'Geography of Hope' & 'The Great Conversation'

c/o Resurgence & Ecologist

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hope	geography
peoples - places	value / values

"... Stegner explained - we need such [wilderness] places because they remind us of a world beyond the human and also because they allow us to see ourselves as part of the 'environment of trees and rocks and soil ... part of the natural world and competent to belong to it". Taken together, he concluded, such places constitute a 'geography of hope'. ...

There are, as Stegner knew, certain thoughts and feelings that can had only in certain places: cognition is site-specific as well as motion-sensitive. It has long seemed to me that we might imagine landscapes as holding specific ideas and experiences just as they hold certain stones, minerals or species; that we might even talk of landscapes as growing ideas as they grow plants. And that, by extension, when we lose certain places - when they are destroyed incidentally, or deliberately - we lose not only the life that they held but also the thoughts that they enabled." p.38.

Mcfarlane, Robert., The Geography of Hope, Resurgence & Ecologist, Nov/Dec 2012, 275:pp.38-39.

https://www.20-20-vision.org/

Elia T. Ben-Ari, Defender of the Voiceless: Wallace Stegner's Conservation Legacy, BioScience, Volume 50, Issue 3, March 2000, Pages 253–257, https://doi.org/10.1641/0006-3568(2000)050[0253:DOTVWS]2.3.CO;2

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intrinsic elements	PERIODIC table
we are elements too - part of nature	value / values "We have broken the great conversation."

"But does the natural world need our writing? Paul Evans, in his Country Diary in The Guardian, wrote of the importance of observing and describing the world with passion; that communicating 'the significance of ephemeral and overlooked things to a world which couldn't care less' is a political and spiritual act." p.41.

Reason, Peter., The Great Conversation, Resurgence & Ecologist, Nov/Dec 2012, 275:pp.40-41.

In the media and many Resurgence & Ecologist issues, there is a stress on our taking time to be slow. I'd written in the margin of Mcfarlane's article; "Relativistic care: The faster we run (travel) the more mass we consume". While by Reason's text I'd scribbled; "H2CM is a statement of intent, in idealised care. In practice it is an outcome."

The conjunction of reality and simulation?

 "Models are approximations of reality, constructed by scientists to address specific questions of natural phenomena using the language of mathematics. Mathematical equations allow the practitioner to decide the level of abstraction needed to tackle a given problem, thus transcending the 'billiard ball' approach." p.198.

 

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"In practice, simulations are often limited by a dynamic range problem, meaning that one runs out of computing power to simulate behavior at all scales. The discretization of mathematical equations in order to program them into a computer introduces subtleties such as numerical dissipation - an artificial side effect of differential equation calculations that does not arise from physics. It is also likely that one needs different numerical methods to simulate behavior on different scales, and a single method may be insufficient for all spatial scales. Perhaps the advent of AI will allow us to overcome some of these limitations, but for now emulations remain an aspiration." p.199.  "

"Generally, examining the microscopic components of a complex system in order to understand how macroscopic behaviour emerges falls short - think biology and economics. Implicitly, this brute-force approach suggests that one may study complex systems without having a scientific question in mind, and if enough computing power is deployed then insight naturally emerges. The billion-euro Human Brain Project is a spectacular example of the limitations of such an approach. Essentially, their  simulations have failed to replace laboratory experiments. As has been noted by climate scientist Isaac Held, there is a tension between simulation and understanding.  We simulate in order to mimic as much of an observed phenomenon as possible. But we achieve understanding by using idealized models to capture the essence of the phenomenon. By design, idealized models necessarily employ assumptions." p.198.

Heng, K., Approximating Reality, American Scientist - Special Issue: Scientific Modelling, July-August 2023. 111:4,198-199.

Immigration - in Hodges' model

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You - have seen nothing yet ...?

"One of the key ideas behind Brexit was to 'take back control' of immigration. Back in 2010, David Cameron pledged to bring net migration to under 100,000 a year, but the promise was never met. ... However, in the post-Brexit years, immigration has soared to unprecedented levels. Net immigration, which hovered around 200,000 in pre-Brexit years skyrocketed to an all-time high of 745,000 in 2022." p.10.

We - have seen nothing yet ...?

How Migration Really Works

Hass, H. de., The Necessity of Immigration, BIG ISSUE, 4 December 2023. Issue 1593, pp.10-11.

'Freedom of belief' - really?

"We have seen that our beliefs are tightly coupled to the structure of language and to the apparent structure of the world. Our "freedom of belief," if it exists at all, is minimal. Is a person really to free to believe a proposition for which he has no evidence? No. Evidence (whether sensory or logical) is the only thing that suggests that a given belief is really about the world in the first place. We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common we call them "religious"; otherwise, they are likely to be called "mad," "psychotic," or "delusional." pp.71-72.

