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Google Project 10^100 Reaches Voting Phase
An anonymous reader writes "In autumn last year, Google announced Project 10 to the 100, through which it aimed to commit $10 million to implement the best philanthropic idea. The project was suspended indefinitely after receiving more than 150,000 submissions. Google has now announced sixteen finalists — each of which was inspired by many individual submissions — and issued a call for votes. The voting deadline is October 8 and the Project 10^100 advisory board will then select up to five ideas to be implemented."
Google's googol garnering a gaggle of generous gentlemen.
Why not promote Scroogle to the world?
A lot of those images in the idea montage were blatant "green gadgets".
This sort of thing certainly attracts attention and will probably pull the votes. Unfortunately.
The tax option looks interesting, but a little too in line with typical ideas of the conservative right in the United States to win my vote. Eliminating income tax and taxing consumption directly through sales tax would severely detriment lower income brackets and reward the affluent. The research on sales tax being more detrimental to lower income groups is pretty solid. I was actually surprised Google passed this idea through given its obvious politics.
The transportation option, on the other hand, while somewhat far-fetched, would revolutionize commerce and local economies if it were widely adopted.
Since all of the ideas are a bit of a long shot, I voted for what I would like to see in an ideal world. In addition, the idea of riding blimps to work is just too cool to pass up.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
It's good to see that google actually cares about what they throw their money at. Hey everybody, give us ideas on how to look philanthropic. And hey everybody vote on which idea we should care about. Philanthropists have a passion for what they do, they don't just give money to look good to the world!
ten million is chump change
I made an entry last year when the contest was open. It concerned a neglected problem that is ripe for better research. I am disappointed that the voting will choose among rather bland and general ideas. My original entry is available from my homepage, http://www.jimworthey.com/ .
What a bunch of lame ideas.
Many of them appeared to be: ...)
- Things that should already be done by well-defined organizations (usually governmental).
- Things that shouldn't be done (because the downsides, like creating databased of personal information that can be used to harm individuals, violate Franklin's rule: (He who trades freedom for safety
- Things that have proven cost-ineffective (such as public transport which, except in special circumstances, tends to cost far more per ride - in money, risk, and rider lifetime - than individual vehicles).
But a handfull of 'em did look useful, rather than just politically correct but probably counterproductive. (My pick: Free online educational materials.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Yeah, I thought a lot of these were of questionable "greater good," and seemed more like things that organized govt should be doing on its own anyhow. And a couple, like the Scientist one, that seemed odd and random.
I groked that the transportation one was more about developing new transportation technology. Which is the one that had the most potential, IMO.
There is not one single idea in that list that could have a significant global impact.
First of all, all the idea submitters are people that have internet access. Letâ(TM)s not forget that ONLY 24.7% of the WORLD has internet access. http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
This means that the people that really need help isn't heard on this 10^100 Project (75.3%)
So I wonâ(TM)t vote for this. or maybe I was expecting something else.
Like
1. Develop an accessible not fossil fuel dependant vehicle
2. Create an organization for exchange guns for [insert exchange here]
3. Offer developing countries support, with technology and money to invest in agriculture related projects
4. Create a free technology exchange portal, where countries can access for free
5. Destroy de Guantanamo Base
i don't know but nothing on that list, what do you think?, what coulld really change this world for the better?
I mean. If that is what 150000 people submitted to make this world better, we are DOOMED..
Now we know why there were sixteen finalists. It's 10^100 in binary (a.k.a. 2^4 in decimal).
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Is "http://www.project10tothe100.com/" actually associated with Google? The site looks phony. The "about" page is an off-site link to Google. The code contains links to "appspot.com", so Google is hosting an application, but that doesn't mean Google is behind it. There's suspicious Javascript that constructs a domain name. There's no SSL cert. The "robots.txt" file blocks everybody.
The domain is registered to Google, though. And it's registered through MarkMonitor. (MarkMonitor is the "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" domain registrar. They register domains like "gm.com", "google.com", "hp.com", and "ford.com".) That's the only indication of legitimacy on the site, though.
1) Obviously the point of investing in new public transport technologies is to improve them. You seem to be ruling out any potential technology that could be called "public transport" out-of-hand, which makes no sense
2) There's no reason public transport might not rely on individual vehicles. Heck, that's what taxis are.
3) There are economically viable public transportation systems all of the world, including the US (commerial air, for one). Dismissing them all as "special circumstances" is a loophole big enough for a double-decker bus.
