There's a few other things which are worth taking a look at on the topic at http://internetofagreements.co... - the HBR piece is short, and this is not a topic that is particularly easy to compress.
There are two things in particular that didn't come across well. Firstly, we expect this to be a five to ten year process. We're well aware how much there is to do, and how far this all has to come. We don't dream you can just digitize a body of law through natural language processing and then have an AI make legal rulings any time soon. But narrow areas - product labeling comes to mind - might be high value and tractable quite soon. And Internet of Agreements blockchain. Blockchain is a *how*, but IoA is a *why*.
Second thing is that IoA's intention is to get people with various pieces of this picture into direct contact with each other, with a rough sense of the goal state in a decade or so, to start building the bits that are currently financially possible to do real engineering on. As time passes, more and more of the vision should become manageable, and things will pick up speed and come together.
I should start this with a disclaimer: I'm the founder of the Hexayurt Project, a Free Hardware building system aimed at refugees and in widespread use at Burning Man. It's those silver pod things (http://hexayurt.com)
I think Wikihouse is exciting technically, but it's *incredibly* expensive to build - something like 7000 EUR of CNC cutting time for a single room. The parametric design aspects of the project are great, however, and I can see a future in which the components are mass produced at reasonable price and then assembled according to plans generated from the parametric design software. But without some kind of standardization, this kind of production is going to remain incurably expensive and therefore just another architectural demo. It's not a technology until costs are estimated. This has happened before: Architecture For Humanity's Open Architecture Network (http://openarchitecturenetwork.org/) rapidly filled with impractical technology demonstrators and student projects - 10000+ designs, but how many practically buildable?
Actually getting buildings that people can build is hard. Architects are trained to think about custom work, one-offs and impressing other architects. Mass producing housing at a price people can afford (hello, Mortage Crisis, goodbye Mortgage Crisis) requires a radical rethink of how we do construction: modularity, prefabrication, standardization - all the same things we did for every other technology we wanted to be cheap, easy and reliable.
It's often said that home building is the last truly-madly-deeply inefficient global industry. Imagine if they built cars by having people come to your garage to hand-assemble them! Whether the radical change is mass manufacture of entire houses Buckminster Fuller style, interchangable modular components (structural insualted panels) or something like 3D printing with insulated concrete, we can't keep buliding houses by hand in a world where everything else is efficiently mass produced with near-zero defects and not distort the shape of our societies.
Hexayurts are dirt cheap and designed for modular mass manufacture. But they look weird. Such is life:-)
"Evolution of Swarm Cooperatives" is about hackathons, unconferences, bar camps etc. - anything where you get a large, reasonably diverse group together in an informal setting to work together, solve problems or learn from each-other. Specific topics to address: more effective code reuse after hackathons, documenting unconferences, and scheduling when you have at lot of potential speakers.
If you're in London and have an opinion, come along - we're about 1/4m from the London Hackerspace on Hackney Road.
The US military is working very hard on robots to assist in the kind of house-to-house combat they have been involved in during Iraq and Afghanistan. In that kind of conflict, there are a lot of casualties and that puts massive pressure on the politicians back home. The pressure is delayed, but very real.
However, once they get robots which can assist in that kind of conflict, it completely unbalances the US Constitution by essentially removing the Second Amendment: effective combat robots are equivalent to gun control. I think that has some very serious implications.
I ran a $2000 Kickstarter to fund a book called The Future We Deserve. The project was to collect 100 essays about the future from 100 people, and then write an analysis which drew out common threads and told a story about the future. The material that came in was so strong, individualistic and subtle that it was simply impossible, after a year of trying off-and-on to make an analysis so we simply accepted that the original task didn't make sense in the face of such strong material, and published it as-is.
We've had a few people be like "where's the book, man?" in that year, and we kept in pretty good touch ("it's in the oven, refusing to cook!")
The book is up on PediaPress now, and people are buying copies and are well pleased with the results, but it was an akward year!
Alienating reporters is a sure-fire way of getting your cause, no matter how good, totally disrespected. Even if they understand you, they never forgive.
