Click here to read it. (This is John’s promise us). The interview is succint; Brueggemann’s answers are thought-provoking, imaginative, and of course, post-modern as his approach to OT and Theology Of The Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy. For example, he responds
The Old Testament invites the church to a narrative reality that is open, pluralistic, and beyond all codifications. The God to whom it witnesses continues to break open our best ideologies. In worship the church needs to hear and think through much, much more text, especially the parts we find implausible and unacceptable. But that depends upon interpretation that takes seriously the complex refusal of the text to be ‘explained.
This ‘problematic’ presentation of God testifies against all of our ‘cozy’ notions of faith, liturgy, piety, doctrine, and morality. The Old Testament and its God is to be received only in dispute and contestation. It constitutes a wake-up call against complacency, easy conclusions, and dumbing down in faith.
A post-modernist or post-colonial reading of Scripture is profitable to combatt all non-sensical hermeneutics and fixed interpretations and meanings which often defer the Text to speak in its voice. I remember reading Brueggemann’ Theology Of The Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy in an OT theology course in seminary my understanding of God and his Word were about to look different and evolved as it is today . I was convinced Brueggemann was right in most of his theological-imaginative assessment and interpretation of Scriptures.
From an interview with Donald Westlake, author of the Parker series of crime novels:
Question: Other than Richard Stark, you have also published books under the names Samuel Holt, Tucker Coe, and Curt Clark, as well as under your given name of Donald Westlake. Why all the pennames?
Westlake: When you’re first in love, you want to do it all the time. I loved writing, and I was just pushing out too much stuff for a rational marketplace to contend with. I first started putting pen names on short stories because magazines wouldn’t publish the same byline twice in the same magazine.
With the novels, Westlake had a contract to do a book a year for Random House, so if I added a second publisher I would need a second name. By the time Tucker Coe came along, both Westlake and Stark had some reputation of their own, and an emotionally-grieving disgraced ex-cop, an open wound, didn’t belong to either of them.
Some years later, I had reached that point known by a lot of writers: What if I were starting now? In this changed market, would I succeed? So I tested the waters the same way Stephen King did with his Richard Bachman novels: throw it out there under cover of darkness, and see what happens. That’s where Samuel Holt came from. (King told me once that, when his agent said they absolutely needed the pen name now because they were printing the cover, he was reading a Richard Stark and listening to Bachman-Turner Overdrive. It really is all incestuous.)
8 pm tonight Chuck Milligan, a hypnotist and entertainer for 23 years, will perform in Finney for the orientation crowd. I recommend you go, I saw the show during my orientation experience and still recognize a guy on campus as “the Britney Spears kid.”
I had the chance to talk with Chuck over the phone and he shared with me some of his background and favorite stories hypnotizing frat boys and playing match maker.
F+L: How did you get into hypnotism?
Chuck: Well, it actually started off as a hobby. I was a police officer in California for a number of years and I actually started doing hypnosis as a hobby, it was never supposed to be a job or a career, it was just supposed to be a Monday night bar trick. After five years of being a police officer during the day and being an entertainer at night I ended up quitting my job as a police officer and going onto the college market and being an entertainer on the college market.
F+L: How do you develop your acts?
Chuck: Sometimes you never know where it’s going to come from. A lot of hypnosis things have been around for years and years and years and you’ll notice that all the hypnotists out there, they all do “hot,” they all do “cold,” and I do those things too because they’re standard things that hypnotists do. One of the things with the new routines is you never know what they’re going to come from. My signature routine, which pertains to a little life preserver around the guy’s waste and he becomes a lifeguard, I was on my way to a university and I walked into a Long’s Bookstore and I saw the life preserver and I go “I could do something with that.” I had no idea what I was going to do with it, it was a little life preserver. Between the 15 minutes that I bought it and drove back to the school to do my show, I invented my signature lifeguard routine. It just comes, sometimes it just hits you in the head, sometimes you get it from other people. You never know where it’s going to come from. I really think that if you just sit down and say “I’m going to think up a routine right now” there’s no way you’re going to do it. It’s got to come to you in a flash.
