Death by PowerPoint

This presentation about BAD PowerPoint is very interesting! I enjoyed this. What I got out of it is that presentations are actually not intended to involve thinking, they are intended to entertain, amuse, and be memorable. They are meant to inspire action but prevent people from thinking too much before acting. Basically, a presentation is intended to be a form of propaganda! (Well, marketing to be more gentle).

I think this is pretty much in line with how Ed Tufte the "data artist" conceptuallizes the use of PowerPoint as well, except that he casts this form of presentation in a negative rather than positive light because his goal is to facilitate clear thinking about complex data rather than entertaining people and getting them to act. See his excerpt "PowerPoint Does Rocket Science." I tend to agree with him, but I can also see the value of entertaining people to get concepts across.

The entertainment presentation view is reasonable, and supportable I think, but it makes a presentation a very speciallized form of communication that is different from the decision making or problem solving process that most people probably assume is going on in meetings, or would optimally like to happen in meetings.

Entertaining people is great, and useful, but it isn't neccessarily why a meeting is being called, and doesn't neccessarily do what needs to be done as far as getting people thinking about the right things.

Some of the "worst" slides demonstrated are actually reasonably good engineering diagrams for speciallized purposes for the same reason they are such bad demo slides, because there is so much information in front of your eyes at once. Having a complex system at a glance is often invaluable for making engineering decisions and locating problems. It is just wildly inappropriate for flashing up on the screen during a presentation where you simply want to make a point (unless the point is: just look at how complex this system is, we dare you to try to remember anything about it!). That's what makes some of the examples so ironic, they were *intended* to be "propaganda" slides to sell products and popularize ideas and instead they are deliberately emulating complex engineering diagrams. Mixed purposes to say the least.

You can't neccessarily avoid the tradeoff between being a good marketer (most useful for teaching new concepts or motivating action) and being a good presenter of dense but well structured technical information (most useful for facilitating problem solving and for facilitate complex decisions).

Very nice work, thanks to Alexei for sharing this!

Also see the related page, "8 PowerPoint Train Wrecks"

Todd

Death by PowerPoint

View more Microsoft Word documents from Alexei Kapterev.

Book Review: "The Imprinted Brain" - A fascinating genetic theory of mental illness

Book Review: "The Imprinted Brain: How Genes Set the Balance of the Mind between Autism and Psychosis" by Christopher Badcock

Review by Todd I. Stark

A bold new theory of mental illness that could revolutionize our understanding, if it is right.

[See my reviews on Amazon.]

This is a deeply fascinating theory. I gave it lots of stars because of the importance of its ideas, even though it is not a great book in literary or stylistic terms.

The relatively uncommon collaboration of a sociologist (Badcock) and a biologist (Crespi) produced a compellingly simple and symmetric theory of the biology of the human mind which remains remarkably explanatory and coherent around just a few central ideas:

1. The "selfish gene." William Hamilton's insight that genes can sometimes serve their own reproductive ends as much as or more than those of the organism they build.

2. The "imprinted gene." Some genes may be inherited by either parent but only be expressed when inherited from one parent vs. the other.

3. The clinical observation that autism and psychosis are expressed in opposite versions of the same kinds of symptoms.

4. The theory that autistic symptoms represent an extreme of thinking in mechanical terms, and psychosis an extreme of thinking in mentalistic terms, with the two kinds of illness forming a single spectrum of disorders from autistic at one end to schizophrenic at the other.

This is not one of those relatively dull or unlikely theories about how schizophrenics might really be geniuses, or how mental illness might somehow be adaptive. The speculations of the imprinted brain theory go well beyond that sort of thing, making it distinctively broad and potentially testable. Although the book has a few philosophical turns in it, the technical journal articles by Badcock and Crespi make it clear this is a scientific theory that will live or die on empirical data, not primarily a philosophical idea.

The theory itself is half about how paternal imprinted genes serve their own reproductive ends by increasing growth and testosterone and by laterallizing the brain and helping to produce thinking that is optimized for dealing with inanimate things in particular ways. The other half of the theory is about how maternal genes serve their own reproductive ends by cutting back on growth, reducing testosterone, and fostering the development of a kind of thinking optimized for interpreting human intentions.

The theory explains the symptoms of autism as an "extreme male brain" which deals well with things but poorly with people. The symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia are seen as "cancers of the mind" resulting from an "extreme female brain," the extremely fertile creation of human intentions and minds around us from little basis. The idea that the autistic end of the spectrum may be an exaggeration of what we think of as stereotypical male cognitive processes has been suggested by many others since the autism was first identified, but the possibility of the other end of the spectrum being a symmetric case of mentalistic overdrive is a little more original. It also seems to be less well supported by the genetic data so far. But the possibility that a beautifully symmetric theory like this might possibly be validated is the kind of thing theorists get very excited over.

The author put a lot into this relatively small book and made it very readable. The style however is a bit lacking and sometimes can be dull and sometimes abrasive in contrast to the fascination of the content itself. I got the feeling at various points that the author couldn't help throwing in his own editorial comments about pet peeves that might be addressed by aspects of the theory, and I think this sometimes hurt the tone of the book. With such a powerful theory it is very tempting to wield it excessively just to see what it can do.

Overall, though, this book provides a reasonable balance between technical presentation and narrative exposition. It isn't a journal article, although it is based on material that has filled a number of journal articles, and it is not a breezy introduction with award winning science writing. It is a general readership account of a technical theory that has both deep scientific and broader cultural implications ... if it turns out to be right.

The book gives a solid introduction to the patterns of symptoms in various mental illnesses and the historical interpretations that help align each of them with their theory. They introduce just enough genetics so that you can understand why they feel "imprinted genes" help explain the complex idiosyncratic inheritance pattern seen in autism and schizophrenia. They discuss the spectrum of symptoms from several different angles so that you can see just how broadly explanatory this theory could potentially be. The authors briefly discuss some cultural implications of their theory for religion, feminism, science, and so on, a deep area that they only touch on very superficially.

The end of the book raises the interesting possibility that certain exceptional kinds of geniuses may be savants at both ends of the spectrum, extreme male and female brains at the same time, capable of both the overdeveloped mechanical cognition of autistic savants and the overdeveloped intentional sensitivity that the authors hypotheize may represent "psychotic savants."

The book is scattered with supporting quotes from erudite psychotics and high functioning autistics describing in their own words how they think and experience the world.

Reading this book I got a feeling that the theory *could* very well be right and that it seemed to make sense of a lot of otherwise very diverse and sometimes puzzling findings in genetics and psychiatry. I think it's entirely accurate to say that this theory has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of mental illness, especially its genetics, and provide a coherent framework where previously we had only scattered loosely related diagnostic categories and quibbles over them.

If I were to deliberately seek out a fault here, other than the sometimes annoying cultural jabs at religion and feminism, it is that the imprinted brain theory seems to explain too much while taking too much for granted. Explaining all of the dimensions of mental illness through an all-encompassing dimension of cognitive abilities seems to explain too much about thinking and not enough about motivation. Mechanistic thinking is not just thinking about things, it is a fascination, an absorption in things, and likewise for mentalistic thinking about people. The book never really talks about how the different cognitive subsystems relate to the motivation to use them, which seems to be just as important, especially in the case of savants, who provide a significant area of data for the theory. This is a topic that I've seen addressed in Crespi's journal articles, but was not really touched on in the book very much.

As far as validation of the overall theory, I think it will depend a lot on whether both both ends of the spectrum of disorders are found to be the genetic result of a common disease pathway resulting from many different variations of rare alleles or a particular conjunction of common ones. If either end depends on rare alleles, its evolutionary significance is much less likely. The beautiful symmetry of this theory depends very much on both ends of the disorder spectrum having evolutionary significance.

See also Badcock's Edge article:
"http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/badcock08/badcock08_index.html"

and the following books on some of the less well known speculative evolutionary genetic ideas underlying this theory:

Genes in Conflict: The Biology of Selfish Genetic Elements

Genomic Imprinting and Kinship (The Rutgers Series in Human Evolution, edited by Robert Trivers, Lee Cronk, Helen Fisher, and Lionel Tiger)

There is some good theoretical backgound to the evolution of reasoning and what we can learn about it from autism in:

Human Reasoning and Cognitive Science (Bradford Books)

How to avoid SharePoint becoming a wicked problem

Check out SharePoint planning presentation by Paul Culmsee on SlideShare:

How to avoid SharePoint becoming a wicked problem

View more presentations from paulculmsee.

