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anonymous

This Is the Man Bill Gates Thinks You Absolutely Should Be Reading - 0 views

  • Let’s talk about manufacturing. You say a country that stops doing mass manufacturing falls apart. Why? In every society, manufacturing builds the lower middle class. If you give up manufacturing, you end up with haves and have-nots and you get social polarization. The whole lower middle class sinks.
  • You also say that manufacturing is crucial to innovation. Most innovation is not done by research institutes and national laboratories. It comes from manufacturing—from companies that want to extend their product reach, improve their costs, increase their returns. What’s very important is in-house research. Innovation usually arises from somebody taking a product already in production and making it better: better glass, better aluminum, a better chip. Innovation always starts with a product.
  • American companies do still innovate, though. They just outsource the manufacturing. What’s wrong with that? Look at the crown jewel of Boeing now, the 787 Dreamliner. The plane had so many problems—it was like three years late. And why? Because large parts of it were subcontracted around the world. The 787 is not a plane made in the USA; it’s a plane assembled in the USA. They subcontracted composite materials to Italians and batteries to the Japanese, and the batteries started to burn in-flight. The quality control is not there.
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  • Restoring manufacturing would mean training Americans again to build things. Only two countries have done this well: Germany and Switzerland. They’ve both maintained strong manufacturing sectors and they share a key thing: Kids go into apprentice programs at age 14 or 15. You spend a few years, depending on the skill, and you can make BMWs. And because you started young and learned from the older people, your products can’t be matched in quality. This is where it all starts.
  • You claim Apple could assemble the iPhone in the US and still make a huge profit. It’s no secret! Apple has tremendous profit margins. They could easily do everything at home. The iPhone isn’t manufactured in China—it’s assembled in China from parts made in the US, Germany, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, and so on. The cost there isn’t labor. But laborers must be sufficiently dedicated and skilled to sit on their ass for eight hours and solder little pieces together so they fit perfectly.
  • But Apple is supposed to be a giant innovator. Apple! Boy, what a story. No taxes paid, everything made abroad—yet everyone worships them. This new iPhone, there’s nothing new in it. Just a golden color. What the hell, right? When people start playing with color, you know they’re played out.
  • Let’s talk about energy. You say alternative energy can’t scale. Is there no role for renewables? I like renewables, but they move slowly. There’s an inherent inertia, a slowness in energy transitions. It would be easier if we were still consuming 66,615 kilowatt-hours per capita, as in 1950. But in 1950 few people had air-conditioning. We’re a society that demands electricity 24/7. This is very difficult with sun and wind.
  • What about nuclear? The Chinese are building it, the Indians are building it, the Russians have some intention to build. But as you know, the US is not. The last big power plant was ordered in 1974. Germany is out, Italy has vowed never to build one, and even France is delaying new construction. Is it a nice thought that the future of nuclear energy is now in the hands of North Korea, Pakistan, India, and Iran? It’s a depressing thought, isn’t it?
  • You call this Moore’s curse—the idea that if we’re innovative enough, everything can have yearly efficiency gains. It’s a categorical mistake. You just cannot increase the efficiency of power plants like that. You have your combustion machines—the best one in the lab now is about 40 percent efficient. In the field they’re about 15 or 20 percent efficient. Well, you can’t quintuple it, because that would be 100 percent efficient. Impossible, right? There are limits. It’s not a microchip.
  • So what’s left? Making products more energy-efficient? Innovation is making products more energy-efficient — but then we consume so many more products that there’s been no absolute dematerialization of anything. We still consume more steel, more aluminum, more glass, and so on. As long as we’re on this endless material cycle, this merry-go-round, well, technical innovation cannot keep pace.
  • What is the simplest way to make your house super-efficient? Insulation!
  • Right. I have 50 percent more insulation in my walls. It adds very little to the cost. And you insulate your basement from the outside—I have about 20 inches of Styrofoam on the outside of that concrete wall. We were the first people building on our cul-de-sac, so I saw all the other houses after us—much bigger, 3,500 square feet. None of them were built properly. I pay in a year for electricity what they pay in January. You can have a super-efficient house; you can have a super-efficient car, a little Honda Civic, 40 miles per gallon.
  • Your other big subject is food. You’re a pretty grim thinker, but this is your most optimistic area. You actually think we can feed a planet of 10 billion people—if we eat less meat and waste less food. We pour all this energy into growing corn and soybeans, and then we put all that into rearing animals while feeding them antibiotics. And then we throw away 40 percent of the food we produce.
  • So the answers are not technological but political: better economic policies, better education, better trade policies. Right. Today, as you know, everything is “innovation.” We have problems, and people are looking for fairy-tale solutions—innovation like manna from heaven falling on the Israelites and saving them from the desert. It’s like, “Let’s not reform the education system, the tax system. Let’s not improve our dysfunctional government. Just wait for this innovation manna from a little group of people in Silicon Valley, preferably of Indian origin.”
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    ""There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil," Bill Gates wrote this summer. That's quite an endorsement-and it gave a jolt of fame to Smil, a professor emeritus of environment and geography at the University of Manitoba. In a world of specialized intellectuals, Smil is an ambitious and astonishing polymath who swings for fences. His nearly three dozen books have analyzed the world's biggest challenges-the future of energy, food production, and manufacturing-with nuance and detail. They're among the most data-heavy books you'll find, with a remarkable way of framing basic facts. (Sample nugget: Humans will consume 17 percent of what the biosphere produces this year.)"
anonymous

