Battery powered calculators? Slide rules? Backup generator? Cell phone apps? Calling a back office who has a calculator?
But see also my other comment on order of magnitude stuff, especially to quickly double-check the answer from a machine. It is probably more important that someone notice that a $99.99 dress and $48.33 pair of pants should not add up to $1048.32 (high by x10) or $58.32 (low by x3) from adding or missing a nine somewhere than that they can do an exact calculation in their head.
Although, if I as a customer had to choose between a clerk who was pleasant and helpful but needed a calculator to ring up a sale and one who was not pleasant or helpful but could do sums in their head without a battery-powered calculator or cell phone, I know which one I'd pick.:-)
IMHO, an important skill is order-of-magnitude calculations. If you subtract US$79.99 from your bank balance in a checking account, you should realize something is wrong if your balance drops by $1000 instead of near to $100. Same for political-type calculations relating to roughly how many people are in a country and how much some policy might cost if it costs $X per person and so on (by rounding, to get a ballpark figure). Without that basic skill, people are completely at the mercy of the machines or their own fat finger typing or unscrupulous other people.
Order-of-magnitude calculation is the sort of skill people picked up quickly using slide rules.:-) "Simulated Pickett N909-ES Slide Rule" http://www.antiquark.com/slide...
"Slip-stick" engineering pretty much got us to the Moon and back.:-) Even if no doubt more precise calculations were made along the way at some point.
But precise calculations are indeed perhaps better turned over to calculators, so people can focus on other things. There are only so many things we can pay attention to or remember at one time.
Yes, I did learn to do a square root on paper at some point, not that I recall it much now. But I don't feel especially weaker for not being able to do that at the moment. And even if I did recall the procedure, what would be the point in using it to determine the square root of 99 if I could punch use a calculator? Again though, being able to check the result roughly would be important though, to know the correct result must be somewhere around 10 and not 5 and not 20.
One example comment there (from an "Instructor of Mathematics"): "I vaguely recall learning the square root algorithm in K-12, but frankly, I see no value in this algorithm except as a curiosity. And I am not of the "reform" crowd. I fully believe students not be given a calculator to use until advanced algebra or pre-calculus, and then only a scientific calculator (not graphing). Do you really believe student at the K-7 level will understand how/why this algorithm works? I was happy to see that you recommended the "estimate and check" method. This is what I also recommended to my daughter, who is now studying square roots in her home school curriculum. The "estimate and check" method is a good exercise in estimating, multiplying, and also memorizing perfect squares...."
Kids need so much -- nature; human interactions; emotion coaching; music; manipulating blocks, sand, and water; physical exercise; and so on. Computers (or other screens) crowd that all out so quickly as a "supernormal stimuli". Sure kids can learn computers young, but the human mind is adapted to grow a certain way within a natural environment and an extended family/tribe. Best to avoid computers/screens as long as possible IMHO, as it will happen soon enough anyway. We did not let our kid have much screen time until around age four, and I still feel that was too soon, and rapidly became a losing battle after age six to eight or so. Sure, like you I'm proud of my own kid's accomplishments with computers, but I also realize they come at a cost of other missed opportunities.
BTW, John Taylor Gatto essentially says "gifted" programs are a scam, carving off those who might otherwise be natural leaders and making them a cog (if that) in a bigger system of social control.
The Albany (NY) Free School and its high school equivalent are examples of places that gets a lot of things right, IMHO. http://www.albanyfreeschool.or... https://tubmanschool.wordpress... "Harriet Tubman Democratic High School is the only democratic educational institution for teens in the Capital District. We offer a supportive and personal learning environment for young adults from diverse backgrounds. Our staff strives to teach young adults how to think for themselves by encouraging critical discussions and respecting student input into their educational process. Our students learn self-motivation and, in the process, discover independence and self-reliance."
Contrast with, at the other extreme, a place like Choate Rosemary Hall,in the words of one of its students, Alfredo Brillembourg '16 News Staff Writer: http://thenews.choate.edu/arti... "In his essay about elite education, writer William Deresiewicz asserts, "Elite education forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers." This idea of higher education refers to a stage of formal learning that further cultivates young minds. Indeed, Choate is an establishment of higher education and it excels in its academic teaching. In light of this, Choate has very high expectations for its students and acts upon them by assigning heavy homework loads, frequent assessments, and rigorous course work. Although this method does promote good habits and a high level of learning, it does not encourage students to think for themselves because there is simply no time for us to do so.
In response to this stress-inducing environment, students are forced to figure out the system of boarding school, rather than actually taking in what they are being taught. Choate scholars need more time to be able to relax and embrace their studies. Choate must steer away from teaching kids to cheat the system of higher education by supporting a more innovative learning environment that will allow kids to appreciate what they are learning, rather than simply learning it for the grade. Choate's methods for education must work toward teaching kids how to think for themselves because it will allow for more success in life as a whole, rather than simply teaching how to succeed through the system of higher education.
The pressure and demands imposed upon students at Choate force kids to resort to techniques such as last-minute studying and memorizing, which are not conducive toward actual learning and will harm students in the long run. The large workloads are a huge source of stress for students, and they cause students to lose interest in pursuing other subjects because they have too much to understand at once. Likewise, the long hours of school and sports combined wear students down, and rather than appreciating intellectual topics outside of school, kids are too caught
"Stay on task" like a workhouse or factory? Whose task? To what end?
The new (yet old) paradigm is learner-directed education. A healthy kid's own natural curiosity and desire to succeed then helps him or he power through challenges (if it has not been wiped out before then through boredom/confusion or rewards/punishments). However, most software and even internet content is not that educational and so is a rough fit. We need more good stuff, especially FOSS educational simulations. If kids are not choosing to learn important things with at least some of their time, we need to ask why? What sort of messages are we sending kids about what we value as a society (like what is on TV)?
See also my essay: "Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools" http://patapata.sourceforge.ne... "Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand.Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change....
So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process."
That said, I strongly believe that there needs to be a way to ensure families have the resources they need to raise healthy educated kids (including paying for tutors and classes as desired). I feel a "basic income" from birth could be part of the answer to that (John Holt suggests that in "Escape from Childhood"), and would provide families with plenty of money to pay for their children's education as desired or time to teach their own. Until then, consider: http://www.pdfernhout.net/towa... "New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators:-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out."
From: http://dojotoolkit.org/referen... "Dojo has made a serious commitment to creating a toolkit that allows the development of accessible Web applications for all users, regardless of physical abilities. The core widget set of Dojo, dijit, is fully accessible since the 1.0 release, making Dojo the only fully accessible open source toolkit for Web 2.0 development. This means that users who require keyboard only navigation, need accommodations for low vision or who use an assistive technology, can interact with the dijit widgets. If you are new to accessibility, please refer to the Web Accessibility Issues page for more general information about accessibility"
Yes, bad things are happening. But unless we remember and celebrate the past successes, we may more easily give way to despair.
Examples of problematical episodes from US history: The McCarthy era in the 1950s, the internment of Japanese-Americans in the 1940s, the US Eugenics movement in the 1930s and before -- where the Nazis got the idea, the lynching of black citizens in the South along with a US white supremacy movement (again, long before "Arianism" took hold in Germany), the tragic Civil War of the 1870s, and many more such things... Plus so much problematical foreign policy, including grabbing big parts of Mexico and invading Canada multiple times, not to mention the systematic genocide committed against the Native Americans to steal their land (the US Army's primary function in early years was taking part in all that). The USA may criticize China's "human rights" record, but the US past is filled with many horrors that may be far worse than things China is doing now (even in Tibet etc.).
Governments always demand to be respected in various ways. Those ways may change over time. Yes, there are bad trends, and bad episodes, some still ongoing and growing like you and others including me point to, but the USA has muddled through them in the past. Some wrongs have been righted decades later (even as "justice delayed is justice denied"); others have yet to be resolved. Generally, the successes are helped along by efforts from citizens, as in: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. (Margaret Mead)".
I can urge you to read "A People's History of the United States" to get a broader perspective on all this regarding the USA. It is a perspective not taught in the past in most US classrooms or probably still in most civics classes for immigrants. It is the history of US citizens struggling repeatedly to control a government and industry (the two being intertwined), to keep them accountable to human needs. It is full of examples both of successes and failures. Here is an online version, but it is probably available in any major book store: http://www.historyisaweapon.co...
Another good book is John Gardner's 1971 book "Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society". Here I quote what he says and comment on it: http://p2pfoundation.net/backu... ""As I was browsing in a university bookstore recently, I heard an apple-cheeked girl say to her companion, "The truth is that our society and everything in it is in a state of decay." I studied her carefully and I must report that she did not seem even slightly decayed. But what of the society as a whole? Decay is hardly the word for what is happening to us. We are witnessing changes so profound and far-reaching that the mind can hardly grasp all the implications.... Only the blind and complacent could fail to recognize the great tasks of renewal facing us -- in government, in education,..."
John Gardner goes on to say that every generation faces the problem of renewing itself to meet new challenges emerging from the very success of the old ways of doing things. And he suggests that social values are not some drying up old reservoir, but rather a reservoir of variable capacity that must be recharged anew in every generation. [He also suggests every generation must re-learn for itself what the words carved on the stone monuments really mean.]
Democracy -- use it or lose it.
Free speech on the internet -- use it or lose it.
Social capital -- use it or lose it?
