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thinkahol *

The World's Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information | Kur... - 0 views

www.kurzweilai.net/nicate-and-compute-information

The World's Technological Capacity to Store Communicate and Compute Information | KurzweilAI

shared by thinkahol * on 13 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 13 Feb 11
     
    A study appearing Feb. 10 in Science Express calculates the world's total technological capacity to store, communicate and compute information, part of a Special Online Collection: Dealing with Data. The study by the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism estimates that in 2007, humankind was able to store 2.9 × 1020 optimally compressed bytes, communicate almost 2 × 1021 bytes, and carry out 6.4 × 1018 instructions per second on general-purpose computers. General-purpose computing capacity grew at an annual rate of 58%. The world's capacity for bidirectional telecommunication grew at 28% per year, closely followed by the increase in globally stored information (23%). Humankind's capacity for unidirectional information diffusion through broadcasting channels has experienced comparatively modest annual growth (6%). Telecommunication has been dominated by digital technologies since 1990 (99.9% in digital format in 2007), and the majority of our technological memory has been in digital format since the early 2000s (94% digital in 2007).
Todd Suomela

Electronic Musical Instrument 1870 - 1990 - 0 views

www.obsolete.com/120_years

music technology history sts electronic via:brucesterling import-delicious

shared by Todd Suomela on 25 Jan 09 - Cached
  • Todd Suomela on 25 Jan 09
     
    This site charts the development of electronic musical instruments from 1870 to 1990. For the purposes of this project electronic musical instruments are defined as instruments that synthesise sounds from an electronic source.
Todd Suomela

The Public Values Failures of Climate Science in the US by Ryan Meyer - Minerva, Volume... - 0 views

www.springerlink.com/...y51g45057072x28x

sts science public values philosophy public-understanding decision groups public-policy

shared by Todd Suomela on 02 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Todd Suomela on 02 Jun 11
     
    "This paper examines the broad social purpose of US climate science, which has benefited from a public investment of more than $30 billion over the last 20 years. A public values analysis identifies five core public values that underpin the interagency program. Drawing from interviews, meeting observations, and document analysis, I examine the decision processes and institutional structures that lead to the implementation of climate science policy, and identify a variety of public values failures accommodated by this system. In contrast to other cases which find market values frameworks (the "profit as progress" assumption) at the root of public values failures, this case shows how "science values" ("knowledge as progress") may serve as an inadequate or inappropriate basis for achieving broader public values. For both institutions and individual decision makers, the logic linking science to societal benefit is generally incomplete, incoherent, and tends to conflate intrinsic and instrumental values. I argue that to be successful with respect to its motivating public values, the US climate science enterprise must avoid the assumption that any advance in knowledge is inherently good, and offer a clearer account of the kinds of research and knowledge advance likely to generate desirable social outcomes. "
Todd Suomela

Hello, Darkness - 96.03 - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...darkness.htm

night light-pollution darkness metaphor technology-effects

shared by Todd Suomela on 09 Mar 09 - Cached
  • But the implication of electricity in the sleep deficit seems hard to argue with. Whatever it is that we wish or are made to do--pursue leisure, earn a living--there are simply far more usable hours now in which to do it
  • In the United States at midnight more than five million people are at work at full-time jobs. Supermarkets, gas stations, copy shops--many of these never close.
  • Living with electric lights makes it difficult to retrieve the experience of a non-electrified society. For all but the very wealthy, who could afford exorbitant arrays of expensive artificial lights, nightfall brought the works of daytime to a definitive end. Activities that need good light--where sharp tools are wielded or sharply defined boundaries maintained; purposeful activities designed to achieve specific goals; in short, that which we call work--all this subsided in the dim light of evening. Absent the press of work, people typically took themselves safely to home and were left with time in the evening for less urgent and more sensual matters: storytelling, sex, prayer, sleep, dreaming.
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  • John Staudenmaier, a historian of technology and a Jesuit priest, for a recent conference at MIT. (The essay will appear in a book called The Idea of Progress Revisited, edited by Leo Marx and Bruce Mazlish.) Staudenmaier makes the point--obvious when brought up, though we've mostly lost sight of it--that from the time of the hominid Lucy, in Hadar, Ethiopia, to the time of Thomas Edison, in West Orange, New Jersey, the onset of darkness sharply curtailed most kinds of activity for most of our ancestors.
  • Todd Suomela on 09 Mar 09
     
