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anonymous

Gapminder Desktop: Explore the World of Data from your own Computer - 0 views

infosthetics.com/...ta_from_your_own_computer.html

data visualization

shared by anonymous on 09 Jul 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 09 Jul 10
     
    "To overcome the online requirement, Gapminder Desktop [gapminder.org has recently been released for all operating systems. Based on Adobe AIR technology, this "No Internet Required" software allows people to explore the same data from their own computer, even when there is no Internet connectivity available. In particular, Gapminder Desktop is aimed to teachers and students to bookmark and present global trends in all sort of situations. It comes preloaded with 600+ indicators on health, environment, economy, education, poverty, technology, and so on."
anonymous

Space Cadets - 0 views

www.antipope.org/...space-cadets.html

longnow technology politics

shared by anonymous on 02 Aug 10 - Cached
  • For starters, they're overwhelmingly white male Americans (plus a handful of Brits and Canadians). Politically they're right-of-centre (by American standards), and libertarian-leaning. They are enthusiastic proponents of space colonization, but will boost any other technological or scientific work oriented in an upward direction (as long as it's carried out by people who look like them: they're somewhat less gung-ho about the former Soviet, and now the Chinese, space programs).
  • There is an ideology that they are attached to; it's the ideology of westward frontier expansion
  • My problem, however, is that there is no equivalence between outer space and the American west.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • There may be possible technological solutions to both problems that don't require the combined lifelong effort of millions of humans. We don't have (a) strong artificial intelligence, (b) self-replicating machines that can work from raw materials extracted from their natural environment, (c) "magic wand" space propulsion technologies (which may themselves be Fermi paradox solutions insofar as their existence implies either flaws in our current understanding of physics or drastically efficient and thereby destructive energy sources), or (d) the ability to re-engineer ourselves. If any one (or more) of these are achievable, then all bets against space colonization are off.
  • These conditions do not apply in space. You don't get to breathe the air on Mars. You don't get to harvest wheat on Venus. You don't get to walk home from an asteroid colony with 5km/sec of velocity relative to low Earth orbit. You don't get to visit any of these places, even on a "plant the flag and pick up some rocks" visitor's day pass basis, without a massive organized effort to provide an environment that can keep the canned monkeys from Earth warm and breathing.
  • I postulate that the organization required for such exploration is utterly anathema to the ideology of the space cadets, because the political roots of the space colonization movement in the United States rise from taproots of nostalgia for the open frontier that give rise to a false consciousness of the problem of space colonization.
  • In other words: space colonization is implicitly incompatible with both libertarian ideology and the myth of the American frontier.
  • anonymous on 02 Aug 10
     
    "Attempts to discuss the prospects of human exploration and inhabitation of the cosmos on the internet tend to attract a certain type of participant. If you've been following the comment threads here you probably recognize them ..." By Charlie Stross at Charlie's Diary on August 2, 2010.
anonymous

Russian Modernization, Part 2: The Kremlin's Balancing Act | STRATFOR - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...ting_assistance_careful_change

geopolitics russia

shared by anonymous on 27 Jul 10 - Cached
  • The Kremlin has already struck many deals with foreign businesses — especially U.S. and European firms — and set out the first steps to make Russia appear more attractive to investors. But the necessary deals and investments will have to be on Russia’s terms, making this modernization program very different from previous efforts in an attempt to prevent the errors of the past from being repeated.
  • In centralizing Russia’s economy, the Kremlin changed the laws, limiting how much a foreign business or citizen can own in Russia’s strategic sectors and nationalizing many assets owned by foreigners. This, along with shifts in Russia’s foreign policy, made Russia’s anti-Western sentiments very clear. Russia, with its oligarchs and organized crime, was already a risky market to invest in, but the legal changes made it even more difficult for foreign groups to work inside the country.
  • Typically, the Kremlin has thought that as long as it had energy wealth it did not need a diverse or modern economy, let alone foreign investments. But over the past two years, a series of events has made the Kremlin reassess Russia’s long-term economic capabilities.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • First was a tumble in global energy prices.
  • That resurgence led to a second issue: international reaction to Russia’s war with Georgia in August 2008. Russia’s confidence in starting a war with one of its neighbors made the West nervous and led many Western states to cease investing in Russia.
  • This, along with reaction to the Russo-Georgian war, led investors to take more than $130 billion — nearly 11 percent of Russia’s foreign investment stock — out of Russia in the last quarter of 2008.
  • These tremors in the Russian economy undermined the Kremlin’s confidence in its ability to hold its consolidated state and periphery in the long term.
  • Russia cannot modernize its economy by itself because it lacks the necessary capital, experience and technology.
  • in the late 1980s, then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced Perestroika, which allowed Western influence and technology to flood the country. This was a major component of the Soviet Union’s collapse.
  • In order to entice foreign businesses and money back into the country — especially those with modern technology — Russia has had to do some restructuring to make itself more attractive for investors, yet it must stand its ground in certain areas to prevent a flood of foreign influence.
  • The Kremlin is also softening the strict laws on capping a foreign firm’s stake in Russia’s strategic assets and sectors.
  • The Kremlin’s first move was to give investors a certain amount of protection.
  • Additionally, the Kremlin has drafted new laws on the legal status of foreign workers in Russia.
  • The last step Russia needed to take was to appear more pragmatic in its relations with the West.
  • To do business in Russia, one still has to be on the Kremlin’s good side. The political, regulatory and judicial environments in Russia remain restrictive, and the regulations are still convoluted to the extent that the Kremlin, regional or local governments decide what to enforce and how. The changes are intended more as confidence-building measures aimed at firms who want to enter (or return to) Russia. The legal shifts also make it easier for foreign firms and investors to comply with domestic and international laws on investing abroad.
  • For the Kremlin, this is not just about controlling business and investments — it is about controlling influence and power inside the country.
  • anonymous on 27 Jul 10
     