How to avoid SharePoint becoming a wicked problem - Presentation Transcript

“If you can tell me why you say that plan A is great, and I understand your judgments, you have succeeded in objectifying your space of judgment to me. And although I might not share your judgment and might not be convinced, I understand you now.” Horst Rittel

“A problem well stated is a problem half solved”  Charles Kettering (1876-1958)

How to avoid SharePoint becoming a wicked problem CIO229 Paul Culmsee, MCT, MCSE, CISSP  Seven Sigma Business Solutions  www.sevensigma.com.au  paul.culmsee@sevensigma.com.au  Author of cleverworkarounds.com blog  SharePoint architect, Trainer, Dialogue and Issue Mapping practitioner, author for SharePointMagazine.net & EndUserSharePoint.com Reformed tech geek, Metalhead

Session Agenda Understanding wicked problems and social complexity  The “SharePoint paradox” and paths to SharePoint  wickedness The power of Issue Mapping and IBIS based  collaboration How to leverage the best of SharePoint and Issue  Mapping
Project Success/Failure Factors Failure Factors  Lack of user input  Incomplete requirements &  specifications Changing requirements &  assumptions Lack of executive support  Technology incompetence  Lack of resources  Unrealistic expectations  Unclear objectives  Unrealistic timeframes  New technology  Source: Chaos Report (1995) 


Project Success/Failure Factors Failure Factors  Lack of user input  Incomplete requirements &  specifications Changing requirements &  Lack of shared assumptions understanding Lack of executive support  of the p r o b le m Technology incompetence  Lack of resources  Unrealistic expectations  Unclear objectives  Unrealistic timeframes  New technology 


Project Success/Failure Factors Failure Factors  Lack of user input  Incomplete requirements &  specifications Changing requirements &  Also a lack of shared assumptions understanding Lack of Executive Support  of the p r o b le m Technology Incompetence  Lack of Resources  Unrealistic Expectations  Unclear Objectives  Unrealistic Timeframes  New technology 


Project pain “They don’t know what they want!”  “The requirements are too vague!”  “If only they had listened to me”  “Not another %$%$% meeting!”  “I was never consulted”  “This is ridiculous – it won’t work”  “It was in the minutes – did you read it?”  “Well if everyone actually followed the process…”  These are examples of the forces of “social  complexity” and “wicked problems”


Social Complexity The more parties involved in a collaboration, the more  socially complex The more different these parties are, the more diverse,  the more socially complex The fragmenting force of social complexity makes  communication very difficult This extends to collaborative technologies too! 
Wicked Problems  Defined by Horst Rittel in 1973  Problems in planning and social or public policy  Highly resistant to resolution  A number of “distinguishing properties” compared to “tame” problems


Wicked Problem Properties The problem is not understood until after formulation of 1. a solution Cognexus Institute www.cognexus.org
Wicked Problem Properties The problem is not understood until after formulation of 1. a solution Wicked problems have no stopping rule • You cannot prove that all solutions have been • considered Solutions differ based on interests, values and ideology • of participants

Wicked Problem Properties A wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways 1. (serving the intentions of who is explaining it) It can be hard to go back – “one shot operation” 2. Every wicked problem can be considered to be a 3. symptom of another problem There is no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked 4. problem
Dealing with Wicked Problems There is no quick fix   No “tame your wicked problems in seven easy steps” “Constrain Scope” Strategy   Have you really solved the problem if you don’t consider the solution in the original context? Authoritative Strategies   Decision is made for us and we agree to abide (Supreme Court) Competitive Strategies   Win-lose outcome (politics and lobbying) Collaborative Strategies   SharePoint?


The SharePoint Paradox To deal with wicked problems we have to collaborate  SharePoint is a collaboration tool  We use a collaborative tool to improve our collaboration  Therefore, why do many SharePoint projects have  wicked elements to them?
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Strategic SharePoint Pitfalls Do not “boil the ocean” 1. “Too much too soon” is a magnet for wickedness  The organisation has to be ready to come too  Have a clear strategy 2. SharePoint should not be a “tool looking for a problem”  Do not paint with the same brush 3. Gen Y think everyone wants web 2.0  Engineers think everyone wants wikis  Record managers hate wiki’s and think *everything* should be  classified Marketing think that people will use it if it looks good  Some will never break the folder habit 

Strategic SharePoint Pitfalls Understand the inherent conflicts within application 1. requirements Records management vs Collaborative Document  management WCM vs Collaborative Portal  Branding before anything else  Account for “soft” factors 2. Organisational culture  Individual learning styles and behavioural styles  Vertical Market/Sector 

Signs of SharePoint wickedness... Arguments over accountabilities and ownership  Excessive rework of custom development  Poor performance and scalability  SharePoint mushrooms (site sprawl)  No history of modifications made  What, when, who and why  A service pack installation is a “War and Peace” effort  You have decided you should attend a best practice  conference :-)
One “best practice” to rule them all Ensure a shared understanding of the  problem among all participants “The ‘Holy Grail’ of effective collaboration is creating shared  understanding, which is a precursor to shared commitment” – Jeff Conklin
Will this solve a wicked problem?

Issue Mapping Horst Rittel created a planning/design method called  IBIS Issue Based Information System  Complex group discussion broken into basic artefacts  – questions, ideas, pros, cons Issue Mapping is crafting an IBIS based map of  discussion It makes critical thinking visible.  Shows the deep structure of an issue 

We are demonstrating the power of issue mapping over conventional techniques to manage the complex dialogue required to manage problems with wicked elements. ISSUE MAPPING IN ACTION
Benefits of Issue Mapping Simple, intuitive, adds clarity to discussion   Limited short term memory means exploration of a complex problem unaided is confusing and error prone  All participants have an organised point of reference Democratic - Acknowledges all contributions   Disarms “truth by repetition”  Disarms “grenade lobbing” (topic shift) Takes the interpersonal “sting” out of supporting or  objecting to an idea Faster - allows a group to achieve shared understanding  with much less pain

The Craft of Issue Mapping Issue maps can be sketched on paper, but  usually crafted using software  Compendium  bCisive. Issue Mapping is a craft based skill – you need  some training and practice!  Don’t fall for the panacea effect!
Issue Mapping with other best practices Maintain your other standards or frameworks   IM emphasis at the problem/requirements definition phase  Compliments any methodology or practice (PMBOK, Scrum) Leverage IM with Agile methods   Agile/Scrum is a *process* based approach that rejects the waterfall approach  Agile processes and methods implicitly support shared understanding, but IM goes beyond software engineering  IM and Agile are a great fit

Leverage IM and SharePoint Use Issue Mapping to understand the problem   Ensures shared understanding and shared commitment among participants Use SharePoint to manage and track the  solution  Documents and reports still need writing  Data needs to be managed, maintained and distributed Holy Grail - Present issue maps within  SharePoint sites  SharePoint project sites containing the latest *thinking* via an integrated issue map

Summing Up Wicked factors are very common in IT projects   SharePoint is especially vulnerable Achieving shared understanding among participants is  *paramount*  Later best practices can be undone by failure to achieve this goal IBIS and Issue Mapping are a key complimentary tool   Designed *specifically* to tackle social complexity and wicked problems When used to their strengths, Issue Mapping and  SharePoint can be a very potent combination


More Information Seven Sigma Business Solutions (www.sevensigma.com.au)   paul.culmsee@sevensigma.com.au  Issue Mapping and SharePoint specialists  CogNexus Institute “Designated Partner” Dr Jeff Conklin – creator of Issue Mapping (www.cognexus.org)   Issue Mapping & Dialogue Mapping training and services  Book: Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems CleverWorkarounds Blog (www.cleverworkarounds.com)   SharePoint Project Management  SharePoint Strategy  SharePoint Governance Compendium Software (http://compendium.open.ac.uk/) 

Book Review: "Bozo Sapiens" by Michael and Ellen Kaplan

Erudite, wise, and delightful tour through human fallibility

A review of "Bozo Sapiens: Why to Err is Human" by Michael and Ellen Kaplan

[See this and other reviews on Amazon]

We don't naturally think like scientists, except perhaps in very limited and specific ways. Thinking that can't stand up to scrutiny is commonplace. Why do we tend to be more wrong than right most of the time? This book is one of many recent releases that attempts to address this question through scientific experiments and theories in various fields.

At first this book looks very much like many other recent releases devoted to the quirks of human decision making. It isn't as strong on the details of neuroscience as many of the others, and there isn't as much technical coverage of psychology as others, but this book has a compelling advantage. It is more of a literary delight than the others with wonderful turns of phrase and superb summaries of the important points.

