HCJ2 Seminar 1 Notes - Chapter 6 MWP + HWP Book 3, Part 1, Ch's 6 & 7

Chapter 6

-John Stuart Mill 

-All maths and science derives from experience

-Numbers are physical phenomena - 2 will always represent pairs, etc.

-The sums of equals are equals

-Inductive

-John Henry Newman

-Reason is knowledge derived from beyond the reach of our senses

-Doesn’t perceive anything, links things that are perceived to things which

aren’t.

-Infer from premisses

-Assent to conclusions

-Simple assent can be rash and unconscious

-Complex assent

-Proof

-Sense of intellectual contentment

-Irreversible

-Certainty - Know stuff for sure (Victoria was Queen)

-Infallible - I know for certain what I did yesterday but my memory is not infallible

-Pierce on Methods of Science

-Method of tenacity - I can’t believe them because I’d be stupid if I did

-Provides peace of mind

-Method of authority - Listen to authority for right and wrong

-Disadvantage 1: Terrorism to one state isn’t terrorism to the other

-Disadvantage 2: No institution can regulate opinion on every subject

-A priori meditation

-No fixation of belief, neither metaphysical or idealist

-Scientific method

-Logic - Using guiding principles of stuff that we do know to find out stuff we do not

-Perfect methods and processes to get better, more accurate results

-Belief

-Something we are aware of

-Appeases irritation of doubt

-Establishment in our rule of nature as an action / habit

-Different beliefs are distinguished by different actions

-Frege on Logic, Psychology, and Epistemology

-If a proposition is mathematical, it’s justification must be mathematical

-A proposition may be thought of without being true but also it may not be thought of but still can be true

-Psychology = Cause of our thinking

-Mathematics = Proof of our thinking

-Pronoun ‘I’ - Special meaning, name of beholder, everyone is presented to themselves differently to as they are presented to others

-We do not have thoughts, thoughts are what is grasped, ‘I am in pain’

-Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description

-Bertrand Russel

-The real table is not what we immediately experience but is an inference of what we immediately known through sense

-Sense data is all we can be certain of

-Introspection - acquaintance with own thoughts, feelings, etc

-Memory - Acquaintance with past data

-Self - Potentially have acquaintance with ourselves

-No acquaintance with other minds or objects

-Objects are logical constructions of sense data

-Husserl’s Epoche

-Adumbrations - Awareness of external objects consists of glimpses and contacts with them

-Wittgenstein on Certainty

-Doubt needs grounds

-Genuine doubt effects behaviour

The next notes are taken from my blog here

Science and the Clockwork Universe

Our journey with science begins with Copernicus, an astronomer who lived between 1473 and 1543. Copernicus was the first person since the Heliocentrics to say that the sun is at the centre of the universe. He had some rather outlandish claims, two of which were that the earth rotates around the sun once a year and that the earth spins on it's own axis once a day. How preposturous!

The Catholic Church certainly thought so; Copernicus dedicated his work 'De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium' to the Pope, but later the Church condemned the book claiming it was unholy. And low and behold, they had the backing of two philosophers. Luther was the first to derail the Heliocentric train when he said that there was proof in sacred texts that the theory was bonkers. He goes on to quote such a text and say that Joshua commanded the sun to stop, NOT the earth. There we go then. That's obviously conclusive proof. I asked for it to stop raining today, it didn't. Now I want Godly powers. Calvin also criticises the theory with God as his witness. He says that the world is stablished and cannot be moved and then questions who would believe the word of Copernicus over that of the Holy Spirit?

Russell points out that the important aspect of Copernicus' work is that it dethrones the earth from its geometrical pre-eminence. In other words, it throws it off-centre. Maybe this is what the religious bodies could not accept? Their whole works focus on the earth being the centre of everything, the be all and end all, yet now they've been shaken up by a new theory which basically suggests that the earth is not the most important object in the universe, and could even be used to suggest that without the sun we would not exist. Where's God hiding now?

Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) holds a theory that is very much against Aristotle's view that the blanket above the moon (stars, planets, etc.) are immovable, that the sky looks the same from where ever you stand, be it on the moon or in Australia. Brahe supports this attack on Aristotle by noting the appearence of a new star in the sky, which is obviously beyond the moon. He also observed some very distant comets. Another of Brahe's important observations is that the sun and the moon rotate around the earth, but the other planets rotate around the sun. He was half-way there, I guess.

Our next important scientist is Kepler who roamed the earth between 1571 and 1630. Kepler was another Heliocentric who puts the sun at the centre of everything. He came up with the Three Laws of Planetary Motion, which I will try to explain here:

1. Planets eliptically orbit the sun, not circually. This was hard for people the church and believers in Plato to believe as an elipse is an imperfect shape and a circle is it's perfect incarnation. Surely the Gods wouldn't create this imperfect universe?
2. The lines joinging the planets to the sun sweep out equal distances in equal times. In the very mathematical way that Russell puts this: If S = Sun, and Planets at equal positions at certain times = P [to the power of]1 P2 P3 etc, then P1SP2, P2SP3 and so on prove that planets closer to the sun rotate around it quicker than those furthest away as they have less distance to travel.
3. The square of the period of time the planet takes to complete one revolution is proportional to the cube of it's average distance from the sun. This compares measurements of different planets. If R = Average distance from the sun, and T = length of planet's year, then Rcubed divided by Tsquared is the same for all the planets. This helped to prove Newton's law of the inverse square for gravitation.

Galileo is and was a pioneer. He's most well known due to the development of his telescope - but more on that later. Right now we're concerned with his discovery of acceleration, a change in the velocity of an object. He developed the law of falling bodies which states that no matter what weight they are, they will fall at a rate of 32 feet per second in a vacuum. This is constant, so they gather 32 feet per second in velocity for every second they are falling. A body falling for 2 seconds, for example, will reach 64 feet per second, compared to a body falling for 5 seconds which hits 160 feet per second.

He is also noted for his work on projectiles. Up until Galileo, the general theory was that a projectile would carry on horizontally for a while, before vertical velocity took over and it dropped suddenly, almost at a right angle. Galileo showed that when vertical velocity takes over, the projectile still has the propulsion from the horizontal velocity, so the object would fall diagonally, covering both vertical and horizontal ground. Galileo's rule of inertia says that an object dropped from the top a tower hits the ground directly underneath it because it is carrying the velocity from the earth's rotation. This is why you don't land in your back garden when you jump 10 miles down the road. You keep the velocity of the rotation.

Now onto the telescope. Galileo already had heliocentric beliefs, so was obviously very keen to observe the sky. He knew that a telescope was being developed in Holland, so he made his own. Through it he could see the phases of venus, he could see that the Milky Way was made of a number of stars, and that Jupiter had four satellites. This is where religion, again, denounces science. They argue that seven is a holy number and that there are 7 holy bodies. Four more orbiting Jupiter will make that number 11, one with no holy significance, so how could Galileo be right? They accused the telescope of causing illusions and refused to look through it. Why? Because science was stomping all over their ancient beliefs and they did not want to lose the pillars of their ethos. Galileo was eventually condemned by the Italian inquisition, halting scientific progress in Italy for centuries.

Isaac Newton is known for discovering gravity, but he also proved Kepler's three laws of planetary motion. He also defined 'force' as a change of motion. If I jump, my force is taken me off the ground, however, when I fall, the force of gravity takes control, and thus I land. With his law of universal gravitation, Newton deduces everything in planetary theory from the planets, satellites, comets and the tides. The law itself states: "Every body attracts every other with a force directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them." With this, Newton made the universe knowable to the masses, he made it clockwork.

There are other notable scientific discoveries in the 17th Century including: magnets, blood circulation, bacteria and the microscope.

Francis Bacon hated the Aristolean and Scholastic approach, he claimed it was both barren and circular, as it was undeveloped for many years and it kept on repeating itself. It didn't go anywhere. Critics of Bacon say that his biggest mistake is mixing religion and science as they have conflicting interests.

