Humanities & Cultures

[...]coyote time makes me think of teaching and learning. It makes me think of all the times we demand precision from students – both in terms of timing and performance. It makes me think of how it would feel for students to have grace windows and large error bars in acceptable performance. It makes me think of the many students who, when they try to run and jump, instead fall into a pit of spikes because they were just a little off.

Celeste is still a very challenging game, but by adding in coyote time (and many other forgiveness mechanics like it), the developers keep it from feeling frustrating and punishing. This is what I hope our courses strive for: stretching students and challenging them without arbitrarily punishing them for not being perfect.

This is a delicate balance to achieve. In moments of tension between challenge and forgiveness, I tend to prefer forgiveness. After all, tolerance for error is one of the key tenets of Universal Design. However, I think games can teach us a lot about how to design experiences that are challenging and yet still work to minimize the consequences of errors, mistakes, and imperfections.

In this post, I’ll explore a few other forgiveness-adjacent game mechanics similar to coyote time. I won’t be suggesting specific teaching practices. Rather, I’ll discuss what I think these mechanics illuminate about the experience of playing a challenging yet forgiving game. By looking outside the world of teaching and learning for inspiration, I hope that we can think creatively about how to create the best possible experience for students. While I may mention a few teaching practices that come to mind, I will mostly be leaving the connections to you, dear reader.

Let’s dive in.

Like many people raised in a white Western settler culture, I was a self-righteous skeptic who’d been taught that plants, animals, and any other other-than-human entities were barely sentient and less than; meant to be used or dominated, not befriended, let alone viewed as equals. (Even the domesticated animals we consider family in most Western cultures are treated, to some extent, as objects we “own.”) I was human, elevated, civilized; everything else was nature, base, uncivilized. This was the inviolable order of things—until, of course, I put my hand on that tree, and definitively learned that it wasn’t.

There was nothing original about my “discovery.” The idea that everyone and every “thing” is alive, has inherent worth, and is interconnected is integral to communities and cosmologies across space and time. In many indigenous languages, there isn’t even a word for “nature” as some discrete, static entity. Quite the opposite: Aboriginal Australians’ conception of Country comprises a “sentient landscape” of waterways, air, land, humans, other-than-humans, ancestors, and their relationships—a way of being and relating so complex and antithetical to dualistic thinking that it threatens to blow the White Western mind.

It would take an ego death and a spiritual rebirth for me to allow it to change mine, and a healthy dose of decolonization to see just how profoundly lonely my anthropocentric individualism had made me. Luckily, a whole world of friends awaited me on the other side.

First, this seemed to be the best community to place this. Second, this is an older article [February 2024] but it is very interesting nonetheless.

Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, cultural life in Russia has endured a new wave of censorship. The government bans not only works of art — films, plays, songs — but also the artists themselves. Literature, of course, is no exception. The Russian authorities have designated writers as “foreign agents” and “terrorists,” charging them with felonies and ordering their books pulled from the shelves in stores and libraries. Many have been forced to leave the country or cease public activities.

Abroad, this has led to the revival of tamizdat: several new publishing houses [...] are releasing books that cannot be printed in Russia. Despite these challenges, work that tackles today’s reality is still being written and sold in Russia. This includes books about what has upended Russian society in recent years: the war in Ukraine. Meduza special correspondent Kristina Safonova explores how this remains possible.

[...]

Officially, there’s no censorship in Russia. However, there are prohibited subjects designated in a growing body of laws adopted by the federal government.

• “You can’t talk about war — no matter which war it is,” says Z., the editor-in-chief of a publishing house. “Even with the Great Patriotic War [the Soviet fronts of the Second World War], you can’t say anything unless it’s praising the heroic deeds of Russian and Soviet soldiers.”
• “Anything at all can be labeled as [LGBTQ+] propaganda,” says E., an editor at a publishing house, explaining that an entire print run can be pulled because of a secondary character who “acts flamboyantly” or says something like, “My parents will never accept my choice.”
• “If characters smoke weed and don’t shout about how disgusting it is and all die before the page ends, you risk getting flagged for [drug] propaganda,” adds editor I.

[...]