As with most books on human reasoning (and unreasoning) you get a list of examples of cognitive distortions, perceptual illusions, theories of decision making, and examples. Where Kaplan and Kaplan excel is in particularly well chosen, memorable, and entertaining examples, and particularly thought provoking and wide-ranging conclusions. They mention but don't dwell much on the classical examples like the Wasson test, then go on to look at the topic from a unique perspective taken from real life experience or literature. This style brings the lessons to life in a very distinctive way. The lessons range broadly over behavioral economics, game theory, evolutionary psychology, social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, probability, various kinds of decision making research, and many other fields. In one chapter, "Fresh off the Pleistocene Bus," they explore evolutionary psychology, but recognize that there is something inherently anti-romantic that grates against our sensibilities about evolutionary psychology, sometimes called "the moral equivalent of fast food." There is a genuine sense of larger wisdom and balance throughout this book that helps keep it fresh and interesting.

Some of my favorites from the book:

"Consciousness brings with it a gnawing sense of exile from the world of simple certainties."

"There seems to be something fundamental about using money as the stand-in for worth that causes us to abandon common sense."

"Sound encodes the rich symbolic power of language and hte emotional truths of music; it duplicates through tone of voice many of the clues to character and mood that we attempt to read from facial expression. This may be why becoming deaf seems more a banishment from life than blindness."

"When the illusion is broken and we see the truth, the world loses a little meaning for us. We laugh as the tension loosens, but deep down we are slightly disappointed."

"Any image forms expectations; attention responds to novelty. We look at what has surprised us in what we see."

"In our lifelong journeys, we humans tend to navigate like coasting sailors, not transoceanic pilots: we look our for landmarks and invent rules of thumb. Our minds, so acute locally but wooly in general, try to concoct the best possible sense our of what life shows us here and now, rather than to develop a consistent picture of how everything fits together. Thus we are built to be interested in and judicious about the incidents and quirks of what we know well - that line of surf over the reef, that darkening of the upwind horizon - while our broader explanations so easily shade off into krakens and mermaids."

How do they wrap this all up? The Kaplans offer interesting advice:

Think probabilistically, admitting the power of the random and the unknown and take small steps testing them along the way. Make good use of the primordial urge to examine new things closely. Don't assume you can understand the complexity of situations, rather use the "straight lines of local conclusions to approximate the wider curves of probability." Culture is essentially the human urge to create fictions and it is what allows us to reshape our own expectations, to create new explanations, to enjoy finding things out, and without them ... we would have died out as victims of our own certainty. Our grand abstractions like truth and justice and free will are "neither divine powers nor personal whims" but are "responsibilities we must take on with full knowledge that they will always be greater than ourselves."

Book Review: "Out of Our Heads" by Alva Noe

Review of: "Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness" by Alva Noe

Review by Todd Stark, 3/30/09

An accessible and compelling exploration of the extended mind

The mind is more than what the brain is doing. The idea isn't new, but it often gets too little respect. Perhaps because people think it implies something supernatural, or perhaps because it just seems weird, but it is a very respectable argument and in Alva Noe's hands, a powerful one.

We often take for granted in brain science that the mind is implemented by things happening inside the skull. That goes against the growing findings that perception is an active process of exploration that depends on our contact with the real world and the skills we possess for navigating its structure. This book takes on the significant challenge of bringing that difficult idea accessibly and non-technically into the popular mind and I think he does an excellent job.

Although Noe doesn't talk about it specifically, Ruth Millikan makes a good related argument that substance categories are really skills. We know substances by our skills for finding and identifying them over and over, not through their intrinsic properties. Noe approaches perception in much the same way. We know the world by interacting with it, not by (or in addition to?) simulating it with detailed models inside our head.

Noe goes a step further and points out how some concepts just don't make from a detached viewpoint, so we are often forced to destroy the phenomena of consciousness, reducing them to something else, in order to study them dispassionately. This is a tough sell, I think, to habitual materialists, but he doesn't rely too heavily on it.

The implication Noe emphasizes is that consciousness is a process involving interaction of the nervous system with the world, not (just) something that is lighting up inside our neural nets. The distinction is sometimes more subtle that Noe acknowledges. He approves of Gibson's ecological theory of perception, but doesn't address the equally important work on expectancy and hypothesis testing approaches to perception, such as Richard Gregory's ideas and the experimental work done around them.

He is probably right that much of our basic perception relies heavily on active engagement with the world, but then some of it, to me, clearly doesn't. He does a good job showing limits to the feature detection approach to vision (doesn't it beg the question to say that features are "built up" toward pictures in the brain?), but doesn't have an alternate explanation for the elaborate architecture of columns and receptor fields and their activity in dreaming and imagination that seem to support at least some version of the mental representation concept in some kinds of mental activity. It seems in places that Noe acknowledges this sort of work but considers it an impoverished-perceptual or non-perceptual kind of mental activity.

Other than the excellent writing and clear arguments, the best part of this book is the skillful use of various findings regarding phantom limbs, sensory illusions, and inattention phenomena to illustrate the empirical implications of a mind extended beyond the brain case. Even if you don't buy the full externalist argument in all its details, it's hard to read those examples and not have a little light go off in your head and think "oh, so that's what he means by the mind being outside the brain!" That's a mark of good writing.

Noe mentions but does not dwell on the role played by philosopher J Merleau-Ponty in many of these ideas, and his work is worth exploring as well. A good non-technical intro in keeping with the spirit of Noe's book is: Merleau-ponty: A Guide for the Perplexed (Guides for the Perplexed).

This book is a good read, a relatively quick read, and very thought provoking.

Moving Your MOSS Databases to a new SQL Server

If you manage a single-server SharePoint 2007 farm, which is a very common configuration, there's a good chance that at some point you will want to move to a separate SQL Server. Maybe for performance, maybe to improve your infrstructure, maybe to help meet corporate database guidelines. There are lots of reasons you might want to do this. So what is involved? Is it a big deal?

The short answer is that it takes a SharePoint admin to do this (instead of or in addition to a SQL admin) and I generally allow about a day to do it if it is a machine I know well. If it is client machine rather than one of mine, and there are unknowns, I allow an additional day to troubleshoot the things that will inevitably break after the move.

So you shouldn't fear this move, but don't take it for granted either. It isn't usually trivial and sometimes can be a little painful. The obvious question in your mind will be: "what in SharePoint is directly dependent on the database server, isn't there a single setting somewhere that tells SharePoint which database server to use?" Unfortunately, it isn't quite that simple. You can't just go into Central Administration or someplace in the registry and tell SharePoint to use a different database server. You will effectively need to back up your farm, disband it, recreate the farm and restore the original content to the new farm. Then you will need to go through and check for various little things that might have directly specified database connections and so will need to be modified. Of course if you know about or can find that sort of thing ahead of time, that would be preferable.

1. The first step is preparation.

---> a. Make sure things are currently working. You don't want to find something broken after the move and be unsure of whether it was working before the move. That makes troubleshooting a lot tougher. If practical, fix broken things before the move, or at least make a note of them. Take snapshots of the most critical pages, so you can look back fondly on them as a pleasant memory if they never come back. Well, also to help troubleshoot them if they don't look quite right at the end. Yes, I've actually had to use this.

---> b. Gather the required information: the file location of the SQL database files on the old and new servers, the name and password for the SQL admin accounts, the account names and passwords of the SharePoint service and administration accounts, the old and new database names. I use a template I call a "configuration sheet" which captures all the server, web application, site collection, database, and IIS information I would need to recreate the farm topology. I recommend using something like that to be sure you have all of the informatiom you need before diving in, to avoid any panicky last second calls.

---> c. Go through Central Admin in SharePoint and make a note of the critical settings that you care about (because you will probably lose these in the move): SMTP server address for incoming and outgoing mail, alternate access mappings, accounts and permissions, yes just about everything! The fact that you have to do this tedious step is the biggest reason why the move is not as simple as you might have assumed. There are some tools that can help with this, but they cost. You wouldn't need my instructions here if had that kind of scratch. You should also get an SPSREPORT (this is a free tool used by Microsoft to capture configuration information and logs).

2. The second step is to get a good multi-technology backup (you should already be doing this routinely):

---> a. Backup your IIS metabase - not strictly neccessary but definitely recommended just in case. Sometimes you need to recreate web sites, and this will save your butt if there were IIS settings you didn't know about.

---> b. Get SQL backups of your content dbs -- hopefully you won't need them, but a good thing to have. Don't bother backing up the configuration db or admin db, you can't do much with them anyway.

