Tag Archives: Internet

Where has the Present gone?

06 Friday Mar 2015

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We are the first humans to live in the future.

In my last post ” You are not a Gadget. Yet ” I attempted to outline how society is being reinvented by the internet, our connected devices – the internet of things.

You might not agree that they are having an effect. If not, you need to wake up.

As in all moments of major technological change, people, companies, and institutions feel the depth of the change, but they are often overwhelmed by it, out of sheer ignorance of its effects.

The Internet, as all technologies, does not produce effects by itself it is the storage of Data that will shape the future. 

Big Data is used almost anywhere these days; A vast subject- from news articles to professional magazines, from tweets to YouTube videos and blog discussions, impacting across virtually all academic disciplines.

Every minute of your existence is being stored and this vast storage is the most relevant subject of our times. DATA NOW STREAM from our daily life:

Today, machines seem to get better every day at digesting vast gulps of information from phones and credit cards and televisions and computers; from the infrastructure of cities; from sensor-equipped buildings, trains, buses, planes, bridges, and factories, you name it —

And they remain as emotionally inert as ever.       But for how long.

It is estimated that if all the data used in the world today were written to CD-ROMs and the CD-ROMs piled up in a single stack, the stack would stretch all the way from the Earth to the Moon and a quarter of the way back again.

The data flow so fast that the total accumulation of the past two years—a zettabyte—dwarfs the prior record of human civilization.

A report by the International Data Corporation in 2010 estimated that by the year 2020 there will be 35 Zettabytes (ZB) of digital data created per year.

All of what we do today leaves a digital trail:

Every bit of that information is being stored—but by whom? for what?

The US alone is home to 898 exabytes (1 EB = 1 billion gigabytes)—nearly a third of the global total.

Kilobyte     1,000 bytes

Megabyte  1,000,000 bytes

Gigabyte  1,000,000,000 bytes

Terabyte  1,000,000,000,000 bytes

Petabyte   1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes

Exabyte    1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes

Zettabyte   1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes

Yottabyte    1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes

Just in case you have no concept of a byte.  A byte is a sequence of 8 bits (enough to represent one alphanumeric character) processed as a single unit of information. A single letter or character would use one byte of memory (8 bits), two characters would use two bytes (16 bits).

So you would want to be certified to think that Society as we know it is not a changing. 

The question is:  What is all of this information going to produce.

There is already an algorithm to detect when women were pregnant by tracking purchases of items such as unscented lotions—and offered special discounts and coupons to those valuable patrons. To plunder the Stock Exchange/Foreign Exchange. (See previous Posts)

Credit-card companies have found unusual associations in the course of mining data to evaluate the risk of default: people who buy anti-scuff pads for their furniture, for example, are highly likely to make their payments.

They are trained computers to identify deep patterns in vocal pitch, rhythm, and intensity; their software can scan a conversation between a woman and a child and determine if the woman is a mother, whether she is looking the child in the eye, whether she is angry or frustrated or joyful.

Other machines can measure sentiment by assessing the arrangement of our words, or by reading our gestures. Still others can do so from facial expressions.

Before you think about anything it has already being done. Good bye to the Present.

Big data is not just about helping an organization be more successful – to market more effectively or improve business operations. It reaches to far more socially significant issues as well. It is transforming science, engineering, medicine, healthcare, finance, business, and ultimately society itself.

The first full human genome sequence took five to 15 years to complete, and cost $1 billion to $3 billion. Now a genome sequence takes a little more than 24 hours and costs about $1,000.

NASA receives over 4 TB of new Earth Science data each day.

It Uses THE SHADOW Internet THAT’S 100 TIMES FASTER THAN GOOGLE FIBER.

Like me you problem never hear of it and will never get to use it.

Google's data centre in Douglas Country, Georgia: The amount of data held by the internet giant means there may soon need to be a new number created to measure the quantity

So what am I exactly trying to say here.

I suppose the best starting point is the Human Brain.

Your brain is home to around 100 billion neurons, all of which are perpetually establishing and breaking connections, known as synapses, with other neurons.

There are trillions of these connections throughout your brain helping orchestrate everything from movement, to learning, to establishing and recalling memories. Just to give you some perspective on the storage capacity of your brain: It has a storage capacity of some estimates come in as low as 1 terabyte, or approximately 1,000 gigabytes.

You can easily buy a 1 gigabyte USB drive for under £15. A gigabyte is 1000 megabytes, so that means you’ve got three brains right there.

For comparison, if your brain worked like a digital video recorder in a television, 2.5 petabytes would be enough to hold three million hours of TV shows. You would have to leave the TV running continuously for more than 300 years to use up all that storage.

