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ThinkCycle: Solving World Problems With A Cluster of Brains
eaglemoon writes: "ThinkCycle is an MIT Media Lab project to apply SETI@Home principles to design problems for underserved communities. Only, intead of donating spare cpu cycles, you donate spare 'think cycles.' Their aim is to build a community of designers, inventors and innovators that want to collaborate on developing novel solutions to some what intractable problems like clean water access , cholera treatment and appropriate shelters. Their aim is to encourage an "open source" ethos for tough design and technology challenges."
A beowolf cluster of these?
:)
Sorry just had to
That should probably be 'apply SETI@Home principles to design challenges." If the communites are underserved, they have enough problems already without designing more.
Wait. What is that called where people do things without some tangible benefit for themselves?
Communism?
No.
Communitarianism? Maybe.
Oh yeah...That was an episode of Star Trek Hoe could I forget?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, simulate.
"....a community of designers, inventors and innovators that want to collaborate on developing novel solutions..." The community has already been establised, it's called the Open Source community!
you will be providing the lazy-boys w/ a hole cut out of the head rest, as well as the necessary implants to the back of my head where a spiky-thingy can be shoved, right? and for the hardcore there is always the "donate some spare electricity" version complete with plexiglass goo-bucket and full interface including "liquified dead" being "intraveneously fed" into my blood stream?
cool
My life in the land of the rising sun.
In preparation for being slashdotted, they have already posted a mirror site link.
maybe they should think about adding more server capacity!
sulli
RTFJ.
Google cache
Also, a news article
The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. -Einstein
intead of donating spare cpu cycles, you donate spare 'think cycles.'
This is such a great idea, but why not also donate the use of spare CPU cycles also! Why not use this "open source ethos" for CPU power as well?
------
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Let a bunch of crazies loose solving the worlds problems with solutions such as this one for lack of clean water access - simply stick a hose on the tail pipe of one of those hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and follow it around with a jug, or maybe the whole waterworld thing.
No seriously enough I think this is a wonderful idea, when I was in elementary school and junior high school our gifted class was a part of a program entitled "Future Problem Solvers of America" We would work on problems very much like the examples listed in this article. And I must say that for a bunch of 3rd-9th graders we did damn good and came up with a bunch of absolutely brilliant ideas. Now apply this over a group of people 10,000 times the size and of a wider age group and I'm sure that some of the ideas will be absolutely revolutionary and of a most cutting edge nature, and yes I'm sure there will be some crazies, but it's never the bad ideas that are remembered or discussed, it's always the brilliant ones, I think the guys over at MIT are on a very productive track with this idea, and I hope enough people get involved to really make a go of it.
...problems is more CPU.
-- SIGFPE
Now that's an opportunity to set up brainforge.net ala sourceforge.net
According to a press agent for Microsoft, MIT's project "ThinkCycle" is nothing more than a smoke screen for anti-capitalistic "Viral Thinking". Microsoft has long established thinking is best done for multinational corporations that are engaged in the accumulation of capital. Thinking outside of the confines of a corporation with a group is nothing more than anti-capitalism. Projects seeking to provide clean water and the treatment of cholera are just pretty window dressing of this Anti-American activity.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Think of the possibility for a literate and numerate president in the The White House .
So this is a wonderful idea..
I somehow do not see this working. Of course I'd be happy to be proved wrong, but how do they plan
on breaking these big, complex, problems up into manageble pieces?
How can they make all these peoples ideas work together without it all turning into a watered-
down compromise-type idea without any edge?
I, for one will be interested in seeing the
results of this experiment..
His infant son recently passed away from SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) and he's been enlisting people who've got some spare time to throw it at creating a baby monitor that can be used to collect statistics so in time, that information can be used to determine what symptoms cause SIDS. So far he's gotten tons of responses.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Sorry, but any "spare cycles" my brain has are going towards figuring out how I'm gonna pay my bills in this piss-poor economy.
an overgrown newsgroup. Or a benevolent (now that's mind boggling) Slashdot.
;)), but more often than not ideas get thrown around online pretty quick and easily...and then nothing comes of them.
The primary problem with anything like this is going to be the fact that just like in Usenet, people - valuable, vital people - will move on due to lost interest, changes in their lives, and the fact that anything like this started over the net tends to die off pretty quickly.
