The Compulsive Explainer

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking, the skill that created the modern world, is fast disappearing. It is being replaced by a resurgence in religious fervor, and a distrust of science. Clear, logical thinking is now considered a social liability, not an asset - because it challenges they primary activity of our post-modern culture: the production and consumption of entertainment.

The reason for this is simple: the ascendancy of television over literature. We now spend much more time watching television. Its world has been adopted as our world, the way the world ought to be. Forces behind the scenes control the way things are: what we are supposed to see and what we are supposed to think: non-critically. Critical thinking is out: where no one wants to be.

McLuhan said it well: the medium is the message, and the message is don't think, just believe.

The young, who know that the modern world is over, are disgusted their elders, who are not with it. For them, the best world is simply the best illusion they can find - and they are looking for that constantly.

Entertainment can be analyzed, and often is: by critics; this is what critics are. But the young regard this with horror: this destroys the most important thing in their lives, the very reason for their existence. And the adults are not far behind.

The Effects of Innovation

The following is from Niel Postman's The Disappearance of Childhood, page 23. He is a genius: he can pull in all kinds of things, seemingly unrelated, and make them coherent.
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We may take as a guide the teachings of Harold Innis. Innis stressed that changes in communication technology invariably have three kinds of effects: They alter the structure of interests (the things thought about), the character of symbols (the things thought with), and the nature of community (the area in which thoughts develop).

To put it as simply as one can, every machine is an idea, or conglomeration of ideas. But they are not the sort of ideas that lead an inventor to conceive of a machine in the first place. We cannot know what was in Gutenberg's mind that led him to connect a winepress to book manufacturing, but it is a safe conjecture that he had no intention of amplifying individualism, or for that matter, undermining the authority of the Catholic church.

There is a sense in which all inventors are, to use Arthur Koestler's word, sleepwalkers. Or we might call them Frankensteins, and the entire process the Frankenstein Syndrome: one creates a machine for a particular and limited purpose. But once the machine is built, we discover - sometimes to our horror, usually to our discomfort, always to our surprise - that it has ideas of its own; that it is quite capable not only of changing our habits but, as Innis, tried to show, of changing our habits of mind.

A machine may provide us with a new sense of time, as did the mechanical clock. Or of space and time, as did the telescope. Or of knowledge, as did the alphabet. Or of the possibilities of improving human biology, as did eyeglasses. To say it in James Carey's bold way: We may find that the structure of our consciousness has been reshaped to parallel the structure of communication, that we have become what we have made.
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I would only add that many of our innovations today are not, strictly speaking, machines, but new kinds of communication: such as the Internet and thereby: Facebook. Their impact is just as huge and unpredictable.

Running out of Uranium

Slashdot
The Energy Collective

Uranium mines provide us with 40,000 tons of uranium each year. Sounds like that ought to be enough for anyone, but it comes up about 25,000 tons short of what we consume yearly in our nuclear power plants. The difference is made up by stockpiles, reprocessed fuel and re-enriched uranium — which should be completely used up by 2013.

Breeder reactors, which in theory should produce more fuel than they consume, have in practice been disappointing.

Dr. Micheal Dittmar summarizes the nuclear waste disposal problem succinctly:

The well known use of nuclear fission energy in PWR's (Pressurized Water Reactor) is unsustainable. The problems related to long-lived transuranic elements, e.g. plutonium and heavier elements, as well as nuclear waste in general, are unsolved.

These facts are not what our conservatives would have us believe. They are controlled by the electrical power industry that wants a return to massive subsidies for nuclear power, which our incompetent American companies have never been able to deliver.

Dr. Dittmar thinks we should concentrate instead on the Liquid fluoride Thorium Reactor or a Thorium Molten Salt Reactor, and urges anther Manhattan Project to pay for their development. This would cost much less than the large solar or wind generation farms now being planned. And Thorium is abundant.

However, voices crying in the wilderness do not reach many ears.

MIT Invents new Voting System

MIT News: Cyrptographic Voting Debuts

A new system for ensuring accurate election tallies, which MIT researchers helped to develop, passed its first real-world test.