Now consider this:

A sweet little external hard drive can give you an entire terabyte of memory for about £70. That’s 1000 gigabytes, and roughly 3333 human brains. So for £70 bucks, you could store 3333 people’s brains in your backpack.  Nice!

If you want to back up your brain and upload it to a cylon body, IBM’s “neurosynaptic” chips are the closest thing to a synthetic brain yet.

Also, consider this:

A typical 3-minute song takes up about 5 megabytes of space. So that means your brain, can hold about 60 songs.

A computer chip that emulates the human brain - and might one day replace it

Now don’t get me wrong I acknowledge that every major scientific revolution has been driven by one thing, and that is data.

Data is pouring in from every conceivable direction: from operational and transactional systems, from scanning and facilities management systems, from inbound and outbound customer contact points, from mobile media and the Web.

Organizations are inundated with data – terabytes and petabytes of it. According to IDC, “In 2011, the amount of information created and replicated will surpass 1.8 zettabytes (1.8 trillion gigabytes), growing by a factor of nine in just five years.

That’s nearly as many bits of information in the digital universe as stars in the physical universe.

I have nothing against the collection of Data nor with sharing the data, which ultimately could improve the lives of the millions of people who are generating it—and the societies in which they are living – to provide a beneficial impact on society as a whole.

The potential for doing good is perhaps nowhere greater than in public health and medicine, fields in which, “People are literally dying every day” simply because data are not being shared.

There are over 200 satellites in orbit continuously collecting data about the atmosphere and the land, ocean and ice surfaces of planet Earth which might save us from Climate Change.

Some of this data is held in transactional data stores – the byproduct of fast-growing online activity. Machine-to-machine interactions, such as metering, call detail records, environmental sensing and RFID systems, generate their own tidal waves of data.  All these forms of data are expanding, and that is coupled with fast-growing streams of unstructured and semi structured data from social media.“

The challenges facing big data today and going forward including, but not limited to: data capture and storage; search, sharing, and analytics; big data technologies; data visualization; architectures for massively parallel processing; data mining tools and techniques; machine learning algorithms for big data; cloud computing platforms; distributed file systems and databases; and scalable storage systems.

In bio medicine the Human Genome Project is determining the sequences of the three billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA.

Big Data is further expected to add more than €250 billion a year to the European public sector administration. Thus, the whole European Union could benefit from the cumulative financial and social impact of Big Data.

One clear example of Big Data is the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) (www.skatelescope.org) planned to be constructed in South Africa and Australia. When the SKA is completed in 2024 it will produce in excess of one exabyte of raw data per day (1 exabyte = 1018 bytes), which is more than the entire daily internet traffic at present.

Another example of Big Data is the Large Hadron Collider, at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), which has 150 million sensors and is creating 22 petabytes of data in 2012 (1 Petabyte = 1015 bytes).

Smart cities, data gathered by sensors integrated with transport data, financial transactions, location of users, social network interaction will provide an entirely new dimension to thinking about how cities function.

These three examples are only scratching the surface.

Google almost certainly has more data storage capacity than any other organization on Earth. Their biggest data centers cost half a billion to a billion dollars, so they can’t have more than 20 or so of those. These are the storage centers we know about.

  1. Berkeley County, South Carolina
  2. Council Bluffs, Iowa
  3. Atlanta, Georgia
  4. Mayes County, Oklahoma
  5. Lenoir, North Carolina
  6. The Dalles, Oregon
  7. Hong Kong
  8. Singapore
  9. Taiwan
  10. Hamina, Finland
  11. St Ghislain, Belgium
  12. Dublin, Ireland
  13. Quilicura, Chilie
  14. Eemshaven, Netherlands
  15. Groningen, Netherlands
  16. Budapest, Hungary
  17. Wrocław, Poland
  18. Reston, Virginia
  19. Additional sites near Atlanta, Georgia

In 2010, they were operating around a million servers, with close to 10 exabytes of active storage attached to running clusters. Google has a hard drive die every few minutes.

Let’s assume Google has a storage capacity of 15 exabytes, or 15,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.

  • Amazon (They’re huge, but probably not as big as Google.)
  • Facebook (They’re on the right scale and growing fast, but still playing catch-up.)
  • Microsoft (They have a million servers, although no one seems sure why.)

However, it’s nothing compared to the ridiculous claims by some news reports about the NSA datacenter in Utah. This facility could hold “between an exabyte and a yottabyte” of data.Microsoft data center

Apple tends to make between three and five times as much revenue as Google does. Whether it is Apple or Google at the top of the heap, you cannot deny that they are both building platforms and business models that will shape the next decade in the tech industry.