    "Russia is undertaking an ambitious modernization program in order to ensure its strength in the long term. However, it lacks the expertise, capital and technology to accomplish its goals on its own and must appeal to foreign firms and investors. The Kremlin is making changes to Russia's strict laws concerning foreign businesses and investment, but is taking care to maintain control and avoid importing potentially dangerous levels of foreign influence along with foreign business." At StratFor on July 27, 2010.
anonymous

DNA/How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet - 0 views

www.douglasadams.com/...19990901-00-a.html

technology dougadams adams

shared by anonymous on 18 Aug 10 - Cached
  • I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this: 1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal; 2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it; 3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
  • Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web.
  • ‘carved in stone.’
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 18 Aug 10
       
      Add: You can carve lies in stone.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Another problem with the net is that it’s still ‘technology’, and ‘technology’, as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is ‘stuff that doesn’t work yet.’
  • In ‘The Language Instinct’, Stephen Pinker explains the generational difference between pidgin and creole languages. A pidgin language is what you get when you put together a bunch of people – typically slaves – who have already grown up with their own language but don’t know each others’. They manage to cobble together a rough and ready lingo made up of bits of each. It lets them get on with things, but has almost no grammatical structure at all. However, the first generation of children born to the community takes these fractured lumps of language and transforms them into something new, with a rich and organic grammar and vocabulary, which is what we call a Creole. Grammar is just a natural function of children’s brains, and they apply it to whatever they find.
  • We are natural villagers. For most of mankind’s history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But that is changing.
  • anonymous on 18 Aug 10
     
    "...the change is real. I don't think anybody would argue now that the Internet isn't becoming a major factor in our lives. However, it's very new to us. Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people 'over the Internet.' They don't bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans 'over a cup of tea,' though each of these was new and controversial in their day." By Douglas Adams at The Sunday Times on August 29, 1999.
anonymous

Never Fight a Land War in Asia - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...0228-never-fight-land-war-asia

shared by anonymous on 01 Mar 11 - Cached
  • First, why is fighting a land war in Asia a bad idea? Second, why does the United States seem compelled to fight these wars? And third, what is the alternative that protects U.S. interests in Asia without large-scale military land wars?
  • Let’s begin with the first question, the answer to which is rooted in demographics and space. The population of Iraq is currently about 32 million. Afghanistan has a population of less than 30 million. The U.S. military, all told, consists of about 1.5 million active-duty personnel (plus 980,000 in the reserves), of whom more than 550,000 belong to the Army and about 200,000 are part of the Marine Corps. Given this, it is important to note that the United States strains to deploy about 200,000 troops at any one time in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that many of these troops are in support rather than combat roles. The same was true in Vietnam, where the United States was challenged to field a maximum of about 550,000 troops (in a country much more populous than Iraq or Afghanistan) despite conscription and a larger standing army. Indeed, the same problem existed in World War II.
  • When the United States fights in the Eastern Hemisphere, it fights at great distances, and the greater the distance, the greater the logistical cost. More ships are needed to deliver the same amount of materiel, for example. That absorbs many troops. The logistical cost of fighting at a distance is that it diverts numbers of troops (or requires numbers of civilian personnel) disproportionate to the size of the combat force.
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • Regardless of the number of troops deployed, the U.S. military is always vastly outnumbered by the populations of the countries to which it is deployed. If parts of these populations resist as light-infantry guerrilla forces or employ terrorist tactics, the enemy rapidly swells to a size that can outnumber U.S. forces, as in Vietnam and Korea. At the same time, the enemy adopts strategies to take advantage of the core weakness of the United States — tactical intelligence. The resistance is fighting at home. It understands the terrain and the culture. The United States is fighting in an alien environment. It is constantly at an intelligence disadvantage. That means that the effectiveness of the native forces is multiplied by excellent intelligence, while the effectiveness of U.S. forces is divided by lack of intelligence.
  • The United States compensates with technology,
  • from space-based reconnaissance and air power to counter-battery systems and advanced communications. This can make up the deficit but only by massive diversions of manpower from ground-combat operations. Maintaining a helicopter requires dozens of ground-crew personnel. Where the enemy operates with minimal technology multiplied by intelligence, the United States compensates for lack of intelligence with massive technology that further reduces available combat personnel. Between logistics and technological force multipliers, the U.S. “point of the spear” shrinks. If you add the need to train, relieve, rest and recuperate the ground-combat forces, you are left with a small percentage available to fight.
  • The paradox of this is that American forces will win the engagements but may still lose the war.
  • the United States is well-suited for the initial phases of combat, when the task is to defeat a conventional force. But after the conventional force has been defeated, the resistance can switch to methods difficult for American intelligence to deal with.
  • The example of the capitulation of Germany and Japan in World War II is frequently cited
  • The back of the Wehrmacht was broken by the Soviets on their own soil with the logistical advantages of short supply lines.
  • The Germans had no appetite for continuing a resistance against the Russians and saw surrendering to the Americans and British as sanctuary from the Russians.
  • As for Japan, it was not ground forces but air power, submarine warfare and atomic bombs that finished them — and the emperor’s willingness to order a surrender.
  • Had the Japanese emperor been removed, I suspect that the occupation of Japan would have been much more costly.
  • Neither Germany nor Japan are examples in which U.S. land forces compelled capitulation and suppressed resistance.
  • The problem the United States has in the Eastern Hemisphere is that the size of the force needed to occupy a country initially is much smaller than the force needed to pacify the country.
  • Some people argue that the United States is insufficiently ruthless in prosecuting war, as if it would be more successful without political restraints at home.
  • The guerrilla has built-in advantages in warfare for which brutality cannot compensate.
  • Given all this, the question is why the United States has gotten involved in wars in Eurasia four times since World War II.
  • In each case it is obvious: for political reasons.
  • In each case, the military was given an ambiguous mission. This was because a clear outcome — defeating the enemy — was unattainable.
  • There are two problems with American strategy.
  • The first is using the appropriate force for the political mission.
  • Moreover, it requires an offensive mission. Defensive missions (such as Vietnam and Korea) by definition have no terminal point or any criteria for victory.
  • Having destroyed the conventional forces of Iraq, the United States was unprepared for the Iraqi response, which was guerrilla resistance on a wide scale.
  • The purpose of a military is to defeat enemy conventional forces. As an army of occupation against a hostile population, military forces are relatively weak.
  • By having an unclear mission, you have an uncertain terminal point. When does it end?
  • Donald Rumsfeld once said, “You go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” I think that is a fundamental misunderstanding of war. You do not engage in war if the army you have is insufficient.
  • Diplomacy can find the common ground between nations. It can also be used to identify the hostility of nations and use that hostility to insulate the United States by diverting the attention of other nations from challenging the United States.
  • Diplomacy for the United States is about maintaining the balance of power and using and diverting conflict to manage the international system. Force is the last resort, and when it is used, it must be devastating.
  • The argument I have made, and which I think Gates is asserting, is that at a distance, the United States cannot be devastating in wars dependent on land power. That is the weakest aspect of American international power and the one the United States has resorted to all too often since World War II, with unacceptable results.
  • An elective war in which the criteria for success are unclear and for which the amount of land force is insufficient must be avoided. That is Gates’ message
  • As with the Monroe Doctrine, it should be elevated to a principle of U.S. foreign policy, not because it is a moral principle but because it is a very practical one.
  • anonymous on 01 Mar 11
     
