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anonymous

The Technium: Bootstrapping the Industrial Age - 0 views

www.kk.org/...bootstrapping_t.php

shared by anonymous on 14 Jun 13 - Cached
  • In February 1942, R. Bradley,  a British Officer in the Royal artillery in World War II was captured and then held prisoner by Japanese in Singapore. Their camp was remote, supplies were almost non-existent, and they were treated roughly as POWs; when they rebelled they were locked in a confinement shed without food.
  • But they were tinkerers, too. Together with some other POWs in his camp, Bradley stole hand tools from the Japanese soldiers and from these bits and pieces he transformed scrap metal into a miniature lathe.
  • It was tiny enough to be kept a secret, big enough to be useful.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • The lathe was a tool-making egg; it was used to manufacture more sophisticated items.
  • During the two years of their interment the lathe remade the tools -- like taps and dies -- which were first used to create it. A lather has those self-reproductive qualities.
  • Over years of tinkering, Gingery was able to bootstrap a full-bore machine shop from alley scraps. He made rough tools that made better tools, which then made tools good enough to make real stuff.
  • Gingery began with a simple backyard foundry. This was a small 5-gallon bucket packed with sand.
  • In its center was a coffee can of smoldering BBQ charcoal. Inside the can of charcoal was a small ceramic crucible into which he threw scrap aluminum – cans, etc. Gingery forced air into this crude furnace via a fan, burning the charcoal with enough heat to melt the aluminum. He poured the molten metal into a mold of wet sand carved out in the shape he wanted. When the cast was cool he had a workable metal holding plate, which became the heart of a homemade lathe. Other lathe parts were cast. He finished these rough parts with hand tools. His one “cheat” was adding a used electric motor – although it is not impossible to imagine a wind or water powered version.
  • When the rough lathe was up and running he used it to turn out the parts for a drill press. With the drill press and lathe operating he constantly reworked pieces of the lathe itself, replacing parts with improved versions. In this way, his tiny machine shop was an upcreation device, capable of generating higher a machine of precision than itself.
  • Gingery recapitulated the evolution of technology, the great pattern by which simple tools create more complex tools and so on infinitum. This expansion of upcreation power is the means by which an entire culture lifts itself out of mud by pulling up on its bootstraps.
  • Yet is it obvious this little demonstration is not pure. As a way to make your own machine tools, Gingerys’ plans are fine and dandy. He uses cast off washing machine motors and other junkyard scrap parts to grow a fairly robust machine shop. But as an example of relaunching a technological society in a kind of Robinson Crusoe maneuver – landing somewhere and starting civilization up -- it’s a cheat because in this latter game you don’t get to start with discarded aluminum cans, scavenged nuts and bolts, old electric motors and waste sheet metal.
  • To really navigate the minimum bootstrap path through the industrial web, you’d have to start with finding your own ore, mining and refining it with primitive tools, firing up bricks, rolling out sheet metal, developing screws and bolts by hand – all just to get you to the point where you’d have enough tools and materials to make the simple 5-gallon bucket foundry that Dave Gingery started with.
  • Select at random any one of the many thousands items within the reach of where you now sit. None of them could exist without many of the others around it. No technology is an island.
  • Let’s take a very sophisticated item: one web page. A web page relies on perhaps a hundred thousand other inventions, all needed for its birth and continued existence. There is no web page anywhere without the inventions of HTML code, without computer programming, without LEDs or cathode ray tubes, without solid state computer chips, without telephone lines, without long-distance signal repeaters, without electrical generators, without high-speed turbines, without stainless steel, iron smelters, and control of fire. None of these concrete inventions would exist without the elemental inventions of writing, of an alphabet, of hypertext links, of indexes, catalogs, archives, libraries and the scientific method itself. To recapitulate a web page you have to re-create all these other functions. You might as well remake modern society.
  • This is why restarting a sophisticated society after a devastating setback is so hard. Without all the adjacent items in a given ecological bundle, a single technology can have no effect
  • you need them all working to get one working
  • The conundrum of disaster relief is a testimony to this deep interdependency: one needs roads to bring petrol but petrol to clear roads, medicines to heal people, but healthy people to dispense medicines, communications to enable organization but organization to restore communications. We see the interdependent platform of technology primarily when it breaks down.
  • This is also the explanation of why we should not confuse a good clear view of the future with a short distance. We can see the perfect outlines of where technology is going, but we tend to overestimate how soon it will come. Usually the delay (in our eager eyes) is due to the invisible ecology of other needed technologies that aren’t ready yet.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 14 Jun 13
       
      Classic example that's relatable to nerds: Virtual Reality. In the '90's, the graphics tech wasn't close to where it needed to be. Also, ram prices and other hardware limitations (speed) made implementing it in any serious way a joke. Now, of course, the Oculus Rift is a consumer good. We don't call stuff "VR" anymore (as a buzzword), we just know we can buy a cool attachment that makes everything 3D.
  • The invention will hang suspended in the future for many years, not coming any closer the now. Then when the ignored co-technologies are in place it will appear in our lives in a sudden, with much surprise and applause for its unexpected appearance.
  • anonymous on 14 Jun 13
     
