stabilizing the trunk get "referred" to injuries in more remote places in the body. When people try to correct for problems with their gait, their posture, and their basic movements, they compensate by using other muscles and end up with patterns that induce strain and eventually injury.
So one of the ideas is to improve proprioception by exercising on unstable surfaces, forcing us to develop better stabilization skills rather than overcompensating with the wrong muscles. Especially if we lack adequate balance, which isn't uncommon.
The problem is that while stabilization by learning balance skills is important, it is only part of the problem and not neccessarily the best focus for remediation. One of the most common "core" problems appears to be when certain tight core muscles inhibit other muscles through a neural mechanism called reciprocal inhibition. This causes a deep inefficiency that is transmitted to other areas of the body. One common example is when a tight muscle on the front of the hip diminishes hip extension and inhibits the use of the glutes. This imbalance is transmitted through the movement chain to cause problems with other parts of the leg during activity.
The point is that you won't neccessarily best fix this kind of problem by wobbling on a board or a ball. You have to assess the problem and come up with movements that help address the imbalance. Assessment isn't black magic, there are some basic tests that are widely used by therapists and trainers. It does take a little experience to watch a movement and recognize problems with it, but the assessment tests are designed to amplify the basic problems so you can see them better. If you don't have a trainer handy and want to know more about assessment, Gray Cook's book The Athletic Body in Balance is a good start. His "functional movement screen" is a good example of a simple assessment tool.
There's nothing wrong with doing work for proprioception skills and limb stabilizing strength, but it shouldn't be your primary focus since injuries are more likely to be the result of underlying deeper stabilizing muscle imbalances, somewhat obscured by the actions of the kinetic chain.
If you remember that movement starts from a platform, and operates through a chain, it makes sense to assess the integrity of the platform first rather than trying to adjust the wobbling at the end of the chain.
That's why I think Mike's approach to training with functional corrective exercise is so helpful.
Flowchart for responding to negative blogs
The Air Force (their Public Affairs Agency) has this simple but useful flowchart for responding to negative press online. I found this reading web marketing author David Meerman Scott's WebInk blog. It's largely commonsense, but as the saying goes, such isn't always so common.
The Air Force (their Public Affairs Agency) has this simple but useful flowchart for responding to negative press online. I found this reading web marketing author David Meerman Scott's WebInk blog. It's largely commonsense, but as the saying goes, such isn't always so common.
Which is Better: Conscious or Unconscious Decision Making?
Which is Better: Conscious or Unconscious Decision Making ?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081224215542.htm
The snippet above from Science Daily reports on the superiority of unconscious decision making in the case of estimating likelihoods.
My thoughts ...
There's a fairly sizable literature on decision making, and typically the headlines hide the facts in this field. I'd estimate that about 70% of the recent experiments went the way of this article with their conclusion (and of course one of Malcolm Gladwell's popular books) and about 30% went the opposite way, saying that the work 'proves' that complex decisions should not be left to unconscious proceses. It's like the nature/nurture question, we feel compelled to slide toward the extremes.
My impression is that what the literature (collectively) has shown so far is:
1. There are perceptual tracking mechanisms and very powerful computational mechanisms that operate completely outside of awareness for the most part, yet are important in decision making (rapid cognition, etc., the "human intuition is so amazing" school)
2. Our conscious reasoning processes are built very recently (phylogenetically) on a substrate of other things, and so they have a lot of biases and blind spots and rely heavily on our limited and easily distrated working memory capacity (Kahnemann, Tversky, etc., the "human reasoning is so fallible" school)
3. The unconscious mechanisms don't work by magic, i.e. with the exception of some basic category templates for recognizing and sorting things, they still rely on an acquired store of experience built onto those templates (Kant plus Darwin)
4. Good decision making for complex problems is good largely because because it tends to use the unconscious processes effectively, and does this by focusing attention on the relevant aspects of the problem (knowing what is relevant and what is not is sometimes the meat of the problem, and sometimes a given)
5. Focusing attention on the relevant aspects of a complex problem generally requires us to draw from the skills that rely on working memory and are generally conscious and build on structural rules, sequencing, and explicit algorithms (the virtual von Neumann machine that many of us we believe we possess in our head)
So while the above is a very simplistic account of a big topic, I think it helps illustrate that "conscious" vs. "unconscious" is not really the important issue in decision making, although it is certainly useful to distinguish automatic processes. The more compelling issue is how to structure problems so we can use the powerful resources of the mind, and how to learn the skills for making best use of those abilities, and the skills for recognizing our own biases and blind spots when we structure problems.
Many natural mechanisms work best on imperfect information but fail when compared to systematic reasoning with good information. However most real and meaningful human problems in nature require responses with limited resources, limited time, and very limited information, so a lot of the research actually demonstrates that while we can do better than intuition in theory, we can't do better than intuition in practice.
That is, unless we have some way of "cheating" by having unusually good information or knowing the answer ahead of time. Our species dependence on social imitation probably reflects exactly that, a way of "cheating" the limitations of individual problem solving by copying what other people are doing. For every problem we find that legitimately shows that people screwed up by trusting systematic reasoning too far, we can find one where someone trusted an intuition that had catastrophic consequences. In my opinion, the key skill set is in learning clues for recognizing when to trust each tool. That is, rather than espousing either blind trust or mistrust in powerful automatic processes.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081224215542.htm
The snippet above from Science Daily reports on the superiority of unconscious decision making in the case of estimating likelihoods.
My thoughts ...
There's a fairly sizable literature on decision making, and typically the headlines hide the facts in this field. I'd estimate that about 70% of the recent experiments went the way of this article with their conclusion (and of course one of Malcolm Gladwell's popular books) and about 30% went the opposite way, saying that the work 'proves' that complex decisions should not be left to unconscious proceses. It's like the nature/nurture question, we feel compelled to slide toward the extremes.
My impression is that what the literature (collectively) has shown so far is:
1. There are perceptual tracking mechanisms and very powerful computational mechanisms that operate completely outside of awareness for the most part, yet are important in decision making (rapid cognition, etc., the "human intuition is so amazing" school)
2. Our conscious reasoning processes are built very recently (phylogenetically) on a substrate of other things, and so they have a lot of biases and blind spots and rely heavily on our limited and easily distrated working memory capacity (Kahnemann, Tversky, etc., the "human reasoning is so fallible" school)
3. The unconscious mechanisms don't work by magic, i.e. with the exception of some basic category templates for recognizing and sorting things, they still rely on an acquired store of experience built onto those templates (Kant plus Darwin)
4. Good decision making for complex problems is good largely because because it tends to use the unconscious processes effectively, and does this by focusing attention on the relevant aspects of the problem (knowing what is relevant and what is not is sometimes the meat of the problem, and sometimes a given)
5. Focusing attention on the relevant aspects of a complex problem generally requires us to draw from the skills that rely on working memory and are generally conscious and build on structural rules, sequencing, and explicit algorithms (the virtual von Neumann machine that many of us we believe we possess in our head)
So while the above is a very simplistic account of a big topic, I think it helps illustrate that "conscious" vs. "unconscious" is not really the important issue in decision making, although it is certainly useful to distinguish automatic processes. The more compelling issue is how to structure problems so we can use the powerful resources of the mind, and how to learn the skills for making best use of those abilities, and the skills for recognizing our own biases and blind spots when we structure problems.
Many natural mechanisms work best on imperfect information but fail when compared to systematic reasoning with good information. However most real and meaningful human problems in nature require responses with limited resources, limited time, and very limited information, so a lot of the research actually demonstrates that while we can do better than intuition in theory, we can't do better than intuition in practice.