Bacon wasn't just a philosopher and scientist; at the age of 23 he joined parliament, then in 1618 he was made Lord Chancellor, but he lost this position after two years for accepting bribes. For this, he was sentenced to spend time in the Tower of London and to pay a £40,000 fine. Although he only spent four days in the tower and didn't pay the fine, he chose to spend the rest of his life writing books, avoiding the public eye.

He introduced the idea of induction: gaining knowledge, then testing it over and over to prove that it's right. This scientific method is still in use today. An example of how Bacon used it can be seen when he wanted to discover the nature of heat; he made a list of bodies that were hot, cold and those that had varying temperatures. He then tested them to see what aspects were heat specific - those that were present in hot bodies but absent in cold were clearly linked specifically to heat. He then tested this over and over in different circumstances to prove that he was right.

A Fresher's Guide to Commuting to Uni

For the past year I've been taking my little Fiat Punto (Lionel) for a trip down the M27 and M3 every morning to get to university in Winchester. Some days I even took the scenic route through Romsey where I drove past many trees and fields and the occasional cow. What an exciting life I lead. Some people would have you believe that this is 'wrong' and that to get the full student experience you have to be in halls 'living the dream' of having zero money, getting smashed off your face every night and getting off with strangers, waking up covered in every possible fluid, forgetting how they got there in the process. But this isn't the case. I can honestly say that I had a fantastic time being a Fresher without being in Winchester 24/7 and, more importantly, with an extra few pennies in my pocket.

The best thing to do before you even get to university is to find a group on Facebook or create one yourself so you and these other complete strangers can communicate prior to going on the course. In my case I had to make one but it was probably the best decision I made as it's still used now for all sorts of things; general chat, help revising and interesting little stories that pop up. If you manage to join or create one of these it brings you up to a certain level, at least where you can say you recognise someone and maybe know a little bit about them before you go saying anything stupid or ridiculous.

Despite this, when I started university I still felt like I was at a huge disadvantage to everyone else. I'd made the assumption that because they'd been there a whole 10 days more than I had that they would all know each other and I'd be a Billy No Mates on my own in the corner. The problem with assumptions is that they put an instant downer on things, especially if they're as life-altering as university, but I was quickly proven wrong. Nobody knew anyone other than the basic things they'd discovered through a casual bit of Facebook stalking. Sure, they had friends who were in their halls, but in time you'll meet these, at least in passing, and to be honest, it doesn't even matter because you're not the one who needs those people anyway. So the first bit of all important advice I can give you is don't panic, you're not alone.

I would definitely suggest trying to make at least one Freshers event. This was something I couldn't manage due to unforeseen circumstances involving a toilet, but something that I wanted to at least try to make. After all, you only get one first year at uni and you don't want to be known as the one who didn't even make an effort. This is quite difficult to start with because obviously you know no one and you'd feel intrusive asking to sleep on their floor, but these people are no different to you and they want to be your friend as much as you want to be theirs, so in your first few days get talking to people and this problem should be solved easily.

This is where I take the 'real student' head off briefly. You'll find that knowing nobody in the first few weeks does have it's advantages. During lengthy breaks between lectures and seminars don't bother going home, use the free time to keep up with your reading and get ahead of the game. Not only does this have educational advantages it also saves you money. If you're driving in you don't want to make a 50 mile round trip twice in a matter of hours and you definitely don't want to fight with the ever-rising petrol prices because that's a battle you'll certainly lose if you're not careful.

If you've got a part-time job already you should be able to work loose hours around your uni scheduled, so in theory you could still keep your job. I know this sounds obvious but until it starts to interfere with your studies the extra income can really help. It allows you more freedom outside your student loan income, making purchases such as new clothes or games, whatever you like, much more affordable. Just remember that nothing is more important than your studies, the part-time job is not your career, so if it gets too much to handle ditch it. That's what I've done for my second year.

