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Category Archives: The Future

The Beady Eye writes an open letter to the United Nations re the forthcoming Climate Summit Paris 2015.

30 Thursday Jul 2015

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in Climate Change., Environment, Humanity., Politics., Sustaniability, The Future

≈ Comments Off on The Beady Eye writes an open letter to the United Nations re the forthcoming Climate Summit Paris 2015.

Tags

Capitalism vs. the Climate., Climate change summit Paris 2015, Delegates Paris Climate change Summit 2015

30th July 2015

Dear Delegate.

In our contemporary world it is very rare that we are asked to talk about what lies at the heart of our actions.  Instead we hide behind statistics, data, policy statements etc, few of which actually touch other people’s hearts and minds.

To days debates between today’s religions, ideologies, nations and classes will in all likelihood disappear along with Homo Sapiens so it is naive to imagine that we simply hit the brakes on climate change and all will be honky dory.

We are more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with all that power. We seem to be more irresponsible than ever. We are accountable to no one, and consequently wreaking havoc on or fellow animals and on the surrounding ecosystem, seeking little more than our own comfort and amusement, yet never finding satisfaction.

There is nothing more dangerous than a dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?

The real question is not what do we want to be come?  but ‘what do we want to want’.

We all know that we must move away from our excessive and selfish lifestyle.

So as you prepare to come to Paris I would like to ask you to think about your personal role, and answer a simple, but profound, question:

Why do I care?

In making climate change and the protection of our beautiful planet a personal issue of your own beliefs and values you will come to the Cop primarily as a conscious human being not just a representative of a Government or agency.

Since time memorial we have all been led to believe that our current lifestyle is the most satisfying, but as you know in reality it is based on egoistic and unjust exploitation of resources and of human capital. It has led to a lifestyle based on selflessness and if left unchecked it will take us to an irreversible process of self-destruction.

We all know that opportunity for an agreement will be beset by challenges.

The question at the heart of any forthcoming  Agreement surely most be > Who is going to pay for it.

It will not be the present exclusively profit-focused, job-oriented, planet threatening, income-wealth, gap-widening civilization.

It will not be the free-market capitalism even thought private investors stand to lose $4.2tn (£2.7tn) on the value of their holdings from the impact of climate change by 2100 even if global warming is held at plus 2C, a report from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) has warned.

It will not be cash strapped world Governments.

It will not be a single global tax or regulatory scheme whether they live in a capitalist or communist society.

It will not be Industry reverting the trend of economic development and investment by coupled its insensible greed for profit with carbon emissions.

There is little point in agreeing a new climate change targets if there is no compassionate response to climate change requires for us to help the world’s poorest gain access to sustainable energy solutions so that they can improve their lives while avoiding the dirty energy path that developed countries followed.

There is little point in making the Agreement an Internationally legally binding treaty when there is no way of enforcing its terms or applying penalties for breach thereof.

There is little point in countries submitting their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions. The very reference to Intended expresses the get out clause.

By far the biggest obstacle to any agreement will be how countries will finance the move to a low-carbon global economy.

Even if one of these above problems were politically feasible, air is vital to a healthy economy. Which it isn’t. It is the people who want to breathe clean air. Climate pollutants, on the other hand, are everywhere. They are a waste product of nearly every aspect of modern life, and they are not limited to carbon; methane, soot and nitrous oxide all contribute to rising temperatures.

The present generation of young people is the forerunner of the generation of the most powerful generation in human history because of the enormous technology in their hands. We have to get them engaged in creating the world they wish to live in, and pass on to the next generation.

The sooner the socially committed players take charge of technology, the faster the world Social business is a new variety of business which delinks itself from any desire to make personal profit, where economic prosperity isn’t defined by constant reckless growth.  We need to develop social systems that encourage people to put aside short-term personal gain in favor of long-term societal and environmental interests.

It is not just yours it is our collective moral responsibility to act. We must act because we care. With that comes a different way of thinking about both mitigating and adapting to climate change, from the roads to the treetops.

We seemingly need to get as close to demise as possible to be able to see things clearly. We’re already running up to and beyond the biophysical boundaries that enable us to exist. Given the pace of change, we can no longer exclude the possibility of reaching critical tipping points that could abruptly and irreversibly change living conditions.

It is only a mobilization of conscience on a global scale that will enable humanity to meet this great challenge confronting us.

We are already seeing promising signs such as the joint announcement by the US and China in Beijing in November 2014 and the decision of the European Council a few weeks before. Together these cover around 50% of world emissions.

Realistically we all know that if either China or the USA were to discover new reserve of Oil, Gas, or Coal they would not leave it in the ground.

So where are we?

The first and only scientific fact to know about climate change is that carbon is (almost) forever. 

The Paris agreement for what its worth will come into effect in 2020. To Late.

At this meeting, more than 190 States will discuss a possible new global agreement you have to reach a universal agreement to limit the global warming to 2 degrees Celsius by 2100. To Late.

Countries have to agreed that there will be no back-tracking in these national climate plans, meaning that the level of ambition to reduce emissions will increase over time. Not Possible. Look at the United Nations a gossip shop with no money controlled by Veto.

Countries have been invited to submit their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions to the new climate agreement to be concluded in December, in Paris. This approach represents a concession to political and diplomatic realities, as well as to the limits of international agreements in influencing countries’ behavior in an area so vital to their interests.

The climate change issue is driven more by national than by international politics, so the agreement needs to allow states to determine the content of their own commitments.

So far 21 out of the 194 attending have submitted their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions. Bravo.

You might well ask at this point what is the solution.

There is only one solution and that is the creation of a World Aid Commission of 0.05% (for sake of argument) On all Stock Exchange Transactions with a higher commission on a High Frequency Trades, on all Foreign Exchange Transactions over $20,000, on all Sovereignty Wealth Funds Acquisition., on all Drilling Wells. 

This is the only viable solution to make Profit and Greed pay.

This would create a perpetual World Aid Fund with unlimited funds to tackle Climate Change, Inequality of Opportunity, Education and Disaster Aid.

It will create incentives and spread the funding through out the world by harnessing the very problem that has created the position we now find ourselves in.

Why will it work?

Because ( if firm action is not taken at the forthcoming climate change talks in Paris and the Earth’s temperature warms by a further 5C)  investors are facing losses of almost $7tn at today’s prices. 

Because democratizing our energy supply can be achieved by this fund in making non repayable grants available to the worlds citizens to install solar power.  There’s something special about solar. Not just because it’s genius technology but because, it puts the power to act in millions of hands.

The energy and climate debate is very political and bogged-down by big vested interests.

Because it would solve Climate change which does not have the time or money to be reverted. Ever four days we add a million more people to the planet scuttling our rosy dreams of sustainability.

The definition of success in Paris has been widely misunderstood, and as a result there is a risk that success may be viewed as failure.

Before I wish every success here is a small practical step. Let the summit ask all major TV Media Channels weather forecasts carry a section on the effects of climate change.

The citizens of the world will be watching you.

Yours Sincerely,

The Founder and writer of the Beady Eye.

PS. There is no need for you to respond to this open letter I along with millions that are currently signing online petitions in support of the Earth which has no voice other than climate Change trust you.

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THE BEADY EYE LOOKS AT WHAT WRONG WITH THE WORLD.

28 Tuesday Jul 2015

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in Humanity., Sustaniability, Technology, The Future

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE LOOKS AT WHAT WRONG WITH THE WORLD.

Tags

Climate change, Distribution of wealth, Earth, Environment, Greed, Solutions to world problems, Technology, Visions of the future.

OK, a list of what is wrong will go from here to eternity, so before you read this post take a look at the two U tube videos below, and then do something.

If you Goggle the question you will quickly find that there’s no shortage of people who know what is wrong with the world.

The most frequently cited reason is probably the decline of religion, specifically the religion of the person writing it.

Second to “the fall of religion” the most popular answer is probably “religion.” But there are other themes too: lack of respect for elders, unregulated capitalism, greed, alcohol, the economy, the rich, attachment, premarital sex, liberals, the unemployed, pride, lawyers, apathy, Starbucks, Mc Donalds.

Googling the question myself, they all sounded more like symptoms to me.

If certain behaviors are widespread and problematic, whatever causes them must be a bigger, more fundamental problem. Right? Maybe not.

Most people cannot even intelligently discuss the pressing issues of our day.