Last week, in Takoma Park, Md., a new cryptographic voting system that could ensure accurate vote counts was used for the first time in a real election. MIT’s Ron Rivest, the Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, helped develop the system and says he’s quite pleased with how the technology worked. Takoma Park’s city clerk, Jessie Carpenter, agrees that the trial “went very well.”

To minimize the disruption of existing voting procedures, the system, called Scantegrity II, was designed to work with ordinary optical-scan voting technology. Optical-scan voting — which has become the dominant technology in the United States since the 2000 presidential election — usually requires the voter to fill in bubbles printed on a ballot next to candidates’ names. With Scantegrity II, the voter instead uses a special pen to expose a code printed inside the bubble in invisible ink. Thereafter, the ballot is fed into an ordinary optical reader, which simply determines which bubbles have been darkened.

Any voter who’d later like to confirm her vote can simply jot down the code that’s in the exposed bubble, along with the ballot’s serial number, and take that information home. (In the Takoma Park election, voters could record their codes on cards stacked in the voting booths, which were printed with the names of the contested offices — mayor and city councilor.) The voter can then look up that serial number on the election commission’s website and confirm that it’s correlated with the code inside the bubble she marked. Although on the website, the code is never associated with the candidate’s name, Scantegrity ensures that if just 2 percent of voters confirm their codes, it’s statistically almost impossible for vote tampering to go undetected.

The problem, as always, is the voters, some of which do their best to mess up the system. Some refused to use the special marker pen, and used their own instead. This had been anticipated and caused no problem. More seriously, only 4 percent bothered to check to see if their vote had been properly tallied - the whole point of the system.

After the fact, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission added its useless verbiage. 

Meanwhile, Brazil has done a successful test of its computerized voting system (which uses Linux). You can read about it here (Google translation).

The Spy in Your Smartphone

From New Scientist

It's a camera, diary, navigator, and social secretary rolled into one. Se if your smartphone falls into the wrong hands, how much could it reveal about you?

THERE are certain things you do not want to share with strangers. In my case it was a stream of highly personal text messages from my husband, sent during the early days of our relationship. Etched on my phone's SIM card - but invisible on my current handset and thus forgotten - here they now are, displayed in all their brazen glory on a stranger's computer screen.

Gone Pishing

These changes could well be exploited in much the same way that email and the internet can be used to "phish" for personal information such as bank details. Indeed, some phone-related scams are already emerging, including one that uses reprogrammed cellphones to intercept passwords for other people's online bank accounts. "Mobile phones are becoming a bigger part of our lives," says Andy Jones, head of information security research at British Telecommunications. "We trust and rely on them more. And as we rely on them more, the potential for fraud has got to increase."

These days, the latest smartphones incorporate GPS, Wi-Fi connectivity and motion sensors. They automatically download your emails and appointments from your office computer, and come with the ability to track other individuals in your immediate vicinity. And there's a lot more to come. Among other things, you could be using the next generation of phones to keep tabs on your health, store cash and make small transactions - something that's already happening in east Asia (see "Future phones").

According to the UK government's Design and Technology Alliance Against Crime (DTAAC), 80 per cent of us carry information on our handsets that could be used to commit fraud - and about 16 per cent of us keep our bank details on our phones.

Meanwhile mobile commerce, or M-commerce, in which phones are used to transfer money or pay for shopping, is already expanding rapidly. Cellphone users in Japan can buy train or airline tickets with their handset, while people in Afghanistan, the Philippines and east Africa can use their handsets to transfer money to each other. "M-commerce is coming, and the expectation is that it will become prevalent in the UK and other European countries within four years," says Joe McGeehan, head of Toshiba's research lab in Europe.

A new Technology Changes the Structure of Discourse

I am now reading Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: how the past can improve the future, by my favorite thinker: Neil Postman.

His objective here is to reacquaint us (or more likely, acquaint us) of what the Enlightenment did: it created the modern world - and made us modern people, for better or worse. Right now he is discussing the impact of technology.

