-
Posted to ethernettv.net
Jane McGonigal: Gaming to Solve Real World Problems
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/EthernetTV/~3/yJMLDL8hxY4/
- Tags:
- society
- technology
-
Posted to metavalent.com
Cultural Neuroscience
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/db8z9mDwMI8/
Explore. Learn.
- Tags:
- society
- neuro-cogno
- education
- metaverse
-
Posted to michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us
On Misandry
Only one page of #misandry ... so far. How is it that nobody even knows the word misandry, when the messaging is increasingly pervasive and the inverse prejudice is (rightly) universally condemned?
- Tags:
- social justice
- society
- norms
- values
- misandry
-
Posted to google.com
The Futurist: The Misandry Bubble
http://www.singularity2050.com/2010/01/the-misandry-bubble.html
Shared by @silverton
Interesting. Glad to see I'm not the only one bringing this up in polite company. I just mentioned this yesterday in a conversation with four female friends. When asked, "do you know the word misogyny?" A chorus of "obviously!" rose. I then asked, "but what is it's inverse?" Not a single one had ever heard of the word misandry. Executive Summary : The Western World has quietly become a civilization that undervalues men and overvalues women, where the state forcibly transfers resources from men to women creating various perverse incentives for otherwise good women to conduct great evil against men and children, and where male nature is vilified but female nature is celebrated. This is unfair to both genders, and is a recipe for a rapid civilizational decline and displacement, the costs of which will ultimately be borne by a subsequent generation of innocent women, rather than men, as soon as 2020.
- Tags:
- social justice
- society
- norms
- values
- misandry
-
Posted to michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us
Information Policy as Posthuman Law
Vintage 2002 topic, only getting more urgent by the day. Or is it? Remind me to dig deeper for a refresh.
The subject of information policy is increasingly flows between machines, machinic rather than social values play ever-more important roles in decision-making, and information policy for human society is being supplemented, supplanted, and superceded by machinic decision-making. As the barrier between the human and machinic falls with implantation of chips within the body and other types of intimate relationships, and as dependence upon the information infrastructure continues to grow, the question of the rights of technological systems themselves is entering the legal system.
-
Posted to digg.com
WSJ.com - For Older Workers, a Reluctant Retirement
http://digg.com/business_finance/WSJ_com_For_Older_Workers_a_Reluctant_Retirement
Although the U.S. labor market is showing improvements, conditions for older workers continue to deteriorate, as a number of workers ages 55 to 64 feel forced to retire before they are financially ready.
Nah, ya' think?
-
Posted to ethernettv.net
Outsourcing Personal Memory: The Benefits and Challenges of Capturing Yourself Digitally
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/EthernetTV/~3/U6ma-YPF3Eo/
- Tags:
- society
- technology
- science
-
Posted to metavalent.com
Legal Challenges in an Age of Robotics
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/vUtekHf9reg/
On Thursday, November 12, 2009, sponsored by The Rock Center for Corporate Governance and Stanford Program in Law, Science, and Technology, Legal Challenges in an Age of Robotics: Once relegated to factories and fiction, robots are rapidly entering the mainstream. Advances in artificial intelligence translate into ever-broadening functionality and autonomy. Recent years have seen an explosion in the use of robotics in warfare, medicine, and exploration. Industry analysts and UN statistics predict equally significant growth in the market for personal or service robotics over the next few years. What unique legal challenges will the widespread availability of sophisticated robots pose? Three panelists with deep and varied expertise discuss the present, near future, and far future of robotics and the law.
-
Posted to ethernettv.net
iCANN on Internationalized Domain Names
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/EthernetTV/~3/0JWUKPBeasY/
Interesting that at nearly the same time as this iCANN decision, Aunt Rosie the Wave Translation Robot may remove language barriers, further enabling all people everywhere to use their own native languages, yet communicate across all language divides.