In the long run, there are softer vectors to attack than social networking. A lot of these fears would apply equally well to private social platforms which were not encrypted, just the NSA etc. would have to scrape the data off the wires rather than having nice databases to mine. But the paydirt is still VISA and tax records and face recognition tied to passport databases. I bet social network data, when you get right down to it, is just a nice-to-have compared to the passport biometrics database combined with pen registers etc. for communications.
You might find http://guptaoption.com/cheapid interesting from this perspective: it's a proposed biometric ID card standard which blinds governments to the biometrics of their population except under special circumstances, and enforces this arrangement with strong cryptography. The passport and driving license databases are key, and this is one way to get rid of them.
A typical deployment for a family home would be three hexayurts made out of polyiso foam and then sprayed with ferrocement. Cost is probably around $1500 for that approach, but that's first-world costs. With hand-plaster rather than sprayed ferrocement, I think a developing world unit could well hit $1000.
And, of course, a simple plywood hexayurt for disaster relief is $100 per family, half the price of a disaster relief tent.
http://www.port-a-cool.com/ is the commercial version, but it's basically some giant fans blowing through a constantly wet evaporation surface.
On second thoughts, I just checked the climate data and it looks like Cairo tends towards humid heat at this time of year, so that's actually not going to help very much at all.
The hexayurt is an ultra-simple geodesic dome design ideal for mass production in an emergency - just straight cuts with a table saw across plywood, or hand cut insulation boards. They're all over Burning Man but ideal for serious work too
Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps http://files.howtolivewiki.com/Dealing%20in%20Security%20JULY%202010.pdf is a CC-licensed infrastructure mapping tool which has been partially adopted by the US.mil community for teaching disaster response. Can be really useful for understanding what you actually need to prepare *for*.
We had a ton of fun. The physical lunar lander game was really excellent, and Paka's horse was a terrifying lump of lumbering metal - really one of the most impressive animal robots I've ever seen. Great times.
Akvo is *definitely* the right answer for the "main drive" - places where things basically work and they've got resources to do capital investment, however small, on moving further forwards.
Nearly all of my stuff is pointed squarely at the frayed edge, the torn margin, where things have fallen apart too far for investment in conventional vehicles to help. I'm really focussed on people who can carry all they own, more or less.
Still, I shall be surprised if *nobody* I know wins one of these, and I suspect the first step is to fan it out into a more general "this is how you use the internet to spread around what works" platform and, at this point, AKVO's the logical starting point for that.
I mean, if I was implementing the health plan because google coughed up, wouldn't RSR be a logical starting point?
I made three entries - the hexayurt, the infrastructure package, and the low cost medical care.
The Hexayurt The hexayurt is a reasonably well tested next generation disaster relief shelter built on free/open source principles and industrial supply chains. It comes from work done at the Rocky Mountain Institute. The basic idea is to take 12 standard 4âx8â industrial panels, cut six in half diagonally and fasten them into a cone (see the site for pictures) and use six whole panels for the walls, giving a durable shelter of 166 square feet, big enough for 5 people at UN standards. These shelters will survive 80 mph winds easily.
The emphasis on using standard industrial materials is the key. Nobody can afford to carry extensive stocks of emergency housing for disasters in the developing world, which often displace millions of people. Airfreighting tents is expensive and inefficient, and tents are lousy shelter for long term use, which is all-too-frequently how they are deployed. The Hexayurt idea is that industrial cities near regular disaster zones (Bangaladesh, strife-torn areas of Africa, the hurricane belt) take their existing industrial infrastructure and add a few simple new skills so that before or after a disaster they can mass produce a simple, long-life shelter for affected populations. This is a step towards disaster relief self-sufficiency at a regional level, so that these areas begin to be able to cope without being so reliant on patchy and poorly-funded international relief effots.
The Hexayurt concept has been tested by US DOD, and is an integral part of the STAR-TIDES program. American Red Cross and Netherlands Red Cross both think it is a great idea and have supported its development, and AMURT is considering the system. All of this has been done by a persistent self-funded open source development effort.
