//// Goldsmiths “find an expert” ////

Enjoy!

experience2_expert.jpg

intellectual.jpg

intellectual2.jpg

Basic lexicon to problematize the link between experience and expertise and to explore the historical evolution of the Homo Expertus.

(From Keywords by Raymond Williams)

After a long process of cross questioning and assessment of shortcomings, the ultimate D&A question was finally achieved:

What kind of attitudes renders a speaker convincing to you – what does it take to make you trust in the knowledge of someone?

In the strictly academic setting of a formal M.A.L.A.B. presentation, a sample population of cultural workers was challenged to confront this question. The strenuous process of data anlysis has now come to an end and D.A.T.E.R.U. Discourse & Attitude sub-unit can finally divulge its unparalleled results!

As shown by the pie chart above, we can only glimpse at the far-reaching implications of this study in relation to clearly identified discourses and attitudes within the field of visible cultures!

Trusting your interest in our project, we will be continuing with our high profile research project and will soon make public further findings.

The moral of the story is that expertise might imply a conscious attempt to erect walls around not only one’s knowledge, but one’s own ability to learn more and change. Being declared an expert brings forth the risk of allowing oneself to a greater degree of ease in relation to one’s own responsabilities towards that (fleeting) entity called knowledge – be it practical or theoretical. In relation to wisdom, it could be argued that taking upon yourself the role of an expert means to foreclose the possibility to become wise, which is perhaps connected to the opposition between gaining an inclusive and expanding general knowledge and the need to narrow down and specialise. Can expertise be seen as a dead-end branch of the path towards wisdom?
Thinking about childhood and teenager-hood identities, isn’t becoming an expert in one field a way to attract attention, to externalise an interest/passion and make it a channel for socialization? What is the difference between that expertise (hobby) and adulthood expertise (thinking of non-professional expertise)?

…

 The people I know with real specialisms and expertise – and yes, I am grateful for all the learned people in the world that use their wisdom wisely – purposely avoid the word expert. In turn, I avoid the opinions of experts; experts are rigid, and the one thing a keen mind must have is flexibility. The cleverest people I’ve met are also the best listeners. A really intelligent person is humble, and realises that knowledge is never finite.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2255096,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront

http://www.library.nhs.uk/healthmanagement/ViewResource.aspx?resID=35495&tabID=290&catID=4031

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/joepublic/2008/01/handing_over_care_to_the_real.html

More from this book could be found at: http://books.google.com/books?id=QgGRar_TCjIC&printsec=frontcover#PPR16,M1

At fifty separate tables lighting up out of the dark, experts sit opposite one guest, changing every half hour – admission is free, the ticket for a discussion costs 1 Euro. From a safe outside position, visitors can listen in on individual conversations through headphones, suddenly up close without being noticed. In the middle of a display and production space, in which narrative formats of conveying knowledge are tested and presented.
The result is a hallucinatory adult education centre in which knowledge, life/survival strategies change hands in a non-institutional manner. During this evening, knowledge transfer as a communicative and performative act becomes a collectively whispered knowledge narrative focused on the subject of gifts.

The “Blackmarket” gathers together 100 experts from a wide range of fields to discuss the ambivalent practice of giving gifts: natural scientists, beggars, media theorists, prodigies, philosophers and artists talk about suicide bombings, the economisation of the social sphere, utopian models of exchange in artist collectives and the open-source movement, managed charity, the problems of prodigies, the perversion of gifts as alms or bribes, religious solidarity, ethnological myth research, the potlatch and gift economy, and much more.

http://www.steirischerherbst.at/2007/english/calendar/calendar.php?eid=186

Experts aims to make communication between journalists, researchers and academics easier.

Security chief renowned as a quiet expert

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2206025,00.html

‘Expert’ who made up interviews is exposed

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2169698,00.html

American and French media yesterday were taking a second look at the work of a so-called terrorism expert who faked his academic credentials – and entire interviews with some of the world’s most prominent figures.
Chirac agrees to share expertise as Blair pushes case for nuclear power stations

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/green/story/0,,1794443,00.html

Kremlin employs western PR expertise for summit

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1766059,00.html

http://www.expert.port.ac.uk/

i.e. is expertise about information storage and transfer, or about the development of information into (applicable) knowledge? can an expert be someone merely acting as memory bank of a certain category of information (my granddad knows every single train route on the austrian railway network as of 1970), or do they necessarily need a vision or new idea to count as experts (someone with a “unique” approach)?

i.e. if an expert produces knowledge, is s/he different from an expert who acquires and uses knowledge without adapting/innovating it? are experts necessarily innovative?

if experts need to have a way of applying their knowledge by way of a service (as consultants, quasi-lexical resources, even practitioners or teachers), then what is their role in society? are they champions of a programme of “progress”, what would a society be without them?

is an expert anyone who can invent themselves a field of expertise?

are experts mainly people who strategically operate in the field of knowledge, or just people who happen to know stuff? must or may an expert position her/himself?

is it desirable that we bring informal knowledges into the realm of expertise/ use the notion of expertise to refer to informal knowledges, or rather do we prefer to do without the notion of expertise when outside of institutionalized/formalized knowledge hierarchies?

does the notion of expertise introduce a hierarchy that is undesirable for democratically minded practice?