For me it is that we are too ignorant to open our minds to the problems around us. To selfish to open our hearts to what else is out in the world. To indoctrinated to accept an opinion other than our own, deaf to other people’s voices, blind to the pain and suffering we see in the streets and scared to do anything about it.

Our planet is now slowly dying and we are the reason to blame for its slow demise.

We fill her oceans with black poison. We fill her skies with acid. We cut down all the trees she spent years to grow. We cover her soil with blood and we use her as our own personal dump.

Worst of all we just sit back and watch as it falls apart.

Why?

Because as the twenty-first century unfolds, immensely powerful currents of capitalism, labour, and information turn and shape the world with a growing disregard for the boards and opinions of states.

So the world we see in front of our eyes is not governed by any particular state, organisation or ethic group, but by greed and profit. All run by the stock exchanges and algorithms

What is left is mindless adoption of technology as the end-all-be-all solution to humanity’s problems rather than global cooperation to the appearance of essentially global problems.

I think most people would not say there isn’t something wrong.

But if we’re going to regard the world as if there’s something wrong with it, shouldn’t we be able to identify it, at least with ballpark-level precision?

Here the Beady eye list of what is wrong.  Feel free to add.

Climate Change: Overpopulation: Thirst:  Poverty:  Inequality of opportunity:  Equal rights:  A lack of Education:  Terrorists:  Atomic arsenals:  Corruption:  Distribution of Wealth:  Religious Extremists: Political Extremists of Far Left & Far Right: Lying Politicians:Racists:  Class structure: Reality TV:  Farmer Subsidies:  Sexists:  Bestiality:  High Cost of Space Programmes:  Hopeless addiction to entertainment, technology, and celebrity gossip:  Soulless of suburbs, sprawls, and office parks create stress, malaise, and depression:  The existence of Hollywood, which poisons the world’s culture by normalizing narcissism, consumerism, and bad movies:  Pervasive politically correct environment where dissenting thought is labeled sexist, racist, or homophobic:  Treatment of smartphones as both friend and passionate lover, which replaces time spent in face-to-face interactions with real friends and lovers:  Universities that serve as liberal brainwashing factories instead of palaces of wisdom, enlightenment, and masculinity:  Disposable culture where still-functional items are thrown away instead of being repaired or reconditioned:  Competitive conversation culture where people talk about themselves instead of listening. Contemplative silences are looked upon as boring or even creepy:  Rule by an oligarchy that spies on citizens who don’t even care about its government’s illegal acts because they are too busy playing Candy Crush: Homosexuality openly embraced and displayed in public around children who don’t yet understand the nature of human sex:  Complete ignorance of world affairs by citizens due to being comically manipulated by media propaganda. Russia bad! Saudi Arabia good!:  People who can no longer handle original thoughts without being offended or“triggered.”: Militarization of police whose monopoly on violence allows them to taze and kill with impunity:  Welfare state that redistributes money from hard-working provider men to a growing population of single mothers who are subservient to the state instead of husbands:  Calling corporate customer service and having to converse with robots:  People who favor tweets for no apparent reason:

Out of date World Organisation are in need of radical reform.

  • For some reason THE US GOVERNMENT still thinks they should have to take care of the whole planet. The U.S. national debt is over 14 times larger than it was back in 1981:
  • OPEC nations are going to bring in over a trillion dollars from exporting oil this year:

So where do we stand in regard to Solutions.?

I would really love to hear your answer to that question, in the comment section below. Whatever comes to mind. The question does presume that there is actually something wrong with the human world. If you think there isn’t, please say so too.

Fans of singer Justin Bieber scream as he performs on NBC's Today Show in New York

I know it’s a pretty broad question, and any answer is welcome. There’s no need to do up an essay or anything, but you’re welcome to. I know Raptitude readers are a thoughtful bunch and I just want to know what kinds of ideas you people have in your minds about what’s wrong with this world.

Here are few Solutions:

Make education FREE not a product.

Place a World Aid commission of 0.05% on all High Frequency Trading, on all Sovereign wealth Funds Acquisitions, on all Foreign Exchange transactions over 20,000 dollars, creating a perpetual World aid fund. ( See previous posts) This would close down all need for Charity.

The poverty trap,” “the ladder of development”—go limp under the magnifying glass of actually being tested.

Leaders who lack wisdom approach problems with linear vision – thus only seeing the problem that lies directly in front of them and blocking the possibilities that lie within the problem. As such, they never see the totality of what the problem represents; Problem solving is the greatest enabler for growth and opportunity.

Out of this fund make available non repayable solar-panel grants. The direction to go is obvious: toward energy independence. THIS IS WHAT THE PARIS CLIMATE CHANGE SUMMIT IN PARIS SHOULD BE LOOKING AT. (https://youtu.be/qlTA3rnpgzU  Probably, a key factor, if not the key factor, in solving our environmental problem is time.

2.5bn people still lack basic sanitation and diarrhoea is the second largest killer of children. 1.1 billion people, or 15 percent of the world’s population, practice open defecation.

Parts of the world could see a supply-demand gap of up to 65% IN WATER RESOURCE BY 2030. Currently, more than one billion people don’t have access to clean water. And with 70 percent of the world’s freshwater used for agriculture, water’s critical role in food production must be considered as climate and resource conditions change.

Reform the United Nations giving equal rights to all Nations.

Legalism of Soft Drugs would reduce the prison population.

Re Introduce National Service to deliver dignity not war.

People think about their own perceived world and part of the challenge is to get people out of that world.

The question now for all of us in the 21st century is will we realize that this is indeed an urgent problem and take bold enough action in sufficient time? The answer to this question is yet to be given.

Here lies the land of technology opportunity, a place where the upside of technology benefits is enormous and world changing.” We’re just the technologists. And actually I think those questions are for society as a whole.” Wrong.

What would happen if we applied our knowledge and skills in these pockets with the resources, creativity and speed of giants like Google and Apple? Let’s give it a try. Let’s encourage our biggest companies to tackle some of the world’s biggest problems. Let’s apply technology tools like hackathons and lab days and rapid prototyping toward solving social and environmental issues. Let’s do some good.”Résultat de recherche d'images pour "pictures of the world"

 

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The Beady Eye looks at the benefits and non benefits of Social Media.

20 Monday Jul 2015

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in Social Media., Technology, The Future

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Big Data, Earths future., Earths Nightmare, Future Society., Globalization, Power of Social Media, Social Media, Social networking, Social world, The Internet of Things, The Internet.

I would like to think you’re here not necessarily because your agree or disagree with what I write, but that you think it is worth hearing and want to learn, interact and debate with me. If you like pressing the like button this is not the place to find the like button.  Lets hear your views.Eyes Robot Cyborg wallpaper background

Social Media a vast and complex subject far to large to cover all aspects.

In this post I am going to try to address some of the more obscure effects it is having on all of us or could have in not the so distant future.

How much do we understand this new dictatorship we’re in?

IF YOU ASKED ME I WOULD SAY: WE DON’T HAVE A CLUE.

Technology has revolutionized the way people go about their daily activities..

Google received over 2 million search queries per minute. The Number of people who use Twitter 302 million monthly active users 28/04/2015. Apple in the last three months turned over 60 billion a 40% profit of 11billion.

Facebook its monthly active users cleared 1.35 billion — roughly equal the population of China, and 9 percent larger than that of India. By these numbers, nearly 20 percent of the world’s population logs into Facebook once a month. And if we just look at the worlds Internet users, roughly half of them — every other person with Internet on the planet — use the site actively. 936 million daily 22/04/2015.

Half of all Internet-users live in “Facebookistan”

In the time it takes you to read this sentence more than 684,478 pieces of content will be shared on Facebook, 100,000 people will tweet, hundreds of thousands more will “like” an Instagram photo…and that’s if you read very quickly.

Access to technology has become an integral part of education, socialisation and industry related requirements, and accordingly Internet usage is evolving and growing rapidly. It is changing the way we shop to the way we drop. It does not care about time or distance. Everyone can be online every time and communicate with everyone everywhere.

The internet is home to millions of sites, representing both commerce and the people who share their thoughts and experiences with anyone who visits. The internet users worldwide now represents 3.17 billion, or in other words half of the current world population.  

The question is whether the effortless, ever-changing world of online social life is in fact one that ultimately undermines the ability to explore narrative, and place people, ideas and events in wider contexts.