Iridium - the satellite phone always rings twice - 0 views

  • In the nineties, Iridium spent $5 billion of Motorolas and other investors money on developing and deploying a revolutionary satellite phone system: 72 satellites were put into Low Earth Orbit through 15 flawless rocket launches in a time-span of a little over a year in 1997-1998. The system was brilliant and worked exactly as designed. The only problem was that the design hadn’t taken into account the realities of Planet Earth below.
  • Iridium became one of the most spectacular business failures ever seen. The bankruptcy hit in 1999, just a few months after this ad ran, and there was even crazy talk about sending the satellites head first into the atmosphere where they would burn up. In the end it was decided not to do that, and instead sell the assets to a group of investors for a mere $25 million. Compare that to the $5 billion invested.
  • In the years since the restructure of Iridium, the new owners have focused on the part of the business that actually made sense: Providing sat-phone coverage not to consumers, but to rescue-workers, humanitarian organizations, military, security, shipping-companies etc. And now, they’ve launched a bold new plan: Iridium NEXT.
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    A great look at the Iridium company, who ran ads in Wired Magazine back in the day. From Wired Re-Read (focused on Wired 07.03 in March 1999).
anonymous

Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson on Where Ideas Come From - 0 views

  • Say the word “inventor” and most people think of a solitary genius toiling in a basement. But two ambitious new books on the history of innovation—by Steven Johnson and Kevin Kelly, both longtime wired contributors—argue that great discoveries typically spring not from individual minds but from the hive mind.
  • Kelly: It’s amazing that the myth of the lone genius has persisted for so long, since simultaneous invention has always been the norm, not the exception. Anthropologists have shown that the same inventions tended to crop up in prehistory at roughly similar times, in roughly the same order, among cultures on different continents that couldn’t possibly have contacted one another. Johnson: Also, there’s a related myth—that innovation comes primarily from the profit motive, from the competitive pressures of a market society. If you look at history, innovation doesn’t come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.
  • Kelly: In part, that’s because ideas that leap too far ahead are almost never implemented—they aren’t even valuable. People can absorb only one advance, one small hop, at a time. Gregor Mendel’s ideas about genetics, for example: He formulated them in 1865, but they were ignored for 35 years because they were too advanced. Nobody could incorporate them. Then, when the collective mind was ready and his idea was only one hop away, three different scientists independently rediscovered his work within roughly a year of one another. Johnson: Charles Babbage is another great case study. His “analytical engine,” which he started designing in the 1830s, was an incredibly detailed vision of what would become the modern computer, with a CPU, RAM, and so on. But it couldn’t possibly have been built at the time, and his ideas had to be rediscovered a hundred years later.
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  • Johnson: And for wastes of time and resources. If you knew nothing about the Internet and were trying to figure it out from the data, you would reasonably conclude that it was designed for the transmission of spam and porn. And yet at the same time, there’s more amazing stuff available to us than ever before, thanks to the Internet.
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    "Say the word "inventor" and most people think of a solitary genius toiling in a basement. But two ambitious new books on the history of innovation-by Steven Johnson and Kevin Kelly, both longtime wired contributors-argue that great discoveries typically spring not from individual minds but from the hive mind. In Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Johnson draws on seven centuries of scientific and technological progress, from Gutenberg to GPS, to show what sorts of environments nurture ingenuity. He finds that great creative milieus, whether MIT or Los Alamos, New York City or the World Wide Web, are like coral reefs-teeming, diverse colonies of creators who interact with and influence one another." At Wired on September 27, 2010.
anonymous

Cyber Command: We Don't Wanna Defend the Internet (We Just Might Have To) - 0 views

  • Members of the military’s new Cyber Command insist that they’ve got no interest in taking over civilian Internet security – or even in becoming the Pentagon’s primary information protectors. But the push to intertwine military and civilian network defenses is gaining momentum, nevertheless. At a gathering this week of top cybersecurity officials and defense contractors, the Pentagon’s number two floated the idea that the Defense Department might start a protective program for civilian networks, based on a deeply controversial effort to keep hackers out of the government’s pipes.
  • Privacy rights organizations and military insiders also wonder whether CYBERCOM is just another way to extend the NSA’s reach. After all, both organizations are headquartered at Ft. Meade. And both are headed by Gen. Keith Alexander. The CYBERCOM official swears that won’t happen. “It’s not NSA taking over military cyber,” he said. “And it’s not military cyber taking over NSA.”
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    By Noah Shactman at Danger Room (Wired.com) on May 28, 2010. Thanks to http://alexkessinger.posterous.com/cyber-command-we-dont-wanna-defend-the-intern-2
anonymous

The Self Illusion: An Interview With Bruce Hood | Wired Science | Wired.com - 0 views

  • LEHRER: If the self is an illusion, then why does it exist? Why do we bother telling a story about ourselves? HOOD: For the same reason that our brains create a highly abstracted version of the world around us. It is bad enough that our brain is metabolically hogging most of our energy requirements, but it does this to reduce the workload to act. That’s the original reason why the brain evolved in the first place – to plan and control movements and keep track of the environment. It’s why living creatures that do not act or navigate around their environments do not have brains. So the brain generates maps and models on which to base current and future behaviors. Now the value of a map or a model is the extent to which it provides the most relevant useful information without overburdening you with too much detail.
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    "Bruce Hood, a psychologist at the University of Bristol, picks up where Woolf and the modernists left off. In his excellent new book, The Self Illusion, he seeks to understand how the singularity of the self emerges from the cacophony of mind and the mess of social life. Dr. Hood was kind enough to answer a few of my questions below:" This whole thing is like one long advertisement for why tabula rasa adherents (ie: Ayn Rand) are highly uncritical.
anonymous

