... you probably lose your scientific career soon enough (sadly). http://philip.greenspun.com/ca... "This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead. Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias."
Having a successful and informative experiment may sometime even end your career sooner than failing in an ideologically approved way: http://disciplinedminds.tripod... "In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline." The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy."
Part of the reason why: https://www.its.caltech.edu/~d... "By now, in the 1990's, the situation has changed dramatically. With the Cold War over, National Security is rapidly losing its appeal as a means of generating support for scientific research. There are those who argue that research is essential for our economic future, but the managers of the economy know better. The great corporations have decided that central research laboratories were not such a good idea after all. Many of the national laboratories have lost their missions and have not found new ones. The economy has gradually transformed from manufacturing to service, and service industries like banking and insurance don't support much scientific research. To make matters worse, the country is almost 5 trillion dollars in debt, and scientific research is among the few items of discretionary spending left in the national budget. There is much wringing of hands about impending shortages of trained scientific talent to ensure the Nation's future competitiveness, especially since by now other countries have been restored to economic and scientific vigor, but in fact, jobs are scarce for recent graduates. Finally, it should be clear by now that with more than half the kids in America already going to college, academic expansion is finished forever....
Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one
Maybe your ex-boss also understood some of the ideas in Tom DeMarco's book "Slack"?
"Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency" https://www.amazon.com/Slack-G... "If your companyâ(TM)s goal is to become fast, responsive, and agile, more efficiency is not the answer--you need more slack.
Why is it that todayâ(TM)s superefficient organizations are ailing? Tom DeMarco, a leading management consultant to both Fortune 500 and up-and-coming companies, reveals a counterintuitive principle that explains why efficiency efforts can slow a company down. That principle is the value of slack, the degree of freedom in a company that allows it to change. Implementing slack could be as simple as adding an assistant to a department and letting high-priced talent spend less time at the photocopier and more time making key decisions, or it could mean designing workloads that allow people room to think, innovate, and reinvent themselves. It means embracing risk, eliminating fear, and knowing when to go slow. Slack allows for change, fosters creativity, promotes quality, and, above all, produces growth.
With an approach that works for new- and old-economy companies alike, this revolutionary handbook debunks commonly held assumptions about real-world management, and gives you and your company a brand-new model for achieving and maintaining true effectiveness."
I bought one of those, but I'm having trouble getting a disk drive so I can pull data off old diskettes while I still can... Lucky you to still have one that works!
To build on your point on TensorFlow, and that of an AC earlier on videos being unconstitutional, there are no closed captions on this Gallaudet video for someone who is Visually Impaired to use via text-to-speech to understand the details of all the images in this video: https://media.gallaudet.edu/embed/secure/iframe/entryId/1_f513jwxu/uiConfId/33370581
That video is linked from here: http://www.gallaudet.edu/
So, Gallaudet has not made that video accessible to blind users. Gallaudet is thus in violation of the ADA with their own self-promotion video. How can such a university express such careless disregard for the special needs of visually impaired people? For shame! For shame!! (and I'm not joking here)
Even worse, Gallaudet has no "alt" "title" or "longdesc" tag on at least some images, like here (first page picked at random): http://www.gallaudet.edu/about/planning-for-the-future
There should be at least several paragraphs there explaining the picture includes five people, what they are wearing, their postures, the color of the carpet, what is written on the whiteboards, and so on.
Sue! Sue!! Sue!!! (again, I'm not joking here, given a lawsuit seems to be what Gallaudet employees seem to think is required to make websites ADA-compliant and better for all)
What they should be doing at the very least: http://accessibility.psu.edu/images/imageshtml/
Here is an example where they do have an alt tag and title: https://my.gallaudet.edu/
<img src="/Asset/00007795/Symposium1.jpg" alt="Department of Interpretation to host symposium, summit, March 29-April 2, 2017" title="Department of Interpretation to host symposium, summit, March 29-April 2, 2017">
But, the tags don't describe the contents of the image! So, like automated Google close captioning of videos they are inadequate for a blind person to fully know what is in the picture!
That is the image with about one hundred people in it: https://my.gallaudet.edu/Asset/00007795/Symposium1.jpg
Why are those people all not described in detail including what the are wearing and where they are sitting? Why is the architecture not described of the lecture hall? Why is the image being projected in the lecture not described? Inadequate! Until someone good at expository writing skills spends at least a few hours describing that picture, it should not be allowed on the Gallaudet web site. Same for every other image on that website. Accessible to all -- or none, according to the DOJ and Gallaudet!
This is the worst sort of hypocrisy.
Using the DOJ logic, Gallaudet's website should be made inaccessible to the public until these are fixed and/or Gallaudet should pay millions of dollars in fines to any visually impaired users victimized by this inability to learn more about what goes on at a university specifically for the deaf and hard of hearing.
Or, if Gallaudet had put their website under a free license, then at least people could make new versions on their own that were more fully accessible. But I see no such license on their pages.
(That said, I feel Gallaudet, like Berkeley, is otherwise doing a great job should get lots more support from lots of sources to help make the university and the rest of the world better for people with hearing impairments -- or other disabilities.)
If a work is under a Creative Commons / Free / Libre / Open Source license, then others can incrementally improve it to be accessible. Forcing the original author or publisher to do so themselves ignores the value of sharing works that others can make better.
It also makes me wonder about a culture of victimhood instead of a culture of agency. I say that prompted in part by the request for monetary *damages* by the plaintiffs for not being able to access the content in the form they preferred (compared to hiring someone to transform it for them) which to me seems to show bad intent. People offer free materials you are not required to interact with but they are not good enough for you for some reason so you are a victim. While *legally* the plaintiffs may have a case as the ADA law is written in the DOJ's view, the result feels morally wrong considering the works were free (and many others charge for such works) -- especially compared to the plaintiffs just saying thank you and improving the free works themselves or hiring others to do so or finding volunteers or philanthropists to help with that.
That said, I remain sympathetic to the request to make materials more accessible to those with disabilities or any other limitation in accessing the content (including things like language barriers). This is a wealthy planet with also a lot of people looking for work to do -- and so globally we should have plenty of resources to improve free resources as needed for people with any sort of special needs. That we choose to spend those resources instead by planning to blow everyone up using nuclear energy to fight over obsolete oil fields and such is a tragedy of modern times. As is the irony of using solar panels to ensure launch readiness at the nuclear missile silos...
More on this: https://www.insidehighered.com... http://www.adatitleiii.com/tag... "The DOJ concluded that many of UC Berkeley's online videos did not have proper closed captions, and has threatened to file an enforcement lawsuit against the school unless it agrees to enter into a consent decree, caption all of its online content, and pay damages to individuals with disabilities who had been injured by UC Berkeley's failure to provide accessible online videos.... The DOJ's position in its findings letter to UC Berkeley -- that a covered entity has a duty to ensure that content that it makes available to the public free of charge is accessible -- certainly pushes the boundaries of the ADA and has not been tested in the courts. If covered entities must in fact ensure that all of the information that they put out for the world to use for free (no matter how remotely related to their central mission) or face lawsuits and DOJ investigations, there may well be a significant reduction in the amount of information provided on the web for public consumption."
There is not necessarily an adaptive value to intelligence in a certain niche -- because intelligence has power, mass, heat-dissipation, and time costs. For example, consider the Hydra, which is a tiny multi-tentacled aquatic creature that lives off of stinging smaller organisms like Daphnia and pulling them into its body cavity. It has a simple neural net it uses to coordinate its feeding behavior. Why doesn't the hydra have a brain the size of a human? That may sound like a stupid question, but bear with me. The Hydra could not support the energy required to operate a brain from its current feeding behavior. It could not protect the brain from predators. Its mobility would be impaired by being attached to a brain that large. It would be unable to reproduce as quickly. Also, the value of a human-sized brain to a hydra is minimal, because there would be little the brain could accomplish using the Hydra's few microscopic tentacles, limited sensory apparatus (no eyes, no ears) and limited mobility choices. Further, the Hydra must react instantly in its tiny world, and a big brain would take too long to process the information. So, for the Hydra, a large brain makes no sense.