- Tags:
- society
- technology
- science
-
Posted to metavalent.com
Cognitive Liberty and Right to One’s Own Mind
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/BiriVNcdlhE/
More extraordinarily high-signal outputs from the seemingly inexhaustible cognition engine behind Sentient Developments: Cognitive liberty is not just about the right to modify one’s mind, emotional balance and psychological framework (for example, through anti-depressants, cognitive enhancers, psychotropic substances, etc.), it’s also very much about the right to not have one’s mind altered against their will … Our society has a rather poor track record when it comes to respecting the validity of certain mind-types … Forced cognitive modification is an issue that’s affecting real people today.
-
Posted to metavalent.com
Of Neuro Economics and Artificial Brains
-
Posted to michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us
Remix for Progressive Effect
http://michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us/packets/?p=976
Inadvertently stumbled across this remix on a slow starting Saturday morning, due to Pandora playing in the background. To recreate: 1. Queue up 04.18.09 NPR Weekend Edition’s interview with Joe Queenan, author of "Closing Time". 2. Queue up the following 4 artists/songs: NiN / Suck, Tool / 46&2, RATM / Killing in the Name, Massive Attack / Teardrop. 3. Mix volumes to taste. "Over the course of time, I got tired of listening to middle class and upper middle class people’s stories, and I got tired to listening to their problems, ‘cuz they didn’t have problems. You know, problems are food, problems are shelter, or problems are somebody down the street has got a gun. Problems are not ‘my daddy doesn’t appreciate me enough’ or ‘I didn’t get into Middlebury,’ those aren’t problems. I wanted to write about what poverty is really like. I wanted to make it clear to people that we don’t all come from the same background. Just because I speak this way, and just because I’ve been to La Sorbonne, and just because I’ve read Marcel Proust: I didn’t start out like you, and there’s a lot of people like me. Don’t you ever think that we all started out the same way, and don’t you ever take your own good fortune for granted.” — Joe Queenan This remix of NPR segments with industrial metal (or anything, for that matter) strikes me as an interesting idea to play with later; overlapping progressive music with progressive dialog.
-
Posted to michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us
Total Social Collapse HOWTO
http://michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us/packets/?p=921
Stewart Brand’s notes from last night’s Total Social Collapse meet-up and pep rally: Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2009 13:10:24 -0800 From: Stewart Brand Subject: [SALT] Managing social collapse (Orlov talk) With vintage Russian black humor, Orlov described the social collapse he witnessed in Russia in the 1990s and spelled out its practical lessons for the American social collapse he sees as inevitable. The American economy in the 1990s described itself as “Goldilocks”—just the right size—when in fact is was “Tinkerbelle,” and one day the clapping stops. As in Russia, the US made itself vulnerable to the decline of crude oil, a trade deficit, military over-reach, and financial over-reach. Russians were able to muddle through the collapse by finding ways to manage:
food, shelter, transportation, and security.
Russian agriculture had long been ruined by collectivization, so people had developed personal kitchen gardens, accessible by public transit. The state felt a time-honored obligation to provide bread, and no one starved. (Orlov noted that women in Russia handled collapse pragmatically, putting on their garden gloves, whereas middle-aged men dissolved into lonely drunks.) Americans are good at gardening and could shift easily to raising their own food, perhaps adopting the Cuban practice of gardens in parking lots and on roofs and balconies. As for shelter, Russians live in apartments from which they cannot be evicted. The buildings are heat-efficient, and the communities are close enough to protect themselves from the increase in crime. Americans, Orlov said, have yet to realize there is no lower limit to real estate value, nor that suburban homes are expensive to maintain and get to. He predicts flight, not to remote log cabins, but to dense urban living. Office buildings, he suggests, can easily be converted to apartments, and college campuses could make instant communities, with all that grass turned into pasture or gardens. There are already plenty of empty buildings in America; the cheapest way to get one is to offer to caretake it. The rule with transportation, he said, is not to strand people in nonsurvivable places. Fuel will be expensive and hoarded. He noted that the most efficient of all vehicles is an old pickup fully loaded with people, driving slowly. He suggested that freight trains be required to provide a few empty boxcars for hoboes. Donkeys, he advised, provide reliable transport, and they dine as comfortably on the Wall Street Journal as they did on Pravda. Security has to take into account that prisons will be emptied (by stages, preferably), overseas troops will be repatriated and released, and cops will go corrupt. You will have a surplus ofmentally unstable people skilled with weapons. There will be crime waves and mafias, but you can rent a policeman, hire a soldier. Security becomes a matter of local collaboration. When the formal legal structure breaks down, adaptive improvisation can be pretty efficient. By way of readiness, Orlov urges all to prepare for life without a job, with near-zero burn rate. It takes practice to learn how to be poor well. Those who are already poor have an advantage. [ms; Finally, OUR TIME HAS COME! We the penniless are the New A-Listers! ;-)] –Stewart Brand
The text of Dmitry Orlov’s SALT talk. Slides from 2006 talk, “Closing the Collapse Gap.”
