Kevin Kelly -- The Technium
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2009/01/better_than_own.php

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kk.org%2Fthetechnium%2Farchives%2F2009%2F01%2Fbetter_than_own.php

Kevin Kelly's visie op de verschuiving van eigendom van content naar toegang tot content

"Better than owning" - a world of subscriptions giving instant universal access (to content, at least)

Better than Owning

Better Than Owning Ownership is not as important as it once was. I use roads that I don't own. I have immediate access to 99% of the roads and highways of the world (with a few exceptions) because they are a public commons. We are all granted this street access via our payment of local taxes. For almost any purpose I can think of, the roads of the world serve me as if I owned them. Even better than if I owned them since I am not in charge of maintaining them. The bulk of public infrastructure offers the same "better than owning" benefits.

Future. Very very cool.

A very engaging look at the current practices of male/female relationships. "Today, though, there is no standard scenario for meeting and mating, or even relating. For one thing, men face a situation—and I’m not exaggerating here—new to human history. Never before have men wooed women who are, at least theoretically, their equals—socially, professionally, and sexually." I think the most interesting point is this idea about female expectations: "[Women] want to compete equally, and have the privileges of their mother’s generation. They want the executive position, AND the ability to stay home with children and come back into the workplace at or beyond the position at which they left. They want the bad boy and the metrosexual." This last sentence is the major sticking point in my mind, though I've wondered since reading it if I'm just attracted to it because it justifies/reinforces my, shall we say, lack of aggression in dating.

"Earlier this year, I published an article in City Journal called “Child-Man in the Promised Land.” The piece elicited a roaring flood of mailed and blogged responses, mostly from young men who didn’t much care for its title (a reference to Claude Brown’s 1965 novel Manchild in the Promised Land) or its thesis: that too many single young males (SYMs) were lingering in a hormonal limbo between adolescence and adulthood, shunning marriage and children, and whiling away their leisure hours with South Park reruns, marathon sessions of World of Warcraft, and Maxim lists of the ten best movie fart scenes."

"I wrote these principles after reflecting on the content of contemporary newspapers and broadcast media and why that content disquieted me. I saw that I was not disturbed so much by what was written or said as I was by what is not. The tacit assumptions underlying most popular content reflect a worldview that is orthogonal to reality in many ways. By reflecting this skewed weltanschauung, the media reinforces and propagates it. I call this worldview the American Cargo Cult, after the real New Guinea cargo cults that arose after the second world war. There are four main points, each of which has several elaborating assumptions. I really do think that most Americans believe these things at a deep level, and that these misbeliefs constantly underlie bad arguments in public debate."

Minimalist satire on ordinary attitudes

What's going on? Normally, we expect society to progress, amassing deeper scientific understanding and basic facts every year. Knowledge only increases, right? Robert Proctor doesn't think so. A historian of science at Stanford, Proctor points out that when it comes to many contentious subjects, our usual relationship to information is reversed: Ignorance increases.

More accurate title: Robert Proctor on how lying asshats dilute the truth.

How the Amish live against tide of technology.

Amish Hackers - Adopting Technology

For the sake of proof-of-concept, I'm glad the Amish exist. "Ivan is an Amish alpha-geek. He is always the first to try a new gadget or technique. He gets in his head that the new flowbitzmodulator would be really useful. He comes up with a justification of how it fits into the Amish orientation. So he goes to his bishop with this proposal: "I like to try this out." Bishop says to Ivan, "Okay Ivan, do whatever you want with this. But you have to be ready to give it up, if we decide it is not helping you or hurting others.""

Great article on the Amish community discernment process for adopting technology. Dispels a lot of myths, and gives a lot to think on.

Amish use the web at libraries (using but not owning). From cubicles in public libraries Amish sometimes set up a website for their business. So while Amish websites seem like a joke, there's quite a few of them. What about post-modern innovations like credit cards? A few Amish got them, presumably for their businesses at first. But over time the bishops noticed problems of overspending, and the resultant crippling interest rates. Farmers got into debt, which impacted not only them but the community since their families had to help them recover (that's what community and families are for). So, after a trial period, the elders ruled against credit cards. One Amish-man told me that the problem with phones, pagers, and PDAs (yes he knew about them) was that "you got messages rather than conversations." That's about as an accurate summation of our times as any. Henry, his long white beard contrasting with his young bright eyes told me, "If I had a TV, I'd watch it."

One Amish-man told me that the problem with phones, pagers, and PDAs (yes he knew about them) was that "you got messages rather than conversations." That's about as an accurate summation of our times as any.

A global perspective on Americans’ religiosity offers a few surprises

Great charts.

"A global perspective on Americans’ religiosity offers a few surprises"

Cracked waxes downright philosophic. I love it. Mostly because they're right. We spend far too much time thinking about what we want, scared to admit that we don't know, worried that means we'll never get anywhere, when sitting and worrying about it all is doing less to help us than virtually any other activity except killing ourselves.

according to experts, it says almost everything we think about what would make us happy is dead wrong. Let's look at the five things we're most wrong about, with some pictures of adorable animals for good measure.

I want to read this article...it looks fascinating.

Ted Kaczynski, the convicted bomber who blew up dozens of technophilic professionals, was right about one thing: technology has its own agenda. The technium is not, as most people think, a series of individual artifacts and gadgets for sale. Rather, Kaczynski, speaking as the Unabomber, argued that technology is a dynamic holistic system. It is not mere hardware; rather it is more akin to an organism; it seeks and grabs resources for its own expansion; it transcends human actions and desires. I think Kaczynski was right about these claims. In his own words the Unabomber says: "The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity.”

