Mindamp

critical mass who understands the urgency

exploration, discussion, documentation and promotion of the knowledge

Global movement

esearch and promotion of Knowledge that helps to combat climate change

helps in adaptation to climate change

indigenous Knowledge

plight of citizen

documentation through research

community-based adaptation (CBA) to climate change

possibilities of rain water harvesting and other means of water storage

watershed degradation, urbanization, growing population are the major factor for water crisis here

making it part of national development policy

Nepal is vulnerable to rising global temperatures and has already been dealing with the impact of erratic rainfall, frequent droughts and floods, which have been affecting food security

experiment with a bottom-up approach using Local Adaptation Plans of Action, or LAPAs, in 10 districts across the country in 2010

ultimately question the status of food security

promote the Indigenous Traditional knowledge (ITK) as Community Based Adaptation techniques that has been practiced by different indigenous community in Nepal in agriculture

The graphs in Fig. 2 trace the influence of online access, estimated from the entire sample of articles, and illustrated for journals and subfields with the mean number of citations. Figure 2A shows the simultaneous effect of commercial and free online availability on the average age of citations

The first question was whether depth of citation—years between articles and the work they reference—is predicted by the depth of journal issues online—how many years back issues were electronically available during the previous year when scientists presumably drafted them into their papers.

Collectively, the models presented illustrate that as journal archives came online, either through commercial vendors or freely, citation patterns shifted. As deeper backfiles became available, more recent articles were referenced; as more articles became available, fewer were cited and citations became more concentrated within fewer articles. These changes likely mean that the shift from browsing in print to searching online facilitates avoidance of older and less relevant literature. Moreover, hyperlinking through an online archive puts experts in touch with consensus about what is the most important prior work—what work is broadly discussed and referenced. With both strategies, experts online bypass many of the marginally related articles that print researchers skim. If online researchers can more easily find prevailing opinion, they are more likely to follow it, leading to more citations referencing fewer articles. Research on the extreme inequality of Internet hyperlinks (14), scientific citations (15, 16), and other forms of “preferential attachment” (17, 18) suggests that near-random differences in quality amplify when agents become aware of each other’s choices. Agents view others’ choices as relevant information—a signal of quality—and factor them into their own reading and citation selections. By enabling scientists to quickly reach and converge with prevailing opinion, electronic journals hasten scientific consensus. But haste may cost more than the subscription to an online archive: Findings and ideas that do not become consensus quickly will be forgotten quickly .

This research ironically intimates that one of the chief values of print library research is poor indexing. Poor indexing—indexing by titles and authors, primarily within core journals— likely had unintended consequences that assisted the integration of science and scholarship. By drawing researchers through unrelated articles, print browsing and perusal may have facilitated broader comparisons and led researchers into the past. Modern graduate education parallels this shift in publication—shorter in years, more specialized in scope, culminating less frequently in a true dissertation than an album of articles (19)

As 21st-century scientists and scholars use online searching and hyperlinking to frame and publish their arguments more efficiently, they weave them into a more focused—and more narrow—past and present.

But when you add to it this religious narrative that's a version of the Frankenstein myth, where you say well, but these things are all leading to a creation of life, and this life will be superior to us and will be dangerous

I'm going to go through a couple of layers of how the mythology does harm.

this overall atmosphere of accepting the algorithms as doing a lot more than they do. In the case of Netflix, the recommendation engine is serving to distract you from the fact that there's not much choice anyway.

