sent2null space

Investigating problems in the wrong Universe.

2012-01-10T06:05:00.002-05:00

A few weeks ago I was working on implementing an extension to the action oriented workflow paradigm that will allow it to infer implicit workflows using artificial intelligence as working agents do their work. I had finished coding the principle core language element changes (additions of new classes to core api's, recompile, build and distribute to staging server) during the distribute part, or rather after I was unable to restart the server instance of AgilEntity that was rebuilt from the newly deployed changes.

Now, I'd seen similar problems dozens of times before and knew just what to do. My assumption was that obviously some change that i made in the new code deployed was causing a problem, despite the fact that all the new code was properly unit tested per class there was still *the chance* that some novel object interaction in the deployed app. was causing a problem, maybe I neglected to add a handler for a required db column, or forgot to add the column to the db (problems that have happened in the past at this point) I quickly checked off the usual suspects as culprits and was left still with no ability to launch the server.

It was getting late and I was getting tired and frustrated, after 4 hours of trying I decided to give up for the night, let my brain rest and attack with vigor in the morning...er afternoon.

When I got up, as is my ken I hopped out of bed and came over to the computer. I thought to myself why isn't this working?? Partially worried, now I was thinking of the need to finish the code and get the UI implementation started. I worried about possibly critically failing with the implementation...my mind was running away into paranoia territory. So I stepped back and thought to do one thing that all Scientists and Engineers need to learn:

To question the most critical assumptions.

I had covered all the bases and every time I loaded the requested path installation line to the command prompt the server only launched one web context (of several that would indicate a fully functional server)...I looked at the web context that loaded and noticed it was the system context. This led me down a path where I investigated the class that bootstraps the system and after about 40 minutes place a trace line in the bootstrap code to see the path and while it was running is when I had the

paradigm shift in how I perceived the problem.

Like the sudden appearance of alternate faces in an illustration made to be an illusion, I realized that there was nothing wrong with the app. it was running exactly as designed. It was I that was flawed, the critical assumption that the *path I was entering* was the correct one had not been examined and seeing the path in the trace report indicated it was the wrong one.

I am a very parsimonious engineer (lazy), when I was writing the bootstrap code I wrote it so that I could easily modify how the system loaded up by modifying the input line. I was (for some reason) inputting the line for bootstrapping an *uninstalled* server (so it was loading only a local context for the web configuration UI, which worked) instead of for a server already registered and xml configured node instance!

The difference between the lines shows it clearly:

New node install path(windows path) what I was entering for hours:

"c:/someinstall/AgilEntity/dpsweb"

Installed node install path, what I should have been entering.:

"c:/someinstall/AgilEntity"

:so my entire Universe was wrong once that mistake was made, all my up level assumptions about what the problem was and associating them to the recent changes (which is normally exactly the right thing to do) was false.

This long story illustrates how even when *doing the right Science* investigating a problem, one should always question the critical foundational assumptions to avoid wasting precious time and trouble shooting away in the wrong Universe.

PS:

After entering the correct path (second one) all the contexts loaded perfectly, there wre no errors in boot strapping induced by the changes I had made.

Abiogenesis and Exoplanets and photosynthesis...so many little details..

2011-12-25T00:12:00.000-05:00

A friend on Facebook posited:

The existence of other Earth-like planets depends on their microorganisms developing photosynthesis -- not a sure thing by any means. There are lots of chemical ways of making a living. So if only our bacteria evolved photosynthesis then Earth is the only planet in the 'verse with an oxygen atmosphere.

I provided the following explanation of the subtleties that attended the invention of photosynthesis during Earth's history....

"The existence of other Earth-like planets depends on their microorganisms developing photosynthesis."

That's mostly true, though it depends on how you classify "Earth-like" do you mean as it is now? Or as it was say 3 billion years ago when the atmosphere was devoid of oxygen, or a billion years later where it was very different from a billion before but still devoid of oxygen...or 300 million years ago when Oxygen percentages were significantly higher than they are today? But that's not the point; The Earth actually was dominated by anerobic life forms (cyanobacteria and other extremophiles that don't get energy from oxygen) for MOST of it's existence and had an atmosphere inhospitable to modern life, so if we look into the void only looking for signatures like present day earth we'll miss many many worlds that may possess life of the type that dominated this planet for all those billions of years...a huge mistake.

Also, photosynthetic processes in particular, seem to emerge quite naturally as they are in essence co-opting a process of photon absorption by molecules that is fundamental to physics itself. The fact that it took nearly 3 billion years for creatures that used the process to be dominant may point more to the particular process that happened on this planet of an anoxic era followed by an aerobic era (1 billion years or so of the total 4.5 going).

"So if only our bacteria evolved photosynthesis then Earth is the only planet in the 'verse with an oxygen atmosphere."