There are aquatic creatures with brains as big or large than human brains (dolphins or whales) but they have a very different ecological niche and a totally different scale and physical structure. And there are a lot fewer whales and dolphins than Hydra in the universe....
What might this mean in a human sense? Perhaps human brains are the size they are because there isn't too much value in being that much smarter because the cost of the additional intelligence is outweighed by the diminishing returns of additional predictive value. For example, some studies show earlier types of human-like creatures like the Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon had a larger brain size than present-day humans....
The precis you posted, which is otherwise technical and advanced, is using a technical term "evolution" as it is colloquially often (mis)used to mean "progress". The two are not the same. And frankly, what is "progress" for one may be "decay" for another, just as what is "good" for one may be "evil" for another, as these have to do with individual goals which may conflict. This weakens your entire argument.
I might go a step further. Because of your essentially "religious" belief based on a limited view of evolutionary theory, you are ignoring the obvious issues relating to the [diminishing] returns of intelligence, or the adaptive value of "dumber" organisms. Thus, as I pointed out in an earlier email to you, when you talk of downloading a human-derived AI into a network, you ignore the fact that that large intelligence may not be able to compete effectively in the network, in the same way as if one grafted a human brain onto a tiny Hydra and threw it into a lake it would not survive. What organisms do survive in a lake? Many, many tiny things. Maybe a few fish. But the largest number are tiny things like bacteria, algae, Daphnia and Hydra. By analogy, most of the digital organisms in a large network will be tiny, and they might rapidly consume larger creatures or parasitize them. Obviously, you can get big fish in a lake -- but their numbers are small compared to the numbers of other smaller organisms.
Because you have been heavily rewarded in your life for being intelligent in various ways, the value of being unintelligent (or differently intelligent) is probably a difficult concept to wrestle with (as it was for me, and as I think it would be for most thinkers). Ironically, both my wife and I didn't finish our PhDs in E&E in large part becaus
http://schoolsucksproject.com/... "Now come back to the present while I demonstrate that the identical trust placed in ordinary people two hundred years ago still survives where it suits managers of our economy to allow it. Consider the art of driving, which I learned at the age of eleven. Without everybody behind the wheel, our sort of economy would be impossible, so everybody is there, IQ notwithstanding. With less than thirty hours of combined training and experience, a hundred million people are allowed access to vehicular weapons more lethal than pistols or rifles. Turned loose without a teacher, so to speak. Why does our government make such presumptions of competence, placing nearly unqualified trust in drivers, while it maintains such a tight grip on near-monopoly state schooling?...
It should strike you at once that our unstated official assumptions about human nature are dead wrong. Nearly all people are competent and responsible; universal motoring proves that. The efficiency of motor vehicles as terrorist instruments would have written a tragic record long ago if people were inclined to terrorism. But almost all auto mishaps are accidents, and while there are seemingly a lot of those, the actual fraction of mishaps, when held up against the stupendous number of possibilities for mishap, is quite small. I know it's difficult to accept this because the spectre of global terrorism is a favorite cover story of governments, but the truth is substantially different from the tale the public is sold...."
by Larry Enright: https://sites.google.com/site/... https://www.amazon.com/Jennife... "In 2096, Deever MacClendon creates Jennifer, the first proto-conscious cybernetic processor. It is hyper-intelligent, aware, and evolving. Deever wants to use his creation for the good of all, to help fix a broken world, but knowing what a powerful weapon it could be in the wrong hands, he hides it. When his secret is uncovered, he is forced to plunge into a high-tech morass of deception and treachery to avoid catastrophe and save a world where humans are no longer the most intelligent species."
Supposedly Trump would be as welthy or wealthier if he had just put his inherited money in an index fund: http://www.celebritynetworth.c... "Depending on which figures you use, if he had taken that $40 million and put it in a simple index fund, he'd have about $3.4 billion in the summer of 2015 (not counting investment fees and taxes), which is in the same neighborhood as what he's worth now [assuming his public claims are accurate]"
Of course, that probably would have been boring to Trump...
Back in 2009 I started an email thread on "the psychopath as peer" on the p2presearch list, and here was a most insightful and cautionary comment by Andy Robinson about using the term "psychopath" to describe anyone (including, in this case, Trump) which amplifies on your concern about indirect diagnosis and labelling: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net...
From: Andy Robinson Mon Nov 2 16:17:58 CET 2009
I'd be careful with these kinds of classificatory schemas for other reasons as well - they have a history of complicity in regimes of regimentation and control, as ways of pathologising difference. While I'd be the first to endorse the idea that there are real kinds of neurological difference in cases such as autism and possibly schizophrenia, I'm sceptical of the idea that real differences can be deduced simply by creating checklists of "behaviours" or subjective stances. Most often it is a matter of old men with beards sitting round in smoke-filled rooms deciding arbitrarily which "behaviours" or subjective dispositions will be classified as "abnormal" and hence included on these lists - hence the inclusion of such things as homosexuality. We are never far away from the world of Soviet and Chinese designations of dissidents as mad - and there have been cases of this kind in Britain and Holland too. Today we have another sinister development in Britain of the use of psychiatric testing to jail people "indefinitely" (for life) for middle-level offences, on the grounds of the supposed risk they pose. I actually know someone who had to argue with her psychiatrist to avoid being classified as a psychopath (presumably she means ASPD?) on the grounds of her political support for property damage in some circumstances. Psychiatry mobilised as system of control - the opposite of what it should be doing, which is protecting difference from persecution through assumptions of sameness. A full recognition of the radicality of psychological difference has drastic effects for ethical theory and jurisprudence, amounting to an effective suspension of judgement due to incommensurability of difference and intangible effects of unjust context - something recognised in historic ideas of *mens rea*, but increasingly resisted today.
The historical construction of the "psychopath" is problematic, because it is clear from the studies of the "London Monster" that the *figure* of the psychopath in popular imaginations precedes the actual emergence of serial attackers of this particular kind. Also that the emergence of this figure is closely connected to the rise of modernity and the alienated city in praticular. Of course, the biological determinists will then revise the historical record to attempt to reinterpret earlier instances of mass-murder in the same terms - but the discursive status was quite different. Anyway - it is clear that the social fears of the random stranger without social ties, who will behave in a "predatory" way, arises from the disintegration of social density in the modern city and the increasing frequency of contact with people with whom one has no particular affinity or specific relation. Hence the fear that such a person might be
Can't say it was especially useful though as far as I took it. It did dice rolls. I think I included a module that did random dungeon generation and also random treasure generation based on what was in the Gamma World DM guide. I don't think it distracted much -- except a personal computer back then like a PET took up a lot of table space.
Kind of miss those Commodore days...
I had donated my Commodore equipment to my local school district long ago.
I tried a few months back to order a Commodore diskette drive from an Amazon vendor to get stuff like that off of old floppies to but the drive never showed up and I got a refund... Still hoping to come across a working one someday somewhere... Or maybe I will try again to get one through Amazon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "Realtime Interrupt is a 1995 science fiction novel by James P. Hogan set in a near-future Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. It tells the story of Joe Corrigan, who awakens in a Pittsburgh hospital without memory. As director of the supersecret Oz Project, he had worked on a virtual reality software project, and as he slowly recalls his past, he sets out on a quest to pick up the pieces of his past life. He discovers that the virtual reality is still going on [(spoiler) and he is trapped in it for reasons of corporate greed]."