That is, unless we have some way of "cheating" by having unusually good information or knowing the answer ahead of time. Our species dependence on social imitation probably reflects exactly that, a way of "cheating" the limitations of individual problem solving by copying what other people are doing. For every problem we find that legitimately shows that people screwed up by trusting systematic reasoning too far, we can find one where someone trusted an intuition that had catastrophic consequences. In my opinion, the key skill set is in learning clues for recognizing when to trust each tool. That is, rather than espousing either blind trust or mistrust in powerful automatic processes.
Monday, December 29, 2008
Hack: using parity to burn more reliable disks
If you like to burn data disks and are concerned about their longevity, check out this great idea posted on LifeHacker. The example here uses a Windows freeware tool called QuickPar, and for recovery you will need another tool (such as ISOBUSTER) to read surviving data from bad disks so you can use this method.
Burn More Reliable Discs with QuickPar http://tinyurl.com/9j7hyb
The tip is about using that lump of extra space you usually end up with on your data disks to hold parity files for your data. Parity files have extra information that lets you recover your files if they are later found to be corrupted. I've had a number of cases where old disks started to have a few corrupted files before the entire disk became unreadable, and this tip would have saved a lot of anguish. Of course if you want to protect everything on the disk, you'll need to leave more space on your disks for the parity files.
This takes just a touch of tech savvy, but it's a beginner tip as "hacks" go. Anyone comfortable with using disk burners and disk reading tools like ISOBUSTER will find this an easy thing to use to make the most precious data on their CDs and DVDs much more reliable.
So why don't they build this functionality into all disk burning tools?
Todd
Burn More Reliable Discs with QuickPar http://tinyurl.com/9j7hyb
The tip is about using that lump of extra space you usually end up with on your data disks to hold parity files for your data. Parity files have extra information that lets you recover your files if they are later found to be corrupted. I've had a number of cases where old disks started to have a few corrupted files before the entire disk became unreadable, and this tip would have saved a lot of anguish. Of course if you want to protect everything on the disk, you'll need to leave more space on your disks for the parity files.
This takes just a touch of tech savvy, but it's a beginner tip as "hacks" go. Anyone comfortable with using disk burners and disk reading tools like ISOBUSTER will find this an easy thing to use to make the most precious data on their CDs and DVDs much more reliable.
So why don't they build this functionality into all disk burning tools?
Todd
Thoughts on Twitter (so far)
I just started using Twitter this week and have been wondering whether it would be of any use in the long run. It seems to leverage our instinct for gossip, effectively a giant ongoing chat room. But that doesn’t mean it can’t become a powerful tool.
First, so far, I think it's pretty clear that it is not the right medium for intelligent discussion and encourages a soundbite mentality that is already too common and too tempting. We can’t structure a thoughtful argument and provide context for an original thought in 140 chars, unless we have been involved in a dialog for a while or have common source of context, neither of which is encouraged by the Twitter format. It is possible but extremely inconvenient for that purpose. You can only give clues to your thinking, or give the impression of saying something useful, which hopefully will trigger thinking in other people.
However, that said, it also seems to me that Twitter seems particularly powerful when used as a source of quick pointers to potentially interesting things … a spur to creativity or looking in new directions. The more people think of it as a way to trigger ideas in others, the more selective they will be about giving ideas rather than statuses, and the more feeds we can read that trigger useful ideas. So long as the mundane “I am going out to the store for some bread and milk now” stuff doesn’t overwhelm the channel.
I think that (as with non-virtual relations), it works best if you surround yourself with people that have good ideas and diverse thoughts about similar interests to yours (and maybe a couple of offbeat friends). I can't see how people following 5,000 Twitter contacts can use it for anything more than random inspiration?
(This is an edit of a comment to Cameron Reilly's blog post about how he uses Twitter).
I just started using Twitter this week and have been wondering whether it would be of any use in the long run. It seems to leverage our instinct for gossip, effectively a giant ongoing chat room. But that doesn’t mean it can’t become a powerful tool.
First, so far, I think it's pretty clear that it is not the right medium for intelligent discussion and encourages a soundbite mentality that is already too common and too tempting. We can’t structure a thoughtful argument and provide context for an original thought in 140 chars, unless we have been involved in a dialog for a while or have common source of context, neither of which is encouraged by the Twitter format. It is possible but extremely inconvenient for that purpose. You can only give clues to your thinking, or give the impression of saying something useful, which hopefully will trigger thinking in other people.
However, that said, it also seems to me that Twitter seems particularly powerful when used as a source of quick pointers to potentially interesting things … a spur to creativity or looking in new directions. The more people think of it as a way to trigger ideas in others, the more selective they will be about giving ideas rather than statuses, and the more feeds we can read that trigger useful ideas. So long as the mundane “I am going out to the store for some bread and milk now” stuff doesn’t overwhelm the channel.
I think that (as with non-virtual relations), it works best if you surround yourself with people that have good ideas and diverse thoughts about similar interests to yours (and maybe a couple of offbeat friends). I can't see how people following 5,000 Twitter contacts can use it for anything more than random inspiration?
(This is an edit of a comment to Cameron Reilly's blog post about how he uses Twitter).
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Being "scientific" about exercise and weight control
I was looking for references to research on the relationship of appetite and exercise and I came across an interesting blog post that inspired some thoughts. I see a lot of people trying to interpret research results, which in general I like to see. But people also seem to commonly try to draw advice for themselves from selectively chosen studies, and that's the part that I wanted to comment on.
If you want to know how exercise effects your body, and you have confidence in science, try doing it and measure the effects. Make yourself the study population rather than trying to identify (or not) with the population in the latest study. Or, if instead you want to understand the research, get the background for the program and read the literature directly.
People tend to treat journalist's reports of research it as if it were "scientific advice" and then when it is nothing of the kind (which is generally the case), the researchers are accused of being hopelessly obscure, getting paid for results, or being contradictory about their advice. What a bum rap. That's not the point of research at all.
Research is most *interesting* when it contains contradictions and gets *boring* when the results become consistent. Sure, you want to prove your new hypothesis is right, but if it were easy to demonstrate someone would already have demonstrated it. You expect things to be fuzzy in a new area of research where there are interesting new hypotheses to test.You can almost never generallize "laws" (or advice) from a single study, nor should you expect to.
Conclusions vary even in very similar studies either because of the way the question was asked or because they didn't identify the right variables in the right way yet to address the question. That's assuming they're even studying something that can be characterized in a law-like way, which isn't always the case.
Sometimes individual differences outweigh generalized laws, even when there *are* underlying laws (this is a common finding in social psychology research). More to the point, this seems to be the case somewhat with nutrition as well. Conflicting results are a symptom of a fertile research topic.
IMO, if you want to draw good advice from research, stop jumping on every new study that comes out just because it seems to say something you'd like to hear, and learn to follow the *trends* in the research programs. That means reading technical books and journals rather than sound bites and blogs, and looking for commonalities rather than just reports that stand out because they are novel. But that's more work than you probably need to do.
There are a lot of people that have been spending decades researching obesity and there are some very useful conclusions. But you still have to do the work to see what works best for you.
I think there are many, many fat people out there exercising like crazy and not reaching their goals because they keep looking for magic bullets or excuses instead of starting with sound principles and then experimenting carefully to see what is working for them and what isn't.