There are exceptions notably some software projects (What I can't imagine
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
Looking at it this way, this system is simply a clearinghouse for problems people find interesting. If people work to break these big problems into manageable and concrete pieces, then these little pieces may be perfect for undergraduate or even graduate students to work on. I know that such a clearinghouse would be very valuable in mathematics. I've always imagined that such a thing would exist before too long for the mathematical community, and this would be a good thing.
The main reason that I think this would be a good thing is that for a young researcher starting out, one has to spend a lot of time understanding the big picture of a certian field, and generating good open problem on one's own. Such a system could bring the problems to the researchers more quickly. This could speed the process up by quite a bit. Such a thing sort of exists already, in the form of preprint servers, and I'm sure there's more to come! What doesn't really exist now is such a "big picture" fremework in a public domain, IMHO.
Come on, give it up, that's
If they can get this to work on a large scale, they may have found the first step towards Utopia. Unfortunately, you'll probably just get a segment of geeks working on this stuff.
Now if they just make the next project "novel ways to remove people who don't help us from the gene pool"
Now that they've reinvented the scientific method, maybe they can reinvent some much needed things like the wheel and fire.
This proposal is just how Baconian scientific research has always existed. So what if this group, among many others, starts working on clean water and other standard-of-living improvements. There's nothing innovative about the proposal at all.
As I was watching The Matrix this kinda thing is what I thought they were farming. Boy was I disappointed with the whole battery thing.
--
"Instead of getting married again, I'm going to find a woman I don't like and just give her a
house." -Steven Seagal
"Their aim is to encourage an "open source" ethos for tough design and technology challenges."
Redesign the wheel and tell the underserved community members to RTFM if they have a problem using the redesigned wheel?
[o]_O
A lot of problems in third world development and disaster relief are not cash-limited, they're brain limited: we really do not know the best ways of treating epidemics in places without any decent high tech infrastructure, for example. Innovative ideas and approaches help: I've seen structures at Burning Man which were a lot better for their purpose than yer average disaster relief tent.
I think opening the design process up to the widest possible collaboration and really encouraging people to follow through could make a difference: kinda like the Simputer project may: a diversity of minds, of approaches, may be the best way to help the poor and the starving.
We can't wait for government to feed the people, you know? Too big, too slow. It's up to us. And it always has been - this is just one more way to help.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
-sorry, i have no brain cycles/cells to give. I have been having fun with mine and there all but gone. "click click"
Some of the problems in handling this approach is that unlike the SETI, etc. way of doing things, where a client goes out, grabs a chunk of data to be worked on, then sends the resultant data back to the server, each of these social/governance problems *aren't* a mathmatical formula. You can't just apply the same formulae to every problem. There is no "right" way to do it.
/. postings on "getting in the zone"]. This means that while people may not be thinking about work during their lunch hour, they will have a difficult time getting back to thinking about work when they are done [or getting into the mindset of whatever problem needs to be solved]
Computers are also good at multitasking, whereas humans [aside from life-functions] have for the most part, a single tasking thought processes. It also takes people a non-trivial amount of time to context switch [see various
Human filter. Again, unlike the SETI idea, a human needs to filter all the resultant data, as by definition, new ways of solving problems don't fit into a previously known idea. say you do get several thousand people working on this project, the resultant data will be huge, *and* every human filter will filter the information in their own way, there is no "control".
That being said, new ideas come from all around us. Who knows what this experiment can yield.
.
Blocklevel: Practical Information Architecture
The only solution is the natural solution. Don't offer charity or feed. Allow the population to stabilize to a number that will be able to subsist on its own resources. At this point, nature will be in balance. Yes there will be some small inconvenience to the native population at first, but in the long haul, a society in balance with its own ecosystem is the only truly healthy and secure society.
Attack The Of Clones versus the Digital Copyright Millenium Act: the battle to see how many /.ers can get it wrong.
Too often we tend to see the world in terms of technology (as in computers). Open source has alot to offer the "digital divide" but this fails to consider that in many places of the world you have to overcome the "sewage divide" and "electicity divide" before you can even have a digital one. I think an "Open Source" type solution is a good idea for providing for the more basic needs of poor countries.