4) I'd love to know what you were thinking when you said public transport is more risky.
Don't get me wrong, the bus service where I live is a huge time waste and I never ride it. That's why I'd love it if somebody invested in finding something better.
All these projects depend on the Make government more transparent. Without this one, the governments will limit all other projects. This is exactly the same reason why Lawrence Lessig is fighting corruption and not copyright problems. He was fighting people that couldn't hear him. So, I vote for it.
I consider Google a smart company.
But I don't think they have manage this project very well.
Instead of going trough 150000 suggestion and let the
public vote for 16 made-up projects.
They should have used the wisdom of the crowd to vote for the 150000 suggestions
and have the advisory board chose between the top 100.
What I would like to see is a open funding network.
Where people can post ideas like this, vote on there favorite projects
and where funds can find and support this projects.
ps. yes, I did submit this idea to 10^100.
It would have been better if they
The problem with Scroogle is, it removes the main reason why I used Google, a clean homepage.
How about using a blank page or your own image. I use a search engine for searches. Scroogle IS google without all the tracking & evil.
Sales taxes (and other consumption taxes) are regressive taxes. However, not all policies involving sales taxes are regressive. The simplest (perhaps not the best...) example of such is the FairTax proposal. It uses a combination of a flat sales tax rate with a constant dollar rebate to each consumer. The combination means that with increasing spending, a larger net fraction of your spending is on taxes. That is, it's a progressive sales tax.
Of course, the Google proposal also talks about various incentive taxes. Whether these are good or bad seems to depend mostly on whether you're calling them sin taxes or a way to internalize externalities so that the market can actually optimize overall wealth. Markets optimize locally; external costs of production that are borne by people other than the producers (like pollution) will be undervalued in the optimization process. Transferring those costs back onto the producer through taxes internalizes that externality and lets the market optimize the thing it should actually be optimizing.
A tax system that was actually based on setting goals, and then looking at data and evidence about what tax systems would actually achieve those goals, would be perhaps the biggest advance in government technology in centuries. Of course, it's also spectacularly idealistic and difficult to make work. But then, so are all the other ideas they list, so...
(I haven't actually decided which to cast my vote for yet, but the taxes proposal is on the short list.)
This one is the only one that will have the ability to make a LARGE impact. The reason is that America, Canada, Australia, etc use roughly 1/5 to 1/3 of our energy on transportation, EU uses something like 1/6, and the developing world, such as China, is really starting to move to cars. China is already the worlds largest polluter (emits more pollutions than the entire western world due to inefficiency) and their CO2 emissions (I do not count this as pollution) has already overtaken America and several other western nations COMBINED. If we do not come up with more efficient transportation systems, then the world really is in for "a world of hurt".
Basically, transportation truly can change the world quickly. All the other ones required lots from governments and that is not likely to happen.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
All concepts of the "good" are subjective and, consequently, "questionable", and most philanthropy is something that the people doing it would agree that organized government should be doing, but is not.
My vote was for social entrepreneurship; my filter words were "petty magnates".
I was disappointed by a number of the options, primarily because they would essentially establish more NGOs that relied, ultimately, on governmental action to make a difference (better tax structure, genocide awareness, etc); the same governments who have shown time and time again that they simply will not react to these problems, no matter how blatant the evidence. I chose social entrepreneurship because it is an outwardly distributed system. Rather than collect distributed resources and narrowing them towards a single focus, it will hopefully take a singular resource and deliver it into the hands of the many. Call it socialism if you want; I call it pragmatism.
Mod Points: Helping you keep your opinion to yourself.
The problem is we're only talking about $10m here. Far more money is already being put into alternative energy and transportation from other sources. I voted for free on-line education materials. If you don't feed the curious minds, there will be no one to develop alternative transportation.
Hell, you could use the $10m to kick start a bunch of bike sharing programs in various cities.
So, you made the New innovators, eh? And you say that the google ideas are bad. OBVIOUSLY, you did not read it. NONE OF THEM, were truly ideas. They are classes of ideas lumped together. Had you actually read the site, you would have seen the suggestions underneath it.
Next time, please read the site PRIOR to boosting and critizing. As it is, the google guys HAD a great idea AND HAVE made a MAJOR IMPACT on the world. In addition, they did it in a RELATIVELY SHORT TIME. So, how does their work compare to yours?
