Eben Moglen – Freedom in the Cloud
ISOC-NY1710-02 Eben Moglen's “Freedom in The Cloud' presentation at NYU Feb 5 2010.
Internet Society of NY: Eben Moglen on Freedom Box
Autonomous InternetKevin Kelly: How Far will Surveillance & Sharing Go?
Cultural Intelligence
A conversation with Kevin Kelly
You have a choice dear reader: spend 3 seconds scanning this blogpost, or spend the full 1:11:28 minutes listening to the interview John Brockman did with technology philosopher and founding editor of Wired Magazine, Kevin Kelly.
The interview touches upon the nature of technology, big data, surveillance society, money as a medium, techno-literacy and the question whether the universe is analog or digital.
The video is best experienced as radio, or you can read the transcript here.
Mini-Me: Poverty Facts are Estimates – Time for a Data Revolution?
Corruption, Government, IO Impotency
Huh?
Development data: how accurate are the figures?
The numbers we use in development, and most of what we think of as facts, are actually estimates. It's time for a data revolution
Claire Melarned
The Guardian, 31 January 2014
You know a lot less than you think you do. Around 1.22 billion people live on less than a $1.25 (75p) day? Maybe, maybe not. Malaria deaths fell by 49% in Africa between 2000 and 2013? Perhaps. Maternal mortality in Africa fell from 740 deaths per 100,000 births in 2000 to 500 per 100,000 in 2010? Um … we're not sure.
These numbers, along with most of what we think of as facts in development, are actually estimates. We have actual numbers on maternal mortality for just 16% of all births, and on malaria for about 15% of all deaths. For six countries in Africa, there is basically no information at all.
In the absence of robust official systems for registering births and deaths, collecting health or demographic data, or the many other things that are known by governments about people in richer countries, the household survey is the foundation on which most development data is built. Numbers from the surveys are used to estimate almost all the things we think we know – from maternal mortality to school attendance to income levels. Household surveys are run by governments or by external agencies such as the World Bank, USAid or Unicef.
But it's a shaky foundation. First, to make the survey representative of the population, you need to know a lot about the population to make a good sampling frame. This knowledge comes from a population census. But only around 12 of the 49 countries in sub-Saharan Africa have held a census in the past 10 years. So there might be large population groups missing – especially in countries undergoing rapid change. There are likely to be big urban informal settlements, for example, which are not included in the most recent census, and therefore don't exist for sampling purposes. They also don't happen very often – 21 African countries haven't had a survey in the past seven years.
And they're not all done in the same way, which makes comparing countries or combining data from different countries very difficult – and illustrates how hard it is to know the “real” number. There are, for example, seven perfectly acceptable ways of asking questions in surveys about how much people eat. A recent experiment by World Bank researchers in Tanzania, comparing results from the different methods, found that estimates of how many people in the country are hungry varied from just under 20% to nearly 70%, depending on the method chosen.
Robin Good: A Great Alternative to RebelMouse: Curate Your Social Media Hub with Pressly Tool
IO Tools
A Great Alternative to RebelMouse: Curate Your Social Media Hub with Pressly
Pressly is a new web app which allows you to create a social hub, similar to what you can do with RebelMouse or Tint, where you can aggregate and curate your favorite content from your social media channels, web site as well as from your fans content.
The app can aggregate and curate content coming from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, SoundCloud, Vimeo and from any RSS feed.
You can easily search for specifick keywords, hashtags and users across any of your “connected” feeds and save any specific search for future use. You can also preview the results of any search and curate the items that you want to curate and publish in your hub in real-time or automatically.
Similarly to its growing number of competitors Pressly automatically generates a social hub that can be easily viewed across web, tablets and smartphones and that it's very easy to navigate.
Differently than RebelMouse, the content aggregated is not just excerpted or simply pointed to, but it is actually imported, stripped of anything outside the original text and images and presented in a new clean and highly readable format.
Jean Lievens: Open Source Electronics, 3D Printing, & Robotics Creating a Revolution in Manufacturing
Hardware, Software
From www
Three innovations — 3D printing, robotics, and open source electronics — are breaking that mold of manufacturing. They're ushering in a new era based on customization, on demand manufacturing, and regional, even local manufacturing.
3D Printing Has Started A Revolution
Paul R. Brody
Huffington Post, 30 January 2014
The revolution brewing in electronics is unprecedented — even for an industry that is used to being upended. The rules that defined a century of innovation, design, and production are about to be rewritten. And modern manufacturing will be swept away.
Few companies grasp the coming upheaval. Perhaps because 3D printing, an innovation that can come across as a curiosity, is propelling this disruption. Yet, these printers, which churn out objects by laying thin layer after thin layer of metal, plastics or other materials on top of each other, won't tip the scale alone.
It's their collision with two other disruptive technologies — intelligent robotics and open source electronics — that will bring an end to the era of big and complex global supply chains. Together, they're going to usher in the digitalization of manufacturing, by creating flexible, fast, local supply chains underpinned by software.
Review (Guest): Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving Into Liquid War
5 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Atlases & State of the World, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Complexity & Catastrophe, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Crime (Organized, Transnational), Culture, Research, Economics, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Future, Misinformation & Propaganda, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity
Pepe Escobar
5 out of 5 stars Tour de Force!