Exclusive Excerpt: Hack the Planet - 0 views

  • Extending this common trope of American environmentalism to the question of climate engineering would be writer and climate activist Bill McKibben, who views geoengineering as the “junkie logic” of a culture addicted to technological solutions.
  • In The Whole Earth Catalog, first published in 1968, Brand wrote of humanity’s responsibility as Earth’s gardeners and caretakers, “We are as gods, and might as well get good at it.” Recently he updated his thinking. “Those were innocent times. New situation, new motto: ‘ We are as gods and have to get good at it.’”
  • Perhaps climate stewardship simply won’t work, and tinkering with the atmosphere won’t be available. Or it will — and we’ll kill one another over the thermostat. Now we contemplate wielding global powers previously imagined only in science fiction. Maybe the biggest question we’ll face may be how changing the planet will change ourselves….
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  • Advanced societies control the weather as a matter of course in the worlds of Star Trek and Dune. When it comes to our air and rain, our control fantasies are strong.
  • We may have to try, but attempting to dictate how much solar energy strikes the planet is a dangerous endeavor, perhaps involving just as much chance as our current course.
  • Succumbing to the illusion of control would mean replacing one burden — navigating the dangers of today’s climate crisis, and overhauling the world’s energy system — with the much more risky burden of revolutionizing our relationship with the sky itself. The illusion of control — “Everthing’s okay, the scientists have fixed the problem” — could engender apathy at a time when we desperately need to stop pouring carbon dioxide into the sky. It could drive nations apart during a planetary emergency, when they most require unity. It might work in unexpected ways or not at all.
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    This is an exclusive excerpt from "Hack the Planet" by Eli Kintisch. It's featured at Wired Magazine.
anonymous

The Lost Tribes of RadioShack: Tinkerers Search for New Spiritual Home - 0 views

shared by anonymous on 10 May 10 - Cached
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    By Jon Mooallem in Wired Magazine on April 19, 2010.
anonymous

Mass Extinction Easier to Trigger Than Thought - 0 views

  • The cataclysmic extinctions that scoured Earth 200 million years ago might have been easier to trigger than expected, with potentially troubling contemporary implications.
  • Rather than 600,000 years of volcanic activity choking Earth’s atmosphere with carbon dioxide, just a few thousand years apparently sufficed to raise ocean temperatures so potent greenhouse gases trapped in seafloor mud came bubbling up.
  • “It could happen again. It’s only the boundary conditions that we don’t know.”
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  • In what scientists call the end-Triassic mass extinction, at least half of all living species simply disappear from the fossil record. The die-off didn’t merely cause ecological disruption. It was so sudden and profound that planetary chemical cycles went haywire for the next several million years.
  • The leading explanation for the extinction invokes extended, climate-altering volcanic activity caused by splitting continental plates, but earlier research by Ruhl suggested a more nuanced and jarring narrative.
  • “A small release of CO2 from volcanoes triggered a small change in the global climate, raising land and ocean temperatures. That led to the release of methane from the seafloor,” said Ruhl.
  • Scientists have raised the possibility that rising global temperatures could release trapped methane into the atmosphere, further raising temperatures and releasing more methane in a feedback loop of warming and planetary disruption. That’s apparently what happened during the end-Triassic extinction.
  • Exactly how much warming would be needed to start the loop anew, and how much methane would flow forth, are open questions. “We could potentially trigger a small increase in ocean temperatures, which triggers methane release,” said Ruhl. “But it’s difficult to quantify how much methane is in the ocean these days. Maybe we have less methane in seafloors now. Maybe we have more.”
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    What a lovely headline! Anyway, humans could have an easier time doing stuff that could obliterate us. Viva evolution!
anonymous

Iridium - the satellite phone always rings twice - 0 views

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    A great article at Wired Reread.
anonymous

Russian swapped for spies is in England, brother says - 0 views

  • A Russian scientist who was part of a swap for 10 Russian spies caught in the United States is now in England, his brother told CNN Sunday.
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    By CNN Wire Staff on July 11, 2010
anonymous

Geoengineering (Wikipedia definition) - 0 views

  • The modern concept of Geoengineering (or Climate Engineering) is usually taken to mean proposals to deliberately manipulate the Earth's climate to counteract the effects of global warming from greenhouse gas emissions.
    • anonymous
       
      I was brought to this page after reading a Wired Magazine excerpt of "Hack the Planet" on March 24, 2010. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2010/03/24/wired-excerpts-hack-the-planet/
anonymous

Tools Never Die, the Finale - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • 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?
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    "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

Three arguments against the singularity - 1 views

  • economic libertarianism is based on the same reductionist view of human beings as rational economic actors as 19th century classical economics — a drastic over-simplification of human behaviour. Like Communism, Libertarianism is a superficially comprehensive theory of human behaviour that is based on flawed axioms and, if acted upon, would result in either failure or a hellishly unpleasant state of post-industrial feudalism.
  • I am not an extropian
  • I'm definitely not a libertarian:
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  • super-intelligent AI is unlikely because, if you pursue Vernor's program, you get there incrementally by way of human-equivalent AI, and human-equivalent AI is unlikely. The reason it's unlikely is that human intelligence is an emergent phenomenon of human physiology, and it only survived the filtering effect of evolution by enhancing human survival fitness in some way.
    • anonymous
       
