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Showing posts from February, 2013

On Consciousness: There is no "binding problem" (period).

Prologue: In the last few years as I was privately working on the approach to extending the Action Oriented Workflow paradigm to include an implicit workflow capability. I had to do a great deal of sampling in the space of work in neuroscience, comparative evolutionary brain history, the current work in machine learning algorithms and approaches to survey the landscape and understand from a holistic vantage point how to solve the problem. In AOW, workflows were as it was originally designed, constructed manually to allow possible User agents to serve on a "Stage" where they could or could not perform a requested "Action". The Actions were the atomic 8 that I'd identified in the origination of my construction of the paradigm and in fact are the basis of the 8 pointed Summa Star logo that defines the AgilEntity platform that implements AOW. At the time, 2004 the systems available for building workflows for human to system to human business processes were ne

Action Oriented Workflow and Social Oversight: Promoting integrity in the emancipated workforce

As I continue to plot the course of the launch of WorkNetz I have been engaging potential clients in conversation about what action oriented workflow does for emancipating the lives of workers. Usually after hearing that the system is designed to both optimize the ability for an employer to find the right worker for a given task and that it simultaneously emancipates the workforce so that people can work on their own schedules, the next question is: "How do you ensure that people are doing good work and not gaming the system?" The answer to this question was very simple and was already in effect as far as 2007, social oversight. The use of a social network to embed the discovery of completed actions in a timeline feed allows the completion of work to be judged by peers of those performing the work. Social oversight is what prevents employees or workers from performing shoddy work as workers that do so will be socially shamed. Not only will they be more likely to have the

1905: Annus Mirabilus - Brownian Motion

In the second of the series of posts (The first covered the photoelectric effect ) covering the ground breaking advances made by Albert Einstein we will discuss the incredible phenomena of Brownian motion. It may seem that this phenomena didn't have the revolutionary muscle behind it that the other discoveries of Einstein's great year but that is an illusion. We need to understand what was known about the world of the subatomic at this time. Basically nothing. There was much conjecture about what the world was possibly made and amazingly through the work of the al-chemists humans gained amazing blind facility with creating new molecules from their very scant understanding of how elements could be mixed in measure to induce various reactions but little was really known about what exactly matter was made up of. Of course going back to the Greeks the idea of what it was made up of was given by smart people like Democritus who stated: "The more any indivisible

Inventing the future, the relentless creators choice.

In a blog post by Erik McClure : "The things I see in my head, I have to make them happen. I have to make them real. Somehow. I'll invent a new precedent for 3D graphics rendering if I have to. Don't even try to tell me something is impossible, because even if you convince me that my ideas are insane I will try to get as close to them as I can anyway. It doesn't matter if I am destined to fail, or chasing an impossible ideal, because without it I have no reason to live, and can derive no joy from my existence. If I get a normal job, I rightfully believe that it will end up killing me, physically or mentally. Even if I don't get a normal job, I am now terrified that if the great Aaron Swartz was somehow driven to suicide by an unrelenting, hopeless reality, my idealism stands even less of a chance. No matter how frightened I become, my imagination remains an unrelenting torrent of ideas, slowly eating away at my mind. It will never let me stop trying. Ever. "

the future is not, you choose: travel in a genetically enhanced future II

August 19, 2483 Afusa was smiling, though he'd been "on duty" for the last 3 hours to watch his son in the crib. He was too busy enjoying the little motions of the tyke as he bobbled around with his mobile. Xuǎnzé (which means "chosen" in Mandarin), was his 8th son, the benefits of being a principle astronaut for the ESA is that the rules regarding progeny for super mortals are a bit relaxed. When Afusa had his first son, back in 2142 he and his first partner were both first parents...after over 100 years of the standardization world wide of revigoration technology the human population had changed in some very important ways. For one, the individual law of nations determined where it was best to have children, some countries outlawed supermortals from engaging in reproduction for the obvious reasons....others which had negative population growth allowed it in intervals, allowing super mortals who had been hoping to raise children the ability while simultaneou

"Emotions" identity crisis in our Brain confirmed

A recent study has shed light on the distinction between what is normally described as the emotion of fear and other alert systems in the human brain that signal to the brain states of danger. http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/02/03/fearless-brain-damaged-patients-are-terrified-of-suffocation-study/ The research was designed to investigate the responses to stimuli that are exhibited by individuals with a degenerative condition in a part of the brain correlated with emotion, and in particular the emotion of fear...the amygdyla.  Urbach-Wiethe disease leaves these individuals with a characteristic inability to feel terror or angst at the sight of many events that are normally immediately traumatic to people without the disease. In it the researchers discovered that the individuals indeed could exhibit fear like responses but did so when they were subjected to carbon dioxide. In my thoughts and writing on human emotions and consciousness I have created a theory that emotions are only

Graduating from Programmer to Engineer: Benefit of doing total life cycle development.

A thread in the java forum on Facebook posed the following question: "What do you think: is it better to learn 1. HTML and CSS 2. JavaScript 3. Database design 4. SQL 5. Java  " First off, this question really applies to those that have the aspiration of doing what is called total life cycle development, people who wish to be generalists of the entire software development stack for an application. To touch all aspects from class design to UI development. This is always good experience to have but often developers are segmented into each tier as each can be it's own world of complexities and issues, languages and best practices. However, doing a project end to end can provide a great deal of the talent that comes with experience that turns a programmer of code into an engineer of systems. I have full belief that ones options for growth as an engineer and in the field are far greater once engineering skills are gained beyond the sandboxed mind set of "programme