    "A favorite fantasy game for engineers is to imagine how they might re-invent essential technology from scratch. If you were stranded on an island, or left behind after Armageddon, and you needed to make your own blade, say, or a book, maybe a pair of working radios, what would it take to forge iron, make paper, or create electricity?"
anonymous

Tools Never Die, the Finale - 0 views

www.npr.org/...tools-never-die-the-finale

shared by anonymous on 24 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • So what Kevin found is not exactly what I asked him to find; the original tool is no longer being made, but the idea, the concept, lives on in new, adaptive forms. Was that our bet? "Remember," he wrote me a little defensively," I did not say 'no technological device' but rather 'no species of technology' [has disappeared] so my emphasis is on the underlying technology rather than the physical device."
  • But the deeper lesson of this whole exercise is that — to a degree I didn't appreciate until Kevin forced me to look — technology does indeed persist. Tools, machines, they change, they adapt, they morph, but they continue to be made. I hadn't noticed this tenaciousness before.
  • Kevin would go further. He has a radical notion, and he talks about it in his book What Technology Wants. He says most living things eventually go extinct. But technology, perhaps, is immortal.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Also when comparing tools to life, the time scales are ridiculously different. Trilobites ranged the Earth for 270 million years. The Paleolithic axe is an infant by comparison, merely 100,000 years old. The homo sapiens who made that axe are only a 200,000 years old. Who's to say that our ideas won't vanish long before the trilobites did?
  • Ideas, what do they use? Not chemicals. Richard Dawkins says they leap from, "brain to brain, via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation." People see a new invention, then they tell friends about it, or they put it onto a cave wall, papyrus, into song, or a book, newspaper, radio, TV, movies, poems, the internet. That way, the invention can be stored and copied.
  • Or is it possible that technology is inherently persistant, that it just won't be thrown out? That's what Kevin is suggesting. That's "What Technology Wants." It "wants" to be copied, to last. I find this idea a bit too mystical for my tastes.
  • "I don't know about you, but I am not initially attracted by the idea of my brain as a sort of dung heap in which the larvae of other people's ideas renew themselves, before sending out copies of themselves in an informational diaspora...Who's in charge, according to this vision — we or our memes?
  • anonymous on 24 Feb 11
     
    "A few weeks ago, Kevin, founding editor of Wired Magazine and world-class gadget geek, made me this bet: I bet, he said, "there is no species of technology that's gone globally extinct on this planet." By which he meant - or I took him to mean - there is no tool, no invention ever manufactured by humans that isn't still being made new today."
anonymous

Five tools to extract "locked" data in PDFs - 0 views

knightcenter.utexas.edu/...tools-extract-locked-data-pdfs

shared by anonymous on 07 May 13 - Cached
  • Remember, no converter is perfect. This is because PDFs can hold scanned information (that requires another kind of conversion, like OCR), complex tables (with columns or rows spanned multiple cells) or without graphic lines, in short, distinct patterns that hinder the correct formatting of the converted file. 
  • According to the journalist, the best way to do this is to randomly check the converted data to see if it's different from the original. And don't be fooled, there will almost always be a need to clean up the data when using an automatic conversion, especially for tables.  
  • 1. Cometdocs
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • 2. Zamzar
  • 4. PDFtoText
  • 5. Tabula
  • 3. Nitro PDF to Excel
  • anonymous on 07 May 13
     
    "Extracting data from PDFs for open use is not a simple task, as ProPublica reporter Jeremy B. Merrill, one of the contributors to the "Dollars for Docs" project, can attest. The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas asked programmers and specialists in data journalism, including the ex-editor of the Guardian Datablog, Simon Rogers, for their recommendations and identified some free tools to facilitate the conversation from PDFs to an open format, like CSV tables."
anonymous

Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature: Rand and Empirical Responsibility 5 - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...re-not-tools-of-cognition.html

criticalthinking objectivism

shared by anonymous on 15 Dec 10 - Cached
  • Where is Rand's evidence for this view? Again, we have nothing -- merely her own say-so.
  • This, of course, is an argument ad hominem with no scientific standing whatsoever.
  • According to Sayegh, the conventional way of thinking about decision making is to banish emotion from its decisions entirely.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The somatic marker hypothesis is a very relevant theory when discussing emotions in decision making. It states that bioregulatory signals such as feelings and emotions provide the principal guide for decisions where individuals, when dealing with a judgement, will assess the severity of the outcomes, their probability of occurrence and their emotional quality to provide their decision.
  • As mentioned earlier, there is an intimate connection between emotion and cognition in practical decision making.
  • If Objectivists wish their view of the role of emotions in cognition to be taken seriously, they need to (1) provide scientific evidence on behalf of their view, and (2) explain why the evidence supporting the Somatic Marker Hypothesis is not inconsistent with Rand's assertions about emotion.
  • anonymous on 15 Dec 10
     