The technology of the Enlightenment was the Printing Press. It made the Reformation possible and mass literacy possible. It is hard for us now to appreciate this, since we are now post-literate and post-modern. But at the time, it was literally an world-changing event. The Founding Fathers, for example, were all voracious readers, writers and thinkers.

As an aside, I am the only one who reads anything in my hamlet of La Alegria de Orosi. The locals are literate, but never read. This is not something they do for recreation. They are people-focused, not print-focused. But let me get back to myself.

I was always an enthusiastic adopter of the latest technology; I figured it gave me a jump ahead of everybody else. But I think I outsmarted myself.

As a young man, the outdoors was my passion, and I was in it as much as possible. I should have gone to work for the Park Service, which was still possible back in the Fifties. But instead I did the sensible thing and became an engineer - even though I was not an engineer at heart. As a result, I wasted much of my life. But let me return to the real subject - which is not me, but technology. I sometimes confuse the two. 

Let me quote from Postman:
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What is at issue are the changes that might occur in our psychic habits, our social relations, and, most certainly, our political institutions, especially electoral politics. Nothing is more obvious than that a new technology changes the structure of discourse. It does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence, and by demanding a certain kind of content.

Ronald Reagan, for example, could not have been president were it not for the bias of television. This is a man who rarely spoke precisely and never eloquently (except perhaps when reading a speech written by someone else). And yet he was called The Great Communicator. Why? Because he was magic on television. His televised image projected a sense of authenticity, intimacy, and caring. It did not much matter if citizens agreed with what he said or understood what he said. This does not in itself suggest that he shouldn't have been president or that he did his job poorly. It is to say that television gives power to some while it deprives others. It is not human nature we worry about here but rather what part of our humanness will be nurtured by technology.

I have often wondered how Abraham Lincoln would have fared on television. Because of the invention of photography in the 1840s, he was the first president to be the subject of continuous comment about his looks (ugly and ungainly, many said). Would it be too much to say that Americans must be eternally grateful for the absence of television when Lincoln made his run for the presidency? Or perhaps we might say that had television existed, no such person as Lincoln could have become a serious candidate for president.

The point is that we must consider whether or not (or to what degree) the bias of a new medium is relevant to the qualities we require of a politician. The twenty-seventh president of the United States - William Howard Taft - was fat, very fat, well in excess of 300 pounds. We may assume that this physical condition would make him an unsuitable candidate in our own time, when the imagery of television dominates our perceptions.
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What will the impact of smart phones be? Here everything depends on the ability to dazzle: the instant impression. Here Reagan would be hopelessly old-fashioned because his style needed a little time to soak in (he was a movie actor). Now things move too fast for that. 

I suspect other forces, forces that can move faster than people can, will control our future political decisions  - without our being aware of it at all.

Open Source Saves Computer Voting

Wired Magazine

Open Source Digital Voting Foundation

The Open Source Digital Voting Foundation (OSDV) announced the availability of source code for its prototype election system Wednesday night at a panel discussion that included Mitch Kapor, creator of Lotus 1-2-3 and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; California Secretary of State Debra Bowen; Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan; and Heather Smith, director of Rock the Vote.

The OSDV, co-founded by Gregory Miller and John Sebes, launched its Trust the Vote Project in 2006 and has an eight-year roadmap to produce a comprehensive, publicly owned, open source electronic election system. The system would be available for licensing to manufacturers or election districts, and would include a voter registration component; firmware for casting ballots on voting devices (either touch-screen systems with a paper trail, optical-scan machines or ballot-marking devices); and an election management system for creating ballots, administering elections and counting votes.

“How we vote has become just as important as who we vote for,” Miller told the audience of filmmakers and technologists who gathered at the Bel-Air home of film producer Lawrence Bender to hear about the project. “We think it is imperative that the infrastructure on which we cast and count our ballots is an infrastructure that is publicly owned.”

He was careful to say they weren't trying to put the voting companies out of business - but anyone who knows anything about what has been going on here could see that this is just the case - and can heave a sigh of relief. The federal voting commission has been dominated by the voting machine industry and has done nothing to protect us from these ruthless incompetent manufacturers. 