First, Earth only contains a percentage (~20) of oxygen in it's atmosphere... so does Mars...smaller percentage but it is there, but again that's not the point..if we just look for oxygen we'll miss tons of life that may be out there in very different atmospheres of the type that existed before we had the anoxic transition. I predict once spectral analysis is possible on exoplanets now being discovered at an astonishing rate by Kepler Satellite we should find Oxygen in percentages all over. Also Oxygen being one of the lighter elements (8 on the periodic table) gets burned into existence by fusion at a very high rate and it forms a large percentage of most gas nebulae.

However, given what is mentioned previously, this (that photosynthesis is unique to Earth) is unlikely..the chemistry admits rather quickly from the simple fact that shining light on matter infuses it with energy. All one needs are molecules of "the right shape" to carry that energy (either in a geometrical shift or strain as is done in many molecules like the rhodopsins) or by transferring it using other energy state storage aspects of a molecule or atom (spin, electron excitation and re-radiation). Over an aqueous soup of formation (water forms a great such soup) containing tens of trillions of such molecular building blocks and a few billion years...the solution seems ready...if you consider waiting 2 billion years "ready". ;) That said, the rapidity within which anerobic life appeared on the Earth (literally while it was still hot according to current evidence 3.8 billion years) seems to indicate that it (life...if not photosynthesizing life) appears in a hurry when the conditions are present...and that was on a planet that was still being bombarded by pretty big stones from space and contained an atmosphere that would kill you or I or any surface animal dead within minutes if we were in it!!! In this context "life" (across it's variant forms that have existed on this planet) has a rather large enabled formation footprint indeed.

That said, it is most likely that each transition to more complex forms were exponentially more difficult to reach without being wiped out by some internal (various volcanic or chemical releases like the methane traps at the bottom of many oceans) or external (hello 15 mile wide meteorite, good bye all life on planet) agent. So what is likely is that the simple life we see all around, up to bacteria and archaea and extromophiles...those are going to be very popular in the galaxy on planets with sufficient aqueous environments and the right rock chemistry (to enable formation of lipids which here are implicated in formation of cell membranes in theories of abiogenesis, amino acids? they rain in from space and are abundant)....over overwhelmingly so in my view...however finding planets that have survived long enough to under go an anoxic transition and then survived longer still to have emerged multicellular life and then survived long enough to have said life emerge from oceans for further evolution to develop intelligence and then society...well....those are all much less likely...however...in the number of planets that I feel could be on the trajectory to such development...there might be far more of those than we think. Of course once said intelligent life forms begin to control their environment they now become another threat to their own survival (just look at what we are doing to our planet now) and thus my view as stated in a few blog posts is that should we gain the power to leap from world to world...we will find countless planets with life of the bacterial sort *and* we will find countless planets with evidence of complex *intelligent* life like us, sentient life.....but as dead worlds, obliterated by the many evils that society will spawn and that we (up to now) have only been lucky to have avoided.

Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amino_acid

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophiles

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_respiration

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_atmosphere

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-cellular_organism

Social networking is really AOL's innovation...

2011-12-16T10:12:00.002-05:00

In a recent post on Facebook, a friend posited a question I have seen posed a few times in the last few years but usually answer individually. It is:

"I wonder sometimes, how did Zuck think that this site of his would get so popular even if MySpace was waay popular back then?
What made him keep doing things?"

My answer is simple, it's based on historical knowledge of what was happening (or not happening) in the space circa 2004. It also is based on what had happened in the critical 5 years prior to 2004 that enabled the shift to a new type of social networking to be possible.

My first answer was:"Novelty, what is scarce has inherent value....doesn't matter what it is. Find a piece of 20,000 year old fossilized human shit (coprolite) and you'll understand what I mean."

To elaborate, there was nothing new concept wise about what Zuckerberg was doing....what was new was the technology he was using to do it. Almost every feature we have here on FB we had in some form on AOL. The differences were the lack of ubiquitous web accessible real time feeding elements which were made possible only with the invention of the XmlHTTPRequest object by MICROSOFT in 2001 to use in their OWS product (Outlook Web Access). The features of the object were quickly modeled into a version for non IE browsers and using it enabled background updates to the HTML DOM (document object model) which is an in memory tree of all the element nodes in a web page. Using XmlHTTpRequest calls (which are asynchronous) one can both make background calls to external resources on a page and based on the returns of those calls dynamically update the page elements, this allows the updating of pages without actual refreshes being manually performed by the user...making feeds (like this one) far more useful. Organizing content elements around a set of "friends" is something AOL was doing way back (95?) when on their service with their (then) innovative approach to IM. However, because their technology was silo-ed in two important ways that web 2.0 social networks were not (it was siloed in hardware because the users were all dial up and it was siloed in web technology because it was before XmlHttpRequest object was invented) it was at significant *scale* disadvantage to what came later once broadband penetration seriously started to pick up as telecoms laid fiber lines with abandon into the ground (which would soon be at over supply as ways to multiply bandwidth (DWDM multiplexing) became cost effective). Increased scale meant a much more efficient access to large swathes of people via any connection medium to the web and also meant the players could provide services with a much reduced technological load than older services like AOL...which required compiled software be installed on every computer using it.

