Tag Archives: resources

Research Post Toasties

Research-Blogging

Invaluable: Research Blogging Portal. Researcgblogging.org aggregates blogs and their posts produced by academics. Where else could you easily find, Why Justin Timberlake Should Avoid Transitive Verbs.

I track a lot of subjects which interest me. This effort is subject to the shortcoming of my extroverted intuition, for which the acquisition of data can come to be one-sided, and at the expense of actually dealing with, or taking the data ‘in.’ If you possess a similar typology you might then agree that the internet is both boon and bane.

When I scroll back fifteen years, my basic discovery modes were aimed at three resources: the library and its card catalog, book stores and their shelves, and a precursor to the internet, various article databases on CD-ROM and microfiche. I became acquainted with the WAIS, Wide Area Information Server, and Gopher search, and Jughead, a few years before I came online in 1995, but this initial internet combination wasn’t very efficient, compared to searching, (after my move back to Cleveland,) through article databases on the old CD-ROM system or on distributed databases at Lakewood Public Library. Interestingly, those archaic database-oriented routines generated data very slowly because the final phase of data capture involved printing the article out on a dot matrix printer–slooow; click clack click.

Before Google search became king around 2000, I used Inktomi and Excite. Google changed everything. Then, in 2005, while working in the tech center of a library, I sometimes was called to assist patrons who couldn’t find what they were looking for using Google. Although Google’s advanced search is grand, most times it was enough to enclose search terms in quotation marks, and stick a plus sign in front of the primary term to solve their riddle. My modest expertise at ‘search’ was often received as wizardry.

I read academic research in all those fields to which I am a wanderer. My number one search tip is, in Google, using the subject folk psychology as an example:

inurl:edu filetype:pdf “folk psychology”

and

inurl:edu filetype:doc “folk psychology”

Bingo, a goldmine. This search string drills down to the ‘edu’ domain, and finds mostly articles, and usually the articles are attached to the CV or bibliographic page on a scholar’s academic home page. Of course once you have the url, you can back off it to all sorts of repositories. Chapters from books can be found and plucked too:

inurl:edu +chapter “folk psychology”

Conference portals are also great resources. Speaking of Adobe Acrobat pdf,

Beyond the PDF Wiki conference, January 19-21, 2011 University of California San Diego. Jodi Schneider’s report at Ariadne (“Ariadne is a Web magazine for information professionals in archives, libraries and museums in all sectors.”)

To me, the main appeal of an iPad would be being able to use it to read journal articles without a ‘top’ on my lap. Almost needless to say, Apple has made it difficult to import PDFs. Still, I’m imagining such a day for myself.

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INTO A VACUUM

…added “Vacuum – Edward Vielmetti in Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104” to the blogroll. Evidently Ed is a librarian and so his attention surplus disorder is expressed through his blog’s rich captures of diverse resources. This earns his blog the ‘all over the place category’ here.

The curious thing is that I learned of Vacuum when Ed picked up two posts, one recent and one olden, with quotes from Karl Weick.  This is neat and Ed is obviously a galumpher.

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DELICATE TURNS

Arthur M. Young wrote two little read albeit influential and (to me) essential books, both published in 1976: The Geometry of Meaning and The Reflexive Universe. Along with the alchemical writings of C.G.Jung, they are the most important contemporary books about quaternity and ‘anthropo’ process. Young/Jung’s research inform SQ1’s model of exploratory learning; this is implicit in my use of quaternistic matrices and integral oppositions in tool designs. The Arthur Young web site provides much to investigate. The essays there are all excellent; for starters: “The Four Levels of Process“.

Grove International, one of my favorite visionary ‘schematicists,’ has published a terrific poster A Theory of Process putting Young’s little known and important work in graphical summary form.

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NO DO-OVER

Found under Blackfoot Creation and Origin Myths at D.S. Ashiliman’s brilliant, indexed resource of folklore.

Order of Life and Death

There was once a time when there were but two persons in the world, Old Man and Old Woman. One time, when they were traveling about, Old Man met Old Woman, who said, “Now, let us come to an agreement of some kind; let us decide how the people shall live.”

“Well,” said Old Man, ” I am to have the first say in everything.”

To this Old Woman agreed, provided she had the second say.

Then Old Man began, “The women are to tan the hides. When they do this, they are to rub brains on them to make them soft; they are to scrape them well with scraping tools, etc. But all this they are to do very quickly, for it will not be very hard work.”

“No, I will not agree to this,” said Old Woman. “They must tan the hide in the way you say; but it must be made very hard work, and take a long time, so that the good workers may be found out.”