P2P -- use it or lose it?:-)
Again, Gardner's book was written in 1971, so, about forty years ago. Although it's true the last thirty years in the USA has prett
See also, for an old German example: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/... "What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security...This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.... To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it -- please try to believe me -- unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, "regretted," that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these "little measure"â(TM) that no "patriotic German" could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head...."
That said, every country is different, with different strengths and weaknesses in different situations. It is not clear how it all will play out in the USA. Like Howard Zinn wrote in 2004, on "The Optimism of Uncertainty": http://www.commondreams.org/vi... "In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning.
To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth.
Let's go back a hundred years. A revolution to overthrow the tsar of Russia, in that most sluggish of semi-feudal empires, not only startled the most advanced imperial powers, but took Lenin himself by surprise and sent him rushing by train to Petrograd. Given the Russian Revolution, who could have predicted Stalin's deformation of it, or Khrushchev's astounding exposure of Stalin, or Gorbachev's succession of surprises? Who would have predicted the bizarre shifts of World War II-the Nazi-Soviet pact (those embarrassing photos of von Ribbentrop and Molotov shaking hands), and the German army rolling through Russia, apparently invincible, causing colossal casualties, being turned back at the gates of Leningrad, on the western edge of Moscow, in the streets of
Many economic models are possible (including subsistence, gift, exchange, and planned, or a mix). The choice depends what sort of society you want and what your priorities are and what your cultural history is. For example, "Palace Economies" and "Water Empires" have lasted for centuries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
I'm not holding central planning as an ideal though. What I write was that at one extreme, one can imagine a reasonable well-planned society that supplies the necessities of life to everyone for essentially no labor needed, leaving everyone lots of free time to do other stuff (including make more things for themselves, raise children, hang out with friends, participate in politics, whatever). There are societies like the ancient Incas that were modeled around this for centuries (explained in the Palace Economy Wikipedia article). It worked for many people for lots of time.
Even the USSR economy "worked", but with lots of problems, including the USA trying to undermine it. If the USSR had not "worked" for decades, why was the USA so afraid of it?
One question to ask is, for most people, is what we have now as a "free market" (although we don't; it is more corporatism and oligarchy), especially in a place like Greece suffering from economic turmoil, better than this planned model, especially given today's materials and automation and so on?
The fact is, so much of our economy is "planned" in so many ways in advance. How many people are involved in deciding what the next iPhone looks like, for example? Granted, it Apple guesses wrong, it may make less profits -- although Apple is a bit of a monopoly in a sense at this point as a close system of apps and such, so almost anything not terrible will sell to the Apple faithful.
However, there are other models people may like better for various reasons.
Imagine, for example, an economy where everyone used the "like" button on Facebook to control what goods would be produced. Limit the number of "likes" per person and you essentially have an economy directed by individuals with a "basic income".
I also wrote there that at another extreme, "... we could have a freewheeling diverse gift economy of local open manufacturing...".
The internet has many aspects of a gift economy. Coupled with improved 3D printing for local on-demand production, this may totally transform our economy, since even if it is hard for a planned economy to get right how many blue shoes people, it is much easier to plan to ensure everyone has a certain amount of raw materials for their 3D printers and enough electricity to run them (or 3D print solar panels or maybe someday cold fusion devices).
What would you object about, say, a plan to create a FOSS commons of free designs and to put a (futuristic, multi-material) 3D printer in every home with enough material and power to use it to print a wide range of consumer goods from shoes to car parts to solar panels? With food supplied from mostly automated indoor agriculture? What is wrong about that as a a baseline from which people could build from in a troubled Greece? Or, what is wrong with the idea, except, of course, that it might put a lot of current industries out of business and change the balance of power in Greek society (and Europe) back to the average citizen?
The Debian project is a bit like an economy controlled by email and IRC chat messages.:-) Mixed with a gift economy. And also exchange with paid workers like at RedHat working on init stuff -- unfortunately pushing stuff like systemd perhaps so RedHat can take over Linux and profit from that as suggested by someone else in such discussions on Slashdot?
There can be many virtues to the market in delivering goods people think feel want. I say "feel" because of advertising. Some people also get addicted to drugs after a drug pusher gets them
But yes, there could be all sorts of hazards out in space we are unaware of and have been very luck to avoid. Including "Galactic Superwaves": http://starburstfound.org/gala...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... "The Flexner Report[1] is a book-length study of medical education in the United States and Canada, written by Abraham Flexner and published in 1910 under the aegis of the Carnegie Foundation. Many aspects of the present-day American medical profession stem from the Flexner Report and its aftermath.
The Report (also called Carnegie Foundation Bulletin Number Four) called on American medical schools to enact higher admission and graduation standards, and to adhere strictly to the protocols of mainstream science in their teaching and research. Many American medical schools fell short of the standard advocated in the Flexner Report, and subsequent to its publication, nearly half of such schools merged or were closed outright. Colleges in electrotherapy were closed. The Report also concluded that there were too many medical schools in the USA, and that too many doctors were being trained. A repercussion of the Flexner Report, resulting from the closure or consolidation of university training, was reversion of American universities to male-only admittance programs to accommodate a smaller admission pool. Universities had begun opening and expanding female admissions as part of women's and co-educational facilities only in the mid-to-latter part of the 19th century with the founding of co-educational Oberlin College in 1833 and private colleges such as Vassar College and Pembroke College....
Flexner viewed blacks as inferior and advocated closing all but 2 of the historically black medical schools. His opinions were followed and only Howard and Meharry were left open, while 5 other schools were closed. His perspective was that black doctors should only treat black patients and should serve roles subservient to white physicians. The closure of these schools and the fact that black students were not admitted to many medical schools in the USA for 50 years after Flexner has contributed to the low numbers of American born physicians of color and the ramifications are still felt more than a 100 years later...."
What has happened recently though to address the shortage of doctors in the USA is that Nurse Practitioners and Physician Assistants are doing more of the hands-on work, and new careers like health coaches are showing up, knowledge about nutrition (the basis of health) is spreading through a variety of sources and practitioners from chefs to nutritionists to writers and movie makers, and we are all turning to the internet more for health care advice...
Doctors are becoming more and more like technicians controlling a prescription pad in the process -- which is sad for a bunch of reasons. As Dr. Fuhrman says, many prescriptions are just "permission slips" for continuing bad behavior including eating poorly.
And some specific specialties like oncology and cardiology are being called scams... "Scientific Studies Show Angioplasty and Stent Placement are Essentially Worthless" https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr... "Exposing the fraud and mythology of conventional cancer treatments" http://www.naturalnews.com/033...
Meanwhile: http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-j... "From Marcia Angell: http://www.nybooks.com/article...
"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs
Much of what kids learned in those one room schoolhouses would be considered college-level material now.
Good points on changes in education sadly... See also John Taylor Gatto, John Holt, Pat Farenga, Alfie Kohn, Grace Lewelly, Chris Mercogliano, and so on...
That is what is deeply wrong with the Euro (although the European Union was probably otherwise a good idea). The Euro went the wrong way. A solid currency needs to be backed by a community, city, state, or nation that has a well-defined common constitution governing the issuance of the currency according to the community's needs. The Euro never had that. Also, Jane Jacobs said currencies need to fluctuate based on the management of those communities -- so the more currencies you have, the finer grained-signals can be sent about people's confidence which helps communities self-correct their policies and manufacturing base and similar factors underlying their overall wealth production (including from "import replacement" as their currency becomes low valued relative to others and imports become expensive). Jane Jacobs outlines how the economic life of cities can be self-correcting if they have their own currencies, but if you have only one currency for many cities, then this only applies to the most powerful capital city and the rest of them tend to suffer relatively. So, the Euro was a dumb idea. Especially dumb in an age of computers and digital currencies that can be instantly converted. And now many countries in Europe (including Greece) are paying for it in human suffering.
My suggestion from 2008 when Greece ran out of tear gas: https://groups.google.com/foru... "Now, does this make any sense if you understand the possibilities of open manufacturing or an open society? In Greece you have a warm climate, access to oceans, lots of sun and wind, an educated populace with a 2000+ year history of democracy (on and off:-), no obvious external enemies declaring war, and so on. And they are so worried about their future ability to make and use things (which is how I translate "fears for Greece's economic future") that they are running out of tear gas? This all makes no *physical* sense. The place should be a paradise. Instead it is in "self-destruct mode" according to one editor. It must be *ideology*. Or, more correctly, ideology *embodied* in a certain type of productive infrastructure....
So, ironically, we have the worst of both systems. We could have a really centralized system run efficiently with a tiny fraction of the workforce now, with a lot less variety perhaps (that is, all the old Soviet Central Planning stuff would work now that we have the internet and great software and great designs and great computers if we accept some voluntary simplicity), but with everything very cheap (essentially, just given away) and 99% of the population doing whatever they wanted with their time. Or, we could have a freewheeling diverse gift economy of local open manufacturing where people just make whatever they want in an open way, with all sorts of useful and useless items. (Aspects of the two extremes may even converge, since what are the 99% of people going to do with the generic stuff but customize it?:-) Instead, we have a system in the middle that produces some variety at a huge expense of human effort taken away from family and civic duties, and it is a system now with so many questions about its uncertain future (including that anyone who is young will have a dignified place in the economic scheme of things) that an entire country has just run out of tear gas. This makes no sense (except of course, that some people do benefit from this, like tear gas manufacturers, school teachers who get paid to keep kids off the streets preparing them for non-existent jobs, people who are near the top of the economic hierarchy already and feel secure, etc.).