As an example of this, I was in Haiti on vacation in December (I hate relaxing vacations...I can relax at work) and it is quite amazing how much human time and energy is spent just keeping clean, getting drinkable water, cooking, in a place where the population doesn't have access to plumbing or electricity. I figured it would be about 3 to 4 extra hours of work each day...time that cannot be spent at another job, learning to read or just having time enough to consider your own existance.
Selling fresh produce for extra cash is difficult becuase of poverty of your potential customers and lack of refrigeration limits the time that it can be sold, cooking it requires getting charcoal from a vendor (this is why Haiti is deforested), raw sewage on the streets makes whatever food that is cooked still risky (in this suburb of Cap Hatien the tallest structure in town was a two story pile of dried sewage in the middle of the street.)
Clearly something needs to be done, and all the other plans have always had contracts, agreements and treaties tied in that equalled that only a few people would profit from a "project" but the situation of the general population would remain unchanged. I hope engineers, earth scientist and botanists get involved in this.
Given that the devil in most large systems is in the number of inter-dependencies, not the complexity of any one given component, not having everyone involved relatively close in meatspace is going to make re-constituting a total solution based on the individual component solutions quite difficult indeed.
<mandatory-lcs-grad-rip-on-the-media-lab>
But atleast this project is has more societal value than some of the other a virtual dog that you can pet.
</mandatory-lcs-grad-rip-on-the-media-lab >
... perhaps they should try to solve the problem of slashdotted websites ...
The opinons expressed are those of the voices in the author's head and are not necessarily those of the author.
Remember innovation is 99% persperation, and 1% insperation. Looks like they are focusing on the 1%, and assuming that the rest will take care of itself.
I don't have all the answers, but I do know that these third world areas are in desperate need of people to do some work. Someone to come in and create a stable goverment (that will not starve opponents). Teachers to show them how to think. There is a total glut in the food market. (The US could easially supply all the world's nutrirtion needs if people would be willing to live food that doesn't taste good)
AIDS is a large problem in Africa. We don't have a cure, but we know how to prevent the spread. However most goverments in Africa are doing little to prevent the spread. (In fact some are actively doing things to cause more cases - at least in groups they don't like) We could use a cure, but until there is a cure, we don't need more non-biologists thinking about AIDS (where they are unlikely to make progress), but we could use those same people in Africa teaching people how to prevent aids. Of course if you actually go to Africa you will soon discover that other problems need to be solved before the AIDS problem can be solved.
We don't need more thinkers, we need more doers. That is much harder. I can go home tonight and think about a methane digester that can be used in a mud hit. I can't go to a village and build them after work tonight.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those.....
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these...
Doesn't seem to be much information there. Of course, since the first team on the list is the Houston Energy, perhaps they have gone the way of Enron?
--
E_NOSIG
You break the problem down into economic, social, technical, political sorts of categories. SO one group(social) might be focused on what the people need, say they figure out the most pressing need is fresh water. Ok, we need the water, the economic group figures out how much can be afforded, or how to raise the money, the technical group designs the pumps, and the political group talks the local governemnts into allowin this to happen. some of these coud be done concurrently, some might have to go in a particualr order, but this is the easy part.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
From what I understand MENSA was created with the same idea, the brightest people solving the worlds problems. Unfortunatly as it has turned out to be more of a status symbol demonstrating how smart you are. Still if this does do what it's supposed to it could be very effective,there is no limit of brilliant ideas floating around out there but what is required is a dedicated group of people to apply effective implementations. A group of dedicated intelligent volunteers may just be able to do this (it's worked with open source).
I stole this Sig
If this works, which I hope it does, it will be one heck of a job sorting through all the ideas and organising them. A lot of people come up with good ideas for things like this, weeding them out and deciding which ones are feasable, and then which ones to use, will be a huge task.
Although seriously, it's not all that amazing an idea, I think it will amount to actually listening to the ideas of all the people who think about these types of issues. Most people that have an interest in these issues have ideas about how they would fix them, this may just be giving them direction in getting those ideas to people who might use them. (I'm not knocking the concept, it's great, just seems like it should have beeen more obvious)
In other news, a number of American corporations are filing a suit claiming that this new theory of 'amature thining' will almost surely infringe on their intellectual property.
Science may someday discover what faith has always known.