Related articles by Zemanta
The Dystopians - featuring Dmitry Orlov (longnow.org)
-
Posted to michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us
The Tyranny of Dead Ideas
http://michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us/packets/?p=909
Journalist and former Clinton administration adviser Matt Miller discusses his new book “The Tyranny of Dead Ideas: Letting Go of the Old Ways of Thinking to Unleash a New Prosperity.” Miller is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a contributing editor at Fortune magazine. He’s also an award-winning contributor to The New York Times and a commentator on National Public Radio. Miller spoke at the Commonwealth Club of California earlier this week. SOURCE: Minnesota Public Radio Dead Ideas:
Things will always be better; our kids will always do better economically than we have. Free Trade is good, no matter how many people it hurts. Your company should take care of you. (Why are companies saddled providing healthcare, for instance?) Taxes hurt the economy and are always too high. Schools are a local matter. Money follows merit. We live in a just meritocracy.
What we can do about them:
Only Government can save Business. Only Business can save Liberalism (because Free Market pays for social justice programs). Only Higher Taxes can save the economy and the planet. Only Lower Upper Class can save us from Inequality. Only Better Living can save us from sagging paychecks. Only a dose of Nationalization can save local schools. Only lessons from Abroad can save American Ideals.
Will be rebroadcast on Feb 27 on KQED.
-
Posted to michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us
Bruce Sterling, Frontiersman
http://michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us/packets/?p=848
We were twapping about Web 4.0. Right, yapping; as everything associated with twitter gets a “tw” makeover these days.
From the tweets and blogs I’ve been scanning of late — I actually feel like I’m catching up a tiny bit thanks to the magic called Feedly — the whole Obama thing seems to be sparking a kind of Mass Reverie. So why not join in? I probably should, as I could sorely use the practice at joining in. As a young child I was fascinated, even obsessed, with pioneers; those peculiar humans walking point for society and in some cases the entire human race; you know, like Lewis and Clark, Charles Lindburgh, Ameila Earhart, Madame Curie, people like that. Later, at around age 12, that fascination merged with what I perceived as a kind of ultimate productive pioneer philosophy, when I read Any Rand’s The Fountainhead. Little did I know at the time, my mother was probably experimenting on me to see if she could perform the nifty parlor trick of parading a 12 year old who had read the 645,000 words contained in Atlas Shrugged. She succeeded, and I lived the rest of my relatively maladaptive teen years magically thinking that if I only kept my eyes on my own paper and fully applied myself, I would one day meet the real John Galt and be spirited away to the Colorado Valley, where I could fulfill my destiny as a co-benevolent, co-equal capitalist empire board member. Peer to all mankind; neither superior nor inferior to any, because I’d successfully escaped the fallen world of socialist leeches and morons all around me. I was just a tweeny, so give me a little break, okay? However, it’s not too hard to imagine how this would lead to the experience of feeling like one was surrounded by an entire society that Doesn’t Get It. After all, when I tried to relate to my fellow sixth and seventh graders on the playground with, “Who’s hotter? Dagney Taggart or Dominique Francon?” or, “do you think they are really the same person in different books?” It didn’t exactly win friend and influence people. Well, it did influence them, but not so much in my favor. Toss in a few generations of genetic predisposition to substance abuse, and yeah, well, that’s pretty much a basic setup for an entire life of just not fitting in. What does all this have to do with Bruce Sterling, Frontiersman? I’ll try to connect the dots. After watching Kevin Kelly’s TED talk about the Next 5,000 Days of the web and the Internet of Things, I decided to dig a bit deeper — maybe still searching for John Galt at some vestigial emotional level — and consequently discovered Bruce Sterling. Sigh. He’s not John Galt. However, he did give this talk at Google two years ago and it prompted me reflect upon the most recent decade of life, during which time I indeed accomplished at least some version my Pioneering Dream by working for a decade in the 1990’s and ultimately