ABSTRACT — During the neoclassical period, antique dealers in Rome harboured the ambition of determining with certainty whether ancient statues came from Greece or Rome. This aim fostered an exchange between scientific knowledge and the culture of the humanities, together with the performance of expertise and counter-expertise, first in Rome and later in Paris. The article analyses the aesthetic, political and economic issues underlying this dialogue of experts, focusing on the controversy opposing Visconti, an antique dealer, and Dolomieu, a geologist, over the marble statue, the Apollo of Belvedere.

Full article available at http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/18/pound.php

I experienced this recently while looking for a mortgage on my new flat. With thousands of products available and a limited knowledge of the market, I turned to an independent financial advisor for help. The financial expert helped evaluate my needs and whittled the choice down to just two or three products. With the right tools, I probably could have done this myself. However relaying on the expertise of another person made my choice much easier and helped mitigate a certain amount of risk.

The crucial aspect of being an expert is experience. We can all open a book and learn about a topic, but that doesn’t make us an expert. Expertise comes from repetition–from doing something over and over again until it becomes second nature. Experience lets us develop patterns, hone our skills and learn from our mistakes. Experience counts.

To get the most out of an expert, you need to trust their experience and relinquish a certain amount of control. This doesn’t mean that you should follow their ideas blindly without any critical analysis of your own. However when faced with a decision about which you have little or no experience, it makes sense to weight the result in favour of the expert.

Unfortunately it’s actually quite difficult to relinquish this control, especially if you’ve not worked with the expert before and can’t vouch for their results. I found this to be the case when looking for a mortgage–constantly asking the expert questions to sound out their expertise and give me enough information to make a decision. Often the real benefit of hiring an expert is in the transmission of their expertise to you.

The use of experts can help increase the chances of success, but they are no means infallible. This is because experts are simply offering an expert opinion, and while their opinions may be more informed than most, they are still just opinions. In the world of the expert, it’s not uncommon to see two experts disagree quite vehemently on a subject. This could be down to the different experiences they have had, or simply because they have chosen to interpret those experiences differently.

Sadly it seems that being an expert these days has less to do with experience and more to do with the strength and simplicity of their message and how well it resonates with the listener. We like our experts to have simple, definitive answers to essentially complex questions. How else can we explain why people listen to the advice of quacks like “Dr” Gillian McKeith over real doctors with years of medical training and experience?

If an expert pronounces something as fact, we tend to take them at face value. After all, they’re the experts right? If they turn out to be wrong, we’re safe in the knowledge that we trusted somebody better informed than us, and it was their mistake, not ours. Conversely, we mistrust experts who aren’t willing to give a definitive answer or one that fits with our own mental models. We dislike any form uncertainty and see this as a sign of weakness, rather than a true assessment of the situation.

This has lead to a dangerous form of rhetoric that values the singularity and strength of an expert’s opinion over the accuracy and validity of their assessment. People seem to admire sticking to a set of generic and intractable beliefs over the ability to critically analyze and understand a problem from numerous angles. As Albert Einstein once said, we should “make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Sadly a lot of experts focus on the first part of that statement, without fully understanding the important or significance of the second part. Our craving for simplicity over complexity seems to come at the detriment of proper understanding.

CWS is the Cochran-Weiss-Shanteau approach to assessing expertise purely from data. The approach is based on the idea that expert judgment involves discrimination – seeing fine gradations among the stimuli – and consistency – evaluating similar stimuli similarly. The approach was inspired by an idea for comparing response instruments suggested by the late statistician William Cochran (1943), and adapted to the domain of expertise by David J. Weiss and James Shanteau.

What do you mean by “an expert?

Applying the term “expert” to a person is a shorthand description of a set of results rather
than a characterization of the person. Talent and training may combine to yield a person
we label as expert, but it must be kept in mind that the label is a generalization. It is the
behavior that is or is not expert. With CWS, we measure expertise in a specific setting,
with specific stimuli and a specific task. Someone who excels in one context may not
excel in others that seem similar.

What is the CWS index?

