Community Mobilization

Online High School

Bloomberg reports that a Silicone Valley foundation - The Malone Family Foundation - and Stanford are teaming up to create the first online High School.  At $12,000.00 per year the tuition is less than the median US private institution.  Online socialization skills are fast becoming important pieces of any professional toolkit.  While some parents bemoan the lack of interaction on the play ground (where most kids apt to attend this school are probably bullied) I think it is a fantastic way to expose youth to a nationally, or even internationally diverse group of peers. Particularly since this school would put effort into encouraging math and hard science, an area that America is beginning to lag in internationally.

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NOAA Joins Second Life

I just saw on Boing Boing that NOAA has created a simulation within Second Life dedicated to Tsunami education.  The simulation takes advantage of the fairly complex physics engine inside SL as well as the very graphical nature of the system. I look froward to other Government organizations to join SL for the purpose of using it as an educational platform that is very immersive and provides extraordinary graphical rendering for complex ideas such as Tsunamis.

Ecological is logical - Happy Shrimp in Europe

I just saw this company called Happy Shrimp and the concept is so fantastic.  It is the first shrimp farm in Europe.  Ye shrimp grow in warm watter ... so this farm uses waste heat from an adjacent power-plant to keep its farm at ideal temperature.  Water is filtered in a closed system to ensure safety and Eco-friendliness as well.  The crustaceans are delivered fresh all over Europe daily saving time, eliminating the need for trans-continental shipping, and delivering a safer and fresher product. In the end everyone from the customer to the environment win.   It is a great entrepreneurial spirit that may make positive impacts on the ecology while delivery even better products cheaper to the masses.

The Meaning of the 21st Century - Part III

Through the Canyon is the third section of James Martin's 'The Meaning of the 21st Century'. In previous posts I reviewed Section I and Section II. The section opens up with the delineation of 15 major challenges and opportunity areas that cover everything from terrorism, to the wisdom gap, to biosphere and poverty.  Martin critically looks at the economic disparities in the world and attributes a vast number of social ills to the unbalanced world economy.  The majority of the section is economic introducing concepts such as Factor 4 (use 1/2 the resources to create 2x the value), and that the smallest players may become the most important. 

Speaking of the Goliaths of industry Martin dedicates a chapter to review the vital importance that the champions of industry play in driving ecologically sustainable productivity.  Furthermore the need of the global industry to pay heed to secondary and tertiary countries in terms of corporate giving and trade policy was also key. Global informatics will also help us tie nation-state closer together through large bandwidth pipes and cultural exchanges.  One hope is to temper extremist cultures and have a much more through cultural understanding.

Finally Martin closes this section with a set of chapters on the new counter-terrorist world. It is an interesting insight into the challenges and aspirations of a control state preoccupied with scenario planning and protection. He lays out 4 scenarios of how the future world may function on an economic level; Fortress States, The Strong Nation Club, Triage, and Compassionate World.  His bet is an evolution from the Triage to the Compassionate World, and I hope he is correct.

Part Two of The Meaning of the 21st Century

In part two of his latest release The Meaning of the 21st Century, James Martin  dives into the 'Technologies of Sorcery'.   After laying out the premise that we are unwise to continue to use technology as a crutch and rely on it for the solution to all of the ills caused by our bad behavior, Martin takes the liberty of outlining some of the most recent an promising technologies and some of their potential effects.  He addresses the fruits and failures of genetic tinkering in both humans as well as plants and other animals.  He takes the time to define red and green genetics as well as the three stages of genetic selection and modification. 

The following chapter introduces some great concepts of the exponential power of computing over the years and paints a reasonably good picture of our problem solving power in the coming years.  He outlines the advent of what AI may become as well as how it could become self-sustainable. Clearly the hope is that we are able to see intelligent goals for technology development and not develop for pure consumerist purposes. Finally he takes on Trans-humanism and the singularity.  I was so happy to see futurist Ray Kurzweil and his ideas featured in the closing bit of this section.  No technology futures book is complete without mentioning his Singularity theory, or down-loadable consciousness.

So now I have the premise that we are destroying our own world.  I also have the outline of the technology we think could possibly mitigate out disastrous behavior.  I hope the next section has some future thinking predictions, plans, or calls to action.