The ultimate problem is that the paradise the Kaczynski is offering, the solution to civilization so to speak, is the tiny, smoky, dingy, smelly wooden prison cell that absolutely nobody else wants to dwell in. It is a paradise billions are fleeing from. Civilization has its problems but in almost every way it is better than the Unabomber’s shack.

I honestly can't believe this is real. Appalling, but true.

With all the recent talk about the decline of big media (eg. Seth Godin's article at http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/01/when-newspapers.html), I thought it relevant to point to this piece about the shocking state of world slavery: "For four years, I saw dozens of people enslaved, several of whom traffickers actually offered to sell to me. I did not pay for a human life anywhere. And, with one exception, I always withheld action to save any one person, in the hope that my research would later help to save many more. At times, that still feels like an excuse for cowardice. But the hard work of real emancipation can’t be the burden of a select few." What place does four years worth of investigative journalism have in an internet driven meritocracy? Philanthropic endeavours? Streamlined news journals?Reportage is going to change and it is important we don't lose the power to expose issues like this.

Standing in New York City, you are five hours away from being able to negotiate the sale, in broad daylight, of a healthy boy or girl. He or she can be used for anything, though sex and domestic labor are most common. Before you go, let’s be clear on what you are buying. A slave is a human being forced to work through fraud or threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence. Agreed? Good. Most people imagine that slavery died in the 19th century. Since 1817, more than a dozen international conventions have been signed banning the slave trade. Yet, today there are more slaves than at any time in human history.

"Standing in New York City, you are five hours away from being able to negotiate the sale, in broad daylight, of a healthy boy or girl. He or she can be used for anything, though sex and domestic labor are most common. ... The total number of Haitian children in bondage in their own country stands at 300,000."

Standing in New York City, you are five hours away from being able to negotiate the sale, in broad daylight, of a healthy boy or girl. He or she can be used for anything, though sex and domestic labor are most common.

There are now more slaves on the planet than at any time in human history

windows theory

But what about a site's physical appearance? Does the aesthetic appearance of a blog affect what's written by the site's commenters? My sense is that the establishment of social norms through moderation, both by site owners and by the community itself, has much more of an impact on the behavior of commenters than the visual design of a site but aesthetics does factor in somewhat. Perhaps the poor application of a default MT or Wordpress template signals a lack of care or attention on the part of the blog's owner, leading readers to think they can get away with something. Poorly designed advertising or too many ads littered about a site could result in readers feeling disrespected and less likely to participate civilly or respond to moderation. Messageboard software is routinely ugly; does that contribute to the often uncivil tone found on web forums?

A 25-year-old Caltech graduate student has developed a tongue-in-cheek statistical look at taste and intelligence.

WSJ - Digits

Anyone who has ever sought to justify their own musical or literary taste may find some solace in the side project of Virgil Griffith, a 25-year-old Caltech graduate student known for embarrassing numerous corporations with his WikiScanner, the database that tracks the sources of anonymous edits to Wikipedia entries.

Using facebook statistics to find correlation between intellegence and taste.

we have directed all of our energies and intelligence to inventing machinery that does nothing but increase the supply of information. As a consequence, our defenses against information glut have broken down; our information immune system is inoperable. We don't know how to filter it out; we don't know how to reduce it; we don't know to use it. We suffer from a kind of cultural AIDS.

YES

What is fragile should break early while it is still small.

N.N. Taleb's ideas about how to avoid financial black swans in the future, based principally on greater regulation (regulating to help people from themselves)

"No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards."

Preciso ler assim que tiver tempo

Eric Hobsbawm: Whatever ideological logo we adopt, the shift from free market to public action needs to be bigger than politicians grasp

"Impotence therefore faces both those who believe in what amounts to a pure, stateless, market capitalism, a sort of international bourgeois anarchism, and those who believe in a planned socialism uncontaminated by private profit-seeking. Both are bankrupt. The future, like the present and the past, belongs to mixed economies in which public and private are braided together in one way or another. But how? That is the problem for everybody today, but especially for people on the left."

An interesting article justifying twittering as an activity

A great post concerning how there is nothing inherent to the banality of Twitter updates; this banality exists in "real" conversations as well. It's a good point and one that I've been trying to make recently with friends who "just don't get Twitter."

Heraclitus would have had a f***ing Twitter feed.

This is a blog version of a book of mine first published in 1998. I am re-issuing it (two posts per week) unaltered on its 10th anniversary. Comments welcomed. ... The thesis of New Rules for the New Economy is that we are now living in an economy based on ideas and communication rather than energy and atoms. Further, this "new" economy has distinct laws or rules so it behaves differently than the previous industrial economy. To do well in the new regime, we need to grasp the new dynamics of information. I reduce the emerging principles to 10 guidelines, and suggest a few strategies for businesses based on each principle.

Kevin Kelly - Blog ver of book.

education

If every child was unschooled -- given the chance to explore and discover and learn in the real world what they love to do, what they're uniquely good at doing, and what the world needs that they care about -- then we would have a world of self-confident, creative, informed, empowered, networked entrepreneurs doing work that needs to be done, successfully. We would have armies of people collaborating to solve the problems and crises facing our world, instead of going home exhausted at the end of the day seeking escape, feeling helpless to do anything that is meaningful to thems or to the world. We would have a world of producers instead of consumers, a world of abundance instead of scarcity, a world of diversity instead of what Terry Glavin calls "a dark and gathering sameness". We would have a world of young people choosing their lives instead of taking what they can get, what they can afford, what is offered to them.

No way, the current system is in place not because those "in power" want it that way but because we live in a democracy and democracy often produces silly rules.

"Cardinal Richelieu famously said: 'If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.' When all your words and actions can be saved for later examination, different rules have to apply."

