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Bill Fulkerson

Anatomy of an AI System - 1 views

anatomyof.ai

AI amazon

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 14 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 14 Sep 18
     
    "With each interaction, Alexa is training to hear better, to interpret more precisely, to trigger actions that map to the user's commands more accurately, and to build a more complete model of their preferences, habits and desires. What is required to make this possible? Put simply: each small moment of convenience - be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song - requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data. The scale of resources required is many magnitudes greater than the energy and labor it would take a human to operate a household appliance or flick a switch. A full accounting for these costs is almost impossible, but it is increasingly important that we grasp the scale and scope if we are to understand and govern the technical infrastructures that thread through our lives. III The Salar, the world's largest flat surface, is located in southwest Bolivia at an altitude of 3,656 meters above sea level. It is a high plateau, covered by a few meters of salt crust which are exceptionally rich in lithium, containing 50% to 70% of the world's lithium reserves. 4 The Salar, alongside the neighboring Atacama regions in Chile and Argentina, are major sites for lithium extraction. This soft, silvery metal is currently used to power mobile connected devices, as a crucial material used for the production of lithium-Ion batteries. It is known as 'grey gold.' Smartphone batteries, for example, usually have less than eight grams of this material. 5 Each Tesla car needs approximately seven kilograms of lithium for its battery pack. 6 All these batteries have a limited lifespan, and once consumed they are thrown away as waste. Amazon reminds users that they cannot open up and repair their Echo, because this will void the warranty. The Amazon Echo is wall-powered, and also has a mobile battery base. This also has a limited lifespan and then must be thrown away as waste. According to the Ay
Bill Fulkerson

Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding | naked capitalism - 0 views

www.nakedcapitalism.com/...ernist-thinking-exploding.html

capitalism power society

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 11 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 11 Mar 17
     
    " Fearless commentary on finance, economics, politics and power Follow yvessmith on Twitter Feedburner RSS Feed RSS Feed for Comments Subscribe via Email SUBSCRIBE Recent Items Links 3/11/17 - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith Deutsche Bank Tries to Stay Alive - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith John Helmer: Australian Government Trips Up Ukrainian Court Claim of MH17 as Terrorism - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith 2:00PM Water Cooler 3/10/2017 - 03/10/2017 - Lambert Strether Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Links 3/10/17 - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Why It Will Take a Lot More Than a Smartphone to Get the Sharing Economy Started - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith CalPERS' General Counsel Railroads Board on Fiduciary Counsel Selection - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Another Somalian Famine - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Trade now with TradeStation - Highest rated for frequent traders Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding Posted on March 10, 2017 by Yves Smith By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website Across the globe, a collective freak-out spanning the whole political system is picking up steam with every new "surprise" election, rush of tormented souls across borders, and tweet from the star of America's great unreality show, Donald Trump. But what exactly is the force that seems to be pushing us towards Armageddon? Is it capitalism gone wild? Globalization? Political corruption? Techno-nightmares? Rajani Kanth, a political economist, social thinker, and poet, goes beyond any of these explanations for the answer. In his view, what's throwing most of us off kilter - whether we think of ourselves as on the left or right, capitalist or socialist -was birthed 400 years ago during the period of the Enlightenment. It's a set of assumptions, a particular way of looking at the world that pushed out previous modes o
Steve Bosserman

What does home mean if your bed is on the pavements of Paris? | Aeon Essays - 0 views