Computing is definitely moving to the cloud, and Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are all in it to win it by manipulate us all.

Because the shifts in both the amount and potential of today’s data are so epic, businesses require more than simple, incremental advances in the way they manage information.

Public Sector Information (PSI) is the single largest source of information in Europe. Its estimated market value is €32 billion.

The value of Big Data to the UK economy alone, being £216 billion and 58,000
jobs in the next 5 years.

Data traffic is expected to grow to 10.8 Exabyte per month by 2016.

Could we have foreseen the mortgage meltdown, the financial institution crisis and the recession, if only we had gotten our arms around more data and done more to correlate it?

Could we trim millions of dollars in fraud from government programs and financial markets?

But big data wants more.

Not satisfied with seeing everything about everybody it wants to store your spoken words which for thousands and thousands of year were private and should remain private.

For us to allow or turn a blind eye to this kind of monitoring and storage would be the first steps to towards slavery.  

Such a move by Governments under the cloud of spotting terrorists plots is a form of terrorism on free speech.  All Smart Phone should be be encrypt to ensure the freedom of mankind.

So I will leave you with this.

Modern science demands the use and understanding of numerical methods.

Data is like an object approaching a fixed point. It is travelling at a constant speed, such that, after one second, the distance is halved: after 1.5 seconds, the distance is halved again; after 1.75 seconds, it is halved again and so on. So data will never actually reach the fixed point, because with each fraction of a second it only halves the distance remaining.  Both the Data and the distance can theoretically be split infinitely.

Big Data technologies to analyse and properly compare disperse and huge data sets would provide huge benefits in terms of discoveries in experimental sciences.

And you think you live in the Present- think again.

Exabytes, zettabytes and yottabytes definitely are on the horizon.

But tell me where is hindsight located? Only then we will be able to cut through the myths surrounding the key technology of our time.

No single person can make sense of what a billion other people are saying. The best way to Safeguard personal data is not to give it in the first place.

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Technology is making us conscious of the need for a new society.

20 Tuesday Jan 2015

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In my last post I said that “Technology is making us conscious of the need for a new society.” It was a thought without an explanation.Illustration

It seems pretty obvious to most observers that our social networks have changed in the past few decades thanks to technology. The widespread use of cell phones, the increasing affordability of air travel, the rise of the Internet, and the advent of social media have changed the way we work, the way we live, and the way we make and maintain friendships, the way we view the world.

Our increasing on-line connectives is and has changed our perceptions of our social world for the better and to the determent of reality. The world of social networking sites is changing every day and is going to have more impact on the lives of generations to come. Because television and other popular forms of social media shape our perception of reality.

Nothing epitomises the anonymity of the Internet more than Anonymous.

Anonymity can be extremely dangerous, particularly to governments.

On the other hand sharing is all the rage these days.  Sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn allow people across the globe to broadcast every detail of their lives with the rest of the world through the mediums of text, audio, photo and video. Nowadays, the internet has simplified everything to the extent where you’re never more than a few minutes away from what you need.

However is the on-line world truly distinct from the off-line one?

Illegal activity such as drug distribution or human trafficking are handled through the ‘deep web’, areas of the internet not indexed by search engines. The worldwide group of self-proclaimed ‘hacktivists’ whose actions have had a number of significant impacts on corporations around the globe are another example.

General internet opinion is undoubtedly one of the most effective ways of establishing a consensus on something, with businesses or Governments ignoring public opinion doing so at their peril.

Technology hasn’t undermined our social relationships, although it has certainly affected them.

The prevalence of social media has, as a result, fundamentally changed the way we read and watch: we think about how we’ll share something, and whom we’ll share it with, as we consume it.

So what impact does Facebook have on today’s technologically advanced society?

Facebook’s effect on today’s society is not difficult to distinguish. … Facebook opens up other questions about today’s society, too. … in the age of digital communication when we can follow our state and national politicians on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. But it remains nothing more than a medium for communication, and yet, it is so much more than that. At a glance, a user can learn everything from what gender a Facebook member is, to what religion they believe in, what school they attend, and their likes and dislikes, all with the click of a mouse.

In other words, the world of constant connectivity and media, as embodied by Facebook, is the social network’s worst enemy.

The time of mentally entertaining ourselves, is disappearing. We’ve forgotten how.” Whenever we have downtime, the Internet is an enticing, quick solution that immediately fills the gap. We get bored, look at Facebook or Twitter, and become more bored.

Getting rid of Facebook wouldn’t change the fact that our attention is, more and more frequently, forgetting the path to proper, fulfilling engagement. And in that sense, Facebook isn’t the problem. It’s the symptom.

