TAYLOR PARKER
  • Home
  • CV
  • Opp's
  • Journal
Contact:

Just a little conservation journal...

I generally focus on conservation issues effecting biodiversity, land use/abuse, research, and job opportunities that I have come across. Most of the opportunities come from the Opps page and you can click on the button below to take you there.
Opps

3 Things I Learned in Grad School ~ March 26 2017

3/26/2017

1 Comment

 
I was schooled in Adobe Lightroom, have been mystified by Daniel Dennett's Competence without Comprehension, and played with Prepared Learning.

Prepared Learning (and Martin Seligman)
Picture
I was not planning in putting this rocktacular photo up but once I found it, how could I not? This is Dr. Martin Seligman in full 1970s kit. Anyway, we approached Martin Seligman again in one of my classes to look at positive psychology’s gifts. I’m pretty familiar with positive psychology through all the popular psychology books I’ve read over the past decade or so but it is a different world completely exploring the original works in actual journal articles. Reading Seligman’s articles is a different beast from reading his book Flourish. I love his book. His articles are bananas. I was looking up what he is known for and he did some pivotal work before he stumbled upon positive psychology. Apparently, he helped put together Prepared Learning. This is a wild concept where we are primed to make associations with fear or optimism or taste than other things. The best example is that we can learn to be afraid of snakes as children after only one negative stimuli or event but it might take a lot longer to be conditioned to be afraid of a Power Ranger doll. The idea is that natural environmental threats can flip the switch in our brain faster for a reproductive or general survival reason. The Power Ranger is new and novel and we don’t know how to respond. We have to tap into a cognition (which Kahneman says is very difficult and requires a lot of mental energy and focus to do – so we usually avoid doing so) to categorize the Power Ranger as dangerous, safe, or neutral. This makes a lot of sense intuitively – we evolved to be able to be cautious of snakes and spiders. I don’t know if it scales up but you can think of the cognitive dissonance apparent in why we allow guns, vehicles, and sugar with little to no regulation but have waged a massive genocide against wolves and sharks when the rate of injury and death from both is so unequal.
 
Competence without Comprehension
Daniel Dennett came out with a new book called From Bacteria to Bach and Back and it is an ass-kicker. My favorite of his so far. Dennett is called one of the four horsemen. Along with Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris, Dennett uses his profound intelligence to explore and explain the mysteries of life. Sidenote: I just learned that there is a fifth member who was supposed to be at the same conference where all of these guys were speaking at and where the label was coined; her name is Ayaan Hirsi Ali and she is a Somali born Dutch-American. I digress: as a philosopher, Dennett’s talent is logical jiu jitsu. As a philosopher of science and neuroscience especially, he digs deep into the big questions of evolution, free will, determinism, consciousness, morality, and language with a technical expertise that is barely understandable by my feeble brain but fascinating nonetheless. I’m trying to make sense of his logic and am not fully there yet but one of his terms is Competence without Comprehension and I love it. It is a powerful shortcut to explain complex concepts.
 
In looking this up, there is not an easy shorthand for it (which makes me think of a rad project) but I did find an awesome blog by a Dutch psychologist. Coert Visser started the blog called Progress-Focused Approach and I love his beliefs: http://www.progressfocused.com/p/some-things-i-believe-and-expect.html
 
Regarding Competence without Comprehension, Visser pulls together the following statements on his site (http://www.progressfocused.com/search?q=+comprehension):
  • “to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it”
  • “In nature, comprehension is not the cause of competence but the effect”
  • “There is no evolutionary advantage to shape understanding into the organism of why the characteristic is so beneficial; the characteristic itself is enough. "Your butterfly that has eye spots on its wings does not have to understand why this is a good thing for it to have. It scares off the birds but it is none the wiser."”
  • ““it is the sea itself who fashions the boats, choosing those which function and destroying the others." "If it comes home ... copy it! That's natural selection."”
 
The other powerful example Dennett uses to discuss consciousness emerging from a system: he mentions CERN and how the thousands of scientists need not and indeed cannot explain the entirety of the project they work on yet each of them is creating new knowledge by their skillful and necessary contribution to the whole. Each scientist has extensive competence but only vague comprehension and yet the outcome is elegance. There is strength in this tool to explain systems theories, evolution through natural selection, and the feedback loops involved.
 