Schneier says privacy is quickly disappearing and we're ignoring it. It's like pollution at the beginning of the century: we're ignoring it now because it's small but soon we'll realize it was a big problem that should have been nipped in the bud. Also, if every conversation is recorded we have to change our standards accordingly; eg: how information is considered in a court.

"Society works precisely because conversation is ephemeral; because people forget, and because people don't have to justify every word they utter. ... Privacy isn't just about having something to hide; it's a basic right that has enormous value to democracy, liberty, and our humanity. ... Just as we look back at the beginning of the previous century and shake our heads at how people could ignore the pollution they caused, future generations will look back at us – living in the early decades of the information age – and judge our solutions to the proliferation of data. We must, all of us together, start discussing this major societal change and what it means. And we must work out a way to create a future that our grandchildren will be proud of."

Beautiful essay by Bruce Schneier on the challenges of our time due to data collection, the "pollution" of the information age. Tweeted by Thomas Kriese.

"Cardinal Richelieu famously said: "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." When all your words and actions can be saved for later examination, different rules have to apply." This is especially important for those who say that they have nothing to hide. That misses the point.

Welcome to the future, where everything about you is saved. A future where your actions are recorded, your movements are tracked, and your conversations are no longer ephemeral. A future brought to you not by some 1984-like dystopia, but by the natural tendencies of computers to produce data. Data is the pollution of the information age. It's a natural byproduct of every computer-mediated interaction. It stays around forever, unless it's disposed of. It is valuable when reused, but it must be done carefully. Otherwise, its after effects are toxic. And just as 100 years ago people ignored pollution in our rush to build the Industrial Age, today we're ignoring data in our rush to build the Information Age. Increasingly, you leave a trail of digital footprints throughout your day.

because I enjoy nightclubs less than I enjoy eating wool. But a glamorous friend of mine was there to "

Charlie Brooker: I'm convinced no one actually likes clubs. It's a conspiracy. We've been told they're cool and fun; that only 'saddoes' dislike them.

Brooker is god and right about everything.

"Clubs are such insufferable dungeons of misery, the inmates have to take mood-altering substances to make their ordeal seem halfway tolerable."

Bill Gates once derided open source advocates with the worst epithet a capitalist can muster. These folks, he said, were a "new modern-day sort of communists," a malevolent force bent on destroying the monopolistic incentive that helps support the American dream. Gates was wrong: Open source zealots are more likely to be libertarians than commie pinkos. Yet there is some truth to his allegation. The frantic global rush to connect everyone to everyone, all the time, is quietly giving rise to a revised version of socialism.

Operating without state funding or control, connecting citizens directly to citizens, this mostly free marketplace achieves social good at an efficiency that would stagger any government or traditional corporation. Sure, it undermines the business model of newspapers, but at the same time it makes an indisputable case that the sharing model is a viable alternative to both profit-seeking corporations and tax-supported civic institutions.

mmunal aspects of digital culture run deep and wide. Wikipedia is just one remarkable example of an emerging collectivism—and not just Wikipedia but wikin

Mr. Pitts's experience shows how deeply computers and the Internet have permeated society. A few years ago, some people were worrying that a "digital divide" would separate technology haves and have-nots. The poorest lack the means to buy computers and Web access. Still, in America today, even people without street addresses feel compelled to have Internet addresses.

huge huge resource here

Mr. Pitts's experience shows how deeply computers and the Internet have permeated society. A few years ago, some people were worrying that a "digital divide" would separate technology haves and have-nots. The poorest lack the means to buy computers and Web access. Still, in America today, even people without street addresses feel compelled to have Internet addresses

Mr. Pitts Lacks a Mailing Address But He's Got a Computer and a Web Forum

Add Pentium processors, external storage drives and 17" screens to the gear list of the newly homeless. The Wall Street Journal reports.

Orwell v. Huxley

Or both right or both wrong.

Le pire étant de se rendre compte qu'ils ont tous deux raison...

huxley 2 orwell 1

この人も、ペラペラしゃべらなければいいだけじゃ～ん。「知りません」と一言いっておけばいいのに。

予定調和の世界 　この記者がどういう本心で取材してきたのかは、私は彼ではないので本当のところはわからない。しかしマスメディア出身で、いまも取材活動を仕事の中心に据えている私としては、この記者が何を考えていたのかはある程度は推測できる。それはつまり、こういう記事を書きたいということなのだ。 　「テレビなどのマスメディアからは相手にされなくなったホリエモンは、ブログやYouTubeのような自分のメディアを作ってそこで閉じこもって細々と情報発信」「60億円の民事訴訟に敗訴したホリエモン、必死で裁判で戦っていくとやせ我慢」

うわああああ

良記事

いじめの認知は、本人、親、友人の誰からの報告であっても 「この事態を心配している人から報告があった」で統一する。 必ず、一人の教員ではなくチームで対応する。 複数の加害者（大抵そうです）と複数の教員が別部屋で１対１で対応 事実を認めた加害者に対し「泣くまで」反省を迫る すぐに誤らせる（「謝らせる」が正しいです）ことはしない 少なくとも一週間の時間を置いて、加害者に誤る（「謝る」）ことを許す 保護者を交えて、いじめの事実を報告

"Dear Old People Who Run the World, My generation would like to break up with you. Everyday, I see a widening gap in how you and we understand the world — and what we want from it. I think we have irreconcilable differences. ... What do the "M"s in Generation M stand for? The first is for a movement. It's a little bit about age — but mostly about a growing number of people who are acting very differently. They are doing meaningful stuff that matters the most. Those are the second, third, and fourth "M"s. Gen M is about passion, responsibility, authenticity, and challenging yesterday's way of everything. Everywhere I look, I see an explosion of Gen M businesses, NGOs, open-source communities, local initiatives, government."

