I saw Daniel Pipes speak once at my university and he spent a lot of his speech going on and on about how we need to reach out to moderate Muslims, yet when it was opened up for questions after his speech, he was incredibly verbally hostile to every Muslim who asked him a question. I know many of the Muslims who asked him questions and they were largely all very moderate, apolitical and with a very modern interpretation of Islam. At the end he was just downright hostile towards the entire audience, even turning off many of the conservatives in the room.
What Daniel Pipes really is a hack writer and pundit for the establishment. His role is to lay an ideological foundation for US foreign policy that is already being carried out. His father was one of the main hawks against Stalinist Eastern Block style Communism during the 60's. He makes a living creating "boogeyman" stereotypes of the people who resist the imposition of neo-liberal economic policies and foreign meddling.
The fact that he runs a group that systematically harasses left leaning university professors in the United States only adds to the fact that he is a rightwing political opportunist who profits off of demonizing cultures and creating racist stereotypes. His group Campus Watch specializes in taking anonymous unsubstantiated claims of conservative students who are upset over their grade. He's not a legitimate academic and has no place in the culture of discussion that academia should be. If all he did was just advance a position, no matter how much I disagreed with it, that would be fine; but intimidating and harassing one's political opponents is not free speech.
Wasn't part of the plot of "The Day The Earth Stood Still" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043456/ that Gort, the giant robot, was actually an intergalactic law enforcement agent with the task of seeking out interplanetary violence and eliminating it?
Seems to me that this article is actually trying to set out an approach to build a similar group of robots.
I still don't think this is that great an idea in the greater scheme of things. I was an engineer on a college autonomous robotics project http://mdrc.rit.edu/igvc and our robots, which tended to have tank treads and weigh 500+ pounds, did have a tendency to try to attack us if we left out semi-colons in its code (its default state seemed to be set to kill).
This is another example of capitalism's drive to de-skill the work force. Having lots of highly skilled and highly paid surgeons on staff is a drag to the enterprising HMO's bottom line. Instead the HMO-run hospital of the future will have one or two surgery programmers on call at any one time, being asked to program dozens of surgeries in one day. The modern surgeon will end up just like many machinists did when lathes and mills went CNC, out of work with an obsolete skill (but way more school loans).
The idea of some surgeon in the future programming dozens of surgery robots in one day scares me. Especially if he programs the way I do, copy-paste past bits of code from old projects, but often forgetting to update little things here and there until after the 37th compile. At my engineering job all to often people copy-paste bits from other project's schematics, but miss some part they need to update to make it actually work with the project at hand (thank god we do probably about 15 peer reviews and have field change orders). What if the surgeon is programming an operation and forgets to take out an unnecessary step?
My experience working for a few months as a medical equipment repair tech is that most medical equipment is programmed to shut down if anything is perceived to be out of safe parameters and then get a service call from a tech to check it out. So does this mean that we look forward to surgery robots freezing up in the middle of a surgery while the surgery robot programmer is out on lunch and the nurses are stuck on hold with tech support?
20 years in the future this technology won't be used to improve surgeries in places with few skilled surgeons, but rather to cut labor costs in our metropolitan hospitals. I for one welcome our future robot bean counting overlords and their robot surgeon counterparts.
As a recent college grad with a degree in Electrical Engineering (from a tech centered university) I'm calling bullshit on this whole premise.
There is probably more competition today in schools than before. Video games, such as FPSs are all about competition. Mandatory standardized testing is all about competition. Kids who want to get out of low income environments are forced to compete at even higher stakes than ever before as social mobility becomes less and less possible. The competition around middle school kids competing for the attention of college sports scouts, the tech minded kids competing for science prizes and honor society slots.
On the point about kids not working, I don't know where you live, but even in the wealthy suburbs around NYC that I grew up in most high school kids had after school and summer jobs. I worked as a theater tech doing load ins/outs (6 hour days on weekdays during school and 16+ hour days on non-school days) and paid for private university out of pocket. More than half of my college friends majoring in technical fields had to drop out or take time off due to financial issues, even while working and taking classes full time.