aeon.co/...d-is-on-the-pavements-of-paris

homelessness anthropology paris home

shared by Steve Bosserman on 29 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • The American anthropologist Edward Fischer, paraphrasing Aristotle, said that the good life is ‘a life worth living’, or a journey towards ‘a fulfilled life’. It has to do with happiness but is not limited to it; it’s often – perhaps counterintuitively – linked to commitment and sacrifice, to the work of becoming a particular person. The French philosopher Michel Foucault in 1982 described these practices as technologies of the self. According to Foucault, the self is ‘not given to us … we have to create ourselves as a work of art’. My informants on the streets of Paris were striving – in their own ways – towards being better selves. I came to understand the activities, processes and routines that they engaged in – begging, making a shelter, accessing temporary housing, etc – as practices of the self geared towards a better life, as practices of homemaking on the street, as practices of hope.
  • Aside from François, others I met on the streets of Paris – such as Sabal from India, and Alex from Kosovo – talked about their engagement in such practices of hope. Following them through soup kitchens, drop-in centres, government institutions and homeless shelters, I observed two main ways in which they attempted to push for a better life. Both of them were connected to the idea of home: my informants in Paris were longing to find and go back to a homeland, often one from the past, while on a daily basis they were struggling to construct a home in order to survive. That was what a better life looked like for them.
  • Home, according to the Australian social scientist Shelley Mallett, is always suspended between the ideal and the real. It relates to ‘the activity performed by, with or in person’s things and places. Home is lived in the tension between the given and the chosen, then and now.’ While Sabal’s India was part of the ideal, what Alex was dealing with was closer to the ‘real’ side of this distinction. His home-making efforts were a continuous process of daily activities.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • For many of the homeless people I’ve met in both London and Paris, home was connected to a place they departed from and have a desire to return to – a place that carried what the English sociologist Liz Kenyon calls a right to return and a sense of one’s origin. Sara Ahmed’s 1999 study of migrants’ writing, particularly Asian women living in Britain, supports this view of home as something in the longer-term future. The British-Australian scholar wrote that home is often a destination, somewhere to travel to: ‘the space which is most like home, which is most comfortable and familiar, is not the space of inhabitance – I am here – but the very space in which one finds the self as almost, but not quite, at home. In such a space, the subject has a destination, an itinerary, indeed a future, but in having such as destination, has not yet arrived.’ Home is, in this sense, not about the present – and surely not a place of passive suffering – but about one’s hopes, about making home an imagined place where one has not yet arrived.
  • Home is exactly such a process, involving the material and the imaginative, social connections and mundane acts. Routines, habits and rhythms – often as simple as regularly visiting certain neighbourhoods, shelters and food kitchens – are important parts of this process, and are deeply connected to a temporal as well as spatial order. This focus on order is best expressed in the classical analysis of home by the English anthropologist Mary Douglas:[Home] is always a localisable idea. Home is located in space but it is not necessarily a fixed space. It does not need bricks and mortar, it can be a wagon, a caravan, a board, or a tent. It need not be a large space, but space there must be, for home starts by bringing some space under control.
  • François, who introduced me to the labour of begging, found something close to home in his daily practices. His home was fashioned by coming face to face with the city around him. These narratives show how far removed these people are from a state of passive suffering. Yes, there were moments of idleness and, for some, long phases of pain. But most of the people I met sleeping rough – independent of age, gender, tenure on the street and level of addiction – were striving, in their way, towards a better life: first on, and hopefully off, the street.
Steve Bosserman