    "U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, speaking at West Point, said last week that "Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined.""
anonymous

The Future Is Not Accelerating - 0 views

io9.com/...the-future-is-not-accelerating

shared by anonymous on 06 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Unlike computers, which we invented, the Earth's processes are something we can only understand through observation. And we need time to do it. Maybe not millions of years, but certainly not just a century either.
  • There is another kind of slow time that we often ignore in our rush to hurtle into tomorrow at light speed. This is called species time. It is the amont of time that a species, like say Homo sapiens, is likely to exist.
  • This is particularly important when you start to think about a reasonable timeframe for the development of space travel and solar system colonization.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • What if our space probes and the Curiosity rover are the equivalent of those reed boats thousands of years ago? It's worth pondering. We may be at the start of a long, slow journey whose climactic moment comes thousands of years from now.
  • Let's return to the one timeframe that we can all grasp easily: the length of a human lifespan, which under ideal circumstances is around 75-85 years.
  • I think it's obvious why we want to measure the pace of the future using technology, and make computer scientists our guides. Technological change is both familiar and easy to observe. We want to believe that other scientific and cultural changes can happen in similarly observable way because generally we think in human time, not species or geological time. Put another way: We all live in a hyper-accelerated timeframe. Slow time is essentially inhuman time. It is what exists before and after each of our individual lives.
  • That said, it's undeniable that technological change and fast human time can profoundly affect events unfolding in slow time.
  • Still, we can't expect all the efforts we make in our short lifetimes to pay off in our lifetimes, too. You will not live to be 200 years old. I repeat: You will not live to be 200 years old.
  • Maybe our grandchildren will have a chance to take a life-extension pill. But not us. And that has to be OK. Making scientific promises we can't keep will do a lot of harm. Ultimately it undermines the public's trust in both science and people who prognosticate about it.
  • We need to think about the future as a set of overlapping timelines. Some events take place in human time. Others exist in the slow time of Homo sapiens or the planet's carbon cycle — or even the Milky Way's collision course with Andromeda.
  • In a sense, we are trapped in accelerated time.
  • anonymous on 06 Dec 12
     
    "H. sapiens evolved about 200 thousand years ago. So we're pretty early in our species life cycle. I know we like to think of ourselves as special creatures, and to be fair it does seem like we are the only superintelligent life that's ever existed on Earth. But it's worth keeping in mind that despite all our accomplishments, like electric blankets and cities and videogames, that we are still part of a species whose lifespan is measured in tens of thousands of years."
anonymous

A Problem Google Has Created for Itself - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...274232

jobhacking

shared by anonymous on 21 Mar 13 - Cached
  • After Reader's demise, many people noted the danger of ever relying on a company's free offerings. When a company is charging money for a product -- as Evernote does for all above its most basic service, and same for Dropbox and SugarSync -- you understand its incentive for sticking with that product. The company itself might fail, but as long as it's in business it's unlikely just to get bored and walk away, as Google has from so many experiments. These include one called Google Notebook, which had some similarities to Keep, and which I also liked, and which Google abandoned recently. 
  • do I trust Google with Keep? No. The idea looks promising, and you can see how it could end up as an integral part of the Google Drive strategy. But you could also imagine that two or three years from now this will be one more "interesting" experiment Google has gotten tired of. 
  • Until I know a reason that it's in Google's long-term interest to keep Keep going, I'm not going to invest time in it or lodge info there.
  • anonymous on 21 Mar 13
     