So after the .com 1.0 era bubble burst in 2000/2001...new players started looking at the space (now with broadband penetration rapidly increasing) and said hey we can do that AOL social stuff but do it without any application to install, without any restrictions on access beyond a web browser that supports web 2.0 technologies...boom! Thus came Friendster, thus came Myspace, thus came Facebook...thus came Friendfeed...etc. Again ...in those early days...novelty and inherent scalability of the approach made those players inherently valuable ...just as today, consolidation took nearly 4 years and Facebook ended up winning the game despite early leads by MySpace...which failed to socialize their offering as quickly as Facebook did (the feed being key in my view).

Well....here we are.

Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coprolite

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_IM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dial-up_Internet_access

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalability

How does an idea form? Autonomics + Memory + Emotion..

2011-12-12T07:47:00.001-05:00

Love that first question and I think it is very important, secondary to me is how we process sensory information ....the mechanisms for that are present from what we know about pattern recognition, we have simulated (using neural networks and more recently neuron-less statistical learning approaches) that part of brain function going back to the early 90's. We even have been able to do it virtually using computer programs but what of intention? drive? What unseen force drives the shift of thoughts?

It is pretty obvious when we think backward in time, imagining that our homonid brains could be de-evolved with each second accounting for 100 years in evolutionary time. In 10 seconds we'd only be at 1,000 a.d. not much changed biologically, in 100 seconds we'd be at 10,000 years...still not a major shift, 500 seconds and we are at 50,000 years...now things are starting to get interesting....for we don't see any evidence of formal writing systems, 1,000 seconds in our trip and we are back to 100,000 years...no homo sapiens sapiens have left Africa and the world is "peopled" by at least 4 lines of homonids cotemporaneously. Homo Sapiens Sapiens in Africa, Homo Erectus advanced variants in Asia and Europe and Australia. We need to go back further and faster, if we shift back 2,000 seconds at a time, we push back the clock by 200,000 years per jump. At 5,000 seconds we are a million years de-evolved, the crania of the human populations (advanced homo erectus) are some 60 percent smaller than in modern humans. At 10,000 seconds , we are further behind still (archaic homo erectus)...as we play the clock back we watch the brain size shrink across homonid populations and by about 25,000 seconds we are at 5 million years ago...and we've reached the time frame of the common ancestor with the chimpanzee a primate that has a brain size just 1/3 to 2/5's the size of an average human being.

Why run the clock backwards? In seeing how the structures emerge and change over time and as our ancestors grow we see the adaptations they evolved written in the transition. Just recently a team of researchers were able to illuminate clearly the linguistic pathways in the brain that enable humans to string words together into sentences. It was found that this pathway *does not exist* in lower apes and explains why though they are adept at symbolic representation (words) they are deficient in dynamic expressions of symbols (sentences). These thought experiments offer clues as to how our cognition is differential from other primates and will help us (through comparative genetic analysis) precisely what has been added as *new* since the last common ancestry. It is a remarkable time we live in where the theoretical possibility to answer these deep questions of difference is actually realizable.

However, I digress from our story...to answer your question we need to keep going back in time. As we continue to add seconds we go back millions of years...from chimpanzees to more ancient giant sized (because they were purely vegetarians that required large guts) species like gorillas, orangutangs, further back still and the primate family in total starts to shrink (read: less diversity) to appear as clans of old world monkeys, their brains a fraction of ours...barely a skin of cortical mass on top of a large portion of limbic brain...and what is housed in the limbic mass? Mostly memories but most important to answering your question: autonomics and emotion. These are the master clocks that drive when we are hungry or thirsty, hot or cold....these tell us how to associate with past memories levels of importance to survival. A burger brings joy to most people who are hungry upon observation because it is food and food is tied with reduction of hunger. It may also be tied with other memories, of our first burger, of the taste of cheese or ketchup...our minds become alive with those associated memories of eating a burger *and the emotions* tied to those memories...where it not for this tying together of the autonic drive (the hunger) and the memory of good emotions associated with the food...I posit we'd have no desire to ingest burgers. We'd be automota that sit there waiting for specific instructions to process....sound familiar? It's the same type of computing machine we've been building....though with artificial means, binary computation in most cases but most recently non linear processors are being designed...but the heart of consciousness and cognition I posit is little to do with the over all paradigm of the architecture but more to do with how that architecture is self connected.

This being true, mirroring that self connection in artifical minds be it with physical or virtual neurons and system pathways is the key to emergent of dynamic and conscious entities, tying the processing portions to simulations of autonomics and emotion will then enable the agent to find it's own way, make inferences from the data it is relating as it "learns" and emerge a complex and hopefully stable consciousness similar to our own once enough multi-sensory inputs are tied together.

