With the growing permeation of online social networks in our everyday life, scholars have become interested in the study of novel forms of identity construction, performance, spectatorship and self-presentation onto the networked medium. This body of research builds upon a rich theoretical tradition on identity constructivism, performance and (re)presentation of self. With this article we attempt to integrate the work of Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello into this tradition.

Pirandello’s classic 1925 novel Uno, Nessuno, Centomila (“One, No One and One Hundred Thousand”) recounts the tragedy of a man who struggles to reclaim a coherent identity for himself in the face of an inherently social and multi-faceted world. Via an innocuous observation of his wife, the protagonist of the novel, Vitangelo Moscarda, discovers that his friends’ perceptions of his character are not at all what he imagined and stand in glaring contrast to his private self-understanding. In order to upset their assumptions, and to salvage some sort of stable identity, he embarks upon a series of carefully crafted social experiments.

Though the novel’s story transpires in a pre-digital age, the volatile play of identity that ultimately destabilizes Moscarda has only increased since the advent of online social networks. The constant flux of communication in the online world frustrates almost any effort at constructing and defending unitary identity projections. Popular social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, offer freely accessible and often jarring forums in which widely heterogeneous aspects of one’s life—that in Moscarda’s era could have been scrupu- lously kept apart—precariously intermingle. Disturbances to our sense of a unified identity have become a matter of everyday life.

Pirandello’s prescient novel offered readers in its day the contours of an identity melee that would unfurl on the online arena some 80 years later.

{ Alberto Pepe, Spencer Wolff & Karen Van Godtsenhoven, Re-imagining the Pirandellian Identity Dilemma in the Era of Online Social Networks | PDF }

In publishing and graphic design, lorem ipsum is placeholder text (filler text) commonly used to demonstrate the graphics elements of a document or visual presentation, such as font, typography, and layout. The lorem ipsum text is typically a section of a Latin text by Cicero with words altered, added and removed that make it nonsensical in meaning and not proper Latin. A close English translation of the words lorem ipsum might be “pain itself” (dolorem = pain, grief, misery, suffering; ipsum = itself).

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularized in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

Lorem Ipsum has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source. Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance.

The standard Lorem Ipsum passage, used since the 1500s:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

The original version:

Sed ut perspiciatis, unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam eaque ipsa, quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt, explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem, quia voluptas sit, aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos, qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt, neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum, quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt, ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit, qui in ea voluptate velit esse, quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum, qui dolorem eum fugiat, quo voluptas nulla pariatur?

At vero eos et accusamus et iusto odio dignissimos ducimus, qui blanditiis praesentium voluptatum deleniti atque corrupti, quos dolores et quas molestias excepturi sint, obcaecati cupiditate non provident, similique sunt in culpa, qui officia deserunt mollitia animi, id est laborum et dolorum fuga.

1914 translation by H. Rackham:

But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?

On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain.

{ Lipsum | Continue reading }

Whenever we get a day like today — down more than 500 points on the Dow at one point — my phone begins ringing with inquiries from various media.

They always ask the same question: What should investors be doing NOW?

That is the wrong question. The proper one is: What should investors have done in the past to prepare for an event like TODAY?

The bottom line remains that investing is a proactive — not reactive — endeavor. If you respond to every twitch, every news story, each turn of the wheel, you will become whipsawed.

That is no way to invest. And its no way to live life, stressing out over things that are out of your control.

What you can do is anticipate events that are cyclical in nature. These major shudders repeat every few years, so we should not be surprised by them. Construct a plan that allows you to ride out these events without panic or forced errors. You need a plan that anticipates these regular occurrences.

{ Barry Ritholtz | Continue reading }

The first basic law of human stupidity asserts without ambiguity that:

Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

{ Carlo M. Cipolla, The basic laws of human stupidity | Continue reading }

There are four ways to deal with system damage: 1) reliability, 2) redundancy, 3) repair, and 4) replacement.