      In other words: what we call 'consciousness' is a bundle of physiological responses, not some tightly designed status.
  • it's possible that just as destructive research on human embryos is tightly regulated and restricted, we may find it socially desirable to restrict destructive research on borderline autonomous intelligences ... lest we inadvertently open the door to inhumane uses of human beings as well.
  • whether we want them to be conscious and volitional is another question entirely. I don't want my self-driving car to argue with me about where we want to go today. I don't want my robot housekeeper to spend all its time in front of the TV watching contact sports or music videos. And I certainly don't want to be sued for maintenance by an abandoned software development project.
  • Consciousness seems to be a mechanism for recursively modeling internal states within a body.
  • Uploading ... is not obviously impossible unless you are a crude mind/body dualist. However, if it becomes plausible in the near future we can expect extensive theological arguments over it. If you thought the abortion debate was heated, wait until you have people trying to become immortal via the wire.
  • Our form of conscious intelligence emerged from our evolutionary heritage, which in turn was shaped by our biological environment. We are not evolved for existence as disembodied intelligences, as "brains in a vat", and we ignore E. O. Wilson's Biophilia Hypothesis at our peril
  • Moving on to the Simulation Argument: I can't disprove that, either. And it has a deeper-than-superficial appeal, insofar as it offers a deity-free afterlife, as long as the ethical issues involved in creating ancestor simulations are ignored.
  • This is my take on the singularity: we're not going to see a hard take-off, or a slow take-off, or any kind of AI-mediated exponential outburst. What we're going to see is increasingly solicitous machines defining our environment — machines that sense and respond to our needs "intelligently". But it will be the intelligence of the serving hand rather than the commanding brain, and we're only at risk of disaster if we harbour self-destructive impulses.
  • We may eventually see mind uploading, but there'll be a holy war to end holy wars before it becomes widespread: it will literally overturn religions.
  • our hard-wired biophilia will keep dragging us back to the real world, or to simulations indistinguishable from it.
  • Therefore I conclude that, while not ruling them out, it's unwise to live on the assumption that they're coming down the pipeline within my lifetime.
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    Over at Charlie's Diary, Mr. Stross articulates why he's not super-enamored of the Singularity. He begins: "I periodically get email from folks who, having read "Accelerando", assume I am some kind of fire-breathing extropian zealot who believes in the imminence of the singularity, the uploading of the libertarians, and the rapture of the nerds. I find this mildly distressing, and so I think it's time to set the record straight and say what I really think. Short version: Santa Claus doesn't exist." The Long version commences...here are excerpts.
anonymous

Simple Tip Turns Kindle into Ultimate News Reader - 0 views

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    "One of the best things about the Gadget Lab is our awesome readership, and this tip comes from Gadget Lab fan Ron Winters. Ron has actually managed to make the Kindle's "experimental" web-browser functional. Better still, it is an always-connected client for reading your own personal news."
anonymous

The Technium: The Average Place on Earth - 1 views

  • I describe this global system of technology deployed around the planet as an emerging superorganism. It consists of roads, electric lines, telephone cables, buildings, water systems, dams, satellites, ocean buoys and ships, all our computers and data centers, and all 6 billion humans. But while this superorganism of new and old technology operates at the planetary scale, and reaches all continents, and spans the oceans, and reaches into orbital space, it is a thin and uneven layer on the globe. In fact most of the planet, on average, is in a very primitive state.
  • Let's draw a grid around the globe with lines that form a square approximately every 100 km (at the equator). At every intersection of these grid lines we'll take a picture for inspection. There are about 10,000 intersections over the land part of this planet. They will give us a very good statistical portrait of what this planet looks like on land. Shown are 6,000 images of a possible 10,000 degree intersections on land.
  • The imaginary grid is the longitude and latitude grid, and somewhat remarkably, over 6,000 of the 10,000 intersections have already been photographed. Intrepid volunteers sign up at a web site called the Degree Confluence that is half art-project, and half adventure storytelling in order to select an intersection somewhere on the globe to visit --no matter how wild -- and record their success with photographs including a legible snapshot of their gps proving a bonafide "even" lat-long reading with lots of zeros.
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  • The resultant grid of photos is very revealing (below). Here is a portion of southern China, one of the most densely settled regions on the planet. Each image is one degree intersection. There is hardly a building in site. And for a place that has been intensely farmed for centuries if not millennia, there is a surprising lot of wildness. What it does to show is urbanization.
  • Projections for the year 2050 predict that most of the 8 billion people on the planet will live in megacities, with populations over 30 million. And these megacity clusters will form a network made up of smaller cities over 1 million in population. But these incredibly dense clusters will weave through a countryside that is emptying. It is already common to find entire villages in China, India, and South America abandoned by its inhabitants who fled to the swelling cities, leaving behind a few old folks, or often, no one at all. This is the pattern on Earth. Extremely dense and vast populations in a network of megacities connected to each other with nerves of roads and wires, woven over an empty landscape of wild land, marginal pastures, and lightly populated farms. By 2050 and beyond, Earth will be a urban planet, while the average place on the planet will be nearly wild.
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    "Technology and human activity are so global that they operate together as if they were a geological force. Civilization is altering the climate in the same way that volcanoes do and have done; our agriculture alters the biosphere the way climate has in the past; and now megacities are altering the planetary balances of heat and sea level. The technium is a planetary event."
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    That opening paragraph is a keeper.
anonymous

Why Americans Are the Weirdest People in the World - 0 views

  • For instance, the different ways people perceive the Müller-Lyer illusion likely reflects lifetimes spent in different physical environments. American children, for the most part, grow up in box-shaped rooms of varying dimensions. Surrounded by carpentered corners, visual perception adapts to this strange new environment (strange and new in terms of human history, that is) by learning to perceive converging lines in three dimensions.
  • As the three continued their work, they noticed something else that was remarkable: again and again one group of people appeared to be particularly unusual when compared to other populations—with perceptions, behaviors, and motivations that were almost always sliding down one end of the human bell curve.
  • In the end they titled their paper “The Weirdest People in the World?” (pdf) By “weird” they meant both unusual and Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It is not just our Western habits and cultural preferences that are different from the rest of the world, it appears. The very way we think about ourselves and others—and even the way we perceive reality—makes us distinct from other humans on the planet, not to mention from the vast majority of our ancestors. Among Westerners, the data showed that Americans were often the most unusual, leading the researchers to conclude that “American participants are exceptional even within the unusual population of Westerners—outliers among outliers.”
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  • The trio of researchers are young—as professors go—good-humored family men. They recalled that they were nervous as the publication time approached. The paper basically suggested that much of what social scientists thought they knew about fundamental aspects of human cognition was likely only true of one small slice of humanity. They were making such a broadside challenge to whole libraries of research that they steeled themselves to the possibility of becoming outcasts in their own fields.
  • “We were scared,” admitted Henrich. “We were warned that a lot of people were going to be upset.” “We were told we were going to get spit on,” interjected Norenzayan. “Yes,” Henrich said. “That we’d go to conferences and no one was going to sit next to us at lunchtime.”
  • Still, I had to wonder whether describing the Western mind, and the American mind in particular, as weird suggested that our cognition is not just different but somehow malformed or twisted. In their paper the trio pointed out cross-cultural studies that suggest that the “weird” Western mind is the most self-aggrandizing and egotistical on the planet: we are more likely to promote ourselves as individuals versus advancing as a group. WEIRD minds are also more analytic, possessing the tendency to telescope in on an object of interest rather than understanding that object in the context of what is around it.
  • The WEIRD mind also appears to be unique in terms of how it comes to understand and interact with the natural world. Studies show that Western urban children grow up so closed off in man-made environments that their brains never form a deep or complex connection to the natural world.
  • Children who grow up constantly interacting with the natural world are much less likely to anthropomorphize other living things into late childhood.
    • anonymous
       