The number of things we have pulling at our attention, the less we are able to meaningfully engage, and the more discontented we become. What Facebook does to our emotional state may be in simply looking at what people actually do when they’re on Facebook. What makes it complicated is that Facebook is for lots of different things—and different people use it for different subsets of those things.

Topics such as cyber bullying, addiction to cyber porn, and overall addiction to Internet games are something we need to study more.

The Internet may increase the overall frequency of communication but it is opening a new forum of disconnection to what really matters in our lives. The internet doesn’t just offer information in comprehensive fashion, it offers it instantaneously.

It is an ongoing record of human history – regardless of how much it continues to grow, individuals will always be able to access some obscure story from the earlier nineties, for instance, ensuring that almost anything we create today will never be lost to future generations.

Sites that mix professional and public criticism together, such as Rotten Tomatoes or Meta Critic, are now regarded as highly important by the likes of film and game manufacturers, as negative reception spreads more quickly than ever and sales are impacted as a result.

Crowd sourcing is allowing projects to source investment, interest and possible custom from a huge user base.

E Bay is providing a medium for consumers to make exchanges with other consumers, allowing people to sell their unwanted goods rather than throwing them away.

YouTube, Sound Cloud or U stream, is used to distribute either pre-recorded or live material.

Trip Advisor, where everything from restaurants to hotels are looked at in meticulous detail.

Netflix and catch-up services. Tailored marketing, literature, games, films and television have outgrown the need for a costly physical medium such as a book or disc, and are accessible in an instant on the likes of e-book readers.

From car-sharing and house-hunting to dating and charitable donation sourcing, somebody somewhere seems to have come up with an online solution that makes things easier, and long may it stay that way.

What is lacking (for lack of a better word) is an Internet World Political Party.MapBoxOSM

A rallying point to bring the power of the Internet to address the Inequalities in our world.

To increases social trust and engagement—and even encourages political participation. It would impart a feelings of bonding with a general social capital increase that could be used to pressurize change for the good of us all.

We live our lives immersed in technology, surrounded by cell phones, computers, video games, digital music players and video cams.

The Internet of Things : ’The home of the future. Your own personal digital ‘nanny’ to control almost every element of your life through apps or a web browser.

People will not only make their entire home web-connect and use it for personal benefits they will also become addicted to their Digital Nanny. 

The Internet of things will become central to society than the internet as we know it today, its role will probably be reduced in the future.

Nonetheless, it’s definitely exciting to see what the future brings other than –                                                     “Liking.”

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The Future of the Consumer Society will decide our Future.

02 Tuesday Dec 2014

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Consumerism quotes

The world-wide spread of extremely resource-intensive lifestyles and economic practices has become one of the most important challenges we face.

There is an increased awareness of human impact on the environment, however, the rate of environmental degradation is still on the rise.

Although many people are uncomfortable with the way things are, they are not motivated to act on their beliefs because they see no other way.

The environmental discourse is still confined to a relatively small minority
of elites and ‘experts’, and it remains incredibly top-down but there are no experts as we are all dancing on the edge of acceptable risk.

Is economic growth making us happier?

What type of change is possible?

By addressing things such as human well-being and the meeting of the needs in environmentally in a sound way, the discourse brings economy down to the grass root level of everyday life.

It enables us to ask questions such as:

How do we change the present day short-shortsightedness which is the source of most modern environmental and economic problems?

Messages of environmental risk should be effective in relaying seriousness and immediacy, but arguably, they are also in danger of breeding hopelessness and fatalism. Although many people are uncomfortable with the way things are, they are not motivated to act on their beliefs because they see no other way.

This is tragic because the way in which we perceive the future has a significant influence on the choices we make.

It affects our values, attitudes, coping mechanisms, expectations feelings, motivations and behaviors. The very act of articulating a future presents a tendency and inclination, which increases its likeliness of occurrence.Consumerism quotes

Could it therefore be possible to produce a set of different outcomes by providing engaging, lucid and optimistic alternative ecological future narratives?

I have posted many posts on the Subject but let’s try an other approach.

Suggest an inexpensive tool that could make a difference.  

Sufficient living questions the connection made between growth and quality of life.

The last time climate change happened was approximately 55 million years ago and it took 1000 years to recover from the level of elevated carbon after the extinction of dinosaurs.

Imagine a world without pollution and waste: Products are made from materials that are beneficial for humans and their surroundings. Imagine a world where humans can be glad that their actions benefit those around them.

It seems that people are not good at providing (quasi) exact statements of the future, but they can be better in stating whether the past trend will change and in which direction.