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my freedom of belief senses - logic my belief - beliefs belief hygiene my mental health state continuum model -  of mental health-illness	freedom of movement senses logic physical reality personal hygiene
culture organised religions our beliefs	theocracy secular states Mental health law

Harris, S. (2004) The End of Faith, London: Norton & Co.

'Mechanical medicine' is a thing ...

Planet Medicine

"Mechanical Medicine: Ancient surgery, poultices; some herbal medicine and bodywork; all Western technological medicine. 

Since healing occurs in the physical world, all medicines must have some substance, if only the substance from which a potency is derived or the bodies of the participants. The acupuncture needles are not pure energy, and the herbs of the Ayurvedic or Basque doctor grow from real soil; even the mind has the external properties of the brain. The San Pedro cactus of Peru which, according to Eduardo Calderon, transfers its light and vibration to the patient and locks with his aura to drive all physical and mental aspects of alienation to the surface, originates in the physical properties of the desert." p.374.

Grossinger, R. (1982) Planet Medicine - from stone age shamanism to post-industrial healing, London: Shambala Publications Inc.

Book cover: Ebay.

Vera Spencer - Artist versus Machine c.1954

Tate Etc.

"The paper card used to create this collage by the artist Vera Spencer may look unassuming, but the idea behind them is monumental. Around 1800, the French merchant and weaver Joseph Marie Jacquard first developed the automated loom, a machine which used perforated cards to store advanced weaving patterns. These perforations - a series of holes or not-holes - created the world's first large-scale system of binary data storage. Jacquard's loom went on to inspire British mathematician Charles Babbage to design the Analytical Engine, the first punch-card calculator and a precursor to the modern computer - the potential of which was grasped by the mathematician Ada Lovelace, regarded as the first computer programmer. . . . 

By modifying punched cards, Vera Spencer started up a material fight with the very tissue of automation. The same automation that today, with the invention of self-learning image and text-creating algorithms like Dall-E and ChatGPT, has reached the practices of artists and writers, challenging our very concept of creativity and ultimately threatening their work." p.99.

 

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creativity	automation material size-scale: loom <> punched card computer  tissue
Vera Spencer Artist versus Machine c.1954

Smith, A., on Vera Spencer Artist versus Machine c.1954, Summer 2023, Tate Etc., Issue 58, p.99.

Previous posts on W2tQ:
Ada Lovelace 

Person to object: Surely you're joking* ...!

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identity person choice	identity person, age integer
people father - mother	election voting age

 

By @Eyesomorphic - https://www.youtube.com/@Eyesomorphic 

"A gentle introduction to the study of Category Theory and Abstract Algebra, done from the ground-up by exploring the mathematical weapon of abstraction. This video aims to give an overview of the fundamental tool at the forefront of pure mathematical research: abstraction. By seeing this tool in various contexts, and how it allows us to encounter Category Theory in a natural and intuitive manner, we'll see how beautiful the abstract can really be."

  ― Timestamps ― 

 0:00 - Intro 

1:49 - Abstraction and Algebra 

7:30 - Examples of Abstraction 

8:49 - Set Theory 

13:25 - Category Theory 

21:16 - Outro 

― Credits ―
All animation and voiceover created by Eyesomorphic. Background music: 'Abstraction', composed by Caleb Peppiatt.

― Further Reading ―
Category Theory for Programmers: The Preface, by Bartosz Milewski: https://bartoszmilewski.com/2014/10/28/category-theory-for-programmers-the-preface/

Category Theory for Computing Science, by Michael Barr & Charles Wells (Book)

 *Person to object - and back again - assuring and preserving the humanistic.

Diagrams, Visualizations, Intuition and Critical Thinking QED

"The atom of Niels Bohr, a miniature solar system, had become a embarrassingly false image. ... Bohr himself had set the tone. In accepting the Nobel Prize for his atomic model, he said it was time to give up the hope of explanation in terms of analogies with everyday experience. 'We are therefore obliged to be modest in our demands and content ourselves with concepts that are formal in the sense that they do not provide a visual picture of the sort one is accustomed to require. . . .' This progress had not been altogether free of tension. 'The more I reflect on the physical portion of Schrödinger's theory, the more disgusting I find it,' was Heisenberg's 1926 comment to Pauli. 'Just imagine the rotating electron who charge is distributed over the entire space with axes in 4 or 5 dimensions. What Schrödinger writes on the visualizability of his theory . . . I consider trash.' As much as physicists valued the conceptualizing skill they called intuition, as much as they spoke of a difference between physical understanding and formal understanding, they had nevertheless learned to mistrust any picture of subatomic reality that resembled everyday experience. No more baseballs, artillery shells, or planetoids for the quantum theorists; no more idle wheels or wavy lines. Feynman's father had asked him, in the story he told many times: 'I understand that when an atom makes a transition from one state to another, it emits a particle of light called a photon. . . . Is the photon in the atom ahead of time? . . . Well, where does it come from, then? How does it come out?' No one had a mental image for this, the radiation of light, the interaction of matter with the electromagnetic field: the defining event of quantum electrodynamics." p.242.