You see, another thing we notice about our thought experiment is that as the brain shrank...the cortical regions devoted to processing various sensory input (sound, sight, taste, touch) all increased in contiguous area...I posit this touching of these regions allows the persistence of *thought* in the mind once triggered by some autonomic urge (every thing starts with autonomics) ...to me, the drive imparted to an individual via autonomics is akin to the shaking of the trunk of a tree...the relatively small vibrations at the trunk translate to wild and varied undulations of the attached leaves on the ends of branches of the tree. Consciousness is like echoing of those leaves from the vibration...across the experience and meaning landscape gathered by the individual. When you are hungry what do you do? When you are cold what do you do? When you fear something how do you know that you should? All our reactions to events in the world are learned ones...we've all seen how a baby with no knowledge of "falling" would walk right off the edge of a table. At that stage in life the mind literally has not built the association between the effects of gravity and danger...and so falling is the only way for them to realize that...as they get older they learn the similar power of fire and other elements in the world. As one of the most ancient sensations I believe "touch" starts the roller coaster of correlations that drive a new born to experience through touch the world...constantly relating everything through touch...soon after touch and taste combine, in some babies this happens in the womb (sucking their thumb)...the cognitive space of the child grows every more and more and start tying into one sense at a time correlating each to the other and filling in the details in cognitive processing in the cortex and associated memories of that processing as correlated to past needs and how important those were (emotions).

Slowly build this process over time across the different sensory inputs and I assert we construct in our own brains a unique response to the world when presented with events, a unique response that undulates with time that we call a "consciousness" , "self", "me".

Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_learning

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_network

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaton

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1065704/

http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2010/07/why-of-emotion-from-whence-did-it-come.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomic_nervous_system

The more we earn the harder it is for us to deploy that value to boost innovation.

2011-12-04T18:06:00.001-05:00

I've made this argument before and to me it seems trivially true but alas...

More or less people have a relatively fixed value scape. A value scape spans the total number of skills that one has that one can put to earning a pay check. It also includes being able to use those skills indirectly to pick winners in their space of expertise (such as an ex. engineer being better at picking companies in the space she once worked due to her expertise and knowledge of the space).

We all tend to have our set of things we do well and don't expand them much through our lives. Now depending on how well we are doing one or another of these things (extracting value from the skill) we can come to earn wealth...which we deploy into providing for ourselves and our families and as well redeploy into either businesses (in the areas in which we have expertise) or just save away for a rainy day.

What should be obvious is that as we gain more and more wealth from having deployed our talents and acquired that value, our tendency to explore areas OUTSIDE our ken goes DOWN.

This is true because as we derive value from our talents we tend to remain satisfied and complacent about exploring areas we do not have expertise in. In fact it costs us literally more energy (in the form of need to learn the new area) in order to explore it and as well make success. So what do we do...we stay in the areas we know..

How ever, if the value we've derived in skill A accrues, our ability to deploy that value across the possible opportunity space of *all known values* is limited. We might build a business or two in that area...and those maybe huge businesses (like M. Bloomberg and his business or D. Trump and his) but outside of those areas we are neophytes that do not deploy capital in effort to build up areas we aren't technically competent. So as more value is extracted, less of it is deployed to other areas. So not only does wealth concentrate but there is concentration of an *ability to deploy wealth* which is far more damaging to the generation of innovation and building new businesses.

This will always be true, no matter the individual or industry...what will vary is how concentrated the effect is. Some individuals have massive talent landscapes and deploy them to extract value across those spaces (by building businesses in each, think of what Elon Musk is doing or what Richard Branson has done) in order to build innovation. Others (mostly institutions like Banks) create cross business funds and hire experts to perform the broad analysis necessary to maximize their ability to invest in innovative businesses in areas but the pre condition of revenue and growth exclude brand new innovations that need funding to be built and tested in the market.

Most people build their wealth in their domain, exceed satisfaction and then sit on a huge wad of dough that is not deployed efficiently and instead continues to grow their wealth. Ways to either slow the growth of massive wealth from forming (tiered taxation with increased earnings IMO should not have an upper limit...the more you make the more the government should take) or the government should build systems to aid those with massive wealth to redeploy that wealth *easily* across non expert domains to help boost innovation. Most conservatives will balk at the first idea but the second is something that should be seriously considered...the tactics by governments in the east like Japan and Korea have seen success setting broad technological initiatives and enabling innovation in those areas...we (in the west in General but in the US in particular) need to mirror those efforts more.

Action Oriented Workflow: Emancipated Worker sourcing allows people to maximize their value

2011-12-03T14:51:00.001-05:00

The key advantages of action oriented workflow have been specified in this post and the identification of ways in which it can be used to both enable businesses using it to emancipate their workforce and as well enable the emancipated workers to maximize their value should be clear.