There is no argument that it is effecting the way we all live but if we don‟t act to enhance inter generational communication, we risk generating a culture structured by a digital/communication divide between young people, their parents and older members of the community.

Cyber citizenship, if it is to retain relevance and deliver benefits to the community, therefore, is a concept that would more usefully be applied to the community as a whole, rather than as a set of policies that target young people as requiring protecting – or protection from – in a digital landscape.

Our understanding of cyber citizenship must be more holistic, to fully encompass and resonate across all of the settings in which we live our lives – be that home, school, work, our local communities or our communities of interest.

So what effect is Social Media actually having on the world communicates and our life styles.

For example:

The internet is the place to interact with new people and a way to expose yourself to strangers. The partial anonymity available online can be used as a mask for sexual offenders and psychos;

Social media is being used as a tool by movie studios well ahead of a film’s release to help shape the marketing campaign.

Billions of Amateur videos, posted on social media websites.

Americans across the country took to social media to celebrate the Supreme Court’s decision making same-sex marriage a right.

Its replacing communication by letter or phone.

Twitter and Facebook are only two of the online connections people use today to stay in contact with friends and family.

The entire purpose of setting up social media networks around the world is to allow and promote the world to communicate and connect with one another. However, the trend that seems to be following this widespread connection and communication is the exact opposite.

It all appears to boil down to you having no way of really knowing what is the truth and what is the lie. 

Someone’s life and personality neatly tucked away in the cyber-universe.

Do the dangers of online networking far outweigh the benefits?

Who knows.

One of the great dangers as far as I am concerned is the establishment of an economic order that would apply to all, everywhere.

No social animal is ever guided by the interest of the entire species to which it belongs.

Social Media allows cooperation with complete strangers who are imagined to be your friends. This could lead to the entire human race becoming a single unit governed by a single set of laws. These days we think of the planet as a single unit but for most of its history it was in fact an entire galaxy of isolated human worlds.

The ever tightening social media links will in the long run destroy individuality.  We are now living in an age of technology where the information contained on these sites is now being used against us.

So the benefits of SNS use are dependent on good internet and media literacy: having the skills to critically understand, analyse and create media content while avoiding addiction.

Young people are consuming, producing, sharing and remixing media.

This has led to the claim that today‟s young people are produsers‟ they actively produce and consume media. The importance of SNS in young people‟s everyday lives is indisputable: 90% of 12 to 17 year olds, and 97% of 16 to 17 year olds, use SNS

Social media has begun to create an unsociable disconnected generation of young adults… they lack awareness of the public nature of the internet. This include the management of personal information and privacy, the risk of predation and cyber bullying.  Can it be minimised?

It is compromising the development and maintenance of supportive friendships and involvement in institutions traditionally understood as the embodiment of “communities‟, namely school, sports clubs, families etc.

Social networking sites have become an important additional arena for politics. It increasingly important for the expression of identity.

What can be done if anything.

Education MUST increased internet and media literacy – ensuring all young people develop the skills to critically understand, analyse and create media content.

With the lack of parental supervision between the ages of fourteen to seventeen, which makes one of largest demographics using social networking sites, these teens ARE subjected to mature elements..

Teenagers are finding their identity in the world, they are the “my space generation” (Livingstone, 2008) the internet has allowed them to connect with people from all over the world but do they choose to do that…

It is presenting mankind with the biggest opportunity to change the course of history.  It is exposing the Inequalities and making the world aware of our common vulnerabilities.

Then there is growing power of Petitions not to mention the job market or trial by Social Media and the greed of the business world which is beginning to be recognized for what it is by targeting Advertising.

As I said don’t press the like button be an individual and leave a comment.

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The Beady eye looks at the enormous cost of space travel.

17 Friday Jul 2015

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in Space., Technology, The Future

≈ Comments Off on The Beady eye looks at the enormous cost of space travel.

Tags

INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION:, Nasa Budget., Nasa., Space.

In the last few days we all watched a few hundred people if that clapping themselves on the back all over a photo or photos of a planet 6 billion mile away that we never set foot upon.  A technological achievement indeed.

Knowledge is invaluable. Furthering our understanding of how the universe came into being, and ultimately how we came into being, cannot be measured as useful solely in terms of cost.

The question is looking at the present state of our planet do we really need to be taking photos of planets that we will never step on.

America was the first nation to land on the moon, but what tangible benefits to mankind have occurred as a result?

The Hubble Telescope has sent back fascinating pictures of our universe. But again, how has this benefited anyone other than providing marvelous sights which awe us?

The only life found on Mars, from the incredibly expensive probes, is some dead amoeba.

All of it hasn’t led to any medical cures or any answers to the origins of the universe.

There are many things in our world that have not discovered yet; do cures to AIDS and cancer ring a bell? And what about over coming poverty?

The point is, space exploration is extremely expensive.

I don’t feel that the solution’s to our problems can be solved by a space expedition. Perhaps it time to find a solution to what we don’t know in our world before exploring a different one. We simply don’t have the money or resources.

Besides, if it’s unemployment you’re worried about, more people to devote their lives to over-coming the problems we know about, and not digging up more for us to “solve”.

We all know that there are major crisis going on at your home planet.

Global warming and the world wild economic crisis, which will cause the collapse of Capitalism not to mention a return to Barbarity – ISIS.

Why rush off to space when we’ve can see our own planet yet?

Why bother spending all this money on exploring space when we could be helping our own planet that us humans live on.? It’s a strong argument.

Why Not?

Out in space there is virtually unlimited resources. It is all just a matter of collecting it and bringing it back, which granted will not be an easy task.

Many discoveries and products have been developed from the knowledge gained from space exploration.

For example, NASA created Velcro which is now used in many clothing items, bags and so forth. Non-stick pans and surfaces were also created as a result of space exploration.

Space travel has also given us a lot of other new things for example the micro chip, the CAT scan and so on. Plastic was invented by material engineers working on the space program. The Internet was a joint military and NASA project.

Satellites were some of the first venturers into space and are now a critical part of our society. Very important for hurricanes and dangerous storm systems.

GPS allows Google to track you ever movement.

If we compared space exploration to other areas of government spending (e.g. military), the cost of space exploration simply isn’t ridiculously high.

It’s about $10,000 to put a pound of anything into a near-earth orbit. To put a pound of anything on the moon costs about 10 times as much.

It use to costs $500 to $700 million every time the shuttle flies combined with overall cost yielding a per-flight cost of nearly $1.7 billion. The average cost to launch a Space Shuttle is about $450 million per mission.The shuttle Columbia lifts off on the first space shuttle mission ever, STS-1, on April 12, 1981.

 

Billionaire space tourists have flown to the space station at a reputed price of $20 million per head.The space shuttle Endeavour and International Space Station shine front and center in this amazing (and historic) photo of the two vehicles docked together as seen from a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Astronaut Paolo Nespoli snapped this view and others durin

The space station costs upward of $100 billion.

The bottom line:

So was the shuttle program worth the 40 years (10 years of development and 30 years of flight) of the $209 billion that NASA and the nation poured into it? That probably depends on your priorities and your point of view.

In 1966, NASA’s budget was $5.9 billion (4.4 percent of the federal budget). By 1972, Nixon had cut it to $3.4 billion (1.6 percent of the budget). To Day its less than one half of one penny out of each dollar the national government spends goes to NASA.

It’s still a lot of money—about 17.7 billion dollars.

And in the four decades since, NASA’s budget has continued to decrease as a proportion of national spending. The agency got $18.45 billion in fiscal year 2011, less than 0.5 percent of the federal budget.

Space exploration isn’t cheap. Let’s put those trillions of dollars to good use here on Earth, where it could change the lives of millions. Send probes to space, but spend the money here on Earth.

For me the real value lies in we are starting to see how small and fragile we are out there floating in space, maybe, just maybe we will not be so prone to abusing our one true home.

To put it in perspective think about this: Apple earns $325,000 every minute.

The next and last step of human evolution is overcoming the mind and learning the truth of life.

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The Beady eye pays homage to Hubble.

14 Tuesday Jul 2015

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in Humanity., Space., The Future

≈ Comments Off on The Beady eye pays homage to Hubble.

Tags

Hubble., Space.

As Horizon fly’s pass Pluto poor old Hubble is left in the dark.

Launched aboard the shuttle Discovery 25 years ago on the April 24, it had its vision restored in December 1993.

