When I was thirteen (over half my life ago) I read a book called Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander. I immediately stopped watching television. Except for a few slips (once during a summer Olympics, and once when the Simpsons were still new) that has stayed with me. Although some of the writing is a little cheesy, the basic points that the book makes are valid - and they don't apply to Web news (yet).
This guy wrote a whole book so this little summary doesn't go into any of the detailed explainations, but... The main points that I remember are:
The medium of television only allows certain type of programming, and those types are generally focused on violence.
The medium of television is physically inferior to nearly every other medium both visually and acoustically (where applicable) and thus relies on "technical events" to maintian a viewers attention - the content of the programming has very little influence in this regard (except insofar as it aligns with point 1).
Television viewers are in an extremely passive role compared to any other media and this is harmful to brain and psychological developement.
I forget the last "argument".
Now, as a software engineer, I spend the vast majority of my waking hours looking at a computer monitor. I don't really think this is healthy, but in many respects it is better than television. My main sources of entertainment (news) are Yahoo, Slashdot, and the GlobeandMail.com (a national newspaper of Canada). I call this entertainment for one very important reason: very very little of the "news" impacts my life. I do not learn things that are important in my day to day life (with perhaps the exception of some of the technical and science articles on Slashdot). Also, about the same time that I was reading 4Arguments, my dad told me something very interesting...
I'm sure that most of us who went to school can remember "current events" as being an important part of the social studies/history/civics cirriculum. We were exhorted to watch or listen to the news and make reports in class. I was never particularly good at this as I spent most of my free time playing with Lego, doing home chemistry experiments of fiddling with whatever electronic device I could get my hands on. Anyway, my father worked in a video production studio as a director. He made several international award-winning artistic shorts and generally was _really_ knowledgable in the field. He also happened to know one of the executives at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation who was involved with their news division. I don't remember all the details of the conversation, but one day my dad told me that news wasn't about information - it was solely about entertainment. I honestly had a hard time believing it. He backed it up by quoting his friend at the CBC who said something to the effect that the only way they keep viewers is by treating all their programming, and especially news, as entertainment. A news item was scrapped if it was not considered entertaining. It had nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with "newsworthyness". I basically refused to believe it, but the conversation stayed with me. Then I started to actually watch the news, not passively, but with this possibility in mind. And very quickly I ended up agreeing.
I was involved in a project at the University of Saskatchewan in 1991-92 that was doing exactly this. We were working on a NeXTSTEP system to provide a user interface for blind users. I was doing the programming and another senior student was doing the hardware. The basic idea was to provide auditory and tactile feedback so that blind users could manouver through the NeXT's GUI. We included a very nice Text-to-Speech system that used the NeXT's built in DSP, as well as audio signals. The software took advantage of some of the really nifty things that NeXTSTEP allowed in terms of the OS and the application environments to basically capture events before they got to the app, and to capture screen info (from the Disply PostScript system) to feed to the mouse.
Can you comment on how this decision sets the stage for a deCSS appeal?
Well, many people have pointed out Kaplan's seeming bias in the judgement with such things as the reference to the defendant's beliefs. Theoretically, Kaplan could have been quite deliberate about putting in extraneous statements, specifically to make an appeal more effective. AFAIK, any flaw in the process is fodder for the appeal. I read about half of the opinion and is very carefully written. Perhaps all the "flaws" are deliberate.
The Fermi paradox is a realy important aspect of the whole discussion. I particularly like the comment about nano-tech as a possible solution to the paradox. The paradox also applies in an analogous way to time travel - if time travel is possible, where are "they"?
Personally, I found the AI aspect of the article the most interesting. I am a fan of Douglas Hofstadter. His books Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies and Le Ton Beau de Marot are incredibly beautiful and insightful. I strongly recommend them to anyone who is interested in AI, philosophy of knowledge, psychology etc. etc.
Now, in an attempt to stay on-topic, I will come back to the article. Hofstadter's basic message seems to be that intelligence is a matter of degree more than anything else. Things such as medium (biological, mechanical, electrical etc.) are irrelevant to the basic question. If he is right, then I can see intelligent beings being much more likely.
As a strongly religious person, I believe that there is some "soul" which imparts to us an aspect that makes us (the human species) unique on the planet (please moderators - that's just an opinion:). But the teachings of my faith seem to be quite clear that every planet has its creatures (not necessarily intelligent) (Unfortunately I don't have a good reference to this specific aspect of my faith).