BTW, a number of VC guys thought that Google's idea was well worth funding for much more than 1.5Million.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Some americans have some pretty funny ideas about things which they don't have well implemented but work quite well elsewhere. Where the hell do you get these ideas about public transport? A car is in 99.9% of all cases more risky and more expensive for the owner. Of course you don't have as much freedom as with a car and, unless the place you're going to has no parking spots, a car will always be faster, but that doesn't mean one shouldn't have a good subway network.
"I decided I could write something better than everything out there in two weeks. And I was right." - Linus Torvalds
But a handfull of 'em did look useful, rather than just politically correct but probably counterproductive. (My pick: Free online educational materials.)
You're saying free online education materials would be counterproductive?
Anyway, that was my pick as well. I've heard the med school here for example typically uses really really old anatomy diagrams since almost anything else is copyrighted*, costs an arm and a leg (sorry), and med students refuse to spend over $10 on materials. And obviously anatomy hasn't changed much in the last hundred years, but it is disconcerting that copyright/trademark/etc* limit future doctors' education.
Not being a med student or anyone who deals with them, I don't know what that's all about, but this was coming from one of the anatomy professors, and that was before the UC system raised tuition.
It's been my experience that professors and staff rarely consider the cost of materials. Being online might not help matters though, I was in a class a few years ago in which an older version of the textbook was online. I found this out halfway through the course, the profesor didn't seem to be aware of that. Fortunately, my strategy of "procrastinate on buying the book" really helped me out there. It's sister strategy of "procrastinate on studying" really didn't, but that's another matter.
*copyright/ trademark / whatever, I don't care, you know what type of laws I'm talking about, and WANAL.
If the bus service near where you live is a waste of time that might be because you live in a place that can't be well-served by public transit. Public transit is efficient when it consolidates common trips, and can become convenient when trips are common enough for frequent service. With common trips into dense areas parking becomes a hassle, so driving is inconvenient and expensive also. Those things don't happen in areas without a focal downtown, or places that are quite dense. When I lived in Silicon Valley I almost never used public transit (exceptions being Caltrain to San Francisco, and taking the shuttle bus to San Jose airport because I'd rather walk the two miles to the bus stop than mess with airport traffic and parking). When I lived in Chicago I almost never drove (only when I needed to carry lots of stuff or go to the suburbs).
As far as changing the nature of public transit, there's always PRT... If you think Google, with no public works experience, will figure out PRT, you're high (although I wouldn't be surprised if they tried). Tons of money has been blown on studies, and it's resulted in one system that partially implements a very simplistic version of the concept: Morgantown, WV. Morgantown's half-PRT works more like a tram during busy periods anyway, because it couldn't handle the volume otherwise.
Originally, Google planned to select 100 finalists to choose from... the people who actually submitted their ideas. Now, with just 16 broad categories, its like the project has lost some of its impact. While Google always said they would ultimately choose the organization best fit to handle the ideas that won, I was looking forward to seeing all of the neat ideas that others put forth, as well as the potential of small-scale/individual projects being launched to a whole new level.
Of course, my opinion is probably biased due to not seeing my idea - The Global Voting System - as one of the finalists.
In the end, it is still nice to see powerful corporations pursuing philanthropic endeavors.
couple of thoughts, http://www.fairtax.org/PDF/FairTax-Fundamentals_and_facts-070122.pdf, "The FairTax lowers the lifetime tax burden for most Americans" page 2 "The FairTax preserves the overall progressivity of the federal tax burden." page 5 "The FairTax dramatically improves the U.S. economy. " page 7 also considering the prebate that gets added in, the lower end of the incom spectrum looks pretty good.
You're saying free online education materials would be counterproductive?
Nope. I'm saying that they'd be VERY productive and were the one I picked to vote for as the best of the lot.
(Though I must admit that doing PR for engineering to counter the anti-tech and anti-success bias drummed into the public school kids was also very attractive.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Um, what? The sales tax portion is flat. Everyone who goes into the store is charged the same rate. The sales tax itself is neither progressive nor regressive. There are other pieces added on that make the system as a whole progressive (the rebates, specifically, in the case of FairTax).
Some americans have some pretty funny ideas about things which they don't have well implemented but work quite well elsewhere. Where the hell do you get these ideas about public transport?
From lots of research.