F+L: What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever gotten someone to do?
Chuck: I was at a fraternity party at a state college, it was when I was first starting off. I told a guy that he could actually walk across the water on the pool. It worked really well, until wound up taking the first step off. Then he woke up.
F+L: Alright, now what’s the second craziest thing you’ve gotten someone to do?
Chuck: (Laughs) I don’t know, there’s just so many funny things that go on you just can’t just say ‘what’s the funniest’ or what’s the…
F+L: Then just what are some of your favorite moments from your 23 years of experience?
Chuck: I don’t know if I’ve ever does this routine at Oberlin College, but I have this routine called “Snow White and Dopey” where I usually have two people who have gone out into the audience, a guy and a girl. And the girl, when I say a certain word, she’s Snow White and she’ll jump up and start screaming “Where’s Dopey? Where’s Dopey?” And the guy across the room will jump up and say “I’m Dopey, Snow White, here I am!” and they’ll run together and hug each other like Snow White and Dopey just found each other. I did that whole bit at [a] College in Arizona with two kids who did not know each other, it was during orientation. I did the “Snow White and Dopey” routine and it worked especially well. They started dating, a year later they were engaged and a year after that they got married.
F+L: I don’t think we can top that one.
Chuck: Yeah, I still have the wedding invitation. And on top of their wedding cake, instead of the bride and the groom, they had the Snow White and the Dopey figures.
Goddamn it. Mom wants to be my Facebook friend. WTF? She’s not the most computer literate person. But I’m sure one thing will lead to another, and she’ll find my irreverent blog. Fucking A. So much for getting myself out there.
Any suggestions? I can’t not friend my own mother. I’m sorry you gave birth to me, but you can’t be my Facebook friend. Letting Mom read my stuff is like being naked. It’s not cool to be naked in front of your mom. Not cool at all.
Speaking of nakedness and mothers–not to be confused with naked mothers. Mom’s been wearing this rather thin, worn night gown. She needs a new one. It’s so thin she wears a robe over it. She says they don’t have nightgowns anymore only pjs. I find this hard to believe. Anyway . . .I ask her what’s wrong with pjs. She says that she wears a nightgown because Dad likes easy access. I can’t believe my mother is saying shit like this. My mother who doesn’t like to discuss sex, religion or politics.
On another note –the bitching about work note–I applied for the ICU/TU position again. Never got an interview the last time. That’s pathetic. Not being able to even get an interview with the organization I currently work for. Please hire me. I’m pathetic and poor. I can be cute too if you just give me a chance. Smart? We’ll have to work on smart.
Changed my cover letter. Cited specific examples of how awesome I was the last time I worked on their floor. If this doesn’t work, I may have to resort to a fictional resume or maybe a creative non-fiction with a disclaimer. *Certain facts were embellished. *Certain events were manufactured. *References may be manufactured for aesthetic reasons.
Francois Vialatte is a researcher at Brain Science Institute RIKEN. He works on deciphering brain signals for creating better Brain-Computer interfaces and tools that can diagnose Alzheimer’s at early stages. Learn more about his research.
On this interview BCI researcher Francois Vialatte answers some unpleasant questions surrounding BCI research, such as does BCI really has its future? Also we discuss current problems with publicity of science, potential hypnotic effects of BCI and possibility of entering altered state of mind while playing BCI games.
When and why did you become interested in BCI?
When I was a young Master’s degree student, I had an intuition that machine learning methods could be applied to extract information from brain signals. I had not read anything related to BCI, but was already developing my own theory. Interestingly, I discussed my idea with my roommate, who believed that my theories were some kind of fringe science, or science-fiction fantasy. Regarding dates, it would be 2002… Later on, I had the chance to join a lab where BCI is one of the main research topic.
There is an opinion that hype created by media around BCI is a big bubble which is about to blow, and BCI cannot really compete with its alternatives in any application. Anyone who invests in BCI will lose his money. What is your opinion about this?
There is a part of truth in this affirmation. The media tend to present a distorted picture of what BCI systems can do. This being said, there are certainly numerous applications where BCI will become profitable, with feasible industrial applications.