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reflection critical thinking intuition	physics Bohr's atomic model reflection

Gleick, J., (1992) GENIUS - Richard Feynman and modern physics, London: Little Brown and Company, p.242.

'Pharma©opia’ (1992) by General Idea outside Museo Jumex © Moritz Bernoully c/o FTWeekend

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	Pharma©opia’ (1992) by General Idea outside Museo Jumex © Moritz Bernoully

Cepeda, G., Mexican art's early champion. Collecting,  FTWeekend, 25-26 November 2023, p.5. 

Image source:
https://www.ft.com/content/96f76039-0703-455f-acbb-d1a74827ee73

With my inversion of the original image.

Tower blocks: Challenge young and older - Courtesy the Artist © Stephen Willats (Revisited)

LIVING WITH PRACTICAL REALITIES, 1978

"Stephen Willats aimed to explore the realities of living in a British tower block. The work centres on Mrs Moran, an elderly woman who lived at Skeffington Court in Hayes, West London. Willats photographed and interviewed Mrs Moran over the course of six months. The text in the work is based on these interviews. In his composition, Willats highlights the physical, social and economic constraints that she faced. Each panel also features a question. These invite the viewer to participate directly in Mrs Moran’s lived experiences."

Gallery label, September 2023

Tower blocks are an integral, defining structure in urban and city life. Governance, effective policy, accountability, high standards, public safety and duty of care must not be an after-thought. 

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© Stephen Willats	© Stephen Willats
© Stephen Willats	Grenfell Tower Inquiry Housing policy Housing provision Housing market 'Mobility' Ownership Private, rented Housing Assoc. ... Tower Blocks Life chances - 'Health career'

Stephen Willats

My source: notebook, as with -

https://hodges-model.blogspot.com/2023/08/rational-concepts-dilworth-1977.html

Plus, a previous post:

https://hodges-model.blogspot.com/2014/03/living-with-practical-realities-1978.html

5th March at Tate Liverpool, the exhibition: "Keywords. Art, Society and Culture in 1980s Britain" from 28 Feb 2014 to 11 May 2014.

See also (listed in the bibliography):
Iris Lohja, Yves Demazeau, Christine Verdier. A multi-agent system approach to dynamic ridesharing for older people: State-of-the-art work and preliminary design. 18èmes Rencontres des Jeunes Chercheurs en Intelligence Artificielle, RJCIA’20, Jun 2020, Angers, France. pp.52-59. ⟨hal-02897446⟩

Processing people ... in Nursing and Social Services

 When the nursing process was introduced in the UK in the late 1970s - early 1980s, the change was resisted to a degree with concern that patients were at risk of being  'processed': assessed, care planned, interventions delivered then evaluated, discharged or re-assessed. ...

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play  my quality of life my quality of care Emotional, Health and Care Plans Teaching Assistant provision continuity of care  'demand'	time my quality of life my quality of care self-care - feeding 23% rise in demand  for school transport Human geography 'supply'
families 'informal carers' needs that can (supposedly) be met at home Government funding crisis social inclusion social capital Care in the community 'demand'	£4bn overall funding gap in children's services Children and Families Act Index of Multiple Deprivation Needs-based funding? Children with special educational needs and disabilites (SEND) Parental resort to specialist tribunal courts: 96% legal challenges successful (2022) National / local taxation 'supply' 'broken' social care market - "dysfunctional"

"The costs are rising inexorably," he said. "Children are very often being processed rather than looked after."

Williams, J. Children at sharp end of council funding crisis, FTWeekend, 2-3 December 2023, p.3.

🤔Just a thought - every supply has a supply' every demand a demand' potentially duplicated across the care domains.

The Digital Collective (DC) a Symposium: Digitalisation, Subjectivities, and Care

Dear colleagues, 

We recognise that many people who wanted to join our symposium on Digitalisation, subjectivities, and care were unable to join in person. For this and other reasons we have moved our symposium to be fully online. Our intention is for the symposium to be accessible to all of our colleagues including those who are outside the NL. 

If this is you, we hope you will now consider submitting an abstract, and as such we have extended the deadline to 31 January 2024.