“Well”, said Old Man, “let the people have eyes and mouths in their faces; but they shall be straight up and down.”

“No,” said Old Woman, “we will not have them that way. We will have the eyes and mouth in the faces, as you say; but they shall all be set crosswise.”

“Well,” said Old Man, “the people shall have ten fingers on each hand.”

“Oh, no!” said Old Woman. “That will be too many. They will be in the way. There shall be four fingers and one thumb on each hand.”

“Well,” said Old Man, “we shall beget children. The genitals shall be at our navels.”

“No,” said Old Woman, “that will make childbearing too easy; the people will not care for their children. The genitals shall be at the pubes.”

So they went on until they had provided for everything in the lives of the people that were to be. Then Old Woman asked what they should do about life and death.

Should the people always live, or should they die? They had some difficulty in agreeing on this; but finally Old Man said, “I will tell you what I will do. I will throw a buffalo chip into the water, and, if it floats, the people die for four days and live again. But, if it sinks, they will die forever.”

So he threw it in, and it floated.

“No,” said Old Woman, “we will not decide in that way. I will throw in this rock. If it floats, the people will die for four days. If it sinks, the people will die forever.”

Then Old Woman threw the rock out into the water, and it sank to the bottom.

“There,” said she, “it is better for the people to die forever; for, if they did not die forever, they would never feel sorry for each other, and there would be no sympathy in the world.”

“Well,” said Old Man, let it be that way.”

After a time Old Woman had a daughter, who died. She was very sorry now that it had been fixed so that people died forever. So she said to Old Man, “Let us have our say over again.”

“No,” said he, “we fixed it once.”

Source: Clark Wissler and D. C. Duvall, Mythology of the Blackfoot Indians (New York: Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, 1908), v. 2, part 1, pp. 19-21.

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ONE OF MY HOBBIES

…is pairs, dichotomies, opposites, twins, binary, polarities, poles, doubles, dyads, dialog, duo, dual…

Which led me to the Pairs subset in the Twexus galleries,
Twexus pairs

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Filed under experiential learning

GLOSSARY HEAVEN

There are lots of portals for word freaks. I highlight the Encyberpedia because, when you scroll down its list of dictionaries, glossaries and thesauri, you get to the middle choice. It’s Glossary Heaven when you do!

My current fave is A Glossary of Frequently Misused or Misunderstood Physics Terms and Concepts.

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HEY, BUT IT WORKS!

Experiential-researchers.org is a valuable resource. Much of its content reflects its mission: to grapple smartly with the conundrum of legitimizing methodologies aimed at improving ultimately subjective re-orderings of constitutive personality and personality’s (i.e. persons,) functioning.

This is, of course, a longstanding problem; psychology’s equivalent of philosophy’s mind/body problem. One can research the means and ends of improvement at the level of the “self-improving” individual, but, this does not then necessarily ramify any method in any general sense of all persons. (I’m a philosophical pragmatist, so it’s a non-problem to me, but it remains interesting from the viewpoint of other frames. It surely is so from the perspective of existential, humanist, psychotherapy, and, regardless, benefits from scientific framing in all cases.

Overview:
Exploring Psychotherapy Scientifically and Experientially
James R. Iberg, Ph.D.

The world before it is perceived is an infinite collection of qualities. It is up to the perceiver to use some of these qualities to differentiate one event from another. This process of differentiation is driven by desire (relevance, need, meaning…). Note that the perceiver does not “construct” reality itself; rather the perceiver constructs an understanding of reality, a model or theory which guides perception and behavior. Neither does reality alone determine perceptions and behaviors, but rather reality as experienced “through” our understanding.

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OLD BRANCHES IN NEW CUPS

A monk asked Kegon, “How does an enlightened one return to the ordinary world?” Kegon replied, “A broken mirror never reflects again; fallen flowers never go back to the old branches.”

Zen joke from: Lighter Side of Zen Buddhism:

Q: What did one Zen practitioner give to another for his/her birthday?

A: Nothing.

Q: What did the birthday boy/girl respond in return?

A: You are thoughtless for giving me this meaningless gift.

To which the giver replied, “Thank you.”

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500 PERSON TUBA CHORUS

Wow. Value Based Management.net is a goldmine. Almost every resource is linked internally to pithy descriptions of conceptual and methodological frameworks. The amount of material is overwhelming. The search engine allows me to note important omissions, such as no no mention of Appreciative Inquiry, but, with a jungle so amazonian, so what?

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Filed under social psychology, organizational development

THINKING STRAITS

Reasoning implements thinking habits. Those habits may be advantageous, or not!

A few quick gleanings from the web in the direction of breaking away.