I've noticed that there are also a number of chubby runners out there who stay chubby because they take in more than they put out, which I suspect is due to the putative appetite effect. It could well be that they would benefit by changing their training to briefer, higher intensity work, so that the appetite effect would lessen and the metabolic increase last longer. But that's speculation at this point and represents very hard work and many people would give up on such a regimen if they're used to jogging and elliptical machines and such. So they have to experiment to see what's right for them.
Well, anyway, personal experimentation (and brief high intensity training) is an approach that has always worked very well for me. Just remember, people tend to distort their own perception of what they take in and what they put out (*that's* a pretty well validated research result across many studies). So when you measure your compliance and your results, be sure to be specific and use accurate measurements and don't rely on memory and estimation.
I was looking for references to research on the relationship of appetite and exercise and I came across an interesting blog post that inspired some thoughts. I see a lot of people trying to interpret research results, which in general I like to see. But people also seem to commonly try to draw advice for themselves from selectively chosen studies, and that's the part that I wanted to comment on.
If you want to know how exercise effects your body, and you have confidence in science, try doing it and measure the effects. Make yourself the study population rather than trying to identify (or not) with the population in the latest study. Or, if instead you want to understand the research, get the background for the program and read the literature directly.
People tend to treat journalist's reports of research it as if it were "scientific advice" and then when it is nothing of the kind (which is generally the case), the researchers are accused of being hopelessly obscure, getting paid for results, or being contradictory about their advice. What a bum rap. That's not the point of research at all.
Research is most *interesting* when it contains contradictions and gets *boring* when the results become consistent. Sure, you want to prove your new hypothesis is right, but if it were easy to demonstrate someone would already have demonstrated it. You expect things to be fuzzy in a new area of research where there are interesting new hypotheses to test.You can almost never generallize "laws" (or advice) from a single study, nor should you expect to.
Conclusions vary even in very similar studies either because of the way the question was asked or because they didn't identify the right variables in the right way yet to address the question. That's assuming they're even studying something that can be characterized in a law-like way, which isn't always the case.
Sometimes individual differences outweigh generalized laws, even when there *are* underlying laws (this is a common finding in social psychology research). More to the point, this seems to be the case somewhat with nutrition as well. Conflicting results are a symptom of a fertile research topic.
IMO, if you want to draw good advice from research, stop jumping on every new study that comes out just because it seems to say something you'd like to hear, and learn to follow the *trends* in the research programs. That means reading technical books and journals rather than sound bites and blogs, and looking for commonalities rather than just reports that stand out because they are novel. But that's more work than you probably need to do.
There are a lot of people that have been spending decades researching obesity and there are some very useful conclusions. But you still have to do the work to see what works best for you.
I think there are many, many fat people out there exercising like crazy and not reaching their goals because they keep looking for magic bullets or excuses instead of starting with sound principles and then experimenting carefully to see what is working for them and what isn't.
I've noticed that there are also a number of chubby runners out there who stay chubby because they take in more than they put out, which I suspect is due to the putative appetite effect. It could well be that they would benefit by changing their training to briefer, higher intensity work, so that the appetite effect would lessen and the metabolic increase last longer. But that's speculation at this point and represents very hard work and many people would give up on such a regimen if they're used to jogging and elliptical machines and such. So they have to experiment to see what's right for them.
Well, anyway, personal experimentation (and brief high intensity training) is an approach that has always worked very well for me. Just remember, people tend to distort their own perception of what they take in and what they put out (*that's* a pretty well validated research result across many studies). So when you measure your compliance and your results, be sure to be specific and use accurate measurements and don't rely on memory and estimation.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Creative Science, Naturally
[I am posting this to preserve a copy of it as much as to share it. It is a book review originally published in Fall, 2003 Entelechy. ]
A review of Nature’s Magic: Synergy in Evolution and the Fate of Humankind written by Peter Corning
by Todd I. Stark
In Nature's Magic, Peter Corning offers us good news and bad news. The he good news is that chance, necessity, and natural selection aren't the only factors in our evolution. There is also a very real role for purpose (or more specifically, purposiveness.) The role of purposiveness has continued to increase over time.
The bad news is that our efforts to seek an underlying grand law or force that governs history may be fundamentally flawed. We may be more responsible for our own survival than we have so far been willing to recognize. The true teleonomy inherent in Corning's view gives us a creative (and destructive) role that is discounted in theories that rely on grand laws of history. Corning refers to the various people who have searched in vain for an inherent mathematical law of evolution as "Neo-Pythagoreans" after the cult surrounding the legendary mathematician. He counts various well-known contemporary complexity theorists like Stuart Kauffman and physicists like Steven Weinberg among them.
Corning doesn't see the world as necessarily a glorious self-maintaining Gaia, he sees it as a place where living things through their relations and interactions have come to have certain responsibility for their own fate. This becomes an awesome burden once we apply this view to humans, where we take on the role of the Sorcerer's Apprentice in Goethe's (and Disney's) tale. The apprentice knows just enough magic to get himself into serious trouble.
The starting point is Arthur Koestler's insight that "true innovation occurs when things are put together for the first time that had been separate." Peter Corning takes this insight to heart and explores its remarkable implications, applying this "astonishing capacity" to nature in general.
The essence of the argument is not that nature creates things that cannot be explained or things that cannot be understood, but that no grand laws of nature predict her fruits. In effect, evolution is grounded in nature's astonishing capacity to create beyond what we foresee at every juncture.
Corning's theory of complexity in evolution is based on synergy, by which he simply and elegantly means the myriad effects of combining things where the result doesn't resemble what we'd expect simply by adding them together: the whole is different than the sum of the parts.
Corning's "Holistic Darwinism" is a way of viewing variety and selection in nature which is at once is fully consistent with the neo-Darwinian synthesis and also provides theoretical bridges with the cybernetic theory of self-regulating systems and much of the body of scientific literature in social and political sciences. Holistic Darwinism shifts the focus in natural selection from selection itself as a causal force to where the variety comes from.
Corning leans heavily upon John Maynard Smith's concept of "synergistic selection." If unrelated individuals are often locked into a shared reproductive fate with others, as Corning suggests, then it is reasonable to assume that they will evolve strategies for cooperation, not for "altruism" per se but for their own interests.
This is an ambitious task for a single book, but at least the foundation is put down extremely well here, persuading us that nature continually yields variety that is neither predictable nor random, but fundamentally economic in its operation. In other words, Holistic Darwinism sees nature as a great marketplace where the functional outcomes of new innovations are continually shaped by the consequences of their costs and benefits.
If combined effects in nature are really different in general than we would expect from simply putting things together, there are some unexpected implications. For one thing, it implies that history matters. If things combine in new ways to produce new features in nature that are not simply an extension of the laws governing the parts, then those new features can potentially have meaningful functional outcomes that play a role in natural selection. This is the core of Corning's argument.
Corning boldly claims that Lamarck was right after all (in a sense). Not that giraffes can create new genes by stretching their necks, but that they can create new ecological niches through their behavior that can later be reinforced by natural selection because of the successful outcomes of those new behaviors.
In a nutshell: "synergy" is combined effects all around us in various forms, it plays a causal role in differential reproductive fitness in a highly context-specific way, and it provides a scientific alternative to overreaching grand laws of history.
Instead of theorizing a vague new force or seeking a new law to help explain how natural selection can lead to biological complexity, Peter Corning supplies a fresh way of looking at the whole puzzle of complexity. He does this by reversing the usual logic about cooperation in living things. Rather than living things somehow cooperating to produce new outcomes through some unexplained form of 'altruism,' Corning sees 'nature's magic' of synergies underlying cooperation.