The Hexayurt Infrastructure Package The hexayurt is a free/open disaster relief shelter which has its own entry. However, a shelter alone is not enough to really help people after a disaster. If you have 100,000 perfectly good shelters in a field, the next problem you face is water and sanitation: without some deployed solution, people will get sick and die.
There are lots of appropriate technology solutions to sanitation, cooking without wasting wood or generating toxic smoke, purifying water to drink. All of them are under-funded, under-tested, and under-adopted. Millions to tens of millions die every year because this âoeappropriate technology infrastructureâ is not being properly funded, and the result is needless loss of life.
The key is to understand that credible candidate technologies exist to provide all the same basic essential services that people enjoy in the developed world on a budget of maybe $200. Furthermore, the services can be provided house-by-house. For example, rainwater is collected on your roof, then purified using a biosand filter to give you safe drinking water, rather than having a water purification factory down the road and pipes. These systems are basic, and some need work, but some combination of SODIS, solar water pasteurization, thermophilic composting toilets, sulabh toilets, solar cookers, rocket stoves, gasification stoves, biosand filters, microsolar, microwind and microhydro will provide all the basic essential services of life in nearly any climate anywhere in the world. What hasnâ(TM)t been done is a global systematic program of testing each of these individual technologies in each region of the world, making local adaptations, cleaning up and publishing the designs, making training videos, running educational courses, and looking for chances to integrated, combine and synthesize systems into whole packages which are proven to provide all essential services in the field. This is our proposal.
Lots and lots of new users are coming on to the internet. How are they to know that Darwin was right and Hubbard was wrong, if John Travolta, who they've seen in movies, tells them in a nice video presentation about how everybody in the world is wrong and him and his people know the truth.
Really, fundamentally, you can see the fear that TBL has here.
On the other hand, although I agree about the problem, this isn't the solution.
http://www.guptaoption.com/5.open_source_development.php - see the final item, "The Primer" for my approach to this problem, which involves big, stable organizations (in this case the USG but anybody coudl do it) publishing basic overviews of reality for newly connected populations to help inoculate them against bullshit.
and they could actuarially revolutionize life in the developing world.
Take all the data from the satellite, crunch it through Precision Agriculture systems to generate recommendations for crop care (and even crop selection), and then distribute the results over the broadband network, along with things like video tutorials for farming techniques.
http://globalswadeshi.net/ takes Gandhi's ideas (like the spinning wheel) and generalizes them into a global picture based on appropriate technology innovations
Basically, if governments or foundations pay for open source innovation in key areas, like solar cookers and efficient cooking stoves, rural water purification technologies - hell, basic sanitation - they can get a very great deal of leverage on the fundamental problems of the world for only a tiny fraction of the money it would take to try and solve them directly.
It's like Linux or Apache - even counting corporate funding, not that much money went into these things, but the value created in the developing world is *huge*. Can you imagine trying to run the IT infrastructure of the developing world, where techs are rare and expensive, on Windows?
Well, we could do the same for infrastructure in general.
One database is operated by an international group, like the UN. The other by nation states. We rely on the natural hatred and distrust of these entities, at different architectural data, to preserve data security.
Look, once you have the ability to use DNA fingerprinting, it's more or less inevitable that authoritarian groups will mount a long-term plan to use it. And for every group like the Innocence Project which is using it to exonerate people, there's five groups that go out after a political protest with mops and buckets to grab DNA samples of people who were there to run through the Federal Crime Database.
I'm not *for* this, I'm simply noting that once the science is there, trying to stop it being used in obvious ways which have some tangible social benefits (rape becomes very, very much harder to get away with) is very hard, even if the social costs (political protests become hard to get away with too) are also very real.
It's a proposal - done on a DoD grant - for using strong cryptography and division of powers to separate the biometric database from the identity database, so that all the metadata about a DNA sample - name, for example - is encrypted in a way which requires court orders to retrieve and - *critically* - stored by a separate agency so that it requires three separate groups to work together to bind a name to a DNA sample.