      I did a shit ton of this. I was very internal, didn't have many friends, and came to identify with 'things' as though they were people.
  • Given that people living in WEIRD societies don’t routinely encounter or interact with animals other than humans or pets, it’s not surprising that they end up with a rather cartoonish understanding of the natural world. “Indeed,” the report concluded, “studying the cognitive development of folkbiology in urban children would seem the equivalent of studying ‘normal’ physical growth in malnourished children.”
  • The three insisted that their goal was not to say that one culturally shaped psychology was better or worse than another—only that we’ll never truly understand human behavior and cognition until we expand the sample pool beyond its current small slice of humanity.
  • Despite these assurances, however, I found it hard not to read a message between the lines of their research. When they write, for example, that weird children develop their understanding of the natural world in a “culturally and experientially impoverished environment” and that they are in this way the equivalent of “malnourished children,” it’s difficult to see this as a good thing.
  • THE TURN THAT HENRICH, Heine, and Norenzayan are asking social scientists to make is not an easy one: accounting for the influence of culture on cognition will be a herculean task. Cultures are not monolithic; they can be endlessly parsed. Ethnic backgrounds, religious beliefs, economic status, parenting styles, rural upbringing versus urban or suburban—there are hundreds of cultural differences that individually and in endless combinations influence our conceptions of fairness, how we categorize things, our method of judging and decision making, and our deeply held beliefs about the nature of the self, among other aspects of our psychological makeup.
    • anonymous
       
      This is another place where my love of long-term thinking rears its head. So modern as we imagine ourselves, with all our fancy machines, we are still bareinfants when it comes to reckoning about ourselves.
  • Recent research has shown that people in “tight” cultures, those with strong norms and low tolerance for deviant behavior (think India, Malaysia, and Pakistan), develop higher impulse control and more self-monitoring abilities than those from other places.
  • Men raised in the honor culture of the American South have been shown to experience much larger surges of testosterone after insults than do Northerners.
  • As Norenzayan sees it, the last few generations of psychologists have suffered from “physics envy,” and they need to get over it.
  • The job, experimental psychologists often assumed, was to push past the content of people’s thoughts and see the underlying universal hardware at work. “This is a deeply flawed way of studying human nature,” Norenzayan told me, “because the content of our thoughts and their process are intertwined.” In other words, if human cognition is shaped by cultural ideas and behavior, it can’t be studied without taking into account what those ideas and behaviors are and how they are different from place to place.
  • This new approach suggests the possibility of reverse-engineering psychological research: look at cultural content first; cognition and behavior second. Norenzayan’s recent work on religious belief is perhaps the best example of the intellectual landscape that is now open for study.
  • “I remember opening textbook after textbook and turning to the index and looking for the word ‘religion,’ ” he told me, “Again and again the very word wouldn’t be listed. This was shocking. How could psychology be the science of human behavior and have nothing to say about religion? Where I grew up you’d have to be in a coma not to notice the importance of religion on how people perceive themselves and the world around them.”
  • He has suggested that there may be a connection between the growth of religions that believe in “morally concerned deities”—that is, a god or gods who care if people are good or bad—and the evolution of large cities and nations.
  • If religion was necessary in the development of large-scale societies, can large-scale societies survive without religion? Norenzayan points to parts of Scandinavia with atheist majorities that seem to be doing just fine. They may have climbed the ladder of religion and effectively kicked it away. Or perhaps, after a thousand years of religious belief, the idea of an unseen entity always watching your behavior remains in our culturally shaped thinking even after the belief in God dissipates or disappears.
  • almost every major theorist on human behavior in the last 100 years predicted that it was just a matter of time before religion was a vestige of the past. But the world persists in being a very religious place.
  • HENRICH, HEINE, AND NORENZAYAN’S FEAR of being ostracized after the publication of the WEIRD paper turned out to be misplaced. Response to the paper, both published and otherwise, has been nearly universally positive, with more than a few of their colleagues suggesting that the work will spark fundamental changes. “I have no doubt that this paper is going to change the social sciences,” said Richard Nisbett, an eminent psychologist at the University of Michigan. “It just puts it all in one place and makes such a bold statement.”
  • At its heart, the challenge of the WEIRD paper is not simply to the field of experimental human research (do more cross-cultural studies!); it is a challenge to our Western conception of human nature. For some time now, the most widely accepted answer to the question of why humans, among all animals, have so successfully adapted to environments across the globe is that we have big brains with the ability to learn, improvise, and problem-solve.
  • Henrich has challenged this “cognitive niche” hypothesis with the “cultural niche” hypothesis. He notes that the amount of knowledge in any culture is far greater than the capacity of individuals to learn or figure it all out on their own.
  • He suggests that individuals tap that cultural storehouse of knowledge simply by mimicking (often unconsciously) the behavior and ways of thinking of those around them. We shape a tool in a certain manner, adhere to a food taboo, or think about fairness in a particular way, not because we individually have figured out that behavior’s adaptive value, but because we instinctively trust our culture to show us the way.
    • anonymous
       