---> c. Backup your web server extensions and inetpub (IIS) folders on the web server. This is not an optional step, this is essential. Most of SharePoint's content is in the database, but some things you need to properly render and use pages are in the front end web server files.

---> d. Perform site collection backups from STSADM for the site collections that are most critical to you. This will give you a way to quickly and easily recover them elsewhere to keep your business going in case of a complete FUBAR.

---> e. Perform "catastropic" backup from STSADM if you are familiar with this. If not, don't worry about it. It's just another way to recover in case of an unexpected problem.

---> f. Lastly, and most importantly, perform a full backup of the farm from the Central Administration GUI interface. This (plus the web server file backup) is going to be your primary tool for SharePoint recovery in most cases). This is a kind of backup that can't be scheduled, it must be performed interactively by an administrator, and it isn't very robust for restoration, but it has some unique advantages for convenient recovery. You should use the Central Admin backup just before any configuration change to your farm.

3. Take a deep breath. You're about to dive in. Run the technologies wizard on the SharePoint server and use it to disconnect the web server from the farm.

4. Use the technologies wizard to create a new farm on the NEW SQL server (this is the key step that recreates the configuration database, which cannot be moved due to dynamic links with other things, thus the root cause of the complications). This is where all that preparation starts to pay off, you should know the right accounts to use for everything. Using the right accounts in the right places in MOSS is critical. If you don't know the rules for this, you should not be recreating the farm, go back and do the homework. No kidding. I promise that you (or someone that curses your name) will be sorry later if you take the account assignments for granted or just use the same admin account for everything.

5. Configure the Office SharePoint Search Service from Central Administration. This may allow you to restore search indexes later if neccessary. It is optional, since you could always recreate the indexes if neccessary.

6. Using SharePoint Central Admin, perform farm restore of the backup you took in step 2f. Did it work? Phew, you're mostly done. I feel your relief. [No? Well, that's why we grabbed all that other stuff before! You have everything you need for a complete disaster recovery. Good luck. Or just reconnect your original databases and try again when you figure out what went wrong.]

7. Tedious but easy: go through Central Admin and replace all of those settings you captured before. Oh, you didn't believe me that you would need them? Too busy to do all that work? Just hope there wasn't anything important in there that you can't figure out later.

8. Take the original databases offline and go through the portal and fix anything that is broken because it needs to be reconfigured or has connection back to the old databases. This is the part that may sometimes take the additional day on a farm with unknowns. Don't forget to go through and change any database backup and maintenance procedures to use the new server if neccessary.

If you can't use the SharePoint Farm Backup and Restore from Central Administration for some reason, the process gets more complicated but it can still be done.

For example, you can sometimes use the "catastrophic" restore to restore the GUI backup using STSADM. You have to get the ID of the appropriate backup and figure out all of the parameters for accounts and locations and so on, but it may work even when the Central Admin restore does not (mainly because it doesn't rely on the timer service).

If you end up having to restore from a site collection backup for some reason, notice that your sites may not work properly. That's because there are some components in the file system for IIS and SharePoint that may have been modified. That's why you took those backups of INETPUB and WEB SERVER EXTENSIONS before. First try replacing the WEBCONFIG and GLOBAL files in your web site virtual folder with the original ones. That often does the trick. If not, you may need to do some more work to track down what is different. That's another reason I plan for a second day for these database migrations.

Best of Luck to you!

Hypnosis Research Text: Hypnotic and Subtle Influence (PDF)

My text about the psychological and neuroscience perspectives on hypnosis Hypnotic and Subtle Influence is posted on Jake Shannon's "Scientific Mind Control" site.

The text is dated but I think by and large still accurate and useful. The basic concepts and research models have not changed significantly, other than to fill in more of the details.

The chapters organization is based around concepts commonly associated with hypnosis:

Imagination, Talents, Healing, History, Suggestion, Unconscious Mind, Trance, Rapport, Role-Taking, and "Frequently Asked Questions"

The detailed table of contents:

Chapter 1 3
The Magic of Imagination 3

The Power to Alter Our Own Awareness 3
Adaptive Self-Regulation 4
Altering Our Own Experience 8
What State Are You In ? 9
Emotional States 10
Activation States 12
States of Consciousness 13
Studying Human Experience in Science 13
Taking Consciousness Seriously 15
The Value in Studying Human Experience 16
Beyond Hypnosis: Principles of Hypnotic Influence 17
Four Themes 19
Actions that happen by themselves 22
Explaining Hypnotic Involuntariness 25
Review of Chapter 1 29
Summary of Chapter 1 33
The Story So Far … 35

Chapter 2 36
Talents Used In Hypnosis 36

Fantasy, Dissociation, and Cooperative Mindset 36
Hypnotizability 36
Highs and Lows 38
Fantasy Proneness and Absorption 43
Amnesia Proneness and Dissociation 46
The Cooperative Mindset: A Gray Area 51
The Three Types of Highly Responsive People 53
Review of Chapter 2 54
Summary of Chapter 2 55
The Story So Far … 56

Chapter 3 57
Hypnosis and Healing 57

Healing the Mind and Healing with the Mind 57
Illness and Healing 57
Coping with Different Kinds of Illness 57
Hope and Healing 60
Core Components of Psychological Healing 63
General Aspect of Mental Healing 63
Specific Aspects of Mental Healing 66
Review of Chapter 3 67
Summary of Chapter 3 68
The Story So Far … 69


Chapter 4 70
Western Perspectives 70

Hypnosis in Western Culture 70
Hypnosis Wakes Up 70
The Forms that Hypnosis Takes Today 75
The Very Different Views of Hypnosis 75
The Fundamental Problem 76
Suggestion: Explicit and Implicit 77
Hypnosis for Entertainment 78
Hypnosis for Healing 78
The Distinct Cultures of Hypnotists 79
The Evolution of the Concept 80
Roots in Faith Healing and Exorcism 81
First Attempts to Study Hypnotic Influence in Science 82
The “Sleep” Method of Hypnotic Influence Emerges 84
Bernheim and Therapeutic Suggestion 88
The Origins of the Concept of Hypnotic “Depth” 90
“Depth” and Involvement in Fantasy 91
Hypnotherapy is more than Laboratory Hypnosis 93
Psychotherapy Independent of Laboratory Hypnosis 94
Summary of Chapter 4 98
The Story So Far … 99

Chapter 5 100
Suggestion 100

Identifying “Hypnotic” Responses 100
What is Suggestion ? 100
A Special Kind of Communication 101
Learning Through Rhythm 103
Ideodynamic Processes and Induction 107
Review of Chapter 5 116
Summary of Chapter 5 118
The Story So Far … 119

Chapter 6 120
The Unconscious Mind 120

What Lies Beneath: Great Storehouse or Self-Deception ? 120
Into the Realm of the Unconscious 122
The Dynamic Unconscious 123
The Cognitive Unconscious 133
Attention and Preconscious Processing 134
Types of Knowledge and Memory 136
Unconscious Procedures 137
Remembered Experiences vs. Known Facts 137
The Social-Emotional Unconscious 139
Dissociated Mental Processes 148
Review of Chapter 6 150
Summary of Chapter 6 153
The Story So Far … 154
3

Chapter 7 155
Trance 155

The Experiential Mindset and The Elusive Mental State of Hypnosis 155
How does trance feel ? 161
What does a Hypnotic Trance look like ? 162
The Paradox of Alert Trance 163
Different Kinds of Trances ? 165
Attentional Focus and the Flow State 168
What are we measuring ? 173
Hypnosis and Relaxation 174
Most hypnosis is mostly relaxation 174
Trance as distinct from sleep or stupor 177
Measurements of Localized Brain Activity 178
Looking for the Phantasms of Hypnotic Trance in the EEG 178
Evoked Potentials 182
EEG correlates of effective cognitive pain control 183
Neuroanatomy and Hypnosis : Where is the “Unconscious” ? 184
Functional Systems and Outcome-Orientation 188
A speculative neurological substrate of goal-directed behavior 190
Hemispheric Asymmetry and Hypnosis 192
“Putting half the brain to sleep,” Is the right hemisphere the Freudian Unconscious ? 197
Hypnosis and Callosal Connectivity 200
The Brain in Trance 202
Information Transduction and the HPA 203
Triggering Fast Waves and the Orienting Response 204
The Hemisphere Shift 207
The Amygdala and the Hippocampus in Attention 208
Perceptual Decisions and the Prefrontal Cortex 212
Switching Between Cognitive Modes 215
Review of Chapter 7 216
Summary of Chapter 7 218
The Story So Far … 219