    ""Emotions are not tools of cognition." Where is Rand's evidence for this view? Again, we have nothing -- merely her own say-so. In Objectivism, emotions are equated with mere "whims"; to allow one's judgment to be affected by emotions is tantamount to committing the horrible crime of "whim worshipping." This, of course, is an argument ad hominem with no scientific standing whatsoever."
anonymous

A New Reality in U.S.-Israeli Relations - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...w-reality-us-israeli-relations

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 19 Mar 13 - Cached
  • In the United States, the political crisis over the federal budget and the struggle to grow the economy and reduce unemployment has dominated the president's and the country's attention.
  • The Israeli elections turned on domestic issues, ranging from whether the ultra-Orthodox would be required to serve in Israel Defense Forces, as other citizens are, to a growing controversy over economic inequality in Israel. 
  • What is interesting is at this point, while Israelis continue to express concern about foreign policy, they are most passionate on divisive internal social issues. Similarly, although there continues to be a war in Afghanistan, the American public is heavily focused on economic issues. Under these circumstances the interesting question is not what Obama and Netanyahu will talk about but whether what they discuss will matter much. 
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • After more than a decade of being focused on the Islamic world and moving aggressively to try to control threats in the region militarily, the United States is moving toward a different stance. The bar for military intervention has been raised.
  • Therefore, the United States has, in spite of recent statements, not militarily committed itself to the Syrian crisis, and when the French intervened in Mali the United States played a supporting role. The intervention in Libya, where France and the United Kingdom drew the United States into the action, was the first manifestation of Washington's strategic re-evaluation.
  • That desire was there from the U.S. experience in Iraq and was the realization that the disposal of an unsavory regime does not necessarily -- or even very often -- result in a better regime.
  • The United States' new stance ought to frighten the Israelis. In Israel's grand strategy, the United States is the ultimate guarantor of its national security and underwrites a portion of its national defense. If the United States becomes less inclined to involve itself in regional adventures, the question is whether the guarantees implicit in the relationship still stand.
  • The issue is not whether the United States would intervene to protect Israel's existence; save from a nuclear-armed Iran, there is no existential threat to Israel's national interest. Rather, the question is whether the United States is prepared to continue shaping the dynamics of the region in areas where Israel lacks political influence and is not able to exert military control.
  • To put it differently, the Israelis' understanding of the American role is to control events that endanger Israel and American interests under the assumption that Israeli and American interests are identical. The idea that they are always identical has never been as true as politicians on both sides have claimed, but more important, the difficulties of controlling the environment have increased dramatically for both sides.
  • The problem for Israel at this point is that it is not able to do very much in the area that is its responsibility.
  • But the most shocking thing to Israel was how little control it actually had over events in Egypt and the future of its ties to Egypt.
  • But the power of the military will not be the sole factor in the long-term sustainability of the treaty. Whether it survives or not ultimately is not a matter that Israel has much control over.
  • The Israelis have always assumed that the United States can control areas where they lack control. And some Israelis have condemned the United States for not doing more to manage events in Egypt. But the fact is that the United States also has few tools to control the evolution of Egypt, apart from some aid to Egypt and its own relationship with the Egyptian military.
  • It may or may not be in the American interest to do something in any particular case, but the problem in this case is that although a hostile Egypt is not in the Americans' interest, there is actually little the United States can do to control events in Egypt.
  • Syrian President Bashar al Assad is a known quantity to Israel. He is by no means a friend, but his actions and his father's have always been in the pursuit of their own interest and therefore have been predictable. The opposition is an amorphous entity whose ability to govern is questionable and that is shot through with Islamists who are at least organized and know what they want.
  • Indeed, the hints of American weapons shipments to the rebels at some point concern Israel as much as no weapons shipments.
  • The Iranian situation is equally complex. It is clear that the Israelis, despite rhetoric to the contrary, will not act unilaterally against Iran's nuclear weapons. The risks of failure are too high, and the consequences of Iranian retaliation against fundamental American interests, such as the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, are too substantial.
  • The American view is that an Iranian nuclear weapon is not imminent and Iran's ultimate ability to build a deliverable weapon is questionable. Therefore, regardless of what Israel wants, and given the American doctrine of military involvement as a last resort when it significantly affects U.S. interests, the Israelis will not be able to move the United States to play its traditional role of assuming military burdens to shape the region.
  • There has therefore been a very real if somewhat subtle shift in the U.S.-Israeli relationship. Israel has lost the ability, if it ever had it, to shape the behavior of countries on its frontier. Egypt and Syria will do what they will do. At the same time, the United States has lost the inclination to intervene militarily in the broader regional conflict and has limited political tools. Countries like Saudi Arabia, which might be inclined to align with U.S. strategy, find themselves in a position of creating their own strategy and assuming the risks. 
  • For the United States, there are now more important issues than the Middle East, such as the domestic economy.
  • It will continue to get aid that it no longer needs and will continue to have military relations with the United States, particularly in developing military technology. But for reasons having little to do with Israel, Washington's attention is not focused on the region or at least not as obsessively as it had been since 2001. 
  • Like Israel, the United States has realized the limits and costs of such a strategy, and Israel will not talk the United States out of it, as the case of Iran shows. In addition, there is no immediate threat to Israel that it must respond to. It is, by default, in a position of watching and waiting without being clear as to what it wants to see. Therefore it should be no surprise that Israel, like the United States, is focused on domestic affairs.
  • It also puts Israel in a reactive position. The question of the Palestinians is always there. Israel's policy, like most of its strategic policy, is to watch and wait. It has no inclination to find a political solution because it cannot predict what the consequences of either a solution or an attempt to find one would be.
  •  Israel has lost the initiative and, more important, it now knows it has lost the initiative. It has looked to the United States to take the initiative, but on a much broader scale Washington faces the same reality as Israel with less at stake and therefore less urgency.
  • This is not a strain in the U.S.-Israeli relationship in the sense of anger and resentment, although those exist on both sides. Rather it is like a marriage that continues out of habit but whose foundation has withered.
  • In private I expect a sullen courtesy and in public an enthusiastic friendship, much as an old, bored married couple, not near a divorce, but far from where they were when they were young. Neither party is what it once was; each suspects that it is the other's fault. In the end, each has its own fate, linked by history to each other but no longer united.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 19 Mar 13
       