A recent set of events have gotten me to thinking a bit more deeply about what role automated inferring systems should play in organizations. From the perspective of some it would seem that AOW based businesses will be responsible for the elimination of many tasks which currently are performed by several layers of humans in the organization who's task it is to run analysis on metrics gathered from their managed teams to determine how to redirect the execution of failing projects or direct the execution of planned new ones. This view is true in so far as such tasks are far more efficiently performed from the business perspective by an automated learning process. Such processes are able to behave in ways that human agents are not, such as:

Automated learning of efficient processes involves a perfect memory of past performance executing the minutia of actions against objects of a given type in the examined process. Perfect memory is equivalent to perfect access to acquired data which makes performing new decisions temporally efficient as data gathering need not be done.
Automated learning eliminates the need for the gathering of consensus across multiple agents tasked with performing analysis. Since an AOW based learning agent performs a system wide convergence across all managed object types the optimal future delegation events are present in memory for any new required delegations. The time consuming process that exists in enterprises today of mid level and more senior managers coming together to discuss the results of their analysis to help shape future decisions is not necessary.
Automated learning agents by eliminating the bias of selection that attends human based management and delegation processes are free to be purely meritocratic in their selection of delegated agents in the emancipated worker pool, eliminating that bias completely from attempts to execute any business required task removing another potential inefficiency that is an issue in human managed systems.

Beyond these points, it is also true that most people who have been "promoted" to positions where they are managing others and analyzing performance completing tasks rather than doing the tasks would also like to be free to maximize their value scape. As described in the maximize your value post, the personal desire for us to perform across the set of skills that we can competently perform and be compensated for and in our own time frame is what we really as humans want to do. It is no wonder that across businesses the management layers are the ones with the highest levels of burn out and attrition as the continuous demands of needing to manage down level working agents and as well manage the interaction with same level and up level management agents leaves such individuals in a state of continuous bombardment that makes consistent performance difficult. The artificially intelligent work routing performed by systems that employ AOW would take the burden of this task over and because it does not have the limitations of burn out induction or limited memory of past data metrics it can consistently make the right choice for the actions delegated at the moment and thus over time achieves hyper efficiency.

Individuals in organizations that are displaced are then able to redeploy their value space such that they can deploy multiple areas of their skills as an emancipated worker for businesses instead of as an easily worn out routing node. More people are then enabled to maximize their value and derive personal happiness in their lives as a result.

Love post Super mortality...

2011-11-22T13:31:00.001-05:00

by now you should be convinced that the Science Fiction we all grew up with is mostly completely wrong. Wrong about when we are going out into space, wrong about *what* is going out into space, wrong about how we will change on this planet in the next half century, wrong about the ways we will truly effect all living things on this planet in intimate genetic ways.

Here we are in the midst of building the detailed tools that will allow us to continue to modify organisms and create organisms from scratch.

Here we are decoding the book of DNA and finally understanding how it's secrets have been organized.

Here we are discovering how the book is organized beautifully into chapters and sections that enable specific production of entire tissues and organ structures and simultaneously guide their developmental projection over time.

Here we are, knocking on the door of the mutational and structural break downs that lead to the condition called aging, which we know KNOW for a fact does not have to terminate with death.

What an amazing time to be on planet Earth!! To share in the bounty that these lines of science will bring us, likely the last generations to lack a choice of dying by natural death...assuming we avoid the other unnatural means.

But what of love? How will we be impacted socially by the changes to come, here I put forward a story of love post super mortality....

Waiting for her arrival

Chris Munoz has been waiting almost 15 minutes now for the arrival of his fiance Neda, her transport was delayed from it's departure from the International Air port in Buenos Aires and thus now hours later and on the other side of the globe it's about to arrive, gently gliding through scant clouds under a clear blue sky at Paris' De Gaulle International Airport.

Chris is very excited, he hasn't seen Neda in nearly 3 months since her trip for business reasons commenced. Neda is a neurobiological engineer and has been working along with a team of cognitively enhanced NE-1 variant humans like herself to design a new series of autonomous robots for working in mines. Her project was a 6 month project of which 3 were spent on site testing the new robots in the field. She reported to Chris via video IM that all things went well with the tests. The new robots employ mechanical, electrical and nano technological advances in their construction. They have extremely powerful and responsive electro-mechanical membranes for muscles that are 25 times as strong as those in a standard birth human, circa 2011. Of course that doesn't mean much as since then, nearly 50 years have passed and humans are classified based on the specific cognitive specializations they received upon birth.