Provocative Ideas @imaginization
A.L.Tenner-Learning From Paradox
Metasystem Transition @Principia Cybernetica

Metasystem Transition Theory @ PC

Nasruddin jokes
one two
Creativity Techniques

Inheriting from the Innovators

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Filed under adult learning, education, experiential learning, psychology

TRAPPED BY SUBJECTS QUALIFIED

The true meaning of a term is to be found by observing what a man does with it, not by what he says about it. – P.W. Bridgman

…from a terrific, short page of quotations @The Dallas/Fort Worth Center for General Semantics. Alfred Korzybski figures into my worldview and frames specific reflections on research greatly, but, let’s face it, General Semantics doesn’t lend itself to an informal application one might just lay on someone else. In a better world it’s practicality would make it first out of the toolbox.Because it is a practical model of evaluation, people who find their way to GM tend to stick it somewhere in their toolbox. In any case, The Insititute for General Semantics, is its home on the web and it is an uncommonly free and valuable resource. Find your way, should you need an introduction, to Catherine Minteer’s Words and What they Do to You and Korzybski’s The Role of Language in the Perceptual Processes.

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Filed under adult learning, psychology

IN THE NOWHERE THAT YOU CAME FROM

If you could give up tricks and cleverness, this would be the cleverest trick!

Rumi was one of the great lanterns of experiential spirituality and Sufism. Today, not only is Rumi the most read poet in the world, his work imbues many spiritual ‘schools’ with important psychological, esoteric and yogic principles and methods.

Who was Rumi? What is the Mevlevi Order? For one thing, it’s not one order today. Here are portals to sites in Turkey, Mevlana.com, and the United States, The Threshold Society. Many fine web sites are maintained on behalf of Rumi’s continuing influence, ranging from examples of orthodox and heterodox views. Many familiar with his poetry will know the versions of Coleman Barks and John Moyne. There are a many other sources of his poetry on the web, including Khamush.com

Divan e-Shamsa & Mathnavi (Masnavi i Ma’navi ) @rumionfire Blissbat Zara Houshmand. Oneworld-publications maintains a recommended listing of links, as does Khamush. Stan Tenen’s schematic perspective on the Sema, the Mevlevi ritual dance is interesting. Finally, Omphaloskepsis offers many downloads of important Sufi literature.

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I CONSTRUCT, YOU CONSTRUCT, WE ALL CONSTRUCT

Being a constructivist by (part of my acquired) nature, (okay…a “folk” constructivist!) I nonetheless am discrete about laying out this most commonsensical position in my work. After all, it’s a prejudice too.

Because constructivist theory, models, and perspectives fit nicely with much of cognitive science, the psychology of learning, social psychology, and depth psychology, its development and theories are well-represented on the web.

“all of this active, meaningful, and socially-embedded self-organization reflects an ongoing developmental flow in which dynamic dialectical tensions are essential.” (Michael J. Mahoney; Constructivism and Why Is It Growing?

resources: Continue reading

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YOU NEVER KNOW

My favorite web stimulation from last year, courtesy of edge.org.

“WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?”

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TEACH THE OLD DOG ANYWAY

Cleveland, Ohio, (post-modernized to be “NEO”) is where I’m at. It’s a region slogging through its post-industrial dark night: post-industrial, ambivalent, self-deprecating, unfashionable, fragmented, and liminal. It’s neither old or new age, nor is it progressive or regressive. NEOland is poor at its heart and wealthy at its extremities. Creative energy moves fitfully through its sclerotic arteries. It’s feudal too; . . . a delapidated city-state, who’s guardians go unguarded. Its crisis is a crisis of arousal.

What’s fascinating is how the short ‘half-life’ of so much in CleveNEO, political celebrity, sports teams, its various articifaces: hall of fame, office parks and malls; industries, night spots and almost every ‘initiative,’ hides a grubby tenacity.

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LOST IN SPACE

The web site is an old school vertical sprawl, the subjects under consideration endless in number and magnitude, the format dialectical, yet, it’s the darn pragmatic mission I wish to highlight:

As you may realise from reading this website, my partner (philosopher Geoff Haselhurst) and I are building a large philosophy website which is the source (and inspiration) for most of the Philosophy, (and some Vintage Erotica and Fine Art) images and quotes in The Philosophy Shop.

For custom products and gifts that are a little different, we have a unique range of Philosophy Prints, Clothes and Apparel with quotes and portraits of Famous Philosophers (from Ancient Greek Philosophy and Metaphysics, Eastern Philosophy and Mysticism, to Modern Western Philosophy and Science).

SpaceAndMotion and erotica.

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