The Meaning of the 21st Century - Part One

I was sent a free copy of the recent James Martin book 'The Meaning of the 21st Century' and I have promised to give honest and strait critique of the work.  I have just finished Part One and to be frank I am shocked and appalled by the behavior of the human race.  Martin's words are scathing and brutally honest as he recounts the vast and various technological, social, and scientific blunders of the last century. He lays on example after example of how we have brutalized our planet in a rapid plunder of resources all in search of personal wealth. He is especially unkind to those who have taken the hubris moral high ground of manifest destiny - that humans are intelligently designed to rule the planet.  Yea ... rule not obliterate.

As a work it is very depressing and maybe it needs to be in order to get people's attention. Martin sets out some slight hope provided we are able to get our heads out of the accounting books an into the real world.  We have become so blind by consumption that we are missing the secondary and tertiary effects of our actions. He pays particular attention to the environmental impacts and social consequences of overpopulation, industrialization, and genetic recombination. Part one paints a very bleak picture with  small window of opportunity - a window I seriously doubt we as a species will be motivated enough to jump through.

Should a doctor tell a fat child he/she is obese or overweight?

A recent article in Medical News Today addresses a simple yet ethical question.  Should physicians tell their patients they are fat?  Has our national taxonomy become so flaccid that we are loosing the ability to clearly communicate serious information? The Center For Disease Control has dictated that physicians should never call a child Obease ... even if they are!  Doctors do not say 'you have 99.99% possibility of risk for cancer' they tell patients that they have cancer! Talking around the issue gives patients a false sense of denial. The community impact of innocuous language may sooth a patient's feelings but it certainly does nothing for alerting them to the imminent dangers resulting from their life choices.  Speaking of choices, using fuzzy language to address the nation's fastest growing health risk is a mindless political one!

Duke report on Americans Having Fewer Friends

A report form Duke University says that American have fewer close friends that they can confide in. The study says our circle of friends have shrunk over the last 20 years.  Has the sharp increase of social technology adoption served as a catalyst for this trend?  Or did the Duke study ask the wrong question. Having not seen the study I am forced to make conjectures about the nature of the questions such as; what constitutes a friend, or a confidant and what were the criteria necessary to fill this role? 

I would say that with the advent of some of the new social software and immersive MMORGs the sheer number of contacts that we hold has increased ... or more specifically our connection managing potential has increased.  Technology is allowing us to hold more contacts than the Dunbar Number says we should be able to hold.   

In expanding our volume of relationships have we diluted our ability to maintain close meaningful ones? Are we are only able to maintain a certain relationship bandwidth? Either way social network media can help us all grow and maintain relationships, yet it always comes back to the fact that we as humans have a finite relationship bandwidth to divide as we see fit.

Open Source Objects

Joi Ito has a very nice video interview with Limor Fried on her open source synthesizer.  Limor has built a kit hat allows musicians to build their own synthesizer.  Her design is based on a model that is no longer in production.  Since musicians build the object themselves they are familiar with the internal working parts and are able to customize and improvise function with it.  In short in empowers owners to tinker with it.  As an open source product it also allows computer programmers to look at the firmware and software to improve its functions and add to the package.  The interview moves ahead and the idea that soon a number of items will be sold under a Creative Commons copy right will hopefully inspire people to better understand their products and capture their creativity in upgrading and updating them.

ACLU has a take on Total Information Awareness

This is probably an older ACLU video but I think that it goes real well with my recent post on the Catalogue video.  I bet this was put together during the DARPA Total Information Awareness Act shenanigans a few years ago.  The interesting thing is that through social networking systems we are filling in huge parts of that information and leaving it our almost totally open on the ether.  Teens in particular are not cautious about how and what hey place in their profiles.  Clearly there are deeper consumer behaviors that these systems do not capture ... right now.  How about a Myspace Mastercard?  Ever consider a Friendster Tivo box? We already have Orkut / G-mail.  These systems are curators of the social tapestry of our lives and as they grow they will want to be involved in many more aspects of our everyday activity.  And since they are not the government we just may let them.