At this point the reasons for these classifications have created all types of political unrest and most world administrative bodies have already repealed identification with explicit reference to individuals enhancements...after all, sensors can read the specific genetic traits of individuals in real time as they pass through check points and terminals all over a typical city in the year 2056. It's been a long time since the revolutions of the stem cell and genetic age that led to the flowering of means to modify existing organisms in ways that would be specifically useful to human needs. Including to point modifications to specific traits of humans themselves...by 2020, stem cells had been coaxed into producing entire organs along with supporting tissues...by 2030, the organ insurance industry was in full flowering....by 2050, individuals who were born in the late 20th century in the late 60's and 70's were still alive and kicking with no apparent side effects from several decades of genetic revigorations. Chris is one such individual, he was born in 1971 and as he waits for Neda to get off her transport he looks age wise about as old as most people walking around the terminal at the air port, some one from our time would say he looked about 21 or 22 years old. Such is the amazing power of the techniques for revigoration that were perfected in the early 2020's and have now spread to a vast number of the human society.

Of course, there was much unrest in the creation of these technologies...questions of how they would effect population had very little time to be discussed as the consistent line of advances in the teens and early 2020's moved the Science and methods at an incredible rate, far faster than the old Moore's law trope that attended electronic advances 50 years earlier. In 2032 many countries began to institute "either or" laws, laws that granted "super mortals" as revigorated individuals became to be known...the gift of continued revigorations but only so long as they did not have children. The population of the planet had grown quite considerably despite efforts to educate populations in third world regions regarding birth control and though advanced technologies in agriculture and fuel supply were ramping up governments felt a need to put a clamp on growth especially as more and more people chose revigoration. It's true by the current year of 2056 that nearly 98% penetration of autonomous thinking robots in a nearly self healing infrastructure into all areas of what were former human only activities (like the mine work of Neda's robots) had addressed much of the problems of the 2030's but since senescence had all but disappeared in most of the modern world (a term which at this point in time included most of South Asia and Africa) it meant that population death rates would perform a near reversal as more and more people engaged revigorations...hence the need to enact controlling laws. Most countries had policies in place that traded 25 years of vigoration free life to be able to have children, during those years the parents could not be eligible for revigoration. It was a weird law that people came to resent, why create a connection between revigoration and being a parent? Should it matter if I look like a 45 year old when I am really a 75 year old who could look like a 22 year old had I been taking revigorations during my most 2038 child raising experiences??

This is where Chris was, he'd been married once before in 2012...he met his first wife when she was 26 and he was 38...they courted and had 3 children. As the years went by he was privy to the technological advances that occurred and as he neared his 60th birthday in 2031 he was trusting enough of the revigoration technologies that he would go in for a treatment. On January 14th 2032 he was given his first injection of auto vectoring agents that would go to work homing in on his stem cells to administer the precise genetic modifications that would allow them to restore youthful function while cleaning out decades of cellular junk that had accrued in his body. The doctors told him that he will feel as if he's suffering a month long cold with symptons of stuffiness and sluggishness but soon after that he will notice changes, by the second month he will see clear and visible restoration of elasticity in his skin as the dermal and epidermal layers rethicken to youthful states. As the 4th month passes he will feel and look 20 years younger as bone density, neuronal plasticity and muscle function are restored, by the 8th month most of the cells in his entire body would have been replaced or restored to a youthful state...for most people this is a cell vigor state that after 8 months had them looking as they did when they were in their early 20's. Chris is fortunate he had no major health issues in his life along the way as those could lead to complications as revigoration proceeds ...when he first "dialed back" as some people call it, he was able to retain over 99.99% genetic fitness. His treatment was a bitter sweet event, his first wife who he loved and cherished, refused for her own reasons to ever submit to revigoration. She felt that she was meant to grow old and die and Chris couldn't bare the idea of leaving her....he stayed with her beyond his revigoration tending to their 3 grown children which...it must be said was a strange situation...especially as after his revigoration he *looked* nearly as young as his youngest child who was only physically 16 at the time. Unfortunately, though possibly unrelated, his first wife's choice to not revigorate gave way to tragedy on August 12, 2035. While Chris was away on a business trip he received word that she'd had a sudden stroke and died, natural year 52.

A new beginning after the beginning....

It took Chris 10 years to get over the death of his first wife. It was 2045 when he was taking one of many visits to the Metropolitan museum in Manhattan, NYC that he'd taken that summer and that is when he saw her. She exhibited a quality that was viscerally inviting in a way that he did not experience with any one other than his first wife and drawn by the energy was compelled to smile just slightly as he looked her way, gawked he thought later but she would later say...his eyes welcomed her and invited her smile in return.