Preceeded by his "Entoverse" in 1991: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "(spoilers) The Jevlenese move JEVEX [a huge supercomputer] to the planet of Uttan so that their researchers can increase its power without the knowledge of the Thuriens. Unknown to both parties, a pocket universe forms within JEVEX, the Entoverse. Some of its sapient inhabitants ("Ents") who go by the title of ayatollahs devise the ability to pass over to the original universe by taking over the minds of the Jevlenese [when they use headsets to work or play in virtual reality]. The Thuriens begin to trust the Jevlenese and contract them with the task of observing human civilization. Still driven by hatred of their old rivals, the Jevlenese set about hindering human progress."
But another comment mentions Simulacron-3 (1964).
I had also read a non-virtual-reality similar story (the simulated people were tiny robots) probably from the 1960s or 1970s perhaps. That world was built to test advertising, and it always was the same day and the "people" who were originally all killed by some nearby chemical plant disaster did not know they were now simulated.
"Now, I've gotten old and I decided I liked money a lot, so I left my job as a programmer after nearly 20 years and moved onto being an network instructor."
Thanks for the interesting programming career story and perspective which obviously reflects a lot of talent, hard work, and success as a software developer. While training is important and well worth doing for lots of reasons, I still don't quite follow from your story how a move to training would pay significantly better than programming?
Granted, sometimes people run onsite training seminars for tens of trainees for totaling thousands of dollars a day (sometimes less hotel conference room rentals and travel expenses etc.). So maybe that is your angle? But even, say, 50 training sessions a year times $5K each is only $250K gross revenue, less after expenses, and travelling can be tiresome -- so overall still seems iffy to me compared to programming in a well-paying position or on an independent (successful) project.
That said, I've enjoyed the times I've taught other people things related to computers, so I won't deny the general appeal -- especially later in a career.
Yes -- training is being replaced by H1B hiring! Investments in employee training by big companies like HP and IBM are what made Silicon Valley possible in the first place.
Discussions about H1Bs also often imply that if you pay an H1B as much as a US citizen then everything is OK -- but it is not. Where is the extra incentive for people to risk their own time to learn stuff which might or might not be in demand when wages are essentially capped at market wages for employees? Or for contractors to put a *lot* of extra unpaid time (and stress) into learning as they go after taking on a project? Granted, most techies learn stuff on the side anyway -- but that is more problematical when you have a family. Example: "Ask HN: Developers with kids, how do you skill up?" https://news.ycombinator.com/i...
Another part of this rarely discussed is that companies used to pay 2X to 3X more than a worker's salary+benefits to specific highly-compensated individuals as independent contractors. But, big contracting firms like Perot Systems lobbied around the 1980s to get laws passed affecting IRS regulations that made it financially risky for companies to hire individuals on a 1099 independent contractor basis -- thus forcing more individuals to work through big companies as W2 employees. We just take that change for granted decades later, but things were not always like this. (That said, in many areas of the economy 1099 IC workers are indeed exploited -- just not back then in the technology field in in-demand areas.)
Increasing mastery (i.e. on the job learning) is one important part of a happy work life (along with autonomy, purpose, and community); sad that so many companies ignore it: "RSA ANIMATE: Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us" https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
And no, learning some new flavor of the month JavaScript framework that reinvents the wheel badly does not count much towards a feeling of "mastery" for an experienced programmer...
Related: http://blog.getabstract.com/th... "So, why are some companies dragging their feet and refusing to invest in employee development? In some cases, it comes down to an insecurity most managers don't want to acknowledge: the fear an employee may become become overqualified, outgrow his job, and leave the company to pursue a better position elsewhere before a promotion is available. This fear isn't completely baseless. Young high achievers job hop frequently to earn a higher salary, and on average, leave their jobs after only 28 months.
Withholding professional development from employees is not the right response to this fear; it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Employees seek professional development to achieve successful careers, and when companies don't invest in this development, employees leave."
As I suggested in this comment about Google and H1Bs: https://slashdot.org/comments.... "So, in a similar way that Angela Davis suggests prisons are the USA's way [of consolidating] dealing with social issues it can't or won't address, hiring H1Bs willing to live like sardines in SV slum-equivalents helps Google make up for those less-than-desirable recruiting aspects while not having to address fundamental issues which are harder to wrestle with involving the soul of the organization and how it spends its revenues towards what ends."
AC insightfully wrote: "That's because there were places and people to fly *TO*. Space is an empty, hostile, barren radiation-blasted hell."
So true! Here is a related comment by me on Slashdot almost a dozen years ago when Jeff Bezos started Blue Origin -- and while there is still nothing comprehensive like I suggested, the open manufacturing movement and 3D printing are two big steps forward since then: "We need DOGS not CATS! (Score:2, Interesting) Monday December 26, 2005" https://slashdot.org/comments....
From there (with most of the links removed and the formatting cleaned up, and a couple of new notes in brackets):
This [the idea that cheap launches lead to permanent colonies in space] is the basis for the argument for CATs (Cheap Access to Space) and various legislative pushes and at least a couple of billionaires (including Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com) putting a lot of money into this (perhaps as businesses, but essentially still billionaire hobbies). While I wish them well, I think this approach towards space settlement is misguided. Let's work the numbers.
The USA has about two million millionaires. There are many more elsewhere.... [A dozen years later there are now over 10 million millionaire households in the USA alone!]
At current launch costs of $10,000 per pound [for the now-defunct over-priced Space Shuttle], to put a 150 pound adult (me on a starvation diet for a couple months!) would be about $1,500,000, or $6,000,000 for a family of four. Now that amount of money being paid is well within the reach of hundreds of thousands of people if they liquidate all their assets -- homes, stocks, retirement accounts, and so forth. Now if you could guarantee that they and their children would have a better life living in cities in space, then some percentage of them might well do that. The problem as I see it is, we can't guarantee that right now. The other problem is of course, there is no place to live right now for hundreds of thousands of people showing up in their underwear and starving with no shelter or clothes or food or air or water or other goods for them.
One solution is to pursue the 1980s NASA vision of first putting automated factories on the moon (or at asteroids) and using robotics (and tele-operation) make space settlements complete with food, water, clothes, etc. for when these people show up. It would in theory only take one Apollo-type launch to the Moon or an asteroid with the seed of an automated factory instead of a LEM to start the process rolling, and that would have an up front cost of a few billion dollars or so -- far less than the total launch costs for all the people. The factory could also carry out putting up mass drivers etc. to realize Gerry O'Neill's or J.D. Bernal's vision of building near earth habitats from lunar or asteroidal resources.
So, as I see it, launch costs are not a bottleneck.
So while lowering launch costs may be useful, by itself it ultimately has no value without someplace to live in space. And all the innovative studies on space settlement say that space colonies will not be built from materials launched from earth, but rather will be built mainly from materials found in space.
So, what is a bottleneck is that we do not know how to make that seed self-replicating factory, or have plans for what it should create once it is landed on the moon or on a near-earth asteroid. We don't have (to use Bucky Fuller's terminology) a Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science that lets us make sense of all the various manufacturing knowledge which is woven throughout our complex economy (and in practice, despite patents, is essentially horded and hidden and made proprietary whenever possible) in order to synthesize it to build elegant and flexible infrastructure for sustaining human life in style in space (or on Earth).