    Speculative connections between electric lighting, sleep deficits, and health.
  • Todd Suomela on 09 Mar 09
     
    I wonder if the driving force behind the sleep deficit is in fact more pervasive, and indeed global in nature: the triumph of light.
Todd Suomela

TPM: The Philosophers' Magazine | Philosophy as complementary science - 1 views

www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=375

science philosophy methods paradigm complementary purpose history sts research

shared by Todd Suomela on 15 Mar 11 - Cached
Bio Synthesis liked it
  • Todd Suomela on 15 Mar 11
     
    "Let me now express my position more clearly and systemically: philosophy of science can seek to generate scientific knowledge in places where science itself fails to do so; I call this the complementary function of philosophy of science, as opposed to its descriptive and prescriptive functions. I propose taking the philosophy of science as a field which investigates scientific questions that are not addressed in current specialist science - questions that could be addressed by scientists, but are excluded due to the necessities of specialization."
Todd Suomela

The Technium: The World Without Technology - 0 views

www.kk.org/...the_world_witho.php

technology technology-effects history anthropology language evolution culture archaeology

shared by Todd Suomela on 10 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Although strictly speaking simple tools are a type of technology made by one person, we tend to think of technology as something much more complicated. But in fact technology is anything designed by a mind. Technology includes not only nuclear reactors and genetically modified crops, but also bows and arrows, hide tanning techniques, fire starters, and domesticated crops. Technology also includes intangible inventions such as calendars, mathematics, software, law, and writing, as these too derive from our heads. But technology also must include birds' nests and beaver dams since these too are the work of brains. All technology, both the chimp's termite fishing spear and the human's fishing spear, the beaver's dam and the human's dam, the warbler's hanging basket and the human's hanging basket, the leafcutter ant's garden and the human's garden, are all fundamentally natural. We tend to isolate human-made technology from nature, even to the point of thinking of it as anti-nature, only because it has grown to rival the impact and power of its home. But in its origins and fundamentals a tool is as natural as our life.
  • The gravity of technology holds us where we are. We accept our attachment. But to really appreciate the effects of technology – both its virtues and costs -- we need to examine the world of humans before technology. What were our lives like without inventions? For that we need to peek back into the Paleolithic era when technology was scarce and humans lived primarily surrounded by things they did not make. We can also examine the remaining contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes still living close to nature to measure what, if anything, they gain from the small amount of technology they use.
  • Then about 50,000 years ago something amazing happened. While the bodies of early humans in Africa remained unchanged, their genes and minds shifted noticeably. For the first time hominins were full of ideas and innovation. These newly vitalized modern humans, which we now call Sapiens, charged into new regions beyond their ancestral homes in eastern Africa. They fanned out from the grasslands and in a relatively brief burst exploded from a few tens of thousands in Africa to an estimated 8 million worldwide just before the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago.
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  • It should have been clear to Neanderthal, as it is now clear to us in the 21st century, that something new and big had appeared -- a new biological and geological force. A number of scientists (Richard Klein, Ian Tattersall, William Calvin, among many others) think that the "something" that happened 50,000 years ago was the invention of language. Up until this point, humanoids were smart. They could make crude tools in a hit or miss way and handle fire – perhaps like an exceedingly smart chimp. The African hominin's growing brain size and physical stature had leveled off its increase, but evolution continued inside the brain.  "What happened 50,000 years ago," says Klein, "was a change in the operating system of humans. Perhaps a point mutation effected the way the brain is wired that allowed languages, as we understand language today: rapidly produced, articulate speech."  Instead of acquiring a larger brain, as the Neanderthal and Erectus did, Sapien gained a rewired brain.  Language altered the Neanderthal-type mind, and allowed Sapien minds for the first time to invent with purpose and deliberation. Philosopher Daniel Dennet crows in elegant language: "There is no step more uplifting, more momentous in the history of mind design, than the invention of language. When Homo sapiens became the beneficiary of this invention, the species stepped into a slingshot that has launched it far beyond all other earthly species." The creation of language was the first singularity for humans. It changed everything. Life after language was unimaginable to those on the far side before it.
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