{ Overcoming Bias | Continue reading }

photo { Dylan Collard }

{ “Miss A—” pictured in 1866 and in 1870 after treatment. She was one of the earliest Anorexia nervosa case studies. The term anorexia nervosa was established in 1873 by Sir William Gull, one of Queen Victoria’s personal physicians. The term is of Greek origin: an- (prefix denoting negation) and orexis (appetite). | Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Are you a verbal learner or a visual learner? Chances are, you’ve pegged yourself or your children as either one or the other. (…) But does scientific research really support the existence of different learning styles, or the hypothesis that people learn better when taught in a way that matches their own unique style?

Unfortunately, the answer is no, according to a major new report.

{ APS | Continue reading }

When we think about Mozart, Einstein, Michael Jordan, Bill Gates or Steve Jobs (or any other hugely successful person) we usually think about how smart they are, not how hard they worked. This creates the illusion that said individuals got to the top because they had something other people didn’t – some sort of genius. The more accurate picture is that their perseverance, work ethic and pure passion for what they did separated them from the rest of us. Unfortunately, as per Dweck’s study, kids praised for being “smart” don’t push themselves to achieve as much as they could because they believe intelligence alone breeds success. This belief causes them to fear failure, which moreover prohibits them from accomplishing and learning more. (…)

Mistakes are an essential component to learning. Learning about cognitive biases and irrational tendencies is vital, but appreciating failure and having a willingness to be wrong – to be irrational – is also essential.

{ Why We Reason | Continue reading }

In 1986, CEO of Perrier North America Bruce Nevins found himself in a difficult spot. On KABC radio in Los Angeles the host challenged him to a blind taste test. The rules were simple: correctly identify a Perrier from seven drinks – six club sodas and one Perrier. Long story short, Nevins failed miserably; it took him not one or two, but five tries before he picked out the Perrier.

I stole this example from Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, author of How Pleasure Works to reinforce a point I made a few posts ago: how you taste something strongly depends on what you believe you are tasting.

{ The Psychology of Pleasure: Interview With Paul Bloom | Continue reading }

painting { Rubens, Cimon and Pero, c.1630 | At first this seems a strange subject for a painting: a young woman giving her breast to an old man tied up in chains in a bare prison cell. In fact it is a story from Roman history: the tale of Cimon and Pero. Cimon is Pero’s father. He is in prison awaiting execution and has been given nothing to eat. Pero has recently had a child and saves her father from starvation by secretly giving him her breast. This relatively large picture was painted by the famous Antwerp artist, Peter Paul Rubens. To enliven the scene, Rubens has added two prying prison guards on the right. }

Historically, the international significance of a language has depended on four key factors: demography (that is, the number of native speakers of the language in question); the military might of the native speakers; the economic power of the native speakers; and, finally, the cultural or political significance of what was written in the language.

Nicholas Ostler suggests that, in the 21st century, the military factor will be replaced by new technological and political factors: translation technology is going to help people communicating in different languages, while nationalistic claims in favour of certain languages will limit the spread of English and other contenders for the role of lingua franca. David Graddol, in his comprehensive report for the British Council, gives priority to the demographic factors and stresses the growth of global, post-modern multilingualism.

The foothold of the English language in North America after the multinational colonization that started in the early 17th century was attributed by 19th century commentators in part to the technical and aesthetic virtues of English – its clarity and grammatical simplicity – just as the past pre-eminence of French in Europe was due to its diplomatic polyvalence.

As for Russian, the life expectancy of Russians has been declining since the 1970s, and it is well established that Russia’s fertility rate is among the lowest in the world. The population of Russia is expected to fall by 30 to 50 million by the year 2050, resulting in a national headcount of around 100 million people, as against today’s 141 million. Although the anomalous mortality rate of the Russian male population may be reversed in the next few decades if social conditions improve, the overall demographic trend is unlikely to change – notwithstanding recent pro-fertility measures introduced by Prime Minister Putin. By contrast, the world’s population is expected to grow by almost one and half times by 2050.

{ Global Brief | Continue reading }

related { How Much Can You Say in 140 Characters? A Lot, if You Speak Japanese }

People directly experience only the here and now. It is impossible to experience the past and the future, other places, other people, and alternatives to reality. And yet, memories, plans, predictions, hopes, and counterfactual alternatives populate our minds, influence our emotions, and guide our choice and action. How do we transcend the here and now to include distal entities? How do we plan for the distant future, understand other people’s point of view, and take into account hypothetical alternatives to reality? Construal level theory (CLT) proposes that we do so by forming abstract mental construals of distal objects.