* the DNA database must run the sample * the Court must agree to decrypt the name information when it is presented * the Identity database must agree to provide the encrypted data to the court
This approach gives excellent security to the individual, and acknowledges the simple reality that we can't make DNA analysis and other biometric technologies go away. We have to use other technologies to counterbalance them (strong crypto) rather than hoping to turn back the clock.
We've seen unambiguously that **GIGANTIC** data sets have their own value. Google's optimization of their algorithms clearly uses enormous amounts of observed user behavior. Translation efforts with terabyte source cannons. Image integration algorithms like that thing that Microsoft were demonstrating recently... gigantic data sets have power because statistics draw relationships out of the real world, rather than having programmers guessing about what the relationships are.
I strongly suspect that 20 years from now, there are going to be three kinds of application programming:
1> Interface programming
2> Desktop programming (in the sense of programming things which operate on *your personal objects* - these things are like *pens and paper* and you have your own.)
3> Infrastructure programming - supercomputer cluster programming (Amazon and Google are *supercomputer* *applications* *companies*) - which will provide yer basic services.
Real applications - change the world applications - need parallel supercomputer programming.
There is an open alternative to this kind of biometric snooping: CheapID. It's a digital identity standard, and a protocol for having a court order be required before the police, or other government agencies, could run a biometric search on the Big Database. It enforces that standard by moving the Big Database to an international level, but encrypting the metadata attached to each record - including fields like name - in a way which means the people with access to the database can't *do* anything with it, because there is no information about *people* in the database (like names,) only information about their physical bodies. Data stripped of metadata is largely worthless, and to unstrip an item needs a court decrypt from a national government.
This paper shows how we can manage large scale biometrics databases and increase the amount of privacy we have from government snooping while still having a secure society.
The basic crux of this paper is that you can separate the biometrics database, which simply identifies your physical body, and isn't necessarily any more intrusive than Flickr or any other online photo sharing site, and the reputation database, which stores things like your credit rating, any criminal record, and the suspicions of various government agencies about your intentions.
So when you do something like rent a car, you give them a token which has your face on it. They match your face to the token, and say "ok, this token is valid." But the token doesn't have your name, or your SSN, or anything else on it: it's totally sterile. But if you steal the car, they take the token to court, as well as the proof you gave it to them, and the court uses the token to get your name, SSN and other details.
If all that FBI or other government biometrics database stored was tokens, and it required a court order to go from a match in the biometrics database to a name and street address, I think we'd have a fair balance between civil liberties and security. A database of pictures of faces or fingerprints is not the intrusive part: it's the connecting of your face or your fingerprint to your background that is the intrusion, and we can separate the two databases and require a court order (and a crypto key) to reconnect them.
Cheap DNA scanners are coming. We've have to fix how we handle biometric data as a society before they arrive.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a few other things which are worth taking a look at on the topic at http://internetofagreements.co... - the HBR piece is short, and this is not a topic that is particularly easy to compress.
There are two things in particular that didn't come across well. Firstly, we expect this to be a five to ten year process. We're well aware how much there is to do, and how far this all has to come. We don't dream you can just digitize a body of law through natural language processing and then have an AI make legal rulings any time soon. But narrow areas - product labeling comes to mind - might be high value and tractable quite soon. And Internet of Agreements blockchain. Blockchain is a *how*, but IoA is a *why*.
Second thing is that IoA's intention is to get people with various pieces of this picture into direct contact with each other, with a rough sense of the goal state in a decade or so, to start building the bits that are currently financially possible to do real engineering on. As time passes, more and more of the vision should become manageable, and things will pick up speed and come together.
Hope that helps.
Sorry, I don't use slashdot very often these days, it used to auto-link URLs - didn't realize it wasn't doing it these days!
Sorry, didn't realize I wasn't logged in!