But in another way, I have to admit that I feel very threatened by the possibility of other intelligence. As an individual I like the fact that I am a member of a species which has done absolutely incredible things. Humanity has created intended beauty in a way that so far seems completely unique in the world. I believe strongly that we can overcome our multitude of problems, and when we do, we will do more that is completely unimaginable at this time. If AI or ET's were to usurp that position of beauty-creators, it would be very very damaging to humanities self-concept. That said, I am fascinated by AI, and I would love to do work in the field (after I make my startup millions:).
As a final comment in this decidedly rambling post: get SETI@home!
I am very happy that a body of the United Nations has been established to handle domain name disputes. I understand that WIPO is considering expanding the conditions under which a domain name registration may be considered for transfer to a dispute plaintif. As a holder of several domains, all of which I am using or intend to use for legitimate personal or business purposes, I am quite concerned that the scope remain focused on the issue of "bad faith" registrations. I do not have any explicit problem with the scope being expanded to geographical names, trade names, and so forth, so long as the plaintif must demonstrate "bad faith" registration on the part of the defendant.
Regardless of the content WIPO's final decision, I hope that WIPO will document carefully all the arguements for and against their decision so that the process may be as open to critical review as possible. Domain names are a very valuable commodity and many people have invested significant amounts of time, money, and more importantly, hope into developing web presenses. Do not let this historical effort, these "sunk" costs to become ignored.
Although Katz's articles are always full of hyperbole, they still have a lot of good stuff in them. I think that underlying most of his articles is something that almost everyone on Slashdot would agree with: we need some new fundamental principles in order to prevent our society from degenerating into a very human-unfriendly place.
I have a few ideas to suggest that may not be very popular, but which would probably help a lot. Most of "my" ideas about this aren't really my own - I'll try to credit where credit it due.
I think the primary principle that we need to add is the concept of the Unity of Humanity. Can anyone doubt that will now live in a global society? We travel and communicate with a facility and frequency that would utterly astound people from even 25 years ago. Our national economies are so tightly interlinked it is ridiculous. Corporations have known this for a long time and have a huge lead on social institutions as a result. Our social institutions, (dare I say it here) government must catch up and the only way is by organizing at a global level. The UN and the Baha'i community are both diverse global organizations that are working on putting this principle into practice. Our technological efforts must be refocused in such a way as to bring the greatest benefit to humanity. Environmental issues also come under this category.
As a consequence of the previous point, we need to inform ourselves of globally held beliefs about the fundamental rights of people. The vast majority of countries in the world have agreed on just such a list of rights in the form of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Any technological and societal developments need to be carefully examined with this fundamental statement of rights in mind. This might mean that Napster should be stopped - or it might mean that it should be promoted - but either way, we need to look at the effects of new technologies on these rights and always choose rights ahead of what is new and cool and in our own personal interest.
The final principle, which is implied by the previous two points, is that technologies are not "neutral". This will be a big point of contention with many here on Slashdot, but I hold to it. Marshall McLuhan has said "the medium is the message" - what is this other than a statement that technologies have very specific measurable effects on people and societies. These effects are not neutral. For a simple example, consider the lightbulb - it requires a very large power generation and distribution infrastructure in order to be useful. The creation and operation of that infrastructure has societal effects - some good, some bad - definately not neutral.
I have worked with NeXTs extensively. I started way back in 1991. I read about them in Time magazine, and instantly fell in love - I didn't know what Object Oriented programming was (I had heard of it though) - but those screen shots looked amazing. That summer, I had a job working for my university's computer services department, and got to hear about what was happening all over the campus, computer-wise. A NeXT was coming! I went and found out who the CompSci prof was who was going to be responsible for them. Turns out they were brought in to work on the development of a user interface for blind users - cool! I pestered the prof a whole bunch and ended up getting sent down to Redwood City, California for the NeXT Developer's Camp (I was a CompSci wiz so this wasn't a huge stretch: the University and I shared the cost of the trip and the registration), in exchange for which I was to help on the UI for blind users.
So, my first real programming job was in an OO environment like none I have seen since. I am a highly paid Java consultant with now 9 years of solid development experience. I have never programmed professionally in any other paradigm but OO (not that I haven't experienced others: structural (C, Pascal), functional (Lisp, Miranda), other declarative (Prolog), etc. etc.). Objective-C is a cool OO language that has strong type checking, but also allows weak typing (remember id?). Dynamic runtime binding is the rule. Method invocations could be forwarded. Classes were true objects in their own right which meant that static methods could refer to self and access the _current_ class (kinda like this accesses the instance it occurs in, in Java).