      What a hell of a closer.
  • anonymous on 19 Mar 13
     
    "Normally, summits between Israel and the United States are filled with foreign policy issues on both sides, and there will be many discussed at this meeting, including Iran, Syria and Egypt. But this summit takes place in an interesting climate, because both the Americans and Israelis are less interested in foreign and security matters than they are in their respective domestic issues."
anonymous

Oil and Militancy in the Niger Delta - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...oil-and-militancy-niger-delta

geopolitics africa oil

shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 13 - Cached
  • anonymous on 27 Mar 13
     
    "With militancy in the Niger Delta on the rise, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan must convince oil investors to keep their money in Nigeria while retaining the services of Niger Delta militants -- one of his most potent political tools. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta grew from popular protest movements that believed energy companies were exploiting their home region. But militancy then became an extortion method by which the region's political elite could gain a stake in the federal government. Leaders and commanders, including imprisoned former leader Henry Okah, were given political and security leeway to attack energy infrastructure on the condition that they minimize foreign casualties and allow for enough crude oil production to leverage in political negotiations. Okah's former commanders remain in the Niger Delta and, under the auspices of oil pipeline and waterway security contracts, prosper from private and public payoffs. Frequently these leaders are in Abuja managing their relationships with government officials. Abuja will use Okah's 24-year sentence, announced by a South African court March 26, to show that it is trying to contain militancy in the Niger Delta. Jonathan's administration does not want international oil companies invested in the Nigerian oil sector to lose confidence in Nigeria's security environment or to relocate to more stable and secure countries. Increased bunkering, kidnapping and piracy operations have validated concerns of even more militancy in the region. In fact, Italian energy company ENI and Royal Dutch/Shell recently shuttered two pipelines, bringing some 200,000 barrels of oil per day offline."
anonymous

Elections Plunge Italy into Political Chaos - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...s-plunge-italy-political-chaos

shared by anonymous on 26 Feb 13 - Cached
  • While Grillo's party ended up in third place, one in four Italians voted for it, and the party became the most voted-for single party into the Chamber of Deputies (the two mainstream parties, the Democratic Party and the People of Freedom, competed as part of electoral coalitions).
  • Grillo's emergence as the referent of the protest against traditional politicians in Italy is not an entirely new phenomenon. In 1994, former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi took advantage of a corruption scandal that prompted the popularity of traditional political parties to plunge. Berlusconi campaigned as an outsider who criticized traditional politicians and their corrupt ways.
  • He combined the tools of mass politics of the mid-20th century with the media tools of the 21st century.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The rise of the Five Star Movement shares similar elements with the electoral growth of the Coalition of the Radical Left, or Syriza, in Greece.
  • Both are anti-system parties that have put the traditional parties against the ropes.
  • Grillo's remarkable performance reflects a growing fatigue among the Italian electorate with the German leadership during the European crisis.
  • When the total number of votes for these three parties are combined, it becomes clear that more than two-thirds of Italians said no to austerity measures. Monti's poor performance in the elections confirms this trend. No matter what happens with Italy's political future, the new Italian government will have this mandate in mind.
  • Italians went to the polls Sunday and Monday hoping that it would be the first step to bringing Italy out of its political and economic stagnation. But they woke up on Tuesday to a country fragmented into three political groups with similar levels of support, where alliances will be extremely difficult to forge.
  • anonymous on 26 Feb 13
     