The scale and layout of much of the US makes mass transit impractical. In some places (like post-fire Chicago and dense-rectangular-grid New York City) it does work - quite well. But in others (like the San Francisco Bay area) it does not. Even if the various agencies worked together rather than building little fiefdoms studies indicate that it would never approach the per-ride total cost of private cars.
In still others (like rural Nevada or even outside a dense city) it's a joke. To have practical mass transit you need masses of people in some places and masses of destinations in others.
A car is in 99.9% of all cases more risky and more expensive for the owner.
You're not counting things like muggers and gangs working bus and train lines or exposure to seasonal flu, TB, and other diseases among "risks", are you?
As for cost I'm not comparing the tax-subsidized fare paid by a rider. I'm talking the total cost of the construction and operation of the bus/train service divided by rides vs. total cost of ownership and operation of an automobile (including its share of road construction and maintenance where it's not double-counted due to gas/license taxation) divided by equivalent rides. Cars beat buses or trains by a factor of several, even if the latter use exisiting rail lines.
Indeed, here in the SF Bay area we have several bus lines where the per-ride cost is in the thousands. It would be cheaper to decommission the line and use the tax money to take each of the regular riders, lease them a Mercedes every year, provide enough gas to make the equivalent trips. As for BART the cars are non-standard, built in France, and cost six million each as of a decade ago. Divide the depreciation over the cars' lifetimes by the number of riders, add in the amortized cost of the land under the (non-standard-gauge) rails, the construction, and the operation. Cars come out 'WAY ahead - even paying the horrible bridge tolls that help subsidize the BART system.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I chose educational materials, too.
I pretty much agree with your criteria for throwing out an idea, though I would like to add another: Things that have already been done, or can be done easily. One idea sounded vaguely like Wikileaks, and another sounded a lot like Wikinews.
I mean, if an idea has been or can be implemented with existing software and a webserver, I see no need to throw $10 million at it.
The research on sales tax being more detrimental to lower income groups is pretty solid.
I find it rather doubtful that among the wide array of possible implementations of this idea that all are correlated to a negative impact on the poor, or that anyone has even attempted to offer research which would show this.
If you exempt food (my state already does), utilities, maybe a few other things (pointing out, too, that second hand goods are already tax free) I don't see how you can get any more "progressive" without explicitly paying people to be below the poverty line. Which, by the way, if you really wanted to do you could--adopting a more economy-friendly tax collection policy does not in any way prevent you from spending the proceeds on socialists programs.
I also wonder what it means when we talk about detrimenting the poor and rewarding the rich. The first half might be a concern, but I don't deduct points because someone else will benefit too, even if it's grossly disproportionate. If overall the poor get richer then that's progressive.
The tax option looks interesting, but a little too in line with typical ideas of the conservative right in the United States to win my vote.
Would you really consider not implementing an idea which would help the poor simply because you don't like who it originated from?
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Whatever happened to Google's second Android contest?
A collection of inspirational clichés. Made me think of the Miss America interviews.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
I picked "Free on-line educational materials" as well.
Just a rundown of some of the other ideas:
Build real-time, user-reported news service: We already have this, I believe many people call it "news bloging" and there are a variety of index services for it already. Oh, and the regular news is opinionated and one sided (depending on new outlet/reporter) enough
Drive innovation in public transport: That's going to take a lot more money to actually pull off. They argue that many people use methods of public transportation more than 100 years old, but that doesn't mean that newer technology isn't available already and simply hasn't been implemented in a lot of places. Furthermore, depending on location viable solutions would most likely be totally different, so even if they did pull off a "public transportation airship" it sounds doubtful it would be used in population dense areas where public transportation is most needed.
Work toward socially conscious tax policies: in what country? America? Go read the description - dose google have the political power to just implement one of their ideas as they feel? Is the 10^100 money going to just be used on lobbying?
Encourage positive media depictions of engineers and scientists: Wait, since when did we become not cool? I can't immediately recall any negative depictions of scientists in the news other than perhaps people who published fraudulent papers. My 3 year old son watches several cartoons which glorify scientists/engineers and one cartoon that is heavily based on chemistry (Element Hunter). And find one kid who doesn't think robots aren't awesome.
Create real-world issue reporting system: We already have this in Japan, at least where I live. There is a hotline and an online reporting system, and a web page with outstanding issues and when those issues will be attended to. To be honest I very very rarely use the system, and have never actually reported an issue because I have yet to encounter one. This is hands down something that government should do, but I have a feeling most places already do this but there just isn't a pretty AJAX enabled real-time interface with integrated bloging facilities and a tagging system all driven in the cloud. The thing is, if such an interface existed would it really make things better, or would the massive load of user data (complaints) just overload public officials and make the system more of a hindrance?
