July 2005

Looks like the local council, which already has a “zero waste” policy, is investigating the possibility of food recycling. Sounds like a good idea, though the implementation might be an issue. See: STUFF : NATIONAL NEWS : ENVIRONMENT - STORY : Food recycling trial to be considered for Waitakere.

Recently we switched from weekly plastics/cans recycling in small green bins to fortnightly in a large blue “wheelie” bin. In principle, I think its a good thing for the wider community but in practice it doesn’t work out as well for us. We used to put out two (mostly) full green bins a week and the new blue one only holds the equivalent of three green bins. So while it might encourage non or minimal recyclers to give it a go, it works against those who already were trying to do lots of recycling. And you can’t get a second bin - you have to store the excess for a later week (See here). So far jumping on the contents and more thorough flatting of material have made it (just) fit - but you’d think in “Eco-City Waitakere” (our city’s slogan) they’d be wanting to encourage more recycling and would make the option of getting extra recycling capacity an option.

I guess the next step for us is to look at ways of reducing acquiring the packaging & plastics etc. that we’re putting in the blue bin, on top of the normal reuse of plastic bags and bottles that we already do.

See also: WCC - Your Guide to Rubbish and Recycling at Home (PDF)

From Science & Theology News : Give an organ, get an organ.

Stephen Giles, a Canadian social worker, thinks people who volunteer to be potential organ donors should be placed high on the waiting list if they are ever in need of an organ.

A brief review from a while back of James Hughes’ book Citizen Cyborg. The copy I was reading has been recalled this week by the university library before I finished it but I agree with the reviewer that it’s a very readable book and takes a different tack from the typical libertarian transhumanist approach. In common with the latter approach though, it still holds to the view that human rationality is the key to essential human being. It makes some good observations about how normally diametrically opposed political factions often form alliances when finding themselves at similar positions on a biopolitical spectrum, and comments worth thinking about for how society should manage technological developments to avoid things like “digital divides“.

See: Boing Boing: Humanist transhumanism: Citizen Cyborg.

I love it when I find poems that connect with my research. Charlie’s poem Crossing over at Borrowed Dust hit the mark today, as I filled out my end of year PhD report. Especially the verse,

Elegant double-helix,
Jacob’s spiral ladder:
hides, convoluted and coiled,
betwixt deo and imago,
bears the inscrutable runes of
dreamers rising from the
dust.
“Very good!”

Reminiscent of Isobel Thrillings poem “Before Lazarus”.

Quite possibly the largest collection of web links I’ve seen for a while over at: Sites Unseen - Earth’s Mightiest Alternative Christian Link Portal.

And they have a comic book section.

This week I’m trying to sort out the broadband dilemma that we’ve been landed with.

We have our (primitive) broadband connection with our ISP (owned by Telco #1) and have our phone account (local and toll) with Telco #2. This has worked well in the past because ISP #1 has been good to us and we’ve got our phone plan with Telco #2 just how we want it.

So when we get an email from our ISP telling us we have to move to Telco #1 for our phone to keep using their broadband we get stuck (and very grumpy). Telco #1 claim that Telco #2 won’t carry our current ADSL connection any more so we either have to:

1. Move our phone connection over to Telco #1 (who don’t have the plan we like at Telco #2), or
2. Change ISP’s to one supported by Telco #2 and suffer the significant grief associated with changing email addresses, ISP transfer charges, and going with an ISP we don’t want to use.

Feel like we’re stuck between two very large Borg motherships - one way or another we’ll be assimilated into the collective whether we want to be or not.

BTW - It doesn’t help too when you phone around other ISPs and their help desk people just end up confusing you. They’re all set to sign up new customers but don’t seem to cope too well with transferring customers.

Been feeling grumpy this week about people who produce Christian resources that use DVDs and then who region-code them. Had a few possibilities for really good resources for using with our house group but they are only available in Region 2 coding. Not a problem, you might say, just use a region-free DVD player (commonly available outside of the US) to play them. Several problems with this.

1. My iBook is now locked on Region 4 after it’s 5 possible region changes have been used up (and can’t be reset). So I can’t view the material there which would be my preference.
2. At least one of the producers won’t ship to NZ because the disk is Region-2. So even if I can play it they won’t deliver “out of zone” (even though their mission statement declares they’re producing materials to take Jesus to the whole world. Maybe their Bible says “Therefore go and make disciples of all in DVD Region 2, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you”).
3. There are no plans for Region 4 (Aus/NZ etc.) coding of the DVDs, nor distribution here.