I should start this with a disclaimer: I'm the founder of the Hexayurt Project, a Free Hardware building system aimed at refugees and in widespread use at Burning Man. It's those silver pod things (http://hexayurt.com)
I think Wikihouse is exciting technically, but it's *incredibly* expensive to build - something like 7000 EUR of CNC cutting time for a single room. The parametric design aspects of the project are great, however, and I can see a future in which the components are mass produced at reasonable price and then assembled according to plans generated from the parametric design software. But without some kind of standardization, this kind of production is going to remain incurably expensive and therefore just another architectural demo. It's not a technology until costs are estimated. This has happened before: Architecture For Humanity's Open Architecture Network (http://openarchitecturenetwork.org/) rapidly filled with impractical technology demonstrators and student projects - 10000+ designs, but how many practically buildable?
Actually getting buildings that people can build is hard. Architects are trained to think about custom work, one-offs and impressing other architects. Mass producing housing at a price people can afford (hello, Mortage Crisis, goodbye Mortgage Crisis) requires a radical rethink of how we do construction: modularity, prefabrication, standardization - all the same things we did for every other technology we wanted to be cheap, easy and reliable.
It's often said that home building is the last truly-madly-deeply inefficient global industry. Imagine if they built cars by having people come to your garage to hand-assemble them! Whether the radical change is mass manufacture of entire houses Buckminster Fuller style, interchangable modular components (structural insualted panels) or something like 3D printing with insulated concrete, we can't keep buliding houses by hand in a world where everything else is efficiently mass produced with near-zero defects and not distort the shape of our societies.
Hexayurts are dirt cheap and designed for modular mass manufacture. But they look weird. Such is life :-)
Never been to a pure OST event. Really want to!
http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/other/swarm-cooperatives-more-event-details-including-speakers-3406
"Evolution of Swarm Cooperatives" is about hackathons, unconferences, bar camps etc. - anything where you get a large, reasonably diverse group together in an informal setting to work together, solve problems or learn from each-other. Specific topics to address: more effective code reuse after hackathons, documenting unconferences, and scheduling when you have at lot of potential speakers.
If you're in London and have an opinion, come along - we're about 1/4m from the London Hackerspace on Hackney Road.
The US military is working very hard on robots to assist in the kind of house-to-house combat they have been involved in during Iraq and Afghanistan. In that kind of conflict, there are a lot of casualties and that puts massive pressure on the politicians back home. The pressure is delayed, but very real.
However, once they get robots which can assist in that kind of conflict, it completely unbalances the US Constitution by essentially removing the Second Amendment: effective combat robots are equivalent to gun control. I think that has some very serious implications.
http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/bigdeal/the-second-amendment-in-iraq-combat-robotics-and-the-future-of-human-liberty-820
I ran a $2000 Kickstarter to fund a book called The Future We Deserve. The project was to collect 100 essays about the future from 100 people, and then write an analysis which drew out common threads and told a story about the future. The material that came in was so strong, individualistic and subtle that it was simply impossible, after a year of trying off-and-on to make an analysis so we simply accepted that the original task didn't make sense in the face of such strong material, and published it as-is.
We've had a few people be like "where's the book, man?" in that year, and we kept in pretty good touch ("it's in the oven, refusing to cook!")
The book is up on PediaPress now, and people are buying copies and are well pleased with the results, but it was an akward year!
Alienating reporters is a sure-fire way of getting your cause, no matter how good, totally disrespected. Even if they understand you, they never forgive.
In the long run, there are softer vectors to attack than social networking. A lot of these fears would apply equally well to private social platforms which were not encrypted, just the NSA etc. would have to scrape the data off the wires rather than having nice databases to mine. But the paydirt is still VISA and tax records and face recognition tied to passport databases. I bet social network data, when you get right down to it, is just a nice-to-have compared to the passport biometrics database combined with pen registers etc. for communications.
You might find http://guptaoption.com/cheapid interesting from this perspective: it's a proposed biometric ID card standard which blinds governments to the biometrics of their population except under special circumstances, and enforces this arrangement with strong cryptography. The passport and driving license databases are key, and this is one way to get rid of them.
There's the Hexayurt Project, which is basically an updated geodesic dome and can be built up to 450 square feet for each module using only hand tools and a screw gun and the Wikihouse which is a fablab style design which relies on a router.