Decisions will be made by 14 February 2024.

Please find the amended call below.

CFP: Digitalisation, subjectivities, and care
7 March 2024, 9.30am – 6pm, online
Deadline abstract submission: 27 November

The Digital Collective (DC) at the University of Twente in the Netherlands is planning a symposium on digitalisation in care. More information below. Please consider submitting an abstract for a talk or poster presentation, deadline: 31 January 2024. 

Any questions to: dc-bms AT utwente.nl 

Introduction

Digitalisation is more than a technological phenomenon. It concerns an ever shifting relation between digital technologies and societal developments. Digital tools are increasingly common in care contexts, reshaping practices, institutions, relations, and social structures. Understanding digitalisation of care therefore requires a multidisciplinary approach to distinct yet related issues that cover the scale of technology innovation, societal impacts (benefits and drawbacks), as well as the pace of development and its ubiquitous nature. In this interdisciplinary symposium we will therefore explore the relation between digital tools and those who use them, willingly or otherwise. 

Topics of interest:

Possible topics related to digitalisation include, but are not limited to: 

• Digital users and digital tools
• Care institutions
• Data development / use in digital care contexts
• Epistemic injustice in digital care contexts 
• Perspectives on ‘users’ of digital care content
• Realities and subjectivities of ‘digital users’ 
• (Multi-)methodological approaches to digital care
• Care labour economies
• Global justice perspectives on care
• Human-technology relations
• Health economics 
• Health Technology Assessment of digital health technologies

The DC is a multidisciplinary platform and we welcome submissions from a broad range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, including from outside academia.

Overview of the symposium:

Schedule and further information about the day to follow.

Submission deadlines:

• Extended abstract submission: Wednesday, 31 January 2024
• Notification of decisions: Wednesday, 14 February 2024

Please note:

• Extended abstracts should be between 500 and 1000 words. 
• Submissions should be sent by email to dc-bms AT utwente.nl 
• Poster proposals should be sent to the same email, and clearly labelled as such. 
• If you want your work to be considered for both a presentation and a poster, please make this clear in your submission. Abstracts not accepted for presentation may be invited to present a poster instead.
• Each submission will receive at least two reviews. 

Additional information:

The Digital Collective (DC) is an interdisciplinary research platform on digitalisation at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. DC consists of social scientists and philosophers specialised in digitalisation and with domain expertise in health, higher education, artificial intelligence, and related technologies. 

After the symposium the DC intends to build a consortium with a view to developing collaborative work, including for a Horizon Europe funding proposal.

 

Event and venue information:

 

The event will be free for all participants. It will be fully online. Further details to follow.

Symposium organisers and programme Committee:

Please send questions to: dc-bms AT utwente.nl 

Dr Y. J. Erden

Associate Professor in Philosophy
University of Twente
AISB Vice Chair 

My source:

Philos-L "The Liverpool List" is run by the Department of Philosophy, University of Liverpool https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/philosophy/philos-l/ 

Follow the list on Twitter @PhilosL. Follow the Department of Philosophy @LiverpoolPhilos 

n.b. With the event now including provision for online presentations I am submitting an abstract.

Kathryn Jackson - Dow Jones Dealing Room 1994

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Ack. Kathryn Jackson. Dow Jones Dealing Room (1994) 3-D collage

My source:

Jackson, K. another dimension, Artists & Illustrators, June 1998, 141, pp.22-23.

COP 28: The water runs deep and broad - Solastalgia for all?

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others - GROUP - many

climate anxiety eco grief ... as yet unforeseen impacts ... [personal and collective]

Raise A Paddle © Fenton Lutunatabua / 350.org

Underwater Cabinet Meeting in the Maldives

political malaise? "'Solastalgia' was first coined by the philosopher Glenn Albrecht almost two decades ago; it is a blend of the Latin word "solacium" (comfort) and the Greek root "-algia" (pain or grief). Solastalgia, argued Albrecht, was a way to convey the idea of distress caused by irreversible environmental transformation. It is 'the homesickness we feel while still at home', he writes." Where exactly do politicians and capitalists 'live'?

Frankopan, P., How to avert an 'eco grief' epidemic, The Daily Telegraph, 12 August 2023, pp.6-7.

Maldives image c/o:
https://sos.noaa.gov/education/phenomenon-based-learning/underwater-cabinet-meeting/

Raise A Paddle c/o NMS:

https://media.nms.ac.uk/resources/raise-a-paddle-fenton-lutunatabua-350-org

Four* care domains - revisited ...

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My source: https://x.com/LeanneHPatrick/status/1731311359554371938?s=20

*Hodges' model can be embedded within the spiritual as per the situation - context.