Week 8

I agree Turkey should not be a model; it has too much of that Ottoman filth in its past, just like Egypt, another country unlucky enough to have lived under every version of barbaric Roman Empire as possible. And Pharaohs before that! I cannot imagine a worse history to draw good lessons from in 21st century.

I would look to Europe for example, even South Africa, anywhere but a Middle Eastern country.

On "rebuilding the apparatus of autocracy": most analysts who are educated in their subject areas are in the danger of seeing developments too "ruler, state centric". 3rd wave changed the equation completely. People now have actual power in their hands through the use of technology. No state denies them this communication completely either, because then, they are seen as backward, camel-humping, Eastern "peoples" in the eyes of their Western counterparts. They're shamed into allowing open communication, and when they do, there goes information, and there goes all the power associated with it. So I see no danger of such an autocracy forming.

There is however a danger of stalled economic development, and the cure for that is liberalization "at warp speed."

Shashank Joshi, BBC: "Viewpoint: Too early to celebrate in Egypt?.. There is every possibility that [Defence Minister Mohamed Tantawi] will simply rebuild the apparatus of autocracy by dispersing superficial powers to a fractured opposition, while restoring the army to its Cold War standing.[..] Some optimists have invoked the "Turkish model" for Egypt, but recall that the Turkish army has toppled four governments since 1960 and still lurks just under the surface of that country's democratic institutions"

In the end, Mubarak was not able to continue his little game any longer. Previously the military had announced to people that their demands would be fullfilled completely (they went street by street for this), but Mubarak made an half-assed announcement , thereby giving US, and the military a black eye. He made him look like a fool -- so the military with some help from US eased Mubarak out of power. Just in good time, because the mood on the streets in Cairo was changing for the worse. If Mubarak did not step down asap, people were ready to take on anyone, including the military.

So the Egyptian state apparatus, the farce, illegitimate and non-functioning piece of work that it is, became VERY scared. It went into survival mode, and started picking up the pieces.

This will be start of a long reformation of the Egyptian state from bottom up. The regime was synonymous with Mubarak, with his leave, we can guess a spring of change is afoot.

This is all good stuff. I congratulate the Egyptian people, and point to one more sign that the Third Wave has arrived. Just like SMS technology helped topple a leader in Spain, Facebook, Twitter, chat, cell phones, sat dishes helped to topple another one in Middle East. This is a new age.

evilrouters.net: [I]n the United States, the “kill switch” bill has been revived and should be heading back to a Senate committee very soon. Interesting timing, to say the least. Since the removal of Egypt from the Internet, I’ve heard many folks discussing alternative means of communications should the same thing ever happen here (USA) [..]. I haven’t heard mentioned — much — is amateur radio.

If or when the government flips the “kill switch”, I’ll be firing those radios back up. When your Internet connection goes down, your landline is cut off, and the cellular towers are overloaded, you won’t be able to access Twitter or Facebook, but you WILL be able to communicate and get your message out. Somewhere in Egypt right now is a ham radio operator getting his message out to the rest of the world.

In summary, it is possible to use Internet protocols using radio frequencies as a transport mechanism"

Psychology Today: "The Sudbury Valley School has, for the past forty years, been the best-kept secret in American education. Most students of education have never heard of it. Professors of education ignore it, not out of malice but because they cannot absorb it into their framework of educational thought. The Sudbury Valley model of education is not a variation of standard education. It is not a progressive version of traditional schooling. It is not a Montessori school or a Dewey school or a Piagetian constructivist school. It is something entirely different. To understand the school one has to begin with a completely different mindset from that which dominates current educational thinking. One has to begin with the thought: Adults do not control children's education; children educate themselves.

But the secret is getting out, spread largely by students and others who have experienced the Sudbury Valley School directly. Today at least two dozen schools throughout the world are modeled after Sudbury Valley. I predict that fifty years from now, if not sooner, the Sudbury Valley model will be featured in every standard textbook of education and will be adopted by many public school systems. In fifty years, I predict, today's approach to education will be seen by many if not most educators as a barbaric remnant of the past. People will wonder why the world took so long to come to grips with such a simple and self-evident idea as that upon which the Sudbury Valley School is founded: Children educate themselves; we don't have to do it for them.