Chapter 8 221
Rapport 221

The Cooperation Mindset and the Hypnotic Dance of Intimacy 221
Hypnotic Cooperation and Intimacy 221
Imagination Plus Intimacy 223
Cooperation of a Special Kind 227
Review of Chapter 8 230
Summary of Chapter 8 231
The Story So Far … 231

Chapter 9 232
Role Taking 232

Involvement and Our Sense of Identity 232
Who I Am Depends On Who I'm With 232
Coordinated Involvement 235
4
Review of Chapter 9 238
Summary of Chapter 9 240
The Story So Far … 240

Epilogue to Section One: Common Questions 242

Is Hypnosis Real ? 242
Does Hypnosis Work ? 242
Will People Do Anything the Hypnotist Says ? 243
Can Someone Be "Brainwashed" Through Hypnosis ? 244
Can I Be Hurt By Hypnosis ? 244
Can Anyone Be Hypnotized ? 245
Can Hypnosis Help Me Change My Habits ? 245
Can I Control My Body Processes With Hypnosis ? 245
Can I Control Pain With Hypnosis ? 246

Subliminal or Marginal Perception - its current scientific status

Subliminal perception is a deeply ambiguous concept, which is perhaps appropriate if you think about it!

This is partly because the concept caught on originally as the result of a hoax. The now infamous "eat popcorn, drink coke study" was a planted story by marketing consultant James Vicary which became a wildly successful urban legend about selling products subliminally in movie theatres. Vicary's model wasn't entirely impossible in theory, but as he later admitted, he made up (or exaggerated?) his results to sell his consulting services and seemed honestly surprised that people got so excited about his planted news stories. He thought of it as a rather subtle effect and the concept caught fire beyond his wildest expectations.

It is also partly because of how much the concept has been abused to make the self-help industry more lucrative. It seems like less work and more exotic to listen to music rather than repeat affirmations or use suggestions, and people like less work and are attracted to the exotic.

Of course part of the ambiguity is because we are naturally fascinated and afraid of something that can potentially influence us without being aware of it. All sorts of paranoia (and also some justified fear!) results from this, especially since it is at least theoretically a real possibility. We don't trust many people who might have a technology like this, and for good reason.

Finally, it is partly because there are legitimately difficult technical issues to resolve within the perceptual research.

Some thoughts on the technical issues in subliminal perception.

First of all, it is important to understand that subliminal perception is real. Sometimes the term "marginal perception" is preferred because the concept of a single sensory boundary is not really accurate. In either case, these terms refer to the theory stating that perception can occur without conscious awareness and have a significant impact on later behaviour and thought.

Second, most of the research on this has been on visual perception, especially using rapidly flashed images and masking stimuli. Auditory subliminal perception is not as popular in experiments for two reasons. First, it is technically much more difficult to control what is going on in order to produce repeatable results, and second, because of those problems and the lack of interest in doing real auditory subliminal research, there have been no convincing repeatable demonstrations yet that there is an auditory subliminal perception effect of the same sort as in the visual experiments. That's why the claims for auditory self-help subliminal programs are not based on any legitimate research, because there really isn't much, and because practical tests have all turned up no evidence of effects beyond placebo. Enough on that. You can check the archives of any good Skeptic magazine to find the research by Phil Merikle and others that tested many of these products.

Third, getting to the legitimate phenomenon and the technical issues, the biggest ambiguity is in how we think of perception. Is it an all-or-none phenomenon or a gradual shift between different levels? This is an important question because it tells us whether effective stimuli can really be hidden from awareness or "unconscious," or whether they just fall into the shadows of our mind but we are dimly aware of them.

This isn't as easy a thing to test as it might seem. Different experimental situations produce clear but different results, and sorting out the overall picture is an interesting but challenging job for theorists. This article from Consciousness and Cognition suggests a perspective I tend to agree with, that if some experiments show gradual levels of awareness and others show all-or-none, then the underlying phenomenon probably consists of levels. It's easier to come up with a model of how levels can become all-or-none under some conditions that a model that creates gradual levels out of an all-or-none effect.

There is a recent experimental tool called the perceptual awareness scale that has been useful so far distinguishing whether something is actually perceived or not, and to what degree. Its implications for understanding subliminal perception are described in this article from Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.

This is just a quick intro to a very deep and very tricky topic that has fascinated me for decades. The choice of the two articles which share an author was not a coincidence, I was inspired to write this after checking in on Thomas Ramsoy's work after I noticed that his wonderful Science and Consciousness Review site had been down for a while. I hope it comes back up in some form, it was once one of the best resources for research news on mind and brain topics.

Also posted at: http://www.scientificmindcontrol.com/forum/topics/subliminal-or-marginal

"Evolving Your Brain" some interesting and inspiring science with an unneccessary spin

My review of "Evolving Your Brain: The Science of Changing Your Mind", (author Joe Dispenza).

Interesting neuroscience, inspiring message, and some old philosophy in new clothes

Overall I enjoyed reading this book, although I did find it somewhat misleading regarding the scientific "paradigm" it offers and the minority philosophical points underlying it, and I was disappointed that there was not more practical applications of the author's interesting model.

My take on this book was almost the opposite of many of the other reviewers here who were either so impressed by the fact that someone would try to sue use science to support "free will" or so dismayed by the amount neuroscience in this book. Neither of those things seems that impressive to me. There *is* a lot of neuroscience here, and much of it is better than average (for a popular non-technical book anyway), but there is also some crude and I think poorly thought out philosophy as well. And the ironic thing for me was that the principles the author espouses for change are pretty mundane and don't really require either the neuroscience or the "consciousness precedes matter" philosophy.

The reasonable principles include such straightforward suggestions as envisioning your end point to organize action, using deliberate shifts of attention to change direction, using rehearsal to change habits, identifying destructive habits of thought, take responsibility for change, and make well-being a priority. Great ideas, but they don't really need the intro to neurosci or quantum physics in my opinion.

Brain science would have been more appropriate if the author had gone into more details about how we make decisions, showing how to influence the thinking process (e.g. see The Owner's Manual for the Brain: Everyday Applications from Mind-Brain Research 3rd Edition, (Howard)), but he avoids *that* sort of research, probably because it would dilute the philosophical message of "free will" that the author seems very concerned with promoting. If there are causal influences on thought, then it doesn't seem so free afterall, the opposite of the rhetorical message of this book.

The author does a pretty good job most of the time selecting and deriving pertinent lessons from neuroscience data and he gives some optimistic and realistic applications for how we can and do change ourselves sometimes. Where there is practical advice given, most of it seems very good to me, which is why I like this book overall and gave it a fairly good rating as inspirational self-help that tries hard to be scientific. As such it may for many people turn out to be a nice corrective to the scientific pessimism they find from many old school medical and psychological experts who are overly deterministic in their prognoses. I guess that's why so many reviewers seem so taken with this book, it does have an element of hope in it dressed in science, and we are more used to getting skepticism or pessimism in scientific treatments.

The author and I both seem to agree that we *can* change ourselves and influence our healing processes deliberately to some degree by rewiring our own nervous system in places, and we both also respect and commit ourselves to scientific causal models. We also both seem to be "compatibilists," people who beleive that our sense of free will and scientific determinism can be adequately reconciled. That far, I liked this book. We may disagree on the limits of self-change in practice in some specific spots, but I think the basic concept of self-healing and self-change is sound and welcome.

However the author also seems to have struggled with the philosophical problem of "top-down causation" at some point and I don't agree with or like the resolution he came up with. The whole concept from the start begins with the idea that thoughts trigger all sorts of physical things that have lasting effects. The author spends a lot of time in the book giving detailed examples of this. I have no problem with that, although it should be mentioned that this is not something new, it has been pretty well documented for decades by other authors, e.g. The Healer Within: The New Medicine of Mind and Body (Locke) and Psychobiology of Mind-Body Healing: New Concepts of Therapeutic Hypnosis (Rossi).

The problem with this particular book that I didn't have with those others is: where did the thought itself come from and what is its manifestation in the brain? That's where the author mostly just hand waves the brain mechanisms and defers to the ancient archaic version of "free will" as something that floats free of physical reality through some obscure unspecified quantum mechanical rationale. Why does he need this stretch to point out that we can change ourselves? I don't think he does.

