The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
I do work on the applications of collective intelligence to global problem solving. I have a strong additional interest in change strategies, and why we fail to notice seemingly apparent changes that, in some cases literally, are right in front of our nose.
If you haven't seen Simon Roberts recent ARUP foresight presentation yet, I think you'd enjoy it very much:
I’ll believe it when I see it.
This is a problem.
It didn’t used to be. It used to be a totally fine strategy to work your way through life only believing what you could see and touch, only caring about what impacted your life right now.
Two things changed:
First, over time, the base of knowledge we have about the world has increased exponentially, and that knowledge compounds. Electrons and ozone and game theory and databases might all be invisible, they might be beyond your understanding, but they’re still important, still looming right at the edges of the life you live right now.
And second, of course, is the notion of a worldwide web of information, a system that brings every bit of news and data and discovery right to your door. While you may want to disbelieve what’s happening around you, that won’t make it go away, and what’s “around you” is now a much larger sphere than it ever was before.
If you are too trusting of the invisible, then you buy that $89 ebook that comes with the promise of instant riches, or you sign up for ear candling, or invest time and money with a charlatan. If you haven't figured out how to discern the invisible stuff that's true from the invisible stuff that's a trick, you're helpless in a world where just about every decision we make has to do with things that are invisible.
Thus, two kinds of serious errors: believing in invisible things that aren't true, or insisting that the truth might not be. They're caused by fear, by deliberate misinformation and by being uninformed.
We have to accept that once we start down the slippery slope of always (or never) believing, we end up in Alice-in-Wonderland territory. Do you have firsthand knowledge that the Earth is round (a sphere)? Really? Have you ever seen the tuberculosis bacteria? Perhaps it doesn’t exist, they might say it’s just a fraud invented by the pharmaceutical industry to get us to buy expensive drugs… Or consider the flip side, the Bernie Madoff too-good-to-be-true flipside of invisible riches that never appear. After all, if someone can't prove it's a fraud yet, it might be true!
Eight things you’ve probably never seen with your own eyes: Buzz Aldrin, the US debt, multi-generational evolution of mammals, an atom of hydrogen, Google’s search algorithm, the inside of a nuclear power plant, a whale and the way your body digests a cookie. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist, nor does it mean you can’t find a way to make them useful.
Do governments and marketers lie to us? All the time. Does that mean that the powerful (reproducible, testable and yes, true) invisible forces of economics, history and science are a fraud? No way.
Once you go down that road, you’re on your own, no longer a productive member of a society built on rational thought. Be skeptical. Test and measure and see if the truth is a useful hypothesis to help move the discussion forward. Please do. But at some point, in order to move forward, we have to accept that truth can’t be a relative concept, something to use when it suits our agenda but be discarded when we're frightened or want to score a point.
Richard Feynman said, “I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding, they learn by some other way — by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!”
Merely because it's invisible doesn't mean it's true–or false.
Is it a skill to figure out what's true, even if it's invisible? I think it is, and a rare and valuable one.
CMU’s Classroom Salon Uses Social Networking to Tap Collective Intelligence of Online Study Groups
Taking their cue from social media, educators at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a social networking application called Classroom Salon that engages students in online learning communities that effectively tap the collective intelligence of groups. Thousands of high school and university students used Classroom Salon (CLS), this past academic year to share their ideas about texts, news articles and other reading materials or their critiques of each others’ writings. With the support of the Next Generation Learning Challenges initiative, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, CLS will be used in an innovative experiment at the University of Baltimore to see if it can help students who are in danger of failing introductory courses or otherwise dropping out of college.
New Corbis Creative Research Reveals Trend Toward “Mass Intelligence”
Corbis reveals a collective longing for rational solutions to the world’s problems and how it is manifested through increased education and technological advances as well as a shift in management style, working practices and policy making. In North America, the number of adults 25 and older with at least a high school diploma has increased from 80 percent to 84 percent, while high school and college enrolment rates are at an all-time high. What’s more, the hottest areas of growth are the fields of biotechnology, nanotechnology, bioinformatics, applied optics, genetic engineering, molecular biology, environmental science, and artificial intelligence. “Our report shows that today we’re beginning to recognize the need for a more pragmatic and rational approach to the future,” says Mark Retzer, Senior Director, Creative Research at Corbis.