Orbiting the Earth for over two decades, Hubble has helped to answer some of the most compelling astronomical questions of our time – and uncovered mysteries we never knew existed. Investigating everything from black holes to planets around other stars, Hubble has changed the face of astronomy, ushering in a new chapter of humanity’s exploration of the universe.

So in honor of Hubble – The beady eye of Space- here is what it has achieved

 

Over 100 Terabytes of observations all captured in digital files.

Astronomers have used all those observations to generate over 12,800 scientific papers, making the Hubble one of the most productive scientific instruments ever designed and built.

There are no rockets or thrusters on board the Hubble. To change directions, it spins reaction wheels that, thanks to Newton’s Third Law of Motion, make the telescope spin in the opposite direction. The wheels spin at about the speed of a clock’s minute hand, turning 90 degrees in 15 minutes.

Hubble operates on only 2,800 W, a little more than an electric range’s largest burner on high.

The telescope gets all its electricity from a pair of solar panels that measure approximately 23 х 9 ft (each).

Engineers gave Hubble a pointing accuracy of 0.007 arc seconds, which is analogous to aiming a laser and hitting a dime 200 miles away.

The most distant objects Hubble has seen are 13.4 billion light years.

The Hubble takes only black-and-white images. The spectacular color images you see from the Hubble are made by combining two or more black-and-white exposures through colored filters. Then, when the image is further processed, colors matching the filters are added.

Hubble helped construct the largest scale 3-D maps scientists have of where dark matter is distributed in the universe.

Also, by helping to find out the mass of Eris, which is 27 percent more massive than Pluto, the realization that similar bodies might lurk in the Kuiper Belt and beyond it helped demote Pluto and similar objects to dwarf planet status.

By gazing at star-forming regions such as the Orion Nebula, Hubble was able to show that protoplanetary disks of gas and dust are ubiquitous around many young stars.

Gamma ray bursts. Hubble helped discover these bursts typically occur in galaxies that were actively forming stars and were low in metallicity.

The comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 collided spectacularly with Jupiter in 1994, an impact Hubble captured in all its startling glory.

Hubble may have helped solve the mystery of how old the universe is, but it unexpectedly turned up an even more profound one — the fact that the rate of the universe’s expansion is not slowing down or even constant, but is inexplicably accelerating.

Hubble discovered that super-massive black holes probably lurk in every galaxy that has a bulge of stars at its center.

Hubble has made some important advances in our research into alien worlds, such as determining the composition of the atmosphere of an exoplanet for the first time and actually imaging the visible light of Fomalhaut b.

Hubble helped refine estimates of the universe’s age down to roughly 13.75 billion years, a result that not only plays a role in modeling how our universe has evolved over time, but also in our understanding other seemingly unrelated cosmic parameters, such as the mass of neutrinos.

It’s re-written a lot of what we know. Re-engineer humans for a better planet.

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The Beady eye looks at what is needed to come out of the Paris Summit on Climate Change.

13 Monday Jul 2015

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in Climate Change., Environment, Humanity., Politics., Sustaniability, The Future, Where's the Global Outrage.

≈ Comments Off on The Beady eye looks at what is needed to come out of the Paris Summit on Climate Change.

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Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, geoengineering, Global warming, Paris Climate Change Summit 2015, politics, science and technology, technophilia

Climate change is the ultimate global collective action problem, requiring cooperation from every government in the world.

It’s over twenty years since the first treaty, signed at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, when countries agreed to limit their emissions of greenhouse gases. 

Here is the reality:

We are the first generation to understand the consequences of a high carbon economy on the planet, on future prosperity and, in particular, on the most vulnerable around the world. Let us be the generation that stands up and takes the responsibility conveyed by that knowledge.” Christiana Figueres, executive secretary, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, May 2014.

So the question now is whether we will have the courage to act before it’s too late. And how we answer will have a profound impact on the world that we leave behind not just to you, but to your children and to your grandchildren.” US President Barack Obama, Georgetown Address, June 2013.

I was very struck by the fact that the impacts of climate change are undermining a whole range of human rights: rights to food, safe water and health and education. But it is also displacing people, which is very likely to cause not just human distress but potentially conflict. So for me it’s a very, very serious issue of human rights.” Mary Robinson, UN special envoy for climate change, 2013

Climate change will amplify existing social, political and resource stresses, shifting the tipping point at which conflict ignites, rather than directly causing it. Climate change is likely to increase the frequency, scale and duration of humanitarian crises. It is also likely to change patterns of migration, making border security an ongoing concern, especially in the developed world.” UK Ministry of Defence, Global strategic trends out to 2040.diesel global warming ny

We have just 5 months left until the Paris Summit. How likely is it that it will be meaningful and make a difference to climate.

What should be in it? 

A world Agreement; ( anything less is worthless.) 

The international agreement that has a clear legal basis that works for different national constitutions.  (All agreements are broken, so perhaps an agreement tied to World Trade/ and Arms deals might be enforceable.)

This agreement should be supported by a clear, shared accounting system and robust, transparent monitoring and reporting requirements.

It must be seen as fair for all. The agreement must allow for comparisons of national contributions, using appropriate indicators of national responsibilities and capabilities, to encourage ambition and ensure that climate action links with strategies for poverty alleviation and sustainable development.

The Agreement can not be seen as static. It should be for five-year cycle, with a ratchet mechanism over time built into the system and a clear, long-term goal.  Why? Because carbon targets will need to be revised in the light of emerging science. It should move towards a goal to phase out pollution from fossil fuels by 2050 and phase in clean energy technologies.

It will need financing to support actions on adaptation and mitigation.

The agreement should include commitments to scaled up public finance, to support adaptation and mitigation action, aligned with other public finance for development; and wider efforts should be made to secure private sector investment in the low-carbon economy.

Any new agreement covering forest protection, land use and agriculture should be properly financed, have clear rules for emissions accounting and involve local communities in decision-making. It should ensure better biodiversity, ecosystem protection and restoration, and include support for sustainable agriculture and increased climate resilience.

Here what at stake:

The uncompromising Math of Global Warming, Pollution will if we fail to act early will guarantee that we are leaving humanity with more dangerous climate change such as more frequent extreme weather, more droughts, heat waves, and floods.

Even in the face of planetary catastrophe, 195 governments in a room can be just incompetent. Amidst the thicket of complex policy talk, we need to define the red lines of the agreement and organise the press and politics around them.

Our top focus – a clear commitment to a world without carbon, powered by 100% clean energy.

That is what will put the fossil fuel industry on notice, and shift private investment massively into renewable energy. New power plants, buildings, city designs, and lifestyles are being formed as we speak. How these are built could lock us into decades of increasing climate pollution as many of these last for several decades at a minimum.

A prime example is in the electricity sector where the emissions of power plants that the International Energy Agency projects could be developed in the next two decades would be larger than the emissions of coal from the beginning of the industrial revolution and eat up a huge chunk of the amount of carbon that can be emitted by all sectors.

The current targets aren’t deep enough to address climate change and most countries only made commitments through 2020. So there is a need to deepen and extend the emissions reduction commitments.

The scale of this crisis demands action that goes beyond consistently “kicking the can down the road”. 

Once we have an agreement in hand then we can engage in serious ethical consideration over whether or not to act.

Will any of this happen?

Not a hope in a world that is driven by Capitalism.

The only way is as I have said in previous blogs is for Capitalism to contribute by placing a World Aid Commission of 0.05% on all High Frequency Trading , on all Foreign Exchange Transactions over $20,000, and on all Sovereign Wealth Funds Acquisitions.

https://youtu.be/anfbjiShjP8

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The Beady Eye looks at your Brain.

10 Friday Jul 2015

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in Humanity., Sustaniability, Technology, The Future

≈ Comments Off on The Beady Eye looks at your Brain.

Tags

Artificial life., Biological Engineering., Final frontier., Future generations., investments in science and technology., Neurosciences., Robots., Telepathy., The Human Brain.

IT’S A LONG, hard road to understanding the human brain so I have no intention of explaining yours to you here in detail.

Other than to say your brain has a critical function to sort out what you should remember and not remember. To determine what is true, it must know what is false.

Believing, interpreting, responding to environmental clues, or guessing is literally what a brain does.

Is your brain you.?  If not who are you.

If a person is not a brain, and a brain is not the thing that perceives, thinks, interprets, feels, desires, decides, and so on we all have serious implications for the future.

Are the mind and the brain one? or is it the mind that tells the brain what it wants or is the mind a product of mere brain activity.