Corning makes his case with a massive amount of data drawn from a wide variety of fields. With obviously decades worth of research behind Nature’s Magic, it covers a lot of ground and has links to a number of other theories in both economics and biology. Because it is so lucid and well-written, it ought to appeal to a wide range of readers, from academics interested in systems science, bioeconomics, and the philosophy of biology, to those without an academic background in biology who want to keep up with what will most likely be a significant part of the future of biological science.
Todd I. Stark is a computer consultant and freelance medical and science writer. He is also an obsessive reader and has written hundreds of book reviews for Amazon. His formal background is in computer science, electrical engineering, mathematics, and psychology at Drexel University. His academic interests include hypnosis and suggestibility research, social psychology, and most recently, evolutionary approaches to behavioral science. Todd briefly moderated the HBE-L list on Yahoo for discussions in evolutionary psychology.
[I am posting this to preserve a copy of it as much as to share it. It is a book review originally published in Fall, 2003 Entelechy. ]
A review of Nature’s Magic: Synergy in Evolution and the Fate of Humankind written by Peter Corning
by Todd I. Stark
In Nature's Magic, Peter Corning offers us good news and bad news. The he good news is that chance, necessity, and natural selection aren't the only factors in our evolution. There is also a very real role for purpose (or more specifically, purposiveness.) The role of purposiveness has continued to increase over time.
The bad news is that our efforts to seek an underlying grand law or force that governs history may be fundamentally flawed. We may be more responsible for our own survival than we have so far been willing to recognize. The true teleonomy inherent in Corning's view gives us a creative (and destructive) role that is discounted in theories that rely on grand laws of history. Corning refers to the various people who have searched in vain for an inherent mathematical law of evolution as "Neo-Pythagoreans" after the cult surrounding the legendary mathematician. He counts various well-known contemporary complexity theorists like Stuart Kauffman and physicists like Steven Weinberg among them.
Corning doesn't see the world as necessarily a glorious self-maintaining Gaia, he sees it as a place where living things through their relations and interactions have come to have certain responsibility for their own fate. This becomes an awesome burden once we apply this view to humans, where we take on the role of the Sorcerer's Apprentice in Goethe's (and Disney's) tale. The apprentice knows just enough magic to get himself into serious trouble.
The starting point is Arthur Koestler's insight that "true innovation occurs when things are put together for the first time that had been separate." Peter Corning takes this insight to heart and explores its remarkable implications, applying this "astonishing capacity" to nature in general.
The essence of the argument is not that nature creates things that cannot be explained or things that cannot be understood, but that no grand laws of nature predict her fruits. In effect, evolution is grounded in nature's astonishing capacity to create beyond what we foresee at every juncture.
Corning's theory of complexity in evolution is based on synergy, by which he simply and elegantly means the myriad effects of combining things where the result doesn't resemble what we'd expect simply by adding them together: the whole is different than the sum of the parts.
Corning's "Holistic Darwinism" is a way of viewing variety and selection in nature which is at once is fully consistent with the neo-Darwinian synthesis and also provides theoretical bridges with the cybernetic theory of self-regulating systems and much of the body of scientific literature in social and political sciences. Holistic Darwinism shifts the focus in natural selection from selection itself as a causal force to where the variety comes from.
Corning leans heavily upon John Maynard Smith's concept of "synergistic selection." If unrelated individuals are often locked into a shared reproductive fate with others, as Corning suggests, then it is reasonable to assume that they will evolve strategies for cooperation, not for "altruism" per se but for their own interests.
This is an ambitious task for a single book, but at least the foundation is put down extremely well here, persuading us that nature continually yields variety that is neither predictable nor random, but fundamentally economic in its operation. In other words, Holistic Darwinism sees nature as a great marketplace where the functional outcomes of new innovations are continually shaped by the consequences of their costs and benefits.
If combined effects in nature are really different in general than we would expect from simply putting things together, there are some unexpected implications. For one thing, it implies that history matters. If things combine in new ways to produce new features in nature that are not simply an extension of the laws governing the parts, then those new features can potentially have meaningful functional outcomes that play a role in natural selection. This is the core of Corning's argument.
Corning boldly claims that Lamarck was right after all (in a sense). Not that giraffes can create new genes by stretching their necks, but that they can create new ecological niches through their behavior that can later be reinforced by natural selection because of the successful outcomes of those new behaviors.
In a nutshell: "synergy" is combined effects all around us in various forms, it plays a causal role in differential reproductive fitness in a highly context-specific way, and it provides a scientific alternative to overreaching grand laws of history.
Instead of theorizing a vague new force or seeking a new law to help explain how natural selection can lead to biological complexity, Peter Corning supplies a fresh way of looking at the whole puzzle of complexity. He does this by reversing the usual logic about cooperation in living things. Rather than living things somehow cooperating to produce new outcomes through some unexplained form of 'altruism,' Corning sees 'nature's magic' of synergies underlying cooperation.
Corning makes his case with a massive amount of data drawn from a wide variety of fields. With obviously decades worth of research behind Nature’s Magic, it covers a lot of ground and has links to a number of other theories in both economics and biology. Because it is so lucid and well-written, it ought to appeal to a wide range of readers, from academics interested in systems science, bioeconomics, and the philosophy of biology, to those without an academic background in biology who want to keep up with what will most likely be a significant part of the future of biological science.
Todd I. Stark is a computer consultant and freelance medical and science writer. He is also an obsessive reader and has written hundreds of book reviews for Amazon. His formal background is in computer science, electrical engineering, mathematics, and psychology at Drexel University. His academic interests include hypnosis and suggestibility research, social psychology, and most recently, evolutionary approaches to behavioral science. Todd briefly moderated the HBE-L list on Yahoo for discussions in evolutionary psychology.
Vox Libertas: On Sex and Evolution and Politics
I liked BRONS' post on altruism and evolution, and I responded to it with my own thoughts on the changing view of altruism in biology.
Vox Libertas: On Sex and Evolution and Politics
Vox Libertas: On Sex and Evolution and Politics
Friday, April 18, 2008
My Favorite Productivity Software
My Favorite Productivity Software
I'm someone who loses track of what he's doing 15 seconds into it unless there's something particularly interesting to hold my attention. So I've looked at a lot of different kinds of tricks and tools over the years to try to help me stay on track.
The list is:
Yosemite FileKeeper
Illium ListPro
SplashData SplashID
Snag-IT
WinDirStat
Microsoft Outlook 2007
Microsoft OneNote 2007
Netcentric Getting Things Done Add-in for Outlook
Franklin Covey PlanPlus V5 for Outlook
Details
Yosemite FileKeeper is a very nice thing to have, it saves versions of your files. Backup (saving a snapshot of everything on your disk) is essential in case of a really big problem, and FileKeeper doesn't replace that. But archival of individual file versions more likely to save your butt more often. It creates a copy of the file every time you perform a "save" operation. So if you deleted something mistakenly and then saved your work, you would normally be out of luck. Especially if you didn't realize your mistake until a few days later. With FileKeeper, you can just ask for the previous version before you made the mistake.
File versions is something that Windows has sorely lacked since the very beginning and it has only barely been implemented in Vista. Although Vista has added a sort-of versioning facility, it is very primitive compared to FileKeeper. FileKeeper lets you configure its archival process to include or exclude specific kinds of files based on rules and lets you specify either a discrete version mode (every time you save the file) or a snapshot mode (for databases and other things that don't save as versions). You can tell it how long to keep versions, and how long to keep them after the original file is deleted. You can create additional "data vaults" on other drives (such as your external USB drives) so that you have additional backup in case something happens to your hard drive.