Over a hundred species are still becoming extinct everyday.  One and a half acres of rain forest is still disappearing every second.

These problems are link to a lack of ideas concerning how to deal with environmental problems and the future of our society.

It is always useful to conceive futures in a generational paradigm, because we find it easier to think of futures in terms of our children and grandchildren’s lifetimes. The decisions we make in the next 20 years will determine the fate of the earth and human civilization for centuries to come.

In this context, online news gives a quick overview on what is happening in the world and the use of the Internet as information source has become an inherent part of everyday life  leading to a sort of “big brother feeling” of being observed.

Unfortunately, most of our ecological future narratives are ambiguous or inherently pessimistic.

For instance, one of the most popularized means of living within nature are ‘sustainable futures. However this vision lacks clarity or a consensus over what it means to live ‘sustainably’. Moreover, a proliferation of ‘sustainability’ definitions leave some to regard it as a landfill dump for everyone’s environmental and social wish list.

In a sense of powerlessness. people perceive the environment to be a single totalising entity that is ‘out there,’ enabling them to remain emotionally distant, despondent and in a state of resignation.

High levels of non-engagement are further exacerbated by the lack of faith in the institutions tasked with combating the problems. People are choosing not to dwell on ecological problems by using reflexive strategies of non-engagement with global issues including the future.

The apparent lack of desirable alternatives is highly dangerous.

Could it therefore be possible to produce a set of different outcomes by providing engaging, lucid and optimistic alternative ecological future narratives?

In other words, if governments continue to think in four-year election cycles, businesses work from one financial year to the next and stock markets re-start everyday there is no hope of achieving anything.

When imagining futures, we also need to invent time for change.

What is needed is long-term thinking that reconciles itself to a planet that is 4.6 billion years old?

We support in the capacity to imagine and articulate preferred outcomes, which in turn mobilise action and creates an opportunity for the visions to embed themselves as possibilities in reality.  As opposed to the current approach of endlessly treating symptoms of a much deeper problem that is both out of sight and out of control.

Each and every individual needs to be actively (and creatively) involved by, possibly, visualising, spreading and implementing ideas of alternative societal models. We need a method that enables us to think beyond existing societal models.

While Industrial welfare state mainly defends business-as-usual change can only be achieved in the world to-day by what I call,

– An Universal Electronic Voice that demands change –
# UEV- Universal Electronic Voice.
When we want to enable consumers to execute truly effective change it is central to empower them to understand their role as important actors in the field.

This is beyond governments, and our present day world institutions.

Governments:  Because before they can mend a road there is an other government.  Institutions:  Because they have turned into gossip shops with no funds, run by the market.

We need to re-define what it meant by people power.

A unified electronic voice will do just that resulting in a movement that unified our cohesive efforts. That will enable the ‘democratisation’ of modern environmentalism that are fixated on finding solutions to one that imagines entirely new possibilities

The debate over climate change and whether it is being influenced by man’s activity has ceased. The prevailing view is that climate change is real and that it is influenced by human activity. The link between rising consumption and climate change is becoming clear and opposition to consumerism is growing.

Images of the future in which the Universal E Voice should be used as tools for making images become part of reality, it can be used to direct actions and decision-making.

Of course none of the above has any hope of becoming a reality unless we tap into the world of greed.

This can only be done by a collective demand to place a world aid commission of 0.05% on all High Frequency trading, Sovereign wealth funds acquisitions and foreign exchange transactions over $20.000, creating a perpetual funded fund. ( see previous posts)

As such UEV(universal electronic voice) does not describe the actions needed to achieve the described future however it would be the first step in the right direction to be heard.  We all know timescales are the best until after the critical period is over and we have the benefit of hindsight.

Now it the time to combine all of those how are Whining on the Internet and Social Media into one voice.

With the rather elusive and volatile character of the Internet creating a focus point for the over strain user of the Net when it comes to selecting individually important and relevant information to establish a collection pool offering one voice has many difficulties to over come.

Perhaps # UEV- Universal Electronic Voice might to the trick.

I am all ears to any suggestions.

The mere fact that more of these devices are constantly introduced to the market and the ways in which they are advertised show that yet again a different perception of the future.

This is only the top of the iceberg.

What more ecologically benign consumption and production patterns would mean in practice? is another question to be discussed.

And to what extent it is fruitful to talk about economy beyond the social? Is another in dire need of serious discussion.

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Are there reasonable and legal limits to free expression ?

30 Tuesday Sep 2014

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Now this is an interesting and complex question.

Far too big a subject to be addressed by my comparatively little brain or written about in a few hundred words. However we all know that stifling free expression is counterproductive.