    "Here's the problem: Google now has a clear enough track record of trying out, and then canceling, "interesting" new software that I have no idea how long Keep will be around. When Google launched its Google Health service five years ago, it had an allure like Keep's: here was the one place you could store your prescription info, test results, immunization records, and so on and know that you could get at them as time went on. That's how I used it -- until Google cancelled this "experiment" last year. Same with Google Reader, and all the other products in the Google Graveyard that Slate produced last week."
anonymous

Restaurant websites: Why are they so awful? Which ones are the absolute worst? - 0 views

www.slate.com/...overdone.single.html

shared by anonymous on 08 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • These nightmarish websites were spawned by restaurateurs who mistakenly believe they can control the online world the same way they lord over a restaurant. "In restaurants, the expertise is in the kitchen and in hospitality in general," says Eng San Kho, a partner at the New York design firm Love and War, which has created several unusually great restaurant sites (more on those in a bit). "People in restaurants have a sense that they want to create an entertainment experience online—that's why disco music starts, that's why Flash slideshows open. They think they can still play the host even here online."
  • When you visit many terrible restaurant websites in succession, it becomes obvious that they're not bad because of neglect or lack of funds—these food purveyors appear to have spent a great deal of money and time to uglify their pages.
  • Masa, the exclusive New York sushi bar, presents you with a pages-long, scroll-bar-free biography of its chef, but (as far as I can tell) no warning that you'll spend $400 or more per person for dinner.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • I did get a plausible-sounding explanation of the design process from Tom Bohan, who heads up Menupages, the fantastic site that lists menus of restaurants in several large cities. "Say you're a designer and you've got to demo a site you've spent two months creating," Bohan explains. "Your client is someone in their 50s who runs a restaurant but is not very in tune with technology. What's going to impress them more: Something with music and moving images, something that looks very fancy to someone who doesn't know about optimizing the Web for consumer use, or if you show them a bare-bones site that just lists all the information? I bet it would be the former—they would think it's great and money well spent."
  • anonymous on 08 Jun 13
     
    "Restaurant sites are the product of restaurant culture. These nightmarish websites were spawned by restaurateurs who mistakenly believe they can control the online world the same way they lord over a restaurant. "In restaurants, the expertise is in the kitchen and in hospitality in general," says Eng San Kho, a partner at the New York design firm Love and War, which has created several unusually great restaurant sites (more on those in a bit). "People in restaurants have a sense that they want to create an entertainment experience online-that's why disco music starts, that's why Flash slideshows open. They think they can still play the host even here online.""
anonymous

Invelox wind turbine claims 600% advantage in energy output - 0 views

www.gizmag.com/...27377

shared by anonymous on 14 Jun 13 - Cached
  • Invelox takes a novel approach to wind power generation as it doesn’t rely on high wind speeds. Instead, it captures wind at any speed, even a breeze, from a portal located above ground. The wind captured is then funneled through a duct where it will pick up speed. The resulting kinetic energy will drive the generator on the ground level. By bringing the airflow from the top of the tower, it’s possible to generate more power with smaller turbine blades, SheerWind says.
  • As to the sixfold output claim, as with many new technologies promising a performance breakthrough, it needs to be viewed with caution. SheerWind makes the claim based on its own comparative tests, the precise methodology of which is not entirely clear.
  • Besides power performance and the fact it can operate at wind speeds as low as 1 mph, SheerWind says Invelox costs less than US$750 per kilowatt to install. It is also claimed that operating costs are significantly reduced compared to traditional turbine technology. Due to its reduced size, the system is supposedly safer for birds and other wildlife, concerns that also informed the designers of the Ewicon bladeless turbine.
  • anonymous on 14 Jun 13
     
    "SheerWind, a wind power company from Minnesota, USA, has announced the results of tests it has carried out with its new Invelox wind power generation technology. The company says that during tests its turbine could generate six times more energy than the amount produced by traditional turbines mounted on towers. Besides, the costs of producing wind energy with Invelox are lower, delivering electricity with prices that can compete with natural gas and hydropower."
anonymous

E-Reading: A Midterm Progress Report - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...260478

education ereaders research tablets

shared by anonymous on 14 Apr 13 - Cached
  • One good development in the past five years: more options for reading at night.
  • LCD screens are as glare-prone as ever: though there are some screen protectors that claim to reduce glare, I have yet to find one that has a significant effect, so if you're going to be reading outdoors the e-ink screens are still your best bet.
  • E-ink screens today have much better contrast that the earlier ones did. That's a big plus.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • E-readers still have limited typeface options and do a generally lousy job of handling kerning and spacing.
  • e-books tend to have far more errors than print books, especially older books that have been scanned using OCR software
  • But it seems to me that the most serious deficiencies of e-readers involve readers' interactions with books. In this respect we may be losing ground rather than gaining it.
  • Try that with a Kindle or Nook. It's impossible now, and it's not clear that anyone is interested in making it possible.
  • In fact, newer versions of the Kindle software are making it harder to annotate: the various versions of the Kindle Touch lack a physical keyboard, and invoking and using the virtual one is very slow and profoundly awkward.
  • Highlighting and commenting are much easier on LCD touchscreens, by and large, though I find that my iPad too often interprets my attempt to start a highlight as an attempt to turn the page -- very annoying -- and it continues to be impossible to extend a highlight across a page break
  • I also love the fact that Amazon records all these annotations and makes them available to me on their website.
  • It's really illuminating to scan a single webpage and see every passage I have annotated in a book.
  • for consumerist reading, e-readers have gotten better in some ways while stagnating in others
  • for engaged, responsive reading, they seem to be generally stagnating, or perhaps even moving backwards.
  • anonymous on 14 Apr 13
     