I'm not going to lie, to make friends whilst commuting you need to make a little bit of extra effort, but the benefits are there for all to see. Find some common ground and partake in activities with them. It sounds trivial and mundane but it can go a long way to cementing friendships. For example I would stick around for hours after uni finished to go to the pub to watch football in the evening, only leaving when the last bus to the park and ride comes along, although there's nothing to say that this bus won't ignore you and drive on by as I found out the hard way.

Back to the important thing now, drinking. After a few weeks you should be on good enough terms with at least a few people to crash on their floor without feeling awkward, so go on nights out with them and take advantage of this, after all, there's nothing to say you can't offer them your floor should they fancy a change of scenery and a night out somewhere else. There's no better way of bonding than drunken chunder over someone's shirt or all over the floor. Honestly, this is how 'real students' live. Join them.

Financially speaking, commuting to uni is the best thing ever. And I mean ever. Why would you want to spend upwards of £100 a week  over your hard-earned student loan on rent when you can spend £30 a week on petrol or train tickets. If you want to eat that's another stupid amount of cash you won't need to spend, and I haven't even got to the bills and stupid, stupid landlords you'd have to deal with in your second year. Staying at home saves money and what's not to love about that?

I hope that this helps numb some fears commuters may have. It really isn't that difficult because if you get it right you get the best of both worlds. The best advice I can give you is to keep calm and have fun.

Chocolate Chewbacca

I'm Living the Good Life!

Two friends and I went on holiday. Stuff happened. This stuff was filmed. This a film of the stuff that happened.

The people and events are real, none of this was created for your entertainment. It shows.

This is the time, and this is the place...

No, this blog isn't going to be about some philosophical crap explaining how right here, right now, is best time to be alive. Nor is it going to jump into any muddy political waters regarding the economy and the current state of the banking system and how this is the perfect time to move on to Communism (for the record, that would be an awful, AWFUL idea). In fact, this blog won't touch on any issues that are even mildly important to anyone other than myself and my friends who have had to listen to me dwindle on and on about it for what feels like centuries. It wouldn't even be 'important' to them if it didn't shut me up.

This blog is simply about a song that's been in my head for about three months. "A small fry," you may be thinking, "why don't you just Google it, you numpty?" Well, I'm glad you've asked. You see, I've tried googling it, but it's pretty near impossible to narrow down the results when you only know nine words from the chorus (see the title of the post) and the tune it's sung in. It's even harder to explain when you can't sing a note in tune and have to use your hands to symbolise whether the word is sung in a high pitch (hand up) or a low pitch (hand down). Picture it now. "[hand down] This is the time, [hand up] and this is the place, [hand gradually getting higher] da da da da [down] da [up] da da da [really high] DA," and so on and so forth. The system does not work. The da's, by the way, are words I don't know. I could write the entire song like it.

However, I'm not entirely useless in this massive fiasco - I do happen to know/think that the song hit the airwaves around the mid-nineties, but it's also entirely possible that it came out in the early noughties. That gives us a time frame of roughly seven years to filter through to find a song that may have been top ten for a week or maybe a few, and while it may have flirted with the number one spot it's also likely that it got nowhere near it.

The voice that provides the all important vocals to the song sounds slightly like the bloke from the Dandy Warhols (it isn't them as far as I'm aware, it could be, they're just a mere reference point), but it could equally sound nothing like them and my mind could be slowly moulding this song into what I want it to be. It's also been brought to my attention that the song in question has been used on a holiday advert in the last decade for some company like Haven or Butlins. Of course, that's dependent on whether or not the sugestee and I are thinking of the same song. He goes to church so maybe the big man upstairs is giving him a helping hand.

Some songs even flatter to deceive by having the very same lyrics. Take the band called 'Grey' for example; I got a little bit excited when I realised that it had the much sought after lyrics not only in the chorus but also in the title. It's fair to say that I felt more than a little bit letdown when I realised that, when listening to the song, not only was it wrong, it was also utter tripe. Triple this feeling then multiply it by fifteen, that's roughly how many times I've been let down by search engines.