The Interface Builder tool, even in it's early iterations was incredibly slick. No friggin' unstable code generation - instead a really stable flexible system similar to Java's serialization, but more flexible because of the dynamic typing (don't tell me Java comes close). The UI for the interface builder was cool and putting together the GUI for a prototype app was often just a few moments of click and drag. It wasn't just painting: it was putting in the connections between the Controller and all the live gui widgets.
Ahh... those were the days...
WebObjects is a very similar environment for building web apps. It has an interface builder that is slightly different from the NeXTSTEP one, but also very flexible and powerful. And of course OSX will continue the legacy that is still unrivaled (AFAIK).
The element of secrecy and suprise is a very important aspect of staying competitive. Every month, every week, every hour makes a difference as far as competitors working to duplicate or one-up a new product.
The element of setting expectations: if the rumors are wrong, reasonable and exciting, then they set expectations that may be hard to live up to.
If the rumors are currently correct, that doesn't mean that last minute announcement changes won't be made, thus disappointing people or revealing problems to competitors. True rumors make it more difficult for a company to "turn on a dime" and avoid customer/competitor/supplier problems.
Having said all that, I like reading speculative info about new cool stuff...
It is a simple matter to make a client that breaks files up into 100k bytes:-) and reconstructs them. How about that search capability? Well, that just means having an index. An index is info and can likewise be broken up into 100k pieces. So the client looks to a common place for the index, downloads the most current version (or does some sort of nifty caching so that only the most used portions are downloaded at first), finds the references, builds a list of urls, downloads the data, patches it together, and voila! you have just downloaded 100MB of mp3s, and not only that, but it sounds like availability will be MUCH better than Napster/Gnutella-like systems!
A process of reflection is needed
on
Selfish Society
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· Score: 2
A process needs to be created by which up and coming technologies can be evaluated. A simple statement to make but with a huge burden of explaination and justification...
I think that technology is not neutral. Believing that a technology is only "as good as the person who is using it" is naive! Every technology has social ramifications that are inherent in its purpose. Marshall McLuhan is often quoted "the medium is the message" but people generally misunderstand this to mean that a medium influences what content can be transmitted on it. I think what it means is more literal: a medium is itself a message... a technology has a specific effect on society... a lightbulb requires a power infrastructure which implies large capital interests, which in democratic capitalism meant large power companies. This is a direct social effect of the technology of the lightbulb.
So what's my point?
Well, I think that both political and social institutions as well as geeks need to fully wake up to the fact that "the medium is the message" and start making decisions about technology on that basis. And do it in a rational manner... not in some haphazard way through boycotts, legislation, lawsuits etc.
I think that a rational examination of technologies will be built on a framework that includes the following three pillars:
"the medium is the message"
human rights (a la Universal Declaration of Human Rights)
"the world is one country" and humankind its citizens
I have been writing a paper on this exact subject. It is currently in progress (and some parts are really old and pretty rough to boot!) but here it is. (I hope my poor server holds up:)
Do Canadian copyright laws differ in any significant ways from the US? Is there anything equivalent to the DMCA? Any news on when PayPal will work in the North?
It's strange being Canadian and reading about all this wierd stuff happening with IP in the US. I'm kinda hoping that Canadian legislators are taking a wait-and-see attitude to what is happening in the States.
Good luck on your endeavor! I'm sure I'll be using it in the future!
And since I have to a moderate degree kept up with the progress over the last ten years, I can truly say that if you are developing a GUI front end _for the first time_ it will be a breeze, a piece of cake, far easier than many would imagine. The tools for building GUI apps in the NeXTStep, OPENSTEP and WebObjects days (all predecessors to OSX) are still more sophisticated than most GUI builder toold I have used on any other platform.
The dual advantage of a good base os (BSD) with a utterly amazing GUI front end (and I'm talk'n from developer's perspective) is going to be significant.
I've worked with many different OS's, frameworks, and tools over the last ten years including JBuilder, VisualCafe, VisualAge, Corba, EJB, TopLink, WinNT, MacOS, BSD's, etc. etc. etc. and really they are all still playing catch-up to the technology that was initially developed in 1991 in NeXTStep 2.x! I have never owned a Mac, but I am now seriously considering it because it will be a good development platform no matter what one is doing!
Well, I got to thinking pretty quickly that only two motors was a bit of a problem and even three doesn't really allow you to do too much. So, I implemented a mechanical trinary counter which allows one drive motor and one touch sensor to control an arbitrary number of drive shafts: forward, reverse and no power. The higher order drive shafts change state quite slowly, but the thing is pretty neet anyway. With this one can basically do anything as long as it doesn't require quick response times.