      Goodness, though! I'm in TOTAL control of everything! :P
  • The unique trick of human psychology, these researchers suggest, might be this: our big brains are evolved to let local culture lead us in life’s dance.
  • People are not “plug and play,” as he puts it, and you cannot expect to drop a Western court system or form of government into another culture and expect it to work as it does back home.
  • Because of our peculiarly Western way of thinking of ourselves as independent of others, this idea of the culturally shaped mind doesn’t go down very easily.
  • That we in the West develop brains that are wired to see ourselves as separate from others may also be connected to differences in how we reason, Heine argues. Unlike the vast majority of the world, Westerners (and Americans in particular) tend to reason analytically as opposed to holistically.
  • That is, the American mind strives to figure out the world by taking it apart and examining its pieces.
  • Shown another way, in a different test analytic Americans will do better on something called the “rod and frame” task, where one has to judge whether a line is vertical even though the frame around it is skewed. Americans see the line as apart from the frame, just as they see themselves as apart from the group.
  • Heine and others suggest that such differences may be the echoes of cultural activities and trends going back thousands of years. Whether you think of yourself as interdependent or independent may depend on whether your distant ancestors farmed rice (which required a great deal of shared labor and group cooperation) or herded animals (which rewarded individualism and aggression).
  • These psychological trends and tendencies may echo down generations, hundreds of years after the activity or situation that brought them into existence has disappeared or fundamentally changed.
  • And here is the rub: the culturally shaped analytic/individualistic mind-sets may partly explain why Western researchers have so dramatically failed to take into account the interplay between culture and cognition. In the end, the goal of boiling down human psychology to hardwiring is not surprising given the type of mind that has been designing the studies. Taking an object (in this case the human mind) out of its context is, after all, what distinguishes the analytic reasoning style prevalent in the West. Similarly, we may have underestimated the impact of culture because the very ideas of being subject to the will of larger historical currents and of unconsciously mimicking the cognition of those around us challenges our Western conception of the self as independent and self-determined. The historical missteps of Western researchers, in other words, have been the predictable consequences of the WEIRD mind doing the thinking.
  •  
    "The growing body of cross-cultural research that the three researchers were compiling suggested that the mind's capacity to mold itself to cultural and environmental settings was far greater than had been assumed. The most interesting thing about cultures may not be in the observable things they do-the rituals, eating preferences, codes of behavior, and the like-but in the way they mold our most fundamental conscious and unconscious thinking and perception."
anonymous

How the internet is making us poor - Quartz - 2 views

  • Sixty percent of the jobs in the US are information-processing jobs, notes Erik Brynjolfsson, co-author of a recent book about this disruption, Race Against the Machine. It’s safe to assume that almost all of these jobs are aided by machines that perform routine tasks. These machines make some workers more productive. They make others less essential.
  • The turn of the new millennium is when the automation of middle-class information processing tasks really got under way, according to an analysis by the Associated Press based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Between 2000 and 2010, the jobs of 1.1 million secretaries were eliminated, replaced by internet services that made everything from maintaining a calendar to planning trips easier than ever.
  • Economist Andrew McAfee, Brynjolfsson’s co-author, has called these displaced people “routine cognitive workers.” Technology, he says, is now smart enough to automate their often repetitive, programmatic tasks. ”We are in a desperate, serious competition with these machines,” concurs Larry Kotlikoff, a professor of economics at Boston University. “It seems like the machines are taking over all possible jobs.”
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  • In the early 1800′s, nine out of ten Americans worked in agriculture—now it’s around 2%. At its peak, about a third of the US population was employed in manufacturing—now it’s less than 10%. How many decades until the figures are similar for the information-processing tasks that typify rich countries’ post-industrial economies?
  • To see how the internet has disproportionately affected the jobs of people who process information, check out the gray bars dipping below the 0% line on the chart, below. (I’ve adapted this chart to show just the types of employment that lost jobs in the US during the great recession. Every other category continued to add jobs or was nearly flat.)
  • Here’s another clue about what’s been going on in the past ten years. “Return on capital” measures the return firms get when they spend money on capital goods like robots, factories, software—anything aside from people. (If this were a graph of return on people hired, it would be called “Return on labor”.)
  • Notice: the only industry where the return on capital is as great as manufacturing is “other industries”—a grab bag which includes all the service and information industries, as well as entertainment, health care and education. In short, you don’t have to be a tech company for investing in technology to be worthwhile.
  • For many years, the question of whether or not spending on information technology (IT) made companies more productive was highly controversial. Many studies found that IT spending either had no effect on productivity or was even counter-productive. But now a clear trend is emerging. More recent studies show that IT—and the organizational changes that go with it—are doing firms, especially multinationals (pdf), a great deal of good.
  • Winner-take-all and the power of capital to exacerbate inequality
  • One thing all our machines have accomplished, and especially the internet, is the ability to reproduce and distribute good work in record time. Barring market distortions like monopolies, the best software, media, business processes and, increasingly, hardware, can be copied and sold seemingly everywhere at once. This benefits “superstars”—the most skilled engineers or content creators. And it benefits the consumer, who can expect a higher average quality of goods.
  • But it can also exacerbate income inequality, says Brynjolfsson. This contributes to a phenomenon called “skill-biased technological [or technical] change.” “The idea is that technology in the past 30 years has tended to favor more skilled and educated workers versus less educated workers,” says Brynjolfsson. “It has been a complement for more skilled workers. It makes their labor more valuable. But for less skilled workers, it makes them less necessary—especially those who do routine, repetitive tasks.”
  • “Certainly the labor market has never been better for very highly-educated workers in the United States, and when I say never, I mean never,” MIT labor economist David Autor told American Public Media’s Marketplace.
  • The other winners in this scenario are anyone who owns capital.
  • As Paul Krugman wrote, “This is an old concern in economics; it’s “capital-biased technological change”, which tends to shift the distribution of income away from workers to the owners of capital.”
  • Computers are more disruptive than, say, the looms smashed by the Luddites, because they are “general-purpose technologies” noted Peter Linert, an economist at University of Californa-Davis.
  • “The spread of computers and the Internet will put jobs in two categories,” said Andreessen. “People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.” It’s a glib remark—but increasingly true.
  • In March 2009, Amazon acquired Kiva Systems, a warehouse robotics and automation company. In partnership with a company called Quiet Logistics, Kiva’s combination of mobile shelving and robots has already automated a warehouse in Andover, Massachusetts.
  • This time it’s fasterHistory is littered with technological transitions. Many of them seemed at the time to threaten mass unemployment of one type of worker or another, whether it was buggy whip makers or, more recently, travel agents. But here’s what’s different about information-processing jobs: The takeover by technology is happening much faster.
  • From 2000 to 2007, in the years leading up to the great recession, GDP and productivity in the US grew faster than at any point since the 1960s, but job creation did not keep pace.
  • Brynjolfsson thinks he knows why: More and more people were doing work aided by software. And during the great recession, employment growth didn’t just slow. As we saw above, in both manufacturing and information processing, the economy shed jobs, even as employment in the service sector and professional fields remained flat.
  • Especially in the past ten years, economists have seen a reversal of what they call “the great compression“—that period from the second world war through the 1970s when, in the US at least, more people were crowded into the ranks of the middle class than ever before.
  • There are many reasons why the economy has reversed this “compression,” transforming into an “hourglass economy” with many fewer workers in the middle class and more at either the high or the low end of the income spectrum.
  • The hourglass represents an income distribution that has been more nearly the norm for most of the history of the US. That it’s coming back should worry anyone who believes that a healthy middle class is an inevitable outcome of economic progress, a mainstay of democracy and a healthy society, or a driver of further economic development.
    • anonymous
       