Yeah, put 100 creative minds together and let them work out solutions to a problem. Out of 100, you'd have:
3 working toward a solution
12 working toward a solution to a completely unrelated problem
4 pissed off that Americans don't share their Eurocentric point of view
9 having goat sex
12 calling each other nazis
and the rest just lurking.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
All your brains are belong to us...
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Imagine:
-> COPC - Cancer Open Source Comuinty
-> AOP - AIDS Open Source
Now God have to open the source for us!!
Microsoft = God, because don't open the source for us!
lol
United Devices along with Intel have designed a clustering program where they use PCs from finding a cure to cancer to modeling the climate..
Only thing that sucks is that they don't have a linux distribution available.. yet
"The ones who dont do anything are always the ones who try to pull you down" -- Henry Rollins
All of society's most complex and vexing problems, convenienty broken down into small, manageable chunks so that millions of individuals would each be able to derive a little personal gain from voluntarily solving some small aspect of the big picture and all of them could come together to build complex and beneficial systems for all mankind!
Why, that would be GREAT!!
I have a name for it, too: we'll call it: Capitalism!
Let's say someone has a brilliant idea for waste water treatment. How is ThinkCycle going to test that that idea works? It can't just run a computation or ask a bunch of random people to verify the idea. You need to build a pilot and try it out. Well, the mechanisms for evaluating what ideas work and what ideas don't already exist, and they are already distributed: publications, peer review, libraries, conferences, symposia, citation statistics, recommendations, talks, etc. The mechanisms by which you do cooperative problem solving already exist, and they have existed for hundreds of years. They are the mechanism by which we collaborate in science, technology, engineering, and the economy. And there has been very active research in supporting them with computers, through groupware, electronic communications, and many other means.
As for the site itself, it looks to me like a fairly regular groupware site. It's nice that someone set up a groupware site to discuss these topics. I find it somehwat ironic, though, that a site which writes "Open Source Design" on its banner has so many DOC and PPT files.
seti@home works because they know exactly what needs to be done and exactly how to do it. They just need more CPU cycles to actually carry out the well-defined well-understood steps.
That's not true for the kind of problems being discussed here. How do you split the problem of, say, clean water access, into a bunch of little chunks that just require someone to think about in their spare time? It seems to me that to do that, you have to already know how to solve the problem!
The Mythical Man-Month by Fred somebody-or-other explained years ago how the effectiveness of a team goes up (or perhaps even down) much less than linearly as new members are added.
If we were ants living on a Rubik's cube, differential geometry would be a little more confusing.
There seem quite a few people concerned about it not working because problems will be too complex. Two cases that this could be so suited too. Both effective yet so simple. 1 - the clockwork radio. 2- The guy that recenbtly realised that if you put one pot inside another, fill the gap with wet sand, the evaporation of the water makes it act as a crude fridge. The idea is now sweeping across africa & co. In both cases, the execution is so simple it was the original idea that eluded everybody. This is the sort of thing that ThinkCycle could achieve.
Too many visionaries and too little "workers" will cause internal squabbling and infighting.
You need one visionary with a veritable dictatorship over an idea, and bunch of hard workers that do as they're told. This is how Linux is successful.
If you start assembling all the smartest people to try to agree on one thing, they will come up with so many great ideas and they will all think they are right, and it will just stymie the entire effort.
Instead of sitting around thinking of ideas, go get off your ass and DO SOMETHING. An attempted but failed idea is much more important than a whole bunch of great ideas that never get implemented.
"Wow, imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!"
We now return you to your regularly scheduled Slashdot.
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
I wanted to get this comment out quickly and then elaborate on it later...
Anyway, wasn't there a project to harness the world's brain power in terms of foreign language? What better way than to ask a French native about French sentences?
It was something along the lines of an agent sitting on the desktop, prepared with the languages the user is proficient in... When there's an incoming question (of the appropriate language, of course), a dialog box notifies the user that someone is in need of translation. Like all distributed networks, for error checking and such, the question goes out to more than one person, to prevent faulty translations or provide a more rich meaning.
Hey, how many slashdotters took Latin in school... =)
"Only, intead of donating spare cpu cycles, you donate spare 'think cycles'."
:)
Judging from the fact that their site crumpled within the first five minutes of slashdotting, I'm betting they'd rather have CPU cycles for at least another few hours.
This tagline is umop apisdn.