Doctors said for Kilmartin to qualify for a kidney transplant, he’d have to lose 100 pounds, and obey a strict diet, one with hard-to-understand restrictions about components like phosphates and phosphorus. Too drained to cook, too overwhelmed by the cost of relying exclusively on takeout, and feeling guilty about burdening his worried wife, he turned to MANNA, the 35-year-old nonprofit that provides free, medically-tailored meals (MTMs) and education about how nutrition affects health conditions to Philadelphians who need it.

MANNA’s positive impact is more than anecdotal. Last month, the journal BMC Nutrition released research by The MANNA Institute, the research arm of MANNA, showing that its clients achieved a “significant decrease in malnutrition risk” and meaningful changes in conditions like diabetes and hypertension. ​​”This is the first of its kind,” explains Jule Anne Henstenburg, PhD, director of The MANNA Institute. “There has never been research involving an in-depth evaluation of a functioning medically tailored meal program.”

Among other compelling findings: Of the clients at risk for malnutrition when starting the program, 56 percent experienced a clinically significant reduction in malnutrition risk by program finish; 62 percent of clients with hypertension reduced their blood pressure by five or more units; among clients with diabetes, median hemoglobin A1C dropped from 8.3 percent to 7.7 percent, indicating improved blood sugar control. Body mass index (BMI) remained stable or decreased for 88 percent of clients who started the program with obesity.

The documentary and its accompanying book, New Wave: Rebellion and Reinvention in the Vietnamese Diaspora (2024), rewrites the narrative of Vietnamese Americans after the war in advance of the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon. Western popular culture has historically represented the Vietnamese people as either victims (refugees from the South) or enemies (communists from the North), gangsters or model minorities, leaving little room for nuance in depicting the experience of the over 45 million people who were forced to flee their home country. For refugees born in Vietnam who came to the United States between the ages of five and 12, or the so-called “1.5 Generation,” music allowed an escape from the binary between home and school, where they were pressured to uphold Vietnamese traditions and assimilate into American culture simultaneously.

Two new research papers challenge that view. Using creative new methods, they find that the costs Walmart imposes in the form of not only lower earnings but also higher unemployment in the wider community outweigh the savings it provides for shoppers. On net, they conclude, Walmart makes the places it operates in poorer than they would be if it had never shown up at all. Sometimes consumer prices are an incomplete, even misleading, signal of economic well-being.

Their conclusion: In the 10 years after a Walmart Supercenter opened in a given community, the average household in that community experienced a 6 percent decline in yearly income—equivalent to about $5,000 a year in 2024 dollars—compared with households that didn’t have a Walmart open near them. Low-income, young, and less-educated workers suffered the largest losses.

Maaherra freely admitted she had copied The Urantia Book verbatim and defended her actions with a curious legal argument. Authorship, she contended, was something only humans could possess; since the papers were a direct transcription of the infallible revelations of an ensemble of celestial beings, the notions of authorship and copyright didn’t apply. The case reached the Ninth Circuit court of appeals, which ruled against her. Without questioning the extraterrestrial origins of the book’s revelations—both parties agreed about that, after all—the judges ruled that the utterances had been mediated by human beings before they reached print, constituting just enough of a human element to trigger authorship protections under the relevant copyright statute.

The court emphasized one kind of mediation, in particular: Sadler and the Forum “chose and formulated the specific questions asked.” These questions, the judges reasoned, “materially contributed to the structure of the Papers, to the arrangement of the revelations in each Paper, and to the organization and order in which the Papers followed one another.” Thus they found that “the ‘extremely low’ threshold level of creativity required for copyright protection has been met.”

[...] The prompt engineers who compiled The Urantia Book may have set a legal precedent for copyright in AI-generated works; Urantia Foundation v. Maaherra has already been cited in early AI cases in the United States. The legal battles over AI currently playing out—and the large number still to come—may profoundly impact the balance of wealth and power in countless democracies in the decades ahead.

For an idea of the scale of the prize, it’s worth remembering that 90 percent of recent U.S. economic growth, and 65 percent of the value of its largest 500 companies, is already accounted for by intellectual property. By any estimate, AI will vastly increase the speed and scale at which new intellectual products can be minted. The provision of AI services themselves is estimated to become a trillion-dollar market by 2032, but the value of the intellectual property created by those services—all the drug and technology patents; all the images, films, stories, virtual personalities—will eclipse that sum. It is possible that the products of AI may, within my lifetime, come to represent a substantial portion of all the world’s financial value.