The reasons less kids are entering tech fields is related to several things.
1) Corporations are shifting more of their high-tech R&D to other countries because PhD researchers in Asia cost less than PhD researchers in the US. It also makes sense for these companies to locate their R&D facilities near their manufacturing centers for product development cycle issues.
If there are less high-tech R&D or engineering jobs here than why get a degree in that field.
2) Schools are woefully under funded. They don't attract the same talent they used to. You need a masters degree to teach (which costs a lot more to get) and with the crumbling infrastructure around you, why bother? I'd rather see bake sales for stealth bombers than just to buy 20 new books for the school library.
3) Tech fields require a sizeable amount of education, heavy in math and science, which a lot of kids have missing foundational concepts in from their lackluster schooling. I made it to college with a very poor understanding of trig (and I was in AP Calc my senior year of high school), which led to my doing poorly in math related classes for several years until the underlying issue of the trig was addressed. Tech educations are also incredibly expensive (4 years at $25,000 a year, plus a masters or a PE license). Why bother when you can major in business and party on weekends (as opposed to living tied to a work station churning out stupid graphs about resistor tolerances for a lab due 8am Monday)
4) Lack of jobs. Most of my friends who are recent grads have major problems finding work. Especially my friends with CS or CE degrees (even an honors student who co-oped at AMD) have problems finding jobs, because the few companies in that are hiring in the US in these fields don't want to spend the investment in these kids to make them experienced employees. Instead they'd rather steal skilled employees from another company. I'm working as an electrical designer for a state engineering design agency because I know that my job will never be outsourced to another country. With Dept. of Corrections as our only client agency with any money for basic infrastructure maintenance, the cycle of deteriorating infrastructure continues.
If you want to change this dynamic it starts by changing this country's priorities and spending our nation's wealth on investing in our future and not bombing poor brown people half way around the world.
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I saw Daniel Pipes speak once at my university and he spent a lot of his speech going on and on about how we need to reach out to moderate Muslims, yet when it was opened up for questions after his speech, he was incredibly verbally hostile to every Muslim who asked him a question. I know many of the Muslims who asked him questions and they were largely all very moderate, apolitical and with a very modern interpretation of Islam. At the end he was just downright hostile towards the entire audience, even turning off many of the conservatives in the room.
What Daniel Pipes really is a hack writer and pundit for the establishment. His role is to lay an ideological foundation for US foreign policy that is already being carried out. His father was one of the main hawks against Stalinist Eastern Block style Communism during the 60's. He makes a living creating "boogeyman" stereotypes of the people who resist the imposition of neo-liberal economic policies and foreign meddling.
The fact that he runs a group that systematically harasses left leaning university professors in the United States only adds to the fact that he is a rightwing political opportunist who profits off of demonizing cultures and creating racist stereotypes. His group Campus Watch specializes in taking anonymous unsubstantiated claims of conservative students who are upset over their grade. He's not a legitimate academic and has no place in the culture of discussion that academia should be. If all he did was just advance a position, no matter how much I disagreed with it, that would be fine; but intimidating and harassing one's political opponents is not free speech.
Wasn't part of the plot of "The Day The Earth Stood Still" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043456/ that Gort, the giant robot, was actually an intergalactic law enforcement agent with the task of seeking out interplanetary violence and eliminating it?
Seems to me that this article is actually trying to set out an approach to build a similar group of robots.
I still don't think this is that great an idea in the greater scheme of things. I was an engineer on a college autonomous robotics project http://mdrc.rit.edu/igvc and our robots, which tended to have tank treads and weigh 500+ pounds, did have a tendency to try to attack us if we left out semi-colons in its code (its default state seemed to be set to kill).