Out of 150,000 ideas I would have imagined there being much better than this.
Since the Google 10^100 contest has descended into obvious bullshit and has turned out to be a waste of time (silly us, thinking they were serious about this effort), I hereby propose that we use up Slashdot's storage and bandwidth by posting our rejected ideas here. My idea isn't anything special, but the rules were that it had to be done with a modest grant (I loved the ones about using VTOL aircraft and passenger airships, yeah, that sounds cheap). Anyway here is my idea:
After a severe or prolonged disaster most people will not have access to phones or internet, especially in poor areas, so re-connecting with loved ones is nearly impossible (think about all the missing persons posters after 9/11 and Katrina!) I therefore propose that we develop free software for use by NGO's, the Red Cross, and other volunteers which will quickly scan handwritten information forms, and upload them to an OCR back-end index and portal, hosted by Google. The blank forms will have a bar code -- the refugee returns to any connected terminal and scans or types the code to receive any information the indexing technology can find about loved ones. Any form that cannot be OCR'd will be posted on the internet in a "Mechanical Turk" arrangement so that volunteers can help index the data. A single laptop and inexpensive scanner connected via HAM radio, SatPhone, or CellPhone can easily process thousands of requests per day, which would be impossible if each refugee had to use the keyboard and navigate through a search site.
Blank forms will have language-selection tick boxes which match the country, plus a few major languages like English. If forms are not available, the software should accept regular paper and issue a unique serial number to the refugee which can be written down. There can also be a few "standard responses" like the Red Cross "Safe and Well List" website has (note that this website is useless unless each refugee has unfettered access to the Internet which is why my idea will re-unite families much more effectively). We could also establish a phone bank connected to volunteers.
I think the first stage should be to create an extensible communications spec, then write the code for PC's, then perhaps later design a solar-powered ruggedized appliance.
I didn't enter the contest, but I would have liked some entry that would involved altering world culture to promote a higher ethical code. This is such a vague concept but ever meet a kid who's parents constantly teach them what is right or wrong and why? This kinda of concept would encompass a culture change where societies would agree on common ethics and morals that transcend religions and cultures in the interest of advancing the spiritual state of mankind. Sounds goofy? Maybe it is.. but it can lead to many other ideas where there is common consensus and agreement and it can be backed by the beliefs of many instead of just a few. I do not mean any of this from a religious standpoint.. do you stop to help a fellow with a flat? Or do you just keep driving? Do you devote resources to feed a hungry city or do you just look the other way? Do you act with positive intent or do you act with anger and hate? Watching tv where every other show is about cops and violence.. its become obvious to me that the issues are in the culture.. (please note I did not include sex in that one, sex is gooooood very gooooood)
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
The participants had better be careful; if their entries - submitted to google, solicited by google - happen to redistribute trademarked Google property in any way such as names, logos, or interaction with google services, they'll just slap them with a Cease and Desist letter shortly after awarding the prize money.
Cherish. Live. Dream.
Specific suggestions include inexpensive village-based banking kiosks for developing countries;
No! If the game of Civilization taught us anything, we 'd rather need inexpensive village based stock exchanges with black jack! with blow and hookers! Seriously, look at the Wall Street, wait, no Las Vegas, wait, Amsterdam! Anyway, don't you want everyone in the world live that life?
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
Or lives in a place that is *underserved* by public transit - as is the case for many US cities.
There is an issue of critical mass with public transportation - gradual adoption doesn't make sense. Most people don't use it because they *can't* use it, because the routes are too few, inconvenient and unreliable to depend on them. But once you reach critical coverage on an area, and you don't have to wait >=1 hour for the bus anymore - things are *qualitatively* different and you have a chance to scale.
I understand your point that some places are too sparsely populated to make it cost effective. But the argument that you need a focal downtown and high density frankly doesn't make sense - many places in this planet don't match that description, and yet 'public' transportation is both omnipresent and effective far into the suburbs and small towns.
I put 'public' in quotes because often it is a mix of private and government-funded mass transit. When there is no public monopoly, it's often easier for small entrepeneurs to extend the official transit network into underserved areas at a smaller scale, for a small profit margin - since they don't have to deal with the politics (or the guarantees of service).