Anyway, this suggests one target of open manufacturing could be a community of size ranging from Iceland (about 300,000 people) to Greece (about 11,000,000 people). That's certainly an interesting size range. I would think 99% closure of those economies by mass should be easily doable. Computer chips, some medicines, and maybe some other specialized components might be the major imports after the system was set up. Note that while one may not expect Greece or Iceland to "self-replicate" any time soon, the ability do do so ensures it can be self-repairing.
Anyway, it kind of comes down to how much economic security is worth to a country compared to minimum effort. Given the massive youth unemployment in Greece, and the economic fears of depending on a global economy, it would seem like maximizing productive efficiency through participating in global production would not be at the top of their priority list now that they are out of tear gas. Unfortunately, they did not invest in this research ten years ago. So, this is only theoretical at this point. It might take a very expensive crash program to bring together thousands of researchers for a year to make headway in any time that might make a difference. Still, politically, that is an out for Greece. We could all move there, recruit all the educated youths off the streets, and spend a year figuring out how to make Greece work for everybody and be 99% self-sufficient by mass.:-) But, no need to move with the internet really. Maybe somebody on the list could coordinate moving the rioters off th
From: http://frac.org/initiatives/hu... === Due to the additional risk factors associated with poverty, food insecure and low-income people are especially vulnerable to obesity (see the section on the Relationship Between Hunger and Overweight or Obesity and the section on the Relationship Between Poverty and Overweight or Obesity). More specifically, obesity among food insecure people -- as well as among low-income people -- occurs in part because they are subject to the same influences as other Americans (e.g., more sedentary lifestyles, increased portion sizes), but also because they face unique challenges in adopting healthful behaviors, as described below. (For more information on the influences all Americans face, see the section on Factors Contributing to Overweight and Obesity.)
Key Factors
Limited resources
Lack of access to healthy, affordable foods
Fewer opportunities for physical activity
Cycles of food deprivation and overeating
High levels of stress
Greater exposure to marketing of obesity-promoting products
Limited access to health care...
You might have a typo in the last sentence that changed your intended meaning?
That said, trust is a complex topic, so it is hard to generalize. The story of Jesus said he hung out a lot with tax collectors, harlots, and sinners... Not because he wanted to be one, but because that is where he felt he was needed.
I agree some technoligies should be banned or heavily taxed because they create unpaid for externalities like pollution. However, in general, what we need are more efficient technologies, technologies that create new resources out of abundant materials (like fusion of hydrogen), and also technologies that let us expand out into space (or responsibly in the ocean or desert or Antarctic, or underground).
The human imagination is the ultimate resource, The more (educated, well-fed) people you have, the more imagination. "The Ultimate Resource II: People, Materials, and Environment" http://www.juliansimon.com/wri...
If I told you that someone had (really) just invented fusion energy (or dirt cheap solar), and someone else had invented automated indoor agriculture, and someone else had invented 3D printers that can recycle 100% of everything they print in a non-polluting way -- even electronics and houses, and together these technologies could feed a trillion people on the planet and house them and clothe them and so on, would your feelings change about "over population"? BTW, we are not very far from all three of these technologies or equivalents.
Even if for aesthetic or environmental reasons we might want to limit the population of humans on the Earth at any one time, the carrying capacity of the solar system, even just with essentially known technologies discussed in 1980, is probably in the quadrillions of humans (plus much more of everything else in supporting ecosystems). http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/...
In any case, the bigger issue is that populations of industrialized countries are peaking already with non-immigrant female citizens in most generally having less than two or so kids each, so less than replacement. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
As I wrote here: http://p2pfoundation.net/backu... "As with the comment on Ireland, that is why the industrialized globe is facing a "Peak Population" crisis, not a "Peak Oil" crisis, even though people are confusing the two, which is odd given solar is now (or soon will be) cheaper than coal.:-)
But, think about it, how many of the industrialized world's current problems are better explained by "Peak Population" rather than "Peak Oil"?
And how much has the "Peak Energy" misrepresentation of the "Peak Oil" fact by people like Catton led to smaller families and made worse the "Peak Population" crisis? Gloomsters and Doomsters are in that sense creating the terrible problems we are facing right now. In Voyage from Yesteryear, James P. Hogan talks about despair versus optimist in a culture, in part based on appreciation of the potential abundance energy in the universe.
The less peers that are around, the less peers can help each other and contribute to a free commons. Maybe there are laws of diminishing returns, but are we anywhere near them? What would Wikipedia be like with only 100 contributors instead of 100 thousand? Especially in a digital age, it is easy for a peer to add more to the free commons than they take away. What do you take away from Wikipedia by reading a page? A little electricity power perhaps, but Wikipedia shows us how to get all the power we need from the sun.So, even in a physical sense, Wikipedia is helping peers physically power it by giving away such knowledge.
We can support quadrillions of humans in the solar system (see my previous references to Dyson, Bernal, Savage, O'Neill, and there are many others), or about a million times our current population on Earth. We essen
Thanks, AC. Yes, that is a typo, sorry, and should be "1775", not "1175". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I... "The Invasion of Canada in 1775 was the first major military initiative by the newly formed Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. The objective of the campaign was to gain military control of the British Province of Quebec, and convince the French-speaking Canadiens to join the revolution on the side of the Thirteen Colonies.... The British sent several thousand troops, including General John Burgoyne and Hessian mercenaries, to reinforce those in the province in May 1776. General Carleton then launched a counter-offensive, ultimately driving the smallpox-weakened and disorganized American forces back to Fort Ticonderoga...."
We could have both perhaps. But in general, this is sad, since with a few trillion invested in R&D, we could have fusion energy (or dirt cheap solar, coming anyway, but more slowly) and automated indoor agriculture and near 100% emissions-free recycling of all consumer goods, and so on. And many actions of the wealthy (especially those invested in oil) have essentially blocked these sorts of efforts politically. As Bucky Fuller says, whether it will be utopia or oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. Whatever the legality, for those in charge of much of the world's wealth for whatever reason to cut-and-run from the very problems they have helped create is morally irresponsible and very selfish.
And it probably won't end well -- even for them. A private airstrip in New Zealand (or "Elysium" for that matter, even backed by a large force of security robots), will not protect you against nuclear fallout or rogue nano-tech or air-born plagues or a bunch of other things -- including just "drone" cruise missiles with conventional warheads we have had for decades. Those missiles are getting cheaper and easier to make; there way a Slashdot article years ago about a DIY cruise missile for about US$5K. The damage from such things will of course fall mostly on the poor as with all disasters, but cheap drones will be another destabilizing force if we have a social meltdown (which history shows, happens again and again, see Daniel Quinn's book "Beyond Civilization" for example). A better approach is to work to prevent the meltdown in the first place (like Bucky Fuller worked towards), or at least protect everyone you can (Schindler's list).
That is why I have invested all my (potential, mostly never realized) wealth (as far as primarily time) into trying to make the world work for everyone, and also trying to make it possible for everyone to build any scale lifeboats/ships they want.
After all, I did graduate from Princeton with Michelle Obama, and in the next year were Jeff Bezos, the late Phil Goldman, and many others. I could have picked a different path. I also worked for a short time as an undergrad with someone investing the Princeton endowment, who told me the reason a big investor does better than the typical small investor was more information, cheaper trades, and faster trades (enough to discourage me from trying to be an individual investor).
But more than that, I read the book, "The Seven Laws of Money" by Michael Phillips when I was a teenager. I had gone to the library to read around books on how to become a millionaire. Of about six or seven there on the topic, all but one told me how to do it (the first million is the hardest; start a small business, work hard, be responsive to customers, hope you get lucky -- most small businesses fail in a few years, but keep trying and maybe you'll get lucky when you have enough experience from your failures). But the last book asked me, "Why do you want to be a millionaire?" And that is a very good question to ask yourself...
The basic concepts from that book: http://www.goodreads.com/book/... http://seeingmoney.org/SevenLa... http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/Comm... "THE SEVEN LAWS OF MONEY The following laws were published in 1977 in 'Seven laws of Money' by Mike Phillips. Mike, a Bank of America banker, was instrumental in developing Master Charge. 1. Do it! Money will come when you are doing the right thing. The first law is the hardest for most people to accept and is the source of the most distress. The clearest translation of this in terms of personal advice is "go ahead and do what you want to do." Worry about your ability to do it and competence to do it, but certainly do not worry about the money. 2. Money has its own rules: records, budgets, savings, borrowing. The rules of money are probably Ben Frankli
From: http://www.shareintl.org/archi... ===
"We need competition in order to survive."
"Life is boring without competition."
"It is competition that gives us meaning in life." These words written by American college students capture a sentiment that runs through the heart of the USA and appears to be spreading throughout the world. To these students, competition is not simply something one does, it is the very essence of existence. When asked to imagine a world without competition, they can foresee only rising prices, declining productivity and a general collapse of the moral order. Some truly believe we would cease to exist were it not for competition.