Another words what you see is not really there; it is what your brain believes is there . . . your brain makes the best interpretation it can . In order to explain (interpret) a visual scene, the brain must represent it first, and then explain it to its self to store in your mind.

We perceive and understand only what our brains represent.

To make sense of the tangle of neurons that makes the human experience human, is as complicated as to why you are here in the first instance.

To understand how the brain works you need one in the first place. It does not however help to explain the electrical pulses that tells a neuron to fire. Never mind how billions firing together. Your brain contains about 100 billion nerve cells, or neurons, each of which can communicate with thousands of other brain cells.

The good news is that humanity is poised to crack open the mysteries of the human brain not the mind.

For the moment the brain remains mysterious, it allows us to  convert information into myriad forms to serve infinitely diverse ends.

The fields of your mind extend far beyond your brains they are hidden from view and not capable of being inspected.  Whatever in your brain is buried deep within the recesses of your mind.

The quest for immortality has inspired humankind since the dawn of civilization. So will understanding the workings of the brain bring us a step closer.

Neurosciences assume that the brain has a wide variety of capacities: the brain interprets and stores information, recognizes symbols, analyzes, thinks, believes, knows, designs computers, determines what is true, paints pictures, deciphers images, analyzes, prioritizes, learns, understands, remembers, and makes decisions of the mind.

However, if I am my brain, and every atom in my brain (or body) is replaced every seven years or so, then I must become someone else every seven years.

There is no need to suppose that all the laws of nature sprang into being fully formed at the moment of the Big Bang, like a kind of cosmic Napoleonic code, or that they exist in a metaphysical realm beyond time and space.

The brain has been designed to change. Or is memory inherent in nature. Ray Kurzweil - director of engineering at Google - claims that by 2045 humans will be able to upload their entire minds to computers and become digitally immortal - an event called singularity

Are we capable of transferring thoughts from one brain to another.

Telepathy is normal not paranormal, natural not supernatural, and is also common between people, especially people who know each other well.

Mental activity are not confined to the insides of our heads. They extend far beyond our brain though intention and attention.

Non biological mine’s.

At our current stage of technological development, we have neither sufficiently powerful hardware nor the requisite software to create conscious minds in computers or robot.

Your Brain gives you the ability to combine and recombine different types of knowledge and information in order to gain new understanding; the ability to apply the solution for one problem to a new and different situation; the ability to create and easily understand symbolic representation of computation and sensory input; and the ability to detach modes of thought from raw sensory and perceptual input.

So what happens when it is introduced to Virtual reality or interface technology or drones contextual technology, or open communication.

We are entering the next Age of Biological Engineering evolving cellular engineering and molecular imaging.

What is the most powerful technology on Earth? Biology is Technology:

Hundreds of companies are now attempting to leverage the manufacturing and computational paradigms of biology.

Inventing new ways to look at the world.

https://youtu.be/aNBSYpgOjzU

By gaining control over biological systems and their biochemical pathways — and designing new pathways by rewriting the DNA “software” in cells — synthetic biologists are ushering in the “Biological Age,” creating substances with not only superior electrical, optical, and mechanical properties, but with properties that we have never seen before in man-made materials:

If you don’t believe me that Biology is Technology:

Have a look.

In the dark forest of our current ignorance, nothing captures the imagination like the possibility of creating a machine that is conscious and exhibits the same higher mental abilities as humans.

Biological systems have the ability to do things that no human-made machine or chemistry can begin to approach: the ability to replicate, to learn, to scale from one to billions, to adapt, and to evolve.

Computers today are so advanced that some contain as many connections as exist in the human brain — ten trillion of them. They can also operate at much higher speeds than the brain. What was once purely science fiction is now approaching the possibility of science fact.

A double edge sword the second machine age is going to replace our brains.

Can advanced robots or computers be moral persons? The term “moral person” refers to a being that has moral rights, such as the right not to be harmed, the right of free movement, and the right of free expression.

So let me ask you a question is it the end of moors law. (Moore’s Law is a computing term which originated around 1970; the simplified version of this law states that processor speeds, or overall processing power for computers will double every two years.) Once transistors can be created as small as atomic particles, then there will be no more room for growth.

Do we have a responsibility to future generations of humans that might be adversely affected by the creation of menacing robots? Should we stop our research into artificial intelligence right now before we create something that we cannot control?

To answer these questions, it those seems odd to speculate about building a mind from electronic scraps when we have so little clarity about the nature of our own conscious minds.

The human body is divided into many different parts called organs. All of the parts are controlled by an organ call the brain.

The cerebellum the forebrain, midbrain, and hindbrain.

No other organ is like the brain and all other organs would be unable to function without the brain which by the way weighs about three pounds.

The brain is known as the “final frontier” of science; It is the nut that is toughest to crack but contains a vast wealth of information, a veritable treasure trove of knowledge that can enrich our understanding of human nature.

The problem with artificial life acquiring consciousness in the form of experience of self is that if gives artificial life autonomy. Consciousness is a loophole out of programming, whether it is genetic (humans) or cybernetic (computers).

When we solve the hard problem of consciousness, then we can create machines with brains any time before that is brainless.

A machine without moral rules that should be embedded into the programming of all superior robots; one of these is that a robot should never harm a human.

We’ll be uploading our entire MINDS to computers by 2045 and our bodies will be replaced by machines within 90 years, Google expert claims.  This singularity is also referred to as digital immortality because brains and a person’s intelligence will be digitally stored forever, even after they die.

But even if Einstein’s brain were intact enough to be plumbed with the tools of modern science, we might have to remain agnostic about the source of his brilliance.

Brain games have not yet fulfilled their promises of improved brain fitness.

How should we construe the relation of a person (soul) to his body or of his mind to his brain? To realize that conceptual clarity contributes to understanding what is known, and to clarity in the formulations concerning what is not known. A person is self-conscious and not brain-conscious, and needs no knowledge of the brain to function.

The brain, no doubt, makes it possible for us (not the brain!), to sense, perceive, think, reason, believe, feel, learn, know, understand, remember, and decide, and hopefully, to change our minds about how we think and talk about a person and the brain.

If not we are left with the following out of date Thesis.

Thesis 1: “The brain, as understood by neuroscience, is a piece of matter tingling with electrochemical activity” (Tallis 2009, p. 4).

Thesis 2: “The mind is what the brain does, and the brain is a causal machine . . . The ‘user illusion,’ nevertheless, is that a decision is created independently of neuronal causes, by one’s very own ‘act of will’” (Churchland 2005).

Thesis 3: “When the brain receives new sensory input from the world in the present, it generates a hypothesis based on what it knows from the past to guide recognition and action in the immediate future. This is how people learn” (Barrett and Bar 2009, p. 1325).

Thesis 4: “We can only understand categories of reality [for example, sound, color, taste, motion, action] and their regularities and interrelationships if our brains are capable of representing these categories . . . [W]e perceive and understand only what our brains represent” (Farah and Heberlein 2007, p. 40).

Thesis 5: Information (such as symbols, letters) is analyzed by and stored in the brain (Thompson and Harrub 2004a, p. 2), and the brain prioritizes information, deciphers images, and remembers (Martin 2013).

Thesis 6: “You are your brain” (Greene and Cohen 2004, p. 1779)

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PS:  Nothing of what I have said about your brain should be construed as in anyway a devaluing of your brain.

We are dualists who have two ways of looking at the world: With or without a Brain. However I would however suggest that you start using yours if you want a sustainable world.

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The Beady Eye looks at what is wrong with Modern day Education.

05 Sunday Jul 2015

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in Education, Sustaniability, Technology, The Future

≈ Comments Off on The Beady Eye looks at what is wrong with Modern day Education.

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Communication Technology, Modern day education, Teaching skills, TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENT, Technological revolution, Technology, THE UNITED NATIONS

Every person is an individual; they think differently, so wouldn’t it make sense that they all learn differently?

Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible.

Unfortunately the modern world does little to combat this. However more and more spheres of activity are being shaken out of their complacent ways.

Education is one of these spheres that needs to be redefined. We are fast approaching a new Singularity: when all the concepts that give meaning to our world – me, you, men, woman, love, hate-will become irrelevant.

So the big question for all of us is-what we want to become.

A question that dwarf the debates that currently preoccupy all of us.