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
And be swamped with numerous problems, threatening it to be shut down
I suspect most of those in favour of Fair Tax and similar systems are the upper-middle class, who don't get benefits which the lower and lower-middle class get, but don't have enough to use income-hiding schemes or personal political favours.
If you consider the typical /.er, the person is likely to be under 30, have no children, and probably singe, with either a reasonably well-paid job or a good hope of getting one. This means that a good chunk of /.ers aren't going to get baby bonuses, joint-tax advantages, income support, and so on. This means that they aren't shilling, they're just acting in what they perceive to be their own benefit.
There is also perhaps a hope that a very simple tax system would make it harder for the top earners to avoid tax. For example, one common feature of flat tax schemes seems to be charging corporate and natural persons the same taxes, preventing the common (at least here) technique of having a one-man company contract out your services and then paying yourself a tiny fraction of that, dumping the rest into trusts or other tax-free structures. Whilst this is done by a large cross-section of society (it is common here for tradesmen to do this), knowing that there are multi-millionaires getting away with only paying 30% or so income tax is the sort of thing which leads to jealousy and resentment
Personally, I think that although these flat-tax schemes sound good for me personally, any actual implementation would probably be as bad or worse than the current system in practice, both for me and for society as a whole.
Would you really consider not implementing an idea which would help the poor simply because you don't like who it originated from?
Yes. NCLB was pushed from the right to help school children. Don't you want to help the school children? Well, it wasn't actually designed to help school children. It was designed to sabotage the public school system with unfunded mandates and lots of interference in local authority (the opposite of what Republicans claim they want, but when it comes to harming our children, they know no bounds). So yes, when they claim to do something that's the opposite of what they've done in the past, I will consider rejecting it because it's more likely, based on their past history, that they are lying in order to harm the very people they claim to be helping. After all, you know how to tell when a politician is lying...
Learn to love Alaska
I like the real world bug tracker option.
What kind of ads could you put on that... We see you're submitting a report about an aggravated robbery, have you ever considered bodyguards from Blackwater? You found some insider trading, maybe you need a new accounting firm!
OK, I know -- let's do nothing about anything, or better yet, tag it 'whatcouldpossiblygowrong' and then do nothing.
I hate this attitude on Slashdot: every initiative has to be met with skepticism or downright opposition.
And then people lament that our society is too risk-averse (see space exploration and 'risk of death' stickers on Segways).
I just realized I'd wasted my vote (see below) and was going to try to change it. The second time I loaded the list, the entries came in a different order. As obvious as that might be to me and other people here, you don't see it very often on the net.
Anyway. How did I waste my vote? I had voted for "Create real-world issue reporting system". Entirely my fault, I thought they wanted to create a bug tracker / issue tracker for real world issues. Nice idea, but it was all in my head, I hadn't read the details :-/
Ah well, wouldn't have worked the way I'd dreamed it, anyway.
CJ
Ah, arrogance and stupidity, all in the same package. How efficient of you. -- Londo Mollari
What a joke! On top of their very bad communication and challenge management, Google has a curious opinion on what will change and improve the world. There were different categories and it seems that only one has been retained (social, education). They have even not published a simple list of submitted project by categories. By the end of the submission period, they have blocked access to the original pages and now they have flushed their cache. Challenge categories: Community: How can we help connect people, build communities and protect unique cultures? Opportunity: How can we help people better provide for themselves and their families? Energy: How can we help move the world toward safe, clean, inexpensive energy? Environment: How can we help promote a cleaner and more sustainable global ecosystem? Health: How can we help individuals lead longer, healthier lives? Education: How can we help more people get more access to better education? Shelter: How can we help ensure that everyone has a safe place to live? Everything else: Sometimes the best ideas don't fit into any category at all. I'm now convinced that this game was setup by Google to grab or better to harvest ideas for free and take patents to make business. I invite everyone to monitor the patents issuing rate from Google since a few months and in the near future. As an example, I've submitted an online Energy meter at the beginning of the game and 4 months later the Google Power meter was published with exactly the same features. Very sad.