Alfie Kohn, author of No contest: the case against competition, disagrees completely. He argues that competition is essentially detrimental to every important aspect of human experience; our relationships, self-esteem, enjoyment of leisure, and even productivity would all be improved if we were to break out of the pattern of relentless competition. Far from being idealistic speculation, his position is anchored in hundreds of research studies and careful analysis of the primary domains of competitive interaction. For those who see themselves assisting in a transition to a less competitive world, Kohn's book will be an invaluable resource. ===
BTW, I'm quoting Morton Deutsch there (as indicated). Here is the source link (also on the previously linked page): http://www.beyondintractabilit... " Q: You're starting to see the analogy to international conflict, or intractable conflict on a larger scale? A: Yes. Well, I wrote a paper about preventing World War III. That was during the height of the cold war, I think I wrote it in 1982, it was called "The Presidential Address to the International Society to Political Psychology." And there I took the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union and characterized it as a malignant relationship, which had some of the characteristics that I was talking about with the couple. It was right for both the United States and the Soviet Union to think that the other was hostile, would undo it, would damage it, you know, all of these things. The relationship was a malignant one. They had to become aware of the malignancy, and the only way out really was recognizing that it's hurting, recognizing that there is a potential better way of relating. And that better way of relating involves having a sense that one can only have security if there's mutual security. And that's true in most relationships. That's particularly true to recognize groups that have had bitter strife where they've hurt each other. They have to deal with the problem of how to get to where they can live together. It may be ethnic groups within a given nation or community. They can only live together if they recognize that their own security is going to be dependent on the other person's security. So each person, each side, each group has to be interested in the welfare of the other.
On a national level it has to deal with military and other economic security. At the group level and personal level, it often has to do with psychological security. It has to do with someone recognizing, I shouldn't be treating the other in an undignified, disrespectful way. So in an interpersonal relationship, that kind of security, recognizing that not only are you entitled to it, so is the other person entitled to it. And if you don't give that other person that entitlement the relationship is going to move in the other direction, back to bitter conflict."
That said, sure, if you look at evolution, there is a sense that every generation is filtered somehow. Only one sperm of millions gets to the egg... But, what really matters to survival of humans once they are conceived? Cooperation seems very important among humans. Individual ex
Thanks for the pointer! I doubt I'll find my name there. Also, I said the 3X3 display wall panel may have sparked an interest in combining speech research and Jeopardy (perhaps, in an unconscious way?) -- but Watson itself is a much broader system. I wanted to work on such systems then, and talked a bit about "wouldn't it be nice if..." like with a display wall connected to a supercomputer for solving tough problems, but I said nothing detailed as to how it would really work, beyond creating a simple system with a Linux server where you could say things like, "put stocks on panel 3" or something like that. I don't even remember in detail what pattern of utterances I set it up to respond to (it was not very complex). So, my contribution to Watson itself technically -- probably near zilch. It's just the display wall Jeopardy connection I wonder about. But now that you raise the issue, aspects of using an AI to help solve problems was part of that idea. But, sci-fi writers like Isaac Asimov with Multivac or his robot stories have been taking about that for decades...
As for credit for being a spark, do people, say, always even remember some book they read years ago where an idea began to seep into their mind? How do you even quantify a degree of contribution? When I asked Ted Nelson (when he visited IBM once) about whether "The Skills of Xandu" short story by Theodore Sturgeon inspired his work, he thanked me said he had been looking for the story and he claimed to not even be able to remember the story's name!:-) Here is an audio version of that story, which is about a wearable nanotech computers supporting humans wirelessly sharing their knowledge and skills -- hot prescient stuff for the early 1950s: https://archive.org/details/pr...
BTW, I gave a copy of that story to my supervisor at IBM Research, a master inventor with 50 patents to his name. He finally looked at it a while after I left, and thanked me, and said it was the story that got him interested in materials research based on its nanotech angle! But he had long forgotten it. I can wonder how many other inventors that story has inspired? I don't know what inspired it though. Maybe Memex?:-) http://www.theatlantic.com/mag...
I've been tangentially around several development like WordNet (George Miller), "Mind Children" (Hans Moravec, who read my senior thesis written under Geoge about self-replicating robots as he was working on the book), Marshall Brain's early career (where he probably saw a simulation I made of self-replicating robots, and I wonder if that contributed to his later concern with "Manna"), and at IBM Research as mentioned with Jeopardy and Watson. Possibly some others (like my possibly talking with David Gelernter about triples I was enamored of, and him saying tuples were more general, at SUNY Stony Brook), my talking at Princeton about robotics and stores (Jeff Bezos was the year after me), my senior thesis which presaged "Evolutionary psychology" but I doubt that sparked much as not many people read it and that field was already developing in parallel. as I can see now. In no case would I claim to be clearly the driving force behind any of these accomplishments which are full of a lot of hard and inventive work. As with Watson, it's possible I was just a tangential spark to some of these projects to some degree -- or not! It is also quite possible that I ended up hanging around people like Hans Moravec because we already were thinking along similar lines. Also, sometime ideas seem just "in the air" for whatever reason. Or ideas come to people by other paths, often multiple times before we even notice them. (It's said in direct mail as a rule of thumb you need to send the same advertising letter three times before people pay attention to it.) And certainly, in all cases, a lot of sparks went the other way, to me.:-)
"(AC:) There's always someone who wants more than safety."
And how in practice are you going to deter someone or defend yourself from someone "who want's more safety" (or even know such a person exists and is out to make trouble for you) unless you are part of a community who are all looking out for each other?
Of course, you also have to be willing to listen and pay attention in that case. Example: "Hoekstra on Underwear Bomber: "We Missed Him at Every Step"" http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/po... "In November the suspect's father went to the US Embassy in Abuja, the Nigerian capital, to warn that his son was being radicalized in Yemen."
Still, I have to agree that the challenge of what to do about mentally ill people or politically ill countries, when they become violent, is a challenging one for any community.
Related movie: "The Day the Earth Stood Still" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... "Klaatu warns the professor that the people of the other planets have become concerned for their safety after humans developed atomic power."
Or, as Einstein said: "The release of atomic power has changed everything except our way of thinking... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker. (1945)"
Although, in an age where even watches have enough CPU power to do the calculations that produced the original atomic bombs, retreating from the problem gets a little more complicated...
As said by someone who studied primitive technology, when asked why he did not just go off to live by himself in the woods, "It takes a village of skilled people to live well int the wilderness" (or something to that effect).
"Free love" is another "Hippy" ideal which did not work out too well either in most cases for various all-too-human reasons. Even when one rejects marriage, rejecting "relationships" is a completely different issue.
But, that the mistakes of many hippies do not prove anything about the general issue of decentralization for resiliency.
I agree with you that "equity" though is a big issue in any emerging social system. That is something that gave me pause long ago, as I write about here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/sunr... "Basically, this all made me realized there is a difference between being an "employee" (even an employee-owner) with revokable rights or loseable equity, and being a "citizen" with irrevokable rights."
Still, the "Co-housing" movement has been addressing some of these concerns as far as US cultural expectations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
A successful US co-housing example: http://ecovillageithaca.org/ "EcoVillage at Ithaca is part of a global movement of people seeking to create positive solutions to the social, environmental and economic crises our planet faces. Since 1991 we have developed an award-winning ecovillage that invites you to live, learn and grow. Our mission is to promote experiential learning about ways of meeting human needs for shelter, food, energy, livelihood and social connectedness that are aligned with the long-term health and viability of Earth and all its inhabitants."
Healthy communities have rules and norms and stories that help manage them. Humans have been living in mostly independent tribal situations for hundreds of thousands of years. It is not like it can't be done, if you are willing to make certain sacrifices. The question is, how could we or should we do it now, with more technical and social knowledge?
Also, some random collection of strangers in the modern day does not have the social cohesion of an extended family or tribe from centuries ago who have known each other from birth. A random collection of strangers, sharing little more initially than some ideal, is probably going to need more formal structure and more formal processes. Also, millennia ago, there was not such a possibility of a huge rich/poor divide in such communities as regards outside work, where one person makes minimum wage at a job cooking or doing child care while another member of the community makes 100X that as a lawyer or a doctor -- or maybe a plumber in some areas these days.:-)
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O... "Sahlins gathered the data from these studies and used it to support a comprehensive argument that states that hunter-gatherers did not suffer from deprivation, but instead lived in a society in which "all the peopleâ(TM)s wants are easily satisfied.""
However, much of my own thinking about this came from an interest in space settlements... This is an issue anybody creating space habitats, moon bases, Mars bases, or whatever needs to think about.
Another aspect of that was figuring out how to create communities that could survive nuclear war and economic collapse. My concern about surviving war might be a bit easier to understand when you consider that this is what my Mother's home town looked like after WWII: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... "Anders Hejlsberg (born December 1960)[2] is a prominent Danish software engineer who co-designed several popular and commercially successful programming languages and development tools. He was the original author of Turbo Pascal and the chief architect of Delphi. He currently works for Microsoft as the lead architect of C#[1] and core developer on TypeScript."
I would have used dot net and C# alone for that reason based on liking Delphi -- except that the main line of those has long been proprietary and single platform compared to other language options which are free and/or multi-platform.
I'd be curious if you have by any chance tried C# and what you thought of it in comparison to Delphi?
Slashdot Mirror
Battery powered calculators? Slide rules? Backup generator? Cell phone apps? Calling a back office who has a calculator?
But see also my other comment on order of magnitude stuff, especially to quickly double-check the answer from a machine. It is probably more important that someone notice that a $99.99 dress and $48.33 pair of pants should not add up to $1048.32 (high by x10) or $58.32 (low by x3) from adding or missing a nine somewhere than that they can do an exact calculation in their head.