A typical deployment for a family home would be three hexayurts made out of polyiso foam and then sprayed with ferrocement. Cost is probably around $1500 for that approach, but that's first-world costs. With hand-plaster rather than sprayed ferrocement, I think a developing world unit could well hit $1000.
And, of course, a simple plywood hexayurt for disaster relief is $100 per family, half the price of a disaster relief tent.
http://www.port-a-cool.com/ is the commercial version, but it's basically some giant fans blowing through a constantly wet evaporation surface.
On second thoughts, I just checked the climate data and it looks like Cairo tends towards humid heat at this time of year, so that's actually not going to help very much at all.
Back to shade then.
The hexayurt is an ultra-simple geodesic dome design ideal for mass production in an emergency - just straight cuts with a table saw across plywood, or hand cut insulation boards. They're all over Burning Man but ideal for serious work too
http://www.boingboing.net/2011/03/17/hexayurt.html (public domain, too)
Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps .mil community for teaching disaster response. Can be really useful for understanding what you actually need to prepare *for*.
http://files.howtolivewiki.com/Dealing%20in%20Security%20JULY%202010.pdf
is a CC-licensed infrastructure mapping tool which has been partially adopted by the US
http://www.flickr.com/photos/makerfaire_uk/3355610023/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/makerfaire_uk/3355610023/
We had a ton of fun. The physical lunar lander game was really excellent, and Paka's horse was a terrifying lump of lumbering metal - really one of the most impressive animal robots I've ever seen. Great times.
Akvo is *definitely* the right answer for the "main drive" - places where things basically work and they've got resources to do capital investment, however small, on moving further forwards.
Nearly all of my stuff is pointed squarely at the frayed edge, the torn margin, where things have fallen apart too far for investment in conventional vehicles to help. I'm really focussed on people who can carry all they own, more or less.
Still, I shall be surprised if *nobody* I know wins one of these, and I suspect the first step is to fan it out into a more general "this is how you use the internet to spread around what works" platform and, at this point, AKVO's the logical starting point for that.
I mean, if I was implementing the health plan because google coughed up, wouldn't RSR be a logical starting point?
PS: do check out http://akvo.org/ - their stuff *works*
May those who help most win so they say.
I made three entries - the hexayurt, the infrastructure package, and the low cost medical care.
The Hexayurt
The hexayurt is a reasonably well tested next generation disaster relief shelter built on free/open source principles and industrial supply chains. It comes from work done at the Rocky Mountain Institute. The basic idea is to take 12 standard 4âx8â industrial panels, cut six in half diagonally and fasten them into a cone (see the site for pictures) and use six whole panels for the walls, giving a durable shelter of 166 square feet, big enough for 5 people at UN standards. These shelters will survive 80 mph winds easily.
The emphasis on using standard industrial materials is the key. Nobody can afford to carry extensive stocks of emergency housing for disasters in the developing world, which often displace millions of people. Airfreighting tents is expensive and inefficient, and tents are lousy shelter for long term use, which is all-too-frequently how they are deployed. The Hexayurt idea is that industrial cities near regular disaster zones (Bangaladesh, strife-torn areas of Africa, the hurricane belt) take their existing industrial infrastructure and add a few simple new skills so that before or after a disaster they can mass produce a simple, long-life shelter for affected populations. This is a step towards disaster relief self-sufficiency at a regional level, so that these areas begin to be able to cope without being so reliant on patchy and poorly-funded international relief effots.
The Hexayurt concept has been tested by US DOD, and is an integral part of the STAR-TIDES program. American Red Cross and Netherlands Red Cross both think it is a great idea and have supported its development, and AMURT is considering the system. All of this has been done by a persistent self-funded open source development effort.
http://hexayurt.com/
The Hexayurt Infrastructure Package
The hexayurt is a free/open disaster relief shelter which has its own entry. However, a shelter alone is not enough to really help people after a disaster. If you have 100,000 perfectly good shelters in a field, the next problem you face is water and sanitation: without some deployed solution, people will get sick and die.