    "When Italian comedian Beppe Grillo created his Five Star Movement three-and-a-half years ago, he probably wasn't expecting it to become the voice of a country beset by a deep economic and political crisis. The overwhelming performance of the Five Star Movement in the general elections that were held Sunday and Monday confirmed that the crisis of legitimacy that is threatening the traditional political parties in Europe has finally reached Italy. While Grillo's party ended up in third place, one in four Italians voted for it, and the party became the most voted-for single party into the Chamber of Deputies (the two mainstream parties, the Democratic Party and the People of Freedom, competed as part of electoral coalitions)."
anonymous

Virtual Shackles - TLDR: EA Sucks - 0 views

www.virtualshackles.com/400

critthink criticalthinking video games

shared by anonymous on 09 Apr 13 - Cached
  • anonymous on 09 Apr 13
     
    Deconstructing EA's claims in light of the recent poll that EA is America's worst company. This also functions as a *fantastic* guide to some crucial critical thinking tools.
anonymous

Jaron Lanier's Ignorance Of History, Basic Economics And Efficiency Is Getting Ridiculous - 1 views

www.techdirt.com/...cy-is-getting-ridiculous.shtml

shared by anonymous on 29 May 13 - Cached
  • The Kodak/Instagram comparison comes up over and over again, and it's moronic. It makes no sense. To demonstrate, let's take something else that's old and something else that's modern that sorta-kinda seems similar, and compare the two: Very, very, very few people make money "auctioning" goods via Christie's. Yet, a few years ago, eBay noted that 724,000 Americans made their primary or secondary incomes from eBay sales, with another 1.5 million supplementing their income. In the simplistic world of Jaron Lanier, this should be proof that eBay is good, and Christie's is bad, right? But, of course that's silly.
  • The fact that Instagram only employed a few people and Kodak employed a lot says nothing about the impact of technology on modern society or the economic status of the middle class.
  • First off, it didn't involve toxic chemicals that create massive amounts of waste and pollution. Second, because people don't have to buy expensive rolls of film to take pictures any more, they get to save money and put it to better use. Third, because we no longer have to worry about the expense of each photo, people are free to take many more photos and capture more memories and generally enjoy photography more. Fourth, because instagram makes the sharing of photos much easier, it enables much greater communication among family and friends, building stronger community bonds. I mean, you could go on and on and on.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • “At the height of its power, agriculture employed 90 percent of the population and produced output worth vastly more than half of U.S. GDP. It even invented countless plant hybrids and animal breeds. But today nearly all farms of the past have gone bankrupt (or, seeing the economic writing on the wall, were transformed to other uses). Agriculture today employs only about one percent of the workforce. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those good agricultural jobs created?”
  • Economic efficiency often shifts jobs around, but creates a much larger pie, which leads to new job creation. We can reasonably question whether the there are people who get left behind, or what kinds of skills are favored as industries become obsolete, but the idea that it destroys a middle class is just silly.
  • We kind of made a bargain, a social contract, in the 20th century that even if jobs were pleasant people could still get paid for them. Because otherwise we would have had a massive unemployment. And so to my mind, the right question to ask is, why are we abandoning that bargain that worked so well? When did "we" make this "bargain" and, honestly, what is he talking about? There was no such bargain made. Jobs have nothing to do with whether they are "pleasant." And we didn't create jobs to avoid unemployment. We created jobs because there was demand for work, meaning there was demand for products and services, just as there still is today.
  • New jobs were created because of demand, and because new technologies create efficiencies which create and enable new jobs. It has nothing to do with "decisions" being made or "social contracts." It has to do with efficiency and new things being enabled through innovation.
  • This is the broken window fallacy exploded exponentially for a digital era. It seems to assume that the only "payment" is monetary. That is, if you do something for free online -- share a video or a photo, like a link, listen to a song -- that you're somehow getting screwed because some company gets that info and you're not getting paid.
  • But that's ridiculous. The people are getting "paid" in the form of the benefit they get: free hosting and software for hosting/streaming videos and pictures, free ability to communicate easily with friends, access to music, etc. The list goes on and on, but Lanier seems to not understand the idea that there are non-monetary benefits, which is why various online services which he seems to hate are so popular.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 29 May 13
       