He was compelled by this reciprocation of interest to find ways to sidle over to her area as he slyly observed her motions through the exhibit in the Egyptian wing of the museum. He could only focus on how beautifully the dark fall of her hair shimmered in the stippled rays of sun light bathing her from the glass wall of windows to the right of the Museum. He then chided himself for acting like a child and then laughed at the thought considering that he looked all of 22 years of age...to his eye Neda looked about his age and that comforted him....though he had no idea if she had been "dialed back". Since his initial treatment in 2032, he'd had another in 2042...the process had been refined greatly by that time...the side effects were much less severe than in his first treatment which involved the reversion of 40 years of cellular damage and material build up. With the second treatment he had a significantly lower level of accrued damage and material, only 10 years worth from that of a 22 year old as his biology indicated. Since that treatment he also made a few other modifications which were available actually in the 2020's when simple targeted genetic cosmecutical treatments were brought to market. When he was born he had brown eyes but he'd always wanted his iris to be hazel... he went in for the treatment after his second dial back had completed course and had his eye color genetically modified from brown to hazel, like the revigoration treatment the process occurred over time as the genes changed the production of melanin concentration in the iris tissue, after one month his eyes were expressing the precise shade of hazel that he'd picked from the cosmecutical catalog. It was these eyes that induced Neda to smile. Similarly, he was born with naturally wavy black hair, he had a treatment to add a slight tinge of brown to his hair and another treatment to permanently keep hair from growing on his face as he disliked shaving. By this point such treatments had been available for 20 years....

He sat down on one of the benches in the open space and continued to day dream as he looked out the glass wall at the swaying trees beyond. As he looked he smiled at knowing that the coming years would be filled with new experiences. He'd taken the last 10 to do a great deal of traveling, he had visited France several times with his first wife and had achieved mastery of the language by living in Normandy for 5 of the last 10 years after her death. He'd also spent another 5 years living in Madrid, prior to his first revigoration he had worked in Information Technology and had built and sold a technology business so his income was disposable. Also as the Self healing infrastructure of robots continued to be deployed, people put their robots to work for them. Chris had at least a dozen at the and Neda's home in a village just a few miles outside of Paris. They performed required tasks and errands and maintained the grounds, attended to shopping and delivery. Chris did very little of his own labor. When he first came to France, he'd taken his youngest daughter with him and she decided to stay there...he thought of his up coming trip there to go see her. She at this point had actually aged to appear older than he did as he was on his second dial back and she had only experienced her first the year before. Ever the romantic for the natural process of aging she sought to live in the vein of her mother though it caused consternation to Chris. He feared losing her as he lost her mother but she decided to dial back right after having her first child and Chris' 5th Grand child....who he'd not seen in nearly a year, was....

"Is it okay if I sit here?"

Chris was startled by a sweet voice interrupting his thoughts.

"Um..eh..yes, ...no ..I mean, sure...no no it's free." he stammered in surprise as he realized who was asking, it was Neda.

"Thank You." , she replied as she took a seat on the bench near him...now he was close enough to smell her and her aroma was delicate like the playing of a violin sonata. "You know, Akhenaton is said to be the originator of the original idea of monotheism." She continued.

Chris, again startled that she continued to speak to him, finally gained some courage and turned to her and said. "Yes, actually I did." They spoke and strolled the museum until sunset.

Over the next few weeks he courted her in much the way that he was accustomed, messages to her IM, gave way to stronger feelings, poetry....Roses and chocolates as their interaction continued. Unlike Chris, Neda had never been revigorated. She was a pre-vig human which at her age of 29 was beginning to be a rare occurrence. Despite little difference in age being visible between 22 and 26 the laws in the United States any way enabled people to perform their first revigoration, 5 years after their 21st birthday. Neda had chosen to stay natural for a few years beyond, so interestingly in this relationship she appeared to be more mature than Chris despite the fact that chronologically he was nearly triple her age. She was born in 2016 a few years prior to his youngest daughters birth but in a time of super mortals so much of the appearance based factors that people use to engage relationships simply go obsolete. With no more marker of any ones age in the physical appearance to rule them in or out every one focuses more on the content of their character and personality, people aren't necessarily any better at it though. However, multi-revigoration recipients like Chris have advantages that natural year individuals do not, no longer subject to the cognitive decline that attended pre - vigorative aging and bolstered by additional genetic treatments and advances in the areas of strengthened neuronal connections and enabled by his extra time on the Earth, Chris and others like him are living store houses of wisdom and often stand out to those who have not revigorated as exceptionally erudite, usually poly lingual (Chris was already on his fourth language with fluency and was considering several more)...for Neda these qualities were attractive and she enjoyed hearing the stories from Chris of a time when people actually feared unavoidable death at the end of a slow process of degeneration caused by aging.

Snatching life back for more love...

The transport finally landed and had docked at the port, Chris was anxious as he waited for his love. He had married Neda in 2052 and they were considering having children. The "either or" laws in France concerning childhood were clear, individuals could not engage in revigoration for 25 years post having children, since they met neither Chris nor Neda under went a revigoration. As you'll recall, Chris had undergone his second in 2042 when they met in the museum in New York in 2045...he'd aged to about 25 and she was 29, now in 2056 both looked about in their mid to late 30's. They were planning a visit to the revigorist to be injected together soon after she arrived. He was looking forward to starting fresh with her, after they both aged back to the appearance of 22 year olds...fresh faced and energized to have children but they couldn't do that in France. Instead, after their treatment they would fly to countries with relatively low populations that had more liberal or no "either or" policies in place. Their plan was to go to Uruguay. Neda had visited the country while she was in South America and felt it would make the perfect place to start a new family.