In what could only be called an act of desperation I took my finger to the spacebar and attempted to 'play' the song on song tapper. That was demotivating to say the least. The thing rarely works. Even when I 'tapped out' the suggested songs (that were miles wide of the mark) they didn't even bring the correct results. Either my tapping is awful or the song tapper is a step too far for the technology of today. Maybe someday.

I can't even remember how the song got into my head, I know I didn't hear it because if I had I would've had the common sense to Shzam! it on the spot. That may be asking too much of myself but I'd like to think that it isn't. I haven't heard it since it got in my noggin either. It has to be the most elusive track in the world. I can't phone up a radio station and request the song because with the nine words I know from it there's a 99% chance that they'll get it wrong. It's slim-pickings on every front. All I know is that if I do hear it I have to take the opportunity to note down the lyrics because I may never get another shot at it.

By now, you, the reader, probably think I'm crazy, but I know that this song exists, that it's out there somewhere, and quite likely to be being played on some radio station at this very instant. If anything, this blog is a cry for help. If you've heard this song recently, seen it live, written the lyrics on a napkin for a loved one, or even cried to it, please let me know what it is. I'm not crazy, it does exist and it's waiting for me somewhere. It would be awfully convenient for you if I were to write a list of the songs I've gone through. I'm not going to. I want you to feel the smallest percentage of the pain that this search has caused me. Even that would be enough to gain your support.

UPDATE:

Turns out I got the lyrics wrong but one mastermind reader of my blog actually managed to find the song. Genius.

For Vlog Sake: Liam Runs for Mayor of London

Boris Johnson has been re-elected as Mayor of London, I assume, for comedic purposes. This is an incredibly late April Fools by the people of London.

Anyway, this got me thinking, maybe, well, not maybe, I could DEFINITELY do a better job.

This video tells you everything you need to know about my campaign:

Moshi Monsters - An Essay on Convergence and Interaction Between Old and New Media

Moshi Monsters is an online social community aimed at children which also integrates many forms of old media to make the premise attractive for the younger generation. When they sign up, children have to choose which ‘Moshi’ represents them in game and once they have done this they can roam the streets of Moshtro City using Rox (in game currency) to purchase food and items to keep their creature happy. Other features of the website include the Daily Challenge, a series of educational questions that users can tackle once a day, and missions which enhance the story of the game and challenge children with point and click puzzles.

This website is a great example of how old and new medias interact to create a better experience for its users, whilst also bringing its intriguing concept to life.

Moshi Monsters trading cards are sold in stores along with stickers also baring the branding. In almost every pack of cards and stickers there is a serial number which can be entered on the website to unlock new features including Moshlings (pets), food, items and Rox - all of which can be used to improve your Moshi’s room. This gives users an incentive to buy the trading cards and sticker collections and also to complete them as the more packs you buy the more chance you have of unlocking something on the website. This premise is also applied to other forms of Moshi Monsters merchandising. Plush toys of the characters can be collected and each of these also comes with unique serial numbers. Moshi Monsters uses old medias to encourage participation in new medias, the website being the prime example of this.

Another example of old and new forms of media working together comes in the form of a CD available which is full of Moshi Monsters music created by the characters on the website. This adds a sense of reality to the experience for the child users as they can listen to their favourite creatures sing and, thanks to the website, they can understand references made to certain parts of the city and other characters. This album is also available to download as a MP3 on iTunes and Amazon, an example of how even new medias work together to enhance experiences.

Both the Apple and Android app stores have Moshi Monsters games available to download. This is an example of how the new media (applications) works well once integrated with the old media (mobile phone). This also adds portability to the new media branch of the brand; running the website on an iPhone is impossible as it needs flash player to run it and running it on an Android is impractical as it would take up a large chunk of data usage. Users of ‘Buster’s Lost Moshlings’ will have to locate the Moshlings within a series of touch screen games. This serves as an extension to the main Moshi missions on the website making the overall experience deeper as a result of expansion.