Too much cleanliness may be a problem. As some think
There are many philosiphers who long for a simpliler life. Of course many of the latter are not willing to actually give up the benifits of our modern life to get the benifits.
Anyone who works on these tasks should keep in mind that not everything that can be done for worse off people is a good idea. I can't answer the philisophical questions (at least not in a way that will convince anyone). I don't have the medical answers. However I do know to keep them in mind.
Using some spare brain cycles to figure out how to keep the webserver from getting slashdotted?
... that is only part of the problem. A bigger problem is the lack of stable governments that look after their people as opposed to oppressing them for the greed of a few. Hatred, greed, desire for power and factional fighting are the primary reasons we have impoverished nations.
An infection also fits the other symptoms, such as fluid in the lungs, which asphyxiation does not fit.
ShouldExist is a Scoop community website for people who have innovative ideas to donate. Know-How Wiki is a community website for people who have problems to solve, or who have advice to give on how to solve them. Any kind of problem, really.
This sounds like the infinite monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters solution to the worlds problems.
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
Nuf said. But this reminds me of a book called Earthweb by Marc Stiegler. The basic premise is that something is looking to destroy everything and everybody on Earth by sending giant Deathstar-like ships chalk full of weapondry to do the job (minus the planet killing beam). Since frontal assualts are useless against this thing (5th in a series), covert ops have the job of destroying the ship from the inside.
.25 cents could add up given how much some of these spam clearing houses pump out...
Anyway, while the squad makes onsite decisions how to destroy the ship, the entire population, linked via web, also contributes via point casts. Ideas are submitted via monitary involvement (if I remeber right), thus ensuring people aren't just spamming with ideas. Put up or shut up, in otherwords. Eventially some ideas gain popularity as the populations votes and a commander makes the decision on how to proceed. The ideas that made the most difference in the battle were given large cash awards. Sounded kinda like the topic at any rate. Even if "Aliens want to destroy the Earth" isn't your fare, Earthweb deals with some interesting social dynamics.
Another interesting concept was being able to charge people for sending you email. That sure as hell would cut down on spamming if you could charge any amount you desired for people to send you a message. Even
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Think BIG!
http://www.startribune.com/stories/535/2832884.ht
There are a lot of people working on such problems. ThinkCycle or something like that might help them coordinate more.
Of course, the classic popular reading for this field is the "The Ugly American".
what part of "society's most complex and vexing problems" is solved by the creation of the 'singing big-mouth bass'?
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
And it's Just Plain Wrong (tm). Remember Tesla's response to Edison: If Mr. Edison thought more, he wouldn't sweat as much.
...because I'm heavily reminded of Marc Siegler's nifty SF novel Earthweb . I commend it to everyone's attention for its depiction of the functioning of "idea futures" markets. (Contrary to an earlier troller, a very capitalistic idea.)
The reason that progress is that not only do they have to solve the problem, they have to convince the controlling 95% of the gov't and general population that are generally self-serving, short sighted, idiots that they have a solution and that the pay off, will be quick enough that everyone can benefit in thier lifetime.
There is a reason that so many of the greatest idea take so long to come to existance. It's not the 'discovery' it's the politics and greed.
This is not the way to help people. This is nerds playing make-believe, pretending to solve the problems of the desperately poor by sitting their fat soda-and-pizza-bloated asses on plush upholstered chairs in air conditioned buildings, fantasizing before their keyboards about how they are going to become famous by saving the planet. Don't buy into the communal dillusion.
Check out the "Featured Topic" which is "Household Water Treatment Systems". They propose to invent a portable water treatement system.
The technology is ALREADY HERE. WTF !! Microporous filters, anitparasitics, carbon filters. This stuff has been around for decades, and their great "idea" is to invent something that you can order in any of at least a dozen different models from any outdoor store in the US. This stuff has been continuously re-engineered and the design refined over decades. Its massed produced and the market is extremely comepetitive. I dont' care if you are an MIT student, you can't just pull portable water filter technology out of your ass. And you can not produce it anywhere nearly as cheaply as you can buy it off the shelf.
Pop Quiz: People trapped in desperately poor, brutally oppressive countries need the following:
A- One hundred years of benevolent colonialism.
B- Citizenship in any western country and one-way tickets.
C- Food, water and medical treatment.