Those already exist:
http://ocw.mit.edu/
http://www.youtube.com/ucberkeley
http://www.google.com/search?q=tensor+calculus (or any other subject)
They could be organized a bit better though. Personally I wonder whether it would help if researchers were to edit wikipedia in their areas of expertise (citing their own published research). It could act as a hypertext, open access journal. It's ridiculous that at the moment, government funded research is locked away by journal publishes and can only be accessed by those who are either affiliated with universities, or willing to pay exorbitant fees.
there is no god but truth, and reality is its prophet
http://www.jimmyr.com/blog/1_Top_10_Universities_With_Free_Courses_Online.php
there is no god but truth, and reality is its prophet
Eliminating income tax and taxing consumption directly through sales tax would severely detriment lower income brackets and reward the affluent. The research on sales tax being more detrimental to lower income groups is pretty solid.
The simplest fix for this is to make food-and-drink groceries exempt from sales taxes. Since the proportion of money spent by people (on average) on food as their income increases, this simple action makes the whole system far more progressive. It's also pretty simple (and hence cheap) to implement. Or you could make all food and drink exempt, which is even easier to do and reduces complexities from working out whether food sold for immediate consumption is a grocery but has the cost of reducing overall tax income. (No idea which is better; I'm not an economist.)
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
I agree; most most of the ideas are worthy with some clearly appearing to be from existing lobbies. c.f. tax agenda.
In most cases the worthy causes have existing lobbies promoting them.
What we don't see is any body promoting a positive depiction and promotion of engineering and science, if anything what we see is a trend for dumbing down across society as a whole.
If most of the ideas are coming from existing lobbies with their own agenda perhaps the slashdot community should support our own agenda.
Most of the ideas are worthy, but I don't think any of them are truly inspired, you would think that with 150,000 people to choose from there would be 16 inspired & original ideas, but apparently not, unless the judges deliberately choose the least inspired.
As it happened I submitted an idea, which I though was cheap and potentially useful, though it never appeared it is at least original, simple and potential useful. When ever there are natural or man-made disasters you get notice boards where people post pictures of lost or found family members. It doesn't matter if the place was New Orleans or Mogadishu. Survivors trek around multiple random locations searching for family and friends. A simple Wiki like platform pre-installed, some ruggedised laptops with integral camera and satellite link up for use by aid workers during disaster relief operations. A few preprepared templates, lost person, found person, supplies needed, supplies available, mashed up with Google Maps. Search features.
Indeed. I was expecting some more concrete ideas to surface. Those generic frameworks just do not go hand in hand with the amount of funding. Meh, I think this initiative, although fundamentally good, turned out to be kind of fail.
I agree that short-distance public transportation[1] is largely an all or nothing proposition. It it does not have sufficient coverage, it is damn near worthless, except for a small number of people, who happen to frequently travel between two places served by the system. So if it is not fully implemented all at once, it ends up looking like it is a bad proposition.
For an example of a very nice transportation system consider London's Underground. No matter where you are, stops are only a few blocks away at most, The routes appear to have been planned for being relatively efficient in getting from any destination to another, requiring few train changes, and many major destinations require none. The lines are all identified by a unique name, and distinct color.[2]
The system was damned enjoyable to use, and I know if I lived in London, I would either not own a car, or own one only for trips outside of London. [3] Further, that is all based solely on the subway system, not considering the other parts of the system, like buses.
Unfortunately there is another problem with public transportation in the US. The US often has fairly low population density. Public transportation tends to work better in high population density areas. One of the obvious issues is greater cost due to the longer distances. Even if we consider only the Metro areas of the county, the United States tend to have lower poulation densities then the city sizes would imply. We seem to have cultivated a suburb culture, in which significant commutes between the suburbs and city are common. The problem here is that suburbs low population denisty make it difficult to provide good coverage. In many suburbs it would just not be economical to have a subway stop every a few city-block-distances, for example. The further appart the stops are placed, the further people need to walk, and a distance of more than a few city-block-distances becomes immpractical to walk.
It is reasonable to have many bus stops in the suburbs, but it would not be economical to have buses arrive every 10 minutes or so. In many areas the frequency would be every hour or worse. That is also a problem. If the timing of the bus happens to be off a bit too much (taking it would cause you to be 15 minutes late to work, for example), you would need to take the previous bus, which could effectively add nearly an hour of wasted time (not traveling) to you commute. That makes it much less useful.
[1] Long distance public transportation, such as airlines can need less coverage to be useful.
[2] All too many subway systems use numbers or letters, which are harder to remember, and have multiple lines re-use the same color for some weird reason.
