Cause and effect June 22, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Memetics , add a commentEric Benson’s stream of consciousness on his blog today:
“The biggest lesson I’ve learned lately is to not learn from experience. Learning is for suckers. Learning from experience is (more often than not) like being a pigeon and learning that spinning in circles will help make the pellets come from the dispenser. Our brains are hard-wired to tie effects to causes (not the other way around) but this only works as a brute force survival method. Other parts of our brains, I think, are much better at judging each individual thing individually, and deciding with a less crude system what to do. This involves some learning from experience, but it’s never of the “I learned to never” or “I learned to always” variety that usually tries to take over our personalities. I think part of the way that I came to learn this was due to my many years at Amazon testing small changes on the website in parallel to see which small change was superior… and slowly coming to the realization that small changes, though they can have big impacts, don’t matter.”
I picked up on this because it bears just a little bit of resemblance to something I was trying to get to grips with in the ILM2 assignment I just handed in:
I also managed to clarify to some extent the problem of drawing conclusions from research, about cause and effect. One case study by itself cannot establish a relationship between actions and subsequent observations - ‘Change this and that happens’ unless further cases can establish a convincing trend, or else the underlying mechanism which links the two in that order can be identified and shown to be happening in the process somehow. It sounds obvious, but from my experience it’s a common pitfall and I feel this is something which Action Researchers in particular need to be wary of.
Emergent path June 13, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Memetics, hi res photos, wildlife , 2comments
A steep rise on part of a popular walk.
Many human footsteps begin to wear away the turf.
At some point it became slightly easier to walk in the same footprints as previous walkers, and then the effect magnified and the pattern locked in.
Of course a few awkward people will still walk to one side or the other, but these strays are treated with suspicion - and then disdain.
Finally, a sign is erected:
“Please keep to the path”
Peak Oil April 15, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Memetics , add a commentHave you heard the expression “Peak Oil” referring to the event of of global oil production reaching its peak quite soon, and all the ramifications thereof?
If so, how long ago did you first come across the term?
If this is the first time you’ve seen it, how soon afterwards do you notice the second instance?
Some info… life after the oil crash
posted in category ‘memetics’
Blog and words of the year December 1, 2004
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Memetics , 4commentsNews yesterday that “Blog” has been dubbed word of the year 2004 by Merriam-Webster with the runners up being
2. incumbent
3. electoral
4. insurgent
5. hurricane
6. cicada
7. peloton
8. partisan
9. sovereignty
10. defenestration
Strange choices, some of them, arn’t they? I’ve heard of the defenstrations of Prague ( 1st 1419, 2nd 1618) but who chucked someone famous out of a window in 2004?
And maybe Blog should be the word of next year really.
More interesting perhaps, are the words of the year in retrospect. If we look at the Oxford Dictionaries’ words of year for the past century some appear a lot earlier than you may expect. What was the word of the year when you were born?
1904 Hip
1905 Whizzo
1906 Teddy bear
1907 Egghead
1908 Realpolitik
1909 Tiddly-om-pom-pom
1910 Sacred cow
1911 Gene
1912 Blues
1913 Celeb
1914 Cheerio
1915 Civvy street
1916 U-boat
1917 Tailspin
1918 Ceasefire
1919 Ad-lib
1920 Demob
1921 Pop
1922 Wizard
1923 Hem-line
1924 Lumpenproletariat
1925 Avant garde
1926 Kitsch
1927 Sudden death
1928 Big Apple
1929 Sex
1930 Drive-in
1931 Mickey Mouse
1932 Bagel
1933 Dumb down
1934 Pesticide
1935 Racism
1936 Spliff
1937 Dunk
1938 Cheeseburger
1939 Blitzkrieg
1940 Molotov cocktail
1941 Snafu
1942 Buzz
1943 Pissed off
1944 DNA
1945 Mobile phone
1946 Megabucks
1947 Wonderbra
1948 Cool
1949 Big Brother
1950 Brainwashing
1951 Fast food
1952 Generation X
1953 Hippy
1954 Non-U
1955 Boogie
1956 Sexy
1957 Psychedelic
1958 Beatnik
1959 Cruise missile
1960 Cyborg
1961 Awesome
1962 Bossa nova
1963 Peacenik
1964 Byte
1965 Miniskirt
1966 Acid
1967 Love-in
1968 It-girl
1969 Microchip
1970 Hypermarket
1971 Green
1972 Watergate
1973 F-word
1974 Punk
1975 Detox
1976 Trekkie
1977 Naff all
1978 Trainers
1979 Karaoke
1980 Power dressing
1981 Toy-boy
1982 Hip-hop
1983 Beatbox
1984 Double click
1985 OK yah
1986 Mobile
1987 Virtual reality
1988 Gangsta
1989 Latte
1990 Applet
1991 Hot-desking
1992 URL
1993 Have it large
1994 Botox
1995 Kitten heels
1996 Ghetto fabulous
1997 Dot-commer
1998 Text message
1999 Google
2000 Bling bling
2001 9/11
2002 Axis of evil
2003 Sex up
2004 Chav
And there are some fascinating phrases with explanations at the American Dialect Society word of the year site
such as
Most Useful: word or phrase which most fills a need for a new word
Winner flexitarian: noun, a vegetarian who occasionally eats meat. 31-41
You’d need the context to understand it though, “bacon vegetarian” seems clearer to me.
No Smoke without Fire November 7, 2004
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Memetics , comments closedI’ve added a new category, “Memetics” because this is a subject which has interested me ever since reading Richard Dawkins‘ books and I want to investigate it further.
I’ve identified the well known popular saying “There’s no smoke without fire” as a kind of Meta-meme. This is like the Aids virus of the meme world, it goes for the immune system and that then makes it easier for countless other memes to get a hold.
What makes it so sticky?
Sticky ideas are ones which some people believe, embrace and pass on, not because they are are intrinsically true or useful, but because they posess a quality which has been dubbed “stickiness”. I would love to be able to identify and define stickiness, but it’s not at all easy for a beginner, so for now I shall leave it as a meaningful tautology. Stickiness is the quality belonging to that which sticks!
‘No smoke without fire’ is attractive because it seems to give you permission to justify spreading a rumour without any proof. The fact that an idea is spreading is supposed to imply that there must be some truth in it. This provides excellent camouflage for ‘wrong ideas which spread’ - bad memes.
The Selfish Gene Dawkins 1989, only £7.19 at amazon.co.uk
Wikipedia entry for Richard Dawkins : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins
Read chapter 11 of The Selfish Gene online here:-
Memes, the new replicators
( the text that began the new science of MEMETICS, and where Dawkins coined the term `meme’).
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