Thus, although we cannot experience what is not present, we can make predictions about the future, remember the past, imagine other people’s reactions, and speculate about what might have been. Predictions, memories, and speculations are all mental constructions, distinct from direct experience. They serve to transcend the immediate situation and represent psychologically distant objects.

Psychological distance is a subjective experience that something is close or far away from the self, here, and now. Psychological distance is thus egocentric: Its reference point is the self, here and now, and the different ways in which an object might be removed from that point—in time, space, social distance, and hypotheticality—constitute different distance dimensions.

According to CLT, then, people traverse different psychological distances by using similar mental construal processes.

{ Construal-Level Theory of Psychological Distance | PubMed | Continue reading }

artwork { Morten Hemmingsen }

The first letter I’m going to read—I’m not going to tell you who the recipient is until I finish the letter. It’s a letter from a father to a son.

“My dear son,”—this is an actual letter.

“I am appalled, even horrified, that you have adopted Classics as a major. As a matter of fact, I almost puked on the way home today. (…)

“I am a practical man, and for the life of me, I cannot possibly understand why you should wish to speak Greek. With whom will you communicate in Greek? I have read, in recent years, the deliberations of Plato and Aristotle, and was interested to learn that the old bastards had minds which worked very similarly to the way our minds work today. I was amazed they had so much time for deliberating and thinking, and was interested in the kind of civilization that would permit such useless deliberation. Then I got to thinking that it wasn’t so amazing after all, they thought like we did, because my Hereford cows today are very similar to those ten or twenty generations ago.

“I am amazed that you would adopt Plato and Aristotle as a vocation for several months, when it might make pleasant enjoyable reading for you in your leisure time as relaxation at a later date. For the life of me, I cannot understand why you should be vitally interested in informing yourself about the influence of the Classics on English literature. It is not necessary for you to know how to make a gun in order to know how to use it. It would seem to me that it would be enough to learn English literature without getting into what influence this or that ancient mythology might have had upon it. (…)

“I hope I am right. You are in the hands of Philistines, and dammit, I sent you there. I am sorry.

“Devotedly,

DAD.”

Quite a remarkable letter. The recipient of this letter was Ted Turner. And while I think Ted Turner’s father is right about most classicists and classics professors and universities, I don’t think he’s right about the classics. And I believe that it was the crypto-classicist in Turner—his exposure to the wisdom of Greece and the culture of Greece, and to those paradigms of thought and understanding and excellence, the vision that he was exposed to in his studies in the classics—that may have played some role in making him the visionary that he was. I like to believe that Ted Turner created CNN somehow out of his studies in the classics. Because, really, if you think about it, what he did was take the television set—which, at that point, was a kind of fishbowl that made the world smaller—and he really transformed it into a window on the world.

{ Herbert Golder | Continue reading }

statue { Zeus, King of the Gods, God of the Sky, Thunder and Lightning, and Law, Order and Justice }

A fundamental difficulty in artificial intelligence is that nobody really knows what intelligence is, especially for systems with senses, environments, motivations and cognitive capacities which are very different to our own.

Although there is no strict consensus among experts over the definition of intelligence for humans, most definitions share many key features. In all cases, intelligence is a property of an entity, which we will call the agent, that interacts with an external problem or situation, which we will call the environment. An agent’s intelligence is typically related to its ability to succeed with respect to one or more objectives, which we will call the goal. The emphasis on learning, adaptation and flexibility common to many definitions implies that the environment is not fully known to the agent. Thus true intelligence requires the ability to deal with a wide range of possibilities, not just a few specific situations. Putting these things together gives us our informal definition: Intelligence measures an agent’s general ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments. We are confident that this definition captures the essence of many common perspectives on intelligence. It also describes what we would like to achieve in machines: A very general capacity to adapt and perform well in a wide range of situations.

{ Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter | Continue reading | PDF }

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) refers to research aimed at tackling the full problem of artificial intelligence, that is, create truly intelligent agents. This sets it apart from most AI research which aims at solving relatively narrow domains, such as character recognition, motion planning, or increasing player satisfaction in games. But how do we know when an agent is truly intelligent? A common point of reference in the AGI community is Legg and Hutter’s formal definition of universal intelligence, which has the appeal of simplicity and generality but is unfortunately incomputable. (…)

Intelligence is one of those interesting concepts that everyone has an opinion about, but few people are able to give a definition for – and when they do, their definitions tend to disagree with each other. And curiously, the consensus opinions change over time: consider for example a number of indicators for human intelligence like arithmetic skills, memory capacity, chess playing, theorem proving – all of which were commonly employed in the past, but since machines now outperform humans on those tasks, they have fallen into disuse. We refer the interested reader to a comprehensive treatment of the subject matter in Legg (2008).

The current artificial intelligence literature features a panoply of benchmarks, many of which, unfortunately, are very narrow, applicable only on a small class of tasks. This is not to say that they cannot be useful for advancing the field, but in retrospect it often becomes clear how little an advance on a narrow task contributed to the general field. For example, researchers used to argue that serious progress on a game as complex as chess would necessarily generate many insights, and the techniques employed in the solution would be useful for real-world problems – well, no. (…)

Legg and Hutter propose their definition as a basis for any test of artificial general intelligence. Among the advantages they list are its wide range of applicability (from random to super-human), its objectivity, its universality, and the fact that it is formally defined.

Unfortunately however, it suffers from two major limitations: a) Incomputability: Universal intelligence is incomputable, because the Kolmogorov complexity is incomputable for any environment (due to the halting problem). b) Unlimited resources: The authors deliberately do not include any consideration of time or space resources in their definition. This means that two agents that act identically in theory will be assigned the exact same intelligence Υ, even if one of them requires infinitely more computational resources to choose its action (i.e. would never get to do any action in practice) than the other.

{ Tom Schaul, Julian Togelius, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Measuring Intelligence through Games, 2011 | Continue reading | PDF }

Hidden inside language are small, stealthy words that can reveal a great deal about your personality, thinking style, emotional state and connections with others. These words account for less than 0.1 per cent of your vocabulary but make up more than half of the words commonly used. Your brain is not wired to notice them but if you pay close attention, you will start to see their subtle power. (…)

We found that the use of pronouns – I, me, we, she, they – mattered enormously. The more people changed from using first-person singular pronouns (I, me, my) to using other pronouns (we, you, she, they) from one piece of writing to the next, the better their health became. Their word use reflected their psychological state.

This was the prelude to a more substantial discovery. (…) I wondered if there were any gender distinctions and found that yes, there were significant differences. (…) Not only was gender a factor, there were large differences in language style as a function of people’s age, social class, emotional state, level of honesty, personality, degree of formality, leadership ability, quality of relationships and so on. (…)

In one experiment, we analysed hundreds of essays written by my students and we identified three very different writing styles: formal, analytic and narrative.
Formal writing often appears stiff, sometimes humourless, with a touch of arrogance. It includes high rates of articles and prepositions but very few I-words, and infrequent discrepancy words, such as “would”, and adverbs. Formality is related to a number of important personality traits. Those who score highest in formal thinking tend to be more concerned with status and power and are less self-reflective. They drink and smoke less and are more mentally healthy, but also tend to be less honest. As people age, their writing styles tend to become more formal.

Analytical writing, meanwhile, is all about making distinctions. These people attain higher grades, tend to be more honest, and are more open to new experiences. They also read more and have more complex views of themselves.

Narrative writers are natural storytellers. The function words that generally reveal storytelling involve people, past-tense verbs and inclusive words such as “with” and “together”. People who score high for narrative writing tend to have better social skills, more friends and rate themselves as more outgoing.

{ NewScientist | Continue reading }

artwork { Jean-Michel Basquiat, Tuxedo, 1982 }

Technically, fundamentally, and economically everything that can go wrong is going wrong for the stock market – all at once.  Which is a positive development for those who understand the need for closure and rock-bottom. In life, the fear of future events is typically worse than when those fears are realized, particularly when the overhang drags on for so long a period of time. I think I speak for most market participants when I say that I’m pleased to see the endgame approaching faster up ahead, because it is only on the other side of these issues that we can progress to the next phase.