So that is why I think billionaires like Jeff Bezos spending money on CATS is a tragedy -- they sh
I had not known these existed. I picked one to make local copies as a token gesture using keepvid.com: "Peace and Conflict Studies 164A - Fall 2006 (Michael N. Nagler)" https://www.youtube.com/view_p... "PACS 164A: Introduction to Nonviolence - Fall 2006. An introduction to the science of nonviolence, mainly as seen through the life and work of Mahatma Gandhi. Historical overview of nonviolence East and the West up to the American Civil Rights movement and Martin Luther King, Jr., with emphasis on the ideal of principled nonviolence and the reality of mixed or strategic nonviolence in practice, especially as applied to problems of social justice and defense."
For some reason lecture #16 is marked private, so can't get that.
Dr. Nagler talks in the first lecture about Kenneth E. Boulding and "The Three Faces of Power" as ways to get something done: * threat power * exchange power * integrative power (the core of principled nonviolence as he sees it)
Those three faces of power also overlap with the five types of economic transactions (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) I outline on my site.
It's unfortunate that the plaintiffs and DOJ here seemed to used "threat power" instead of focusing on building better relationships for mutual benefit through "integrative power" to both fix the specific problem and have a beneficial effect on the whole educational ecosystem.
See also my point here as regards UCB now putting stuff behind what presumably may be a paywall again requiring registration: http://www.pdfernhout.net/open... "Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."
Glad to see more substantial efforts going on as mentioned in another comment.
"$120K in Silicon Valley for a single person means either soul-destroying commutes or living like a student with three random housemates"
In looking further at this, probably I have overstated the housing case. Housing is still problematical, but probably the new hire could afford a nearby one bedroom apartment or such with a secure parking spot on that salary in SV. Still not great for the supposedly very best CS graduates who will be working 60+ hours per week -- but better than what I first outlined.
Of course, if they have big student loans and also want to save for a down payment on a SV house and start a family...
I had not know DMOZ was the early basis of some part of Google... Sad to see the loss of the scaffolding of the web -- but it is true that communities move on or at least individuals do. Glad Archive.org and others are making a copy of it -- but you can't as easily make an archival copy of a community.
One issue with DMOZ was that you got (at the time) at most two listings per item. The book "The Disciple of Organizing" shows instead how one can have a facet-based approach with multiple categories instead of, or in addition to, to a single hierarchical one.
Some of our listing for work by my wife and I from way back when (and the sadness is also much more for remaining unrealized potential on the projects -- still wanting to redo them in JavaScript for the browser -- than just DMOZ's passing): http://www.dmoz.org/search?q=k...
Kurtz-Fernhout Software Formerly commercial programs now available for free. Garden with Insight is a garden simulator, and PlantStudio is botanical illustration software. http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/ Home > Gardening > Landscaping [That should really have been under Science > Software > Simulation]
Embedded Squeak, Speech Synthesizer By Kurtz-Fernhout Software: version 1.0 for Squeak 2.2, by Paul Fernhout. Zip file has standalone Exe file to run Squeak in Win95 text-only console, and all source code (VC++ 5.0, Squeak 2.2) to produce it. [Open Source, Squeak license] http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/... Computers > Programming > Languages > Smalltalk > Squeak > Software
PlantStudio Tool for creating pictures of 3D plants. It simulates herbaceous (non-woody) plants like wildflowers and cut flowers, vegetables, weeds, grasses, and herbs using a parameter-driven simulation of plant growth and structure. http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/... Computers > Software > Graphics > 3D > Rendering and Modelling
StoryHarp Audioventure Interactive Fiction Voice-operated interactive fiction including text-to-speech, sounds and music. http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/... Games > Video Games > Adventure > Text Adventures > Design and Development > Authoring Systems
OSCOMAK: Open Source Community On Manufacturing Knowledge Goal: create a distributed global repository of production knowledge of past, present and future processes, materials, products. http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/... Computers > Open Source > Open Content
* $120K in Silicon Valley for a single person means either soul-destroying commutes or living like a student with three random housemates https://news.slashdot.org/stor...
In Google's defense, when people try to build relatively affordable housing around SV, towns tend to permit more office space but will not allow more housing -- even as that is starting to change (maybe too little too late though?): https://www.nytimes.com/2016/1...
* But even if there was cheaper housing, for singles, SV still has a dating problem other than the year 2038: https://slashdot.org/story/17/...
* Google no longer has quite the reputation it had now that "don't be evil" is just a memory -- especially as Google has become thought of as a key player in the surveillance/malware state (e.g. with Android).
The fundamental problem here is that the software and services the world desperately needs to be resilient, healthy, and free are not the centralized software and services that will make a company like Google the most money (or maybe that much money at all -- e.g. Gnu/etc/Linux/BSD).
* Google's stock is unlikely to appreciate as significantly as in the past given competition, changing digital landscapes, (re)branding issues, falling computer and networking costs makign personal search engines more viable, federated computing and an emerging social semantic desktop, and more
* Google insists everyone work on-site (ironically, for a company about computer mediated experiences) -- and most of the sites are in expensive places to live (and most US jobs are not at the cheaper cost-of-living sites) -- all of which reduces cognitive diversity at Google from a lack of rural perspectives
Also, Google has not figured out how to try new products without then abandoning ones that are not growing and thus alienating both employees and customers (e.g. Google Reader)
* Google tends to screen out qualified employees by a biased hiring process that, reading between the lines, Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google, indirectly admits has failed -- meaning that the current population of Googlers may not be a diverse enjoyable group of people to work with -- while also indirectly implying a very high fine-grained surveillance of all employee activities: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06...
* Googlers tend to have little work-life balance, working long hours (made worse by being on-site), meaning Google can't readily attract older workers who have families or participate in community obligations or take vacations https://www.glassdoor.com/Revi... "Cons: Absolutely no work life balance. Deteriorating health conditions thereafter."
* But even if Google could boast work-life balance to be of interest to older workers, Google, like most SV companies practices rampant age discrimination anyway
The logical conclusion? http://archive.ncsa.illinois.e... "Of course," said a famous lecturer - he of the French Revolution, who gilded each new decay with splendour - "of course we shall not press our complaints now. The Mending Apparatus has treated us so well in the past that we all sympathize with it, and will wait patiently for its recovery. In its own good time it will resume its duties. Meanwhile let us do without our beds, our tabloids, our other little wants. Such, I feel sure, would be the wish of the Machine."
"I feel therefore I am": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "Damasio presents the "somatic marker hypothesis", a proposed mechanism by which emotions guide (or bias) behavior and decision-making, and positing that rationality requires emotional input. He argues that Rene Descartes' "error" was the dualist separation of mind and body, rationality and emotion."
Also from Albert Einstein: http://www.sacred-texts.com/ao... "For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly."
Stuff I wrote years ago on putting humane values back into economics given post-scarcity trends:
"Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease" http://www.pdfernhout.net/read... "The PU economics department, of course, should be abolished as part of this transition
Slashdot Mirror
... you probably lose your scientific career soon enough (sadly).
http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...
"This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead. Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias."
Having a successful and informative experiment may sometime even end your career sooner than failing in an ideologically approved way:
http://disciplinedminds.tripod...
"In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline." The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy."
Part of the reason why: ...
https://www.its.caltech.edu/~d...
"By now, in the 1990's, the situation has changed dramatically. With the Cold War over, National Security is rapidly losing its appeal as a means of generating support for scientific research. There are those who argue that research is essential for our economic future, but the managers of the economy know better. The great corporations have decided that central research laboratories were not such a good idea after all. Many of the national laboratories have lost their missions and have not found new ones. The economy has gradually transformed from manufacturing to service, and service industries like banking and insurance don't support much scientific research. To make matters worse, the country is almost 5 trillion dollars in debt, and scientific research is among the few items of discretionary spending left in the national budget. There is much wringing of hands about impending shortages of trained scientific talent to ensure the Nation's future competitiveness, especially since by now other countries have been restored to economic and scientific vigor, but in fact, jobs are scarce for recent graduates. Finally, it should be clear by now that with more than half the kids in America already going to college, academic expansion is finished forever.
Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one
See James P. Hogan: Two Faces of Tomorrow scifi novel: https://books.google.com/books...
Otherwise, I agree with your insightful comment. Good luck to you and your family!
About 50 other ideas I collected together: http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a...
"If you got anything useful done at all I wouldn't judge him so poorly from a corporate perspective."
Yes, see also my reply: https://it.slashdot.org/commen...
"He'd let us slack off all day. "
Maybe your ex-boss also understood some of the ideas in Tom DeMarco's book "Slack"?
"Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency"
https://www.amazon.com/Slack-G...
"If your companyâ(TM)s goal is to become fast, responsive, and agile, more efficiency is not the answer--you need more slack.
Why is it that todayâ(TM)s superefficient organizations are ailing? Tom DeMarco, a leading management consultant to both Fortune 500 and up-and-coming companies, reveals a counterintuitive principle that explains why efficiency efforts can slow a company down. That principle is the value of slack, the degree of freedom in a company that allows it to change. Implementing slack could be as simple as adding an assistant to a department and letting high-priced talent spend less time at the photocopier and more time making key decisions, or it could mean designing workloads that allow people room to think, innovate, and reinvent themselves. It means embracing risk, eliminating fear, and knowing when to go slow. Slack allows for change, fosters creativity, promotes quality, and, above all, produces growth.
With an approach that works for new- and old-economy companies alike, this revolutionary handbook debunks commonly held assumptions about real-world management, and gives you and your company a brand-new model for achieving and maintaining true effectiveness."
Other related ideas I've collected:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
http://store.go4retro.com/zoom...
I bought one of those, but I'm having trouble getting a disk drive so I can pull data off old diskettes while I still can... Lucky you to still have one that works!
To build on your point on TensorFlow, and that of an AC earlier on videos being unconstitutional, there are no closed captions on this Gallaudet video for someone who is Visually Impaired to use via text-to-speech to understand the details of all the images in this video:
https://media.gallaudet.edu/embed/secure/iframe/entryId/1_f513jwxu/uiConfId/33370581
That video is linked from here: http://www.gallaudet.edu/
So, Gallaudet has not made that video accessible to blind users. Gallaudet is thus in violation of the ADA with their own self-promotion video. How can such a university express such careless disregard for the special needs of visually impaired people? For shame! For shame!! (and I'm not joking here)
Even worse, Gallaudet has no "alt" "title" or "longdesc" tag on at least some images, like here (first page picked at random):
http://www.gallaudet.edu/about/planning-for-the-future
<div class="image " style="background-image: url('images/Components/tiles/jumpstart-teacher-presentation.jpg');"></div>
There should be at least several paragraphs there explaining the picture includes five people, what they are wearing, their postures, the color of the carpet, what is written on the whiteboards, and so on.
Sue! Sue!! Sue!!! (again, I'm not joking here, given a lawsuit seems to be what Gallaudet employees seem to think is required to make websites ADA-compliant and better for all)
What they should be doing at the very least:
http://accessibility.psu.edu/images/imageshtml/
Here is an example where they do have an alt tag and title:
https://my.gallaudet.edu/
<img src="/Asset/00007795/Symposium1.jpg" alt="Department of Interpretation to host symposium, summit, March 29-April 2, 2017" title="Department of Interpretation to host symposium, summit, March 29-April 2, 2017">
But, the tags don't describe the contents of the image! So, like automated Google close captioning of videos they are inadequate for a blind person to fully know what is in the picture!
That is the image with about one hundred people in it:
https://my.gallaudet.edu/Asset/00007795/Symposium1.jpg
Why are those people all not described in detail including what the are wearing and where they are sitting? Why is the architecture not described of the lecture hall? Why is the image being projected in the lecture not described? Inadequate! Until someone good at expository writing skills spends at least a few hours describing that picture, it should not be allowed on the Gallaudet web site. Same for every other image on that website. Accessible to all -- or none, according to the DOJ and Gallaudet!
This is the worst sort of hypocrisy.
Using the DOJ logic, Gallaudet's website should be made inaccessible to the public until these are fixed and/or Gallaudet should pay millions of dollars in fines to any visually impaired users victimized by this inability to learn more about what goes on at a university specifically for the deaf and hard of hearing.
Or, if Gallaudet had put their website under a free license, then at least people could make new versions on their own that were more fully accessible. But I see no such license on their pages.
(That said, I feel Gallaudet, like Berkeley, is otherwise doing a great job should get lots more support from lots of sources to help make the university and the rest of the world better for people with hearing impairments -- or other disabilities.)
If a work is under a Creative Commons / Free / Libre / Open Source license, then others can incrementally improve it to be accessible. Forcing the original author or publisher to do so themselves ignores the value of sharing works that others can make better.
It also makes me wonder about a culture of victimhood instead of a culture of agency. I say that prompted in part by the request for monetary *damages* by the plaintiffs for not being able to access the content in the form they preferred (compared to hiring someone to transform it for them) which to me seems to show bad intent. People offer free materials you are not required to interact with but they are not good enough for you for some reason so you are a victim. While *legally* the plaintiffs may have a case as the ADA law is written in the DOJ's view, the result feels morally wrong considering the works were free (and many others charge for such works) -- especially compared to the plaintiffs just saying thank you and improving the free works themselves or hiring others to do so or finding volunteers or philanthropists to help with that.
That said, I remain sympathetic to the request to make materials more accessible to those with disabilities or any other limitation in accessing the content (including things like language barriers). This is a wealthy planet with also a lot of people looking for work to do -- and so globally we should have plenty of resources to improve free resources as needed for people with any sort of special needs. That we choose to spend those resources instead by planning to blow everyone up using nuclear energy to fight over obsolete oil fields and such is a tragedy of modern times. As is the irony of using solar panels to ensure launch readiness at the nuclear missile silos...
More on this: ... The DOJ's position in its findings letter to UC Berkeley -- that a covered entity has a duty to ensure that content that it makes available to the public free of charge is accessible -- certainly pushes the boundaries of the ADA and has not been tested in the courts. If covered entities must in fact ensure that all of the information that they put out for the world to use for free (no matter how remotely related to their central mission) or face lawsuits and DOJ investigations, there may well be a significant reduction in the amount of information provided on the web for public consumption."
https://www.insidehighered.com...
http://www.adatitleiii.com/tag...
"The DOJ concluded that many of UC Berkeley's online videos did not have proper closed captions, and has threatened to file an enforcement lawsuit against the school unless it agrees to enter into a consent decree, caption all of its online content, and pay damages to individuals with disabilities who had been injured by UC Berkeley's failure to provide accessible online videos.
As I wrote to Kurzweil in 2001 (reposted by someone else along with four others I sent): http://heybryan.org/fernhout/k...
From that email:
There is not necessarily an adaptive value to intelligence in a
certain niche -- because intelligence has power, mass, heat-dissipation,
and time costs. For example, consider the Hydra, which is a tiny
multi-tentacled aquatic creature that lives off of stinging smaller
organisms like Daphnia and pulling them into its body cavity. It has a
simple neural net it uses to coordinate its feeding behavior. Why
doesn't the hydra have a brain the size of a human? That may sound like
a stupid question, but bear with me. The Hydra could not support the
energy required to operate a brain from its current feeding behavior. It
could not protect the brain from predators. Its mobility would be
impaired by being attached to a brain that large. It would be unable to
reproduce as quickly. Also, the value of a human-sized brain to a hydra
is minimal, because there would be little the brain could accomplish
using the Hydra's few microscopic tentacles, limited sensory apparatus
(no eyes, no ears) and limited mobility choices. Further, the Hydra must
react instantly in its tiny world, and a big brain would take too long
to process the information. So, for the Hydra, a large brain makes no
sense.