This may be the most accurate description of my generation I've seen, ever

to read

Small is beautiful, at least in economy...

Gen M is about passion, responsibility, authenticity, and challenging yesterday's way of everything. Everywhere I look, I see an explosion of Gen M businesses, NGOs, open-source communities, local initiatives, government.

The poorer you are, the more things cost.

You have to be rich to be poor. That's what some people who have never lived below the poverty line don't understand. Put it another way: The poorer you are, the more things cost. More in money, time, hassle, exhaustion, menace. This is a fact of life that reality television and magazines don't o...

view on the future

from Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death--in cartoon form

"Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism."

この事件、成り行きをどうなるのか、たぶん解決は無理と思っていた人がほとんどだったと思う。 もちろん解決することはできない深い問題だけれど、まぁ、叫び罵りあわずに、ビールでも飲んで話そうよ、ということを提案したことで、議論がとたんにポジティブになった

１、行動が迅速 ２、直接に話をし、徹底的に説明する ３、自分の悪かった点についての反省 ４、ネガティブな事件をポジティブなことに変える ５、まぁ、飲んで話そうよ、という落とし所

Topic for discussion in AP

Steven Pinker on how violence has declined over history.

Interesting, somewhat counterintuitive hypothesis here - mankind has been getting steadily LESS violent since pre-historic times - and a bunch of theories as to why.

Steven Pinker explains why he thinks humans have evolved to be more peaceful over time.

They can’t make any decisions, because they don’t know what they want, and they don’t know what they want because they don’t know who they are, and they don’t know who they are because they’re allowed to be anyone they want.

been thinking about this since moving back to sf — this quote is nice, and not just for guys: " 'And that you’re never going to have any fun again, because you have to work. You’re never going to have sex again because you’re going to get married. Your life is over.' So why bother? Literal and figurative fucking around is infinitely more appealing to men who are still sorting out what they want their lives to look like."

I wish I didn't appreciate this, but I can't help it.

An interesting article on how many 20-somethings see the world.

Tongue in cheek Beschreibung der Lebensverhältnisse junger PhD und schlimmerer Versager.

Definitely one to read if you're twenty-something and less than content.

Suggests that high production values, high quality products are not where the mainstream market is. Looks at digital video cameras, legal services, health care, and Web content. Made me think about legal publishing, where increased costs are justified by "value added" content, which gets very little use. At some point the "good enough" plateau will be reached so that lawyers and librarians will not continue to pay for improvements that go beyond what is valued.

Interesting article on how goods are increasingly becoming just good enough as opposed to high quality

Interesting article but sorely mistaken about the novelty of 'good enough'. This is an old phychological framework.

After some trial and error, Pure Digital released what it called the Flip Ultra in 2007. The stripped-down camcorder had lots of downsides. It captured relatively low-quality 640 x 480 footage at a time when Sony, Panasonic, and Canon were launching camcorders capable of recording in 1080 hi-def. It had a minuscule viewing screen, no color-adjustment features, and only the most rudimentary controls. It didn't even have an optical zoom. But it was small (slightly bigger than a pack of smokes), inexpensive ($150, compared with $800 for a midpriced Sony), and so simple to operate—from recording to uploading—that pretty much anyone could figure it out in roughly 6.7 seconds.

An estimated 7,000 languages are being spoken around the world. But that number is expected to shrink rapidly in the coming decades. What is lost when a language dies? In 1992 a prominent US linguist stunned the academic world by predicting that by the year 2100, 90% of the world's languages would have ceased to exist.

"Clusters of happy and unhappy people are visible in the network, and the relationship between people’s happiness extends up to three degrees of separation (for example, to the friends of one’s friends’ friends). People who are surrounded by many happy people and those who are central in the network are more likely to become happy in the future. Longitudinal statistical models suggest that clusters of happiness result from the spread of happiness and not just a tendency for people to associate with similar individuals. A friend who lives within a mile (about 1.6 km) and who becomes happy increases the probability that a person is happy by 25% (95% confidence interval 1% to 57%). Similar effects are seen in coresident spouses (8%, 0.2% to 16%), siblings who live within a mile (14%, 1% to 28%), and next door neighbours (34%, 7% to 70%). Effects are not seen between coworkers. The effect decays with time and with geographical separation."

The rise of overparenting. Insightful and amusing.

The literature on overparenting raises a number of sticky questions. For example, is it really wrong for us to push our children to excel in areas where they are talented?

“Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.” The article reviews books about the new "crisis" of overparenting. There are some helpful comments, but it is nice that the author acknowledges the pendulum swings in pop psychology and in parenting. Would be nice to follow some of the implications of these movements. The article briefly touches on the implications of the selfishness of current parents, but it is only hypothesis. I'd be intersted in a thorough analysis of implications from a historical perspective. Every generation seems to believe the next generation is spoiled and lazy, which seems to be the real critique behind the overparenting books.

The rise of overparenting.

How does the Internet change the way we think?

each year this site asks major thinkers to answer a question, here, "How is the Internet changing your way of thinking?" A great question with lots of respondents' short essays--enough to keep me reading for a week.

HOW IS THE INTERNET CHANGING THE WAY YOU THINK?

My daughter’s worldview and life will be shaped in very deliberate ways by technologies like the Kindle and the new magical high-tech gadgets coming out this year — Google’s Nexus One phone and Apple’s impending tablet among them. She’ll know nothing other than a world with digital books, Skype video chats with faraway relatives, and toddler-friendly video games on the iPhone. She’ll see the world a lot differently from her parents.

“People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project. “College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.”