      This is the meaty center. It's what I worry about. The "Middle Class" may just be an anomaly.
  • Indeed, some have argued that as technology aids the gutting of the middle class, it destroys the very market required to sustain it—that we’ll see “less of the type of innovation we associate with Steve Jobs, and more of the type you would find at Goldman Sachs.”
  • So how do we deal with this trend? The possible solutions to the problems of disruption by thinking machines are beyond the scope of this piece. As I’ve mentioned in other pieces published at Quartz, there are plenty of optimists ready to declare that the rise of the machines will ultimately enable higher standards of living, or at least forms of unemployment as foreign to us as “big data scientist” would be to a scribe of the 17th century.
  • But that’s only as long as you’re one of the ones telling machines what to do, not being told by them. And that will require self-teaching, creativity, entrepreneurialism and other traits that may or may not be latent in children, as well as retraining adults who aspire to middle class living. For now, sadly, your safest bet is to be a technologist and/or own capital, and use all this automation to grab a bigger-than-ever share of a pie that continues to expand.
  •  
    "Everyone knows the story of how robots replaced humans on the factory floor. But in the broader sweep of automation versus labor, a trend with far greater significance for the middle class-in rich countries, at any rate-has been relatively overlooked: the replacement of knowledge workers with software. One reason for the neglect is that this trend is at most thirty years old, and has become apparent in economic data only in perhaps the past ten years. The first all-in-one commercial microprocessor went on sale in 1971, and like all inventions, it took decades for it to become an ecosystem of technologies pervasive and powerful enough to have a measurable impact on the way we work."
anonymous

This EULA Will Make You Rethink Every App and Online Service You Use - 1 views

  • Can we compare the internet to the road that must precede a lemonade stand?
    • anonymous
       
      On the face of it? No. Unless you're, I dunno, high...
  • The government built the road.
  • The whole idea of a public road is to push entrepreneurship up to a higher level. Without the government there would have most likely been a set of incompatible digital networks, mostly private, instead of a prominent unified internet.
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  • (Al Gore actually played a crucial role in bringing that unity about when he was a senator, following in the footsteps of his father, who had facilitated the national system of interstate highways.)
  • Without the public road, and utterly unencumbered access to it, a child’s lemonade stand would never turn a profit. The real business opportunity would be in privatizing other people’s roads.
    • anonymous
       
      This looks to be the start of another classic example of why markets are not Perfect. Again, the notion that you can somehow decouple politics *from the near-only way that people have a voice in it* - MONEY - seems a quaint libertarian fantasy.
  • Here’s the EULA no one would read in the utopia they pine for:
  • Dear parents or legal guardians of ___________ As you may be aware, your daughter is one of ______ children in your neighborhood who recently applied for a jointly operated StreetApp® of the category “Lemonade Stand.”
  •  
    "We aren't creating enough opportunity for enough people online. The proof is simple. The wide adoption of transformative connecting technology should create a middle-class wealth boom, as happened when the Interstate Highway System gave rise to a world of new jobs in transportation and tourism, for instance, and generally widened commercial prospects. Instead we've seen recession, unemployment, and austerity."
anonymous