No staff members at the school have tenure. All are on one-year contracts, which must be renewed each year through a secret-ballot election. As the student voters outnumber the staff by a factor of 20 to 1, the staff who survive this process and are re-elected year after year are those who are admired by the students.

Students are free, all day, every day, to do what they wish at the school, as long as they don't violate any of the school's rules. The rules, all made by the School Meeting, have to do with protecting the school and protecting students' opportunities to pursue their own interests unhindered by others.

None of the school's rules have to do with learning. The school gives no tests. It does not evaluate or grade students' progress.[1] There is no curriculum and no attempt to motivate students to learn. Courses occur only when students take the initiative to organize them, and they last only as long as the students want them. Many students at the school never join a course, and the school sees no problem with that. The staff members at the school do not consider themselves to be teachers. They are, instead, adult members of the community who provide a wide variety of services, including some teaching. Most of their "teaching" is of the same variety as can be found in any human setting; it involves answering sincere questions and presenting ideas in the context of real conversations."

There is all this talk about Sputnik moment, time of change etc., but let's not forget what happened after the so called "Sputnik moment" during the 50s. US got all scared, wanted to catch-up, decided to fund, out-educate, out-RD, and then ... they brought in the German guy.

Right? Would the Apollo projects get off the ground (literally) without Von Braun? Or let's generalize and say "without serious European mojo"? That is the critical point, even today, the solution for more R&D, more innovation in US seems to be more immigration. Partly this is understandable, since US is a country founded by immigrants. But the question is, can it continue to rely on immigrants in an age when more and more people opt to stay at home, and, with the absence of an immigration option, can US find a way to out-educate other nations without using innovative methods?

I argue US cannot do this by using outdated words such as "classrooms", "standards", and "teachers". Obama state of the union speech fell flat on many issues and education was one of them. The world has changed, nothing in the past will be able to help 100%. You can look to Reagan all you want for solutions -- at least he had the good sense to talk to Tofflers in his day -- but world has changed drastically even compared to Reagan's time. We need original ideas.

Aside from that though, the article also had some eternal youth stuff in there, uploading the mind into computers etc.. and I am like "man where did this come from?". Then couple days later I am watching Tron Legacy, then it made all sense. The TIME article basically takes bunch of unrelated, random ideas from Tron Legacy and throws'em together, creates a weird cocktail. Seriously, those parts are so bad they are in fact comical.

A great slam on the TIME article about Singularity.

"Independent of whether you believe progress is slowing or not, increases in the speed and performance of computers do not necessarily imply that we will attain strong AI soon"

Very true. In fact I would add the speed limit at which microprocessor runs an operation "linearly" has been reached already -- hence the industry's move to multicore architectures. In other words, we are seeing an exponential rise in the "total" amount of things we process, but we reached the limit on how fast we can execute "2+2", and that makes a lot of difference for hard AI. As a result we have bunch of silicon "brains" multiplying. But isn't that like population growth of say.. bugs? Bugs do processing, they multiply.. But did they reach Singularity? No.

I am not saying human intellect can be replicated or not, or if Singularity is impossible. I just think we cannot know for sure right now. Also the way Kurzweil and his followers argue for Singularity just seems wrong.

Excellent question "Are scholarly journals outdated? If so, what should replace them?" on Quora and some great answers:

Marius Kempe: Yes. Moreover, charging the taxpayers who have publicly funded scientific research for access to its products is immoral and will hopefully one day be illegal [..] An excellent article on this subject is Michael Nielsen's 'Is scientific publishing about to be disrupted?' [link]

Venkatesh Rao: Research publishing started as a way to share new knowledge. Now [..] even an apparently non sequitur paper about Shakespeare ends up becoming as much a part of the scholarly-industrial complex as some technical engineering paper.

That's really what this is: a "scholarly industrial complex" that's a relic of the industrial age. I am not saying industrial modes of scarcity-driven production are bad. But in the age of the Internet, there is no justification for applying them to anything that does not involve physical atoms. Research output is bits. It's not like making steel.

In the scholarly-industrial complex, the idea of actually sharing information for the purpose of stimulating intellectual exchanges has gone from being 100% of the purpose in the old days of Abbe Mersenne's living room or the original Royal Society, to maybe 10% (optimistically). The other 90% of the purpose of journal publishing has nothing to do with the original purpose. It's about perpetuating the institutions that live off the publishing. This explains why 90% of the papers published in most disciplines is mostly junk DNA in humanity's collective knowledge genome.