By Donald L. Conover
Tour de Force! That's the only way to describe Pepe Escobar's remarkable achievement with Globalistan: How the Globalized World Is Dissolving into Liquid War. In page after page, Mr. Escobar demonstrates his remarkable erudition gained in a peripatetic career, spanning the caves of Tora Bora to the slums of Sao Paolo and Mumbai; from the halls of venality to the palaces of the gluttonously wealthy; from conversations with forgotten Pentagon warlords to raps with Brazilian gang lords.
Our Neocon leaders seem to think the rest of the World is frozen in situ, waiting for them to hatch their nefarious schemes. Globalistan shows us the consequences of such a blindered [or should I say “blundered”] attitude.
Producers for the talking heads of “mainstream” media will have to have this book. It is the one volume necessary to make sense of our churning humanity in the 21st Century. A quick scan can provide the background on every crisis from Iran to “Chindia”; from Shiiteistan to the Gazprom Nation; from PetroEurostan to the Bush White House.
Escobar demonstrates why it is true that if we don't find ways to spread our prosperity around the World, the have-nots will come and take it away from us with guns and bombs and box cutters. All of the walls and fences cannot protect the United States, Europe, and Saudi Arabia from overwhelming illegal immigration. Weapons and fences doom us, like the Texans at the Alamo. Eventually they will be overrun by 3 billion human beings living in abject poverty, but with access to the latest episodes of “24” and “Sleeper Cell,” unless we help the Mexicans achieve their dreams of Texas in Mexico.
Pepe Escobar: NSA, Globalistan, and the Human Rat Brain Not Keeping Up with Predatory Technology
Cultural Intelligence
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
The AI Wet Dream: Back to the Future With the NSA
by PEPE ESCOBAR
CounterPunch, Weekend Edition February 7-9, 2014
In the spring of 1986, Back to the Future, the Michael J Fox blockbuster featuring a time-traveling DeLorean car, was less than a year old. The Apple Macintosh, launched via a single, iconic ad directed by Ridley Blade Runner Scott, was less than two years old. Ronald Reagan, immortalized by Gore Vidal as “the acting president”, was hailing the mujahideen in Afghanistan as “freedom fighters”.
The world was mired in Cyber Cold War mode; the talk was all about electronic counter-measures, with American C3s (command, control, communications) programmed to destroy Soviet C3s, and both the US and the USSR under MAD (mutually assured destruction) nuclear policies being able to destroy the earth 100 times over. Edward Snowden was not yet a three-year-old.
It was in this context that I set out to do a special report for a now defunct magazine about Artificial Intelligence (AI), roving from the Computer Museum in Boston to Apple in Cupertino and Pixar in San Rafael, and then to the campuses of Stanford, Berkeley and the MIT.
AI had been “inaugurated” in 1956 by Stanford’s John McCarthy and MIT professor Marvin Minsky, then a student at Harvard. The basic idea, according to Minsky, was that any intelligence trait could be described so precisely that a machine could be created to simulate it.
My trip inevitably involved meeting a fabulous cast of characters. At the MIT’s AI lab, there was Minsky and an inveterate iconoclast, Joseph Weizenbaum, who had coined the term “artificial intelligentsia” and believed computers could never “think” just like a human being.
At Stanford, there was Edward Feigenbaum, absolutely paranoid about Japanese scientific progress; he believed that if the Japanese a fifth-generation (5G) program, based on artificial intelligence, “the US will be able to bill itself as the first great post-industrial agrarian society”.
And at Berkeley, still under the flame of hippie utopian populism, there was Robert Wilensky – Brooklyn accent, Yale gloss, California overtones; and philosopher Robert Dreyfus, a tireless enemy of AI who got his kicks delivering lectures such as “Conventional AI as a Paradigm of Degenerated Research”.
Meet Kim No-VAX
Soon I was deep into Minsky’s “frames” – a basic concept to organize every subsequent AI program – and the “Chomsky paradigm”; the notion that language is at the root of knowledge, and that formal syntax is at the root of language. That was the Bible of cognitive science at the MIT.
. . . . . . .
Human beings don’t have the appropriate engineering for the society they developed. Over a million years of evolution, the instinct of getting together in small communities, belligerent and compact, turned out to be correct. But then, in the 20th century, Man ceased to adapt. Technology overtook evolution. The brain of an ancestral creature, like a rat, which sees provocation in the face of every stranger, is the brain that now controls the earth’s destiny.
It’s as if Wilensky was describing the NSA as it would be 28 years later. Some questions still remain unanswered; for instance, if our race does not fit anymore the society it built, who’d guarantee that its machines are properly engineered? Who’d guarantee that intelligent machines act in our interest?
What was already clear by then was that “intelligent” computers would not end a global arms race. And it would be a long time, up to the Snowden revelations in 2013, for most of the planet to have a clearer idea of how the NSA orchestrates the Orwellian-Panopticon complex. As for my back to the future trip, in the end I did not manage to uncover the “secret” of AI. But I’ll always remain very fond of Kim No-VAX.