The way thoughts themselves arise is one of the most important and interesting aspects of brain science, and still largely a mystery. The author's good but selective review of neuroscience mentions "free will" a lot but never all the wonderful data that has been accumulated regarding how we make decisions or where our perceptions and misperceptions of "free will" come from. Free will, in the sense that it actually exists and is worth seeking, is not something that escapes the brain and then reprograms it as the author claims, it is a result of that same remarkable brain, even if not entirely understood. At least that is a more interesting and promising line scientifically than hand waving about quantum weirdness and how "thoughts" as disembodied entities cause things to happen in the body. From my perspective, the illusion that makes us feel as if thought has to be non-physical is addressed well in: The Illusion of Conscious Will (Wegner) and Freedom Evolves (Dennett).

This "new paradigm" of the author is actually more philosophy and pop science speculation than hard science I think. It isn't terrible by any means, or impossible, and he isn't alone in considering it, but it is not really a new scientific model at all in any interesting experimental sense. It has been around for a while and has had a small, marginal, but dedicated following outside of mainstream science (and more broadly in popular media).

The author applies the problematic "consciousness is prior to matter" philosophical stance and then at the end of the book he throws in the traditional idiosyncratic interpretation of quantum physics to make the point more "scientific." To be fair, this view is reasonable philosophically and more to the point, I suppose may help non-scientists better appreciate human potential for change, which seems to be the author's primary overriding goal. But personally I think it is a technically completely unneccessary and misleading way to resolve the issue raised by top-down causation. For details on the philsophical issues, Jaegwon Kim's books are particularly helpful, such as: Mind in a Physical World: An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental Causation (Kim).

"Top-down causation," is the problem of how the mind, as a product of the brain, can then turn around and influence the body. I would say that this is a problem of how some aspects of brain function can influence others. The author instead joins those modern day Cartesians who evade the scientific problem with philosophy by making "thought" something outside of the physical world that causes things to happen in the physical world. Yes, I agree with the author that whatever a thought is in the brain does cause other things to happen in the body, but I disagree with him that it requires a weird non-physicalist take on consciousness and quantum mechanics to achieve this in principle. I particularly don't like that he claims this is some sort of new scientific paradigm. It is an old philosophical idea. There's a nice account of the difference between this intuitive view and the scientific worldview in: The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them (Flanagan).

This idea is certainly considered seriously by some philosophers, especially those who feel it is impossible to solve "hard problems" like qualia with physical explanations. But there is very little science here that applies to these ideas unless you really stretch and squint an awful lot at a few marginal experiments that could just as well be interpreted in other ways.

More importantly, the book doesn't really have as much in the way of practical ideas as I would have liked. The "science of changing your mind" should actually have a lot in it about changing your mind, rather than just explaining why it should be possible to change your mind.

So I don't think this was pioneering science because of its unneccessary odd digressions of philosophy and quantum physics, and I don't think it is a good how-to book, but I think the author makes a good case from neuroscience for the possibility of changing ourselves. I did find some value in the author's general model of how we change, but that would have made a better article than a book.

If the author had taken his model of change and neuroscience references and applied them to many practical examples rather than using them to promote an idiosyncratic underlying theory, this would have been a superb book in my opinion.

As it is, it is a better than average "alternative science" book. A worthwhile spiritual and also practical message combined with a mixture of real scientific and also very idiosyncratic models.

Volumetrics: Practical application of the obesity research

The top of the diet book list: More Taste, More Filling, Less Calories

My review of "The Volumetrics Weight Control Plan" by Barbara Rolls, PH.D. and Robert A. Barnett, HarperCollins, 2000.

There are thousands of diet books out there promoting approaches with varying combinations of common sense, science, experience, and novelty in their approach to weight control. They each have their advocates. I think Volumetrics is at the very top of the list of approaches for a number of reasons.

First is credibility. Barbara Rolls is not a personal trainer or a celebrity or "nutritionist" in the generic sense or someone who read a handful of studies and observed a handful of clients to derive her conclusions, she is a leading nutrition and health researcher. She knows the trends and patterns in the research, she knows which approaches have been reliable and which have not in the long run and with the widest base of people. Her foundation in the science of weight control is as solid as anyone writing about nutrition, and much better than 99.9% of the authors.

Second is flexibility. Volumetrics is not a concept based on sensory-specific boredom or food restriction, common and very popular approaches which generally are self-defeating. Volumetrics is instead based on understanding our own feelings of satisfaction with food so that we can feel satisfied while meeting our health goals rather than depriving ourselves. There are a number of effective tactics in Volumetrics for eating in a way that is satisfying and does not restrict food yet does restrict calories and therefore control weight. These tactics are not all or nothing, you can apply the ones you need to the degree that you need without following rigid rules and dietary restrictions. The tactics are organized in modular fashion. You can apply these principles when you go out to eat or order take-out or prepare your own favorites or you can make your own Volumetric meals from scratch, or any combination of these. Most of the time you are not avoiding foods at all, you are actually adding new ones in to help satisfy hunger so you don't need as much of the ones you crave in order to feel satisfied.

Third is variety. Unlike most programs, Volumetrics takes advantage of our natural inclination to eat a variety of foods in order to get the wide variety of nutrients that we need for optimal health. Most programs recognize that variety triggers us to eat more, so they discourage it and encourage boredom but we eventually get bored of nutritional boredom. Volumetrics instead encourages variety but provides a variety of choices that help rather than hurt weight control goals.

The central concepts are probably not going to be new to anyone who reads diet books. The presentation of their scientific basis and the reason why they work in terms of modern obesity research models is the strength of this book, and having this rationale is what allows the principles to be applied more flexibly. If you understand the *why* of the food choices, you can improvise flexibly in your own application of the program, and that's what Volumetrics gives you.

The key principle is satiety. Research indicates that in the long run we tend to eat until we are satisfied and we know we are satisfied in two ways. First, a complex collection of physiological signals from various parts of the body combine to produce the experience of satiety itself. Then we also learn what behaviors and foods lead to the experience of satiety for us. The Volumetrics approach centers around learning how to effectively produce the experience of satiety with what we eat and how to retrain our expectations for what we need to eat to be satisfied. That's it, the rest is details.

The main detail is the concept of energy density. Another important consistent research result is that people tend to eat the same amount by weight because of how we've learned to satisfy our hunger. The key result that makes the Volumetrics approach workable is that we can trigger the same signals that a particular weight of food produces with an equal volume of more satisfying, less energy-dense food. By deliberately creating the right sensory experience and fullness with foods that have less caloric energy, we learn to satisfy our hunger with less calories and so lose weight while eating more healthy and less calories.

The important point is that this is not about just eating salads and soups all the time, it is about strategically getting good nutrition by knowing the relative energy density of foods and eating more of the low energy density foods we really enjoy, and then more strictly portion control the higher energy density ones we have been craving and have been obstacles to our health goals. The emphasis on satiety in low-density foods controls the cravings for the high-density ones, making this possible.

This probably sounds a lot like common sense, and I think much of it is. However the details and their scientific rationale are what really make the program in this book stand out and make it workable and flexible. Volumetrics explains the specific problems with various other approaches like high protein/low carb and presents a broadly workable and scientifically based alternative that give you good lifelong nutritional habits rather than a tricky way to lose weight for a few weeks. I've been gradually incorporating these principles into my own life for several years and have been very happy with both their sustainability and their effectiveness. I think this program is going to be they key to weight control for a lot of people.

Given that the treatment of weight control in this book is so good, let's look at the few limitations.

First, since it is written from the perspective of health, there is really no treatment of performance or athletic nutrition, so athletes interested in weight control may be able to use these principles but they will not be able to rely on this book for their complete nutritional program.

Second, a related limitation is that the treatment regarding exercise is rather weak compared to the treatment of nutrition. Guidelines for walking and moderate activity are emphasized particularly for weight maintenance where they are most effective, rather than weight loss. The Volumetric approach is consistent with the trainer's dictum "you can't out-train a bad diet." Only a competitive endurance athlete and few extremes of that sort can hope to move so much that they burn off an energy-dense diet. So the principles of weight loss emphasize calorie restriction and satiety rather than exercise. As Volumetrics explains, exercise becomes important in three ways for weight *maintenance* (rather than loss) however: (1) strength training builds lean mass which raises resting metabolism, so we don't need to restrict calories as much, and (2) activity itself is more successful at maintaining weight than losing it, once we have eating patterns that maintain a nearly stable weight, and (3) a good exercise program is extremely effective at increasing our sense of self-efficacy, which leads to compliance and success in other habits as well. The limitation is that the book offers no help in what makes a good exercise program effective in these ways. It is not a book about exercise. High intensity exercise is mentioned as possibly even more useful for people who can tolerate it. I think this aspect is very important and should have been discussed a bit more. However it is a large book with a lot of details on its core principles, and exercise is really just a secondary concern to the authors.