Escape to another world | 1843 - 0 views

www.1843magazine.com/...escape-to-another-world

time management economics trade-off work-life balance

shared by Steve Bosserman on 01 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • What these individuals are not doing is clear enough, says Erik Hurst, an economist at the University of Chicago, who has been studying the phenomenon. They are not leaving home; in 2015 more than 50% lived with a parent or close relative. Neither are they getting married. What they are doing, Hurst reckons, is playing video games. As the hours young men spent in work dropped in the 2000s, hours spent in leisure activities rose nearly one-for-one. Of the rise in leisure time, 75% was accounted for by video games. It looks as though some small but meaningful share of the young-adult population is delaying employment or cutting back hours in order to spend more time with their video game of choice.
  • People work for many reasons – to occupy their time, to find purpose in life and to contribute to society, among other things – but the need to earn money typically comes top of the list. Money puts food on the table, clothes in the wardrobe and a roof overhead. Yet these days, satisfying those needs in the most basic way does not take an especially large income, particularly for those with the option of depending on family members for assistance. The reason to work harder and earn more than the minimum needed to survive is, in part, the desire to have something more than the bare necessities – nice meals, rather than the cheapest calories available, a car, holidays abroad, a home full of books and art. Much of the work we do is intended to earn the money to afford a few luxuries to add to our comfort and enrich our lives.Yet we face a trade-off. The harder we work, the less time we have to enjoy the luxuries our labour affords us. The more lavish the luxuries we seek, the more we must earn to acquire them, and the longer and harder we find ourselves working.
  • Stand back, however, and the implications are far more substantial than this. One can just about spot the vision of a distant, near-workless future in the habits of young gamers. If good things in life can be had for very little money, then working hard to have more than very little money looks less attractive. The history of the industrial era has been one in which technology has reduced the proportion of income devoted to necessities like food while providing vast new possibilities for consumption. As this happened, the hours worked by the typical person declined.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • A life spent buried in video games, scraping by on meagre pay from irregular work or dependent on others, might seem empty and sad. Whether it is emptier and sadder than one spent buried in finance, accumulating points during long hours at the office while neglecting other aspects of life, is a matter of perspective. But what does seem clear is that the choices we make in life are shaped by the options available to us. A society that dislikes the idea of young men gaming their days away should perhaps invest in more dynamic difficulty adjustment in real life. And a society which regards such adjustments as fundamentally unfair should be more tolerant of those who choose to spend their time in an alternate reality, enjoying the distractions and the succour it provides to those who feel that the outside world is more rigged than the game.
Steve Bosserman

Jane Jacobs's Theories on Urban Planning-and Democracy in America - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...501104

democracy urban design ecosystems diversity neighborhoods

shared by Steve Bosserman on 17 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Urban life was Jacobs’s great subject. But her great theme was the fragility of democracy—how difficult it is to maintain, how easily it can crumble. A city offered the perfect laboratory in which to study democracy’s intricate, interconnected gears and ballistics. “When we deal with cities,” she wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), “we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense.” When cities succeed, they represent the purest manifestation of democratic ideals: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” When cities fail, they fail for the same reasons democracies fail: corruption, tyranny, homogenization, overspecialization, cultural drift and atrophy.
  • I was encouraged to believe that simple conformity results in stagnation for a society, and that American progress has been largely owing to the opportunity for experimentation, the leeway given initiative, and to a gusto and a freedom for chewing over odd ideas. I was taught that the American’s right to be a free individual, not at the mercy of the state, was hard-won and that its price was eternal vigilance, that I too would have to be vigilant.
  • Her 1,500-word speech, a version of which appears in Vital Little Plans, became the basis for The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Her main argument was Kirk’s: Small neighborhood stores, ignored by the planners in their grim demolition derby, were essential social hubs. She added that sidewalks, stoops, laundries, and mailbox areas were also indispensable centers of community activity, and that sterile, vacant outdoor space served nobody. “The least we can do,” she said, “is to respect—in the deepest sense—strips of chaos that have a weird wisdom of their own.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Reduced to a word, Jacobs’s argument is that a city, or neighborhood, or block, cannot succeed without diversity: diversity of residential and commercial use, racial and socioeconomic diversity, diversity of governing bodies (from local wards to state agencies), diverse modes of transportation, diversity of public and private institutional support, diversity of architectural style. Great numbers of people concentrated in relatively small areas should not be considered a health or safety hazard; they are the foundation of a healthy community. Dense, varied populations are “desirable,” Jacobs wrote,
  • Madison argued that as you increase the “variety of parties and interests” contained within a republic, “you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens.”
  • “We need all kinds of diversity,” Jacobs concluded in Death and Life, “so the people of cities can sustain (and further develop) their society and civilization.”
  • In her comparative study of fallen empires, Jacobs identifies common early indicators of decline: “cultural xenophobia,” “self-imposed isolation,” and “a shift from faith in logos, reason, with its future-oriented spirit … to mythos, meaning conservatism that looks backwards to fundamentalist beliefs for guidance and a worldview.” She warns of the profligate use of plausible denial in American politics, the idea that “a presentable image makes substance immaterial,” allowing political campaigns “to construct new reality.” She finds further evidence of our hardening cultural sclerosis in the rise of the prison-industrial complex, the prioritization of credentials over critical thinking in the educational system, low voter turnout, and the reluctance to develop renewable forms of energy in the face of global ecological collapse.
  • In the foreword to the 1992 Modern Library edition of Death and Life, Jacobs likens cities to natural ecosystems. “Both types of ecosystems,” she writes, “require much diversity to sustain themselves … and because of their complex interdependencies of components, both kinds of ecosystems are vulnerable and fragile, easily disrupted or destroyed.”
Bill Fulkerson