Adobe Lightroom
I’ve been using Lightroom to edit and collect my photos for two years now. It was recommended by Dave Pirazzi of Colorado Lagoon fame and I took his advice unquestioningly. It was brilliant advice. I am self-taught and youtube-taught. And while I knew I wasn’t using it to the full power and I didn’t understand what a lot of the toggle bars did, I was competent enough to create decent photos. Then I met a photographer Jeff Sarvis who asked me: “But did you know there is a right way to use it, an order in which you’re supposed to use Lightroom?” No, Mr. Sarvis, I did not. He was amazing enough to invite me over to his house for an afternoon and walk me through it. 3 hours and several pages of notes later I was exhausted. I had to eat 2 chocolate chip cookies and have a cup of mate to get my brain functioning again. He taught me so much about it and answered all the questions I didn’t even know I had. For the sake of simplicity I am going to note down the simple steps for a normal photo (not an HDR, a specific touch up, or graphic design project):
  1. Make sure your camera and lens are calibrated – flick the button
  2. Use Dehaze first (it’s near the bottom in Lightroom CC)
  3. Then crop how you want (there are a ton of methods, philosophies, and subjective aesthetics around cropping but I crop first according to the size I like whereas others crop last and according to printable size)
  4. Use spot remover
  5. Don’t mess with temp
  6. Go to black and make the Histogram tail hit the black edge
  7. Go to white and make the Histogram tail hit the white edge
  8. Adjust shadow, highlights, and contrast accordingly
  9. Go down to clarity and adjust no higher than 35
  10. Go to vibrance and half the clarity
  11. Leave the saturation toggle alone
  12. Go down to the next box and leave hue alone
  13. Use saturation for each individual color however you want
  14. Do the same for luminescence
  15. Look over everything and adjust accordingly
  16. Catalog how you want (flags, stars, keywords, etc – some people do this before starting)
  17. Set up Print how you want
 
Genius. I started a whole new Catalog so I could start fresh with this new information. I am so excited.
1 Comment

    Archives

    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    June 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    November 2014
    October 2014
    August 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014

    Categories

    All
    3 Things
    4 Ways Of Knowing
    Adaptation
    Adobe
    Affordance
    ANOVA
    Ashi Waza
    Ausubel
    Baldwinisms
    Barrett
    Beginning Of Infinity
    Bekoff
    Biodiversity
    Blue Carbon
    Box Plots
    Breakthrough
    Cave Bears
    Cheetah
    Coert Visser
    Cognitive Reappraisal
    Commons
    Competence
    Comprehension
    Conservation Jobs
    Conservation News
    Construal Theory
    Consumerology
    Convolve
    Critical Periods
    Csikszentmihalyi
    Culture-pattern Model
    Delphi Method
    Dennett
    Design
    Dont Think Of An Elephant
    Doughnut Economics
    Drive-discharge Model
    Dr. Mark Johnson
    Dweck
    Earth Day
    Ecosystem Theory
    Eisenberg
    Endangered Species
    Environmentalism
    Environmental Psychology
    Environmental Wins
    Extinction Countdown
    Flagship Species
    Flourish
    Fluorescent Minerals
    Framing
    Gatekeepers
    Gentrification
    Group Socialization Theory
    Growth Mindset
    Heteroscedasticity
    Hitchens
    How Emotions Are Made
    Idiographic
    Indicator Species
    Instrumental Case Study
    Intrinsic Case Study
    Jaguar
    Judo
    Kellert's Typology
    Keystone Species
    Lakoff
    Lightroom
    Lion
    List
    Listed
    Listening
    Marcia's Identity Theory
    Maslow
    Neotony
    Neurochemicals
    Newsletter
    Nomothetic
    Nordhaus
    Ocelot
    Opps
    Peter Maas
    Photo Elicitation
    Photography
    Place Bonding
    Planetary Boundaries
    Poetic Naturalism
    Poetic Trasncription
    Positive Disintegration
    Positive Psychology
    Poverty
    Pragmatism
    Prefigurative Politics
    Premiere
    Prepared Learning
    Priority Species
    Pro-environmental Behavior
    Progress Focused Approach
    Qualitative
    Raworth
    Resilience
    Restorative Environments
    Rewild
    Roman
    Sebastio Salgado
    Self Determination Theory
    Self-Organizing Theory
    Self-sabotage
    Seligman
    Seoi Nage
    Serious Leisure
    Shellenberger
    Simulacra
    Social Capital
    Social Scientist
    Species And People
    Statistics
    Supervenience
    System Thinking
    Telomeres
    Thought Exercise
    Translational Science
    Umbrella Species
    Umwelt
    Validity
    Veridical
    Vernacular Conservation
    Wicked Problems
    Wildlife
    Wolf
    Wolfs Tooth

    RSS Feed

Enjoy the site!
  • Home
  • CV
  • Opp's
  • Journal