The CWS index is a numerical value that captures the degree of expertise
demonstrated in a set of responses. It consists of the ratio of discrimination to
inconsistency. Discrimination refers to the candidate’s differential evaluation of the
various stimuli within a set. Consistency refers to the candidate’s evaluation of the same
stimuli similarly over time; inconsistency is its complement. The ratio will be large when
a candidate discriminates effectively, and will be reduced if the candidate is inconsistent.

Inconsistency
Discrimination
CWS==
The rationale for incorporating discrimination and consistency into an index of expertise
is that a good measuring instrument, such as a ruler or a thermometer, has these
properties. Discrimination and consistency are the building blocks of measurement.
Similarly, expertise at its core requires the ability to evaluate the stimuli in one’s domain.
Note that accuracy is not involved in CWS, as we do not assume any knowledge of
correct responses.

http://www.k-state.edu/psych/cws/pdf/using_cws.pdf

http://www.k-state.edu/psych/cws/downloads.htm

Harry Price expert ghost hunter

Writing in his autobiography Search for Truth in 1942, Harry Price declared that the creation of a laboratory where mediums and psychics could be scientifically tested was a dream which he had entertained for many years. The National Laboratory of Psychical Research was the realisation of this ambition and through this and the University of London Council for Psychical Investigation which it later became.

the National Laboratory of Psychical Research
© Senate House Library, University of London

Ghost Hunting kits
http://www.tomsgadgets.com/products/products.aspx?cat2=18
http://www.lessemf.com/ghost.html
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/GHOST-HUNTING-EQUIPMENT-KIT_W0QQitemZ300191876647QQcmdZViewItem

We set up tables and chairs on 5th avenue (@ 27th St.) in front of the Museum of Sex. We invited experts Barbara Carrellas, Veronica Vera and Candida Royalle to join us. The five of us counseled the public about sex, love, and relationships from noon until 4:00 PM. We helped a gay Mormon man, a married couple who were tourists from India, a group of 18 year old students on a field trip, a woman whose husband had just admitted to an extramarital affair, an older gentleman whose wife didn’t want him to touch her, a lesbian couple that wanted to be polyamorous, and dozens of others. All for free.
We, Elizabeth M. Stephens and Annie M. Sprinkle, are an artist couple committed to doing projects that explore, generate, celebrate and glorify love. We utilize visual art, installation, theater pieces, interventions, live-art, exhibitions, lectures, printed matter and activism. Each year we orchestrate one or more interactive performance art weddings in collaboration with various national and international communities, then display the ephemera in art galleries. Our projects incorporate the colors and themes of the chakras, a structure inspired by Linda M. Montano’s 14 Years of Living Art.

http://www.loveartlab.org/slideshow.php?year_id=2&cat_id=56

Mark Lythgoe is a neuroscientist who is sceptical about intuition. In this programme he discovers whether it’s a real phenomenon or just a popular myth.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/inside_intuition.shtml

At the end of four months Entartete Kunst had attracted over two million visitors.

The Artists pension trust. Currently, there are eight trusts within the overall umbrella structure, each run by a team of experts. Add up the works of art gathered by each trust and a portfolio of 40,000 works of art by 2,000 artists will eventually emerge.

“It is definitely the fastest art collection in the world,” says Mr Khezri.

Given that all the artists have been invited to join by experts who have examined their work, the breadth of the arts portfolio should make it fairly likely that the next generation’s Damien Hurst or Jackson Pollock will be amongst the trust’s members, reasons Mr Khezri.

“It really comes down to mathematical probabilities,” he says.

…

“Business and the private sector is much better at making a difference,” grins Mr Khezri. “Art is becoming a part of their lifestyle.”

The enterpreneurial spirit makes a difference.

Whos pension will your expertise secure?

Suggested screening: Vérités et mensonges (1974) also known as F for Fake, by Orson Welles.

21 Jan 08 (9-5pm)

15 Belgrave Square, London SW1X 8PS

contact. Katie Hillman, khillman@rcpsych.ac.uk

In 1996, Social Text published an essay suggesting a link in quantum mechanics and post-modernism by Professor Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University.
On the day of publication, Sokal announced in Lingua Franca that the article, ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’, had in fact been a hoax.

http://www.physics.nyu.edu/people/sokal.alan.html

http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/general/sokal.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A2671733

http://www.math.tohoku.ac.jp/~kuroki/Sokal/

http://www.physics.nyu.edu/~as2/

SOME THEORY RESOURCES
the flexible personality: http://eipcp.net/transversal/1106/holmes/en
governmentality and self-precarization: http://eipcp.net/transversal/1106/lorey/en
geopolitics of pimping: http://eipcp.net/transversal/1106/rolnik/en
artists as producers: http://eipcp.net/transversal/1204