I go both ways on this question. The security of getting a regular salary is usually tied in with the security of having other benefits as well. Security is often good - I have a family and so this is somewhat important. What I don't like is that this arrangement usually implies that I can be "exploited" for lots of extra hours with no consequences to my employer, even though there might be severe consequences to my non-work life.
This situation then becomes the basis for a decision about a possible change. If I was working somewhere where I put in a regularly low number of hours (like 35/week) with only very occasional overtime, I would be very hesitant to switch over to hourly pay as it might mean a serious drop in my paycheck. The reverse situation is obvious.
What isn't so obvious is that being an employee (either salary or hourly) has a implication of loyalty. The employer is giving you "benefits" in exchange for a long-term commitment (you to your employer, but certainly not the other way around). But the fact is that if one becomes a contractor, there is usually a significant jump in compensation which often more than covers the "benefits" of employment and has the additional benefits that there is no need to feel loyalty to a corporation that is not reciprocating that feeling (no matter what corporate propaganda may be), and that you have ultimate control over how much money you actually earn.
Currently, I do a little of both. I have a nice full-time day job, and I take small contracts on the side to cover my options and establish a network of contacts that I can rely on should my employer cease to be "loyal"...
So what is the teacher's role given these purposes?
provide academic education
provide a social role model
supervise students safety
On a surface level, I would say that it's not just academics that are suffering!! In a very pluralistic society like the one's in the US, Canada and a few other countries, providing a social role model is not going to work too well. And as far as supervising students safety is concerned, that seems to be getting worse as well.
But what to do? Home schooling is an option that is becoming more popular - it addresses the problems at their root: reclaiming the role of parenting. Private schools that cater to specific educational philosophies, specific religious affiliations, and specific skills or subject areas are useful to a degree.
There are huge amounts of literature out there about the problems and their solutions. Check out books by Jonathan Kozol, Ivan Illich, Paulo Freire, Maria Montessori, Paul Goodman, Alan Bloom etc. etc....
Obviously, from the free market and libertarian standpoints, option one is the "winner", but by no means is this a foregone conclusion.
Many here have made the comparison of software to guns. I think this comparison is false in two ways. First, it is always taken as a foregone conclusion that the user of a gun is both ethically and legally responsible, but this is actually an unsupported assertion. Second, the fundamental purpose of guns is very different from that of software. Software is not a single purpose tool. A gun has as its primary purpose to kill animals, and in some cases, specifically to kill humans. That is what they are designed for. On the other hand, software's primary purpose is to push bits around on a computer.
That leaves us in a funny spot: software is used at a level of abstraction above its primary purpose. And that level of abstraction is intended. If I were to use/create software for the purpose of designing biological weapons, I am both ethically and legally in the wrong regardless - because I am intending an illegal/unethical purpose.
I guess the main point I would like to make is that in both the act of creation and the use of something, purpose is manifested. As a society we have legally established a system where the act of creation is protected. There are very real benefits to this system, but there are also very real disadvantages. Most here could wax eloquent on the advantages, but I would like to point out one disadvantage: ideas, technologies, whatever, cannot be evaluated at creation time. Think of it as the difference between compile-time syntax and semantic checking versus run-time checking!
One possible rebuttle is that our "system" is set up one the survival of the fittest model and it works pretty good. But personally, I don't think anyone has given a really good try at designing an evalation system - a compile-time ethics checker:) This would be a solution along the lines of option three above - society takes some responsibility for its own ethical standpoint.
If Microsoft were to release its source code to windows under the GPL or some other free software licensing scheme, would that really make them any less of a monopoly? I can see that with the resouces they have in terms of engineering, sales and marketing, I suspect that they may be able to hijack the open source concept in such a way that they remain "in control". In this (very hypothetical) case, even though the licensing agreement would prevent them from using a legalistic means of controlling distributors etc. they could potentially remain an effective monopoly and still abuse that power. So this question has two parts: from an economic standpoint, if a product is a freely available commodity can a company exert control over it and monopolize it? and from a legal standpoint, if the licensing is "open/free" then can they be held accountable for their control and/or abuse of that control?
It is definately true that phonics is better for young children. However, for babies, memorizing words is the only way possible because usually their ability to differentiate phonemes is very poor and teaching them the abstractions of letter symbols is very difficult.
There is a sweet spot somewhere in the range of 2 years to 5 years old when phonics is really good. (See the book "Teach Your Child to Read in 60 Days" - I can't remember the author's name - which discusses a purely phonics based method of early reading instruction.)