In this light, the question of ownership takes on its true scale, revealing itself as a version of Bertolt Brecht’s famous query: To whom does the world belong?

As of this writing, AI companies have largely responded to lawsuits with defensiveness and evasion, refusing in most cases even to divulge what exact corpora of text their models are trained on. Some newspapers, less sure they can beat the AI companies, have opted to join them: the Financial Times, for one, minted a “strategic partnership” with OpenAI in April, while in July Perplexity launched a revenue-sharing “publisher’s program” that now counts Time, Fortune, Texas Tribune, and WordPress.com among its partners.

At the heart of these disputes, the input problem asks: Is it fair to train the LLMs on all that copyrighted text without remunerating the humans who produced it? The answer you’re likely to give depends on how you think about LLMs.

Your opinion on the input problem may come down to your view of the true nature of LLMs. Critics of generative AI tend to view its way of answering questions as only an elaborate cut-and-paste job performed on material written by humans—incapable even of showing genuine understanding of what it says, let alone of any Senecan transformation of what it reads. This view is forcefully articulated in the now-famous characterization of LLMs as “stochastic parrots” by Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell. Boosters of the technology dispute this view—or counter that, if accurate, it also serves just as well to characterize the way human beings produce language. (As cartoonist Angie Wang wondered: “Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?”)

AI developers will doubtless argue that they need to be able to exploit the products of their models in order to incentivize innovation; licensors will argue that they need to be financially rewarded for all their efforts in fine-tuning AI models to produce the kind of outputs they seek. Hollywood studios will ask: How can we put AI to use in generating marvelous images for the whole family to enjoy if any Tom, Dick, or Harry can “steal” the characters, plots, and graphics it generates for us? How can we devote our expertise in fine-tuning AIs to design drugs, pharmaceutical companies will crow, if we can’t recoup our investment by controlling the market with intellectual property protections? These industries are extremely skilled in influencing the legal frameworks under which they operate; their efforts to strengthen and extend their intellectual property rights have resulted in a staggering and unequivocal series of victories. How can we expect the public domain, which has no financial heft, no army of lawyers, no investors and no lobbyists, to compete with that?

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17772988

A helpful guide on how to be less frustrating towards people of color.

Unlike for alcohol or heroin, there are no targeted medications to help drug users wean off stimulants like cocaine and methamphetamine. While the deadly opioid crisis might make more headlines, 65 percent of drug-related deaths in California now involve stimulants, especially meth. Deaths from these kinds of stimulants more than quadrupled between 2011 and 2019, and the number of amphetamine-related E.R. visits increased nearly 50 percent between 2018 and 2020, according to an analysis by the Oakland nonprofit California Health Care Foundation. Therefore the state is urgently looking for new ways to rein in the drug crisis, and in early 2023, it began the controversial experiment: paying people to stay sober. This could be one part of the puzzle in securing an unexpected outcome: For the first time in decades, overdose deaths have plummeted by 10 percent between April 2023 and April 2024.

Two dozen counties, including San Francisco, Los Angeles and Orange, are participating in the “recovery incentive” or “contingency management,” as it’s called. The state has allocated $60 million for the pilot phase. The 24-week program essentially uses positive reinforcement with the aim of readjusting people’s brains so they associate being sober with gratification. After each negative drug test, they receive a reward. For the first negative test, they get a gift card in the amount of $10, for the second $11.50, up to $26 or a total of $599 (because any amount larger than that needs to be reported to the IRS). It is part of a bigger initiative, CalAIM, to connect the most vulnerable and high-need citizens with resources and non-traditional benefits in a whole-person approach.

Most importantly, when clients test positive, there are no negative consequences. They simply don’t get their reward and drop back to the initial $10 the next time they deliver a negative test. “If they test positive, we take it as an opportunity to engage with them,” Duff explains. “We say, ‘We’re glad you’re here. Let’s sit down and talk about what happened.’ The goal is to keep them completely engaged. The longer they stay talking to a counselor, the better off their chances in the long run.”