After all if we don’t come to grips that we all live on the one planet and that all of to days debates between today’s religions, ideologies, nations, classes, will in all likelihood disappear along with all of us.  If we don’t learn to educate for sustainability rather than consumption and Slavery to information and knowledge owned by Google a by-product of capitalism.

There is little point in going to Space, or anywhere else if we are represented by Artificial Intelligence.

It is not a lack of education, but a lack of creativity, and an inability to independently think for ourselves that is the problem with Modern day Education.

For nearly a century, societies have believed that higher education is necessary for success, but the opposite is true with the modern version of education.

For instance, most of the high-tech companies were created by high school dropouts, who dream’t of doing something that nobody else had done.

You won’t find such inventive and pioneering attitudes in those who have been through school, college, and then university.  Students are trained to only strive for self-limiting ‘reachable goals’. 

For a lot of people out there, it is time to realize that creative, independent, free thought is more important than anything they can learn at any university.

To teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.”

“I never let my schooling interfere with my education.” — Mark Twain

So let’s have a look with the Beady Eye. (This is a “think piece” intended to stimulate thought and discussion, rather than a scholarly manuscript.) We just didn’t have time to address every social issue that surrounds education.

The term education is derived from Latin word educere, educare, and educatum which means ‘to learn’, ‘to know’, and to ‘lead out’. Education is an act or process of imparting or acquiring general or particular knowledge or skills, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life.

But rest assured that nobody cares about learning when they can’t even feed themselves.

In the primitive era indigenous education is said to be the significant resource for development, but in recent times it is said that modern education is the significant resource for material wealth. 

There is no argument that both types of education play a significant role in development of our world and that both type are precious tools to life, to put one’s potentials to use.

But how do we explain the fact that those who had spent the most time in college are also the most unsuccessful.

It is due to what we think education is for in the first place.

Technology enthusiasts have long heralded the power of technology—from the printing press, to blackboards, to the laptop—to transform education.

So far it has done little to impact educational processes and outcomes.

A young girl is using her mobile phone to send an SMS message in Urdu to her teacher. The girl is part of a Mobilink-UNESCO program to increase literacy skills among girls in Pakistan.  It is not. Why?  Because the education is in English (which is deemed to be the only language to learn if you want to understand the Modern Capitals World) not her language.

She is being turned into one of the ultra-conformists that Google and modern schools seek to mass-produce.  She will become one of the ones that couldn’t make it in the real world – her world.

No human beings are able to survive properly without education. Untrue.

The training of a human mind is not complete without education. Untrue.

Only because of education a man is able to receive information from the external humanity, to notify him with past and receive all essential information concerning the present. Untrue.

What is true is that indigenous educating in ones native tongue has created culture for millennium. In so doing ensuring their survival as a culture. Indigenous means originating in and characteristic of a particular region or country. It can also mean native, innate, inherent, or natural, produced, growing, or lliving, naturally in a country or climate; not exotic; not imported.

In the absence of writing, indigenous people depended on the power of their memories to facilitate the retention and transmission of all learned ideas to future generations.

Now its the power of Google, Facebook and the Smart Phone that is dumming us all down to a click for knowledge.

The debate is whether the power of mobile phone technology, will help hurdle several education barriers by finding new ways to support learning for rural girls or boys in insecure areas.

The point here is that we must protect verity, not to become copies of each other.

WHAT IS MODERN EDUCATION:

It is education that is synonymous with colonial, western or Christian education. Modern education can be understood as a by- product of the capitalist regime the terror of the ecosystem.

With the rapid expansion of information communication technologies around the globe, there is a high level of misdirected interest in harnessing modern technology to help advance the education status of some of the world’s poorest people at the cost of loosing their cultural values.  

Indigenous education was for everyone in the community and existed for the purpose of strengthening the community while Modern education is for everyone in the society for the purpose of strengthening the society.

Indigenous education taught children their own indigenous culture based within their own society while Modern education brings in cultures from another societies. 

The potential of technology to help improve education has significance beyond teaching children reading and math.

Quality education plays an important role in promoting economic development, improving health and nutrition and reducing maternal and infant mortality rates.

We look back on our past, and learn from our experiences.

There are many forms of Education.

Visual learning: Power point presentations, videos, and word documents.

Auditory learning has the most basic tool to learn- your voice. Through speaking and lectures.

Tactile learning involves physical hands-on activities, and therefore can take several forms.

Special attention, programs for students who need extra help to learn.

Education is in upheaval, with free online classes proliferating, tuition surging and public universities struggling. Perhaps worst of all, too many students leave school with high debt and no degrees. The endless chase for prestige and the resort-like marketing of college has nothing to do with Education.

Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are just one of these upheavals.

Others include initiatives to grant credit for “competency” in skills rather than time spent in class; digital systems to help match students to the right colleges and guide them to the most efficient course of study to obtain a degree; and hybrid learning environments at schools.

When  ‘cloud computing’, ‘m-learning’, or ‘total cost of ownership’ are introduced into the conversation no one knows where education is going.

Therefore, education has become a basic principle to measure the labor market on the basis of essential skills and the ability to appropriate them through suitable communication. The knowledge gained through education enables individuals’ potential to be optimally utilized owing to training of the human mind. Employment in the contemporary world is based on education, as employees must possess the required skills that correspond with the current technology to perform their tasks.

It is said that Information Communication Technology (ICT). (ICT refers to technologies that provide access to information through  telecommunications). is generally used to describe most technology uses and can cover anything from radios, to mobile phones, to laptops combined with technology holds great promise in helping bring quality learning to some of the world’s poorest and hardest to reach communities.

It does nothing to teach common culture and values. Other than through this type of education that Technological advancement has been realized enabling communication and production of cost-effective products and services to the society at large.

Education is an important tool that is applied in the contemporary world to succeed, as it mitigates the challenges which are faced in life. Untrue.

Everyone is an expert in something. A modern-day form of segregation.

In many ways, higher education is like any industry that has produced its product a particular way for a long time and is suspicious of anything new.

Teaching skills require a shift away from designing curricula based on topics and subjects and toward creating experiences where learners can choose their own objectives.”You can’t make socialists out of individualists. Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone is interdependent.”

— John Dewey, Father of Modern Education

Indeed, in some of the most remote regions of the globe, mobile phones and other forms of technology are being used in ways barely envisioned in the United States or Europe.

Will a technological future fix any of this? I hope so.

The lack of clear distinctions between service and education is blatantly visible in the world.

Experience alone cannot define its educational value without understanding its relationship to the individual learner.

Designating students for separate educational paths based on their academic performance as teens or younger is a worthless use of resources.

There is hope.

We’re already starting to see how tech-savvy people are using the web, software, and devices to connect those who have with those who don’t.

Can education help fix any of this? And not just in terms of stitching together technology, neuroscience, and learning design, but also in stitching together opportunity, safety, support, and care. We can only hope so.

We have much to do.

So far the educated Sapiens regime on EARTH has produced little that we can be proud off.

Despite the astonishing things that humans are capable of doing we remain unsure of our goals and we seem to be as disconnected as ever. No one seems to know where we’re going.

Self made Gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company. Wreaking havoc all around us, yet not finding happiness. It’s time we started to reeducate ourselves. So, do we need to revert to old school education in this new age techno world?

For starters you’d have to do away with the internet and the array of electronic gadgets that are so much a part of our children’s everyday lives.

The truth, as I see it, is that we are caught in an inexorable grind of change and human evolution. Towards what, God only knows, but it will obviously influence our children’s education, and their future. Finally, regardless of how out-of-control today’s schoolchildren appear, it may well be a matter of perception coloured by the nature of our own reality as adults.

I think some people teach solely because of that very belief.

Learning is a life-long endeavor.

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The Beady Eye looks at You.

01 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in Humanity., The Future

≈ Comments Off on The Beady Eye looks at You.

Tags

Evolution, Homo sapiens., Humanity, Liberal eugenics

I am no Anthropologist.

But here is what I know about you.

How are you?  If you stretched out all the DNA in your body and put them end to end, it would be about six times the distance that Pluto is from the Sun.

You are capable of abstract reasoning, language, introspection, and emotion. You are notable for your desire to understand and influence the world around you, seeking to explain and manipulate natural phenomena through science, philosophy, mythology and religion.

Your brain weights about 2% of our body mass but consumes 20% of our oxygen at resting state.

The changes in your DNA are completely random.

But not all evolutionary changes make inherent sense.

Sperm hold a much higher chance of carrying an error or mutation than an egg, especially among older men.