Although, if I as a customer had to choose between a clerk who was pleasant and helpful but needed a calculator to ring up a sale and one who was not pleasant or helpful but could do sums in their head without a battery-powered calculator or cell phone, I know which one I'd pick. :-)
IMHO, an important skill is order-of-magnitude calculations. If you subtract US$79.99 from your bank balance in a checking account, you should realize something is wrong if your balance drops by $1000 instead of near to $100. Same for political-type calculations relating to roughly how many people are in a country and how much some policy might cost if it costs $X per person and so on (by rounding, to get a ballpark figure). Without that basic skill, people are completely at the mercy of the machines or their own fat finger typing or unscrupulous other people.
Order-of-magnitude calculation is the sort of skill people picked up quickly using slide rules. :-)
"Simulated Pickett N909-ES Slide Rule"
http://www.antiquark.com/slide...
"Slip-stick" engineering pretty much got us to the Moon and back. :-) Even if no doubt more precise calculations were made along the way at some point.
But precise calculations are indeed perhaps better turned over to calculators, so people can focus on other things. There are only so many things we can pay attention to or remember at one time.
Yes, I did learn to do a square root on paper at some point, not that I recall it much now. But I don't feel especially weaker for not being able to do that at the moment. And even if I did recall the procedure, what would be the point in using it to determine the square root of 99 if I could punch use a calculator? Again though, being able to check the result roughly would be important though, to know the correct result must be somewhere around 10 and not 5 and not 20.
Just out of curiosity:
"How to calculate a square root without a calculator"
http://www.homeschoolmath.net/...
One example comment there (from an "Instructor of Mathematics"): ..."
"I vaguely recall learning the square root algorithm in K-12, but frankly, I see no value in this algorithm except as a curiosity. And I am not of the "reform" crowd. I fully believe students not be given a calculator to use until advanced algebra or pre-calculus, and then only a scientific calculator (not graphing). Do you really believe student at the K-7 level will understand how/why this algorithm works? I was happy to see that you recommended the "estimate and check" method. This is what I also recommended to my daughter, who is now studying square roots in her home school curriculum. The "estimate and check" method is a good exercise in estimating, multiplying, and also memorizing perfect squares.
Kids need so much -- nature; human interactions; emotion coaching; music; manipulating blocks, sand, and water; physical exercise; and so on. Computers (or other screens) crowd that all out so quickly as a "supernormal stimuli". Sure kids can learn computers young, but the human mind is adapted to grow a certain way within a natural environment and an extended family/tribe. Best to avoid computers/screens as long as possible IMHO, as it will happen soon enough anyway. We did not let our kid have much screen time until around age four, and I still feel that was too soon, and rapidly became a losing battle after age six to eight or so. Sure, like you I'm proud of my own kid's accomplishments with computers, but I also realize they come at a cost of other missed opportunities.
BTW, John Taylor Gatto essentially says "gifted" programs are a scam, carving off those who might otherwise be natural leaders and making them a cog (if that) in a bigger system of social control.
The Albany (NY) Free School and its high school equivalent are examples of places that gets a lot of things right, IMHO.
http://www.albanyfreeschool.or...
https://tubmanschool.wordpress...
"Harriet Tubman Democratic High School is the only democratic educational institution for teens in the Capital District. We offer a supportive and personal learning environment for young adults from diverse backgrounds. Our staff strives to teach young adults how to think for themselves by encouraging critical discussions and respecting student input into their educational process. Our students learn self-motivation and, in the process, discover independence and self-reliance."
Contrast with, at the other extreme, a place like Choate Rosemary Hall,in the words of one of its students, Alfredo Brillembourg '16 News Staff Writer:
http://thenews.choate.edu/arti...
"In his essay about elite education, writer William Deresiewicz asserts, "Elite education forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers." This idea of higher education refers to a stage of formal learning that further cultivates young minds. Indeed, Choate is an establishment of higher education and it excels in its academic teaching. In light of this, Choate has very high expectations for its students and acts upon them by assigning heavy homework loads, frequent assessments, and rigorous course work. Although this method does promote good habits and a high level of learning, it does not encourage students to think for themselves because there is simply no time for us to do so.
In response to this stress-inducing environment, students are forced to figure out the system of boarding school, rather than actually taking in what they are being taught. Choate scholars need more time to be able to relax and embrace their studies. Choate must steer away from teaching kids to cheat the system of higher education by supporting a more innovative learning environment that will allow kids to appreciate what they are learning, rather than simply learning it for the grade. Choate's methods for education must work toward teaching kids how to think for themselves because it will allow for more success in life as a whole, rather than simply teaching how to succeed through the system of higher education.
The pressure and demands imposed upon students at Choate force kids to resort to techniques such as last-minute studying and memorizing, which are not conducive toward actual learning and will harm students in the long run. The large workloads are a huge source of stress for students, and they cause students to lose interest in pursuing other subjects because they have too much to understand at once. Likewise, the long hours of school and sports combined wear students down, and rather than appreciating intellectual topics outside of school, kids are too caught
"Stay on task" like a workhouse or factory? Whose task? To what end?
The new (yet old) paradigm is learner-directed education. A healthy kid's own natural curiosity and desire to succeed then helps him or he power through challenges (if it has not been wiped out before then through boredom/confusion or rewards/punishments). However, most software and even internet content is not that educational and so is a rough fit. We need more good stuff, especially FOSS educational simulations. If kids are not choosing to learn important things with at least some of their time, we need to ask why? What sort of messages are we sending kids about what we value as a society (like what is on TV)?
See also my essay: ...
"Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools"
http://patapata.sourceforge.ne...
"Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case"
based on someone else's demand.Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change.
So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process."
That said, I strongly believe that there needs to be a way to ensure families have the resources they need to raise healthy educated kids (including paying for tutors and classes as desired). I feel a "basic income" from birth could be part of the answer to that (John Holt suggests that in "Escape from Childhood"), and would provide families with plenty of money to pay for their children's education as desired or time to teach their own. Until then, consider: :-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towa...
"New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators
Also, there are so many addicting aspects to modern society, parents need better support in managing that for their children (rather than even more kid-targeted commercials and so on). The problem and some partial solutions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://www.paulgraham.com/addi...
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-...
From: http://dojotoolkit.org/referen...
"Dojo has made a serious commitment to creating a toolkit that allows the development of accessible Web applications for all users, regardless of physical abilities. The core widget set of Dojo, dijit, is fully accessible since the 1.0 release, making Dojo the only fully accessible open source toolkit for Web 2.0 development. This means that users who require keyboard only navigation, need accommodations for low vision or who use an assistive technology, can interact with the dijit widgets. If you are new to accessibility, please refer to the Web Accessibility Issues page for more general information about accessibility"
Just like Alaska does with its "Permanent fund"?
Yes, bad things are happening. But unless we remember and celebrate the past successes, we may more easily give way to despair.
Examples of problematical episodes from US history: The McCarthy era in the 1950s, the internment of Japanese-Americans in the 1940s, the US Eugenics movement in the 1930s and before -- where the Nazis got the idea, the lynching of black citizens in the South along with a US white supremacy movement (again, long before "Arianism" took hold in Germany), the tragic Civil War of the 1870s, and many more such things... Plus so much problematical foreign policy, including grabbing big parts of Mexico and invading Canada multiple times, not to mention the systematic genocide committed against the Native Americans to steal their land (the US Army's primary function in early years was taking part in all that). The USA may criticize China's "human rights" record, but the US past is filled with many horrors that may be far worse than things China is doing now (even in Tibet etc.).
Governments always demand to be respected in various ways. Those ways may change over time. Yes, there are bad trends, and bad episodes, some still ongoing and growing like you and others including me point to, but the USA has muddled through them in the past. Some wrongs have been righted decades later (even as "justice delayed is justice denied"); others have yet to be resolved. Generally, the successes are helped along by efforts from citizens, as in: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. (Margaret Mead)".
I can urge you to read "A People's History of the United States" to get a broader perspective on all this regarding the USA. It is a perspective not taught in the past in most US classrooms or probably still in most civics classes for immigrants. It is the history of US citizens struggling repeatedly to control a government and industry (the two being intertwined), to keep them accountable to human needs. It is full of examples both of successes and failures. Here is an online version, but it is probably available in any major book store:
http://www.historyisaweapon.co...
Another good book is John Gardner's 1971 book "Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society". Here I quote what he says and comment on it: ... Only the blind and complacent could fail to recognize the great tasks of renewal facing us -- in government, in education, ..." :-)
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
""As I was browsing in a university bookstore recently, I heard an apple-cheeked girl say to her companion, "The truth is that our society and everything in it is in a state of decay." I studied her carefully and I must report that she did not seem even slightly decayed. But what of the society as a whole? Decay is hardly the word for what is happening to us. We are witnessing changes so profound and far-reaching that the mind can hardly grasp all the implications.
John Gardner goes on to say that every generation faces the problem of renewing itself to meet new challenges emerging from the very success of the old ways of doing things. And he suggests that social values are not some drying up old reservoir, but rather a reservoir of variable capacity that must be recharged anew in every generation. [He also suggests every generation must re-learn for itself what the words carved on the stone monuments really mean.]
Democracy -- use it or lose it.
Free speech on the internet -- use it or lose it.