If a program tells you, well, this is how things are, this is who you are, this is what you like, or this is what you should do, we have a tendency to accept that.

our economy has shifted to what I call a surveillance economy, but let's say an economy where algorithms guide people a lot, we have this very odd situation where you have these algorithms that rely on big data in order to figure out who you should date, who you should sleep with, what music you should listen to, what books you should read, and on and on and on

people often accept that

all this overpromising that AIs will be about to do this or that. It might be to become fully autonomous driving vehicles instead of only partially autonomous, or it might be being able to fully have a conversation as opposed to only having a useful part of a conversation to help you interface with the device.

other cases where the recommendation engine is not serving that function, because there is a lot of choice, and yet there's still no evidence that the recommendations are particularly good.

there's no way to tell where the border is between measurement and manipulation in these systems.

if the preponderance of those people have grown up in the system and are responding to whatever choices it gave them, there's not enough new data coming into it for even the most ideal or intelligent recommendation engine to do anything meaningful.

it simply turns into a system that measures which manipulations work, as opposed to which ones don't work, which is very different from a virginal and empirically careful system that's trying to tell what recommendations would work had it not intervened

What's not clear is where the boundary is.

If you ask: is a recommendation engine like Amazon more manipulative, or more of a legitimate measurement device? There's no way to know.

we don't know to what degree they're measurement versus manipulation.

If people are deciding what books to read based on a momentum within the recommendation engine that isn't going back to a virgin population, that hasn't been manipulated, then the whole thing is spun out of control and doesn't mean anything anymore

not so much a rise of evil as a rise of nonsense.

because of the mythology about AI, the services are presented as though they are these mystical, magical personas. IBM makes a dramatic case that they've created this entity that they call different things at different times—Deep Blue and so forth.

Cortana or a Siri

This pattern—of AI only working when there's what we call big data, but then using big data in order to not pay large numbers of people who are contributing—is a rising trend in our civilization, which is totally non-sustainable

If you talk about AI as a set of techniques, as a field of study in mathematics or engineering, it brings benefits. If we talk about AI as a mythology of creating a post-human species, it creates a series of problems that I've just gone over, which include acceptance of bad user interfaces, where you can't tell if you're being manipulated or not, and everything is ambiguous.

It creates incompetence, because you don't know whether recommendations are coming from anything real or just self-fulfilling prophecies from a manipulative system that spun off on its own, and economic negativity, because you're gradually pulling formal economic benefits away from the people who supply the data that makes the scheme work.

I'm going to give you two scenarios.

let's suppose somebody comes up with a way to 3-D print a little assassination drone that can go buzz around and kill somebody. Let's suppose that these are cheap to make.

Having said all that, let's address directly this problem of whether AI is going to destroy civilization and people, and take over the planet and everything.

some disaffected teenagers, or terrorists, or whoever start making a bunch of them, and they go out and start killing people randomly

This idea that some lab somewhere is making these autonomous algorithms that can take over the world is a way of avoiding the profoundly uncomfortable political problem, which is that if there's some actuator that can do harm, we have to figure out some way that people don't do harm with it.

the part that causes the problem is the actuator. It's the interface to physicality

not so much whether it's a bunch of teenagers or terrorists behind it or some AI

The sad fact is that, as a society, we have to do something to not have little killer drones proliferate.

What we don't have to worry about is the AI algorithm running them, because that's speculative.

another one where there's so-called artificial intelligence, some kind of big data scheme, that's doing exactly the same thing, that is self-directed and taking over 3-D printers, and sending these things off to kill people.

There's a whole other problem area that has to do with neuroscience, where if we pretend we understand things before we do, we do damage to science,

You have to be able to accept what your ignorances are in order to do good science. To reject your own ignorance just casts you into a silly state where you're a lesser scientist.

To my mind, the mythology around AI is a re-creation of some of the traditional ideas about religion, but applied to the technical world.

The notion of this particular threshold—which is sometimes called the singularity, or super-intelligence, or all sorts of different terms in different periods—is similar to divinity.

In the history of organized religion, it's often been the case that people have been disempowered precisely to serve what were perceived to be the needs of some deity or another, where in fact what they were doing was supporting an elite class that was the priesthood for that deity.

If AI means this mythology of this new creature we're creating, then it's just a stupid mess that's confusing everybody, and harming the future of the economy. If what we're talking about is a set of algorithms and actuators that we can improve and apply in useful ways, then I'm very interested, and I'm very much a participant in the community that's improving those things.