{ Joshua M Brown/The Big Picture | Continue reading }

“People often follow a different way of thinking than the one dictated by classical logic,” says Aerts. “The mathematics of quantum theory turns out to describe this quite well.”

It’s a finding that has kicked off a burgeoning field known as “quantum interaction”, which explores how quantum theory can be useful in areas having nothing to do with physics, ranging from human language and cognition to biology and economics.

{ New Scientist | Continue reading }

image { William Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty, 1753 }

A survey conducted in 2006 by political scientist Jon D. Miller of Michigan State University showed that only 14 percent of American adults consider evolution “definitely true” while roughly a third believe it to be “absolutely false.” Out of a sampler of 34 countries, only Turkey was less accepting of Darwin’s theories, while in nations such as Denmark, Sweden, and France, better than 80 percent of the adults questioned sided with Darwin. Perhaps more disquieting is the fact that 20 years ago about seven percent of U.S. adults were uncertain about evolution; that number has since tripled.

The uniquely American aspect to this resurgence of religious fundamentalism is reiterated by a chart showing the relationship of wealth to religious belief republished in the June 2, 2010 opinion section of by the New York Times (“Why Is America Religious?”), which demonstrates that “the wealthier a country is, the less important religion is to that country. The one exception: The United States.”

{ Logos Journal | Continue reading }

You live in the past. About 80 milliseconds in the past, to be precise (just slightly longer than the blink of an eye). Use one hand to touch your nose, and the other to touch one of your feet, at exactly the same time. You will experience them as simultaneous acts. But it takes more time for the signal to travel up your nerves from your feet to your brain than from your nose. The reconciliation is simple: our conscious experience takes time to assemble, and your brain waits for all the relevant input before it experiences the “now.” (…)

Aging can be reversed. (…) It’s only the universe as a whole that must increase in entropy, not every individual piece of it. Reversing the arrow of time for living organisms is a technological challenge, not a physical impossibility.

{ Discover | Continue reading }

photo { Violet Forest }

‘“Most people are simply not designed to eat pasta:” evolutionary explanations for obesity in the low-carbohydrate diet movement

Low-carbohydrate diets, notably the Atkins Diet, were particularly popular in Britain and North America in the late 1990s and early 2000s. On the basis of a discourse analysis of bestselling low-carbohydrate diet books, I examine and critique genetic and evolutionary explanations for obesity and diabetes as they feature in the low-carbohydrate literature. Low-carbohydrate diet books present two distinct neo-Darwinian explanations of health and body-weight. First, evolutionary nutrition is based on the premise that the human body has adapted to function best on the diet eaten in the Paleolithic era. Second, the thrifty gene theory suggests that feast-or-famine conditions during human evolutionary development naturally selected for people who could store excess energy as body fat for later use. However, the historical narratives and scientific arguments presented in the low-carbohydrate literature are beset with generalisations, inconsistencies and errors.

{ SAGE | Continue reading }

related { Habit makes bad food too easy to swallow }

This article looks at how previous practice of portraiture prepared the way for self-presentation on social networking sites. A portrait is not simply an exercise in the skillful or “realistic” depiction of a subject. Rather, it is a rhetorical exercise in visual description and persuasion and a site of intricate communicative processes. A long evolution of visual culture, intimately intertwined with evolving notions of identity and society, was necessary to create the conditions for the particular forms of self-representation we encounter on Facebook. Many of these premodern strategies prefigure ones we encounter on Facebook. By delineating the ways current practices reflect earlier ones, we can set a baseline from which we can isolate the precise novelty of current practice in social networking sites. (…)

Although a Velasquez portrait does not look much like a Facebook page, it fulfills many of the same functions. A portrait by Velasquez, hanging in the grand palace of Madrid, articulates an image of royal power and privilege to those permitted to view it, and thus reinforces the sitter’s right to certain prerogatives and respects.

{ SAGE | Continue reading }