For example?
Clinical applications for paralyzed patients (especially with ALS) are the most obvious applications. Video games will most probably be a rich field to explore. I think also that neurometrics are viable applications. Somehow, what can be said about BCI is that the technology recently moved from the basic research to the applied research, so it is still far from being optimal.
But what about existing interfaces for disabled persons based on eye-tracking? Can they compete with BCI?
Nice question. Why should eye-tracking be opposed to BCI? Both technologies can be integrated (in this case we generally speak about BMI, or Brain Machine Interface). My opinion is that BCI will be integrated in the future technologies (such as combined eye-tracking/BCI systems)
But can eye-tracking become cheaper and more easy-to-use alternative to BCI?
If you really want to put the two technologies in competition, then there has to be a looser. The more “easy to use” is not the winner, but the one with the higher bit rate transfer. On this aspect, no one knows what the future will be. And there is no guarantee that BCI or eye-tracking would win or loose. This is why I would suggest industrial applications to be based on both (and also on other physiological measurements, such as ECG, etc… when possible).
What are main obstacles that prevent BCI to become widely used?
As I mentioned above, BCI recently moved from the basic research to the applied research. The last step, the development of industrial prototypes, is not completed (or only in the beginning). Some applications could already be developed, but I suppose that companies are waiting until an optimal level of research is reached. Several questions remain opened, many elements are still untested.
What is the coolest thing about BCI?
This technology is one of the most impressive application of the recent progresses in neuroscience. BCI is cool because it is nearly a science-fiction technology. This is probably the reason why it became so fashionable in the media. But to me, BCI is interesting because it let me dream of what could be done at the next step (when we will hopefully have access to more precise measurement technologies, or more accurate mathematical tools).
And something about science publicity… When I just started to using this science papers, I always wondered where is the source code section. Usually only results and description are published, for code, this is not common. What are you opinion?
I agree, it is not common to see it published, and it would be a good habit. This is a problem similar to data withholding in science. Data and code are intellectual properties, the scientist is not always the owner of these elements, and not always encouraged (or even allowed) to share them. Somehow, this is detrimental for developing countries (with less fundings, their scientists have access to less data or code than the developed countries). In other words, modern science is not international, and not public. Only its results are made public. A few journals have, exceptionally, policies asking the authors to submit their data and code together with the paper.
For check?… So the situation is that research groups just want to keep their secret to themselves?
Yes. If you keep your data and your code, then you have some kind of “intellectual trust”. This way you can keep control of your field, and avoid competition.
This not good (should be corrected)…
Yes, I agree, it should be corrected. But it needs some institutional will to move it towards the good direction: research is not directed by scientist, but by administrative policy makers, who are not totally aware of all the aspects of the problem.
Well if even Microsoft finally had to make moves towards opensource, I think for science we won’t wait for too long. But it will require some competitive pressure from independent researchers… otherwise there will be no need for institutions to change existing system.
Note that I understand that the problem is not the same in industry, but there is a hope. A company has to make money on short term, this is obvious, and if they share their code and their data (if they are the only one doing so), it is like shooting in their own foot. But for science, there is hope. If the new generation of young scientists are willing to make these changes, they can spread the idea. Furthermore, they will be the scientific leaders of tomorrow.
Let’s talk about your research in signal synchrony. It is not focused on BCI specifically but BCI improvement is one of its possible applications. But was BCI improvement the main idea from which this study started?
Well, the idea is somehow “bidirectional” improve BCI on one hand, get a better understanding of synchrony on the other hand. Synchrony should increase the reliability of BCI signal processing tasks.
Concerning other applications, I am also working on Alzheimer’s disease. In this context, we use measures of synchrony to investigate the early stages of the disease. For Alzheimer, the purpose is two-fold: obtain a better understanding of the disease, and possibly develop methods to help the diagnostic of the disease before its onset (a task also termed as early detection). Potentially, these measures have many applications. Generally speaking, if brain signal synchrony is a relevant feature for the brain, any technology involving the brain could exploit similar techniques (especially if higher cognition is involved).