This is another example of capitalism's drive to de-skill the work force. Having lots of highly skilled and highly paid surgeons on staff is a drag to the enterprising HMO's bottom line. Instead the HMO-run hospital of the future will have one or two surgery programmers on call at any one time, being asked to program dozens of surgeries in one day. The modern surgeon will end up just like many machinists did when lathes and mills went CNC, out of work with an obsolete skill (but way more school loans).
The idea of some surgeon in the future programming dozens of surgery robots in one day scares me. Especially if he programs the way I do, copy-paste past bits of code from old projects, but often forgetting to update little things here and there until after the 37th compile. At my engineering job all to often people copy-paste bits from other project's schematics, but miss some part they need to update to make it actually work with the project at hand (thank god we do probably about 15 peer reviews and have field change orders). What if the surgeon is programming an operation and forgets to take out an unnecessary step?
My experience working for a few months as a medical equipment repair tech is that most medical equipment is programmed to shut down if anything is perceived to be out of safe parameters and then get a service call from a tech to check it out. So does this mean that we look forward to surgery robots freezing up in the middle of a surgery while the surgery robot programmer is out on lunch and the nurses are stuck on hold with tech support?
20 years in the future this technology won't be used to improve surgeries in places with few skilled surgeons, but rather to cut labor costs in our metropolitan hospitals. I for one welcome our future robot bean counting overlords and their robot surgeon counterparts.
As a recent college grad with a degree in Electrical Engineering (from a tech centered university) I'm calling bullshit on this whole premise.
There is probably more competition today in schools than before. Video games, such as FPSs are all about competition. Mandatory standardized testing is all about competition. Kids who want to get out of low income environments are forced to compete at even higher stakes than ever before as social mobility becomes less and less possible. The competition around middle school kids competing for the attention of college sports scouts, the tech minded kids competing for science prizes and honor society slots.
On the point about kids not working, I don't know where you live, but even in the wealthy suburbs around NYC that I grew up in most high school kids had after school and summer jobs. I worked as a theater tech doing load ins/outs (6 hour days on weekdays during school and 16+ hour days on non-school days) and paid for private university out of pocket. More than half of my college friends majoring in technical fields had to drop out or take time off due to financial issues, even while working and taking classes full time.
The reasons less kids are entering tech fields is related to several things.
1) Corporations are shifting more of their high-tech R&D to other countries because PhD researchers in Asia cost less than PhD researchers in the US. It also makes sense for these companies to locate their R&D facilities near their manufacturing centers for product development cycle issues. If there are less high-tech R&D or engineering jobs here than why get a degree in that field.
2) Schools are woefully under funded. They don't attract the same talent they used to. You need a masters degree to teach (which costs a lot more to get) and with the crumbling infrastructure around you, why bother? I'd rather see bake sales for stealth bombers than just to buy 20 new books for the school library.
3) Tech fields require a sizeable amount of education, heavy in math and science, which a lot of kids have missing foundational concepts in from their lackluster schooling. I made it to college with a very poor understanding of trig (and I was in AP Calc my senior year of high school), which led to my doing poorly in math related classes for several years until the underlying issue of the trig was addressed. Tech educations are also incredibly expensive (4 years at $25,000 a year, plus a masters or a PE license). Why bother when you can major in business and party on weekends (as opposed to living tied to a work station churning out stupid graphs about resistor tolerances for a lab due 8am Monday)
4) Lack of jobs. Most of my friends who are recent grads have major problems finding work. Especially my friends with CS or CE degrees (even an honors student who co-oped at AMD) have problems finding jobs, because the few companies in that are hiring in the US in these fields don't want to spend the investment in these kids to make them experienced employees. Instead they'd rather steal skilled employees from another company. I'm working as an electrical designer for a state engineering design agency because I know that my job will never be outsourced to another country. With Dept. of Corrections as our only client agency with any money for basic infrastructure maintenance, the cycle of deteriorating infrastructure continues.
If you want to change this dynamic it starts by changing this country's priorities and spending our nation's wealth on investing in our future and not bombing poor brown people half way around the world.