Third, there is really very little discussion of popular principles that just aren't effective or those that possibly might be useful. The authors explain that most diets succeed in the short term because of various kinds of boredom and appetite suppression rather than because they are sound eating patterns. And they explain why adequate protein is important but more than that is not particularly helpful in the long run for weight control. But all of the rest of the tactics are left pretty much untouched. It would have been useful for some of the more intriguing ones to have been addressed, such as intermittent fasting.

Fourth, the thoroughness of the book will also be its downfall for some less patient readers used to reading web pages rather than books. This is a real book, not a pamphlet. It doesn't give you a condensed program in abstract form in the first few pages, you have to read the book and digest its lessons in order to get its full education and apply them effectively and flexibly. That's the whole point of the program, at least from my perspective, that deeper knowledge of the principles will help you with lifelong better eating.

All in all, I'd say this is the best single book on general principles of lifelong nutrition for weight control, it is detailed, comprehensive, and authoritative, and the program is practical, flexible, and sustainable. I'd venture so far as to say that other programs probably succeed or fail largely on how well they apply the sound principles behind Volumetrics.

Hypnosis and Synesthesia

Hypnosis and Synesthesia

New Scientist ran a recent review article by David Robson that might be of interest to those exploring the nature of hypnosis. It is on the experimental investigation of synesthesia effects using hypnosis. Feb 14-20 2009 issue. Research is reviewed narrowing down the genetic origin of synesthesia, but then research is also reviewed showing that similar sensory cross-over effects can be reproduced with suggestion. The percentage of people who showed a particular cross-over effect under the hypnosis condition was roughly the same as that of people diagnosed with synesthesia, and significantly different from non-hypnosis controls.

This is interesting but not neccessarily something all that new. It doesn't say as much about the nature of hypnosis as a different state of consciousness as Robson's article seems to assume because it is also suspected that synesthesia effects are actually fairly common, and that the diagnostic criteria reveal a matter of degree more than kind. So as in T.X. Barber's famous line of "non-trance" experiments, suggestion rather than hypnosis per se could well be what brings out the cross-over effects. Missing from the hypnosis synesthesia experiment seems to be a non-trance task-motivated or expectancy control, their controls were simply "asked to imagine." The difference between being "asked to imagine" and being motivated or expectant to see results is very different, and this was one of Barber's central contributions to hypnosis research.

On the incidence of synesthesia effects, also see Alison Motluk's article from New Scientist last year: "Do we all have some synaesthetic ability?"
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14841-do-we-all-have-some-syn...

Synesthesia and suggestion both turn out to be fascinating windows into the mind!

The Story Behind the Landmarks in the History of Life

The Story Behind the Landmarks in the History of Life

A review of Sean Carroll's book "Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origin of Species" 2009, Houghton Mifflin.

This is one of those “stories behind the science” books that gives you a sense of the sort of explorations that lay behind the famous discoveries that shaped modern biology. The primary focus is on the paleontologists who made various critical fossil finds and whose scientific obsessions led the efforts to uncover the history of life. Other books have covered the stories behind the genetics and the development of evolutionary theory itself better, but this one is particularly strong on the stories of key fossil hunters and their unique fascination with deep history and what it tells us.

The thing that makes this book worthwhile is that it is not just a travelogue of fossil discoveries, it makes a good and often successful effort to tie the work of each of the paleontologists into its implications for the history of life as well as making each find an interesting discovery for the reader.

It’s a very different experience learning the principles of biology in a classroom and reading the story of biology from the eyes of the naturalists discovering it firsthand.

On the other hand, the author doesn’t always tie specific finds back to their specific implications for biology. There is story and there is explanation, and the two are hard to balance. Story sometimes gets the better of explanation in this book. Although he is often careful to give simple explanations of concepts when introducing them, in a book of this type the author can’t help implicitly assuming a fair amount of knowledge that some lay readers might not have. I’m not sure I’d recommend this book as a primer on evolutionary biology, but then it wasn’t intended to be anything of the sort and that’s part of its charm.

What better way to celebrate Darwin’s bicentennial this year than to learn about how his ideas helped inspire generations of scientist-detectives to learn about the fascinating history of living things on our planet. The story is intriguing throughout, but by the time Carroll gets to the story of discoveries close to our own species, it has become a story you just can’t put down and which is really just beginning to be told.

The Sexual Selection Theory of Art: A Review of Dennis Dutton's "The Art Instinct"

The Sexual Selection Theory of Art: A Review of Dennis Dutton's "The Art Instinct"

Why have human beings always enjoyed making and experiencing art throughout history and in all areas of the world? This book is a bold claim about the nature of human beings. The claim is that the things we enjoy doing and the things we appreciate about each other were shaped largely by our history as a species rather than by what we learn from each other during our own life time.

This may not seem too bold to those unfamiliar with the academic climate of modern social sciences and humanities. In academia, particularly in social sciences and humanities, it is virtually heretical to claim any significant role at all for "nature" in human behavior. Although biologists in general agree that human nature is the result of an interaction of the expression of genes and their environment, the philosophy underlying the arts and social sciences heavily emphasizes the role of learning and enculturation in shaping us.

Still, even among biologists, Dutton's version of the claim is somewhat controversial. Dutton doesn't just say that human beings are the result of an evolutionary history. He doesn't just say that our brain and other organs are shaped by that history. Those claims are uncontroversial in biology. Dutton's particular boldness is that he claims that our nervous system specifically was shaped during the Pleistocene period of our history to favor certain qualities in potential mates, and that this shaping is the reason we have art.

The reason this claim is controversial even within biology has to do with two kinds of problem. The claim is rooted in a relatively recent subfield of biology known as evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary biologists are split about the potential of evolutionary psychology to explain human behavior. Some, proponents of evolutionary psychology, believe that the only way we can fully trace the workings of the human mind is to find what specific sorts of problems it evolved to solve.

Others are skeptical on principle. Some just think the whole endeavor is wrongheaded. The late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould argued that the human mind was more like a collection of byproducts of adaptations than adaptations. The philosopher Jerry Fodor argues that while modularity of the sort assumed by Dutton's chosen form of evolutionary psychology is clearly the rule in lower level neural processes like perception, it is unlikely in principle to play a role in higher mental processes.

Still others agree with the principles behind evolutionary psychology but don't think we can do it practically because the evidence we would need is too elusive and too easily obscured . They often cite the unfortunate tendency to explain everything glibly in terms of hypothetical Pleistocene adaptations. This tendency has been noted about evolutionary biology in general, but in other areas of evolutionary biology the methodological issues are more readily addressed. When we try to explain the roots of human behaviors, the issues become more complex.

Teasing out the evolutionary history of adaptations can be surprisingly tricky even for things with seemingly straightforward functions like feathers and eyes. When we look at mind and complex behaviors, the issues get extremely thorny.

Perhaps the best review of the empirical issues around evolutionary psychology are found in David Buller's book "Adapting Minds." [[ASIN:0262524600 Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature (Bradford Books)]] Buller summarizes the core arguments: (1) EP requires a specific stable environment that we adapted to over time, and the evidence for this is based entirely on time span, rather than having found such an environment, (2) a primary tool of adaptation analysis, the comparison of species which share a common ancestor, is rendered problematic by our lack of knowledge other hominid species any closer than chimps, (3) rapid evolutionary change since the Pleistocene is potentially relevant, and points out the difficulties distinguishing adaptations of the Pleistocene from those far more ancient, and (4) most of the EP experimental programs are open to interpretation regarding how their data relates back to evidence for adaptations.

Dutton's argument is well made but not compelling because it is by nature very speculative. However he does do a good job addressing the major objections in a way that lets you see the potential for his theory. The argument is particularly difficult, and Dutton's efforts particularly admirable, because he not only has to address the scientific issues regarding evolutionary psychology, but also the climate of opinion in the arts and social sciences that opposes the whole notion of explaining human preferences and experience in biological rather than cultural terms. Against this background of broad skepticism, Denis Dutton is particularly well suited to make the case for the bold use of evolutionary psychology because he is more familiar than most people with humanities as well as having a good understanding of biology.