D- An airlift of portable water filters from campmor.com
E- Any of the above.
F- Ignorant do-gooders planning to invent stuff that already exists.
It basically amounts to arrogance and laziness. Typical elitist academic attitude "We are so smart we need to tell you relief workers, suffering horrible conditions, voluntarily risking your lives in these shithole countries to push back the wretchedness, how to do your job better. From indoors, between games of Quake, unless the Dominoes is here yet.
It's just disgusting that they are trying to take credit.
Sounds great if you think about it like some kind of infamous beowulf cluster of these...
Then you'd have CPU_Power(N)~Sigma(i, 1, N, CPU_Power(i)) which is ~ N*CPU_Power(1) if all CPUs have the same power.
Unfortunately, it is well known that IQ != CPU_Power, in fact, estimations are:
IQ(N) ~ Min(i, 1, N, IQ(i))/N
which is, the intellectual quotient of a group of n individuals is about the inltelectual quotient of the dumbest member divided by the number of participants.
Reminds me of a despair.com poster "Idiocy" ("never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups")
Expect Monty Python's solutions to world problems
I personally think we should tap into the unused power of the brains of coma patients. They could solve the worlds problems and not even know they were doing it.
Sure, you would have the PETCP (People for the Ethical Treatment of Coma Patients) whining about how we are exploiting innocent people for their "think cycles" but c'mon; are they really going to be using them anyway?
They could be monitored from home and their progress tracked on a graph via the web. Aunt betty could say, "Billy has completed 5,000,000 SETI units this week. I'm so proud. Glad we didn't pull the plug!"
... the only problem is that ThinkCycle has been implemented already in a more effective manner: it's called volunteerism. No, it dosen't have fancy buzzwords like "distributed brainpower" or "open-source", but it has already proven it's success for centuries across many continents. People have been part of "distributed efforts" working on some of the world's larger problems by volunteering internationally, for the United Nations, or in their own communities. I have to say that Thinkcycle has their hearts in the right place, but good people with expertise have already thought of a more effective, old-fashioned implementation. Want global interconnectivity for using spare brain-cycles of professionals on far-away problems? Medecins Sans Frontières and Engineers Without Borders have been consulting like this for years with amazing technologies such as the 'telephone' and through 'mail' and even on the 'internet'
I just tried to get to www.thinkcycle.com, and got 'Server Busy' nice touch guys :-)
Why should he mention that?
The whole point of the post was to illustrate that others are already attempting the pooling of human thought, not the showcase of SIDS. SIDS was only the example.
Reminds me of decision markets. Caught this link from a presentation by Vernor Vinge:
decisionmarkets.pdf
The proposition in the article is that we waste our time trying to solve things we already pay the governments to solve, without the prizes of freedom (you'll still live under a DMCA/DRM world and won't be able to chop George Bush with an axe no matter how many children you save or how many epidemics your work avoids).
I'm still for the good old-fashioned plain Anarchy.
fnord
Scarcity of good ideas and good intentions is not the problem. What is rare is implementation. It's nice that people want to do good, but many do-gooders have a very limited capacity for managing a project to completion.
Another thing I don't see here is an incentive to cooperate. Most contributors will assume that their own aproach to cholera or low-income housing is The Right Way. If they cooperate with other people, they risk having to work on some other approach, and losing their proper recognition as The Prophet of The Right Way.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
This reminds me about my own project called "free individuals society". A thinking cluster of all citizens in Europe or perhaps the whole world. Of course it's everbodys private decission to join or not. But it should be possible for anyone to join. The goal of the project was to trying to solve the big and complex questions of the future and report the result back to our politicians. The only reason to locate it in Europe, was that the dark European history needs some kind of peace project. A supercluster of Linux computers and a high capacity connection could make us clustering our brains, intelligense and souls and perhaps the result could solve the big questions of the future. A thinking cluster for the future! I hope that my idea some day become a reality because our governments and politicians needs help (No doubt about that...) The real world is beginning to look very unfriendly and Internet is our only choice. A large supercluster of free humans working together trying to make a better world or find a better home seems like a exellent idea.I called it "free individuals society"-Europe-Planet Earth. But unfortunatly politicians and people in Sweden starts to look very strange at me when i talk about my dream. But i am just a stupid propellerhead from the swedish cuntryside. I have a house...a wife...two kids...two friends...a modem...no work...no money...But i have something else...i have a dream!