The France Show 08

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Bubble London
Childrens clothing and accessories
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22/01/2008
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ATEI
The World’s Foremost Coin-Op and Amusement Exhibition.
Earls Court One & Two, Ground Level
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The Dedicated Remote Gaming Exhibition.
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The Event Show 08
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Olympia Musicmania 08

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The Times presents Destinations: The Holiday & Travel Show 08
The UK’s largest and most entertaining holiday and travel event
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Doctor Who Exhibition
March 2008 sees the opening of the Doctor Who Exhibition at the Museum Hall, Earls Court, London
Museum Hall, Earls Court
TBC
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Asia Expo 08

Olympia Grand Hall
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The Times presents Destinations: The Holiday & Travel Show 08
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Londonedge and Londoncentral
The original and the best international trade alternative, street and club wear exhibitions
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Screen Expo Europe event information
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icm08 The Credit Management Convention
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Ever since the conference that Jacqui Smith and I organized in West Berlin (Ericsson & Smith, 1991) I have collaborated with several colleagues on the task of describing the structure and acquisition of expert performance. My work with Ralph Krampe and Clemens Tesch-Romer (Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Romer, 1993) on the acquisition of very high levels of music performance with expert violinists at the Berlin Music Academy, documented the effects of deliberate practice and outlined evidence on the mediating mechanisms. For a brief summary and description of the Acquisition of Expert Performance and how this is explained by Deliberate Practice
full text:

http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.exp.perf.html

more on Dr. K. Anders Ericsson: http://www.fsu.edu/indexTOFStory.html?lead.expert

http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Handbook-Expertise-Expert-Performance/dp/0521600812

“Successful people spontaneously do things differently from those individuals who stagnate. They have different practice histories. Elite performers engage in what we call “deliberate practice”–an effortful activity designed to improve individual target performance. There has to be some way they’re innovating in the way they do things.”

And his last advice:

“Successful people spontaneously do things differently.”

My last interview with K. Anders Ericsson, Professor of Psychology, Florida State University

Ericsson has spent 25 years interviewing and analyzing high-flying professionals. He’s the coeditor of the recent 918-page book Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2006), in which he says elite performers aren’t genetically superior. They just do things differently. He can explain in less than 900 pages, so I asked him to.

Is talent overrated?_”The traditional assumption is that people come into a professional domain, have similar experiences, and the only thing that’s different is their innate abilities. There’s little evidence to support this. With the exception of some sports, no characteristic of the brain or body constrains an individual from reaching an expert level.”

What do you have to do to become the best?_”Successful people spontaneously do things differently from those individuals who stagnate. They have different practice histories. Elite performers engage in what we call “deliberate practice”–an effortful activity designed to improve individual target performance. There has to be some way they’re innovating in the way they do things.”

Can you explain how deliberate practice works?_”Here’s a typical example: Medical diagnosticians see a patient once or twice, make an assessment in an effort to solve a particularly difficult case, and then they move on. They may never see him or her again. I recently interviewed a highly successful diagnostician who works very differently. He spends a lot of his own time checking up on his patients, taking extensive notes on what he’s thinking at the time of diagnosis, and checking back to see how accurate he is. This extra step he created gives him a significant advantage compared with his peers. It lets him better understand how and when he’s improving. In general, elite performers utilize some technique that typically isn’t well known or widely practiced.”

So does experience matter?_”Just because you’ve been walking for 55 years doesn’t mean you’re getting better at it. It’s very hard for older engineers, for example, to stay competitive with young engineers trained with new and improved methods. Those who are successful have to put in a lot of extra time to learn about these new methods. You have to seek out situations where you get feedback. It’s a myth that you get better when you just do the things you enjoy.”

This paper reports the results of a study in which the tacit knowledge of domain experts was elicited, represented, and analyzed for validity. The subjects were a group of instructors and students at a USPS training school whose memory structures were analyzed for evidence of two common characteristics of expertise: holistic perception and use of abstract concepts. No evidence of either characteristic was found in the more experienced instructor group but, when the subjects were regrouped based on observed performance, the cognitive models of the high performers contained structural evidence of both characteristics. This finding led to the conclusion that experience alone is not an indicator of expertise. Other factors, such as the cognitive ability to correctly structure those experiences, must also be present.