    "E-readers have been around long enough now that the novelty has largely worn off. To be sure, we still get the occasional article or blog post celebrating the smell of "real books" and denouncing the disembodied fakery of text on a screen, but not nearly as many as in recent years. E-readers are simply part of the reading landscape now -- the first Kindle was released almost five years ago -- and it's time for a midterm progress report. How is the technology developing? What has been accomplished and what remains to be done?"
anonymous

Jeff Dean facts: How a Google programmer became the Chuck Norris of the Internet. - Sla... - 0 views

www.slate.com/...ck_norris_of_the_internet.html

shared by anonymous on 23 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Meanwhile, in the shadows of these giants—all of whom have graduated from day-to-day gruntwork—are legions of faceless developers who tap away at keyboards every day to build the products and systems we all use.
  • In the tech world, more so than in most other industries, those employees are far from interchangeable. A great accountant might save you 5 percent on your taxes. A great baseball player will reach base just a bit more often than a mediocre baseball player. But a great software developer can do in a week what might take months for a team of 10 lesser developers—the difference is exponential rather than marginal.
  • As a high schooler, he wrote software for analyzing vast sets of epidemiological data that he says was “26 times faster” than what professionals were using at the time. The system, called Epi Info, has been adopted by the Centers for Disease Control and translated into 13 languages.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Google’s founding ideas came from Page and Brin, world-class developers in their own right. In the late 1990s they built PageRank, an algorithm for returning the most relevant results to a given search query. The focus on relevance put Google on a course to surpass Yahoo, AltaVista, and the day’s other leading search engines. But as the upstart grew in popularity, it faced a tremendous computing challenge. “We couldn’t deploy machines fast enough” to keep up with demand, Dean recalls.
  • Ghemawat helped lead a team that built the Google File System, which allowed for huge files to be efficiently distributed across thousands of cheap servers. Then Dean and Ghemawat developed a programming tool called MapReduce that allowed developers to efficiently process gargantuan data sets with those machines working in parallel.
  • anonymous on 23 Jan 13
     
    "The programs that Dean was instrumental in building-MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner-are not the ones most Google users associate with the company. But they're the kind that made Google-and, consequently, much of the modern Web as we know it-possible. And the projects he's working on now have the potential to revolutionize information technology once again."
anonymous

Why So Much Anarchy? - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...why-so-much-anarchy

shared by anonymous on 06 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Civil society in significant swaths of the earth is still the province of a relatively elite few in capital cities -- the very people Western journalists feel most comfortable befriending and interviewing, so that the size and influence of such a class is exaggerated by the media.
  • The End of Imperialism. That's right. Imperialism provided much of Africa, Asia and Latin America with security and administrative order. The Europeans divided the planet into a gridwork of entities -- both artificial and not -- and governed. It may not have been fair, and it may not have been altogether civil, but it provided order. Imperialism, the mainstay of stability for human populations for thousands of years, is now gone.
  • The End of Post-Colonial Strongmen. Colonialism did not end completely with the departure of European colonialists. It continued for decades in the guise of strong dictators, who had inherited state systems from the colonialists. Because these strongmen often saw themselves as anti-Western freedom fighters, they believed that they now had the moral justification to govern as they pleased.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • No Institutions. Here we come to the key element. The post-colonial Arab dictators ran moukhabarat states: states whose order depended on the secret police and the other, related security services. But beyond that, institutional and bureaucratic development was weak and unresponsive to the needs of the population -- a population that, because it was increasingly urbanized, required social services and complex infrastructure.
  • with insufficient institutional development, the chances for either dictatorship or anarchy proliferate. Civil society occupies the middle ground between those extremes, but it cannot prosper without the requisite institutions and bureaucracies.
  • Feeble Identities. With feeble institutions, such post-colonial states have feeble identities. If the state only means oppression, then its population consists of subjects, not citizens. Subjects of despotisms know only fear, not loyalty. If the state has only fear to offer, then, if the pillars of the dictatorship crumble
  • Doctrinal Battles. Religion occupies a place in daily life in the Islamic world that the West has not known since the days -- a millennium ago -- when the West was called "Christendom." Thus, non-state identity in the 21st-century Middle East generally means religious identity.
  • As the Roman Empire collapsed and Christianity rose as a replacement identity, the upshot was not tranquility but violent, doctrinal disputes between Donatists, Monotheletes and other Christian sects and heresies. So, too, in the Muslim world today, as state identities weaken and sectarian and other differences within Islam come to the fore, often violently.
  • Information Technology. Various forms of electronic communication, often transmitted by smartphones, can empower the crowd against a hated regime, as protesters who do not know each other personally can find each other through Facebook, Twitter, and other social media.
  • while such technology can help topple governments, it cannot provide a coherent and organized replacement pole of bureaucratic power to maintain political stability afterwards. This is how technology encourages anarchy.
  • The Industrial Age was about bigness: big tanks, aircraft carriers, railway networks and so forth, which magnified the power of big centralized states. But the post-industrial age is about smallness, which can empower small and oppressed groups, allowing them to challenge the state -- with anarchy sometimes the result.
  • Because we are talking here about long-term processes rather than specific events, anarchy in one form or another will be with us for some time, until new political formations arise that provide for the requisite order. And these new political formations need not be necessarily democratic.
  • When the Soviet Union collapsed, societies in Central and Eastern Europe that had sizable middle classes and reasonable bureaucratic traditions prior to World War II were able to transform themselves into relatively stable democracies
  • But the Middle East and much of Africa lack such bourgeoisie traditions, and so the fall of strongmen has left a void.
  • The real question marks are Russia and China.
  • The possible weakening of authoritarian rule in those sprawling states may usher in less democracy than chronic instability and ethnic separatism that would dwarf in scale the current instability in the Middle East. Indeed, what follows Vladimir Putin could be worse, not better. The same holds true for a weakening of autocracy in China.
  • anonymous on 06 Feb 14
     