Dutton has to jump through several rather big hoops. Since he is arguing specifically about our universal appreciation of art as something to be explained, he has to first establish that art is indeed a distinct universal domain that can be studied. This is a challenge already because the modernist philosophy underlying art does not view it as a single domain that is universal to human beings. Dutton addresses this in two parts: first arguing that art can be defined usefully in terms of a dozen or so related cluster criteria, and then arguing that these are more likely the result of natural selection than they are byproducts. Next he has to establish that art is not only universal to humankind but also that something universal to our species actually requires an evolutionary explanation.

In the most generally interesting parts of the book, Dutton raises common controversies about art in order to show how he would address them. In the most technically interesting parts of the book, Dutton compares and contrasts the competing theories: (1) it is purely cultural with no relation to natural selection, (2) it helps bind people into groups for collective action, (3) it is the result of byproducts of evolutionary adaptation, (4) it is the result of sexual selection.

Ultimately Dutton settles on a sexual selection explanation, similar to Geoffrey Miller's treatment in "The Mating Mind," [[ASIN:038549517X The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature]] but more focused on art in particular. In this theory, we came to appreciate certain abilities in each other as a way to find better mates, and these various abilities cluster around certain common themes like skill, novelty, specific focus, expressive individuality, intellectual challenge, emotional saturation, and imaginative experience.

If you appreciate Dutton's intriguing cluster criteria for art and you accept at least in principle the concept that we may have evolved preferences shaped through sexual selection, it is easy to find Dutton's argument exciting in spite of its speculative status. This is very good popular science writing: a bold theory, a well made argument, and a lot of interesting examples.

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of such a bold theory, but at least one good reason to consider it: it is wonderfully elegant.

The "Peek-A-Boo" Tactic in Modern Martial Arts

The Peek-A-Boo Tactic in Modern Martial Arts

Update Dec 2, 2011: Lee Morrison at Urban Combatives recently expanded on the idea of the Peek-A-Boo as a distinct tactic by combining it with some other more or less instinctive positions commonly used by well known instructors such as Tony Blauer's "SPEAR" and calling the positions collectively "default positions." Interesting idea and worth reading I think. I was leading up to something like this in the article here but never got around to following up, but I think Lee did a better job than the one I would have done.

The Peek-A-Boo as a Distinct Tactic

There's a very widely used and very effective tactic in modern martial arts that is used for the two critical purposes of: (1) defending from a wide range of attacks and (2) bridging from boxing range into close range striking and grappling.

It is notable in that the best known Asian traditions mostly use tactics where you stand upright, hands down or outstretched, grabbing or trapping limbs and striking while moving into close range. In Western boxing, the hands are usually held in front of the chin and beside the jaw.

The "peek-a-boo" tactic differs in that the fighter places both hands on his head (or sometimes at brow level), blocking with his forearms and elbows, and then in some variations may use this defense as part of a guarded rush to force the opponent back and engage them at close range. The position may appear momentarily in some form in boxing and Asian martial arts while covering up, but it becomes a distinct "Peek-A-Boo Tactic" when it is heavily relied on for its own unique characteristics.


A number of styles seem to treat this tactic as if they originated it, but it is likely that it was developed in parallel because relies on some of our gross defensive instincts, such as hunching over and pulling our body away from attack and raising our shoulders and arms to cover our face. That's probably why it is so highly favored in "reality-based" martial arts training, it requires little formal training and little fine motor skill to use effectively under a wide range of conditions.


The Peek-A-Boo in Boxing

The first place I know of that this tactic was used with dramatic effectiveness was in boxing. The legendary Cus D'Amato trained two world champion boxers in it: Floyd Patterson and Mike Tyson. Both used it to great effect at times. Wikipedia has a useful description of the Peek-A-Boo tactic as used in boxing:


"Peek a boo boxing utilizes relaxed hands with the forearms in front of the face and the fist at nose-eye level, as opposed to the orthodox style where the hands are at chin level with the left hand slightly in front of the chin and the right hand next to the chin. Other unique features includes side to side head movements, bobbing, weaving and blind siding your opponent. The number system e.g. 3-2-3-Body-head-body or 3-3-2 Body-Body-head is drilled with the stationary dummy and on the bag until the fighter is able to punch by rapid combinations with what Cus calls "bad intentions". The style allows swift neck movements as well quick duckings and the bad returning damage, usually by rising uppercuts or even rising hooks."


The Peek-A-Boo in Martial Arts

The use of the tactic in martial arts follows this pattern as well, but expands on it. The hands are kept high (often actually being placed on the top of the head when defending), moving from side to side continually but also moving the hands continually to faciliate quick blocking reactions. Martial artists are concerned with attacks from a wider range of angles than boxers and allows a wider range of counter-attacks, so the Peek-A-Boo in martial arts has to make more use of active blocking to cut off the angles and counter-attack.

"Jailhouse Rock"


You find this tactic featured in some martial arts of African origin and it is featured prominently in "Jailhouse Rock," an art of recent origin which a number of sources have testified to finding in modern prisons. The link to Jailhouse Rock is probably not coincidental. One version of the story of Floyd Patterson says that it was Patterson's use of the tactic he learned in Coxsacki prison that led to Cus D'Amato developing it for boxing. This story can only be partially true at best, however, since D'Amato had already taught a similar kind of defense to fighters before working with Patterson. In any case, whether boxing learned the tactic from prison, or prison from boxing, the tactic appears in similar forms in boxing and in penal fighting. There are many ways that the two could influence each other back and forth because of the unfortunate fact that many professional boxers have done prison time.











In this scan from John S. Soet's book Martial Arts Around the World, the aggressive use of elbows from a loose Peek-A-Boo defense is shown as an illustration of Jailhouse Rock.






















Other Appearances

The tactic is found in a number of other modern systems as well. Defensive Tactics instructor Steve Tarani teaches a stationary version of the tactic for fast emergency defense and calls it the QuickShield (a name he trademarked). It is found in informal versions in self-defense arts such as Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, where it is used very briefly as a temporary defense and as a way to get into close range more safely rather than as a formal defensive system. I don't know if they use it in the Israeli arts, but I'd be very surprised if it didn't appear there somewhere. The heavily Indonesian flavored Jeet Kune Do of Dan Inosanto makes good use of this tactic and similar ones. The tactic has recently been featured in the fighting scenes of several movies. There is an interesting variation sometimes seen where one hand takes on the Peek-A-Boo posture on the head and the other hand braces against that elbow.

Mel Gibson is shown below doing a variation of the Peek-A-Boo.

More formally, the tactic is featured very prominently in several fighting systems as well. It is particularly apparent in the "Crazy Monkey Defense," and the Keysi Fighting Method. In the Keysi system, a particularly versatile form of the Peek-A-Boo is called the Pensador or "Thinking Man" and is used in a very aggressive way very similar to the boxing application.

Crazy Monkey



The folks at Crazy Monkey Defense (Rodney King and friends) say that they invented the Peek-A-Boo tactic from watching monkeys while on safari. They use in primarily in a defensive boxing context, by keeping hands constantly in motion so as to use forearms for rapid blocking without giving up the defensive shield. Their use of Peek-A-Boo differs slightly from D'Amato's mainly in that they are initially teaching it purely as a defensive system and use blocking motions with the arms (as shown in the jab defense example below) rather than bobbing and weaving. This probably makes the defensive shield easier for beginners to utilize effectively, while at least temporarily giving up on the potentially aggressive use of the tactic.

Keysi Fighting Method


The Keysi Fighting Method was created by Justo Dieguez and Andy Norman in the 1950's and they say it originated in the "Spanish Gypsy streets." It heavily emphasizes a form of the Peek-A-Boo as a unique sort of aggressive defense in order to get into close range and set up close range strikes. In the Keysi system, the shield position is maintained continually and used to set up strikes and guarded rushes at close range. The Keysi method demonstrates the unique versatility of the Peek-A-Boo for both offense and defense when used in a more general martial arts application. The founders of the art also train in Jeet Kune Do with Dan Inosanto, which probably helps explain why it shares a lot of similarity in places with Kali, Silat, and other Indonesian martial arts. The Keysi method has received a lot of attention due to being featured in several popular Hollywood films such as Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and MI-3.

The central concept in the Keysi method is the Pendador ("Thinking Man") which is the name they give the mobile, aggressive use of their particular version of the Peek-A-Boo position, with hands overlapping on the head. Many other concepts involve the use of that position to set up close range attacks.

Trinity Block: T.J. Kennedy's Hybrid Fighting Method




Raw Combat Sweden: Using arm attacks

The Rare Amazonian Dog-Bird (photo)

The rare Amazonian DogBird: I love this photo.

http://scienceblogs.com/grrlscientist/2009/01/todays_mystery_bird_for_you_to_155.php

"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.