There are lots of appropriate technology solutions to sanitation, cooking without wasting wood or generating toxic smoke, purifying water to drink. All of them are under-funded, under-tested, and under-adopted. Millions to tens of millions die every year because this âoeappropriate technology infrastructureâ is not being properly funded, and the result is needless loss of life.
The key is to understand that credible candidate technologies exist to provide all the same basic essential services that people enjoy in the developed world on a budget of maybe $200. Furthermore, the services can be provided house-by-house. For example, rainwater is collected on your roof, then purified using a biosand filter to give you safe drinking water, rather than having a water purification factory down the road and pipes. These systems are basic, and some need work, but some combination of SODIS, solar water pasteurization, thermophilic composting toilets, sulabh toilets, solar cookers, rocket stoves, gasification stoves, biosand filters, microsolar, microwind and microhydro will provide all the basic essential services of life in nearly any climate anywhere in the world. What hasnâ(TM)t been done is a global systematic program of testing each of these individual technologies in each region of the world, making local adaptations, cleaning up and publishing the designs, making training videos, running educational courses, and looking for chances to integrated, combine and synthesize systems into whole packages which are proven to provide all essential services in the field. This is our proposal.
Lots and lots of new users are coming on to the internet. How are they to know that Darwin was right and Hubbard was wrong, if John Travolta, who they've seen in movies, tells them in a nice video presentation about how everybody in the world is wrong and him and his people know the truth.
Really, fundamentally, you can see the fear that TBL has here.
On the other hand, although I agree about the problem, this isn't the solution.
http://www.guptaoption.com/5.open_source_development.php - see the final item, "The Primer" for my approach to this problem, which involves big, stable organizations (in this case the USG but anybody coudl do it) publishing basic overviews of reality for newly connected populations to help inoculate them against bullshit.
and they could actuarially revolutionize life in the developing world.
Take all the data from the satellite, crunch it through Precision Agriculture systems to generate recommendations for crop care (and even crop selection), and then distribute the results over the broadband network, along with things like video tutorials for farming techniques.
Boing Boing has a post on the basics of precision agriculture here: http://www.boingboing.net/2008/09/09/agroveillance-using.html
http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/hexayurt/supercomputer-applications-for-the-developing-world-375
Was an approach to doing this based on repurposing military imagery.
Really could change the world in a big way, food security for all.
Basically, when you run the numbers, it seems like about half of all global death is from poverty.
This talk (I presented it about two weeks ago) gives some details, sketches out possible solutions, and puts the whole thing in context.
http://www.globalswadeshi.net/video/video/show?id=2097821%3AVideo%3A1943
Enjoy.
is turning into quite a movement.
http://appropedia.org/ is like wikipedia but, predictably, for appropriate technology.
http://hexayurt.com/ is a nice little emergency shelter (that's my project.)
http://globalswadeshi.net/ takes Gandhi's ideas (like the spinning wheel) and generalizes them into a global picture based on appropriate technology innovations
http://akvo.org/ does water technology
http://openfarmtech.org/ does a wide range of systems for a very high standard of living
and there's a lot more out there.
http://www.globalswadeshi.net/video has a series of video interviews with people working on appropriate technology in this general vein.
not from a charitable approach, but from a foreign policy approach.
http://www.guptaoption.com/2.long_peace.php - Winning the Long Peace
http://www.guptaoption.com/5.open_source_development.php - Saving the World through Open Source
(also relevant: http://appropedia.org/
Basically, if governments or foundations pay for open source innovation in key areas, like solar cookers and efficient cooking stoves, rural water purification technologies - hell, basic sanitation - they can get a very great deal of leverage on the fundamental problems of the world for only a tiny fraction of the money it would take to try and solve them directly.
It's like Linux or Apache - even counting corporate funding, not that much money went into these things, but the value created in the developing world is *huge*. Can you imagine trying to run the IT infrastructure of the developing world, where techs are rare and expensive, on Windows?
Well, we could do the same for infrastructure in general.
More at http://hexayurt.com/ - click on the infrastructure links.
I can tell you didn't read the paper.
One database is operated by an international group, like the UN. The other by nation states. We rely on the natural hatred and distrust of these entities, at different architectural data, to preserve data security.