    "Twenty years ago, in February 1994, I published a lengthy cover story in The Atlantic Monthly, "The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, Tribalism, and Disease are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet." I argued that the combination of resource depletion (like water), demographic youth bulges and the proliferation of shanty towns throughout the developing world would enflame ethnic and sectarian divides, creating the conditions for domestic political breakdown and the transformation of war into increasingly irregular forms -- making it often indistinguishable from terrorism. I wrote about the erosion of national borders and the rise of the environment as the principal security issues of the 21st century. I accurately predicted the collapse of certain African states in the late 1990s and the rise of political Islam in Turkey and other places. Islam, I wrote, was a religion ideally suited for the badly urbanized poor who were willing to fight. I also got things wrong, such as the probable intensification of racial divisions in the United States; in fact, such divisions have been impressively ameliorated."
anonymous

5 Things My Gen X Manager Taught Me About Millennials - 0 views

www.policymic.com/...er-taught-me-about-millennials

shared by anonymous on 06 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • 1. Despite what you’ve heard, millennials and Gen X are natural allies.
  • Gen X was actually the first generation to have less affluence than the Boomers, to understand the joke that is social security, and to begin incorporating daily technology use into their careers.
  • 2. Millennials are not going to leapfrog over Generation X.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Many of us aren't accustomed to the same kind of work that Gen X has been doing for years. Over half of millennials would like to start their own business, and many have relied heavily on freelancing
  • Gen X can provide millennials with insights and cautionary tales in ways that our Boomer counterparts cannot.
  • Millennials like me will be better recieved in the workplace when we respect its processes, when we acknowledge that every generation has paid its dues — maybe not the same dues, maybe not as hefty a price, but dues nonetheless. 
  • 3. Technology has changed the game for millennials, for better or worse.
  • The downside of our generation's widespread use of technology is how easy it's been for us to forget the value of in-person interactions. In the workplace, that means millennials can unconsciously neglect what our Gen X counterparts consider the common staples of communication
  • 4. Yes, millennials are screwed, but the next generation will have it even worse.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 06 Dec 13
       
      I *really* hope this is more debatable. Only because I'm crossing my fingers for the economic reconfiguration that doesn't look due for another 10+ years.
  • Gen X has less affluence than the Boomers, millennials even less than Gen X — what exactly will be left for Gen Z?
  • If current trends continue, the competition we face now will only get more intense, in part because Boomers and Gen X have had to delay retirement and are staying longer in positions.
  • 5. Mentorships are best when they form naturally.
  • While a networking event can introduce us to executives in our field, the perfect mentor on paper may have absolutely zero emotional connection to us.
  • anonymous on 06 Dec 13
     
    Largely fluffy in that way-broad brush, but still contains some nuggets to keep in mind on our journey to oversimplify generational changes. :) I will note, though, that the most important bit (to me) was the idea that Gen X'ers are more relatable than Boomers. This simplification is largely true, in my experience. This isn't because of any innate goodness, just economic realities. My boomer dad-in-law is super nervous about having [extremely low amounts] of medical debt: for him it's a *very* new phenomenon. For his kids, it's far huger debt and quite regular and we simply accept it. See also: Old Economy Steve. "Concern over our careers (or lack thereof) continues unabated for all of us 20-somethings entering the job market full speed ahead. While plenty of people have proffered advice to the newly minted generation of workers who do manage to get a job, and plenty of managers have offered advice to other managers on how to hire millennials, there's a distinct lack of genuine dialogue between millennials and Gen X-ers in the workplace- a shame, because our generational differences are largely superficial. "
anonymous