So how is synchrony helpful for BCI?
Synchrony provides us with a higher level feature. Synchrony and other methods could be compared metaphorically to the use of a microscope vs. direct observation.
With synchrony more like observation – i.e. it helps us to see the forest for the trees.
Yes, synchrony gives a bigger picture. For my own research, I have to solve the problem of integrating the time, frequency, and space dimensions of EEG (space = electrodes) Fourier measures are electrode-specific, they do not indicate relationships between different brain areas. Other recent measures could be compared with synchrony, like for instance measures of information flow.
Ok, could you tell something about application of synchrony to SSVEP-based BCI?
My preferred BCI systems are the P300 and SSVEP based systems. The reason is that with this system, the subjects do not need lengthy and tiring periods of training. SSVEP produces a stable signal, with a few number of commands it can be a good choice for BCI.
But it is also quite annoying, for how long can you use SSVEP without getting your eyes tired?
It depends on two elements: what paradigm is used, and which frequencies are used. Low frequency is more tiring than high frequencies. For instance one of my subject consistently felt asleep with low frequency “hypnotic” stimuli.
Concerning the paradigm, it is much easier to concentrate on a game than on a screen with numbers. Several studies have shown that BCI systems with a friendly feedback, and especially in a game environment, are more efficient (including a study from our lab using a car driving game).
I heard that 7Hz-frequency stimulation can make person frightened to death. Is it what low-frequency SSVEP can do?
Frightened to death? This looks like an urban legend! Low frequency stimulation is extremely boring and if the fixation is too long, a little hypnotic (it sometimes gives me the feeling of having an empty mind), but I was never scared by these stimuli.
There is however another real danger, which is the risk of photogenic epilepsy. This risk is seldom mentioned in studies about SSVEP, despite being well known. The most famous case of epileptic seizures associated with repetitive flashes of lights was documented after a “pokemon” animation was aired on a Japanese channel. Radford and Bartholomew estimated that 12,000 children suffered from symptoms and/or illness due to this TV show (the symptoms included photogenic seizures, but also photogenic migraines).
Can it be that there was no epilepsy before, but after it was induced, symptoms arose and affected later life?
No, those who had symptoms had already a sensibility (the show did not create the disease), but they did not know. They did suffer from epileptic seizures though. My point is that subjects who undergo experiments with SSVEP-based BCI should be controlled for possible photo-sensibility. Without such control, there is a risk that the subject might have a seizure during the experiment. If they are prone to photosensitive epilepsy, SSVEP-BCI would be dangerous for them, if they are not, then this type of BCI is safe (photo sensitive epilepsy cannot be, as far as I know, induced in healthy subjects). Here is a link about photosensitive epilepsy.
Ok, so it is safe except some special conditions like epilepsy. Just searched Google if low-frequency can cause something bad in healthy persons, and it turned to be “Brown Note” urban legend - you were right.
Yes. Furthermore, concerning repetitive pattern stimuli like SSVEP, you should know that we are constantly exposed to similar stimuli. Computer screens flicker at about 60 Hz, neon lights also flicker, we are surrounded by such stimuli, and as far as I know no one even tried to measure the long term effect of these stimuli.
And, there are such devices sold around – “Mind Machines”: “A mind machine uses pulsing rhythmic sound and/or flashing light to alter the brainwave frequency of the user. Mind machines are said to induce deep states of relaxation, concentration and in some cases altered states of consciousness, that have been compared to those obtained from meditation and shamanic exploration.” Considering that SSVEP uses the same technique – i.e. rhythmic flashes – will we have shamanic experience each time we use it?
I am not aware of any serious publication about this kind of toys. If it did really induce an altered state of consciousness, it should be possible to measure a long term effect (which was not shown). Indeed, SSVEP can have some effect on cognitive functions.
You mentioned there was a hypnotic effect, but very little.