However, in the long run, the use of phonics tends to limit the speed at which one can read because of its connection to a linear, vocalized "meaning" of the words and symbols. Spead reading is only possible by returning to a system of visual recognition and processing of text. I haven't done too much research on this, but I expect that after doing a couple of years of phonics, it would be beneficial to start deliberately moving back to a purely visual system.
Come to think of it, the ability of adults to learn to speed read (to transition from a vocalized from of reading to a visual form) is probably a supporting example of the flexibility of the mind in "later" years. I've tried to learn to speed read myself, with some very limited success (when I'm in practice, I can read at about 500 wpm - my normal speed is about 300 wpm).
One last comment is to reiterate that I believe the important issue is not so much the specific technique of instruction but that the first five years of a child's life should include much more deliberate, challenging, interesting and loving education - and unfortunately, for most kids that means getting some at all! Maria Montessori wrote way back in the late 19th century that those early years were extremely important and I don't think that these new discoveries in any way invalidate this, rather they just point to the possibility that remedial efforts might have more success than we would otherwise think possible.
Check out an old book by Glenn Doman "Teach Your Baby to Read". It's about teaching babies to read. The ideal age for learning to read is 24 months according to this guy...
Now the really neet thing is that I'm doing it with my 15 month old son. I print out in big bold caps each new word he learns to say (eg. CRACKER, MAMA, DOGGY, BOOT etc.) and show it to him, say it to him and put it in context a few times a day. In two weeks of doing this, he can easily identify 8 words presented in random order mixed with words he doesn't know. I only spend 10 or 15 minutes a day doing this. And the ease with which he learns new words is increasing.
So where am I going with this (certainly my purpose is not just to brag about my son:)? We are constantly robbing our children of their true potential by underestimating their abilities. The same is probably true for adults if this article is correct. For all you who are parents out there, take 15 or 20 minutes a day to teach your children, and you will be astounded!
Most of us geeks know that humans can learn much more than school presents us with. Its a matter of challenge, interest and love, not ability.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was thirteen (over half my life ago) I read a book called Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander. I immediately stopped watching television. Except for a few slips (once during a summer Olympics, and once when the Simpsons were still new) that has stayed with me. Although some of the writing is a little cheesy, the basic points that the book makes are valid - and they don't apply to Web news (yet).
This guy wrote a whole book so this little summary doesn't go into any of the detailed explainations, but... The main points that I remember are:- The medium of television only allows certain type of programming, and those types are generally focused on violence.
- The medium of television is physically inferior to nearly every other medium both visually and acoustically (where applicable) and thus relies on "technical events" to maintian a viewers attention - the content of the programming has very little influence in this regard (except insofar as it aligns with point 1).
- Television viewers are in an extremely passive role compared to any other media and this is harmful to brain and psychological developement.
I forget the last "argument".Now, as a software engineer, I spend the vast majority of my waking hours looking at a computer monitor. I don't really think this is healthy, but in many respects it is better than television. My main sources of entertainment (news) are Yahoo, Slashdot, and the GlobeandMail.com (a national newspaper of Canada). I call this entertainment for one very important reason: very very little of the "news" impacts my life. I do not learn things that are important in my day to day life (with perhaps the exception of some of the technical and science articles on Slashdot). Also, about the same time that I was reading 4Arguments, my dad told me something very interesting...
I'm sure that most of us who went to school can remember "current events" as being an important part of the social studies/history/civics cirriculum. We were exhorted to watch or listen to the news and make reports in class. I was never particularly good at this as I spent most of my free time playing with Lego, doing home chemistry experiments of fiddling with whatever electronic device I could get my hands on. Anyway, my father worked in a video production studio as a director. He made several international award-winning artistic shorts and generally was _really_ knowledgable in the field. He also happened to know one of the executives at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation who was involved with their news division. I don't remember all the details of the conversation, but one day my dad told me that news wasn't about information - it was solely about entertainment. I honestly had a hard time believing it. He backed it up by quoting his friend at the CBC who said something to the effect that the only way they keep viewers is by treating all their programming, and especially news, as entertainment. A news item was scrapped if it was not considered entertaining. It had nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with "newsworthyness". I basically refused to believe it, but the conversation stayed with me. Then I started to actually watch the news, not passively, but with this possibility in mind. And very quickly I ended up agreeing.
I was involved in a project at the University of Saskatchewan in 1991-92 that was doing exactly this. We were working on a NeXTSTEP system to provide a user interface for blind users. I was doing the programming and another senior student was doing the hardware. The basic idea was to provide auditory and tactile feedback so that blind users could manouver through the NeXT's GUI. We included a very nice Text-to-Speech system that used the NeXT's built in DSP, as well as audio signals. The software took advantage of some of the really nifty things that NeXTSTEP allowed in terms of the OS and the application environments to basically capture events before they got to the app, and to capture screen info (from the Disply PostScript system) to feed to the mouse.