Speak for yourself. Sorry, but darwin wasn't all that.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
So far he's gotten tons of responses.
Tons?
What's the mass of an average response?
And is that short tons or long tons?
YES,
How about the ultimate practical Joke?
Place their brains into something kind of like
the Aibo while they are out of it.
Just imagine their surprise when they wake up!
Either that or a new Reality show on MTV,
"The Coma World" Oh wait, they already have that.........
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
...thinking doesn't parallelize well.
and notably, exactly the problems that do
parallelize well are the ones we can solve
more efficiently with computers.
the killer app for human brains
is distributed I/O - not distributed
processing. example: slashdot
The problems listed are not the result of lack of means to fix them, it is lack of political will to let them be fixed.
Democracies don't have famines. Countries with a free press don't have warlord/election troubles. Capitalist regions don't have pandemics.
The third world is in such a mess because the people "in charge" in these countries would not be "in charge" if these problems were fixed. A well fed, educated nation will eventually overthrow a dictator, so he will use hunger and ignorance as a weapon. UN food supplies? Heh.
So, instead of using these "think cycles" to "solve" these easily solvable problem, how about using our brains and energies to export freedom, democracy, law, and knowledge to other peoples, and not tolerate despotic thugs.
Hey Zimbabwe, I think you here us knocking! And were coming in!
Donut
In "Mostly Harmless", Arthur Dent realizes:
"He had been extremely chastened to realise that although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and armagnac he didn't, by himself, know how any of it worked. He couldn't do it. Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster."
I'd bet this would describe 90% of us. So, just as a curiosity, what simple inventions would a small village need?
how come it wasn't thought up by hundreds of collaborating geniuses?
It's already been done:
http://www.halfbakery.com
should they just use something like everything to get a large brain/idea dump of stuff? they could have a bunch of "posts" which are just basically a list of problems to be fixed and a slashdot-style comment and moderation system and people can post their comments and moderate, only they might want to give only certain people the ability to moderate. or even if they don't want to give people moderation and just have the comments and go through them all since they seem to just be looking for ideas. i think that would be pretty cool and it would allow people who wouldn't normally get their ideas out in the open to speak their minds. if they want to get stuff done, they'd listen to the masses rather than the select few "experts".
please me, have no regrets.
It'll take this "cluster of brains" 2 years to develop an EULA for their results. It'll be so hard to understand, that only 2 people (and all lab mice) can read and understand it.
Matrix II teaser in divx5.0
I'd have to consider myself the equivalent of somewhere between a high end SGI machine and a Cray-1. (I've had 3 IQ tests done, and they've come back as 143, 163, or 167. The 163 was from iqtest.com and the other two were done by competent proctors.) I tend to have lots of MIPS but no I/O.
Someone like Stephen Hawking would obviously be ASCI White. The average person would probably be a typical x86 machine. Most of the people I have to deal with are C64s... sorry, didn't mean to insult the C64 like that.
o/~ All God's children shall be free in Pirates of the Caribbean, when we reach that Magic Kingdom in the sky... o/~
I dont think so Not that word 9 is not a good web page creator, but just for decency they should try to encourage the use of software comming from people sharing the same kind of ideas, The Open Source Comunity
I'm positive, don't belive me look at my karma
Democracies don't have famines.
India has no starving people?
Don't underestimate people!
Don't assume Africa is full of people unable to help themselves given the opportunity. What is missing in many regions is education, and information. The New Scientist has some interesting material in the last 4 issues concerning these matters - with innovative use of basic technologies such as Radio / street plays / print conveying information that can be used locally to improve quality of life greatly.
You don't need a cure to fight AIDS in most regions - you need education. FOr the past 20 years the majority of the developing world has been unaware that AIDS is sexually transmitted. Make this known, and you reduce infection rates. Simple. The questions changes from how do we cure AIDS, to how to we communicate the FACTS about AIDS.
Those are questions currently being dealt with by charity health workers - I reckon a random selection of guys in the pub could come up with better ideas (at least, NEW ideas which would be worth testing).
This IS a great idea. I'd play!
Mmmmmmm.... Liquified Dead - Homer Simpson
way back when you were a sprog ...