Physics and information theory give a glimpse of life's origins | Aeon Essays - 0 views

aeon.co/...ive-a-glimpse-of-lifes-origins

physics life information origins

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 08 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 08 Sep 20
     
    How did life originate? Scientists have been studying the question for decades, and they've developed ingenious methods to try to find out. They've even enlisted biology's most powerful theory, Darwinian evolution, in the search. But they still don't have a complete answer. What they have hit is the world's most theoretically fertile dead end. When scientists look for life's origins, they usually work in one of two directions. They work backwards in time through the record of organisms that have lived on Earth, or they work forward from one of the many hypothetical prebiotic worlds in which life could have emerged.
Bill Fulkerson

By Losing Genes, Life Often Evolved More Complexity | Quanta Magazine - 0 views

www.quantamagazine.org/olved-more-complexity-20200901

complexity life genes

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 02 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 02 Sep 20
     
    Recent major surveys show that reductions in genomic complexity - including the loss of key genes - have successfully shaped the evolution of life throughout history.
Steve Bosserman

You Have Permission to Take a Media Break - 0 views

go.ind.media/...a3d8d501296f9aa0bd8d7bfdbc1470

social media time work-life balance

shared by Steve Bosserman on 10 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • The things that you don’t want to miss are found in your family, with your community and friends. It’s shared meals and laughter and hugs and a baby’s first word or first step. It’s real life. It’s being present for someone in the real world, to comfort them or help them in a moment of need.
  • And those things you don’t want to miss in real life are all rooted in Love.
  • Yes, it’s important to be informed. But at the end of your life, I suspect you won’t be glad for all the hours you spent scrolling through Twitter or the New York Times app. No one, on their deathbed, says, “I’m so glad for the time I wasted on Twitter scrolling through half-baked ideas, bad jokes, conspiracy, and hate speech.”
Bill Fulkerson

How Civilization Started - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...amp

ecological civilization agriculture past history

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 18 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 18 Sep 17
     
    "The big news to emerge from recent archeological research concerns the time lag between "sedentism," or living in settled communities, and the adoption of agriculture. Previous scholarship held that the invention of agriculture made sedentism possible. The evidence shows that this isn't true: there's an enormous gap-four thousand years-separating the "two key domestications," of animals and cereals, from the first agrarian economies based on them. Our ancestors evidently took a good, hard look at the possibility of agriculture before deciding to adopt this new way of life. They were able to think it over for so long because the life they lived was remarkably abundant. Like the early civilization of China in the Yellow River Valley, Mesopotamia was a wetland territory, as its name ("between the rivers") suggests. In the Neolithic period, Mesopotamia was a delta wetland, where the sea came many miles inland from its current shore."
Bill Fulkerson

How Absentee Landowners Keep Farmers From Protecting Water And Soil - 0 views

flip.it/t0ub-d

water landlords farmers soil

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 14 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 14 Jul 20
     