You decide who to have as a mate or how best to rear your children.

You have develop in a cultural sense; inheriting knowledge from previous generations and building upon it.

Your intellectual and emotional abilities are genetically surprisingly fragile.

Although you are now surrounded by the technological and medical benefits of a scientific revolution, these have masked an underlying decline in your brain power which is set to continue into the future leading to the ultimate dumbing-down of the human species.

You cannot step away from evolution.

In fact no matter how unique you think you are: you are living and dying like me on this planet called Earth.

“Uniquely in the living world, what makes humans what we are is in our minds, in our society, and not in our evolution.”

So what type of Modern Human are you.?

This is who you are.

Many people conceptualize evolution to be a gradual process, with natural selection blindly tinkering away at genetic and phenotypic diversity across generations. As long as people are tempted to confuse evolution with improvement dramatic changes in a species, under certain circumstances, can accelerate rapidly.

You don’t have to be right to be doing something useful.

Modern day human evolution is a contentious topic.

Is the human species doomed to intellectual decline?

Will our intelligence ebb away in centuries to come leaving our descendants incapable of using the technology their ancestors invented?

In short: Will Homo be left without his sapiens?

Our intelligence is designed to allow us to build houses and throw spears straighter at pigs in the bush, but that is not the real driver of brain size… In reality, what has driven human and primate brain evolution is the complexity of our social world, [and] that complex world is not going to go away.

Will the fruits of science and technology enabled humans to rise above the constraints of nature and cushioned our fragile intellect from genetic mutations. I don’t think so.

Humans of the future may have less hair.

Humans of the future may be more resistant to diabetes and heart disease.

Humans of the future may be physically weaker and more susceptible to pathogens.

Humans of the future may lack wisdom teeth.

Race differences may disappear.

But natural forces of evolution will still continue to shape humanity despite the power we have to profoundly alter the world around us.

This time does seem to mark a watershed where modern humans are pushing the boundaries further and further.

In my last post (The beady eye look’s at history’s greatest frauds) I argued that humanity’s collective intelligence has gone downhill ever since we started living on farms.

Its continuing with the iPad man. 

The cost of greater intelligence is marginally more expensive.

Human beings have stopped evolving after becoming the only species to “put halt to natural selection of its own free will”. Says David Attenborough

Humanity is fragile.

Are we genetically different from our Homo sapiens ancestors who lived 10-20,000 years ago?

When we think of human evolution, our minds wander back to the thousands of years it took natural selection to produce the modern-day man. But are we still changing as a species, even today.

But not only are we still evolving, we’re doing so even faster than before.

In the last 10,000 years, the pace of our evolution has sped up 100 times, creating more mutations in our genes, and more natural selections from those mutations.

In recent years, enormous advances in techniques for the recovery and analysis of ancient DNA have unlocked new secrets about our human evolutionary family tree. These advances indicate that modern humans did not completely replace other human species, as had once been suggested. Instead there was some interbreeding. This model has become known as replacement-hybridisation, ‘leaky replacement’, or ‘mostly out of Africa’.

All people today are classified as Homo sapiens.

Living in cities has produced a genetic variant that allows us to be more resistant to diseases like tuberculosis and leprosy. While we may like to believe our big brains make us smarter than the rest of the animal world, our brains have actually been shrinking over the last 30,000 years.

The average volume of the human brain has decreased from 1,500 cubic centimeters to 1,350 cubic centimeters, which is equivalent to a chunk the size of a tennis ball.

But about 10,000 years ago, someone who lived near the Black Sea developed a genetic mutation that turned brown eyes blue. It is virtually impossible for two blue-eyed mates to create a brown-eyed baby, our blue-eyed male ancestors may have sought out blue-eyed mates as a way of ensuring fidelity.

Finally, can we say what direction human evolution will take in the future?

This is a fascinating question to consider but impossible to answer because of innumerable unknown factors. Though, it is certain that we will continue to evolve until we reach the point of extinction.

Is Technology making modern-day MUMMIES: The world suffers global recession, enormous inequity, hunger, deforestation, pollution, climate change, nuclear weapons, terrorism, etc.

Are we going to stand back and spectate while the ugly foundations of a modern-day. More people have a mobile phone than a toilet.

It’s obvious to anybody that looks around at the behavior of Homo sapiens that we’re not really perfected in any way.

The violence and vandalism unleashed by the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in the Middle East in recent years is seen from Yerevan as a logical continuation of the world’s failure to properly recognize and condemn the past genocides, including the Ottoman-era massacres of 1.5 million Armenians.

To those who say we’re are really making progress, there are more slaves than at any time in human history — 27 million. On average, in the past half-hour, one more person will have been trafficked to the United States into slavery. Never mind the rest of the word.

But there are also other forms, where people voluntarily agree to take what’s presented to them as a job. It’s usually an opportunity for a better life and much-needed income. They go willingly.

There’s a lot of illegal money being made buying, selling, and exploiting humans — about $32 billion a year.

Until human rights are elevated to a serious consideration for all decision-making, the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration will remain an unattained goal. We are all human beings therefore we all have a stake in our history.

What if Darwin Got Wrong? Has our culture and our technology stopped or changed our evolutionary trajectory?

The Judeo-Christians believed that nature was placed here on Earth to be dominated by humans.

What is the present day relationship between nature and society?

Men are presented as being more powerful in society than women. As a species, we have naively disconnected ourselves from the ecology of life and have never fully credited our interdependence with nature. We are acting in ignorance to this whole and we are only beginning to feel the repercussions. The results of any evolution right now won’t really be visible until thousands of years in the future.

This is what we did look like:

 

 

 

 

This is what we might look like 100,000: years in the future.

So where does this leave us, evolutionarily speaking?

Don’t take received wisdom as the truth. All scientific knowledge is provisional. Question everything.

We differ from each other not only in our outward appearance, but also in the inner workings of our bodies. If humans had access to more than the 10% of the mental capacity that they now use, we would be able to control our body’s involuntary functions.

Evolution Has Never Been Observed.

But we are on the path to liberal eugenics?

Liberal eugenics is the idea of using genetic technologies to enhance human abilities and characteristics. Imagine the possibility of giving birth to your child without the possibility of any genetic mutations or ‘undesirable’ traits being passed along.

What would happen if we could change our physical appearance by the power of our own minds.

I believe that one day, we will be left with only two human races: those privileged enough to go through the process of designing their offspring’s own genome and those who will continue to roll the evolutionary die.

Is this the way we simply must go?

Society is the sum of the inventions, institutions, and relationships created and reproduced by human beings across particular places and times.

<a style=”color: #111; font-family: helvetica;” target=”_blank” href=”https://www.khanacademy.org/video/human-evolution-overview?utm_campaign=embed”&gt;

<b>Human evolution overview</b>: From the extinction of the dinosaurs to humanity
</a><br/>
https://www.khanacademy.org/embed_video?v=frE1rjhH77Y

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The Beady Eye looks at Big Data.

30 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in Big Data., Politics., Privatization, Technology, The Future

≈ Comments Off on The Beady Eye looks at Big Data.

Tags

Artificial Intelligence., Big Brother., Big Data, Distribution of wealth, Drones., Globalization, Inequility, Technological revolution

Is our world along with humanity disappearing into the Cloud.?

We as individuals are turning into “walking data generators”  ” App Material”

The Beady eye is only going to look a the most contentious realms of Big Data. Technologies that drive the explosion of growth of digital information such as the information collected.

Big Data is disseminated from trillions of devices such as smartphones and embedded sensors.

Huge quantities of digital trace data are collected through digitized devices (captured, for example, via social networks, online shopping, blogs, Apps, ATM withdrawals and the like) and through in-built sensors. The latter technologies include those that are equipped with GPS systems (e.g., smartphones and other surveillance and monitoring devices) and thus have the ability to identify a user’s location.

Ever since the dawn of life with language man has been collecting information. Not until written letters or symbols arrived was this information stored for future generations.

It is now being collected to replace us all with AI.

Knowledge was and still is the power that split the world into cultures- the rich in information and the poor with illiteracy – Slave or Master.

To day data is money and it is re splintering the world into the have and have not’s.

A next-generation retailer will be able to track the behavior of individual customers from Internet click streams, update their preferences, and model their likely behavior in real-time. Traditional advertising is shifting rapidly into the realm of personalized and highly targeted online and mobile ads—the realm of data driven marketing. Big Data and Advertising Case Study

Across all industries, including government, healthcare, media, energy, among others, data is becoming central to business operations. Every business is a digital company; and, every customer or employee is a content producer.