Ich lebe online. Alle Texte, die ich seit 1983 geschrieben habe, sind auf dem Computer geschrieben worden. Sie liegen auf einem halben Dutzend Rechnern im Netz verstreut. Seit 1986 achte ich darauf, portable Formate zu verwenden, um auch bei einer Migration auf neue Systeme keine Daten zu verlieren. Seit 20 Jahren lese ich laufend meine Mail, ich bin jeden Tag in fünf verschiedenen IM-Systemen zu erreichen.

Die wunderbare Welt von Isotopp

Überlegungen von Kristian Köhntopp zum "Leben online" und Politikern

best. black friday. ever.

stampede

A Wal-Mart worker died early Friday after an "out-of-control" mob of frenzied shoppers smashed through the Long Island store's front doors and trampled him, police said.

By allowing people from all around the world to come together and share info, stories, and knowledge, social media has become a wonderful catalyst for social change. Over the past few of weeks, we have all witnessed how important and powerful social media can be as a vehicle for spreading information and calling people to action by watching how it is being put to use in Iran.

By allowing people from all over the world to join together and share info, experiences, and knowledge, social media has become a wonderful catalyst for social change. Over the past few of weeks, we have all witnessed how important and powerful social media can be as a vehicle for spreading information and calling people to action by watching how it is being put to use in Iran.

By allowing people from all around the world to join together and share information, experiences, and knowledge, social media has become an amazing catalyst for social change. Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve all witnessed how important and powerful social media can be as a vehicle for spreading info and calling people to action by watching how it is being put to use in Iran.

By allowing people from all over the universe to come together and share information, experiences, and knowledge, social media has become an amazing catalyst for social change. Over the past couple of weeks, we have all witnessed how important and powerful social media can be as a vehicle for spreading information and calling people to action by watching how it is being put to use in Iran.

By allowing people from all over the world to come together and share information, experiences, and knowledge, social media has become a wonderful catalyst for social change. Over the past couple of weeks, we have all witnessed how important and powerful social media can be as a vehicle for spreading info and calling people to action by watching how it is being put to use in Iran.

By allowing people from all over the universe to join together and share info, stories, and knowledge, social media has become an amazing catalyst for social change. Over the past few of weeks, we have all witnessed how important and powerful social media can be as a vehicle for spreading information and calling people to action by watching how it is being put to use in Iran.

By allowing people from all over the universe to come together and share info, stories, and knowledge, social media has become a wonderful catalyst for social change. Over the past few of weeks, we have all witnessed how important and powerful social media can be as a vehicle for spreading info and calling people to action by watching how it is being put to use in Iran.

By allowing people from all around the world to join together and share information, experiences, and knowledge, social media has become an amazing catalyst for social change. Over the past couple of weeks, we have all witnessed how important and powerful social media can be as a vehicle for spreading info and calling people to action by watching how it is being put to use in Iran.

By allowing people from all over the universe to come together and share info, experiences, and knowledge, social media has become a wonderful catalyst for social change. Over the past few of weeks, we have all witnessed how important and powerful social media can be as a vehicle for spreading info and calling people to action by watching how it is being put to use in Iran.

By allowing people from all over the universe to join together and share information, experiences, and knowledge, social media has become an amazing catalyst for social change. Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve all witnessed how important and powerful social media can be as a vehicle for spreading information and calling people to action by watching how it is being put to use in Iran.

By allowing people from all around the world to come together and share information, experiences, and knowledge, social media has become a wonderful catalyst for social change. Over the past couple of weeks, we have all witnessed how important and powerful social media can be as a vehicle for spreading info and calling people to action by watching how it is being put to use in Iran.

Finally read this NYT Mag article. Western individualism bad for mental health treatment?

To blog about later. "For more than a generation now, we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world. We have done this in the name of science, believing that our approaches reveal the biological basis of psychic suffering and dispel prescientific myths and harmful stigma. There is now good evidence to suggest that in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we’ve been exporting our Western “symptom repertoire” as well. That is, we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders — depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them — now appear to be spreading across cultures with the speed of contagious diseases. These symptom clusters are becoming the lingua franca of human suffering, replacing indigenous forms of mental illness."

常識

Top 5 priorities - a year ago and still valid

The most scary thing about the Internet for your government is not pedophiles, terrorists or viruses, whatever you may have read in the papers. It is the danger of your administration being silently obsoleted by the lightening pace at which the Internet changes expectations.

RT @timoreilly: MySociety's top 5 Internet priorities for government is, as expected, right on. http://bit.ly/ghZl6 [from http://twitter.com/NicMcPhee/statuses/1330269653]

The Great Recession may be over, but this era of high joblessness is probably just beginning. Before it ends, it will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar men. It could cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a despair not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years to come.

The first time I entered ChatRoulette—a new website that brings you face-to-face, via webcam, with an endless stream of random strangers all over the world—I was primed for a full-on Walt Whitman experience: an ecstatic surrender to the miraculous variety and abundance of humankind. The site was only a few months old, but its population was beginning to explode in a way that suggested serious viral potential: 300 users in December had grown to 10,000 by the beginning of February. Although big media outlets had yet to cover it, smallish blogs were full of huzzahs. The blog Asylum called ChatRoulette its favorite site since YouTube; another, The Frisky, called it “the Holy Grail of all Internet fun.” Everyone seemed to agree that it was intensely addictive—one of those gloriously simple ideas that manages to harness the crazy power of the Internet in a potentially revolutionary way.

I found myself fantasizing about a curated version of ChatRoulette—powered maybe by Google’s massive server farms—that would allow users to set all kinds of filters: age, interest, language, location. One afternoon I might choose to be thrown randomly into a pool of English-speaking thirtysomething non-masturbators who like to read poetry. Another night I might want to talk to Jets fans. Another night I might want to just strip away all the filters and see what happens. The site could even keep stats, like YouTube, so you could see the most popular chatters in any given demographic. I could get very happily addicted to a site like that. Read more: Is ChatRoulette the Future of the Internet or Its Distant Past? -- New York Magazine http://nymag.com/news/media/63663/index2.html#ixzz0fcTHDklh

microinteraction!