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Video: Changing the World, One Map at a TimePatrick Meier | May 4, 2011 at 9:31 am | Tags: Re:publica, rp11, video | Categories: Conferences, Crisis Mapping, Crowdsourcing, Digital Activism, Humanitarian Tech, New Media, Ushahidi | URL: http://wp.me/pecFU-1oX
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Hosted in the beautiful city of Berlin, Re:publica 2011 is Germany's largest annual conference on blogs, new media and the digital society, drawing thousands of participants from across the world for three days of exciting conversations and presentations. The conference venue was truly a spectacular one and while conference presentations are typically limited to 10-20 minutes, the organizers gave us an hour to share our stories. So I'm posting the video of my presentation below for anyone interested in learning more about new media, crowdsourcing, crisis mapping, live maps, crisis response, civil resistance, digital activism and check-in's. I draw on my experience with Ushahidi and the Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF) and share examples from Kenya, Haiti, Libya, Japan, the US and Egypt to illustrate how live maps can change the world.
Click to Visit Original Post and then View Video (53:41, Color, Major Stage Presentation)
Theme: combined clouds and crowds to achieve social progress with maps as a foundation.
From BSA listserve: Excellent article on integration of 3G, LTE, Wifi and land lines i.e.- 5G networking. The only thing missing is this article is the 5th “G” – green networking. With so much overlapping coverage from the different wireless and wired nodes you don’t need five nines reliability for each node. Individual nodes can therefore be powered with small solar panels and micro wind mills. This is also great opportunity for R&E networks to partner with carriers like Vodafone and others who are building integrated Wifi/LTE networks and use Eduroam to extend reach of their networks for personal health research applications, sensor networks built around smart phone etc. For more details please see http://goo.gl/W9mla and http://goo.gl/a1Lpz – BSA]
21st Century Triple Networks: Ubiquitous 4G, WiFi, & Wires
The best engineers on the planet are coming to the same conclusion: a hybrid 4G/WiFi/landline network is the way to meet mobile demand. Folks like John Donovan of AT&T and Masayoshi Son of Softbank in Japan
had this vision around 2007-2008. As the iPhone/iPad/Android made the coming demand clear, networks planners around the world evolved similar strategies.
• 4G gives wide coverage but is limited in capacity.
• WiFi actually provides far more capacity, because the range of perhaps 100 meters means the spectrum can be reused thousands of times in a major city. (China Mobile is putting 20,000 WiFi hotspots across
Beijing.) A network builder tells me “WiFi is a solution to off load ‘portable' traffic where possible and rely on 3G/4G for ‘mobile' traffic.” Femtos and perhaps small cells will play a significant part.
• Landlines effectively have 10x the capacity of a similar wireless network and are already ubiquitous from both telco and cable. A top engineer tells me “The general rule is the quicker you can get the byte of information onto a hard facility (copper, fiber) the cheaper it is to operate the network.” Randall Stephenson of AT&T explains “You're always going to have to have a fixed line capability to offload this traffic.”
[…]
So cell tower 3G/4G ideally is supplemented with local WiFi/femto. Cell towers cover large areas, allowing comprehensive coverage except for a few dead spots. They offer limited bandwidth over that entire
area, with a network like Verizon's LTE offering perhaps 35 megabits to share. WiFi is much lower power, limiting range to a typical 100 meters or so, less with obstructions. Within that range, the capacity is high; 3×3 MIMO 802.11N can carry 100's of megabits in a small area. Locally, 802.11 uses spectrum more efficiently, incorporated a limited set of “spread-spectrum” type features.
WiFi was in few phones two years ago because it ran down batteries too quickly and cost too much. Moore's Law now enables low power, low cost WiFi. The latest chips from RALINK/Trendchip, for example, cost
less than $5. Off mode power consumption is 0.012 mw, transmit power is 19dBm, and the chips are 5 to 7 mm square. Easily 3/4ths of the phones sold by a carrier like Verizon will soon have WiFi as do just
about all tablets. As Qualcomm, Broadcom and others include WiFi on their primary cellphones chips it will become ubiquitous.
[…]
Carriers are choosing different strategies to get from where they are today to triple networks. Vodafone, Europe's largest wireless company, is adding millions of DSL customers through unbundling and giving them
femto+WiFi gateways. Sky in Britain is buying a WiFi network named “The Cloud.” Free.fr enables WiFi on their millions of DSL connections and bought a wireless license. AT&T is putting WiFi hotspots from Times Square NY to San Francisco with expansion plans. China Mobile is adding 1,000,000 hotspots.
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Tip of the Hat to original poster Bill St. Arnaud.
Phi Beta Iota: Gordon Cook thinks very highly of Bill St. Arnaud, and observes that Mr. Arnaud is a consultant for Surfnet in the Netherlands working out their wireless cloud for the research and education community in that country of some 1,000,000 out of 16,000,000 people. He is describing some of what he is building that is based on the Netherlands national fiber backplane.
America’s Core Values: We the People vs. Them Crooks
CURVEBALL: The Interview + Integrity RECAP
Journal: USA Slouching Toward Tyranny
Reference: Empire of Lies & Secrecy
Search: cost of corruption + Corruption RECAP