Social capital -- use it or lose it?
P2P -- use it or lose it?
Again, Gardner's book was written in 1971, so, about forty years ago. Although it's true the last thirty years in the USA has prett
See also, for an old German example: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/... ..This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. ... To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it -- please try to believe me -- unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, "regretted," that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these "little measure"â(TM) that no "patriotic German" could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head. ..."
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security.
That said, every country is different, with different strengths and weaknesses in different situations. It is not clear how it all will play out in the USA. Like Howard Zinn wrote in 2004, on "The Optimism of Uncertainty":
http://www.commondreams.org/vi...
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning.
To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth.
Let's go back a hundred years. A revolution to overthrow the tsar of Russia, in that most sluggish of semi-feudal empires, not only startled the most advanced imperial powers, but took Lenin himself by surprise and sent him rushing by train to Petrograd. Given the Russian Revolution, who could have predicted Stalin's deformation of it, or Khrushchev's astounding exposure of Stalin, or Gorbachev's succession of surprises? Who would have predicted the bizarre shifts of World War II-the Nazi-Soviet pact (those embarrassing photos of von Ribbentrop and Molotov shaking hands), and the German army rolling through Russia, apparently invincible, causing colossal casualties, being turned back at the gates of Leningrad, on the western edge of Moscow, in the streets of
Many economic models are possible (including subsistence, gift, exchange, and planned, or a mix). The choice depends what sort of society you want and what your priorities are and what your cultural history is. For example, "Palace Economies" and "Water Empires" have lasted for centuries:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
I'm not holding central planning as an ideal though. What I write was that at one extreme, one can imagine a reasonable well-planned society that supplies the necessities of life to everyone for essentially no labor needed, leaving everyone lots of free time to do other stuff (including make more things for themselves, raise children, hang out with friends, participate in politics, whatever). There are societies like the ancient Incas that were modeled around this for centuries (explained in the Palace Economy Wikipedia article). It worked for many people for lots of time.
Even the USSR economy "worked", but with lots of problems, including the USA trying to undermine it. If the USSR had not "worked" for decades, why was the USA so afraid of it?
One question to ask is, for most people, is what we have now as a "free market" (although we don't; it is more corporatism and oligarchy), especially in a place like Greece suffering from economic turmoil, better than this planned model, especially given today's materials and automation and so on?
The fact is, so much of our economy is "planned" in so many ways in advance. How many people are involved in deciding what the next iPhone looks like, for example? Granted, it Apple guesses wrong, it may make less profits -- although Apple is a bit of a monopoly in a sense at this point as a close system of apps and such, so almost anything not terrible will sell to the Apple faithful.
However, there are other models people may like better for various reasons.
Imagine, for example, an economy where everyone used the "like" button on Facebook to control what goods would be produced. Limit the number of "likes" per person and you essentially have an economy directed by individuals with a "basic income".
I also wrote there that at another extreme, "... we could have a freewheeling diverse gift economy of local open manufacturing...".
The internet has many aspects of a gift economy. Coupled with improved 3D printing for local on-demand production, this may totally transform our economy, since even if it is hard for a planned economy to get right how many blue shoes people, it is much easier to plan to ensure everyone has a certain amount of raw materials for their 3D printers and enough electricity to run them (or 3D print solar panels or maybe someday cold fusion devices).
What would you object about, say, a plan to create a FOSS commons of free designs and to put a (futuristic, multi-material) 3D printer in every home with enough material and power to use it to print a wide range of consumer goods from shoes to car parts to solar panels? With food supplied from mostly automated indoor agriculture? What is wrong about that as a a baseline from which people could build from in a troubled Greece? Or, what is wrong with the idea, except, of course, that it might put a lot of current industries out of business and change the balance of power in Greek society (and Europe) back to the average citizen?
The Debian project is a bit like an economy controlled by email and IRC chat messages. :-) Mixed with a gift economy. And also exchange with paid workers like at RedHat working on init stuff -- unfortunately pushing stuff like systemd perhaps so RedHat can take over Linux and profit from that as suggested by someone else in such discussions on Slashdot?
There can be many virtues to the market in delivering goods people think feel want. I say "feel" because of advertising. Some people also get addicted to drugs after a drug pusher gets them
http://io9.com/11-of-the-weird...
But yes, there could be all sorts of hazards out in space we are unaware of and have been very luck to avoid. Including "Galactic Superwaves":
http://starburstfound.org/gala...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... ... ..."
"The Flexner Report[1] is a book-length study of medical education in the United States and Canada, written by Abraham Flexner and published in 1910 under the aegis of the Carnegie Foundation. Many aspects of the present-day American medical profession stem from the Flexner Report and its aftermath.
The Report (also called Carnegie Foundation Bulletin Number Four) called on American medical schools to enact higher admission and graduation standards, and to adhere strictly to the protocols of mainstream science in their teaching and research. Many American medical schools fell short of the standard advocated in the Flexner Report, and subsequent to its publication, nearly half of such schools merged or were closed outright. Colleges in electrotherapy were closed. The Report also concluded that there were too many medical schools in the USA, and that too many doctors were being trained. A repercussion of the Flexner Report, resulting from the closure or consolidation of university training, was reversion of American universities to male-only admittance programs to accommodate a smaller admission pool. Universities had begun opening and expanding female admissions as part of women's and co-educational facilities only in the mid-to-latter part of the 19th century with the founding of co-educational Oberlin College in 1833 and private colleges such as Vassar College and Pembroke College.
Flexner viewed blacks as inferior and advocated closing all but 2 of the historically black medical schools. His opinions were followed and only Howard and Meharry were left open, while 5 other schools were closed. His perspective was that black doctors should only treat black patients and should serve roles subservient to white physicians. The closure of these schools and the fact that black students were not admitted to many medical schools in the USA for 50 years after Flexner has contributed to the low numbers of American born physicians of color and the ramifications are still felt more than a 100 years later.
What has happened recently though to address the shortage of doctors in the USA is that Nurse Practitioners and Physician Assistants are doing more of the hands-on work, and new careers like health coaches are showing up, knowledge about nutrition (the basis of health) is spreading through a variety of sources and practitioners from chefs to nutritionists to writers and movie makers, and we are all turning to the internet more for health care advice...
Doctors are becoming more and more like technicians controlling a prescription pad in the process -- which is sad for a bunch of reasons. As Dr. Fuhrman says, many prescriptions are just "permission slips" for continuing bad behavior including eating poorly.
And some specific specialties like oncology and cardiology are being called scams...
"Scientific Studies Show Angioplasty and Stent Placement are Essentially Worthless"
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
"Exposing the fraud and mythology of conventional cancer treatments"
http://www.naturalnews.com/033...
Meanwhile: http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-j...
"From Marcia Angell:
http://www.nybooks.com/article...
"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs
Much of what kids learned in those one room schoolhouses would be considered college-level material now.
Good points on changes in education sadly... See also John Taylor Gatto, John Holt, Pat Farenga, Alfie Kohn, Grace Lewelly, Chris Mercogliano, and so on...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...
That is what is deeply wrong with the Euro (although the European Union was probably otherwise a good idea). The Euro went the wrong way. A solid currency needs to be backed by a community, city, state, or nation that has a well-defined common constitution governing the issuance of the currency according to the community's needs. The Euro never had that. Also, Jane Jacobs said currencies need to fluctuate based on the management of those communities -- so the more currencies you have, the finer grained-signals can be sent about people's confidence which helps communities self-correct their policies and manufacturing base and similar factors underlying their overall wealth production (including from "import replacement" as their currency becomes low valued relative to others and imports become expensive). Jane Jacobs outlines how the economic life of cities can be self-correcting if they have their own currencies, but if you have only one currency for many cities, then this only applies to the most powerful capital city and the rest of them tend to suffer relatively. So, the Euro was a dumb idea. Especially dumb in an age of computers and digital currencies that can be instantly converted. And now many countries in Europe (including Greece) are paying for it in human suffering.
My suggestion from 2008 when Greece ran out of tear gas: https://groups.google.com/foru... :-), no obvious external enemies declaring war, and so on. And they are so worried about their future ability to make and use things (which is how I translate "fears for Greece's economic future") that they are running out of tear gas? This all makes no *physical* sense. The place should be a paradise. Instead it is in "self-destruct mode" according to one editor. It must be *ideology*. Or, more correctly, ideology *embodied* in a certain type of productive infrastructure. ... :-) Instead, we have a system in the middle that produces some variety at a huge expense of human effort taken away from family and civic duties, and it is a system now with so many questions about its uncertain future (including that anyone who is young will have a dignified place in the economic scheme of things) that an entire country has just run out of tear gas. This makes no sense (except of course, that some people do benefit from this, like tear gas manufacturers, school teachers who get paid to keep kids off the streets preparing them for non-existent jobs, people who are near the top of the economic hierarchy already and feel secure, etc.). :-) But, no need to move with the internet really. Maybe somebody on the list could coordinate moving the rioters off th
"Now, does this make any sense if you understand the possibilities of open manufacturing or an open society? In Greece you have a warm climate, access to oceans, lots of sun and wind, an educated populace with a 2000+ year history of democracy (on and off
So, ironically, we have the worst of both systems. We could have a really centralized system run efficiently with a tiny fraction of the workforce now, with a lot less variety perhaps (that is, all the old Soviet Central Planning stuff would work now that we have the internet and great software and great designs and great computers if we accept some voluntary simplicity), but with everything very cheap (essentially, just given away) and 99% of the population doing whatever they wanted with their time. Or, we could have a freewheeling diverse gift economy of local open manufacturing where people just make whatever they want in an open way, with all sorts of useful and useless items. (Aspects of the two extremes may even converge, since what are the 99% of people going to do with the generic stuff but customize it?