Pandora's Seed - 0 views

seedmagazine.com/...pandoras_seed

layscience longnow

shared by anonymous on 07 Jun 10 - Cached
  • From obesity to chronique fatigue syndrome, jihadism to urban ennui, the costs of civilization are becoming ever more apparent. Spencer Wells explores adapting to a world where accelerating change is the new status quo.
  • Everywhere there is a feeling that the world is in flux, that we are on the brink of a historic transition, and that the world will be fundamentally changed somehow in the next few generations.
  • Trying to imagine what the world will be like at the close of the 21st century is nearly impossible.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Is there some sort of fatal mismatch between western culture and our biology that is making us ill? And if there is such a mismatch, how did our present culture come to dominate? Surely we are the masters of our own fate, and we created the culture that is best suited to us, rather than the other way around?
  • It turns out that early farmers were actually less healthy than the surrounding hunter-gatherer populations. So why did the farmers ‘win’ so resoundingly, to the extent that virtually no one on Earth today lives as a hunter-gatherer?
  • necessity is the mother of invention.
  • It is likely that we have changed more at the DNA level in the past 10,000 years than we did in the previous 100,000.
  • As we settled down into farming villages, and then towns and cities, society became more complicated. Hunter-gatherers, having fewer people in their groups, tend to have fairly simple and egalitarian social structures. A chief perhaps, but certainly not a specialized bureaucracy, a professional army, a priesthood and other trappings of what we call civilization.
  • The existence of these things is a direct outcome of the decision to settle down and start growing food.
  • ow can a species that spent almost all of its evolutionary history adapting to hunting and gathering in small, fairly dispersed groups learn to cope with the challenges posed by this relatively new culture?
  • The first is the growing power of genetic engineering.
  • unlike other technologies that have witnessed explosive growth over the past couple of decades, from computers to nanotechnology, the applications of genetics have the potential to affect the biological identity of future generations, through our ability to choose the traits our children – and all subsequent generations – will carry.
  • The second enormous challenge that we need to face as a result of the events set in motion 10,000 years ago with the development of agriculture is climate change.
  • The final significant challenge, unlike the other two, is not fundamentally technological in nature, though some of the solutions will likely involve the application of technology. We have now evolved culturally to the point where the entire world is connected in a way it has never been before.
  • For secular rationality, read loss of faith and certainty. For improving living standards, read increased consumption. For increased social mobility, read loss of traditional roles and threats to vested interests.
  • The rise of fundamentalism in the latter half of the 20th century reflects the very real loss of the traditions that guided much of humanity over the past several thousand years.
  • Providing an inclusive mythos for the modern age will be a significant challenge of the next century.
  • The biggest revolution of the past 50,000 years was not the advent of the Internet, the growth of the industrial age out of the seeds of the Enlightenment, or the development of modern methods of long-distance navigation. Rather, it was a seemingly trivial event that happened rather quickly around 10,000 years ago – the dawn of the age of agriculture, when a few people living in several locations around the world decided to stop gathering their food from the land, abiding by limits set in place by nature, and grow their food.
  • anonymous on 07 Jun 10
     
    A guest essay by Spencer Wells at Seed Magazine on June 7, 2010.
anonymous

Europeans Bury 'Digital DNA' Inside Mountain - 0 views

blog.sptnk.org/...ry-digital-dna-inside-mountain

longnow technology

shared by anonymous on 17 Jun 10 - Cached
  • In a secret bunker known as the Swiss Fort Knox deep in the Swiss Alps, European researchers recently deposited a “digital genome” that will provide the blueprint for future generations to read data stored using defunct technology.
  • The capsule is the culmination of the four-year “Planets” project, an 15 million-euro ($18.49 million) project which draws on the expertise of 16 European libraries, archives and research institutions, to preserve the world’s digital assets as hardware and software.
  • “Unlike hieroglyphics carved in stone or ink on parchment, digital data has a shelf life of years not millennia,” said Andreas Rauber, a professor at the University of Technology of Vienna, which is a partner in the project.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • People will be puzzled at what they find when they open the time capsule, said Rauber. “In 25 years people will be astonished to see how little time must pass to render data carriers unusable because they break or because you don’t have the devices anymore,” he said. “The second shock will probably be what fraction of the objects we can’t use or access in 25 years and that’s hard to predict.”
  • anonymous on 17 Jun 10
     
    At Sputnik Laboratory on June 15, 2010
anonymous

Artificial meat? Food for thought by 2050 | Environment | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...ficial-meat-food-royal-society

layscience technology longnow predictions

shared by anonymous on 16 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Artificial meat grown in vats may be needed if the 9 billion people expected to be alive in 2050 are to be adequately fed without destroying the earth, some of the world's leading scientists report today.
  • A team of scientists at Rothamsted, the UK's largest agricultural research centre, suggests that extra carbon dioxide in the air from global warming, along with better fertilisers and chemicals to protect arable crops, could hugely increase yields and reduce water consumption.
  • Instead, says Dr Philip Thornton, a scientist with the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi, two "wild cards" could transform global meat and milk production. "One is artificial meat, which is made in a giant vat, and the other is nanotechnology, which is expected to become more important as a vehicle for delivering medication to livestock."
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • seven multinational corporations, led by Monsanto, now dominate the global technology field."These companies are accumulating intellectual property to an extent that the public and international institutions are disadvantaged. This represents a threat to the global commons in agricultural technology on which the green revolution has depended," says the paper by Professor Jenifer Piesse at King's College, London.
  • anonymous on 16 Aug 10
     
    "Leading scientists say meat grown in vats may be necessary to feed 9 billion people expected to be alive by middle of century" By John Vidal at The Guardian on August 16, 2010.
anonymous