[3] Even if public transportation can get me to my destination, depending on that destination, there might not be sufficient public transportation at my destination to move around to where I want.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
Name me a few places with low density and no focal downtown where public transit is effective. The San Jose/Silicon Valley area has a lot of buses and even a light-rail system but it's not very effective (the rail system, in particular, has very poor ridership and thus recovers only a tiny portion of its costs from the fare box).
The only places I know of where public transit for daily commuter use extends far into suburbs is when it carries people from those suburbs to a downtown area. Metra in Chicago goes out to the fringe of the suburbs. At those distances there aren't stops within walking distance of everyone's house, but many people drive to the station and take the train downtown. This only works because downtown is very dense. Tons of people are employed within walking distance of each downtown Metra station.
I don't think you need both high density and a focal downtown, but you do need one of those things. Without a focal downtown a grid of buses (or streetcars, perhaps, but I think buses have major advantages) could be a good general-purpose transit system, but to have a tight bus grid with frequently running buses you need lots of trips to fund it -- you need high density. There are some special-purpose mass transit systems in areas that don't fit those descriptions. There are Pace bus routes in the Chicago suburbs that specifically serve suburban UPS complexes and large industrial parks, perhaps picking up at a transit-accessible place like a local commuter rail station.
All pretty useless.
Living in Africa, one of the biggest problems is corruption.
Corruption removes funds from coffers that assist people and businesses. Corruption destroys the free market and prevents the most effective or efficient businesses from succeeding.
One of the keys to Africa will be sustainable living. With such huge divides between the "haves" and "have nots", corruption grows through envy and family preservation.
Logic might follow that today we are rich, tomorrow and tomorrow we might not have a job, therefore take as much as we can because - we can.
When society is balanced and prosperous, all boats rise. I cannot say that any of the ideas tackle sustainable living for the "current government employees".
The closest is "better education".
4) I'd love to know what you were thinking when you said public transport is more risky.
I may be wrong but I think he meant that plenty of people get mugged or stabbed on buses and trains.
I don't think he was talking about the small risk of getting blown up on an airplane.
Basically, that sums up half the ideas.
Too bad people can't realize what Africa needs are better thinkers, philosophers and politicians, or ways to prevent those from fleeing elsewhere.
Many of them appeared to be:
Things that should already be done by well-defined organizations (usually governmental).
Of course, this depends on your view of government. Some believe that government should do the minimum possible. If that's the case, then the government shouldn't be doing most of them, with a couple obvious exceptions (I'm looking at you, government transparency). Personally, though, I agree with you. Any time there's an investment to be made in which the overall benefit is greater than the cost by a certain margin, the government would have the responsibility to ensure that investment is made. Please note I said benefit and not profit, which is the reason the private sector wouldn't get involved. There would, though, be obvious limitations as to where civil liberties and freedoms are involved.
But then I realized the cable was blue, so I only gave it one star. I hate blue.
Half the clips in that video dealt with alternative energy sources (wave, wind, etc), yet there is no such category to vote on??
Um what, indeed.
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/103213_taxstudy08.shtml
Sales taxes are regressive because there is a minimum amount of consumption everyone must do to live, and it affects a higher percentage of a poor person's income than a rich person's.
Consider: a person making $1000 a month who pays $100 in sales tax on groceries, clothes, and other living necessities versus a person making $8000 a month buying the same groceries and clothes.
Alternately, consider the whole policy, rather than simply the tax half of it. The rebate half of it matters too, which is the point of the proposal and what I've been trying to say.
Consider a person making $1000/mo who pays $100/mo in taxes and receives a $100/mo rebate, for a net tax rate of 0%. Now consider someone making $8000/mo who pays $400/mo in taxes (it's unreasonable to assume they don't spend *any* more; feel free to adjust that $400 number up or down a bit, though) and receives the same $100/mo rebate. They pay a net $300/$8000 = 3.75% tax rate. The overall tax policy is progressive with respect to spending, and also income (though less so, because spending doesn't rise quite as rapidly as income). You can adjust the rate and rebate values to match your desired total revenue and level of progressiveness / regressiveness.
Unfortunately, with only two degrees of freedom, you can't also adjust the curvature of the system; that's the basis for the argument that FairTax disproportionately hurts the middle class. We can adjust the numbers to get the line in the right place at the ends, but what we really wanted was a curve. That's where the various credits and exemptions come in; choose them carefully, and they have a different impact variation with income, and the result curves about the way you want too. Of course, this step is much harder and prone to pet projects and political agendas.