Yes, I did mention this in one of my publications. Synchrony is strongly altered during SSVEP stimulation. I do not rule out the possibility to induce some effect using SSVEP. For instance, one study showed an enhancement of working memory in elders after a 10 Hz stimulation. I did observe the hypnotic effect. But to do so, we need to gather several conditions:
strong light
long stimuli duration (> 30 sec)
large stimuli
Effects might also depend on the stimulus frequencies and colors. I am not aware of any study in BCI using these parameters. So, in other words, you will not have a shamanic experience with an SSVEP-BCI. But the possible effects of SSVEP on higher cognitive function seem intriguing, and I would be curious to read any serious investigation about this topic (I might do one if I have time).
So mind machines might have a point despite no serious publication/effect observed yet.
Yes, my concern is to now what is the real effect (especially long term effect) of this kind of toy to know.
we, erm, touched on this dude yesterday, but seriously, yo, this dude is bananas.
was he a dj? just a big music fan?slightly creepy?
does what he says, plays some slept on gizznems from back in the dilznays.but so, so much more.he edits a dope video to match, and kicks a little k(nowledge), and gets the fuck outta there…
interviews too, check him interviewing/asskissing the dude from k.c and the sunshine band…more gas than exxon.
he goes deep like freddie west on this one!
the inspiration for that dodgy old party cut that ice t did, with everlast..anyways,
ill cover version of the excorcist.go, music mike.3.55 for the drums.
And….the guy is a radio buff, but to the extreme.
his other channel is all airchecks, jingles, and test broadcasts from throughout the states.depth/
Frankly none of your interview bloopers have quite matched up to Neal from Crawley’s stump-shaking cringerama as featured in Episode 105, but we’re still very pleased you’ve shared with us your solecisms: check them outHERE, and here are a few more that came into our inbox. Tanya from Twickenham recounts an awkward university interview:
I had to sit on what looked like a kitchen chair in the middle of a massive room. There were two interviewers, a man and a woman – the man was sitting on the far right side of the room on a very high chair like a barstool and the woman was sitting on a very low sofa on the far left side of the room.
I felt totally ridiculous looking from one to the other from my isolated position in the middle of the room, and I could hardly hear what the woman was asking me as she was so far away. The man picked his nose throughout the whole thing.
When I left, I tripped over the rug and crashed into the door. They didn’t offer me a place.
Another university interview Fail comes from Alex from Nottingham:
I had an interview to study medicine at UEA. I took the train down and there was a death on the track ahead; I never got the details but we got an announcement that the police had made it into a crime scene as we rushed to the coach.
Later on in my interview the interviewer asked if I had any trouble getting there and I replied, “Oh not much, I came down on the train but there was a death on the track ahead.” There was an awkward pause and so I carried on, “…Which almost made me late.” I then realised this was the kind of callous thing never to say to an interviewer whose primary purpose was to analyse how caring and compassionate I was. Unsurprisingly, I did not get in.
This one from Alasdair from Austria reads more like an early-90s sitcom plot:
In 1991 as students, a friend and I went to an interview for a placement year in Wiltshire from Leicester, and it was the worst time ever. I did the normal thing and was up early and dressed smart etc., then dropped around to my friend’s house to find he had pulled the night before and was asleep with her and hungover. After an impolite and confusing rush to get him awake and help him get his clothes and car keys etc. and somehow explain to the lady that we had to go, we piled into his car and drove off.
About an hour later, after occasionally helping him stay on the road by “assisting” him with the steering wheel, we ran out of petrol. I had to walk sweating up a hill with a petrol can and luckily found a farmer’s house and persuaded the farmer’s wife to drive me to a petrol station and get petrol. At least it was a respite from the stale alcohol fumes from my friend’s mouth. He was of course asleep when I got back to the car.
We finally arrived in the small town almost late, and my friend was not yet in his suit. We ended up stopping at a pub to change, but since it was before opening hours it was closed and he had to get changed in a little plastic kiddy tree-house. As you can imagine we arrived thoroughly rattled, I was physically shaking from fried nerves and we hadn’t eaten.
In the end I got offered a job. My friend was still hungover of course and didn’t.
Any more for any more? No need to be shy, you’re among friends here. Share with us, that we might all learn from your mistakes laugh at your misfortune.