But we assumed that they were male, to the point that we named one Rudolph.

Where does this myth come from, is it harmless, and what does it say about us?

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17644126

Archived version (South China Morning Post)

A Chinese professor has sparked a public backlash after he asked a visiting Kazakh diplomat how to make Chinese women “have children obediently, early and in large numbers” at a think tank event.

Wang Xianju, a professor at Renmin University and a former counsellor at the Chinese embassy in Belarus, was speaking to Erlan Qarin, the state counsellor of Kazakhstan, who visited the university in November.

Qarin had given a speech on Kazakhstan’s domestic reforms and relations between the two countries at an event hosted by the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, a think tank based at the university.

The institute published Wang’s remarks on its WeChat account in November but the article only gained online traction – and criticism – this week. It has since been deleted.

During the question-and-answer period, Wang said he was surprised to find there were many children when he visited Kazakhstan.

He said Kazakhstan apparently had effective policies encouraging births, and he wondered how that might be possible, given that Chinese women did not want to get married and have children, and would not listen to their parents or supervisors.

“I even heard that women in Kazakhstan immediately have children after they graduate college, they have children one after another,” Wang said in a now-deleted WeChat article by the think tank.

“How could they listen to you and obediently, submissively have children, have children early and have lots of children?”

Once upon a time, Nova Gorica and Gorizia were one; the two cities were created – and separated – in 1947 after World War Two when the Treaty of Paris established Europe's new borders, restricting travel between Italy and the former Yugoslavia. An Allied commission determined that Gorizia should belong to Italy and the less-developed part of town should be part of the Slovenian republic within the Socialist Federalist Republic of Yugoslavia. The new town was to be called Nova Gorica (New Gorizia), and from that moment on, Nova Gorica and Gorizia have existed as two towns split across two countries.

But with Slovenia's entry into the EU in 2004, the border between them was dissolved, allowing a cross-cultural exchange for the first time in generations. And in 2025, Gorizia/Nova Gorica will reunite as the first transnational European Capital of Culture, in a project called GO!2025.

It was difficult to choose where to throw this.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17544837

Archived

The term “revenge society,” or “revenge against society,” is used in China to refer to acts of violence against innocent civilians committed in blind desperation by those on the bottom rung of society to protest social and political injustices for which there seems no recourse. Emerging online in the early 2000s, the term has been applied in both mainstream (CCP-led) news coverage and online discourse to random attacks on unsuspecting victims, generally in cases where the perpetrators are thought to have disadvantaged and precarious positions economically and socially.

On November 11, 2024, dozens of Chinese were killed and many more injured as a 62-year-old driver unhappy about a divorce settlement plowed his car into a stadium in the southern city of Zhuhai, running down people on the sports track. Just five days later, eight people were killed and 17 wounded in a knife attack on the campus of a vocational school in Yixing, in Jiangsu province, a city famed since ancient times for its clay teapots. The suspect was reportedly enraged because he had failed an exam and not received his graduation certificate.

These cases were merely the latest in a string of brutal attacks in China killing scores of people in the fall of 2024. Collectively, they brought renewed discussion over a period of weeks of a phenomenon that has been a feature of Chinese media coverage of such cases since at least the 1990s — “social revenge” (报复社会). Not used in other Chinese-language contexts such as Taiwan and Hong Kong, “social revenge,” or “revenge against society,” is the idea that assailants, particularly from the disaffected ranks of society, have perpetrated attacks against innocent people in a desperate bid to air their grievances.

...

The term “revenge society” was regularly used through the 2000s. In August 2005, after a 42-year-old farmer with terminal lung cancer set off a homemade explosive on a bus in the city of Fuzhou, injuring 31 people, the magazine Lifeweekly (三联生活周刊) called the incident “individual terrorism” (一个人的恐怖主义), but noted that the incident did not clearly fit the pattern of “revenge against society.” People discussing the case, it noted, had been “unable to find the actual rationalization behind his social revenge” (却找不到他报复社会真实).

The term often seemed a way to frame or make sense of cases of incredible and sometimes mysterious brutality — particularly against the backdrop of a controlled media environment in which it was difficult to openly discuss many of the objective social factors behind these cases, including labor rights violations, forced demolition, and migrant discrimination.