– An expert system is a computer program that simulates the judgement and behavior of a human or an organization that has expert knowledge and experience in a particular field. Typically, such a system contains a knowledge base containing accumulated experience and a set of rules for applying the knowledge base to each particular situation that is described to the program. Sophisticated expert systems can be enhanced with additions to the knowledge base or to the set of rules. Among the best-known expert systems have been those that play chess and that assist in medical diagnosis.

http://www.expertsystem.net/?lang=1

http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/html/expert.html

Expert Systems. The Journal of Knowledge Engineering:

http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0266-4720&site=1

Try The Academy of Experts, you won’t be disappointed!

http://www.academy-experts.org

http://www.excel-london.co.uk/en/visitors/whats_on/full_list.html

http://www.expertsearch.co.uk/

http://www.experts.com/

Stage 1: Discovery and interest
The path to expertise begins when you first discover your field. No doubt even Einstein had once never heard of physics, Mozart hadn’t played a note, and Tiger Woods had never held a golf club.

Most people who go on to become experts fall almost immediately in love with their field when they discover it.
This stage generally involves a level of obsession, and a strong desire to spend as much time as possible engaged in your new interest. However, usually work attempts are very amateurish at this point.

Stage 2: Early self-teaching
Initial interest and fun is followed by some motivated self-instruction. A golfer goes down to the local oval to hit a few balls, a pianist teaches herself simple songs, a software developer writes his first few programs. Confidence is gained and the depth of the field begins to open out in the mind.

Stage 3: Formal education
This stage involves more formal learning with a subject-matter expert expanding on the earlier knowledge. It’s extremely rare that anyone becomes an expert without some kind of formal education. This kind of coaching provides guidance, discipline and feedback that simply isn’t available through self-teaching. Here, the person’s skills will likely improve rapidly to a level of competence.

Stage 4: Humiliation
This occurs when the person first enters serious competition – the first attempt at getting a professional job, the first few tournaments, the first public recital. It’s in this environment where exposure to the cold-winds of comparison to those who’ve worked harder, longer and more seriously at the art occurs.

This is usually an extremely unpleasant experience, with the early joy of participation being replaced by humiliation. In every field there are people who gain real pleasure from destroying those who are below them in skill and experience. They like to expose them as imposters – not worthy to play on the same field.

Horrible as it is, this stage is very necessary. It acts as both a motivator and a reality check. It’s here that most people either leave their pursuit of improvement in the field altogether, or develop a fiery determination to beat those who’ve humiliated them.

Stage 5: Serious attempts at professional improvement
This is where the humiliation of stage 4 leads to serious work at self-improvement. A focus on the more professional rivals leads to hard work and conscious discipline on the bettering of skills.

Stage 6: The beating of local rivals
One thing I’ve found about those who like to do the humiliating in stage 4, is that usually they’re not as good as they appear to the amateur. At best, they generally rank among the low-level experts. Real experts usually don’t have the time or will to bother with hurting amateurs. Plus, they already know they’re good and don’t have to pick off easy prey to prove it.

Once you’ve reached this stage, you’re probably about average for a professional in your field. Maybe even a bit above average.

Stage 7: Youthful arrogance.
This stage came for me when I started to get paid really well as a software developer. I noticed that I was better at it than most of my peers – even those who were better trained than me. It seemed easy to look around and imagine I was the smartest person in the room.

I knew there were a lot of important things I didn’t know that much about, but I just assumed very few other people did either. I was the classic big fish in a small pond.

Stage 8: Reality check and crashing back down to Earth
This usually occurs when you stop playing with the fairly big boys (or girls) and start playing with the giants. Suddenly, you realize with a sick feeling that you’re nowhere near as smart as you thought you were.

Stage 9: Realizing that you’ll never come close to knowing everything
This is the stage I believe the vast majority of experts are at. They know enough to realize that they know virtually nothing. Sure, they’re way ahead of the average person in the street, but they’re a long way from true enlightenment.

I remember hearing a delightful story once about Alan Greenspan – who used to be the head of the Federal Reserve Bank in the US. He was a very highly respected economist and believed by many to be the best central banker in history. Mr Greenspan would apparently often ask recent economics graduates for their opinions and listen intently to the answers. He’d do so even in a room full of distinguished experts. It’s clear he realized he didn’t know everything, and that even someone of much lower status may be able to teach him something.

It’s at this stage you realize that expertise isn’t a destination, but a journey. A lifelong travel that will never be complete – no matter how fast you run.

www.pattiwood.net/

www.robertphipps.com/courses.html

The nationally recognized experts at the Institute are experts in expertise. In keeping with the tradition, these people must meet strict criteria regarding experience and training. All experts at the Institute are board certified in expertise. And, many are fellowship trained, adding an even higher level of experience.

Our experts are supported by a strong team of specialist support staff.

http://www.excel-london.co.uk/en/visitors/whats_on/full_list.html