The site itself is a glorified social network for children that also aids educational development. Friends are encouraged to add each other on the website so that they can interact on each other’s message boards and visit their rooms. Friends can also send one another in game gifts that they have unlocked and either do not require or do not want. This encourages the children to help each other complete their online collection of Moshlings and improve the quality of their Moshi’s happiness. They can also go head to head for the highest scores in the Puzzle Palace.

As a social network, Moshi Monsters allows open communication between friends that anyone can view if they have an account. This gives the users an internet presence and thus, a sense of online identity where having a pretty room on the site or the most Moshlings could lead to people becoming increasingly more popular among the community based on their achievements in this online world. In their journal ‘Friend Networking Sites and Their Relationship to Adolescents’ Well-Being and Social Self-Esteem’, Valkenburg, Peter and Schouten found that the social network their participants were signed up to did have an indirect effect on the users’ well-being and self-esteem. Positive feedback enhanced their well-being and self-esteem whereas negative opinions damaged it. This model can be easily related to Moshi Monsters as if you tell an eight year old that their online room is great they will believe it and if you tell them that it is horrible they are likely to be upset by it. The same study also discovered that the frequency that users received feedback had effects on both their well-being and self-esteem, leading to assumptions that the more feedback a user receives leads to an increase in their sense of belonging in the online community.

Technological determinists would say that the aforementioned features aid the view point that technology determines the direction of society and aids its developments. The integration of old medias such as puzzles and letters into the new media of a flash website is an example of technological convergence and also shows how we have used technology to enhance the way we interact with old media. We no longer have to sit in the same room as each other to play games and complete puzzles, we can now access it via the internet and play with people from all over the world. In his book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Henry Jenkins argues that: “old media are not being displaced. Rather, their functions and status are shifted by the introduction of new technologies.”

 Moshi Monsters is a good example of this point.

Jenkins also argues that media convergence isn’t just a shift in technology, but that it also changes the relationships between existing technologies, industries, markets, genres and audiences.

 This is very true for Moshi Monsters as it is a service that uses convergence to bring existing technologies and markets together; using trading cards to increase participation with their subscription based website brings two markets and technologies together and encourages children to pay money for both aspects, keeping them ahead of their competitors.

Moshi Monsters does have other competitors in the trading card industry. Arguably, their main competitor is the long-running Pokemon franchise which has a history of exploiting new technologies to increase the size of the brand. Pokemon started off life as a Gameboy game but later branched off in different directions, the most popular of which was the Manga cartoon series. Such was the popularity of the show, trading cards were released encouraging you to ‘collect them all’ as opposed to ‘catch them all’ as the series stated. Moshi Monsters chose a similar approach, starting life as a website before expanding into the trading card industry, among others. However, the way that Moshi Monsters uses convergence allows it to stand out from Pokemon as it’s own entity, not just another rip off of the same formula. This is due to the way new medias and old medias work together in the way I explained earlier, something that the Pokemon franchise has yet to move on to.

This leaves the market forces argument open that the creators have invested time in researching and developing technologies to allow for a greater profit and to get ahead of the competition, and that they may also have invested time in researching and developing new technologies that enable them to do this. The main example is the use of unique serial numbers in each pack of trading cards and how they can be used to unlock more features on the website. This technology was clearly researched and developed to keep users going back to the website and paying more subscription fees so that they can unlock their rewards.

Another major competitor for the brand is the much renowned Top Trumps franchise. They do not exploit new medias in the same way as Moshi Monsters, instead they rely on their traditional approach of conventional advertising on the television, in shops and in magazines. Top Trumps expand their market by not limiting themselves to the area that their business model constricts them too. Unlike Moshi Monsters, the brand’s interaction with new medias is directly linked with the cards they sell. They do not just sell cards with cute monsters on and hope they sell, they also cover other areas such as music, cars and TV shows.

To conclude, Moshi Monsters does use a high amount of convergence to increase the income of the business and also to entice more users to their website through conventional and popular old medias. By using old medias such as trading cards and books to offer new features, Moshlings and items on the website, Moshi Monsters demonstrates the worth of convergence between old and new medias and how, as a business model, it can be used to optimise revenue and increase popularity.