...

The late 2000s was still a time of relative discursive space for China’s press, though always under the watchful eye of Chinese Communist Party “guidance.” In its own, indirect way, China Youth Daily was suggesting that more responsibility should be placed on the government in such cases, implying that poor governance, and failing rule of law, were factors behind issues of social injustice. “When revenge is committed against society, the government should understand that it can change society and transform it through good governance to achieve social justice at a higher level,” the newspaper wrote.

...

A glimpse at medieval western European astronomy, following a Roman theory that Mercury and Venus orbit the Sun and how it influenced Copernicus's heliocentric model a millennium later.

Given the emphasis on community and belonging in our cultural moment, the impulse to save everything we can is understandable: to restore storm-damaged buildings, hold back the tide, snuff out the wildfires, and show that by outwitting nature we are still our own masters. There’s an implicit guilt behind these salvage attempts: a recognition that our suffering now and in future is caused by what we ourselves have wrought. In Pacifica, on the California coast, the local administration talks about ‘managed retreat’ to describe its medium-term evacuation process in response to wildfires, to the dismay and anger of some residents. The episode of the podcast This American Life telling their stories was headlined ‘Apocalypse Now-ish’. Politically, it is an invidious problem – no politician wants to be accused of ‘abandoning a community’, or to tell someone who loves their home: ‘It’s time to go – and to let go.’

Can we learn to embrace impermanence? Climate realists make a compelling case, reminding us that generations to come will have to ‘find the beauty in our burnt planet’ since they deserve beauty too. The balance to be struck is between acknowledging the worst effects and likely future impacts of climate change, and insisting that we continue to resist them – pushing for changes that will save lives, communities and ecosystems. An honest appraisal of how ‘burnt’ things are becoming should not give way to climate nihilism. Letting go of settlements is not the same as ‘giving up’. In Holderness, people have been learning to let go for thousands of years.

How does knowing two or more languages affect the way we process emotion? Recent research suggests that each language can make its speakers perceive reality in a different way, and people can even notice a change in themselves as they switch from one language to another.

Other studies have shown that bilingual people may behave differently depending on the language they use. The people talking to them also perceive them differently depending on which language they are speaking.

[...]

If you speak multiple languages, you process words that define or describe emotion differently depending on whether you use your mother tongue (which you learn in childhood and predominates your thought and speech) and your second language (which has been learned, either formally or organically).

The mother tongue tends to have an emotional edge over the second language – bilingual or multilingual people feel greater emotional intensity when speaking theirs, especially when recalling experiences they had in this language.

Some studies have shown that people describe childhood memories more vividly if they speak in their mother tongue, since this is the language in which they label and remember these experiences. The second language, in contrast, offers a degree of emotional distance, allowing the speaker to feel less anxiety or shame when talking in complex situations, like when they need to express anger or apologise.

In other words, the mother tongue is perceived as a more emotionally rich language, while the second language is less expressive, but more practical. This means that emotional expression in the mother tongue is felt more intensely, regardless of whether the emotion is positive or negative.

Different language, different personality?

The choice of language in which bilingual people communicate affects not only emotional intensity, but also the way they perceive themselves and others. Using one language or another can influence the construction of discourse, and reveal cultural and social aspects that are specific to the language communities to which they belong.

[...]

Driving the news: English professors across the country say college students are struggling to finish books, The Atlantic reports. That’s in part because middle and high school teachers have noted kids’ attention problem and started assigning poems, short stories or excerpts of books instead of full works.

Kids shows are getting shorter. Episodes of Bluey, one of the most popular kids shows, are about seven minutes long on average, Vulture notes. Pop songs are simpler, shorter and more repetitive to give them a better chance of going viral on TikTok and Instagram in snippet form, Forbes reports.

Zoom out: Studies have linked excessive screen time to problems focusing in kids.

All of us — including kids and teens — have a world of entertainment at our fingertips, and we can just keep scrolling if something doesn’t grab us.

Research shows that individual acts of kindness and connection can have a real impact on global change when these acts are collective. This is true at multiple levels: between individuals, between people and institutions, and between cultures.

