The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Barry Schwartz makes a passionate call for “practical wisdom” as an antidote to a society gone mad with bureaucracy. He argues powerfully that rules often fail us, incentives often backfire, and practical, everyday wisdom will help rebuild our world.
Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Barry Schwartz at TED on Our Loss of Wisdom”
Climate challenges us to reconnect to place, reality and reason
We are out of sync with the world and especially with “place”. We lack the insights and capacities that come from knowing a place deeply over generations and from conscious vulnerability to the real world. Our speedy technological consumer culture not only created climate change but undermines our ability to respond to it. Understanding this dilemma and the dynamics that generate it could help us redirect our endangered destiny.
Dear friends,
Naomi Klein’s Climate Change Is the Fight of Our Lives – Yet We Can Hardly Bear to Look At It offers a novel view of our climate dilemma. She notes how “warming causes animals to fall out of step with a critical food source, particularly at breeding times, when a failure to find enough food can lead to rapid population losses.” She then notes how climate change is happening at a time in our social evolution where we are ill prepared to respond effectively: “The climate crisis hatched in our laps at a moment in history when political and social conditions were uniquely hostile to a problem of this nature and magnitude.”
She adds, however, that it is not all bad news. “The good news is that, unlike reindeer and songbirds, we humans are blessed with the capacity for advanced reasoning and therefore the ability to adapt more deliberately – to change old patterns of behaviour with remarkable speed.”
I find the details of her analysis fascinating. Given its brilliance, however, I was surprised to find several essential ingredients missing. Perhaps the most glaring is that the climate crisis didn’t just “hatch” or “happen”. It was created by the very same political, economic and psychosocial forces and institutions that she identifies as being responsible for our inability to respond to it. It’s all one big ball of yarn, as the saying goes. Furthermore, our disconnection from the historic and now shifting eco-realities of “place” that she highlights as underlying our inability to respond has been developing for centuries if not millennia. Obsessive global consumerism is just a recent development in our ever-growing capacity to separate ourselves from “the elements”.
Two former high-level insiders may have solved two of the mysteries surrounding the disappearance of Malaysian Flight 370:
What caused the plane to suddenly fly off-course? And why are all of the governments involved covering up the truth?
Had MH 370 crashed in the ocean, it would have left a huge, easily-visible debris field. Countries with satellite surveillance systems, and their partners, know exactly where the plane went. Boeing and its engine-manufacturer Rolls Royce also know, since planes and engines have GPS systems. (You can buy a GPS system for a little over $50 in the US; it would be naive to think a $320 million aircraft doesn’t have one.) Even the INMARSAT satellite “pings” that we have been told can only sweep a broad arc of possible locations could in reality be used to locate the aircraft with some precision, due to the fact that radio transmissions vary in signatures according to time of day, sunspots, and so on. The “hunt for the airliner” peddled to the mainstream media is clearly a charade.
So what are all of the major players – both in governments and the aircraft industry – working so hard to hide?
Why American Apples Just Got Banned in Europe
Back in 2008, European Food Safety Authority began pressing the chemical industry to provide safety information on a substance called diphenylamine, or DPA. Widely applied to apples after harvest, DPA prevents “storage scald”—brown spots that “becomes a concern when fruit is stored for several months,” according to Washington State University, reporting from the heartland of industrial-scale apple production.
DPA isn't believed to be harmful on its own. But it has the potential to break down into a family of carcinogens called nitrosamines—not something you want to find on your daily apple. And that's why European food safety regulators wanted more information on it. The industry came back with just “one study that detected three unknown chemicals on DPA-treated apples, but it could not determine if any of these chemicals, apparently formed when the DPA broke down, were nitrosamines,” Environmental Working Group shows in an important new report. (The EFSA was concerned that DPA could decay into nitrosamines under contact with nitrogen, a ubiquitous element, EWG notes.) Unsatisfied with the response, the EFSA banned use of DPA on apples in 2012. And in March, the agency then slashed the tolerable level of DPA on imported apples to 0.1 parts per million, EWG reports.
Someone is once again raining on the big data parade, urging us to consider carefully before jumping on the bandwagon. FT Magazine warns, “Big Data: Are We Making a Big Mistake?” Writer Tim Harford points to Google’s much-lauded Google Flu Trends as an emblematic example in the field. That project notes an increase in certain search terms, like “flu symptoms” or “pharmacies near me”, by point of origin. With those data points, its algorithm extrapolates the spread of the disease. In fact, it does so with only one day’s delay, compared to a week or more for the CDC’s analysis based on doctors’ reports.
The thing is, this successful project is also an example of the blind faith many are putting into the results of data analysis. The scientists behind it aren’t afraid to admit they don’t know which search terms are most fruitful or how, exactly, its algorithm is constructing its correlations—it’s all about the results. Correlation over causation, as Harford puts it. However, Google Flu Trends hit a speed bump in 2012: it greatly over-estimated the flu’s spread, unnecessarily alarming the public. Correlation is much, much easier to determine than causation, but we must not let ourselves believe it is just as good.
The article cautions:
Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: Caution Advised on Big Data”
Here’s the Right Way to Build the Futuristic Cities of Our Dreams
Our technology-first approach has failed the city of the future. So-called “smart cities,” powered by technology, carry the promise of responding to the great pressures of our time, such as urban population growth, climate instability, and fiscal uncertainty. But by focusing on the cutting-edge technologies themselves and relying on private companies to move forward, we have lost sight of what we even want our cities to achieve with all that tech.
To date, smart city conversations mostly trade in optimism, focusing on images of cities without congestion and smart energy meters on every building. Global publications like this one devote space to specific solutions, while television commercials offer a visual taste of how our cities could look in the years ahead. Marketers fuel the fire by estimating a multi-trillion dollar market within a decade.
At what point do we prioritize the municipality–the actual governance of the city–to make great plans?
To help push the industry forward and achieve those trillion dollar market projections, we need to spend as much time and energy creating policy blueprints as we’ve spent researching and marketing new technologies. Smart policies must match smart technologies.
KEY POINTS ONLY::
Continue reading “Berto Jongman: WIRED on Right Way to Build Smart Cities”
ROBERT STEELE: Why Big Data is Stillborn (for Now) + Comments from EIN Technical Council
Robert Steele: PhD Proposal — includes new M4IS2/OSE Conference
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