So is Freedom of expression still a universal human right?

Is it the 
lynch pin
 of
 democracy?

The Internet is by its very nature border less, but it is still intimately connected to the physical world, and as such to the territories of sovereign nation states.

Therefore, states can significantly influence the free flow of information, expression and free speech.

An open and free Internet is a key means by which individuals can exercise their right to freedom of opinion, expression, association and assembly. However, these freedoms in our present world cannot on one hand be absolute and on the other they have to be absolute.

Freedom of information is a fundamental element of freedom of expression, with the Internet a key instrument for the exercise of the right to freedom of expression.

This is the Quandary.

Because when you turn to Google with a question, the search engine must decide, at that moment, what “answers” to give, and in what order to put those answers.

Is it commercializes something that is not commerceable? And if so is there a compelling argument that computerized decisions should be considered speech?

Computers as you know make trillions of invisible decisions each day.

Gone are the days of waiting for the evening news to present events occurring on the battlefield. Gone are the days of relying on professional journalists, or embedded reporters, to paint the day-to-day picture of the world.

Gone are the days that the Internet was merely an alternative communicative channel.

What will its impact be on free speech?

I believe in the long run it is going to be the down fall of free speech and expression.

Cyberspace today is an important part of living as a private and public individual in the modern world. It is a way of speaking and listening; an essential part of being human, but is it turning into a privatized “wild west”, where individuals’ expressions and information retrieval is not subject to arbitrary restrictions with no judicial review or democratic legitimacy.

Should non human or automated choices be granted the full protection of Free Speech?

Is it time for states to grant these expressions the same protection, which we apply to expressions in the physical world ?

Self-regulation is a dangerous path when applied to public sphere communication.

My answer is –  No Cyberspace should not be allocated such a high status.

Why?

Because Extremists –often claim to speak for whole communities.

Because if we are not careful the potential result is that we get a homogenised, sanitised universal culture that either gives offense to none or is controlled by the most vocal and powerful group whatever the rest of the populace may want or believe.

In July 2011, the United Nations Human Rights Committee confirmed the central role of freedom of expression in human rights, making it clear that it can only be limited in the most exceptional circumstances, and calling for the first time for unrestricted public access to official information.

Now we all know that there cannot be a democratic society without the fundamental right to freedom of expression but the internet is allowing new means for humans to express themselves. Hong Kong as I write is expressing all over social net works its unwillingness to have Beijing puppets put up for election.

Because in today’s world, we have delegated many of our daily decisions to computers. On the drive to work, a GPS device suggests the best route; at your desk, Microsoft Word guesses at your misspellings, and Facebook recommends new friends.

In the past few years, the suggestion has been made that when computers make such choices they are “speaking,” and should enjoy the protections of the First Amendment. Free Speech.

Because the internet connectives which the internet provides to humans today makes it possible for soldiers in Iraq to post their thoughts and reflections regarding an upcoming or recently accomplished mission, to include pictures and video, on a blog in Iraq and within seconds this news from the front can be read by thousands if not millions of people world-wide.

Everyone has the right to associate freely through and on the Internet, for social, political, cultural or other purposes. There are efforts by a number of states including Russia, China and Iran to increase state control of the internet within their territories.

The Internet is a space for the promotion, protection and fulfillment of human rights and the advancement of social justice. While governments have an important obligation in protecting and furthering internet freedom, the very nature of the Internet means that civil society, the private sector and academia also need to be involved in discussions on internet governance not just Governments.

Free speech is essential to a free society because, when you deny people ‘an opportunity to act like normal political parties’, there’s nothing left for them to do but punch your lights out. Just look at what is happening with a culture like ISIS  that can’t bear a dissenting word on race or religion or gender fluidity. It is a barbarous society that will cease to innovate, and then stagnate, and then decline, very fast if left alone.

Another growing causes for concern is that diverse voices of the non-religious are either not being heard or are not equally valued: Religious voices are claiming their right to freedom of expression but at the cost of non-religious voices being silenced.

The ability to freely speak your mind is widely seen as a natural right, in other words a government (or any other institution) can’t grant you this right, only take it away. A liberal society is one which is content to call ‘true’ (or ‘right’ or ‘just’) whatever the outcome of undistorted communication happens to be, whatever view wins in a free and open encounter.

If free speech is only for polite persons of mild temperament within government-policed parameters, it isn’t free at all.

We live, in ‘interesting’ times, from Islam and Israel to global warming and gay marriage.

Within the EU,internet there is no specific (foreign) policy agenda for internet freedom.

So the question I started out with might sound like a fanciful question, a matter of philosophy or science fiction but a world where real, primal, universal rights — like freedom of expression is where I want to live.