Today’s organizations use a plethora of information systems to support their business processes.

Advances in technologies and the increasing amount of information are transforming how business is conducted in many industries, including government.

Every business sector now collects data of one form or another, and the future marketplace will have even more computing power at their fingertips to mine customer behavior. Someone from every major industry is looking at the impact of being able to glean data from multiple data sources, structured and unstructured, from Healthcare to agriculture and more.

Businesses are using the power of insights provided by big data to instantaneously establish who did what, when and where.

The world’s volume of data doubles every 18 month.

In all forms it will grow 650 percent over the next five years.

Despite feeling overwhelmed, there’s an insatiable desire for more data.

The information overload is real and causing problems.

There is little or no regulations governing every time you click on a website, post on social media, use a mobile app and comment via email or to call centers, your data is collected for future use.

In my opinion, the world needs proper regulations about how and what kind of data should be collected.

My bigger concerns are related to unsanctioned organizations using my data and inferences about my interests, passions, affiliations and associations for borderline uses about my political, religious, sexual, etc. preferences. Just because a company can collect all kinds of personal information on consumers, it doesn’t mean they should use it willy nilly.

The more is better” philosophy.  There in lies the trouble.

Tracking customer preferences and purchases can reveal all kinds of private information, like illnesses, financial problems, even pregnancy.

For example a father recently discovered that his daughter was expecting a baby only because of Target’s TGT – 0.5% customer advertising technology. It analyzing his daughter shopping patterns so the store started to send her coupons for baby products which alerted the father.

Data gathering is not going away.

This should have us concerned, not just about targeted marketing but about what can be inferred about all of us every time we “like” something on FACEBOOK or post a snarky tweet on TWITTER.

From what I can tell, what Big Data does best is spy on individuals and collect useless data that helps people develop false and inaccurate assumptions.

Big Data may have wonderful potential, but we’re still going to have to get better at data exchange and integration before it’s going to have its biggest impact. We’ve spent decades digitizing everything, we should be able to analyze it. The problem is, that’s really hard – and it always has been.

THE BIG QUESTION REMAINS: Who does it belong to, and who should have access to it?
Human Face of Big Data

Big Data will let us watch flu outbreaks bloom and direct scarce vaccines to the most critical area’s. Schools are collecting more data than ever on how children are doing. Companies and nonprofits, meanwhile, are racing to put that data to use in the classroom.

Today, we’re at the convergence of these innovations—biotechnology, the ability to remote monitor and sensor, and now Big Data—which puts an augmented reality at our disposal.

However there is an undercurrent of concern about who owns big data and who has the right to access it.

Big Data technologies are at the heart of the intelligent economy and the solutions that enable it.

Big Data technologies are analyzing massive data sets, in science and research as well as mine data to prevent bad actors from committing acts of terror and/or to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse.

Government data generation and digital archiving rates are on the rise due to the rapid growth of mobile devices and applications, smart sensors and devices, cloud computing solutions, and citizen-facing portals.

As digital information expands and becomes more complex, information management, processing, storage, security, and disposition become more complex.

Information is a strategic asset, and government needs to protect, leverage, and analyze both structured and unstructured information to better serve and meet mission requirements.

New technology brings new challenges, and they should be properly educated to use it wisely and critically. It is used to study employee performance and retention.

The younger generations are not always aware of the challenges and dangers that come with big data.

Privacy here is a key issue to consider.

I sometimes get frightened to see what younger generations publish on their social media, without being aware how they expose themselves to the outside world. Just think about recommender systems.

When you want to buy a product or service from an online retailer, you are often frustrated because of the many choices and configurations possible. Thanks to an intelligent, analytical recommender system, purchases (and their customer feedback) are continuously monitored to better tailor future recommendations to customers.

Credit card fraud detection system.

In fact, thanks to credit risk analytics, our savings money is now efficiently safeguarded since every bank is obliged (via the Basel III capital accord) to analytically estimate credit losses and make sure it has enough provisions or equity buffers for worst-case scenarios.

Big Data is being used to detect social security fraud, to detect tax evasion fraud, to employ and fire people.

New data stores have emerged increasing the distribution of data and the complexity of securing and protecting that data along with it. It is now harder to protect sensitive data as it may move around between different transactional and analytical data stores as companies create new analytical workloads.

While there is more to do to wrestle big data to the ground. Defense (DOD) is investing approximately $60 million annually for new projects that will harness and utilize massive data in new ways and bring together sensing, perception, and decision support to make truly autonomous systems that can learn from experience, maneuver and make decisions on their own, and understand the limits of their knowledge.

Governments are facing more and more challenges in managing the life cycle of Big Data as government’s traditional silo approach hinders sharing knowledge and working across organizational boundaries.

While emails, instant messages, data files, document files, and scanned images are all driving the growth of Big Data, managing and storing this information — and its growth — are not trivial tasks. It has raised red flags about privacy, which remain unresolved.

The only way to make data totally safe is to not ever use it or keep it. Big Data Discriminates.

Our currents Laws cannot adequately handle the issues raised by Big data.

Just look at the legal complications created by systems using data and algorithms to include and exclude people from various programs.

What we have are porous laws on how this new technology changes previous understandings of civil liberties, not to mention data analysis, machine learning and the work scientists have been doing on non-discriminatory data mining models.

Individuals should be granted meaningful opportunities to challenge adverse decisions based on scores miscategorizing them.

Where data goes in and a decision comes out it’s unclear, or certainly opaque, just how that decision was arrived at. There is no way to trace why a decision was made.

With programmers doing real-life damage without even knowing it. The question is:  How do we update our understanding of due process for the 21st century?

These black box issues such as credit-scoring systems should be legal required to make their Systems Transparent.

If you take Google’s search algorithms for instance no one knows how it chooses the direction of its search. Perhaps it directs your search only to its profit.  It’s not  just about the quality of the user experience.HUNGARY–DPA Requesting a Flyby

Drones are becoming more widespread globally, the non military use of drones will add a further deluge of big data:

Cameras, heat and motion sensors, GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi signals, facial recognition and bio metric scanners allow for the growing use of drones in the industrial, agricultural, transportation and retail areas.

The use of drones—theoretically—should only be possible upon individual permit irrespective of the drone’s starting point and final destination.

However enforcement may be difficult.

The only way is a world license that creates an official record of the individuals operating/using drones for a commercial purpose.

In practice, the widespread use of drones for private purposes may result in unreasonable administration in connection with the above, drone users and operators may also be reluctant to provide so detailed information on their activities for confidentiality reasons.

If the drone records flight details for aviation safety considerations, personal data captured but not relevant for this purpose should be anonymised and stored separately or should be made unidentifiable, unrecognizable and inaccessible by the controller immediately after the drone finished flying.

Data should be stored on the drones only temporarily.

For example, during the security surveillance of a property, the drone may record pedestrians’ faces, movements, body-temperature etc., and the devices should be configured in a way which prevents them from this kind of processing. Drones should solely be able to signal the location and fact of an allegedly unauthorized attempt at entry onto the premises.

In practice, this principle should be assessed on a case-by-case basis, as the actual use of the drone may require more extended data processing than envisaged at the beginning. The drone may locate a trespasser who needs to be identified (to ensure to security surveillance purpose), and, in such a case, privacy-by-default settings should not prevent the enforcement of the drone operator’s legitimate interests.

For example, a recording of an agricultural land cannot be used for the surveillance of agricultural workers.

Given the amount of data governments store on citizens and the sensitivity of some of that data, it makes sense for state budgets to carve out funds for someone to shepherd how that data is collected, treated and stored.

Should there be a meaningful data life cycle amidst the sea of data.

In fact , big data may ultimately be a key factor in how nations, not just companies , compete and prosper . Algorithmic decision-making:

In a nutshell, the problem with ‘datification’ is that somebody else may … use the data thus produced – often with purposes different from those originally intended.

Make no mistake about it:

Our future, the future of humanity and the planet hangs in the balance.

Do we have what it takes to disrupt what is…in order to create what can be?

Big data as a high concept will never fully define itself it’s just a big scam. Surveillance programs. High Frequency Stock Trading. Electronic Currency Trading. Dooming us all down to rely on Google.

I hope it die’s a miserable death.

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