building the first symmetric Gigabit Ethernet To The Home networks from 1999-2001; promptly after which I finally joined my True Peers, or in Jonathan Livingston Seagull terms, My True Flock, in that soaring mystical realm where pioneers actually most often end up: face down in the mud with arrows in our backs. After a few years of existential convalescence and cognitive behavioral therapy, I realized that pioneering was perhaps not all it was cracked up to be. I know: I’m a slow reader, even slower learner. Maybe I just needed to write a 650,000 word treatise, set on an Asmovian stage, fleshing out the hypocritical failings of objectivism. Nah, too reactionary. Or maybe I just need to find a bar stool next to Reverend Jesse, enlessly reminiscing about back in the day. Nah, too recitivist. Still, after investing forty-some years into a certain way of thinking and being, it’s a little difficult to take a completely new and different approach. Actually, it’s not so difficult personally, but difficult sociologically, because our culture of Industrial Era hyper specialization and interchangeable human parts seriously discourages such change. I mean really seriously discourages it; as in, “you shall now be rendered permanently unemployable and homeless” -type serious. So, the best that I could manage at the time was to backpedal from the pioneering mindset to the frontiersman perspective. A long time loyal friend and ally helped me to find a gig where I could contribute to work on planning for the California High Speed Rail (HSR), which finally recieved a thumbs up vote from California voters. With the encouragement of a great mentor, I helped the City of Fresno to flesh out plans to deploy Smart Cards for their mass transit system; which should eventually plug into the Bay Area TransLink system and HSR, for a truly regional transportation grid. These were great and rewarding projects, but still left me scrapping in the Wage Slave salt mines, far from that mythical Colorado Valley. Not that it would matter these days, I don’t even actually like the weather in Colorado all that much. The people and geology are awesome; but snow? Not so much. This is supposed to be about Frontiersmen, though. Those second-order sociologically innovative souls who follow the trail of blood, sweat, and tears left by the pioneers; who take advantage of the environmental signals left behind by the forgotten and disparaged heroes of yore. Those who seek out shadowy map etchings left on rocks and word of mouth folklore-accepted-as-fact; clues that, though gossamer, do cloak veiled hints about new threats and new opportunities in a new terrain just at the horizon. This is imporant: at the horizon, not over it. Frontiersmen are just too restless and relentlessly curious for the Settler lifestyle. They understand that they are not normal Settlers, yet they constantly seek approval in the form of the satisfaction gained when seeing new wagon trains of Settlers move into a new area and claim it as their own; even claiming that they discovered the place. Whatever. Frontiersmen often name places, things, or trends tentatively and the names don’t often stick. It’s not the names that matter, its more about the process, the progress, it’s about the constant migration toward a New, More Abundant and Sustainable Normal for Everyone. Then, having arrived safely at our Next Big Future, we immediately begin probing the fringes of possibility once again, scanning the skies for circling vultures — icons of ugliness to most, but daemons of progess to us — which point the way again toward those once brave souls, ever face down in the mud with arrows in their back. We hope for even a barely legible scrawled out message, scaps of a not-quite-accurate map, clenched in that now frozen, eternally noble, white-knuckled fist called ultimate persistence and determination. It may be true that constructing oneself as a Frontiersman is still a relatively unwinnable role in terms of widespread contemporary acceptance; after all, even a successful Frontiersman like Sterling was met with a surprising number of blank stares and slack jaws amongst many of the apparently best and brightest at Google. Yet, at least frontiering is a slightly more survivable calling, as there’s more hope for the Frontiersman that the hard work, creativity, and imagination that we bring to bear upon society’s common challenges and opportunities will somehow evolve into something that gets completely past our neologisms and simply becomes “the way we live now,” as Bruce puts it. Wagons, ho.
- Tags:
- All Posts
- truthiness
- snarkiness
- society
1 2