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[Editor’s note: This is the first in a new column series from the pragmatic visionaries at the Thornburg Center for Professional Development for edtech digest]
“The availability of technologies to youth is its own instructor.” –Nobelist Herbert A. Simon (June 15, 1916 – February 9, 2001), Author of Science of the Artificial and a Father of Artificial Intelligence
EXTRACT: TOYS MIRROR WHAT’S NEXT IN TECHNOLOGY
In the same way that Erector Sets were patterned after the technologies of the third phase of the industrial revolution, the LEGO MindStorms kits reflect the structure of emerging technology and careers in the 21st Century. In 2006, Nano Quest from FIRST Robotics enabled students to program LEGO robots to mimic biological, chemical, and physical systems across micro-, meso-, and nano-scales.
1. When you're setting a record for the longest modern war, cutting it short just increases the chances of somebody breaking your record some day.
2. When Newt Gingrich, Cal Thomas, and Lindsey Graham turn against a war, keeping it going will really confuse Republicans.
3. If we pull U.S. troops out after they have shot children from helicopters, kicked in doors at night, waved Nazi flags, urinated on corpses, and burned Korans it will look like we're sorry they did those things.
4. U.S. tax dollars have been funding our troops, and through payments for safe passage on roads have also been the top source of income for the Taliban. Unilaterally withdrawing that funding from both sides of a war at the same time would be unprecedented and could devastate the booming Afghan economy.
5. The government we've installed in Afghanistan is making progress on its torture program and drug running and now supports wife beating. But it has not yet mandated invasive ultrasounds. We cannot leave with a job half-finished, not on International Women's Day.
6. We have an enormous prison full of prisoners in Afghanistan, and closing it down would distract us from our essential concentration on pretending to close Guantanamo.
7. Unless we keep “winning” in Afghanistan it will be very hard to generate enthusiasm for our wars in Syria and Iran. And with suicide the top killer of our troops, we cannot allow our men and women to be killing themselves in vain.
8. If we ended the war that created the 2001 authorization to use military force, how would we justify our special forces operations in over 100 other countries, the elimination of habeas corpus, or the legalization of murdering U.S. citizens? Besides, if we stay a few more years we might find an al Qaeda member.
9. A few hundred billion dollars a year is a small price to pay for weapons bases, a gas pipeline, huge profits for generous campaign funders, and a perfect testing ground for weapons that will be absolutely essential in our next pointless war.
Back in 2002 while I was at a major Command, Friedman made a pitch to provide “ground truth” intelligence on contract. While some folks went gaga over his presentation, there were many small indicators that all was not well. Apparently Friedman was asked to leave LSU for reasons undetermined. Offically, according to STRATFOR ” In 1997, a small company that would eventually grow into Stratfor—called Strategic Intelligence LLC—left Baton Rouge and LSU, where its founder George Friedman had been a professor. A 1999 profile in Texas Monthly said the company “couldn't thrive” in Baton Rouge, and that's why Friedman took it to Austin, where it blossomed into a global powerhouse.”
Reasoning heard on the street by colleagues active in San Antonio, he was bankrolled by Mossad and they wanted him in an area of hightech.
I have read his comments about OSS and you specifically; his arrogance is unbelievable. His “analysts” are currently UT-Austin students with a couple of “seasoned veterans”, none of whom have an intelligence
background.
He has been described as a neocon and I think that fits. From where I sit, I think STRATFOR is finished, they are trying very hard to regain their client base….with little success…
EXTRACT: Armed with this conviction about “where the action is,” I found my philosophical research invariably led me into study and research within each of the scientific fields with which my conceptual inquiries shared a sufficiently long border, including inter alia neuroscience, cybernetics, complexity theory, semiotics, perceptual control theory, communication theory, psychology and psychoanalysis. I pursued these empirical studies in depth alongside my work in analytic philosophy, and so accordingly, for what it’s worth, my academic credentials have come to include degrees in cybernetics (from Brunel University—in the former Institute of Cybernetics) and in social sciences and neuroscience as well as philosophy (from Oxford), among other things, grounding my philosophical inquiries with training and research on the empirical side of the fence.
EXTRACT: Academic philosophy has lately made a fetish of arguments in the sense of disputation, in place of arguments in the sense of argumentation to establish the reasonableness or otherwise of conclusions reached. A more and more arcane, deliberately exclusive technical vocabulary has largely displaced a long tradition of philosophical writing accessible to those from other disciplines. Philosophers have increasingly been talking only to themselves, and in voices increasingly shrill. Competition thriving on disagreement has replaced cooperation in the service of reaching agreement. Technical, often pseudoscientific logic-chopping and internecine disputes, spurred on by what Freud called “the narcissism of minor differences,” have replaced an overriding interest in cooperative engagement with colleagues outside philosophy, in the humanities and in the sciences. Dogged by false oppositions between logic and rhetoric, the empirical and the conceptual, philosophers for the first time in modern intellectual history have found themselves operating in a vacuum.
EXTRACT: Four of the largest books in Wilk’s library — where he keeps his kaleidoscope collection — comprise his thesis. His friends call it “the slab”. Its title is Principium Metamorpholigica. Metamorphology, from metamorphosis, is, according to Wilk, a “nascent discipline” concerned with the science of change. So far, Wilk is its only practitioner. His thesis is highly technical, drawing on the work of cyberneticians such as Gregory Bateson and DJ Stewart, who supervised the doctoral work. Its central argument: that change is instant and easy, no matter how large the system.
a one-year introductory course on the philosophical and scientific understanding of change
and its application in rapidly pinpointing minimalist interventions
EXTRACT: Each Interchange design session normally results in a pertinent and elegant solution that can be implemented at once, with immediate and bankable results, only occasionally requiring a second or third session to secure the client’s objectives. Daunting challenges and ambitious objectives—regardless of how longstanding and intractable, . . . or new, daring and unprecedented—can be successfully addressed and secured within days or weeks, and executives can accordingly dispense with normal expectations of feasibility and timescales. In place of high-risk, high-profile, high-cost initiatives, Interchange enables clients to achieve the same or better results reliably—in a fraction of the time—through low-risk, low-profile, catalytic interventions or “nudges” whose marginal cost of implementation is typically negligible.
Last week I distributed a five part series on drones, specifically the MQ-9 Reaper. It was published at Time Magazine's Battleland blog. This last message on the series distributes each of the five parts and the entire paper as originally written for any who might be looking for a missed part or to read the paper as one piece. But also, I attempt here to raise some broader issues.
My paper addressed Reaper as a physical system, and I take a few shots at some of the more uninformed things that have been written about drones by some people who, had they looked more into the data, probably would have been a little less effusive about the “revolution in warfare” and expectation that drones should naturally replace manned aircraft for air combat roles in the foreseeable future.
My paper only scratched the surface of the implications of the burgeoning love affair of the US defense community with drones. Some of those issues have already been thoroughly discussed in the press: such as the use of unmanned systems to pursue air to ground combat roles in friendly, ambiguous and hostile countries as a “safe” way to pursue policy makers' objectives. The endnotes in the first part of the series referenced several excellent articles on this issue, or you might want to read Andrew Cockburn's more recent essay in the London Review of Books at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n05/andrew-cockburn/drones-baby-drones.