"Eventually, I realized that clicking “next” was not so much a rejection as it was pure curiosity, like riding a train past an apartment building at night, looking briefly into as many lit windows as possible."

DIY at home genetic engineering movement has begun

"Co-founder Mackenzie Cowell, a 24-year-old who majored in biology in college, said amateurs will probably pursue serious work such as new vaccines and super-efficient biofuels, but they might also try, for example, to use squid genes to create tattoos that glow."

"Many of these amateurs may have studied biology in college but have no advanced degrees and are not earning a living in the biotechnology field. Some proudly call themselves "biohackers" — innovators who push technological boundaries and put the spread of knowledge before profits."

biohackers

Now it's twenty five years since I got out of that miserable fucking hell-hole. And people from my high school class are suddenly getting in touch, sending me email, trying to friend me on Facebook, and trying to convince me to bring my family to the reunion. (It's a picnic reunion, full family invited.) Even some of the people who used to beat the crap out of me on a regular basis are getting in touch as if we're old friends. My reaction to them... What the fuck is wrong with you people? Why would you think that I would want to have anything to do with you? How do you have the chutzpah to act as if we're old friends? How dare you? I see the RSVP list that one of you sent me, and I literally feel nauseous just remembering your names.

yes.

Very off topic: Why I won't be at my high school reunion

The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors. In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.

Our graduate system has been in crisis for decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the formation of modern universities. Kant wrote that universities should “handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.” Unfortunately this mass-production university model has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization.

Research and publication has become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages faculty members to cultivate those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these students having futures as full professors.

I’m not a psychologist, nor am I a parent, so let me start by saying she might be right that these sites are harmful in some cognitive way. But I think she’s wrong to assume social networking is devoid of a “cohesive narrative and long-term significance.” I can see where she’s coming from, but like a lot of people who don’t actually use these sites, she’s missing a fundamental shift from Web 1.0 chat room days to Web 2.0 social networks: Real identity.

Interesting discussion of social networking

Why social networking is good for kids

We type on, engrossed in conversation, forgetting we're being recorded and those recordings might come back to haunt us later. Oliver North learned this, way back in 1987, when messages he thought he had deleted were saved by the White House PROFS system, and then subpoenaed in the Iran-Contra affair. Bill Gates learned this in 1998 when his conversational e-mails were provided to opposing counsel as part of the antitrust litigation discovery process. Mark Foley learned this in 2006 when his instant messages were saved and made public by the underage men he talked to. Paris Hilton learned this in 2005 when her cell phone account was hacked, and Sarah Palin learned it earlier this year when her Yahoo e-mail account was hacked. ... Ephemeral conversation is dying. Cardinal Richelieu:If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."

"Conversation used to be ephemeral. Whether face-to-face or by phone, we could be reasonably sure that what we said disappeared as soon as we said it. Organized crime bosses worried about phone taps and room bugs, but that was the exception. Privacy was just assumed. This has changed. We chat in e-mail, over SMS and IM, and on social networking websites like Facebook, MySpace, and LiveJournal. We blog and we Twitter. These conversations -- with friends, lovers, colleagues, members of our cabinet -- are not ephemeral; they leave their own electronic trails. We know this intellectually, but we haven't truly internalized it. We type on, engrossed in conversation, forgetting we're being recorded and those recordings might come back to haunt us later."

When he becomes president, Barack Obama will have to give up his BlackBerry. Aides are concerned that his unofficial conversations would become part of the presidential record, subject to subpoena and eventually made public as part of the country's historical record.

"When he becomes president, Barack Obama will have to give up his BlackBerry. Aides are concerned that his unofficial conversations would become part of the presidential record, subject to subpoena and eventually made public as part of the country's historical record."

But as technology makes our conversations less ephemeral, we need laws to step in and safeguard ephemeral conversation.

"The younger generation chats digitally, and the older generation treats those chats as written correspondence. ... until we have a Presidential election where both candidates have a complete history on social networking sites from before they were teenagers -- we aren't fully an information age society." (via Oblinks)

Goemon 2

長期日本在住の外国人のブログ　てか長いなー

«It's time to declare the end of adolescence. As a social institution, it's been a failure. The proof is all around us: 19% of eighth graders, 36% of tenth graders, and 47% of twelfth graders say they have used illegal drugs, according to a study by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the University of Michigan. One of every four girls has a sexually transmitted disease, suggests a recent study for the Centers for Disease Control. A methamphetamine epidemic among the young is destroying lives, families, and communities. And American students are learning at a frighteningly slower rate than Chinese and Indian students.»

"Adolescence was invented in the 19th century to enable middle-class families to keep their children out of sweatshops. But it has degenerated into a process of enforced boredom and age segregation that has produced one of the most destructive social arrangements in human history: consigning 13-year-old males to learning from 15-year-old males." Good point.

an graduate a year early get the 12th year's cost of schooling as an automatic scholarship to any college or technical school they want to a

Attempting to command, as well as deal with, the on the internet status has become increasingly hard.

But the nonsense we’re all worried about today? I just don’t think it will carry the same weight in a few years. Because if there are pictures of the person hiring you smoking pot in college online, and there are pictures of every other candidate smoking pot in college online, it just won’t be a big deal any more. And the kind of accusations that can kill a career today will likely be seen as a badge of honor, and a sign of an ambitious individual who has pissed off a few people along the way. At least that’s what I hope will happen. Because there are a few pictures of me in high school and college that I’m tired of trying to keep off the Internet. Let’s just get it all out there sooner rather than later, and move on.

by Michael Arrington, TechCrucnh - March 28, 2010

Trying to manage, or even control, the on the web status has become progressively difficult.