A lot of people in the religious world are just great, and I respect and like them. That goes hand-in-hand with my feeling that some of the mythology in big religion still leads us into trouble that we impose on ourselves and don't need.

The researchers conclude that the experiments “suggest that heavy media multitaskers are distracted by the multiple streams of media they are consuming, or, alternatively, that those who infrequently multitask are more effective at volitionally allocating their attention in the face of distractions.”

Members of the ‘Net Generation’ reported more multitasking than members of ‘Generation X,’ who reported more multitasking than members of the ‘Baby Boomer’ generation. The choices of which tasks to combine for multitasking were highly correlated across generations, as were difficulty ratings of specific multitasking combinations.

same time, these experts predicted that the impact of networked living on today’s young will drive them to thirst for instant gratification, settle for quick choices, and lack patience

The educational implications include allowing students short ‘technology breaks’ to reduce distractions and teaching students metacognitive strategies regarding when interruptions negatively impact learning.”

survey about the future of the Internet, technology experts and stakeholders were fairly evenly split as to whether the younger generation’s always-on connection to people and information will turn out to be a net positive or a net negative by 2020.

said many of the young people growing up hyperconnected to each other and the mobile Web and counting on the Internet as their external brain will be nimble, quick-acting multitaskers who will do well in key respects.

similar mental limitations in the types of tasks that can be multitasked.

The data suggest that “using Facebook and texting while doing schoolwork were negatively predictive of overall GPA.” However, “emailing, talking on the phone, and using IM were not related to overall GPA.”

Regression analyses revealed that increased media multitasking was associated with higher depression and social anxiety symptoms, even after controlling for overall media use and the personality traits of neuroticism and extraversion.

I advocate avoiding distraction but going deep, introspective, and finding out what exactly is freaking you out.

heartache (emotional overload) and hearburn (physical ailments) are far more distracting than email . . . and they make it harder to learn new technologies too.

The problem is that I am having to learn everything from scratch, all the time, all at once.

The same, by the way, is also true when your worklife depends on technology and the technology changes.

your former patterns and reflexes don't serve you invisibly, efficiently, automatically. 

unlearning, in fact, makes us pay attention to the world in a new way.  George Lakoff says it is useful to become "reflective about our reflexes."

I am hoping that the result of this tedious, difficult, uneven, sometimes triumphant, sometime despairing transition time will be a fresh new way of looking at the world, now that so much of the world I took for granted, so many of the collaborations and processes and bureaucracies and patterns and expertise is so vividly transparent.

Multitasking is not a symptom of technology.   The problem is that I am having to learn everything from scratch, all the time, all at once.

The same, by the way, is also true when your worklife depends on technology and the technology changes.

I say that unlearning, in fact, makes us pay attention to the world in a new way.  George Lakoff says it is useful to become "reflective about our reflexes."

How people work and function is altered when new tools are utilized.

The pipe is more important than the content within the pipe. Our ability to learn what we need for tomorrow is more important than what we know today.

An organizations ability to foster, nurture, and synthesize the impacts of varying views of information is critical to knowledge economy survival. Speed of “idea to implementation” is also improved in a systems view of learning.

Design of learning environments

The need to evaluate the worthiness of learning something is a meta-skill that is applied before learning itself begins.

These theories do not address learning that occurs outside of people (i.e. learning that is stored and manipulated by technology).

Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual.

Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known

Behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism are the three broad learning theories most often utilized in the creation of instructional environments. These theories, however, were developed in a time when learning was not impacted through technology.

Learning needs and theories that describe learning principles and processes, should be reflective of underlying social environments

The “half-life of knowledge” is the time span from when knowledge is gained to when it becomes obsolete.

To combat the shrinking half-life of knowledge, organizations have been forced to develop new methods of deploying instruction.”

So be proactive – share FIRST. Don’t wait for someone you’re connected with to share something with you.

6. Engage the people you follow. Be polite, mindful of making demands on their attention. Put work into dialogue if they welcome it. Thank them for sharing.