Well, many people have pointed out Kaplan's seeming bias in the judgement with such things as the reference to the defendant's beliefs. Theoretically, Kaplan could have been quite deliberate about putting in extraneous statements, specifically to make an appeal more effective. AFAIK, any flaw in the process is fodder for the appeal. I read about half of the opinion and is very carefully written. Perhaps all the "flaws" are deliberate.
BTW, IANAL.
Personally, I found the AI aspect of the article the most interesting. I am a fan of Douglas Hofstadter. His books Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies and Le Ton Beau de Marot are incredibly beautiful and insightful. I strongly recommend them to anyone who is interested in AI, philosophy of knowledge, psychology etc. etc.
Now, in an attempt to stay on-topic, I will come back to the article. Hofstadter's basic message seems to be that intelligence is a matter of degree more than anything else. Things such as medium (biological, mechanical, electrical etc.) are irrelevant to the basic question. If he is right, then I can see intelligent beings being much more likely.
As a strongly religious person, I believe that there is some "soul" which imparts to us an aspect that makes us (the human species) unique on the planet (please moderators - that's just an opinion :). But the teachings of my faith seem to be quite clear that every planet has its creatures (not necessarily intelligent) (Unfortunately I don't have a good reference to this specific aspect of my faith).
But in another way, I have to admit that I feel very threatened by the possibility of other intelligence. As an individual I like the fact that I am a member of a species which has done absolutely incredible things. Humanity has created intended beauty in a way that so far seems completely unique in the world. I believe strongly that we can overcome our multitude of problems, and when we do, we will do more that is completely unimaginable at this time. If AI or ET's were to usurp that position of beauty-creators, it would be very very damaging to humanities self-concept. That said, I am fascinated by AI, and I would love to do work in the field (after I make my startup millions :).
As a final comment in this decidedly rambling post: get SETI@home !
Regardless of the content WIPO's final decision, I hope that WIPO will document carefully all the arguements for and against their decision so that the process may be as open to critical review as possible. Domain names are a very valuable commodity and many people have invested significant amounts of time, money, and more importantly, hope into developing web presenses. Do not let this historical effort, these "sunk" costs to become ignored.
Thanks,
Mishkin.
I have a few ideas to suggest that may not be very popular, but which would probably help a lot. Most of "my" ideas about this aren't really my own - I'll try to credit where credit it due.
I am writing a paper on the topic of the careful pursuit of technology. It is in progress so my appologies for the rough and unsubstantiated parts :)
A book called The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom has some very interesting related points and is generally a good read.
So, my first real programming job was in an OO environment like none I have seen since. I am a highly paid Java consultant with now 9 years of solid development experience. I have never programmed professionally in any other paradigm but OO (not that I haven't experienced others: structural (C, Pascal), functional (Lisp, Miranda), other declarative (Prolog), etc. etc.). Objective-C is a cool OO language that has strong type checking, but also allows weak typing (remember id?). Dynamic runtime binding is the rule. Method invocations could be forwarded. Classes were true objects in their own right which meant that static methods could refer to self and access the _current_ class (kinda like this accesses the instance it occurs in, in Java).
The Interface Builder tool, even in it's early iterations was incredibly slick. No friggin' unstable code generation - instead a really stable flexible system similar to Java's serialization, but more flexible because of the dynamic typing (don't tell me Java comes close). The UI for the interface builder was cool and putting together the GUI for a prototype app was often just a few moments of click and drag. It wasn't just painting: it was putting in the connections between the Controller and all the live gui widgets.
Ahh... those were the days...
WebObjects is a very similar environment for building web apps. It has an interface builder that is slightly different from the NeXTSTEP one, but also very flexible and powerful. And of course OSX will continue the legacy that is still unrivaled (AFAIK).
- The element of secrecy and suprise is a very important aspect of staying competitive. Every month, every week, every hour makes a difference as far as competitors working to duplicate or one-up a new product.
- The element of setting expectations: if the rumors are wrong, reasonable and exciting, then they set expectations that may be hard to live up to.
- If the rumors are currently correct, that doesn't mean that last minute announcement changes won't be made, thus disappointing people or revealing problems to competitors. True rumors make it more difficult for a company to "turn on a dime" and avoid customer/competitor/supplier problems.