    The application of network science to biology has advanced our understanding of the metabolism of individual organisms and the organization of ecosystems but has scarcely been applied to life at a planetary scale. To characterize planetary-scale biochemistry, we constructed biochemical networks using a global database of 28,146 annotated genomes and metagenomes and 8658 cataloged biochemical reactions. We uncover scaling laws governing biochemical diversity and network structure shared across levels of organization from individuals to ecosystems, to the biosphere as a whole. Comparing real biochemical reaction networks to random reaction networks reveals that the observed biological scaling is not a product of chemistry alone but instead emerges due to the particular structure of selected reactions commonly participating in living processes. We show that the topology of biochemical networks for the three domains of life is quantitatively distinguishable, with >80% accuracy in predicting evolutionary domain based on biochemical network size and average topology. Together, our results point to a deeper level of organization in biochemical networks than what has been understood so far.
Bill Fulkerson

Universal scaling across biochemical networks on Earth - 0 views

flip.it/Qo3z8H

networks scaling earth

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 14 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 14 Jul 20
     
    The application of network science to biology has advanced our understanding of the metabolism of individual organisms and the organization of ecosystems but has scarcely been applied to life at a planetary scale. To characterize planetary-scale biochemistry, we constructed biochemical networks using a global database of 28,146 annotated genomes and metagenomes and 8658 cataloged biochemical reactions. We uncover scaling laws governing biochemical diversity and network structure shared across levels of organization from individuals to ecosystems, to the biosphere as a whole. Comparing real biochemical reaction networks to random reaction networks reveals that the observed biological scaling is not a product of chemistry alone but instead emerges due to the particular structure of selected reactions commonly participating in living processes. We show that the topology of biochemical networks for the three domains of life is quantitatively distinguishable, with >80% accuracy in predicting evolutionary domain based on biochemical network size and average topology. Together, our results point to a deeper level of organization in biochemical networks than what has been understood so far.
Bill Fulkerson

Phenomenal World | Essential Infrastructures - 0 views

phenomenalworld.org/...essential-infrastructures

Covid-19 coronavirus telecommunications

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 31 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 31 Jul 20
     
    As social distancing became norm and law in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, people turned to video teleconferencing to meet with friends and family, attend religious services, and go on dates. Zoom work accounts became a conduit for maintaining nonwork social ties, and as people came to depend on this enterprise tool, Zoom's stock valuation soared.1 The pandemic has widened the sphere of life dependent on such market technologies, heightening existing questions around the political, legal, and economic governance of these companies. How should the fabric of social life, especially as it is rewoven by the pandemic, relate to the private ownership of telecommunications?
Steve Bosserman

Why Didn't America Become Part of the Modern World? - 0 views

eand.co/-the-modern-world-dac6d65e9015

failed state modernity usa poverty

shared by Steve Bosserman on 09 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • Now you know what modernity is. It’s the idea that poverty causes ruin, and so the primary job of a modern society is to eliminate poverty, of all kinds, to give people decent lives at a bare minimum — and a social contract which does all that. Hence, Europe became a place rich in public goods, like healthcare, media, finance, transport, safety nets, etcetera, things which all people enjoy, which secure the basics of a good life — all the very same things you intuitively think of when you think of a “modern society” — but America didn’t.
  • So in America, poverty wasn’t seen as a social bad or ill — it was seen as a necessary way to discipline, punish, and control those with a lack of virtue, a deficit of strength, to, by hitting them with its stick, to inculcate the virtues of hard work, temperance, industriousness, and above all, self-reliance. The problem, of course, was that the great lesson of history was that none of this was true — poverty didn’t lead to virtue. It only led to ruin.
  • So here America is. Modernity’s first failed state. The rich nation which never cared to join the modern world, too busy believing that poverty would lead to virtue, not ruin. Now life is a perpetual, crushing, bruising battle, in which the stakes are life or death — and so people take out their bitter despair and rage by putting infants on trial. History is teaching us the same lesson, all over again. Americans might not even learn it the second time around. But the world, laughing in horror, in astonishment, in bewilderment, should.
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