They’re also a platform for dialogue and discussion, going beyond information exchanges into deeper levels of communication – sharing insights and experiences. Rheingold reminds us to be kind and show gratitude;

7. Inquire of the people you follow, of the people who follow you. But be careful. Ask engaging questions – answers shd be useful to others

Being mindful of being useful to others helps to ensure that we build mutually productive and gratifying relationships in our social channels.

8. Respond to inquiries made to you. Contribute to both diffuse reciprocity and quid pro quo

Your goal is to identify people and potential sources you can add to your personal knowledge network.

In a recent Twitter conversation, he laid out 8 key thoughts on how to build your own personal learning network from your social media channels. Here they are, along with my thoughts on each:

1. Explore: It’s not just about knowing how to find experts, co-learners, but about exploration as invitation to serendipitous encounter.

3. Follow candidates through RSS, Twitter. Ask yourself over days, weeks, whether each candidate merits continued attention

2. Search – Use Diigo, delicious, listorious, to find pools of expertise in the fields that interest you.

You need to be open: To new people, opportunities, possibilities, to knowledge.

Once you’ve identified people who are posting information that appears to be relevant to your areas of intererst, follow them.

Analyze the quality of their social media posts. What is their point of view? Is the information they’re posting accurate? Are they focused or scattershot? What is the “signal to noise ratio” of their feed? In other words, out of everything they post, how much useful information?

4. Always keep tuning your network, dropping people who don’t gain sufficiently high interest; adding new candidates

I follow about 900 people on Twitter. But I’ve developed a list I call “rockstars” who consistently provide the best ideas and resources in their feeds. That’s the tweetstream I visit first, because that’s where I’ll find the best stuff in the least amount of time.

During a three-hour surgery on April 22, Rezai implanted a chip smaller than a pea onto the motor cortex of Burkhart’s brain. The tiny chip interprets brain signals and sends them to a computer, which recodes and sends them to the high-definition electrode stimulation sleeve that stimulates the proper muscles to execute his desired movements. Within a tenth of a second, Burkhart’s thoughts are translated into action.

Battelle also developed a non-invasive neurostimulation technology in the form of a wearable sleeve that allows for precise activation of small muscle segments in the arm to enable individual finger movement, along with software that forms a ‘virtual spinal cord’ to allow for coordination of dynamic hand and wrist movements.

As part of the study, Burkhart worked for months using the electrode sleeve to stimulate his forearm to rebuild his atrophied muscles so they would be more responsive to the electric stimulation.

Ongoing improvement in email/document/desktop and cloud-centric search frees them from legacy information management behaviors like filing.

what would really prove more personally productive — folders that sort 15% faster? Or key phrase search capabilities that were 20% better?

They’re “organizing” for flexibility, adaptiveness and immediate response. More accurately, their technologies exist to give them greater speed and flexibility. Their personal organizational ethos reflects a Toyota Production System “just-in-time” attitude.

nstead of better tools for better organizing, people want their organization done for them. Organizing is wasteful; getting its benefits is productivity.

They want what I’ve described earlier as “promptware” — a cue and intervention that creates measurable value in the moment, rather than promised efficiencies in the future.

We’ll likely get more done better if we give less time and thought to organization and greater reflection and care to desired outcomes. Our job today and tomorrow isn’t to organize ourselves better; it’s to get the right technologies that respond to our personal productivity needs. It’s not that we’re becoming too dependent on our technologies to organize us; it’s that we haven’t become dependent enough.

When you consume in a passive way, by skimming and moving to the next thing, you’re at a learning disadvantage.

When I was in University, I worked at a psychology research center under the direction of one of Time Magazine’s Top 100 most influential people, Dr. Richie Davidson.

Self-taught individuals, also called autodidacts, are masters of retaining information largely because of their ability to reflect and put into action most of what they consume.

Instead of just trying to get to the end of your Twitter feed or articles that you saved for later, read each article as if you would need to tell a friend about it after.

1-page summary immediately after every chapter he reads.

Nothing will help you absorb more of what you consume than trying to do. It’s through the mistakes made where the real learning happens.