Trying to handle, or maybe deal with, ones on-line popularity has become significantly hard.

Attempting to command, and even manage, the on-line popularity is now increasingly tough.

Trying to command, or even manage, the online standing is now more and more challenging.

En utvald buddhistpojke hoppar av som utvald att vara en reinkarnation av en hög lamaledare i Tibet.

it is believed that he was reincarnation of... wait, what?

"Instead of leading a monastic life, Osel Hita Torres now sports baggy trousers and long hair, and is more likely to quote Jimi Hendrix than Buddha."

Yesterday he bemoaned the misery of a youth deprived of television, football and girls. Movies were also forbidden – except for a sanctioned screening of The Golden Child starring Eddie Murphy, about a kidnapped child lama with magical powers.

As a toddler, he was put on a throne and worshipped by monks who treated him like a god. But the boy chosen by the Dalai Lama as a reincarnation of a spiritual leader has caused consternation – and some embarrassment – for Tibetan Buddhists by turning his back on the order that had such high hopes for him.

As a toddler, he was put on a throne and worshipped by monks who treated him like a god. But the boy chosen by the Dalai Lama as a reincarnation of a spiritual leader has caused consternation – and some embarrassment – for Tibetan Buddhists by turning his back on the order that had such high hopes for him. Instead of leading a monastic life, Osel Hita Torres now sports baggy trousers and long hair, and is more likely to quote Jimi Hendrix than Buddha.

Can't wait to see the movie.

# 5000万人の視聴者を獲得するまでにかかった年数 # ラジオ 38年 # テレビ 13年 # インターネット 4年 # iPod 3年 # Facebook 2年

2010年に需要のある仕事上位10位は 2004年にはまだ存在していませんでした。

パラダイムシフト

Most counterterrorism policies fail, not because of tactical problems, but because of a fundamental misunderstanding of what motivates terrorists in the first place. If we're ever going to defeat terrorism, we need to understand what drives people to become terrorists in the first place.

"Conventional wisdom holds that terrorism is inherently political, and that people become terrorists for political reasons...Max Abrahms, a predoctoral fellow at Stanford, argues that this model is wrong, and discusses seven habits observed in terrorist groups that contradict the theory that terrorists are political maximizers...Abrahms has an alternative model to explain all this: People turn to terrorism for social solidarity."

Abrahms has an alternative model to explain all this: People turn to terrorism for social solidarity. He theorizes that people join terrorist organizations worldwide in order to be part of a community, much like the reason inner-city youths join gangs in the United States. The evidence supports this. [[Some of the comments are very intriguing as well. —Ed.]]

Most counterterrorism policies fail, not because of tactical problems, but because of a fundamental misunderstanding of what motivates terrorists in the first place—by Bruce Schneier

『俺は見捨てられる』

あとでよむ

これは確かに一理ある。

海外のマスコミの日本のニュースをチェックするのが質が高くて，ニュートラルなニュースが読めるかも．これからはそうしようかなぁ．

麻生首相は明らかに、４つある日本の民放TVネットワークの犠牲になっている。これらの民放は政治の話題を、何か別な形態の番組と区別せずに扱っているように見える。つまりテーマが面白おかしくなければならないような種類の番組と、そうではない番組ということである。

I'll up the ante. What if they were Muslim? @laughingwoman Tim Wise: What if Tea Partiers were black? http://bit.ly/cZzE8K

Protest is only seen as fundamentally American when those who have long had the luxury of seeing themselves as prototypically American engage in it. And this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do, on a daily basis.

RT @CarriBugbee: Ephphatha Poetry: "Imagine if the Tea Party Was Black" - Tim Wise ""Imagine if the Tea Party Was Black" - Tim Wise" htt ...

"Protest is only seen as fundamentally American when those who have long had the luxury of seeing themselves as prototypically American engage in it. When the dangerous and dark “other” does so, however, it isn’t viewed as normal or natural, let alone patriotic. . . . // And this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do, on a daily basis." (avoid the comments)

Excellent article on white privilege

"In other words, imagine that even one-third of the anger and vitriol currently being hurled at President Obama, by folks who are almost exclusively white, were being aimed, instead, at a white president, by people of color. How many whites viewing the anger, the hatred, the contempt for that white president would then wax eloquent about free speech, and the glories of democracy? And how many would be calling for further crackdowns on thuggish behavior, and investigations into the radical agendas of those same people of color?" Via Debbie.

And this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do, on a daily basis.

"He had been hunted, kidnapped, and told he was filming his own execution. But CNN correspondent Michael Ware had no plans to leave Iraq. Now, it won’t leave him."

Hell and a bucket of gasoline.

He had been hunted, kidnapped, and told he was filming his own execution. But CNN correspondent Michael Ware had no plans to leave Iraq. Now, it won’t leave him.

"The growing expectation placed on schools and parents to boost pupils' self-esteem is breeding a generation of narcissists, an expert has warned."

We've been telling children they are unique and special for over a decade.

Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition.

Heather Havrilesky, fantastic article and reader responses. God, I love Heather.

Nov. 7, 2008 | Dear boomers: We're sorry for rolling our eyes at you all these years. We apologize for scoffing at your earnestness, your lack of self-deprecation, your tendency to take yourselves a little too seriously.