Look, once you have the ability to use DNA fingerprinting, it's more or less inevitable that authoritarian groups will mount a long-term plan to use it. And for every group like the Innocence Project which is using it to exonerate people, there's five groups that go out after a political protest with mops and buckets to grab DNA samples of people who were there to run through the Federal Crime Database.
I'm not *for* this, I'm simply noting that once the science is there, trying to stop it being used in obvious ways which have some tangible social benefits (rape becomes very, very much harder to get away with) is very hard, even if the social costs (political protests become hard to get away with too) are also very real.
I have a partial solution to this problem.
http://guptaoption.com/4.SIAB-ISA.php
It's a proposal - done on a DoD grant - for using strong cryptography and division of powers to separate the biometric database from the identity database, so that all the metadata about a DNA sample - name, for example - is encrypted in a way which requires court orders to retrieve and - *critically* - stored by a separate agency so that it requires three separate groups to work together to bind a name to a DNA sample.
* the DNA database must run the sample
* the Court must agree to decrypt the name information when it is presented
* the Identity database must agree to provide the encrypted data to the court
This approach gives excellent security to the individual, and acknowledges the simple reality that we can't make DNA analysis and other biometric technologies go away. We have to use other technologies to counterbalance them (strong crypto) rather than hoping to turn back the clock.
http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/hexayurt/supercomputer-applications-for-the-developing-world-375
We've seen unambiguously that **GIGANTIC** data sets have their own value. Google's optimization of their algorithms clearly uses enormous amounts of observed user behavior. Translation efforts with terabyte source cannons. Image integration algorithms like that thing that Microsoft were demonstrating recently... gigantic data sets have power because statistics draw relationships out of the real world, rather than having programmers guessing about what the relationships are.
I strongly suspect that 20 years from now, there are going to be three kinds of application programming:
1> Interface programming
2> Desktop programming (in the sense of programming things which operate on *your personal objects* - these things are like *pens and paper* and you have your own.)
3> Infrastructure programming - supercomputer cluster programming (Amazon and Google are *supercomputer* *applications* *companies*) - which will provide yer basic services.
Real applications - change the world applications - need parallel supercomputer programming.
There is an open alternative to this kind of biometric snooping: CheapID. It's a digital identity standard, and a protocol for having a court order be required before the police, or other government agencies, could run a biometric search on the Big Database. It enforces that standard by moving the Big Database to an international level, but encrypting the metadata attached to each record - including fields like name - in a way which means the people with access to the database can't *do* anything with it, because there is no information about *people* in the database (like names,) only information about their physical bodies. Data stripped of metadata is largely worthless, and to unstrip an item needs a court decrypt from a national government.
From http://guptaoption.com/4.SIAB-ISA.php
This paper shows how we can manage large scale biometrics databases and increase the amount of privacy we have from government snooping while still having a secure society.
The basic crux of this paper is that you can separate the biometrics database, which simply identifies your physical body, and isn't necessarily any more intrusive than Flickr or any other online photo sharing site, and the reputation database, which stores things like your credit rating, any criminal record, and the suspicions of various government agencies about your intentions.
So when you do something like rent a car, you give them a token which has your face on it. They match your face to the token, and say "ok, this token is valid." But the token doesn't have your name, or your SSN, or anything else on it: it's totally sterile. But if you steal the car, they take the token to court, as well as the proof you gave it to them, and the court uses the token to get your name, SSN and other details.
If all that FBI or other government biometrics database stored was tokens, and it required a court order to go from a match in the biometrics database to a name and street address, I think we'd have a fair balance between civil liberties and security. A database of pictures of faces or fingerprints is not the intrusive part: it's the connecting of your face or your fingerprint to your background that is the intrusion, and we can separate the two databases and require a court order (and a crypto key) to reconnect them.
Cheap DNA scanners are coming. We've have to fix how we handle biometric data as a society before they arrive.
the main pressure is sexual selection, and that's mediated by culture to an alarming degree.
Smart people! Breed! Follow your goddamn instincts for once in your life!