All that is necessary now is this public software mated with generic hardware that standard computer companies, such as Oracle, Sun and IBM will be happy to provide.

Business is Opening Up

Previously, I have been a more-or-less standard liberal, and used more-or-less standard liberal sources: Truthout, for example. I still use them, but I now have a whole now world of ideas from the must unexpected source imaginable: the business world. The same world that messed up most of my life - and which I hated with the strongest passion imaginable.

What has happened here? Part of the business world seems to have opened up and is now entertaining powerful new ideas. Twenty years ago these thinkers would have gotten the boot. Now they are giving business seminars.

This is a refreshing change. The old liberal world was getting stale and useless. This new world is fresh and has the backing of the people who count - or at least a few of them.

My State of the Union message would now be: a part of American is beginning to open up - but a much larger part is closing down. The future is uncertain.

Here are my new sources:

Nicolas Carr: The Big Switch
The Internet Promotes Social Polarization
Software as a Service

John Hagel & John Seely Brown The Only Sustainable Edge
Why we Need Big organizations
A Labor Day Manifesto for a New World
The Global Financial Crisis: Not out of the Woods Yet

Benoit Mandelbrot: The (Mis)Behavior of Markets
A Fractal View of Financial Turbulance
The Nature of Time
Power Curves

Shocks on the Front Wheel of a Bicycle

I just got them today, and I was surprised at the result: you need them soft on a rough road to keep from bouncing all over the place, but you have to stiffen them up on a smooth surface to make it more stable, like a road bike. Fortunately, they are adjustable.

I also got a basket mounted on the rear of the bike. A heavy load in a basket on the front makes steering difficult. Delivery bicycles with a large front basket have a small front tire to keep the center of gravity lower.

Powerful Thoughts About the Future of the Internet - and About the Future of all of Us

Edge Perspectives with John Hagel: defining the big shift

I got this from Slashdot, my source for a lot of stuff.

SphereOfInfluence writes "Dion Hinchcliffe over on ZDNet declared in [0]a new post that the Web OS has finally arrived and that businesses and IT departments must adjust to the fact that everything's starting to move to the cloud. He cites John Hagel's so-called [1]big business shifts of the 21st century and claims cloud computing, crowdsourcing, open APIs, Software-as-a-Service are the future of the workplace. He goes on to present a compelling visual model of the [2]Web OS circa 2009 and examples to back up some of the statements."

This posting will only follow up in link [1], but that is plenty. John Hegel is one smart guy. Any futurist will have a hard time keeping up with him. Note the new buzzwords: the cloud, crowdsourcing, open APIs, software-as-a-service. Of the bunch, I only what open APIs are, although I am getting a feel for software-as-a-service. I hear about the cloud constantly, but am only beginning to understand it - but I can see it is going to have an enormous impact. Here is John:
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At the highest level, we would characterize the Big Shift as moving from a world of push to a world of pull.  In other words, given the growing uncertainty in the world around us, we must master a new set of techniques required to access, attract and accumulate resources to unleash peer based learning in far more flexible ways than conventional push programs permit.

We are moving from a world where the source of strategic advantage was in protecting and efficiently extracting value from a given set of knowledge stocks – what we know at any point in time.  As knowledge stocks depreciate in value at an accelerating pace, the focus of economic value creation shifts to effective and privileged participation in knowledge flows. Finding ways to connect with people and institutions possessing new knowledge becomes increasingly important. Since there are far more smart people outside any one organization than inside, gaining access to the most useful knowledge flows requires reaching beyond the four walls of any enterprise.

The greatest economic value will come from finding ways to connecting relevant yet diverse people, both within the firm and outside it, to create new knowledge.

Just at the time when more and more information is becoming available about more things, the driver of value creation is shifting from explicit knowledge – that which can be expressed abstractly and statistically – to implicit knowledge – that which drives our day to day practices but which we generally have a very difficult time expressing, much less quantifying.
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Powerful stuff!