I like the interface and it seems to work seamlessly and without impacting my work. I never know it's there unless I have to restore a file, and then it becomes invaluable.
ListPro runs on Windows and on the PocketPC handheld. It is a general purpose list utility that can be used for a lot of things you would normally just jot down, like shopping lists, lists of things you are collecting, gift suggestions, time tracking, and so on. It is almost as flexible as jotting things down and has the advantage of being able to structure your lists and move things around.
Even though I use Outlook to keep track of my tasks, I still use ListPro for reminders because it has a unique list-specific alarm feature. You can associate lists with a particular alarm that goes off at a particular time. So for example I create a list that has an alarm that goes off just before I leave for work and another that goes off just before I leave to go home. If I add anything to that list and date it for today, I get a reminder of all the things I need to do before I leave the house or things I need to pick up on the way home. I can then change the alarm for the whole list if my schedule changes, instead of having to change each task reminder.
SplashID is another list utility that can be used with handheld computers, similar to ListPro. However SplashID is optimized for keeping information safe rather than configuring lists with all sorts of different kinds of fields. SpashId only has a few different kinds of fields, but it saves copies of itself automatically whenever you exit it, and can be kept encrypted strongly with a single password so you can keep your combinations, social security numbers, and passwords safe. It is a tremendous convenience to remember one password instead of dozens. Just be sure you don't forget the SplashID password!
Snag-It is a great screen capture utility that lets you capture just about anything in a wide variety of modes and then annotate your captures very easily. I use it very heavily for documentation, for travel directions, and so on. It often lets me save things that would otherwise be very difficult to save.
WinDirStat is a brilliantly crafted visual display of what is on your disk. This is one of those utilities that les you see why you are running out of disk space. But the difference is that the display is a visual map of blocks where the size of a block represents the size of the file, the color represents the file type, and the position in the map represents the location. The reason this is so clever is that it gives you at a glance a complete understanding of where and how the space is being used. For example, you can instantly tell that the space is being taken up by a lot of small files in one place and a couple of huge files in another place, and you know what kinds of files they are.
One of the most useful things I've found David Allen's "Getting Things Done" methodology, and there is software that plugs into Microsoft Outlook to make use of it there. I use it along with Franklin Covey's PlanPlus V5 for Outlook to keep an organized list of things I have to do, appointments, and so on.
The GTD add-in makes it easier to use the email inbox as a way of tracking what I have to do and funnel incoming requests and reminders into tasks and calendar events.
PlanPlus helps organize tasks according to things I'm trying to accomplish. It is a very light form of project management that mostly just reminds me of my goals periodically so I don't lose sight of them while working on the details of things.
You can use either of those add-ins independently or together, or you do most of the same things with Outlook 2007 without the add-ins, if you are willing to put some work into it and establish some new habits.
The latest version of Microsoft's e-mail client (Outlook 2007) is a bit heavy on resources and slow off the blocks but lets you conveniently keep track of your RSS feeds, your SharePoint lists, and your forms, and lets you keep convenient offline copies of your SharePoint documents. I probably wouldn't buy Outlook 2007 for personal use by itself, but working in an environment where I use many Microsoft programs including Office and SharePoint for sharing information with other people, it becomes particularly useful.
The add-ins are a great convenience though if you don't want to have to learn a lot about Outlook 2007 or you don't want to write code, or you want to save on the amount of learning and customizing you have to do.
Microsoft OneNote is very a convenient repository for saving captures of things that you can annotate, and is well integrated with other Microsoft tools. It's particuarly nice if you use a Tablet PC (one of those small laptops where you can write with a digital pen instead of using a mouse). I use it with a standard laptop and still find it useful, especially with the various add-ins that let you print to OneNote and save from Outlook to OneNote directly. Probably the best thing about it is that it has a very good search facility built into it for helping find your notes later in case you didn't file them the way you thought you did.
I'm someone who loses track of what he's doing 15 seconds into it unless there's something particularly interesting to hold my attention. So I've looked at a lot of different kinds of tricks and tools over the years to try to help me stay on track.
The list is:
Yosemite FileKeeper
Illium ListPro
SplashData SplashID
Snag-IT
WinDirStat
Microsoft Outlook 2007
Microsoft OneNote 2007
Netcentric Getting Things Done Add-in for Outlook
Franklin Covey PlanPlus V5 for Outlook
Details
Yosemite FileKeeper is a very nice thing to have, it saves versions of your files. Backup (saving a snapshot of everything on your disk) is essential in case of a really big problem, and FileKeeper doesn't replace that. But archival of individual file versions more likely to save your butt more often. It creates a copy of the file every time you perform a "save" operation. So if you deleted something mistakenly and then saved your work, you would normally be out of luck. Especially if you didn't realize your mistake until a few days later. With FileKeeper, you can just ask for the previous version before you made the mistake.
File versions is something that Windows has sorely lacked since the very beginning and it has only barely been implemented in Vista. Although Vista has added a sort-of versioning facility, it is very primitive compared to FileKeeper. FileKeeper lets you configure its archival process to include or exclude specific kinds of files based on rules and lets you specify either a discrete version mode (every time you save the file) or a snapshot mode (for databases and other things that don't save as versions). You can tell it how long to keep versions, and how long to keep them after the original file is deleted. You can create additional "data vaults" on other drives (such as your external USB drives) so that you have additional backup in case something happens to your hard drive.
I like the interface and it seems to work seamlessly and without impacting my work. I never know it's there unless I have to restore a file, and then it becomes invaluable.
ListPro runs on Windows and on the PocketPC handheld. It is a general purpose list utility that can be used for a lot of things you would normally just jot down, like shopping lists, lists of things you are collecting, gift suggestions, time tracking, and so on. It is almost as flexible as jotting things down and has the advantage of being able to structure your lists and move things around.
Even though I use Outlook to keep track of my tasks, I still use ListPro for reminders because it has a unique list-specific alarm feature. You can associate lists with a particular alarm that goes off at a particular time. So for example I create a list that has an alarm that goes off just before I leave for work and another that goes off just before I leave to go home. If I add anything to that list and date it for today, I get a reminder of all the things I need to do before I leave the house or things I need to pick up on the way home. I can then change the alarm for the whole list if my schedule changes, instead of having to change each task reminder.
SplashID is another list utility that can be used with handheld computers, similar to ListPro. However SplashID is optimized for keeping information safe rather than configuring lists with all sorts of different kinds of fields. SpashId only has a few different kinds of fields, but it saves copies of itself automatically whenever you exit it, and can be kept encrypted strongly with a single password so you can keep your combinations, social security numbers, and passwords safe. It is a tremendous convenience to remember one password instead of dozens. Just be sure you don't forget the SplashID password!
Snag-It is a great screen capture utility that lets you capture just about anything in a wide variety of modes and then annotate your captures very easily. I use it very heavily for documentation, for travel directions, and so on. It often lets me save things that would otherwise be very difficult to save.
WinDirStat is a brilliantly crafted visual display of what is on your disk. This is one of those utilities that les you see why you are running out of disk space. But the difference is that the display is a visual map of blocks where the size of a block represents the size of the file, the color represents the file type, and the position in the map represents the location. The reason this is so clever is that it gives you at a glance a complete understanding of where and how the space is being used. For example, you can instantly tell that the space is being taken up by a lot of small files in one place and a couple of huge files in another place, and you know what kinds of files they are.