There are aquatic creatures with brains as big or large than human ...
brains (dolphins or whales) but they have a very different ecological
niche and a totally different scale and physical structure. And there
are a lot fewer whales and dolphins than Hydra in the universe.
What might this mean in a human sense? Perhaps human brains are the size ...
they are because there isn't too much value in being that much smarter
because the cost of the additional intelligence is outweighed by the
diminishing returns of additional predictive value. For example, some
studies show earlier types of human-like creatures like the Neanderthal
or Cro-Magnon had a larger brain size than present-day humans.
The precis you posted, which is otherwise technical and advanced, is
using a technical term "evolution" as it is colloquially often (mis)used
to mean "progress". The two are not the same. And frankly, what is
"progress" for one may be "decay" for another, just as what is "good"
for one may be "evil" for another, as these have to do with individual
goals which may conflict. This weakens your entire argument.
I might go a step further. Because of your essentially "religious"
belief based on a limited view of evolutionary theory, you are ignoring
the obvious issues relating to the [diminishing] returns of intelligence, or
the adaptive value of "dumber" organisms. Thus, as I pointed out in an
earlier email to you, when you talk of downloading a human-derived AI
into a network, you ignore the fact that that large intelligence may not
be able to compete effectively in the network, in the same way as if one
grafted a human brain onto a tiny Hydra and threw it into a lake it
would not survive. What organisms do survive in a lake? Many, many tiny
things. Maybe a few fish. But the largest number are tiny things like
bacteria, algae, Daphnia and Hydra. By analogy, most of the digital
organisms in a large network will be tiny, and they might rapidly
consume larger creatures or parasitize them. Obviously, you can get big
fish in a lake -- but their numbers are small compared to the numbers of
other smaller organisms.
Because you have been heavily rewarded in your life for being
intelligent in various ways, the value of being unintelligent (or
differently intelligent) is probably a difficult concept to wrestle with
(as it was for me, and as I think it would be for most thinkers).
Ironically, both my wife and I didn't finish our PhDs in E&E in large
part becaus
http://schoolsucksproject.com/... ... ..."
"Now come back to the present while I demonstrate that the identical trust placed in ordinary people two hundred years ago still survives where it suits managers of our economy to allow it. Consider the art of driving, which I learned at the age of eleven. Without everybody behind the wheel, our sort of economy would be impossible, so everybody is there, IQ notwithstanding. With less than thirty hours of combined training and experience, a hundred million people are allowed access to vehicular weapons more lethal than pistols or rifles. Turned loose without a teacher, so to speak. Why does our government make such presumptions of competence, placing nearly unqualified trust in drivers, while it maintains such a tight grip on near-monopoly state schooling?
It should strike you at once that our unstated official assumptions about human nature are dead wrong. Nearly all people are competent and responsible; universal motoring proves that. The efficiency of motor vehicles as terrorist instruments would have written a tragic record long ago if people were inclined to terrorism. But almost all auto mishaps are accidents, and while there are seemingly a lot of those, the actual fraction of mishaps, when held up against the stupendous number of possibilities for mishap, is quite small. I know it's difficult to accept this because the spectre of global terrorism is a favorite cover story of governments, but the truth is substantially different from the tale the public is sold.
by Larry Enright: https://sites.google.com/site/...
https://www.amazon.com/Jennife...
"In 2096, Deever MacClendon creates Jennifer, the first proto-conscious cybernetic processor. It is hyper-intelligent, aware, and evolving. Deever wants to use his creation for the good of all, to help fix a broken world, but knowing what a powerful weapon it could be in the wrong hands, he hides it. When his secret is uncovered, he is forced to plunge into a high-tech morass of deception and treachery to avoid catastrophe and save a world where humans are no longer the most intelligent species."
A fun read!
It's a story about a world where people use technology to freely share skills -- including, when needed, the skill of achieving freedom.
Print: https://archive.org/details/Ga...
Audio performance: https://archive.org/details/pr...
Supposedly Trump would be as welthy or wealthier if he had just put his inherited money in an index fund:
http://www.celebritynetworth.c...
"Depending on which figures you use, if he had taken that $40 million and put it in a simple index fund, he'd have about $3.4 billion in the summer of 2015 (not counting investment fees and taxes), which is in the same neighborhood as what he's worth now [assuming his public claims are accurate]"
Of course, that probably would have been boring to Trump...
Back in 2009 I started an email thread on "the psychopath as peer" on the p2presearch list, and here was a most insightful and cautionary comment by Andy Robinson about using the term "psychopath" to describe anyone (including, in this case, Trump) which amplifies on your concern about indirect diagnosis and labelling:
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net...
From: Andy Robinson
Mon Nov 2 16:17:58 CET 2009
I'd be careful with these kinds of classificatory schemas for other reasons
as well - they have a history of complicity in regimes of regimentation and
control, as ways of pathologising difference. While I'd be the first to
endorse the idea that there are real kinds of neurological difference in
cases such as autism and possibly schizophrenia, I'm sceptical of the idea
that real differences can be deduced simply by creating checklists of
"behaviours" or subjective stances. Most often it is a matter of old men
with beards sitting round in smoke-filled rooms deciding arbitrarily which
"behaviours" or subjective dispositions will be classified as "abnormal" and
hence included on these lists - hence the inclusion of such things as
homosexuality. We are never far away from the world of Soviet and Chinese
designations of dissidents as mad - and there have been cases of this kind
in Britain and Holland too. Today we have another sinister development in
Britain of the use of psychiatric testing to jail people "indefinitely" (for
life) for middle-level offences, on the grounds of the supposed risk they
pose. I actually know someone who had to argue with her psychiatrist to
avoid being classified as a psychopath (presumably she means ASPD?) on the
grounds of her political support for property damage in some circumstances.
Psychiatry mobilised as system of control - the opposite of what it should
be doing, which is protecting difference from persecution through
assumptions of sameness. A full recognition of the radicality of
psychological difference has drastic effects for ethical theory and
jurisprudence, amounting to an effective suspension of judgement due to
incommensurability of difference and intangible effects of unjust context -
something recognised in historic ideas of *mens rea*, but increasingly
resisted today.
The historical construction of the "psychopath" is problematic, because it
is clear from the studies of the "London Monster" that the *figure* of the
psychopath in popular imaginations precedes the actual emergence of serial
attackers of this particular kind. Also that the emergence of this figure
is closely connected to the rise of modernity and the alienated city in
praticular. Of course, the biological determinists will then revise the
historical record to attempt to reinterpret earlier instances of mass-murder
in the same terms - but the discursive status was quite different. Anyway -
it is clear that the social fears of the random stranger without social
ties, who will behave in a "predatory" way, arises from the disintegration
of social density in the modern city and the increasing frequency of contact
with people with whom one has no particular affinity or specific relation.
Hence the fear that such a person might be
... around 1981 or so for the Commodore PET.
Can't say it was especially useful though as far as I took it. It did dice rolls. I think I included a module that did random dungeon generation and also random treasure generation based on what was in the Gamma World DM guide. I don't think it distracted much -- except a personal computer back then like a PET took up a lot of table space.
Kind of miss those Commodore days...
I had donated my Commodore equipment to my local school district long ago.
I tried a few months back to order a Commodore diskette drive from an Amazon vendor to get stuff like that off of old floppies to but the drive never showed up and I got a refund... Still hoping to come across a working one someday somewhere... Or maybe I will try again to get one through Amazon.