Solar panels could destroy U.S. utilities, according to U.S. utilities - 0 views

  • That is not wild-eyed hippie talk. It is the assessment of the utilities themselves.
  • Back in January, the Edison Electric Institute — the (typically stodgy and backward-looking) trade group of U.S. investor-owned utilities — released a report [PDF] that, as far as I can tell, went almost entirely without notice in the press. That’s a shame. It is one of the most prescient and brutally frank things I’ve ever read about the power sector. It is a rare thing to hear an industry tell the tale of its own incipient obsolescence.
  • You probably know that electricity is provided by utilities. Some utilities both generate electricity at power plants and provide it to customers over power lines. They are “regulated monopolies,” which means they have sole responsibility for providing power in their service areas. Some utilities have gone through deregulation; in that case, power generation is split off into its own business, while the utility’s job is to purchase power on competitive markets and provide it to customers over the grid it manages.
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  • But the main thing to know is that the utility business model relies on selling power. That’s how they make their money.
  • Here’s how it works: A utility makes a case to a public utility commission (PUC), saying “we will need to satisfy this level of demand from consumers, which means we’ll need to generate (or purchase) this much power, which means we’ll need to charge these rates.”
  • The thing to remember is that it is in a utility’s financial interest to generate (or buy) and deliver as much power as possible. The higher the demand, the higher the investments, the higher the utility shareholder profits.
  • Now, into this cozy business model enters cheap distributed solar PV, which eats away at it like acid.
  • First, the power generated by solar panels on residential or commercial roofs is not utility-owned or utility-purchased. From the utility’s point of view, every kilowatt-hour of rooftop solar looks like a kilowatt-hour of reduced demand for the utility’s product.
  • (This is the same reason utilities are instinctively hostile to energy efficiency and demand response programs, and why they must be compelled by regulations or subsidies to create them. Utilities don’t like reduced demand!)
  • It’s worse than that, though. Solar power peaks at midday, which means it is strongest close to the point of highest electricity use — “peak load.”
  • Problem is, providing power to meet peak load is where utilities make a huge chunk of their money. Peak power is the most expensive power. So when solar panels provide peak power, they aren’t just reducing demand, they’re reducing demand for the utilities’ most valuable product.
  • This is a widely held article of faith, but EEI (of all places!) puts it to rest. (In this and all quotes that follow, “DER” means distributed energy resources, which for the most part means solar PV.) Due to the variable nature of renewable DER, there is a perception that customers will always need to remain on the grid. While we would expect customers to remain on the grid until a fully viable and economic distributed non-variable resource is available, one can imagine a day when battery storage technology or micro turbines could allow customers to be electric grid independent. To put this into perspective, who would have believed 10 years ago that traditional wire line telephone customers could economically “cut the cord?” [Emphasis mine.]
  • Just the other day, Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers said, “If the cost of solar panels keeps coming down, installation costs come down and if they combine solar with battery technology and a power management system, then we have someone just using [the grid] for backup.”
  • What happens if a whole bunch of customers start generating their own power and using the grid merely as backup? The EEI report warns of “irreparable damages to revenues and growth prospects” of utilities.
  • As ratepayers opt for solar panels (and other distributed energy resources like micro-turbines, batteries, smart appliances, etc.), it raises costs on other ratepayers and hurts the utility’s credit rating. As rates rise on other ratepayers, the attractiveness of solar increases, so more opt for it. Thus costs on remaining ratepayers are even further increased, the utility’s credit even further damaged. It’s a vicious, self-reinforcing cycle:
  • One implication of all this — a poorly understood implication — is that rooftop solar fucks up the utility model even at relatively low penetrations, because it goes straight at utilities’ main profit centers.
  • (“Despite all the talk about investors assessing the future in their investment evaluations,” the report notes dryly, “it is often not until revenue declines are reported that investors realize that the viability of the business is in question.” In other words, investors aren’t that smart and rational financial markets are a myth.)
  • So rates would rise by 20 percent for those without solar panels. Can you imagine the political shitstorm that would create? (There are reasons to think EEI is exaggerating this effect, but we’ll get into that in the next post.)
  • The report compares utilities’ possible future to the experience of the airlines during deregulation or to the big monopoly phone companies when faced with upstart cellular technologies.
  • In case the point wasn’t made, the report also analogizes utilities to the U.S. Postal Service, Kodak, and RIM, the maker of Blackberry devices. These are not meant to be flattering comparisons.
  • Remember, too, that these utilities are not Google or Facebook. They are not accustomed to a state of constant market turmoil and reinvention.
  • This is a venerable old boys network, working very comfortably within a business model that has been around, virtually unchanged, for a century.
  •  
    "Solar power and other distributed renewable energy technologies could lay waste to U.S. power utilities and burn the utility business model, which has remained virtually unchanged for a century, to the ground."
anonymous

When a Calorie Is Not a Calorie - 0 views

  • In a wide-ranging discussion of how food is digested in everything from humans to rats to pythons, the panel reviewed a new spate of studies showing that foods are processed differently as they move from our gullet to our guts and beyond. They agreed that net caloric counts for many foods are flawed because they don’t take into account the energy used to digest food; the bite that oral and gut bacteria take out of various foods; or the properties of different foods themselves that speed up or slow down their journey through the intestines, such as whether they are cooked or resistant to digestion.
  • The process used to estimate calories for food was developed at the turn of the 19th to 20th century by Wilbur Atwater. It was a simple system of calculating four calories for each gram of protein, nine calories for each gram of fat, and four calories for each gram of carbohydrate (modified later by others to add two calories for a gram of fiber). Although it has been useful for approximating the energetic costs of metabolizing many foods, its shortcomings have been known for decades—and some nations, such as Australia, have dropped the system because it is “inaccurate and impractical,” said panelist Geoffrey Livesey, a nutritional biochemist and director of Independent Nutrition Logic Ltd. in Wymondham, U.K..
  • One key area where the system is inaccurate, Wrangham reported, is in estimating the calories for cooked food.
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  • The way foods are processed can also make them easier to digest.
  • New studies also are finding that bacteria in the gut respond differently to processed foods and cooked foods. Carmody reported that she and Peter Turnbaugh of Harvard University are finding “key differences in the type of bacterial communities” in the guts of mice, depending on whether they were fed chow or cooked meat.
  • Why does all of this matter? Because we’re in the midst of an obesity epidemic and counting calories has been misleading, said David Ludwig, a pediatric endocrinologist at Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School.
  •  
    "When it comes to weight loss, a calorie is a calorie is a calorie. That's been the mantra of nutritionists, dietitians, and food regulators in the United States and Europe for more than a century. But when it comes to comparing raw food with cooked food, or beans with breakfast cereals, that thinking may be incorrect. That was the consensus of a panel of researchers who listed the many ways that the math doesn't always add up correctly on food labels"
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