One of the most useful things I've found David Allen's "Getting Things Done" methodology, and there is software that plugs into Microsoft Outlook to make use of it there. I use it along with Franklin Covey's PlanPlus V5 for Outlook to keep an organized list of things I have to do, appointments, and so on.
The GTD add-in makes it easier to use the email inbox as a way of tracking what I have to do and funnel incoming requests and reminders into tasks and calendar events.
PlanPlus helps organize tasks according to things I'm trying to accomplish. It is a very light form of project management that mostly just reminds me of my goals periodically so I don't lose sight of them while working on the details of things.
You can use either of those add-ins independently or together, or you do most of the same things with Outlook 2007 without the add-ins, if you are willing to put some work into it and establish some new habits.
The latest version of Microsoft's e-mail client (Outlook 2007) is a bit heavy on resources and slow off the blocks but lets you conveniently keep track of your RSS feeds, your SharePoint lists, and your forms, and lets you keep convenient offline copies of your SharePoint documents. I probably wouldn't buy Outlook 2007 for personal use by itself, but working in an environment where I use many Microsoft programs including Office and SharePoint for sharing information with other people, it becomes particularly useful.
The add-ins are a great convenience though if you don't want to have to learn a lot about Outlook 2007 or you don't want to write code, or you want to save on the amount of learning and customizing you have to do.
Microsoft OneNote is very a convenient repository for saving captures of things that you can annotate, and is well integrated with other Microsoft tools. It's particuarly nice if you use a Tablet PC (one of those small laptops where you can write with a digital pen instead of using a mouse). I use it with a standard laptop and still find it useful, especially with the various add-ins that let you print to OneNote and save from Outlook to OneNote directly. Probably the best thing about it is that it has a very good search facility built into it for helping find your notes later in case you didn't file them the way you thought you did.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
The Problem: Home Backup
I don't want to lose my important data or my software. Files get deleted accidentally. Files get corrupted by various means. Sometimes I edit a document and then realize too late that I liked the previous version better and I didn't use software that saves versions. Sometimes a hard drive gets damaged. Backups can save a lot of grief. A lot of people don't back up their home computers and laptops, and when they do it is rarely done in any comprehensive way. It isn't surprising when you realize how difficult it is to do. You have to know a fair amount about computers to get it right, and you will probably throw a lot of money at it if you have a number
of computers and no corporate network available to you to centrallize the work the way business often do.
It isn't easy finding a robust, reliable, affordable solution to backing up multiple desktops and laptops without a network backup server. Tape drives are unpopular in this arena because they are hard for most people to deal with for home systems. Even if yo find a great drive and software for it, you have to set up some sort of multiple pile storage of recycling tapes and keep replacing them properly as you move the drive from computer to computer. And that's the best case for a home tape backup with current technology. I don't want to use my company's business network to backup my own computers for various reasons and I don't want to set up a server at home for this purpose either. I want a purely local backup solution under my own control, using an external hard drive I can simply move from computer to computer.
Here's the vision I came up with:
I want a general purpose solution for backing up multiple computers locally to the same portable backup media that I can carry around from computer to computer. My criteria are simple but (especially for a Windows solution) very demanding.
1. The solution has to work through external drives on USB ports. The only thing I have in common between all my computers is USB and I don't want to install more cards in the computers or buy separate backup devices for each computer unless I absolutely have to. This means it will be slow, but that' a reasonable tradeoff to me if it can run overnight.
2. The solution must be able to restore individual files. I need to be able to restore individual files that might get accidentally deleted or large files that are deleted in the event I run out of disk space.
3. The solution must work for disaster recovery of drives and partitions. I need to be able to restore entire computers or entire drives in the event that I get a nasty virus or rootkit and have to reformat the drive, or in the event that the hard drive has to be replaced. I have a lot of important software installed and I don't want to have to reinstall it all manually one program at a time and then hope I saved all those license codes and that the software can all be re-registered another time. I don't want to have to rebuild a laptop and install an operating system and then reinstall the backup software just in order to restore the disk. So it must work entirely from external drives if neccessary.
4. I want to be able to re-use as much of the same solution as possible to backup multiple computers rather than use different devices and software on each computer.
5. It has to be reliable and easy enough to use that I don't have to study manuals to use it or remember arcane sequences of tasks. I'm a computer consultant but not a PC technician, and I don't have a of time and resources to put into tweaking. I don't want my backup solution to become a troubleshooting puzzle everytime I go to use it or restore from it. I want minimal updating of drivers, hacking of the registry or boot sectors, moving files around, etc. to get it to work.
6. I want it to work with Windows XP and Vista.
7. I don't want to spend more than about $200-$300 for a solution to back up several computers. Even a reasonably priced external hard drive multiplied by 4 systems already blows away that budget if I can't share the backup solution between systems.
I spent a lot of time and tried a number of different solutions of various kinds. The main thing I was surprised at was how many backup programs didn't do the job by my simple criteria, and how much work I had to do to find that out. After a long Thanksgiving Holiday weekend of experimenting I did find a solution that I'm very happy with so far and can recommend very highly to others with similar criteria.
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My Solution: Maxtor USB Drive and Acronis True Image
Acronis TrueImage is exceptional backup software that works for my solution because it is extremely straightforward to use, creates external USB bootable media, worked with my USB external hard drives without additional drivers or configuration, and allows individual file backup and restore as well as entire drives and partitions. I tested it with a Sony external USB CD/DVD dual layer writable drive (about $150) and a Maxtor OneTouch4 500 Gb external hard drive (about $170). This solution takes about 3 hours to back up an 80 Gb laptop hard drive completely and can be moved from computer to computer using the same mobile drives. The thing that seals the deal is the cost of the software. Seagate and Acronis cut a deal to make some of this superb backup software available for free to anyone who owns a Maxtor or Seagate external hard drive.
Free Image Backup Software
Keep in mind that if you wanted to run the fully featured Acronis backup, you would be legally obligated to buy a license for each system. At $50 per license, this would make the solution less practical for me because it would add a couple of hundred dollars to an already fully utilized budget. If this were my only option, I would probably be tempted to stretch the budget and pay the price because of the value of the solution. In that case, Ghost (at about $70 per copy) becomes a closer competitor to TrueImage as a good home disaster recovery solution. However I found another option that saves the license cost for the backup software.
The features of Acronis are well worth the price I think, but I wouldn't need them on all of my systems. Fortunately I discovered that there are free versions available with just the limited features I need for most of my systems. These are versions of Acronis rebranded by Maxtor (Maxtor MaxBlast ) and Seagate (Seagate DiskWizard ). The catch is that you need to have a Seagate or Maxtor external hard drive to use these free versions of the softtware. I use Maxtor external hard drives, so this was no problem for me. If you want to try out this solution yourself and you haven't purchased your external hard drive yet, keep this in mind when you go to buy it. If you can take advantage of the free rebranded versions, you can save $50 per computer. I like the features of Acronis but I only really one them on one of my computers, so I chose to purchase one full version of Acronis TrueImage and then use the free version on my other computers as a compromise.
The Solution
The components of the solution
[Maxtor 500 GB OneTouch4 USB External Hard Drive] moved between several computers, each with
free [Maxtor MaxBlast 5] image backup software installed. [Writable CD/DVD drive] used to create a bootable
disk for recovery purposes, adn to boot from for systems with no internal CD drive. USB cables to connect each drive to the computers. A writeable CD.