"Your earnest, self-important prattle has gotten on Gen X nerves for decades. But now we finally get it... When we watched Barack Obama's victory speech on Tuesday night, we looked into the eyes of a real leader, and decades of cynicism about politics and grass-roots movements and community melted away in a single moment. We heard the voice of a man who can inspire with his words, who's unashamed of his own intelligence, who's willing to treat the citizens of this country like smart, capable people, worthy of respect. For the first time in some of our lifetimes, we believed."

折田先生像に対する見解といい、京大はしぶすぎる。

兄弟かこよす

これが正しい態度ですね。

なんか周囲で嫌な予感

俺ね、5年以内に起業して年収1000万超えるから。

The complete slogan reads: "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." As the campaign has raised more than anticipated, it will also have posters on the inside of buses as well.

Bendy-buses with the slogan "There's probably no God" could soon be running on the streets of London.

The complete bus slogan reads: "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."

Buses with the slogan "There's probably no God" could be running on the streets of London.

Bendy-buses with the slogan "There's probably no God" could soon be running on the streets of London. (BBC)

8% wereldwijd is econoom; de meerderheid jurist

The presence of so many engineer-politicians in China goes hand in hand with a certain way of thinking.

ter, Wen Jiabao, specialised in g

Economist article on the prevalence of lawyers in U.S. and U.K. politics.

Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same. For years, women’s progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women? A report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way— and its vast cultural consequences

Daughters preferred over sons, women more successful

Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same. For years, women’s progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women? A report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way— and its vast cultural consequences

"Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same. For years, women’s progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women? A report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way— and its vast cultural consequences"

In his final book, The Bachelors’ Ball, published in 2007, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu describes the changing gender dynamics of Béarn, the region in southwestern France where he grew up. The eldest sons once held the privileges of patrimonial loyalty and filial inheritance in Béarn. But over the decades, changing economic forces turned those privileges into curses. Although the land no longer produced the impressive income it once had, the men felt obligated to tend it. Meanwhile, modern women shunned farm life, lured away by jobs and adventure in the city. They occasionally returned for the traditional balls, but the men who awaited them had lost their prestige and become unmarriageable. This is the image that keeps recurring to me, one that Bourdieu describes in his book: at the bachelors’ ball, the men, self-conscious about their diminished status, stand stiffly, their hands by their sides, as the women twirl away.

As thinking and communicating have come to eclipse physical strength and stamina as the keys to economic success, women begin to have the advantage.

“We will transcend all of the limitations of our biology,” says Raymond Kurzweil, the inventor and businessman who is the Singularity’s most ubiquitous spokesman and boasts that he intends to live for hundreds of years and resurrect the dead, including his own father. “That is what it means to be human — to extend who we are.” But, of course, one person’s utopia is another person’s dystopia. http://www.kurzweilai.net/news/frame.html?main=news_single.html?id%3D12295

NYT article about the singularity movement

ON a Tuesday evening this spring, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, became part man and part machine. About 40 people, all gathered here at a NASA campus for a nine-day, $15,000 course at Singularity University, saw it happen. While the flesh-and-blood version of Mr. Brin sat miles away at a computer capable of remotely steering a robot, the gizmo rolling around here consisted of a printer-size base with wheels attached to a boxy, head-height screen glowing with an image of Mr. Brin’s face. The BrinBot obeyed its human commander and sputtered around from group to group, talking to attendees about Google and other topics via a videoconferencing system.

At that point, the Singularity holds, human beings and machines will so effortlessly and elegantly merge that poor health, the ravages of old age and even death itself will all be things of the past. Some of Silicon Valley’s smartest and wealthiest people have embraced the Singularity. They believe that technology may be the only way to solve the world’s ills, while also allowing people to seize control of the evolutionary process.

While the flesh-and-blood version of Mr. Brin sat miles away at a computer capable of remotely steering a robot, the gizmo rolling around here consisted of a printer-size base with wheels attached to a boxy, head-height screen glowing with an image of Mr. Brin’s face. The BrinBot obeyed its human commander and sputtered around from group to group, talking to attendees about Google and other topics via a videoconferencing system. The BrinBot was hardly something out of “Star Trek.” It had a rudimentary, no-frills design and was a hodgepodge of loosely integrated technologies. Yet it also smacked of a future that the Singularity University founders hold dear and often discuss with a techno-utopian bravado: the arrival of the Singularity — a time, possibly just a couple decades from now, when a superior intelligence will dominate and life will take on an altered form that we can’t predict or comprehend in our current, limited state.

Whether Cahn and Carbone are right will take time and subsequent scholarship to learn; but their story is both plausible and sobering. Plausible, because it brings so many aspects of the culture wars into sharper focus. Sobering, because the economic and cultural forces battering traditional family norms show no signs of abating -- but the new, education-centered pathway to adulthood is often least accessible to those who need it most.

In red America, families form adults

"New norms arise for this environment, norms geared to prevent premature family formation. The new paradigm prizes responsible childbearing and child-rearing far above the traditional linkage of sex, marriage, and procreation. Instead of emphasizing abstinence until marriage, it enjoins: Don't form a family until after you have finished your education and are equipped for responsibility. In other words, *adults form families*. Family life marks the end of the transition to adulthood, not the beginning. Red America still prefers the traditional model."

RT @brainpicker: Do "family values" weaken families? Very compelling read from National Journal http://is.gd/c3p5t [from http://twitter.com/bfwriter/statuses/13765341391]

Can it be? One of the oddest paradoxes of modern cultural politics may at last be resolved. The paradox is this: Cultural conservatives revel in condemning the loose moral values and louche lifestyles of "San Francisco liberals." But if you want to find two-parent families with stable marriages and coddled kids, your best bet is to bypass Sarah Palin country and go to Nancy Pelosi territory: the liberal, bicoastal, predominantly Democratic places that cultural conservatives love to hate.