I also bought a ZoomFloppy board to bridge USB to Commodore, but it is useless without a drive:
http://www.go4retro.com/produc...
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataH...
Unfortunately, as I note in a comment there several days ago, not all the lectures seem to have made it...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Realtime Interrupt is a 1995 science fiction novel by James P. Hogan set in a near-future Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. It tells the story of Joe Corrigan, who awakens in a Pittsburgh hospital without memory. As director of the supersecret Oz Project, he had worked on a virtual reality software project, and as he slowly recalls his past, he sets out on a quest to pick up the pieces of his past life. He discovers that the virtual reality is still going on [(spoiler) and he is trapped in it for reasons of corporate greed]."
Preceeded by his "Entoverse" in 1991:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"(spoilers) The Jevlenese move JEVEX [a huge supercomputer] to the planet of Uttan so that their researchers can increase its power without the knowledge of the Thuriens. Unknown to both parties, a pocket universe forms within JEVEX, the Entoverse. Some of its sapient inhabitants ("Ents") who go by the title of ayatollahs devise the ability to pass over to the original universe by taking over the minds of the Jevlenese [when they use headsets to work or play in virtual reality]. The Thuriens begin to trust the Jevlenese and contract them with the task of observing human civilization. Still driven by hatred of their old rivals, the Jevlenese set about hindering human progress."
But another comment mentions Simulacron-3 (1964).
I had also read a non-virtual-reality similar story (the simulated people were tiny robots) probably from the 1960s or 1970s perhaps. That world was built to test advertising, and it always was the same day and the "people" who were originally all killed by some nearby chemical plant disaster did not know they were now simulated.
"Now, I've gotten old and I decided I liked money a lot, so I left my job as a programmer after nearly 20 years and moved onto being an network instructor."
Thanks for the interesting programming career story and perspective which obviously reflects a lot of talent, hard work, and success as a software developer. While training is important and well worth doing for lots of reasons, I still don't quite follow from your story how a move to training would pay significantly better than programming?
Example for the US:
https://www.indeed.com/salarie...
"Average [hourly] salary: $17.60 [with the tail going up to around $50]"
Granted, sometimes people run onsite training seminars for tens of trainees for totaling thousands of dollars a day (sometimes less hotel conference room rentals and travel expenses etc.). So maybe that is your angle? But even, say, 50 training sessions a year times $5K each is only $250K gross revenue, less after expenses, and travelling can be tiresome -- so overall still seems iffy to me compared to programming in a well-paying position or on an independent (successful) project.
That said, I've enjoyed the times I've taught other people things related to computers, so I won't deny the general appeal -- especially later in a career.
Makes a lot of sense to have software pass a test, same as for people.
Yes -- training is being replaced by H1B hiring! Investments in employee training by big companies like HP and IBM are what made Silicon Valley possible in the first place.
Discussions about H1Bs also often imply that if you pay an H1B as much as a US citizen then everything is OK -- but it is not. Where is the extra incentive for people to risk their own time to learn stuff which might or might not be in demand when wages are essentially capped at market wages for employees? Or for contractors to put a *lot* of extra unpaid time (and stress) into learning as they go after taking on a project? Granted, most techies learn stuff on the side anyway -- but that is more problematical when you have a family. Example:
"Ask HN: Developers with kids, how do you skill up?"
https://news.ycombinator.com/i...
Another part of this rarely discussed is that companies used to pay 2X to 3X more than a worker's salary+benefits to specific highly-compensated individuals as independent contractors. But, big contracting firms like Perot Systems lobbied around the 1980s to get laws passed affecting IRS regulations that made it financially risky for companies to hire individuals on a 1099 independent contractor basis -- thus forcing more individuals to work through big companies as W2 employees. We just take that change for granted decades later, but things were not always like this. (That said, in many areas of the economy 1099 IC workers are indeed exploited -- just not back then in the technology field in in-demand areas.)
Increasing mastery (i.e. on the job learning) is one important part of a happy work life (along with autonomy, purpose, and community); sad that so many companies ignore it:
"RSA ANIMATE: Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
And no, learning some new flavor of the month JavaScript framework that reinvents the wheel badly does not count much towards a feeling of "mastery" for an experienced programmer...
Related:
http://blog.getabstract.com/th...
"So, why are some companies dragging their feet and refusing to invest in employee development? In some cases, it comes down to an insecurity most managers don't want to acknowledge: the fear an employee may become become overqualified, outgrow his job, and leave the company to pursue a better position elsewhere before a promotion is available. This fear isn't completely baseless. Young high achievers job hop frequently to earn a higher salary, and on average, leave their jobs after only 28 months.
Withholding professional development from employees is not the right response to this fear; it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Employees seek professional development to achieve successful careers, and when companies don't invest in this development, employees leave."
As I suggested in this comment about Google and H1Bs:
https://slashdot.org/comments....
"So, in a similar way that Angela Davis suggests prisons are the USA's way [of consolidating] dealing with social issues it can't or won't address, hiring H1Bs willing to live like sardines in SV slum-equivalents helps Google make up for those less-than-desirable recruiting aspects while not having to address fundamental issues which are harder to wrestle with involving the soul of the organization and how it spends its revenues towards what ends."
AC insightfully wrote: "That's because there were places and people to fly *TO*. Space is an empty, hostile, barren radiation-blasted hell."
So true! Here is a related comment by me on Slashdot almost a dozen years ago when Jeff Bezos started Blue Origin -- and while there is still nothing comprehensive like I suggested, the open manufacturing movement and 3D printing are two big steps forward since then:
"We need DOGS not CATS! (Score:2, Interesting) Monday December 26, 2005"
https://slashdot.org/comments....
From there (with most of the links removed and the formatting cleaned up, and a couple of new notes in brackets):
This [the idea that cheap launches lead to permanent colonies in space] is the basis for the argument for CATs (Cheap Access to Space) and various legislative pushes and at least a couple of billionaires (including Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com) putting a lot of money into this (perhaps as businesses, but essentially still billionaire hobbies). While I wish them well, I think this approach towards space settlement is misguided. Let's work the numbers.
The USA has about two million millionaires. There are many more elsewhere. ... [A dozen years later there are now over 10 million millionaire households in the USA alone!]
At current launch costs of $10,000 per pound [for the now-defunct over-priced Space Shuttle], to put a 150 pound adult (me on a starvation diet for a couple months!) would be about $1,500,000, or $6,000,000 for a family of four. Now that amount of money being paid is well within the reach of hundreds of thousands of people if they liquidate all their assets -- homes, stocks, retirement accounts, and so forth. Now if you could guarantee that they and their children would have a better life living in cities in space, then some percentage of them might well do that. The problem as I see it is, we can't guarantee that right now. The other problem is of course, there is no place to live right now for hundreds of thousands of people showing up in their underwear and starving with no shelter or clothes or food or air or water or other goods for them.
One solution is to pursue the 1980s NASA vision of first putting automated factories on the moon (or at asteroids) and using robotics (and tele-operation) make space settlements complete with food, water, clothes, etc. for when these people show up. It would in theory only take one Apollo-type launch to the Moon or an asteroid with the seed of an automated factory instead of a LEM to start the process rolling, and that would have an up front cost of a few billion dollars or so -- far less than the total launch costs for all the people. The factory could also carry out putting up mass drivers etc. to realize Gerry O'Neill's or J.D. Bernal's vision of building near earth habitats from lunar or asteroidal resources.
So, as I see it, launch costs are not a bottleneck.
So while lowering launch costs may be useful, by itself it ultimately has no value without someplace to live in space. And all the innovative studies on space settlement say that space colonies will not be built from materials launched from earth, but rather will be built mainly from materials found in space.