Now I know that some argue that DVD region coding is good because it prevents movies being sold in a region before it gets released in the cinema (of course, that falls down where you live somewhere where the film never comes, nor the DVD for your region). But why should that affect producing material for the kingdom of God (especially if you’re not part of some larger media empire). And yes, there are the PAL/NTSC/SECAM issues - but surely it’s not rocket science to produce a multi-zone DVD (”Region 0″). If you write a book on discipleship or mission you don’t make it so only readers in the UK can physically read it. So here’s my list of suggestions for Christian content producers (including theological colleges and emergent-types):

• Please encode the DVD with a multi-zone format if you can.
• Ship disks out of zone anyway.
• Grow your “market” globally. Don’t forget about the rest of the world outside of regions 1 & 2. Some of us actually want to pay you for good resources that we can use, even if we’re not the “target market”.
• Make your websites accept international orders - especially if you’re not going to ship any disks to retailers here.

Enough ranting - time to prepare dinner.

Relevant DVD links

• www.dvddemystified.com : What are “regional codes,” “country codes,” or “zone locks”?
• hometheater.about.com : Region Codes - DVD’s Dirty Secret (interesting comments about the possibily of region-coding being used for price-fixing)
• wikipedia.org : DVD

Links to an assortment of cartoon strips sorted by various philosophical categories. See: PHILOSOPHY COMIX.

Article on the use of robots for the care of the elderly in Japan. One of the systems talked about here, the Hybrid Assistive Limb (HAL), is effectively an exoskeleton that augments the person’s muscle strength. In effect it creates another form of cyborg, not dissimilar to those seen in the cinema, video games and comic books.

See: STUFF : Japan looks to robots for elderly care.

A researcher at Japan’s University of Tsukuba, Sankai has developed a robotic suit designed to make it easier for elderly people with weak muscles to move around or for care-givers to lift them.The sleek, high-tech get-up looks like a white suit of armour. It straps onto a person’s arms, legs and back and is equipped with a computer, motors and sensors that detect electric nerve signals transmitted from the brain when a person tries to move his limbs.

When the sensors detect the nerve signals, the computer starts up the relevant motors to assist the person’s motions.

See also:

• New Scientist : Bionic suit offers wearers super-strength
• Video of the HAL system from available University of Tsukuba Cybernics Lab.

Article from a few weeks back in Science and Theology News about a survey of college and university students’ religious and spiritual beliefs.

According to a recently released national study, the majority of college students across America think about their religious and spiritual beliefs with similar contemplation. The University of California, Los Angeles’ Higher Education Research Institute surveyed about 100,000 freshmen at 236 colleges and universities last year and found that 80 percent were interested in spirituality. Seventy-nine percent said they believe in God.

See : Science & Theology News : Spirituality makes the grade on campus.

The article is that it provides a link to a PDF file containing the survey questionnaire. So you can see exactly what type of questions were asked, rather than just the normal summary of results. Might be helpful if you were looking at doing something similar.

Via Conrad Gempf’s blog I see that New Testament scholar Ben Witherington III has a blog. Not only that but but he’s blogging about the Fantastic 4! And Conrad Gempf posts a comment there about the one, true Green Lantern - Hal Jordan (though Alan Scott is also a favourite).

I enjoyed Witherington’s commentary “Conflict and Community in Corinth” (1995) when I was doing a NT Epistles paper a few years back. One of the few commentaries that was often not returned on time to the closed reserve desk because the student reading it was throughly engrossed in it!

Coincidentally, just finished re-reading “Green Lantern : The Road Back” last night, having seen it lurking in the library yesterday.

A long time ago (circa 1994-96) in a galaxy far, far away (Waikato University, Hamilton, NZ) I was involved in the team that created the original WEKA data mining software. Since then the software has evolved into a significant open-source data mining package. Ian Witten and Eibe Frank published the book Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques with Java Implementations which described how to use Eibe’s Java version (WEKA 3) (Second edition info here), and now the WEKA software has been awarded the ACM SIGKDD Service Award. From the award notice,

SIGKDD Service Award is the highest service award in the field of data mining and knowledge discovery. It is is given to one individual or one group who has performed significant service to the data mining and knowledge discovery field, including professional volunteer services in disseminating technical information to the field, education, and research funding.

…

Weka is a landmark system in the history of the data mining and machine learning research communities, because it is the only toolkit that has gained such widespread adoption and survived for an extended period of time (the first version of Weka was released 11 years ago). Other data mining and machine learning systems that have achieved this are individual systems, such as C4.5, not toolkits.

Since Weka is freely available for download and offers many powerful features (sometimes not found in commercial data mining software), it has become one of the most widely used data mining systems. Weka also became one of the favorite vehicles for data mining research and helped to advance it by making many powerful features available to all.

In sum, the Weka team has made an outstanding contribution to the data mining field.