Everyone has the duty to respect the human rights of all others in the online environment.

     How about You!

 

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Knowing how to Google something is not enough.

26 Friday Sep 2014

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Like me I am sure you look at our world and wonder how has it got its self in such a mess.

If anything, the amount of knowledge one needs to know to make sense of today’s issues is staggering.

Putting inequality and greed aside, the lack togetherness has to be one of the main problems. We with our interconnected world have little if any appreciation or understanding of other cultures in the world.

So has technology plunged the world into its present day state?

”You can look anything up on you iPad, so you don’t have to know anything (“factual mastery is become less and less important.”)

Real knowledge and understanding is going out the door. In order to have a conversation, or to contemplate or invent something, you must have the information in your head, so that you can combine it with other information that is also in your head. There’s no time to “look it up. You can only work with what’s in your head. That’s why computers don’t just have hard disks, they also have “working memory.

Or is the Internet making us more skilled at asking questions, or is it more important that it is parroting answers to someone else’s questions.

I can’t help wondering what will happen if we rely mainly on electronic devices to provide information…..and then there’s a blackout.

Then who has the floor?

The person who actually KNOWS something and can articulate it. The guy looking it upon the iphone plays second fiddle.  Who do you think would win? The guy with the knowledge, and therefore, quick retorts in his head, or the one fumbling with the Ipad?

Unfortunately, this is the road we are going down. I don’t see how present days technologist are creating knowledge to improve the world. This can only be true when a microchip can be implanted in my head so that my brain can draw on all the knowledge it needs to reason and think creatively. We can’t fix a human problem with a pure technological solution. I am also afraid to tell you that technology is no replacement for caring.

Education is a dance. A theatrical moving-about. It requires more than a dump of information and a hologram or computer or Smart Phone to be Intelligent.

You might think I am talking unadulterated crap but the best educated of most of us learned was what we did it with a pencil, some paper, an adult teacher and some chalk in a classroom. Miraculously such people got a man on the moon. The very idea of computers was invented by such people (Bill Gates and the late Stephen Jobs were in their middle 50s).

Humans have always worked in collaboration for important achievements. Unfortunately these days factual mastery is becoming less and less important.

We are into a hodgepodge of moment-driven quantitative analyses.

We now have Teenagers who have a great knowledge of math and science but no capability to understand what the value of it is beyond a paycheck they might earn.

Why learn a foreign language when there is Google Translate?  We persist in using skin color as a way of defining individuals.

The capability of the human mind to keep knowledge does not increase at the same rate as the expansion of knowledge. Learning is never done and there is no arbitrary point where we are ready for the real world.

At least becoming proficient, in another language is key to global integration, not the reverse.

In this computer-driven age more and more exams in many subjects are multiple choice guessing contests graded by computer – and even math exams require one to enter the problem’s solution in an exact and strictly timed format, making it possible to get all the right answers and still fail for lack of ability to perform data entry with sufficient dexterity and speed.

You hear these day with the current terrorism in the world that young people are being radicalized. Why?

  1. Because the wheels of commerce are supercharged by the electricity of a million of Hippocratic hand shakes. USA-Iran,Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Palestinian.
  2. Because the alternative of the ignorant is to rely on some talking head.
  3. Because New technologies are profoundly altering the way knowledge is conveyed.
  4. Because the pursuit of knowledge and skills is too expensive.
  5. Because we don’t educate our young to gain a full range of basic intellectual skills. Value, Curiosity, Tolerance, Respect, Creativity.
  6. Because ethical thinking which is crucial for individuals and societies to better address and deal with public policy issues is a forgotten as a moral philosophy, leaving a void to radicalization, away from the materialistic world.
  7. Because we have forgotten that Education will be more about how to process and use information and less about imparting it.  It has degenerated over the last two generations from a reflective science that gave value to life through the deep thinking of individuals and the careful review of their peers into I am all right Jack syndrome.
  8. Because we rely almost entirely on passive learning.  To follow in over-trodden paths of conventionalism. If the goal is to turn students into robot-like performers they’ll certainly accomplish it, but how much can you expect the many problems in the real world to be solved by robots?
  9. Because a big part of stopping radicalization and having students thrive is to give them people to emulate, and people who support their dreams. At the rate and direction we are headed I wonder if students will be able to answer what is 13 squared without a calculator or recall who fought in WWI or II.
  10. Because we should pay for students to spend a semester or more abroad.  An educational experience worth every penny of its extra cost. To Master  A Language. would be far more beneficial than; mastering, or rethinking how to more effectively prepare.
  11. Because we need to do away the basic notion that you have to learn something in order to be able to move toward higher level skills of thinking and analysis. So it can go down more easily with students who were raised on the internet.
  12. Because the current system of grouping pupils by age across all subjects by force is archaic.
  13. Because the idea that data and collaboration are “coming” is absurd. We need an education system the is flexible enough to be custom tailored to each student without the necessity to change any part of the system itself. The capability of the human mind to keep knowledge does not increase at the same rate as the expansion of knowledge.”It’s a common error to believe language exists in a vacuum, that by simply sharing a common lexicon the world’s social, economic and political barriers will fall like leaves in an autumn wind.
  14. Because Specialization is for insects.
  15. Because teaching Mandarin to the next generation wouldn’t be a bad idea, as a one-way communication of English will otherwise lead to global misunderstanding.
  16. Because naked greed, willful ignorance, and incompetence – are as common as daylight. Let’s also deliver thoughtfulness.
  17. Because  A good example is the concept of our living in a heliocentric system rather than a earth-centric system.
  18. Because it was impossible to think seriously about the future many things in life holds that things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then happen faster than you thought they could.
  19. Because there is a huge difference between sheer memorization of a tremendous amount of data and actually knowing how to use that data.