      Whuffie!
  • A token few will find success on Kickstarter or YouTube, while overall wealth is ever more concentrated and social mobility rots. Social media sharers can make all the noise they want, but they forfeit the real wealth and clout needed to be politically powerful. Real wealth and clout instead concentrate ever more on the shrinking island occupied by elites who run the most powerful computers.
  • This is bullshit, plain and simple. Under the "old" system, you had a smaller "token few" who found success via getting a major label contract or having a publisher accept them into the club of published authors.
  • It's as if Lanier is talking about a mythical past that never existed to make some point about the future. But all of the evidence suggests that more people are now able to make use of these tools to create new incomes and new opportunities to make money, while in the past you had to wait for some gatekeeper.
  • Lanier, a beneficiary of the old gatekeepers, may like the old system, but he's confused about history, facts, reality and economics in making this ridiculous argument -- and it's a shame that those interviewing him or publishing his ridiculously misinformed screeds don't seem to ever challenge him on his claims.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 29 May 13
       
      Given the Gladwellian attention he's getting, this would seem prudent. If there *is* something of value in there, let's use that wacky, radical tool: science - to figure it out. :)
  • anonymous on 29 May 13
     
    "So... we'd already taken a stab at debunking Jaron Lanier's "gobbledygook economics" a few weeks back when it started appearing, but since then there's been more Lanier everywhere (obviously, in coordination with his book release), and each time it seems more ridiculous than the last. Each time, the focus is on the following economically ridiculous concepts: (1) there should be micropayments for anyone doing anything free online because someone benefits somewhere (2) modern efficiency via technology has destroyed the middle class. Both of these claims make no sense at all. "
anonymous

Misinformation and Its Correction - 1 views

psi.sagepub.com/...106.full

shared by anonymous on 17 Oct 12 - Cached
  • anonymous on 17 Oct 12
     
    "Abstract The widespread prevalence and persistence of misinformation in contemporary societies, such as the false belief that there is a link between childhood vaccinations and autism, is a matter of public concern. For example, the myths surrounding vaccinations, which prompted some parents to withhold immunization from their children, have led to a marked increase in vaccine-preventable disease, as well as unnecessary public expenditure on research and public-information campaigns aimed at rectifying the situation. We first examine the mechanisms by which such misinformation is disseminated in society, both inadvertently and purposely. Misinformation can originate from rumors but also from works of fiction, governments and politicians, and vested interests. Moreover, changes in the media landscape, including the arrival of the Internet, have fundamentally influenced the ways in which information is communicated and misinformation is spread. We next move to misinformation at the level of the individual, and review the cognitive factors that often render misinformation resistant to correction. We consider how people assess the truth of statements and what makes people believe certain things but not others. We look at people's memory for misinformation and answer the questions of why retractions of misinformation are so ineffective in memory updating and why efforts to retract misinformation can even backfire and, ironically, increase misbelief. Though ideology and personal worldviews can be major obstacles for debiasing, there nonetheless are a number of effective techniques for reducing the impact of misinformation, and we pay special attention to these factors that aid in debiasing. We conclude by providing specific recommendations for the debunking of misinformation. These recommendations pertain to the ways in which corrections should be designed, structured, and applied in order to maximize their impact. Grounded in cognitive psychological theory, these rec
anonymous

Conflict History - 0 views

www.conflicthistory.com

shared by anonymous on 17 Oct 12 - Cached
  • anonymous on 17 Oct 12
     
    Browse the timeline of war and conflict across the globe. A VERY powerful tool.
anonymous

What Isn't for Sale? - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...8902

shared by anonymous on 21 Mar 12 - Cached
Erik Hanson liked it
  • Why worry that we are moving toward a society in which everything is up for sale?
  • For two reasons. One is about inequality, the other about corruption
  • Paying kids to read books might get them to read more, but might also teach them to regard reading as a chore rather than a source of intrinsic satisfaction.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • These examples illustrate a broader point: some of the good things in life are degraded if turned into commodities. So to decide where the market belongs, and where it should be kept at a distance, we have to decide how to value the goods in question—health, education, family life, nature, art, civic duties, and so on. These are moral and political questions, not merely economic ones. To resolve them, we have to debate, case by case, the moral meaning of these goods, and the proper way of valuing them.
  • The difference is this: A market economy is a tool—a valuable and effective tool—for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavor. It’s a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.
  • The great missing debate in contemporary politics is about the role and reach of markets. Do we want a market economy, or a market society? What role should markets play in public life and personal relations? How can we decide which goods should be bought and sold, and which should be governed by nonmarket values? Where should money’s writ not run?
  • This nonjudgmental stance toward values lies at the heart of market reasoning, and explains much of its appeal. But our reluctance to engage in moral and spiritual argument, together with our embrace of markets, has exacted a heavy price: it has drained public discourse of moral and civic energy, and contributed to the technocratic, managerial politics afflicting many societies today.
  • anonymous on 21 Mar 12
     
    WE LIVE IN A TIME when almost everything can be bought and sold. Over the past three decades, markets-and market values-have come to govern our lives as never before. We did not arrive at this condition through any deliberate choice. It is almost as if it came upon us.
  • Erik Hanson on 26 Mar 12
     