The full description of WEKA, the award and the many people involved can be found here: KDnuggets News 05:13, item 2, Features.

Other related links are:

• Waikato University : Weka’s winning ways
• Waikato University Machine Learning Research Group (including WEKA download and publication pages)
• KDD05 - The Eleventh ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
• Data Mining : Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques (Second Edition, July 2005) by Ian Witten and Eibe Frank.

When I heard about the award I went looking in my old photos and found this picture of four of us from the Waikato ML group at the International Machine Learning Conference at Lake Tahoe in 1995 (where I did a workshop presentation on the infant WEKA). From left to right - Ian Witten, Len Trigg, Stephen Garner and Craig Nevill-Manning.

Congratulations to the WEKA team. Nice to see the hard work that lots of people put in being recognised.

This book looks interesting. Engaging Technology in Theological Education: All That We Can’t Leave Behind by Mary E. Hess.

Link to Mary Hess’ faculty overview here.
Link to additional resources here. (Including links to the Religious Education and Challenge of Media Culture Project and her dissertation “Media literacy in religious education: Engaging popular culture to enhance religious experience”)

Thanks to Paul for mentioning the book. Thanks also to Tim who supplied the link to the resources page.

Take the Ecological Footprint Quiz.

The quiz is based on national consumption averages and is meant to give you an idea of your Ecological Footprint relative to other people in the country you live in. It is not highly detailed, but should give most people an idea of where they stand.

I don’t stand as well as I’d like - with the killer negative rating being on the food front. Still better than the average they give for NZ but not good for the world overall. Some stuff to work on.

Quiz link from maggi dawn: What’s your ecological footprint?

The New Zealand Herald : Technology and Science : Mind-enhancing drugs likely to be developed over next 20 years.

“We are on the verge of developments which could possibly move us into a world where we could take a drug to help us learn, think faster, relax, sleep more efficiently or even subtly alter our mood to match that of our friends,” Sir David said.
“This would have implications for individuals, and could lead to a fundamental change in the way we behave as a society,” he said.

Similar to the stuff I heard Eric Kandell talk about at Auckland Uni last year-the use of particular chemical compounds to enhance long-term memory.

Following on from the previous posting on rejecting an ethical-doctrinal dualism, Theodore Jennings Jr’s comments on the ethical project seem apt.

In theological ethics, it is generally unwise to approach specific ethical dilemmas in the absence of a wider perspective that will help reveal what may be at stake or even how a particular issue may be helpfully framed. Moreover, theological ethics is productively conceived not as problem solving but as forming a worldview and a set of dispositions that enable believers to respond to their world in ways that embody basic faith values.Jennings, Theodore W., Jr. “Theological Anthropology and the Human Genome Project.” In Adam, Eve, and the Genome : The Human Genome Project and Theology, ed. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, 93-111. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003.

Often, it seems we’re looking for a Christian response to a specific problem that faces us - wisdom for the moment. If we reject the ethical-doctrinal dualism, then Jennings approach of an integrated worldview that the believer(s) operates within seems helpful. Determining a series of “cases” or “rules” of how to “behave” in various specific situations can lead to inflexibility in the face of new problems. We should instead develop a flexible framework that allows engagement quickly and consistently. This is not to say that the initial engagement may not need further refinement and theological reflection at a later date.

The “What Would Jesus Do?” approach is on attempt to do something like this. Effectively a form of imatatio Dei, it attempts to have the individual (primarily) ask what course of action to take based upon an understanding of what Jesus’ basic faith values were, and how they were manifested on earth. The effectiveness of the approach depends, of course, upon the understanding of what Jesus’ key values actually are. Which means that without “doctrinal” components - “What did Jesus say?”, “What did Jesus do?”, and “What did Jesus mean?” - the approach isn’t deep enough to be helpful and one might fall back on “folk theology” or “proof-texting“.

Furthermore, understanding Jesus Christ as moral example (if that’s how you’re going to treat WWDJ?) is rooted in wider theological reflection. For example, how does our understanding of the Incarnation supply wisdom for ethical living today? How do our understandings of creation, eschatology, humanity, sin, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ interact with WWJD?

Building a robust framework seems to me to be key for then engaging with situations both envisaged and not envisaged by the biblical writers. The problem then becomes making it simple enough to be applied in day-to-day life, while rich enough to handle highly specialised situations. (Not that I’m implying a “simple/rich” dualism.)