I am not saying the work that goes into them is useless, but the value most of the time is not in the paper, but in the person who does the work, and their immediate social research context. Good research mostly diffuses through word of mouth, not journals. I don't think any of my papers belongs in the 10% non-junk (there, I admitted it). The 90% does NOT need to be "published." It should merely be written up and posted online, and informally discussed. I mean come on, everybody has LaTeX for FREE today, and can get a website for free as well.

TIME magazine is talking bunch of nonsense on Ronald Reagan and his "revolution". I guess it makes sense "mainstream" publications to "concentrate" on "central" characters. I will quote Toffler's Powershift book on this one:

Shortly after Ronald Reagan was elected to the American presidency, Lee Atwater, one of his chief aides (later successively to George Bush's campaign manager and chairman of the Republican National Commitee), met with friends for lunch at the White House. His candor at that table was remarkable.

"You will hear a lot in the coming months about the Reagan Revolution", he said. "The headlines will be full of the tremendous changes Reagan plans to introduce. Don't believe them.

Reagan does want to make a lot of changes. But the reality is, he won't be able to. Jimmy Carter pushed the 'system' five degrees in one direction. If we here work very hard and are extremely lucky, Reagan may be able to push it five degrees in opposite direction. That's what the Reagan Revolution is all about".

Despite a media focus on individual politicians, Atwater's remark underlines the degree to which even the most popular and highly placed leader is a captive of the 'system'. This system, of course, is not capitalism or socialism, but bureucratism.

In his speech Mubarak used words like "constitution", "commision", "amendment", as if he is a President of a working, functional system that is not rigged, and farce. Mubarak doesnt want to be seen as a two-bit dictator, like Ben Ali in Tunisia packing up and leaving at the first sign of trouble, unfortunately no matter how he serviced his country and for how long, he is still a dictator. He should leave.

This is a stubborn man, it's probably a cultural thing, which leads me to think why it should be no surprise that two previous holders of his office were killed on the job. Surely Egypt's size, and relative importance in the Middle East gives it a bit of a different status than other Arab nations, but that does not make the current regime any less farce. The current regime made the decision to rig the previous elections, rendering any argument that people have a working, legitimate government moot.

People on the street will not accept this -- and they shouldnt. All bets are off now.

I think Mubarak needs a good ass-kicking. He could even be assasinated pretty soon.

Ain't that the truth... Basicaly Egyptian history is a piece of shit. Their culture sucks too. The only advantage young people had was having spent relatively less time with both -- due to their age.

Plus, the Internet Age creates its own culture.

In You Are How You Work we talked about how going about your daily life effects your outlook on life. In an age when ideas, knowledge can be transmitted at the click of a button, no central authority can maintain dictatorial hold on people for long. Each dictator (with the exception of hermit states) allows this communication because of basic shame, and by the time they cut the communication (the day of a protest) it's already too late. Ideas have formed, friendships are created, new relationships came to being. In the power triad wealth, knowledge, violence, knowledge is by far the most versatile out of the three, and can easily be subsituted for the other two. Tunisia, Egypt, Spain are living proof of this.

BBC commentator: Egypt did not have a single day of democracy in its history"

Eric Raymond: "Nokia's Suicide Note.. Stephen Elop has jumped his company off the burning platform, all right. And, I judge, straight into the fire. [..] Elop has failed to resolve Nokia’s drift and lack of a strategic focus. Instead of addressing this problem, Elop plans to institutionalize it by splitting the company into two business units that will pursue different – and, in fact, mutually opposing – strategies.

The plan Elop has pulled out from under wraps effectively splits Nokia in two. The “Smart Devices” piece own MeeGo and Symbian Smartphones, and is expected to work with Microsoft on developing a portfolio of WP7 phones. The vagueness of [their statement] is telling. Clearly “Mobile Phones” is expected to milk the Third-World market for Symbian dumb-phones as long as it can [..]

Actually, the “Smart Devices” unit has confusions of its own. It’s expected to manage no fewer than three platforms – MeeGo, high-end Symbian, and WP7. Nothing has been resolved here! We’re looking at a plan that will scatter Nokia’s management bandwidth and engineering talent in four different directions, formalizing the existence of product-line and line-of-business silos when what the company needed to do was exactly the opposite – shoot the weak horses through the head, end the internal infighting, and focus.