    One particular issue is that we even have a system for some of this commodification in the courts. All sorts of things, from "pain and suffering" to "intentional infliction of emotional distress" get converted into cash values for the sake of assigning damage awards.
anonymous

The Spark File - 2 views

medium.com/8d6e7df7ae58

shared by anonymous on 11 Sep 12 - Cached
  • There are a number of ways that your memory can get in the way of a good writing session when you're in the middle of a project, mostly because you've remembered too much. But when you're just starting out on a project, when you're in that early stage where you're still trying to figure out what you want to write in the first place—at this stage, it's the frailty of memory that causes problems.
  • This is because most good ideas (whether they're ideas for narrative structure, a particular twist in the argument, or a broader topic) come into our minds as hunches: small fragmentsof a larger idea, hints and intimations.
  • The problem with hunches is that it's incredibly easy to forget them, precisely because they're not fully-baked ideas.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • for the past eight years or so I've been maintaining a single document where I keep all my hunches: ideas for articles, speeches, software features, startups, ways of framing a chapter I know I'm going to write, even whole books.
  • There's no organizing principle to it, no taxonomy--just a chronological list of semi-random ideas that I've managed to capture before I forgot them. I call it the spark file.
  • Now, the spark file itself is not all that unusual: that's why Moleskins or Evernote are so useful to so many people. But the key habit that I've tried to cultivate is this: every three or four months, I go back and re-read the entire spark file.
  • But what happens when I re-read the document that I end up seeing new connections that hadn't occurredto me the first (or fifth) time around: the idea I had in 2008 that made almost no sense in 2008, but that turns out to be incredibly useful in 2012, because something has changed in the external world, or because some other idea has supplied the missing piece that turns the hunch into something actionable.
  • But this kind of inventory doesn't quite convey the most interesting part of the experience, which is the feeling of reading through your own words describing new ideas as they are occurring to you for the first time. In a funny way, it feels a bit like you are brainstorming with past versions of yourself.
  • The key is to capture as many hunches as possible, and to spend as little time as possible organizing or filtering or prioritizing them. (Keeping a single,chronological file is central to the process, because it forces you to scroll through the whole list each time you want to add something new.) Just get it all down as it comes to you, and make regular visits back to re-acquaint yourself with all your past explorations. You'll be shocked how many useful hunches you've forgotten.
  • anonymous on 11 Sep 12
     
    "Looking back at all the tools and techniques that I've developed over the years as a writer, it occurs to me that most of them are, in one way or another, grappling with two critical mental forces: the power (and weakness) of human memory, and the sometimes overwhelming drive to procrastinate."
anonymous

Defrag Your Brain With a Spark File - 0 views

lifehacker.com/...g-your-brain-with-a-spark-file

shared by anonymous on 11 Sep 12 - Cached
  • anonymous on 11 Sep 12
     
    "Do you have a lot of ideas but no clue how to organize them? Or maybe ideas come to you and by the time you have a chance to record them, you've forgotten? Enter the Spark File. As Alex Hillman explains, this tool doesn't just capture half-baked ideas-it helps you turn small concepts into great things."
anonymous

Did Dining on Seafood Help Early Humans Grow These Big Brains? - 0 views

blogs.discovermagazine.com/...y-humans-grow-these-big-brains

layscience longnow

shared by anonymous on 02 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Near a place called Lake Turkana, archaeologists David Braun found two intriguing groups of items: The bones of fish, turtles, and even crocodiles with the scars of stone tools still showing, and stone fragments that Braun says come from the simple tools these hominins used to carve up the marine animals.
  • anonymous on 02 Jun 10
     
    By Andrew Moseman at Discover Magazine (80beats) on June 2, 2010.
anonymous

The Best Magazine Articles Ever - 0 views

www.kk.org/...the-best-magazi.php

shared by anonymous on 03 Aug 10 - Cached
  • This is a work in progress. It is a on-going list of suggestions collectively made by readers of this post. At this point the list has not been vetted or selected by me. In fact, other than the original five items I suggested, all of the articles mentioned here have been recommended by someone other than me.
  • anonymous on 03 Aug 10
     
    "The following are suggestions for the best magazine articles (in English) ever." By Kevin Kelly at Cool Tools.
anonymous