The teachers I’ve learnt most from have been those who integrated both doctrine and ethics. Indeed, they didn’t see a dualism between the two. Today I was reading an essay by Stanley Hauerwas that summed up this idea of integration nicely. In critiquing the divide he says,

Those trained to do theology ‘proper’, however, seldom stray into ‘ethics’ as part of their job description. Too often theologians spend there time writing prolegomena, that is, essays on theological method meant to show how theology should be done in case anyone got around to doing any. Those who do try to do theology too often assume that their primary task is to construct a systematic presentation of theological loci and their interrelations. Ethics is what is done after one has accomplished these more primary tasks, or ethics becomes the responsibility of those who teach course in ethics.Stanley Hauerwas, “On Doctrine and Ethics” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine (ed. Colin E. Gunton).

BTW - There’s a Hauerwas portal of sorts here with links to many online articles.

Thwarted in my efforts to get to see “Batman Begins” this week. Instead I read several articles by David Zimmerman (Strangely Dim) on “Batman Begins” and the “Fantastic Four”. This week I hope to make it in to the cinema, though with the school holidays on my normal 10am morning slot where there’s only a handful of people in the cinema with me won’t be available.

• PopMatters Film Feature | Cape Fear: Courage, Calling and Community in Batman Begins.
• INTHEFRAY Magazine | Everything silly is serious again. (Batman)
• Commentaries: One Fantastic Family - Christianity Today Movies.

Watched the BBC last night as the news came in about London.

We pray, of course. But where to start.
We pray for those affected, we pray for Great Britain, we pray for the world.
We pray for healing, justice, compassion, love, against inaction.
We pray for those who help.
Jesus said to “love our enemies.” We try to understand how that is, we struggle with those prayers.

One thing that is on my heart is to pray against hate, fear, uncertainty and doubt. That the terror visited upon people does not become a monster that consumes communities of neighbours seeing each other as the “other”.

We remember to add London to the other places we pray for too.

Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy.

The print edition of Reality Magazine may now be defunct but some articles from the last issue have been put online, including an interesting article on God, nature and Christian engagement with the environment. See: Reality. Issue 69: Springs of Living Water, by Nicola Hoggard Creegan,

In Christianity today one of our problems is that there are very starkly different stories out there. We don’t agree about origins; we don’t agree about God’s connection to the world; nor about how the story will end. Christians have set our story over against the scientific story, forcing many to choose between science and faith, even between being educated and being a Christian. Looking at nature within a theological perspective often becomes very painful; ecological/theological reflection is not done.

Interview by Heather J. Smith with Christian bioethicist Ronald Cole-Turner on the ethics of designer babies. See: Science & Theology News : Customized kids may be the wave of the future.

(Smith)How might this impact human nature?

(Cole-Turner)It’s widely said that human germline modification would be a violation of human dignity. I challenge: If you can help define human dignity in a way that makes it obvious how germline modification would violate it, I would be glad to hear from you. But “human dignity” is a term that is simply not defined adequately by people who go around protesting that technology is about to violate it. Almost nowhere does anybody set forth a clear definition of human dignity.

It’s hard to know how to have any sympathy for that argument, except as a way to call attention rhetorically to the seriousness of what we’re doing. At that level, I’m sympathetic. Yes, this is very serious, sobering and we ought to give it really careful attention. I just don’t know that there is a definition of human dignity that is convincing as to why we ought to prevent this and not other technologies.

Cole-Turner raises something I’ve come across time and time again in my reading. Lots of people talk about “human dignity” or people made “in God’s image” and things like “playing God” but very few people then unpack what they mean by that in their rhetoric. At that point the case is closed, and as Ted Peters comments, there’s a withdrawal into apparently safe, religious conservatism. “We say, ‘No.’”, followed by, “We say no because God says no.”

Looks hopeful - virtualtheology.net » welcome to virtualtheology.net. I look forward to seeing how it works out.

May hold off on changing over to something like Drupal or WordPress until this is sorted out. From Netcraft: PHP Blogging Apps Vulnerable to XML-RPC Exploits,

Many popular PHP-based blogging, wiki and content management programs can be exploited through a security hole in the way PHP programs handle XML commands. The flaw allows an attacker to compromise a web server, and is found in programs including PostNuke, WordPress, Drupal, Serendipity, phpAdsNew, phpWiki and phpMyFAQ, among others.

Nice piece here on a guy with a cochlear implant, Michael Chorost, and the positives of being cyborg. See: eastbayexpress.com | Culture | Hi, I’m Bionic | 2005-06-29

“When you become a cyborg, you’re no less human than you were before,” he says. “You’re differently human.”

He’s written a book, Rebuilt : How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human (Houghton Mifflin : June 2, 2005). I’ve now added it to my wish list.

See the following related link: The peril and promise of mix-and-match biotech : Is a proliferation of human-animal mixtures good for either? by Matt Donnelly in Science & Theology News.