Having said all that, I like reading speculative info about new cool stuff...It is a simple matter to make a client that breaks files up into 100k bytes :-) and reconstructs them. How about that search capability? Well, that just means having an index. An index is info and can likewise be broken up into 100k pieces. So the client looks to a common place for the index, downloads the most current version (or does some sort of nifty caching so that only the most used portions are downloaded at first), finds the references, builds a list of urls, downloads the data, patches it together, and voila! you have just downloaded 100MB of mp3s, and not only that, but it sounds like availability will be MUCH better than Napster/Gnutella-like systems!
I think that technology is not neutral. Believing that a technology is only "as good as the person who is using it" is naive! Every technology has social ramifications that are inherent in its purpose. Marshall McLuhan is often quoted "the medium is the message" but people generally misunderstand this to mean that a medium influences what content can be transmitted on it. I think what it means is more literal: a medium is itself a message... a technology has a specific effect on society... a lightbulb requires a power infrastructure which implies large capital interests, which in democratic capitalism meant large power companies. This is a direct social effect of the technology of the lightbulb.
So what's my point?
Well, I think that both political and social institutions as well as geeks need to fully wake up to the fact that "the medium is the message" and start making decisions about technology on that basis. And do it in a rational manner... not in some haphazard way through boycotts, legislation, lawsuits etc.
I think that a rational examination of technologies will be built on a framework that includes the following three pillars:
- "the medium is the message"
- human rights (a la Universal Declaration of Human Rights)
- "the world is one country" and humankind its citizens
I have been writing a paper on this exact subject. It is currently in progress (and some parts are really old and pretty rough to boot!) but here it is. (I hope my poor server holds upDo Canadian copyright laws differ in any significant ways from the US? Is there anything equivalent to the DMCA? Any news on when PayPal will work in the North?
It's strange being Canadian and reading about all this wierd stuff happening with IP in the US. I'm kinda hoping that Canadian legislators are taking a wait-and-see attitude to what is happening in the States.
Good luck on your endeavor! I'm sure I'll be using it in the future!
The dual advantage of a good base os (BSD) with a utterly amazing GUI front end (and I'm talk'n from developer's perspective) is going to be significant.
I've worked with many different OS's, frameworks, and tools over the last ten years including JBuilder, VisualCafe, VisualAge, Corba, EJB, TopLink, WinNT, MacOS, BSD's, etc. etc. etc. and really they are all still playing catch-up to the technology that was initially developed in 1991 in NeXTStep 2.x! I have never owned a Mac, but I am now seriously considering it because it will be a good development platform no matter what one is doing!
Well, I got to thinking pretty quickly that only two motors was a bit of a problem and even three doesn't really allow you to do too much. So, I implemented a mechanical trinary counter which allows one drive motor and one touch sensor to control an arbitrary number of drive shafts: forward, reverse and no power. The higher order drive shafts change state quite slowly, but the thing is pretty neet anyway. With this one can basically do anything as long as it doesn't require quick response times.
This situation then becomes the basis for a decision about a possible change. If I was working somewhere where I put in a regularly low number of hours (like 35/week) with only very occasional overtime, I would be very hesitant to switch over to hourly pay as it might mean a serious drop in my paycheck. The reverse situation is obvious.
What isn't so obvious is that being an employee (either salary or hourly) has a implication of loyalty. The employer is giving you "benefits" in exchange for a long-term commitment (you to your employer, but certainly not the other way around). But the fact is that if one becomes a contractor, there is usually a significant jump in compensation which often more than covers the "benefits" of employment and has the additional benefits that there is no need to feel loyalty to a corporation that is not reciprocating that feeling (no matter what corporate propaganda may be), and that you have ultimate control over how much money you actually earn.
Currently, I do a little of both. I have a nice full-time day job, and I take small contracts on the side to cover my options and establish a network of contacts that I can rely on should my employer cease to be "loyal"...
- - academic education
- - socialization
- - babysitting
All of these are substitutes for parenting.So what is the teacher's role given these purposes?
- provide academic education
- provide a social role model
- supervise students safety
On a surface level, I would say that it's not just academics that are suffering!! In a very pluralistic society like the one's in the US, Canada and a few other countries, providing a social role model is not going to work too well. And as far as supervising students safety is concerned, that seems to be getting worse as well.But what to do? Home schooling is an option that is becoming more popular - it addresses the problems at their root: reclaiming the role of parenting. Private schools that cater to specific educational philosophies, specific religious affiliations, and specific skills or subject areas are useful to a degree.
There are huge amounts of literature out there about the problems and their solutions. Check out books by Jonathan Kozol, Ivan Illich, Paulo Freire, Maria Montessori, Paul Goodman, Alan Bloom etc. etc....
- The user takes responsibility.