Key Skills and Procedures
1. You have to download and install the backup software. Get the free offer from the Seagate web site using the above links, don't use the version of software that comes with the drive. The solution here depends on the Acronis TrueImage version of the software, which is a special offer from the web site and is completely different from the software that comes with Seagate and Maxtor drives. If the free offer goes away, you may end up having to license Acronis on each home system to use this solution ($50 per computer).
2. You have to be able to use the backup software to create a bootable CD. This is easy but you have to remember to do it before it is really needed.
3. You have to be able to configure your computer so it can boot from the CD drive. It may already be able to do this, depending on your computer. Try it out by putting a bootable disk in the drive and rebooting. If it doesn't work, you may have to hit a special key such as F10, F5, or F8 during boot to edit the BIOS and tell the computer it can boot from the CD drive. For a system without an internal CD drive, where you have to rely on a USB external CD drive, you can usually configure the BIOS to also boot from USB paths. I had no trouble doing this with my tablet PC which only has USB external drives, but the difficulty depends somewhat on the computer.
4. You have to be able to create the backup image using the backup software. This is very easy.
5. You have to be able to test the solution at least far enough to boot from the bootable CD and verify the integrity of your backup image. It would be nice, but usually impractical to test actually restoring a disk drive.
6. If you are using this solution, you probably won't want to install the backup software that comes with your external hard drive, so you should also learn to avoid installing it and disable any autolaunch that might try to install it when you connect the drive to a new computer. You probably will want to copy the backup software you are using to the external hard drive so it can be moved from computer to computer and installed on each one.
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Things I Tried That Didn't Work For This Solution
Most of the backup software I tried simply didn't do a good job, or sometimes any job at all, at restoring entire drives and partitions intact. The software that comes with Windows XP and the software that comes with external drives is usually for file backups, not disaster recovery.
The Retrospect Express software that came with one of my Maxtor OneTouch hard drives is very convenient for routine incremental backups from one system but it is not a disaster recovery solution and is not intended to be used from multiple systems. To use it to restore a drive I would have to rebuild the operating system from scratch, reinstall Retrospect Express, and then try to restore the backups. This is not what I want to be doing, and more importantly, many critical steps in the process can't be conveniently tested.
The Nero Backitup2 that came with the Nero suite with my Sony DVD writer seems to be good for making CDs and DVDs but I found it problematic as a backup solution, much less a disaster recovery solution. The BackItUp software did single backups fine, and on paper it seems to have the needed features, but I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to get incrementals and differential backups to work properly. Also the software seems to have an odd disposition for finding conflicts with other things on my computer and coming up with "Server Busy" dialogs. I also found the job scheduling hard to use. I wasn't confident enough with the basic features to even try to test it for real disaster recovery. It could just be limitations of the "lite" version that came with the drive, but I didn't want to invest more in the product just to find out.
I have a copy of Uniblue's WinBackup as part of their performance and management suite. I found this to be very good backup software, reasonably easy to use, moderately featured, but not really a disaster recovery solution of the sort I needed because it required Windows to already be running and WinBackup installed in order to restore things.
The closest second place I found for my backup solution was Ghost . Ghost is designed specifically for disaster recovery and cloning entire drives and partitions and is a classic and traditionally superb way of doing that. Ghost works by setting up your computer to boot from DOS and run a backup program. This is great for disaster recovery because it means you don't need an operating system like Windows to be working to use it, and nothing in Windows can affect the backup or restore. It just creates a snapshot of your disk, regardless of what operating system is on it.
When I asked several IT consulting colleagues their opinions for personal disaster recovery solutions, they pretty much unanimously suggested Ghost. I didn't end up with Ghost for several reasons. Most of my reasons are strategic, I don't like the direction the product is going. It seems to me that it is progressively losing what made it such a good solution for so long, its operating system independence. Another thing I personally don't like about it is that it still feels like a product designed primarily for computer technicians cloning drives between systems, not regular people who just want to protect their computer hard drive.
First, Ghost was purchased by Symantec. I have terrible experience with Symantec technical support, but that's not enough to put me off a good solution. If it works, hopefully I shouldn't need much technical support. More importantly, Symantec has a bad reputation for purchasing great products and driving them into the ground by adding poorly integrated features. It looked to me like they were doing this with Ghost from what I was seeing in the support forums. This didn't prevent me from trying Ghost as a solution either, but it did limit how much I was willing to invest in making a Ghost solution work if it involved having to keep upgrading and tweaking it.
Ok, so the stage was set for a (very biased) test of Ghost. I installed Ghost 2003, which seemed to me from my research to be the best compromise of simplicity, good engineering, and features, of the Ghost versions that would work with XP. It might not work directly from Vista, but at least I'd have a basic recovery solution if it worked. This is an old Ghost version, which makes the test even more unfair. Ghost 2003 boots from DOS so it doesn't really care about your operating system, except for convenience in setting up the backup operation. However the DOS boot does need to have the right drivers to be able to see your external drives. That's where the real version dependence comes in. Later Ghost versions (e.g. 10, 11, 12, etc.) have drivers more specifically intended for external USB drives. So they would really be a more fair test. However I had never used Ghost for personal backup, so I just wanted to see what it could do for basic functions.
Right off the bat, it didn't see my external USB hard drive when from DOS, not entirely unexpectedly. None of the variations of drivers supplied with it would work. Ghost seems to be more particular about the kinds of USB devices it can use than other backup programs. That's perhaps a reasonable tradeoff for their disk cloning technology but it also means an ongoing dependence on having the latest drivers and keeping boot disks updated. That's one of the things I had hoped to minimize.
I checked the forums for solutions and found several, but they were more work than I wanted to do and most of them pulled me out of my comfort zone for things I wanted to rely on for a backup solution. I think I could probably have created a boot disk with updated drivers that would let Ghost backup to my external USB hard drive, or of course I could have upgraded my version of Ghost, but it would have been more expense and another day of work to build and test that I didn't want to spend if I didn't have to.
I was able to get Ghost to work with my external DVD writer, with a minor change to the settings to tell Ghost to boot with USB 1.1 drivers. So over about a 24 hour period I was able to cut an 11 DVD backup set using Ghost 2003. I was very disappointed that after all that, because I couldn't see the contents of the set using Ghost Explorer for some reason. Then the image verify looked like it would take nearly as long as the backup and require me to tie up the computer for a full day and keep feeding it disks every hour or so. So I'm not really confident in the backup because the verify process is impractical and I can't see even a list of the contents. Finally, the interface Ghost uses on the bootable CD is a little hard to figure out. I haven't ruled out Ghost as a solution, but neither have I been able to verify it yet.
In an online forum, someone was having the same problem I was with getting Ghost to see external USB drives, and they suggested Acronis. Since there was a full featured 15 day trial and also a limited feature free version available, I was able to test that. The Acronis software works from Windows XP and Vista. It backed up fine from Windows, which should not be a big deal of course. It took just under 3 hours to completely back up an 80 Gb tablet PC C drive.
The acid test was whether it could create bootable media that would let me restore a disk without having Windows available, and be able to see my USB external hard drive from that boot. It worked with my USB hard drive, and the interface on the bootable CD was very straightforward. I could use the bootable CD to verify the image backup. Verification took about 2 hours. The one quirk I found was that I couldn't verify the backup image from Windows, I had to boot to the CD to do it, or the operation died from "insufficient resources" a few minutes into the verification.