Anyway, this suggests one target of open manufacturing could be a community of size ranging from Iceland (about 300,000 people) to Greece (about 11,000,000 people). That's certainly an interesting size range. I would think 99% closure of those economies by mass should be easily doable. Computer chips, some medicines, and maybe some other specialized components might be the major imports after the system was set up. Note that while one may not expect Greece or Iceland to "self-replicate" any time soon, the ability do do so ensures it can be self-repairing.
Anyway, it kind of comes down to how much economic security is worth to a country compared to minimum effort. Given the massive youth unemployment in Greece, and the economic fears of depending on a global economy, it would seem like maximizing productive efficiency through participating in global production would not be at the top of their priority list now that they are out of tear gas. Unfortunately, they did not invest in this research ten years ago. So, this is only theoretical at this point. It might take a very expensive crash program to bring together thousands of researchers for a year to make headway in any time that might make a difference. Still, politically, that is an out for Greece. We could all move there, recruit all the educated youths off the streets, and spend a year figuring out how to make Greece work for everybody and be 99% self-sufficient by mass.
From: http://frac.org/initiatives/hu...
===
Due to the additional risk factors associated with poverty, food insecure and low-income people are especially vulnerable to obesity (see the section on the Relationship Between Hunger and Overweight or Obesity and the section on the Relationship Between Poverty and Overweight or Obesity). More specifically, obesity among food insecure people -- as well as among low-income people -- occurs in part because they are subject to the same influences as other Americans (e.g., more sedentary lifestyles, increased portion sizes), but also because they face unique challenges in adopting healthful behaviors, as described below. (For more information on the influences all Americans face, see the section on Factors Contributing to Overweight and Obesity.)
Key Factors ...
Limited resources
Lack of access to healthy, affordable foods
Fewer opportunities for physical activity
Cycles of food deprivation and overeating
High levels of stress
Greater exposure to marketing of obesity-promoting products
Limited access to health care
You might have a typo in the last sentence that changed your intended meaning?
That said, trust is a complex topic, so it is hard to generalize. The story of Jesus said he hung out a lot with tax collectors, harlots, and sinners... Not because he wanted to be one, but because that is where he felt he was needed.
http://overpopulationisamyth.c...
I agree some technoligies should be banned or heavily taxed because they create unpaid for externalities like pollution. However, in general, what we need are more efficient technologies, technologies that create new resources out of abundant materials (like fusion of hydrogen), and also technologies that let us expand out into space (or responsibly in the ocean or desert or Antarctic, or underground).
The human imagination is the ultimate resource, The more (educated, well-fed) people you have, the more imagination.
"The Ultimate Resource II: People, Materials, and Environment"
http://www.juliansimon.com/wri...
If I told you that someone had (really) just invented fusion energy (or dirt cheap solar), and someone else had invented automated indoor agriculture, and someone else had invented 3D printers that can recycle 100% of everything they print in a non-polluting way -- even electronics and houses, and together these technologies could feed a trillion people on the planet and house them and clothe them and so on, would your feelings change about "over population"? BTW, we are not very far from all three of these technologies or equivalents.
Even if for aesthetic or environmental reasons we might want to limit the population of humans on the Earth at any one time, the carrying capacity of the solar system, even just with essentially known technologies discussed in 1980, is probably in the quadrillions of humans (plus much more of everything else in supporting ecosystems).
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/...
In any case, the bigger issue is that populations of industrialized countries are peaking already with non-immigrant female citizens in most generally having less than two or so kids each, so less than replacement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
As I wrote here: :-)
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
"As with the comment on Ireland, that is why the industrialized globe is facing a "Peak Population" crisis, not a "Peak Oil" crisis, even though people are confusing the two, which is odd given solar is now (or soon will be) cheaper than coal.
But, think about it, how many of the industrialized world's current problems are better explained by "Peak Population" rather than "Peak Oil"?
And how much has the "Peak Energy" misrepresentation of the "Peak Oil" fact by people like Catton led to smaller families and made worse the "Peak Population" crisis? Gloomsters and Doomsters are in that sense creating the terrible problems we are facing right now. In Voyage from Yesteryear, James P. Hogan talks about despair versus optimist in a culture, in part based on appreciation of the potential abundance energy in the universe.
The less peers that are around, the less peers can help each other and contribute to a free commons. Maybe there are laws of diminishing returns, but are we anywhere near them? What would Wikipedia be like with only 100 contributors instead of 100 thousand? Especially in a digital age, it is easy for a peer to add more to the free commons than they take away. What do you take away from Wikipedia by reading a page? A little electricity power perhaps, but Wikipedia shows us how to get all the power we need from the sun.So, even in a physical sense, Wikipedia is helping peers physically power it by giving away such knowledge.
We can support quadrillions of humans in the solar system (see my previous references to Dyson, Bernal, Savage, O'Neill, and there are many others), or about a million times our current population on Earth. We essen
Thanks, AC. Yes, that is a typo, sorry, and should be "1775", not "1175". ... The British sent several thousand troops, including General John Burgoyne and Hessian mercenaries, to reinforce those in the province in May 1776. General Carleton then launched a counter-offensive, ultimately driving the smallpox-weakened and disorganized American forces back to Fort Ticonderoga. ..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
"The Invasion of Canada in 1775 was the first major military initiative by the newly formed Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. The objective of the campaign was to gain military control of the British Province of Quebec, and convince the French-speaking Canadiens to join the revolution on the side of the Thirteen Colonies.
We could have both perhaps. But in general, this is sad, since with a few trillion invested in R&D, we could have fusion energy (or dirt cheap solar, coming anyway, but more slowly) and automated indoor agriculture and near 100% emissions-free recycling of all consumer goods, and so on. And many actions of the wealthy (especially those invested in oil) have essentially blocked these sorts of efforts politically. As Bucky Fuller says, whether it will be utopia or oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. Whatever the legality, for those in charge of much of the world's wealth for whatever reason to cut-and-run from the very problems they have helped create is morally irresponsible and very selfish.
And it probably won't end well -- even for them. A private airstrip in New Zealand (or "Elysium" for that matter, even backed by a large force of security robots), will not protect you against nuclear fallout or rogue nano-tech or air-born plagues or a bunch of other things -- including just "drone" cruise missiles with conventional warheads we have had for decades. Those missiles are getting cheaper and easier to make; there way a Slashdot article years ago about a DIY cruise missile for about US$5K. The damage from such things will of course fall mostly on the poor as with all disasters, but cheap drones will be another destabilizing force if we have a social meltdown (which history shows, happens again and again, see Daniel Quinn's book "Beyond Civilization" for example). A better approach is to work to prevent the meltdown in the first place (like Bucky Fuller worked towards), or at least protect everyone you can (Schindler's list).
That is why I have invested all my (potential, mostly never realized) wealth (as far as primarily time) into trying to make the world work for everyone, and also trying to make it possible for everyone to build any scale lifeboats/ships they want.
After all, I did graduate from Princeton with Michelle Obama, and in the next year were Jeff Bezos, the late Phil Goldman, and many others. I could have picked a different path. I also worked for a short time as an undergrad with someone investing the Princeton endowment, who told me the reason a big investor does better than the typical small investor was more information, cheaper trades, and faster trades (enough to discourage me from trying to be an individual investor).
But more than that, I read the book, "The Seven Laws of Money" by Michael Phillips when I was a teenager. I had gone to the library to read around books on how to become a millionaire. Of about six or seven there on the topic, all but one told me how to do it (the first million is the hardest; start a small business, work hard, be responsive to customers, hope you get lucky -- most small businesses fail in a few years, but keep trying and maybe you'll get lucky when you have enough experience from your failures). But the last book asked me, "Why do you want to be a millionaire?" And that is a very good question to ask yourself...
The basic concepts from that book :
http://www.goodreads.com/book/...
http://seeingmoney.org/SevenLa...
http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/Comm...
"THE SEVEN LAWS OF MONEY
The following laws were published in 1977 in 'Seven laws of Money' by Mike Phillips. Mike, a Bank of America banker, was instrumental in developing Master Charge.
1. Do it! Money will come when you are doing the right thing. The first law is the hardest for most people to accept and is the source of the most distress. The clearest translation of this in terms of personal advice is "go ahead and do what you want to do." Worry about your ability to do it and competence to do it, but certainly do not worry about the money.
2. Money has its own rules: records, budgets, savings, borrowing. The rules of money are probably Ben Frankli
You're welcome. Thanks for reading and modding.
From: http://www.shareintl.org/archi...
===
"We need competition in order to survive."
"Life is boring without competition."
"It is competition that gives us meaning in life."
These words written by American college students capture a sentiment that runs through the heart of the USA and appears to be spreading throughout the world. To these students, competition is not simply something one does, it is the very essence of existence. When asked to imagine a world without competition, they can foresee only rising prices, declining productivity and a general collapse of the moral order. Some truly believe we would cease to exist were it not for competition.