War and the American Republic - 0 views

www.3quarksdaily.com/...and-the-american-republic.html

war geopolitics america ideas

shared by anonymous on 14 Sep 10 - Cached
  • I offer three reasons that I believe, taken together, provide an answer: (a) The demographics of the American military (b) Historical inexperience of war and the world, and (c) The impetus from corporate capitalism.
  • The Demographics of the American Military 
  • The composition of most militaries today, including the U.S., suggests that this is indeed the case. The economic and political elites tend not to serve in the military, but very much dictate its priorities. They increasingly have no skin in the game, and a diminishing sense of its human cost.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Thucydides clearly cautioned against such trends: ‘The nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.’
  • Historical Inexperience of War and the World
  • The last real war on the U.S. mainland was the Civil War, 150 years ago. Not since then has the U.S. experienced war at home.
  • Europeans are also shrewder than Americans about non-Western societies—a byproduct of Europe’s geography, colonial empires, and in some ways, their salad-bowl model of immigration
  • and of this Kantian insight: ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.’ Keener than the Americans that is, whose relative naivete, insularity, and evangelical instincts (religious, political, and economic) only make them more vulnerable to demagogues who cry wolf about threats from foreign cultures.
  • The Impetus from Corporate Capitalism
  • Not usually through boardroom conspiracies, which surely happen, but by staying true to its dominant class character, like an animal who cannot help being any other way, whose one authentic instinct is to sustain and engorge itself. To that end, it uses every tool at its disposal.
  • One such tool is the news media, which has changed drastically in recent decades.
  • It tends to employ company men and women who uphold their bosses’ values and viewpoints—not from coercion but consent, in exchange for some of the spoils.
  • War often boosts the economy (especially via the military-industrial complex) and is usually good for the media.
  • anonymous on 14 Sep 10
     
    "War is always spoken of as an option; to be averse to it is taken as a sign of weakness. Indeed, why are the Americans so much more jingoistic today than, say, the Europeans? I offer three reasons that I believe, taken together, provide an answer: (a) The demographics of the American military (b) Historical inexperience of war and the world, and (c) The impetus from corporate capitalism. " By Namit Arora at 3 Quarks Daily on September 13, 2010.
anonymous

The Skeptic's Skeptic: Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm

criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 03 Nov 10 - Cached
  • If God created the eye, then how do creationists explain the blind salamander? “The most they can do is to intone that ‘the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,’” Hitchens mused. “Whereas the likelihood that the postocular blind­ness of underground salamanders is another aspect of evolution by natural selection seems, when you think about it at all, so overwhelmingly probable as to con­stitute a near certainty.”
  • To wit, after watching a quack medicine man fleecing India’s poor one Sunday afternoon, the belletrist scowled in a 2003 Slate column, “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” The observation is worthy of elevation to a dictum.
  • So, the question can and must be rephrased: ‘Why will our brief ‘something’ so soon be replaced with nothing?’ It’s only once we shake our own innate belief in linear progression and consider the many recessions we have undergone and will undergo that we can grasp the gross stupidity of those who repose their faith in divine providence and godly design.”
  • anonymous on 03 Nov 10
     
    "Science values data and statistics and champions the virtues of evidence and experimentation. Those of us "viewing the world with a rational eye" (as the new descriptor for this column reads) also have another, underutilized tool at our disposal: rapier logic like that of Christopher Hitchens, a practiced logician trained in rhetoric. Hitchens-who is "leaving the party a bit earlier than I'd like" because of esophageal cancer, as he lamented to Charlie Rose in a recent PBS interview-has something deeply important to offer on how to think about unscientific claims. Although he has no formal training in science, I would pit Hitchens against any of the purveyors of pseudoscientific clap­trap because of his unique and enviable skill at peeling back the layers of an argument and cutting to its core." By Michael Shermer at Scientific American on November 3, 2010.
anonymous

Russia's Growing Resurgence - 1 views

www.stratfor.com/...408_russias_growing_resurgence

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 10 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Not coincidentally, members of the interim government that the opposition began forming on Wednesday have lengthy and deep ties to Russia. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was not only quick to endorse the new government, but he also offered the opposition Russia’s support — financial or otherwise.
  • There are many reasons why Russia decided to target Kyrgyzstan. The country lies in a key geographic location nestled against China and Kazakhstan, and surrounds the most critical piece of territory in all of Central Asia: the Fergana Valley. Whoever controls Kyrgyzstan has the ability to pressure a number of states, including Kazakhstan, China, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
  • Russia’s main goal within that struggle is to have Western influence pulled back from its former turf — especially in the former Soviet states — and for the United States to accept Russian pre-eminence in the former Soviet sphere. But Russia is not just waiting for the United States to hand over its former turf. Instead, it has been actively resurging back into these countries using a myriad of tools.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • As of Wednesday, Russia has now added to its repertoire of tools used in the former Soviet states the ability to pull off its own style of color revolution with the toppling of the Kyrgyz government.
  • Now and going forward, Russia will tailor the type of influences it uses to each country it wants to control.
  • anonymous on 10 Apr 10
     
    By StratFor on Friday, April 9th, 2010.
anonymous

American Leadership Database: View by Congress - 1 views

www.lifecourse.com/...bycong.php

generations

shared by anonymous on 10 Jun 11 - Cached
  • anonymous on 10 Jun 11
     
    This query tool enables the user to select a single Congress, or many Congresses as a group, and to further select the position and the state or region. The database will then list all leaders meeting these criteria. It will also provide other information about them, including breakdowns by generation, birth year, age, longevity, and party.
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