Hello 2012
and we dance, and we sing. I heard you are haunted? I know just the thing!
ownership is...
"Are you asking me if I make conclusive bodies of work?"
"No. But that's a good question."
thanks to Tim Hettler for talking me through the strange language of code.
"No. But that's a good question."
thanks to Tim Hettler for talking me through the strange language of code.
A Big Vision podcast interview on collaboartive jouranlism. Interview with David Cohn of Spot.US
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“You cannot run a community if you’re not informed. Journalism is really the act of informing communities so that they can make better decisions, that is part of the public service, informing communities so that together we can know where else we need to help.”
“Journalism will survive the death of its institutions, and that means journalists will survive, but we’re going to be a little bit more of a diaspora, rather than working within these larger organizations that sort of protected us and shielded us from the realities of the world and being an independent producer of content.”
“As I was saying before, as a freelancer, this one-to-one pitching wasn’t working, I wanted to pitch the world. That was my itch, and I needed to scratch it. The second one is, bite small and chew well. I originally wanted to launch Spot.us in every city in the country and go national, and I would have suffered from death of a thousand paper cuts, is how someone described it. That sounds like a horrible way to die. It’s OK to start small and to go through a period of relative obscurity. Those are the two main things. That, and if you have passion for it, that will keep you going.”
Interview from July 9, 2009 with David Cohn, the Founder of Spot.us. Spot.Us is a nonprofit project pioneering a community funded reporting. Through Spot.Us, the public can commission journalists to do investigations on important, and perhaps overlooked stories. David is a journalist turned entrepreneur who has written for Wired, Seed, Columbia Journalism Review and The New York Time
(Just Personal Notes on Human Evolution)
Things I learned have helped make humans evolve uniquely:
*Ultimately it seems not one particular adaptation that favored homosapien survival, but rather our ability to rapidly adapt to repeated and radical climate change.
*Walking upright
*Shorter arms then chimps
*Longer, thinner legs
*Smaller guts: leaner
*Loss of body hair to keep body cooler then other African mammals so hunting in the middle of the day is possible
*The ability to sweat with one’s whole body instead of panting: correlates to endurance running in mid-day heat to wear out prey and kill by chasing until they drop with heat exhaustion.
*The ability to learn, to recall from the past, make decisions
*Eating meat to consume calories faster: accommodates larger brains which require a lot of energy
*Engineering tools
*Cooking over fire: speeds digestion process; allows for smaller jaws and teeth
fire: allows for safety while sleeping out of trees: helps compensate for loss of great climbing arms: also becomes center for socializing and beginning of community relationships
*Social teamwork; looking out for each other, working together to hunt, raising children in groups to decrease burden of parenting on individual
later genetic mutation to be able to digest milk becomes highly favored
*While homosapiens have overpopulated themselves we are genetically very limited in genetic selection. Our species has been pushed to the brink of extinction multiple times in the last 300,000 years. We have experienced enormous population collapse over and over again at times of mass climate change. It seems all the people that exist today derive from very roughly 600 people in Africa.
What does all this mean? The essence of what it means to be human? All this time I’ve been taught so many things about spiritual, moral and ethical beliefs… never have I been taught where I come from or how to support myself.
If history is important for humans why can’t we maintain it? It it is not, why do we continually pursue it?
It’s like a running joke our DNA plays on us, really. Homosapiens are Earth’s most “intelligent” species to ever evolve. Part of our big brains is our ability to learn, to recall, to remember, and language; yet we have no way of information retention. We have this fantastic ability to learn and remember, but we are not at all aware of “where we come from” We can not recount our species past or origins of any kind. It’s like walking around with amnesia over and over again, generation after generation. We as humans have never evolved or developed a reliable way to build upon the previous generations of learning. We can not remember where we originate from. We can not maintain one comprehensive form of communication amongst all people that exist. We can not even remember everything about our own lifetime. We are smart enough to suspect we have a past; that we have a history. We have year after year decided our origins are somehow important, yet we don’t know and have no way of preserving what we do know over time or ensuring our offspring will inherit any of our knowledge.