Russian Modernization, Part 1: Laying the Groundwork - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...ation_part_1_laying_groundwork

geopolitics russia

shared by anonymous on 27 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Russia is launching a massive modernization program that involves seriously upgrading — if not building from scratch — many key economic sectors, including space, energy, telecommunications, transportation, nanotechnology, military industry and information technology.
  • Moscow has seen incredible success at home and in its near abroad. Now the plan is to make it last as long as possible.
  • However, there are two factors that could keep Russia from remaining strong enough to carry out its plans.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • First, Russia is suffering from an extreme demographic crisis that could lead to a further decline of Russian society as a whole, much like the decline seen in the 1990s.
  • Second, Russia’s indigenous capital resources are insufficient to maintain its current economic structure — much less the economic power of the former Soviet Union.
  • Russia is now looking to extend its economic lifespan in hopes that the country can remain strong for another generation.
  • Russia has traditionally lagged behind Western nations in the fields of military, transportation, industry and technology but has employed periodic breakneck modernization programs, which have destabilized the country during their enactment while also bringing it into the modern era.
  • The main unifying theme of each modernization period in Russia was that it required the import of Western technology, information, planning or expertise.
  • Russia cannot simply throw more of its domestic population at the problem as it has in the past. It must import foreign expertise on a massive scale. So Russia is turning to the West for help.
  • Russia’s timing in this is critical. Moscow feels more secure in reaching out to the West for such deals because it has already expanded and consolidated control over much of its near abroad. Furthermore, Europe is fractured (and becoming more so) and the United States is occupied in the Middle East. This is a very opportune time for Russia to undertake another grand modernization.
  • First, Russia will have to change its restrictive laws against foreign investment and businesses, which the Kremlin implemented from 2000 to 2008 in order to contain foreign influence in the country.
  • Second, Russia has to moderate anti-Western elements of its foreign policy implemented from 2005 to 2008, to show that the country is pragmatic when it comes to foreigners.
  • Third, Russia will have to decide which investors and businesses to invite into the country.
  • The fourth part of the process is the most difficult and the most important. The Kremlin must calculate how far it can modernize without compromising the core of Russia, which depends on domestic consolidation and national security above everything else.
  • Russia remembers all too well what happened during the last modernization process — Perestroika — when too much modern and Western influence flooded the country, collapsing the Soviet Union’s social structure and political control.
  • First, there are those in the Kremlin — like Medvedev — who want full modernization, with sweeping reforms.
  • Second, there are the conservatives — who form the majority in the Kremlin — who are terrified that the chaos and collapse which followed Perestroika will recur.
  • That is why Russia is heading down the path of the third group within the Kremlin. This group is led by Putin, who is attempting to implement modernization in an incredibly careful step-by-step process in order to lead the country into the future while controlling foreign forces, to prevent them from shaking Russia’s foundation.
  • anonymous on 27 Jul 10
     
    "Russian President Dmitri Medvedev is leading a large delegation of Russian economists, politicians and businessmen on a tour of the United States this week. Medvedev's visit is part of Russia's effort to launch a massive modernization program that will involve attracting investment and expertise from the West. Russia's long-term survival depends on such modernization, but the process will require changes and compromise within the Kremlin." At StratFor on June 23, 2010.
anonymous

Learning by Playing: Video Games in the Classroom - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...19video-t.html

gaming education

shared by anonymous on 20 Sep 10 - Cached
  • WHAT IF TEACHERS GAVE UP the vestiges of their educational past, threw away the worksheets, burned the canon and reconfigured the foundation upon which a century of learning has been built? What if we blurred the lines between academic subjects and reimagined the typical American classroom so that, at least in theory, it came to resemble a typical American living room or a child’s bedroom or even a child’s pocket, circa 2010 — if, in other words, the slipstream of broadband and always-on technology that fuels our world became the source and organizing principle of our children’s learning? What if, instead of seeing school the way we’ve known it, we saw it for what our children dreamed it might be: a big, delicious video game?
  • anonymous on 20 Sep 10
     
    "What if teachers gave up the vestiges of their educational past, threw away the worksheets, burned the canon and reconfigured the foundation upon which a century of learning has been built? What if we blurred the lines between academic subjects and reimagined the typical American classroom so that, at least in theory, it came to resemble a typical American living room or a child's bedroom or even a child's pocket, circa 2010 - if, in other words, the slipstream of broadband and always-on technology that fuels our world became the source and organizing principle of our children's learning? What if, instead of seeing school the way we've known it, we saw it for what our children dreamed it might be: a big, delicious video game? " By Sara Corbett at The New York Times on September 15, 2010.
anonymous

Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...10google.html

technology

shared by anonymous on 10 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 10 Oct 10
     
    "Autonomous cars are years from mass production, but technologists who have long dreamed of them believe that they can transform society as profoundly as the Internet has. Robot drivers react faster than humans, have 360-degree perception and do not get distracted, sleepy or intoxicated, the engineers argue. They speak in terms of lives saved and injuries avoided - more than 37,000 people died in car accidents in the United States in 2008. The engineers say the technology could double the capacity of roads by allowing cars to drive more safely while closer together. Because the robot cars would eventually be less likely to crash, they could be built lighter, reducing fuel consumption. But of course, to be truly safer, the cars must be far more reliable than, say, today's personal computers, which crash on occasion and are frequently infected. " By John Markoff at The New York Times on October 9, 2010.
anonymous

Defending Against Drones - 0 views

www.newsweek.com/...print

military

shared by anonymous on 08 Mar 10 - Cached
  • All told, two thirds of worldwide investment in unmanned planes in 2010 will be spent by countries other than the United States.
  • Just as we once failed to imagine terrorists using our own commercial aircraft against us, we are now underestimating the threat posed by this new wave of technology. We must prepare for a world in which foreign robotics rivals our own, and terrorists can deliver deadly explosives not just by suicide bomber but also by unmanned machine.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 08 Mar 10
       
      That comment from Tuttle is classic and is a poignant reminder that many experts routinely miss bit shifts in institutional framework changes.
  • We've channeled billions into UAVs, initiating what has been called the largest shift in military tactics, strategy, and doctrine since the invention of gunpowder.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • That means widening the threat scenarios our agencies plan and train for.
  • anonymous on 08 Mar 10
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