Information Science Capstone

Ponderings

The explosion of choice

Perusing a menu of options to decide what best matches individual desires and values - which is what we generally mean today by making a choice - is a key feature of modern democratic and consumer culture alike. It is also an exalted one. People may disagree about what the possibilities should be, but rarely about the principle of maximising arenas for choice-making or the options themselves. For many of the world's citizens, this is simply what freedom feels like.
Yet, as you may have also felt at various moments, abundant choice isn't always so straightforward.

By Sophia Rosenfeld

Aeon Magazine, 16 October 2025

Cybernetics

Weiner, Norbert (1948). Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

How then does the beehive act in unison, and at that in a very variable, adapted, organized unison? Obviously, the secret is in the intercommunication of its members.
This intercommunication can vary greatly in complexity and content. With man, it embraces the whole intricacy of language and literature, and very much besides. With the ants, it probably does not cover much more than a few smells. It is very improbable that an ant can distinguish one ant from another. It certainly can distinguish an ant from its own nest from an ant from a foreign nest, and may cooperate with the one, destroy the other. Within a few outside reactions of this kind, the ant seems to have a mind almost as patterned, chitin-bound, as its body. It is what we might expect a priori from an animal whose growing phase and, to a large extent, whose learning phase are rigidly separated from the phase of mature activity. The only means of communication we can trace in them are as general and diffuse as the hormonal system of communication within the body. Indeed, smell, one of the chemical senses, general and undirectional as it is, is not unlike the hormonal influences within the body.

read Chapter 8, pp. 215-230

Economist

The Ivy League rat race: Finance, consulting and tech are gobbling up top students

All this raises the question of what a university is meant to be. Ivy League schools exist in the imagination as places to search for one's calling, whether it is to become a playwright, a cancer researcher or some other surprising possibility. Or, yes, a Wall Street banker (a few people know the suit fits them from an early age). T oday corporate recruiting has become a dominant feature that shapes campus life from the moment students step into it. This careerist atmosphere may turn off some students like Annushka and draw in others like Luke. Either way, their experience of the university is shaped by recruiting.

Something else

Robert Hood & Femi Kuti jouent James Brown

In France TV's Variations showcases, duos create electronic-acoustic collaborations that are like dives into the unknown. In its fourth season in 2019, Variations presented an unprecedented encounter of Detroit techno innovator Robert Hood with Afrobeat saxophonist Femi Kuti to bring to new life to the little-known music of the Godfather of Soul, James Brown. The jazz side of JB from the horn of Pee Wee Ellis was the focus. The electronic producer largely lays the foundation for the set with his minimalist beats and experimental colors which free Kuti to deliver his explosive improvisations. Kuti says that Robert “built the house and I did the decoration.” There are stretches of call-and-response grooves as well as chants of “stomp your feet” and sample-like JB singular shouts. Femi's father was the master Fela Kuti who controversially jazzified the Ghana-born highlife music in his native Nigeria and became known as the African James Brown. He was the chief purveyor of Afrobeat. A virtuoso on his instrument, Femi takes the source and charges ahead with an edgy brew of pop, soul, avant-jazz. No lyricism, just grit and determination. While the pair had never worked together, based on a telephone conversation prior to this show, they agreed that they linked spiritually.
Dan Ouellette

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