Food For Thought @ 03/22/2008 09:51 PM
From I, Cringely: War of the Worlds: The Human Side of Moore’s Law:
Here, buried in my sixth paragraph, is the most important nugget: we’ve reached the point in our (disparate) cultural adaptation to computing and communication technology that the younger technical generations are so empowered they are impatient and ready to jettison institutions most of the rest of us tend to think of as essential, central, even immortal. They are ready to dump our schools.
Cringely goes on to lay out the case that the way kids are learning on their own to search out information, communicate with each other, and view the world as one big interconnected whole, is chipping away at the very foundations of our school-based educational system.
The University of Phoenix is supposedly preparing a complete middle and high school online curriculum available anywhere in the world. I live in Charleston, SC where the public schools are atrocious despite spending an average of $16,000 per student each year. Why shouldn’t I keep my kids at home and online, demanding that the city pay for it?
It’s a good, deep question that deserves comparable thought.
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Down A Slippery Slope... @ 08/31/2007 09:03 PM
The customer said, “So what’s the idea?”
The salesman replied, “I can’t tell you.”
“What do you mean, you can’t tell me?”
“This idea is copyrighted. If I tell you, you’ll have the idea without paying the originator for it.” The salesman held out a small pill. “If you want to know this idea, take this.”
The customer looked at it warily. “What’s this?”
“It’s a microtransmitter that tuned to this idea. Whenever you think about the idea, it’ll send an IM to your bank to transfer a small payment to the idea copyright holder’s account.”
The customer looked skeptical. “How will it know I’m thinking about this idea? Brains are full of thoughts and ideas all the time.”
“After you take it, I’ll tell you the idea. Hearing it’ll create a certain EEG wave pattern in your brain. The transmitter will pick up that pattern as similar to a generic pattern it has on file, and store your specific pattern. From that point forward, it’ll know whenever you think of the idea.”
“Well — if it’s the only way…” The customer swallowed the pill. “Ok! Now, what’s the idea?”
“It’s a word: hello.”
The customer was aghast. “What!”
The salesman looked at a PDA. “Oh, good, the transmitter’s working — it just requested a transfer of one dollar to the copyright holder’s account from yours.”
The customer sputtered, “But, but — that’s just a common word! You can’t copyright words like hello!”
“Another dollar.” The salesman smiled. “And you’re also behind the times. The 2010 law that extended copyright into perpetuity specifically allowed for the copyright of anything at all. The Supreme Court upheld it in 2012.”
The salesman put away his PDA. “You might say, from this day forward, all your hellos are belong to us.”
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Bob Cringely Suggests Searching for Warning Signs @ 04/26/2007 11:00 PM
Bob Cringely has a good suggestion in regards to the Virginia Tech massacre: crawl the web looking for the warning signs of hate, alienation, and mental disturbance that could lead to more deaths:
What has changed is the failure mode. Twenty-five years ago the failure mode was an unhappy kid killing himself. Today the failure mode is an unhappy kid killing himself and killing 32 other people, too. The stakes are higher but we haven’t really taken that into account in the way we, as institutions and adults, respond to these threats.
Imagine how differently you would react if a hard disk head crash in your laptop could not just destroy data but also trigger a small nuclear explosion. I would give up computers entirely.
If the failure mode has changed but the institutions that are supposed to be paying attention haven’t, well the only good news is that the rest of us are in a lot better position to pay attention than we were in the past. The Columbine shooters had a web site, you’ll recall, that pretty much telegraphed their murderous intentions, and the school knew about it. Virginia Tech, too, became a multimedia extravaganza, though a bit too late. The fact is that these alienated kids are generally not into denying their alienation. They shout it. And more and more they’ll be shouting it on the Internet.
There are Internet start-ups scouring the web by the hundreds right now looking for every imaginable form of content or commercial intention, but I’m guessing there isn’t a single spider program specifically dragging back signs of hate. Why not? Search the web for hate and vitriol and despair, do some clever parsing and analysis to figure out the where and when, then throw a mapping mashup interface on it all with the simple goal of giving school principals and baseball coaches and worried moms and dads a place to look for trouble brewing in their schools, towns or neighborhoods.
It wouldn’t violate privacy, free speech, or any laws because everything searchable on the web is public anyway. IT COULD EVEN BE SUPPORTED BY ADVERTISING. It would be like the program that is supposed to warn you when your hard drive is about to die, only applied to our culture.
It would probably save lives.
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Attacking the Root of the Problem @ 11/21/2006 02:34 PM
Study says US should greatly expand anti-jihadist efforts | Science Blog
To defeat the global jihadist movement, the United States should move beyond the boundaries of conventional counter-terrorism and seek to undermine support for Islamic terrorism within Muslim nations, according to a RAND Corporation study issued today.
The report says this type of campaign enabled the United States to help nurture opposition to Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, culminating in the overthrow of ruling regimes and the collapse of the Soviet system.
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Tick, Tick, Tick... @ 10/17/2006 02:22 PM
BBC NEWS | Americas | US population reaches 300 million:
The US population has hit 300 million people, just 39 years after it reached 200 million, according to US Census Bureau estimates.
The population reached the milestone at 0746 (1146GMT) – a timing based on calculations that factor in birth and death rates and migration.
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