Alfie Kohn, author of No contest: the case against competition, disagrees completely. He argues that competition is essentially detrimental to every important aspect of human experience; our relationships, self-esteem, enjoyment of leisure, and even productivity would all be improved if we were to break out of the pattern of relentless competition. Far from being idealistic speculation, his position is anchored in hundreds of research studies and careful analysis of the primary domains of competitive interaction. For those who see themselves assisting in a transition to a less competitive world, Kohn's book will be an invaluable resource.
===
BTW, I'm quoting Morton Deutsch there (as indicated). Here is the source link (also on the previously linked page):
http://www.beyondintractabilit...
" Q: You're starting to see the analogy to international conflict, or intractable conflict on a larger scale?
A: Yes. Well, I wrote a paper about preventing World War III. That was during the height of the cold war, I think I wrote it in 1982, it was called "The Presidential Address to the International Society to Political Psychology." And there I took the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union and characterized it as a malignant relationship, which had some of the characteristics that I was talking about with the couple. It was right for both the United States and the Soviet Union to think that the other was hostile, would undo it, would damage it, you know, all of these things. The relationship was a malignant one. They had to become aware of the malignancy, and the only way out really was recognizing that it's hurting, recognizing that there is a potential better way of relating. And that better way of relating involves having a sense that one can only have security if there's mutual security. And that's true in most relationships. That's particularly true to recognize groups that have had bitter strife where they've hurt each other. They have to deal with the problem of how to get to where they can live together. It may be ethnic groups within a given nation or community. They can only live together if they recognize that their own security is going to be dependent on the other person's security. So each person, each side, each group has to be interested in the welfare of the other.
On a national level it has to deal with military and other economic security. At the group level and personal level, it often has to do with psychological security. It has to do with someone recognizing, I shouldn't be treating the other in an undignified, disrespectful way. So in an interpersonal relationship, that kind of security, recognizing that not only are you entitled to it, so is the other person entitled to it. And if you don't give that other person that entitlement the relationship is going to move in the other direction, back to bitter conflict."
That said, sure, if you look at evolution, there is a sense that every generation is filtered somehow. Only one sperm of millions gets to the egg... But, what really matters to survival of humans once they are conceived? Cooperation seems very important among humans. Individual ex
Thanks for the pointer! I doubt I'll find my name there. Also, I said the 3X3 display wall panel may have sparked an interest in combining speech research and Jeopardy (perhaps, in an unconscious way?) -- but Watson itself is a much broader system. I wanted to work on such systems then, and talked a bit about "wouldn't it be nice if..." like with a display wall connected to a supercomputer for solving tough problems, but I said nothing detailed as to how it would really work, beyond creating a simple system with a Linux server where you could say things like, "put stocks on panel 3" or something like that. I don't even remember in detail what pattern of utterances I set it up to respond to (it was not very complex). So, my contribution to Watson itself technically -- probably near zilch. It's just the display wall Jeopardy connection I wonder about. But now that you raise the issue, aspects of using an AI to help solve problems was part of that idea. But, sci-fi writers like Isaac Asimov with Multivac or his robot stories have been taking about that for decades...
As for credit for being a spark, do people, say, always even remember some book they read years ago where an idea began to seep into their mind? How do you even quantify a degree of contribution? When I asked Ted Nelson (when he visited IBM once) about whether "The Skills of Xandu" short story by Theodore Sturgeon inspired his work, he thanked me said he had been looking for the story and he claimed to not even be able to remember the story's name! :-) Here is an audio version of that story, which is about a wearable nanotech computers supporting humans wirelessly sharing their knowledge and skills -- hot prescient stuff for the early 1950s:
https://archive.org/details/pr...
BTW, I gave a copy of that story to my supervisor at IBM Research, a master inventor with 50 patents to his name. He finally looked at it a while after I left, and thanked me, and said it was the story that got him interested in materials research based on its nanotech angle! But he had long forgotten it. I can wonder how many other inventors that story has inspired? I don't know what inspired it though. Maybe Memex? :-)
http://www.theatlantic.com/mag...
I've been tangentially around several development like WordNet (George Miller), "Mind Children" (Hans Moravec, who read my senior thesis written under Geoge about self-replicating robots as he was working on the book), Marshall Brain's early career (where he probably saw a simulation I made of self-replicating robots, and I wonder if that contributed to his later concern with "Manna"), and at IBM Research as mentioned with Jeopardy and Watson. Possibly some others (like my possibly talking with David Gelernter about triples I was enamored of, and him saying tuples were more general, at SUNY Stony Brook), my talking at Princeton about robotics and stores (Jeff Bezos was the year after me), my senior thesis which presaged "Evolutionary psychology" but I doubt that sparked much as not many people read it and that field was already developing in parallel. as I can see now. In no case would I claim to be clearly the driving force behind any of these accomplishments which are full of a lot of hard and inventive work. As with Watson, it's possible I was just a tangential spark to some of these projects to some degree -- or not! It is also quite possible that I ended up hanging around people like Hans Moravec because we already were thinking along similar lines. Also, sometime ideas seem just "in the air" for whatever reason. Or ideas come to people by other paths, often multiple times before we even notice them. (It's said in direct mail as a rule of thumb you need to send the same advertising letter three times before people pay attention to it.) And certainly, in all cases, a lot of sparks went the other way, to me. :-)
"(AC:) There's always someone who wants more than safety."
And how in practice are you going to deter someone or defend yourself from someone "who want's more safety" (or even know such a person exists and is out to make trouble for you) unless you are part of a community who are all looking out for each other?
Of course, you also have to be willing to listen and pay attention in that case. Example:
"Hoekstra on Underwear Bomber: "We Missed Him at Every Step""
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/po...
"In November the suspect's father went to the US Embassy in Abuja, the Nigerian capital, to warn that his son was being radicalized in Yemen."
Still, I have to agree that the challenge of what to do about mentally ill people or politically ill countries, when they become violent, is a challenging one for any community.
Related movie:
"The Day the Earth Stood Still"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
"Klaatu warns the professor that the people of the other planets have become concerned for their safety after humans developed atomic power."
Or, as Einstein said: "The release of atomic power has changed everything except our way of thinking ... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker. (1945)"
Although, in an age where even watches have enough CPU power to do the calculations that produced the original atomic bombs, retreating from the problem gets a little more complicated...
As said by someone who studied primitive technology, when asked why he did not just go off to live by himself in the woods, "It takes a village of skilled people to live well int the wilderness" (or something to that effect).
Yeah, so most hippies were naive and also lacking technical skills and resources.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
"Free love" is another "Hippy" ideal which did not work out too well either in most cases for various all-too-human reasons. Even when one rejects marriage, rejecting "relationships" is a completely different issue.
But, that the mistakes of many hippies do not prove anything about the general issue of decentralization for resiliency.
I agree with you that "equity" though is a big issue in any emerging social system. That is something that gave me pause long ago, as I write about here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/sunr...
"Basically, this all made me realized there is a difference between being an "employee" (even an employee-owner) with revokable rights or loseable equity, and being a "citizen" with irrevokable rights."
Still, the "Co-housing" movement has been addressing some of these concerns as far as US cultural expectations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
A successful US co-housing example:
http://ecovillageithaca.org/
"EcoVillage at Ithaca is part of a global movement of people seeking to create positive solutions to the social, environmental and economic crises our planet faces. Since 1991 we have developed an award-winning ecovillage that invites you to live, learn and grow. Our mission is to promote experiential learning about ways of meeting human needs for shelter, food, energy, livelihood and social connectedness that are aligned with the long-term health and viability of Earth and all its inhabitants."
Healthy communities have rules and norms and stories that help manage them. Humans have been living in mostly independent tribal situations for hundreds of thousands of years. It is not like it can't be done, if you are willing to make certain sacrifices. The question is, how could we or should we do it now, with more technical and social knowledge?
Also, some random collection of strangers in the modern day does not have the social cohesion of an extended family or tribe from centuries ago who have known each other from birth. A random collection of strangers, sharing little more initially than some ideal, is probably going to need more formal structure and more formal processes. Also, millennia ago, there was not such a possibility of a huge rich/poor divide in such communities as regards outside work, where one person makes minimum wage at a job cooking or doing child care while another member of the community makes 100X that as a lawyer or a doctor -- or maybe a plumber in some areas these days. :-)
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...
"Sahlins gathered the data from these studies and used it to support a comprehensive argument that states that hunter-gatherers did not suffer from deprivation, but instead lived in a society in which "all the peopleâ(TM)s wants are easily satisfied.""
However, much of my own thinking about this came from an interest in space settlements... This is an issue anybody creating space habitats, moon bases, Mars bases, or whatever needs to think about.
Another aspect of that was figuring out how to create communities that could survive nuclear war and economic collapse. My concern about surviving war might be a bit easier to understand when you consider that this is what my Mother's home town looked like after WWII:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
"Anders Hejlsberg (born December 1960)[2] is a prominent Danish software engineer who co-designed several popular and commercially successful programming languages and development tools. He was the original author of Turbo Pascal and the chief architect of Delphi. He currently works for Microsoft as the lead architect of C#[1] and core developer on TypeScript."
I would have used dot net and C# alone for that reason based on liking Delphi -- except that the main line of those has long been proprietary and single platform compared to other language options which are free and/or multi-platform.
I'd be curious if you have by any chance tried C# and what you thought of it in comparison to Delphi?