All the old reasons a WP7 commitment was a bad idea remain problems under the new order. WP7 has bombed in its first quarter; there’s actual evidence that it’s not competitive. This means that the alliance does nothing to address Nokia’s historic weakness in the North American market.

In the rest of the article, Raymond recommends adoption of Android. I would recommend to put all resources behind their own OS, MeeGo, trying to make it viable and attractive for developers any way possible. We need diversity in the market. It's good for Nokia as well"

Nokia has truly lost its way. It needs little slapping -- they are thinking of adapting that bullshit American OS called Windows 7!

There is an alternative, Linux, which is written by another Finnish citizen Linux Torvalds -- Linux already powers all of the (Google) Android phones out there which is set to become a true alternative to iPhone.

I would expect better from Nokia, I would expect them to create a Linux, Python based (a language created by a Dane) OS on their own and pull developers toward them who are not wholly committed to Android. Nokia is truly in wilderness right now.

Someone please slap the shit out of them.

Oh, by the way, Google self-driving cars are programmed by a German citizen now in US, his name is Sebastian Thrun... Wake up Europe. Thrun has some interesting criticism on the university system of his home country as well"

Healthcare is indirectly related to another issue: immigration (as most things are in America). Businesses want cheap labor, that means immigraiton, but will US be able to hand out US citizenship like candy when this means the country now has to provide healthcare for all its citizens, including all new immigrants?

I do not think we can apply free market principles in its entirity to healthcare. It could be argued that the "product" offered by a healthcare system is diminishing in nature -- there is only so many healthcare professionals to provide a limited service, that this service can be "priced" by the market, But the expectations of people from the system are wildly erratic. As the excellent program on This American Life reports, people pay X amount of money in the system, and expect the insurance company to show up with a truckload of money at their front door when they suffer any serious ailment.

The Obama solution that "requires" people to have a healthcare is, unfortunately, a non-starter as well, and as Newsweek reports it could even be unconstitutional (I hope it is, otherwise, I will lose a lot of respect for the US Constitution).

Then, a single payer system could be an option here. Hospitals can still be private, people still "choose" which hospitals they go to, in turn, doctors "choose" which medicine to perscribe to their patients, spurring R&D in drug industry.

Another question is, would innovation, cost cutting measures be pursued by anyone in such a system?

I believe it would, hospitals would compete to provide better service for less, therefore pursue new and better technologies.

US needs to look to Canada for inspiration. If this message is a tough swallow, then maybe government sponsoring of healthcare can be seen as "infrastructure" spending. Hell, government builds roads and bridges, so the economy can "flow" over these arteries, right? Well, in a 3rd Wave economy, people are the infrastructure, hence their well-being takes utmost importance.

That said, no system that is "concentrated (in hospitals)", "semi-central" (backed by gov) and are served by "specialists (doctors)" can be truly sufficient in the new age. Personalization, self sufficiency is king in the new world, starting with diagnosis, more involvement of technology will be essential in order to bring healthcare to the 21st century.

Great stagnation or external growth? A nice post on Tyler Cowen's book The Great Stagnation. I think it connects nicely with our post A New Form of Currency. I tend to favor the argument that we are innovating (no shortfall there), surely can do lots more, however in order to measure what we are already innovating, and to provide incentives for more of it, we need to allow different payment methods.

Google Map of Protests

I am not sure if this is a big trend yet, but it could be -- some of my conservative friends are pissed off -let me use a Cheney word here- BIG TIME about certain neocon types taking a stance against revolutions in Middle East. Responses we heard from such people so far ranged from lukewarm to downright hostile, and my conservative peeps are not happy about this at all. Personally I saw Newt on TV, he was talking bunch of nonsense, was mad at Obama for supporting the Arab street, and apparently Glenn Beck literally (and finally) lost his mind and is rooting for dictators in the Middle East right now. I have to say, events in this part of the world has been a great litmus test helping seperate the good from the bad.

"400 Hundred Years in a Convent, 50 Years in Hollywood"... This is how Philippines describe their history -- I thought it was funny. The convent part is due to the Spanish colonization I guess, and the 50 years must be their American "colonization". Not a true colonization obviously, they probably were a "client-state" of sorts.