Conclusion
Acronis True Image turned out to be the only backup software I've tried so far that works for disaster recovery from USB devices without hacking or tweaking, and it has a very rich and easy to use feature set as well and is even available in a limited free version. I like the convenience and simplicity of USB devices and am willing to sacrifice the extra time it takes to backup a machine with them to make things easy for myself. So the solution that works best for me right now is TrueImage (or the free rebranded versions: Maxtor Maxtor MaxBlast and Seagate Seagate DiskWizard ) with my Maxtor USB external hard drives. Current versions of Ghost (Ghost 12 retails for about $70/copy) might be a viable alternative but I have no experience with those at this time.
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
MOSS Notes - reducing authentications
Tips for reducing the number of authentications (Windows XP)
Add the SharePoint sites to the list of trusted sites
1. In Internet Explorer, on the Tools menu, click Internet Options.
2. On the Security tab, in the Select a Web content zone to specify its security settings box, click Trusted Sites, and then click Sites.
3. Clear the Require server verification (https:) for all sites in this zone check box.
4. In the Add this Web site to the zone box, type the URL for the SharePoint site, and then click Add.
5. Click Close to close the Trusted Sites dialog box.
6. Click OK to close the Internet Options dialog box.
Configure user authentication settings for trusted sites
1. In Internet Explorer, on the Tools menu, click Internet Options.
2. On the Security tab, in the Select a Web content zone to specify its security settings box, click Trusted sites, and then click Custom Level.
3. In the Settings list box, under User Authentication, click Automatic logon with current username and password.
4. Click OK twice.
Note If you do not want to add the SharePoint Central Administration site to the list of trusted sites, but you do not want to be prompted for your user name and password every time you access the SharePoint Central Administration site, you can instead add the SharePoint Central Administration site to the Local intranet zone. If you do this, you must enable the Automatic logon only in Intranet zone user authentication setting instead of the Automatic logon with current username and password user authentication setting
Configure proxy server settings to bypass the proxy server for local addresses
1. In Internet Explorer, on the Tools menu, click Internet Options.
2. On the Connections tab, in the Local Area Network (LAN) Settings area, click LAN Settings.
3. In the Proxy Server area, select the Bypass proxy server for local addresses check box.
4. Click OK to close the Local Area Network (LAN) Settings dialog box.
5. Click OK again to close the Internet Options dialog box.
Remove extraneous cached logins that might override authentication
Start à Control Panel à User Accounts à Manage Passwords
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Thursday, December 22, 2005
Review of Fiorina book on culture war rhetoric
Fiorina: Culture War rhetoric arises from an ideologically polarized political class
Since I think it is relevant to the politics of the ID issue that I've been discussing today, I am copying the text of my Amazon review of Morris Fiorina's book on culture war in American to here. For example, Bill Dembski (an Intelligent Design author) frequently states that culture war is important to us and demands that ID be made a political issue. Fiorina's argument would make his motivation seem rather hollow and parochial.
Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America (Great Questions in Politics Series) by Morris P. FiorinaEdition: Paperback
Price: $14.00
Political class is polarized, but the rest of us can think!, November 16, 2004
This is a very brief and tightly argued book of enormous relevance to us in 2004. It makes the following remarkable points:
(1) On close inspection of individual opinions, the vast majority of the electorate in the U.S. are *moderate*, not radically polarized into liberals and conservatives. That is, most of us are, as we would like to believe, capable of thinking independently for ourselves rather than strictly along party ideological lines.
We are a _closely_divided_ nation, as reflected in the very close recent elections, however we are NOT a _*deeply*_divided_ nation. That is, we are not really a nation of two distinct warring camps and a couple of swing states as the media sometimes present it for dramatic purposes. Fiorina sugests that we are actually something close to an ambivalent nation which divides itself in poltitical matters because we have no choice when presented with highly divided options.
Since I think it is relevant to the politics of the ID issue that I've been discussing today, I am copying the text of my Amazon review of Morris Fiorina's book on culture war in American to here. For example, Bill Dembski (an Intelligent Design author) frequently states that culture war is important to us and demands that ID be made a political issue. Fiorina's argument would make his motivation seem rather hollow and parochial.
Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America (Great Questions in Politics Series) by Morris P. FiorinaEdition: Paperback
Price: $14.00
Political class is polarized, but the rest of us can think!, November 16, 2004
This is a very brief and tightly argued book of enormous relevance to us in 2004. It makes the following remarkable points:
(1) On close inspection of individual opinions, the vast majority of the electorate in the U.S. are *moderate*, not radically polarized into liberals and conservatives. That is, most of us are, as we would like to believe, capable of thinking independently for ourselves rather than strictly along party ideological lines.
We are a _closely_divided_ nation, as reflected in the very close recent elections, however we are NOT a _*deeply*_divided_ nation. That is, we are not really a nation of two distinct warring camps and a couple of swing states as the media sometimes present it for dramatic purposes. Fiorina sugests that we are actually something close to an ambivalent nation which divides itself in poltitical matters because we have no choice when presented with highly divided options.
(2) The American public has *not* become dramatically polarized even over such hot topics as abortion. Rather, relatively small differences among us have been magnified by the rhetoric used to present the issues to us.
(3) The political choices we have are determined by a distinct class of politicians, party activists, and interest group leaders, who *have* become increasingly polarized over moral and religious ideology as well as economic ideology.
(4) A large part of the polarization of the political class has been the result of the realignment of the South, such that republicans aligned aggressive foreign policy with hostility to the welfare state, and democrats aligned antiwar sentiment with support of those at risk. This is represented particular well by the "gender gap" which widened at the same time this realignment or tuning of the ideologies of the parties was taking place.
Fiorina suggests that when Bill Clinton once said early in his presidency that he was Pro-Choice, but against abortion, most Americans knew what he meant, that most of us, liberal or conservative, do not want to legislate morality for others, even though we have a clear sense of what is right and wrong. Fiorina also points out for example that most 80% of us believe that abortion should be legal under some conditions (even if wrong), and illegal under others. The extremes at each end which promote unconditional rights for unborn babies or for mothers are roughly the 10% tail at either side of a normal curve.
Finally, he also provides data showing that the averaged opinions of self-identified liberals and conservatives regarding abortion differ only regarding under what specific conditions they think abortion should be legal, not the legality of abortion in general.
The result is that the supposed "culture war" is really a war between increasingly ideologically polarized political parties and their activists who arent really even aware of each others reasoning, with most of us in the middle getting hit by friendly fire from both sides, but being forced to choose between them.
The bottom line for Fiorina's argument here is that we are a nation currently creating unneccessary internal conflicts and indulging in "culture war" polarized issues like gay marriage or unconditional rights of various kinds that are really of concern to a relatively small and unrepresentative number of us. They are sold to us by political parties and the media because of their drama rather than their relative importance. It's hard for me to look at the political ads for either of the current candidates in 2004 without nodding agreement on this.
Our political system provides us with ideological extremism on both sides, and seems to have no desire or ability to change itself, whereas most of us caught in it would usually prefer pragmatic and non-ideological solutions to issues that address larger numbers of us.
I read this at the same time at Juergensmeyer's book "Terror in the Mind of God," and it is chilling how much the "culture war" among the political elites comes to resemble the "cosmic war" of good and evil that Juergensmeyer theorizes leads to real violence under some conditions.
If Fiorina is right, we may not really have a (popular) culture war at all, but we could create one if it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as we come to accept it uncritically. If Fiornia had a solution for this centrally important problem, this book would merit 6 or 7 stars. However, just by pointing it out so clearly, it merits the highest rating I can give it.
Please read this important and timely book.
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