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Sunday, May 08, 2005 |
Blogging tourism: Iran in June.
This is really good news: BBC Persian reports that Iran now issues transit seven-day Visas for foreigners in Tehran international airports.
It's really a smart decision which I think should've made immediately after Bush labeled Iran as part of Axis of Evil. Let the world see if Iran is really evil or it's on its way toward a more democratic and open society despite all internal conflicts and problems.
I had long though about encouraging bloggers around the world to visit Iran. Now this is the best chance. Especially after Dave Winer's idea about blogging global tours which is amazing. Simply because blogs can observe and reports things that mainstream media could never do and the voice that bloggers would give, for instance, to the people of Iran is absolutely incomparable to anything else.
Now I'm more confident about the idea of going back to Iran in early June before the election. Would anyone be joining me?
[Editor: Myself (English)]
7:44:15 PM 
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Ethology of Cooperation?.
This recent New Scientist review of Natural Conflict Resolution by Filippo Aureli and Frans de Waal (eds) points toward potentially valuable contributions from ethology to an understanding of human cooperation:
(Thanks, Bru!)
LOOK at the world's worst trouble spots and you can't fail to notice they have one thing in common: tit-for-tat attacks between warring parties. Escalation of violence is incredibly destructive, yet we humans find it very difficult to break the vicious cycle. It seems we are not good at conflict resolution. Perhaps we could learn a lesson or two from the spotted hyena.
Spotted hyenas are highly sociable. Like other animals that live in close-knit groups, they don't always get along. But spotted hyenas don't hold a grudge. Within about 5 minutes of a fight, the erstwhile combatants can often be seen playing, licking or rubbing one another, or engaging in other friendly acts to dissipate the tension. And they are not the only animals with a penchant for kissing and making up. In their book Natural Conflict Resolution, Filippo Aureli from Liverpool John Moores University, UK, and Frans de Waal from the Yerkes Primate Center at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, document reconciliation in no less than 27 species of primates. Bottlenose dolphins also do it. Even goats. So why can't we be more forgiving?
Admittedly, human interactions are far more complex. But perhaps we can draw some lessons from the study of conflict resolution in nature. Not only have ethologists discovered that it is a lot more common than you might expect, they are also working out the costs and benefits of conflict resolution. Their ideas about when, where and how reconciliation works in nature could help us to improve the chances of settling our own disputes.
As our understanding of natural conflict resolution grows, it is tempting to hope that we can apply what we have learned to improve human relations. The cost-benefit approach certainly looks like a step in the right direction, but we will need much more detailed work on non-humans before we can develop general predictions that might apply to us. The possibilities are tantalising, though. [Smart Mobs]
1:03:32 AM
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Happy Mothers Day!
12:57:12 AM
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Simple division.
Glad to see I'm on the good side of Seth's Digital Divide. Quotage:
Does it surprise you that more than half of the hundreds of thousands of Boing Boing readers use Firefox? That's about five times the number you'd expect. It turns out that a lot of these tech-friendly behaviors come in bunches. Someone who has a few of these behaviors is likely to have most of them. (and no, this is by no means a complete list. I'm sure the blog community will find twenty others and post them in a day or two!)
So what? Why should you care if a bunch of nerds are learning a lot of cool new stuff? [The Doc Searls Weblog]
12:56:37 AM
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