So, what is a bottleneck is that we do not know how to make that seed self-replicating factory, or have plans for what it should create once it is landed on the moon or on a near-earth asteroid. We don't have (to use Bucky Fuller's terminology) a Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science that lets us make sense of all the various manufacturing knowledge which is woven throughout our complex economy (and in practice, despite patents, is essentially horded and hidden and made proprietary whenever possible) in order to synthesize it to build elegant and flexible infrastructure for sustaining human life in style in space (or on Earth).
So that is why I think billionaires like Jeff Bezos spending money on CATS is a tragedy -- they sh
I had not known these existed. I picked one to make local copies as a token gesture using keepvid.com:
"Peace and Conflict Studies 164A - Fall 2006 (Michael N. Nagler)"
https://www.youtube.com/view_p...
"PACS 164A: Introduction to Nonviolence - Fall 2006. An introduction to the science of nonviolence, mainly as seen through the life and work of Mahatma Gandhi. Historical overview of nonviolence East and the West up to the American Civil Rights movement and Martin Luther King, Jr., with emphasis on the ideal of principled nonviolence and the reality of mixed or strategic nonviolence in practice, especially as applied to problems of social justice and defense."
For some reason lecture #16 is marked private, so can't get that.
Dr. Nagler talks in the first lecture about Kenneth E. Boulding and "The Three Faces of Power" as ways to get something done:
* threat power
* exchange power
* integrative power (the core of principled nonviolence as he sees it)
See here (until March 14th): https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Those three faces of power also overlap with the five types of economic transactions (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) I outline on my site.
It's unfortunate that the plaintiffs and DOJ here seemed to used "threat power" instead of focusing on building better relationships for mutual benefit through "integrative power" to both fix the specific problem and have a beneficial effect on the whole educational ecosystem.
See also my point here as regards UCB now putting stuff behind what presumably may be a paywall again requiring registration:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open...
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."
Glad to see more substantial efforts going on as mentioned in another comment.
"$120K in Silicon Valley for a single person means either soul-destroying commutes or living like a student with three random housemates"
In looking further at this, probably I have overstated the housing case. Housing is still problematical, but probably the new hire could afford a nearby one bedroom apartment or such with a secure parking spot on that salary in SV. Still not great for the supposedly very best CS graduates who will be working 60+ hours per week -- but better than what I first outlined.
Of course, if they have big student loans and also want to save for a down payment on a SV house and start a family...
I had not know DMOZ was the early basis of some part of Google... Sad to see the loss of the scaffolding of the web -- but it is true that communities move on or at least individuals do. Glad Archive.org and others are making a copy of it -- but you can't as easily make an archival copy of a community.
One issue with DMOZ was that you got (at the time) at most two listings per item. The book "The Disciple of Organizing" shows instead how one can have a facet-based approach with multiple categories instead of, or in addition to, to a single hierarchical one.
Some of our listing for work by my wife and I from way back when (and the sadness is also much more for remaining unrealized potential on the projects -- still wanting to redo them in JavaScript for the browser -- than just DMOZ's passing):
http://www.dmoz.org/search?q=k...
Kurtz-Fernhout Software
Formerly commercial programs now available for free. Garden with Insight is a garden simulator, and PlantStudio is botanical illustration software.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/
Home > Gardening > Landscaping
[That should really have been under Science > Software > Simulation]
Embedded Squeak, Speech Synthesizer
By Kurtz-Fernhout Software: version 1.0 for Squeak 2.2, by Paul Fernhout. Zip file has standalone Exe file to run Squeak in Win95 text-only console, and all source code (VC++ 5.0, Squeak 2.2) to produce it. [Open Source, Squeak license]
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Computers > Programming > Languages > Smalltalk > Squeak > Software
PlantStudio
Tool for creating pictures of 3D plants. It simulates herbaceous (non-woody) plants like wildflowers and cut flowers, vegetables, weeds, grasses, and herbs using a parameter-driven simulation of plant growth and structure.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Computers > Software > Graphics > 3D > Rendering and Modelling
StoryHarp Audioventure Interactive Fiction
Voice-operated interactive fiction including text-to-speech, sounds and music.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Games > Video Games > Adventure > Text Adventures > Design and Development > Authoring Systems
OSCOMAK: Open Source Community On Manufacturing Knowledge
Goal: create a distributed global repository of production knowledge of past, present and future processes, materials, products.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Computers > Open Source > Open Content
Why?
* $120K in Silicon Valley for a single person means either soul-destroying commutes or living like a student with three random housemates
https://news.slashdot.org/stor...
In Google's defense, when people try to build relatively affordable housing around SV, towns tend to permit more office space but will not allow more housing -- even as that is starting to change (maybe too little too late though?):
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/1...
Google private buses do make the commutes easier though -- at a social cost:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
* But even if there was cheaper housing, for singles, SV still has a dating problem other than the year 2038:
https://slashdot.org/story/17/...
* Google no longer has quite the reputation it had now that "don't be evil" is just a memory -- especially as Google has become thought of as a key player in the surveillance/malware state (e.g. with Android).
The fundamental problem here is that the software and services the world desperately needs to be resilient, healthy, and free are not the centralized software and services that will make a company like Google the most money (or maybe that much money at all -- e.g. Gnu/etc/Linux/BSD).
* Google's stock is unlikely to appreciate as significantly as in the past given competition, changing digital landscapes, (re)branding issues, falling computer and networking costs makign personal search engines more viable, federated computing and an emerging social semantic desktop, and more
* Google insists everyone work on-site (ironically, for a company about computer mediated experiences) -- and most of the sites are in expensive places to live (and most US jobs are not at the cheaper cost-of-living sites) -- all of which reduces cognitive diversity at Google from a lack of rural perspectives
* Google's 20% time is now 120% time (one big perk gone)
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...
Also, Google has not figured out how to try new products without then abandoning ones that are not growing and thus alienating both employees and customers (e.g. Google Reader)
* Google tends to screen out qualified employees by a biased hiring process that, reading between the lines, Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google, indirectly admits has failed -- meaning that the current population of Googlers may not be a diverse enjoyable group of people to work with -- while also indirectly implying a very high fine-grained surveillance of all employee activities:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06...
* Googlers tend to have little work-life balance, working long hours (made worse by being on-site), meaning Google can't readily attract older workers who have families or participate in community obligations or take vacations
https://www.glassdoor.com/Revi...
"Cons: Absolutely no work life balance. Deteriorating health conditions thereafter."
* But even if Google could boast work-life balance to be of interest to older workers, Google, like most SV companies practices rampant age discrimination anyway
For example:
http://www.computerworld.com/a...
Not that the last is specific to only G
The logical conclusion? http://archive.ncsa.illinois.e... "Of course," said a famous lecturer - he of the French Revolution, who gilded each new decay with splendour - "of course we shall not press our complaints now. The Mending Apparatus has treated us so well in the past that we all sympathize with it, and will wait patiently for its recovery. In its own good time it will resume its duties. Meanwhile let us do without our beds, our tabloids, our other little wants. Such, I feel sure, would be the wish of the Machine."
"I feel therefore I am": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Damasio presents the "somatic marker hypothesis", a proposed mechanism by which emotions guide (or bias) behavior and decision-making, and positing that rationality requires emotional input. He argues that Rene Descartes' "error" was the dualist separation of mind and body, rationality and emotion."
Also from Albert Einstein: http://www.sacred-texts.com/ao...
"For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly."
Stuff I wrote years ago on putting humane values back into economics given post-scarcity trends:
"Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics"
http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a...
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable on structural unemployment and a
basic income"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/read...
"The PU economics department, of course, should be abolished as part of this transition