Do people leave college with an accurate robust knowledge of probability?

No. It is only attained.

Most things are as untrue as they are true.

“A human being should be able to change a nappy, plan an invasion, butcher a pig, steer a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.

The purpose of public education is to teach students to think, give students real skills, and give students experiences that require use of both.

University is a preserver of the past in terms of values and outlooks and shared “facts.”

Those who do not know history and have not thought about it, repeat its mistakes use Google, Safari Library or externalized knowledge stores.

.The initial development of revolutionary ideas come from individuals.

Isn’t this the way we should be handing the reins of government, over and over, to the “best and brightest”

That one expert will, one hopes, teach the controversies about the war, rather than simply teaching their own opinions as fact, but there’s still a real danger of creating an intellectual mono culture that might, like genetically modified crops, have a shared vulnerability.

We’ve already got this  (think Tea Party and climate change or evolution).

Educators have a huge problem on their hands as to how to offload their brain empower students to be creators, rather than mere consumers.

Da Vinci today alone cannot build an jet-airplane. The people who designed the microchips, wrote the operative system, made the special glass, and so on weren’t specialists?

Let me tell you the first time as a young man I went to see the Eiffel Tower it was surrounded by pigeons now it’s surrounded by machine guns.

Its time we taught values not just our values, values that we all share and need to live on this plant in Peace.

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NATURAL LAW GOVERNS ALL TECHNOLOGY NOW AND IN THE FUTURE

05 Monday May 2014

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Just in case you are one of those lonely people with 500 friends on Facebook, (most of them you never hear of but promoted by a faceless Facebook prompt) tweets all day long, can’t go anywhere without you smart phone, spend most of your time looking down into LCD screens, Googling , Flip Boarding, never experiencing real cooking, real friendship, real conversation with body language, doesn’t know what true or false, you are on a complex collision with what life is really like.

Now don’t get me wrong I am not against Technological advances but I am somewhat  fearful that we are not seeing as yet a genuine revolution of Technology.  We are creating a world which is not connected but becoming more and more disconnected.  A world of vast inequalities.

What we can do in the world depends on what we can make.

Take for instance the Internet.  Prosperity= Internet.  Poverty=no Internet.

There is no doubt that the world as we ( the older generation) have known it is coming to an end.

The microchip is everywhere and no where.

We are only on the threshold of Technology. It won’t be long before the whole lot will be on your wrist, or in your contact lenses.

With you very own genome map on a DNA chip that will be down loaded to grow replacement new body parts, and analyze your health while sitting on the toilet.   Cant wait! for the Robots with AI.

Before you all get carried away here is a dose of Present Day conflict worldwide.

Realities that are turned into entertainment by the Mass media, before the weather forecast.  Why are there so many.?  Because we are disconnected to the reasons. The present day War in Syria started with a Drought.

AMERICANS:

5 Countries.
25 drug cartels, militias guerrillas, separatist, anarchic groups involved.

Europe:

8 Countries.
68 militias guerrillas, separatist, anarchic groups involved

Middle East:

8 countries.
168 militias guerrillas, separatist, anarchic groups involved.

Asia:

15 Countries;
127 militias guerrillas, separatist, anarchic groups involved.

Africa:

24 Countries:
145 militias guerrillas, separatist, anarchic groups involved

Total 60 Countries: 534 militias guerrillas, separatist, anarchic groups involved.

All the communication technology in the world is worthless if we don’t value life rather than Profit for Profit sake.