- The creator takes responsibility.
- Society takes responsibility.
Obviously, from the free market and libertarian standpoints, option one is the "winner", but by no means is this a foregone conclusion.Many here have made the comparison of software to guns. I think this comparison is false in two ways. First, it is always taken as a foregone conclusion that the user of a gun is both ethically and legally responsible, but this is actually an unsupported assertion. Second, the fundamental purpose of guns is very different from that of software. Software is not a single purpose tool. A gun has as its primary purpose to kill animals, and in some cases, specifically to kill humans. That is what they are designed for. On the other hand, software's primary purpose is to push bits around on a computer.
That leaves us in a funny spot: software is used at a level of abstraction above its primary purpose. And that level of abstraction is intended. If I were to use/create software for the purpose of designing biological weapons, I am both ethically and legally in the wrong regardless - because I am intending an illegal/unethical purpose.
I guess the main point I would like to make is that in both the act of creation and the use of something, purpose is manifested. As a society we have legally established a system where the act of creation is protected. There are very real benefits to this system, but there are also very real disadvantages. Most here could wax eloquent on the advantages, but I would like to point out one disadvantage: ideas, technologies, whatever, cannot be evaluated at creation time. Think of it as the difference between compile-time syntax and semantic checking versus run-time checking!
One possible rebuttle is that our "system" is set up one the survival of the fittest model and it works pretty good. But personally, I don't think anyone has given a really good try at designing an evalation system - a compile-time ethics checker :) This would be a solution along the lines of option three above - society takes some responsibility for its own ethical standpoint.
If Microsoft were to release its source code to windows under the GPL or some other free software licensing scheme, would that really make them any less of a monopoly? I can see that with the resouces they have in terms of engineering, sales and marketing, I suspect that they may be able to hijack the open source concept in such a way that they remain "in control". In this (very hypothetical) case, even though the licensing agreement would prevent them from using a legalistic means of controlling distributors etc. they could potentially remain an effective monopoly and still abuse that power. So this question has two parts: from an economic standpoint, if a product is a freely available commodity can a company exert control over it and monopolize it? and from a legal standpoint, if the licensing is "open/free" then can they be held accountable for their control and/or abuse of that control?
It is definately true that phonics is better for young children. However, for babies, memorizing words is the only way possible because usually their ability to differentiate phonemes is very poor and teaching them the abstractions of letter symbols is very difficult.
There is a sweet spot somewhere in the range of 2 years to 5 years old when phonics is really good. (See the book "Teach Your Child to Read in 60 Days" - I can't remember the author's name - which discusses a purely phonics based method of early reading instruction.)
However, in the long run, the use of phonics tends to limit the speed at which one can read because of its connection to a linear, vocalized "meaning" of the words and symbols. Spead reading is only possible by returning to a system of visual recognition and processing of text. I haven't done too much research on this, but I expect that after doing a couple of years of phonics, it would be beneficial to start deliberately moving back to a purely visual system.
Come to think of it, the ability of adults to learn to speed read (to transition from a vocalized from of reading to a visual form) is probably a supporting example of the flexibility of the mind in "later" years. I've tried to learn to speed read myself, with some very limited success (when I'm in practice, I can read at about 500 wpm - my normal speed is about 300 wpm).
One last comment is to reiterate that I believe the important issue is not so much the specific technique of instruction but that the first five years of a child's life should include much more deliberate, challenging, interesting and loving education - and unfortunately, for most kids that means getting some at all! Maria Montessori wrote way back in the late 19th century that those early years were extremely important and I don't think that these new discoveries in any way invalidate this, rather they just point to the possibility that remedial efforts might have more success than we would otherwise think possible.
Check out an old book by Glenn Doman "Teach Your Baby to Read". It's about teaching babies to read. The ideal age for learning to read is 24 months according to this guy...
Now the really neet thing is that I'm doing it with my 15 month old son. I print out in big bold caps each new word he learns to say (eg. CRACKER, MAMA, DOGGY, BOOT etc.) and show it to him, say it to him and put it in context a few times a day. In two weeks of doing this, he can easily identify 8 words presented in random order mixed with words he doesn't know. I only spend 10 or 15 minutes a day doing this. And the ease with which he learns new words is increasing.
So where am I going with this (certainly my purpose is not just to brag about my son :)? We are constantly robbing our children of their true potential by underestimating their abilities. The same is probably true for adults if this article is correct. For all you who are parents out there, take 15 or 20 minutes a day to teach your children, and you will be astounded!
Most of us geeks know that humans can learn much more than school presents us with. Its a matter of challenge, interest and love, not ability.