This relational micro-activism is a powerful force for change – and serves as an antidote to hopelessness because unlike global-scale issues, these small acts are within individuals’ control.

Manual textile-making has historically been a communal process, too, providing space for conversation, solidarity and, sometimes, resistance. Over the past decade, textile arts have been responsible for some of Australia’s most popular exhibitions. And yet as a form, textiles have a history of marginalisation in the high art world; associated with women, domesticity, First Nations traditions, and queer and class activism. They have been ignored or dismissed by the “pale, male and stale” art canon.

Radical Textiles at the Art Gallery of South Australia revels in its rejections of this bias and in its enthusiastic reverence for expert craft. Nearly 200 works are on show, gathered from more than 150 artists, designers and activists from Australia and abroad, and ranging from tapestries to trousers, union banners to sewn sculptures – disparate forms that communicate shared ideas about community, empathy and collective identity.

Inside the album were 377 black-and-white photos taken between 1940 and 1942. They included street scenes with civilians and ubiquitous German soldiers, going about the business of Occupation near some of the most recognizable landmarks: Montmartre, the Place de la Concorde or the Champs-Elysées.

But there was no indication of who had taken the pictures, and with good reason.

During the German Occupation of France, the Nazis strictly prohibited outdoor photography; taking pictures without an official permit was punishable by imprisonment or death.

Adding to the intrigue were the captions on the back of the photos, written in block letters as if someone were trying to mask their handwriting. Not only was the location, date and exact time of day noted, but there was also often a snarky caption about the German soldiers, whom the photographer referred to, pejoratively, as "Fritzes."

One read: "After 10 months of Occupation, the Fritzes still can't find their way around Paris."

My grandmother was a good Catholic who didn’t go to college and had eight children. Her oldest child went to college and had one child, me. Your own family probably fits this pattern. In a decline that correlates with education and secularism, and is concentrated in the Global North, women across the world are having about half the number of children they had only fifty years ago.

However strange it may sound to characterize the post-Roe present as overflowing with reproductive choice, the mainstream center-left tends to agree with the far right that this choice is a new phenomenon, and that our predecessors were spared the existential dilemma. As Dutch philosopher Mara van der Lugt writes in Begetting: What Does it Mean to Create a Child?, “Traditionally, and biologically, having children was not something that is decided upon, but something that occurs.” Likewise, in What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice, Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman assert that until fairly recently, having children was “not, as it is steadily becoming today, one possible path to take among several equally legitimate ones.” It was “just what people did.”

Books like these emphasize free choice by foregrounding a modern could-be parent (who happens to be the author, but might as well be the reader) struggling to make this incredibly consequential, and individual, decision, in the face of a society that would make that choice for her. Against her culture’s repository of inherited givens and traditional foreclosures, freedom is when she discovers, for herself, what that right choice is. Yet what happens to “society” when it becomes the name of this “modern” problem? What if the problem isn’t new? What if it isn’t a problem at all?

Books like these imply or outright state that the birthrate is falling because of a new epidemic of chosen childlessness. But the data doesn’t show us that; what it shows is that people have far fewer children, one or two instead of eight. (Meanwhile the sharp decline in teen pregnancy alone accounts for half the drop in the United States’ general fertility.) Opinion columnists and reactionary politicians habitually infer rampant childlessness from the declining number of total births, but the modern childless woman (and debates about “parents” are mainly talking about women) remains the same kind of statistical outlier she has always been.

As recently as 2016, the percentage of U.S. women between ages 40 and 44 who had borne a child was 86 percent—higher than it’s been since the mid-1990s and down only from 90 percent in 1976, a time when only about 10 percent of women earned a bachelor’s degree. The rate fell as low as 80 percent in 2006, but these are still strikingly high numbers. Direct comparisons to the past are tricky, but it’s telling that in 1870, for example, only 84 percent of married American white women had borne a child, compared to 93 percent in 1835. (Imagine the panicked op-eds! Of course, among enslaved women, for whom reproduction was truly compulsory, the number was about 97 percent.) If we remember that perhaps 1 in 10 American women today struggle with infertility, it seems hard to imagine it could be much higher (at least in a reproductively free society).