The red light above the departure doors indicating that the passengers were about to enter the terminal began to flash, Chris tensed as he prepared to see his love and craned his neck around others crowding to the gates. As the doors opened he caught immediate sight of Neda. Her luggage bot was at her side with her items in hand but Chris only saw that smile, those eyes, that hair and remembered how she looked that warm summer day 10 years before...and how she would look in a couple of months after the revigoration process had completed. He started moving toward the gate unconsciously as she ran to him and they embraced and kissed a slow passionate kiss of longing recovered in an instant of affection. "You know, I could love you for the next 300 years." she said coyly as he recovered from the sweetness of her lips and aroma. "Well, that's a coincidence...because I fully intend to give you at least that much time." He returned as they began to walk toward to exit the terminal, their luggage bot following them along the way.

A revolution in living....

2011-11-09T09:44:00.002-05:00

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111103120605.htm

It's difficult to preface the development indicated in the link above without getting emotional. For those who have been closely following the steady and rapid set of advances in the areas of cell biology and genetics over the last 10 years or so, the pacing has been exhilarating and remarkable. From the invention of iPSC by Shinya Yamanaka in 2006 to the demonstration of clear ability to restore a youthful state to senescent cells in only 5 years is amazing. In that time dozens of teams across the world have contributed additions to the race that have enabled the culmination of the success indicated above. These cofactors will go down in history as the beginning of the new therapy of revigoration. The restoration of life states to youthful points of operation using periodic treatments.

I prognosticated about this ability over several posts in the last few years, but in my wildest optimistic projection did I think we'd achieve so much so quickly.

An excerpt from the post shows how conservative my hypothesis may turn out to be:

"The genetic revigorations that he received were standard for astronauts of the ESA at the time. Today, the program is a historical footnote of the ESA's nearly 300 year history because since the invention of full genome vigorations development back in 2032, the entire human population has been undergoing continuous vigoration and adaptation."

http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2008/10/travel-in-genetically-enhanced-future.html

2032 indeed. In 2008, to be fair when I wrote the post iPSC had many major issues preventing it from working as it currently works. For one the cofactors and methods used (by Yamanaka) were very different from the 6 used in this research, they had a bad side effect of triggering cancer formation. It was later in 2009 that efficient methods were found that used cofactors and lacked the oncogenic threat. Developments continued apace in 2009 and 2010 and now here we are on the brink of enabling super mortality as a treatment for aging itself.

I sit here stunned that in less than 6 years from their invention by Shinya Yamanaka, reprogrammed somatic cells via the technique of iPSC are now on the verge of unlocking the mystery of aging.

I wrote the hypothetical blog post on the life of Afusa O'Reilly 3 years ago in 2008 at the time, iPSC research was plagued with many issues (accidental cancer formation being one of them) but later discoveries of the use of enzymatic cofactors to enable pluripotency got rid of many of those concerns while significantly improving the percentage of cells that would become pluripotent.

Now, we know that rejuvenation is also a part of the gift of this technology. Though still in a developmental mode (the cells are not used therapeutically ....yet) we can expect the following to quickly occur.

1) Labs working on similar research will replicate the findings of the LeMaitre team (which is funny to me since it roughly means "the owner" in French) and test the stability of the rejuvenation.

2) Parallel work earlier this year (another Nobel Prize winning effort in my view) that enabled for the first time in vivo modification of genetic information without cancer formation will combine to allow living individuals to have their key stem cells (of any tissue type) rejuvenated.

3) Prior to 2) Occurring though...it is likely that cosmetics companies will look very closely into paying for some of this research to find ways to provide these cofactors to existing senescent cells in hopes of spurring rejuvenation. (Which may work but in a weak way)

4) The world needs to seriously sit down and wake up to what all this will mean. In my original prognostication I thought 2032 would be about when full revigoration (as I called it) would be possible as a treatment to anyone who could pay for it. We don't have that yet (as these successes are only in the lab) but they are an inevitable result of this work that will likely happen within the next 2 years as no significant blockages present. The issues that a super senescent or super mortal population of individuals that can continue to reproduce must be taken seriously. All the projections on food supply and resource use assume that the death rate will pretty much stay as it has been but with a revolution like this that rate will shift dramatically (especially if these treatments are widely available as a commercial service) we will have to seriously think, one society after another about how to deal with over population. The time for such think is NOW.

5) Other serious issues also present, the fact that individuals living today carry the dominant cultural memes of the generation (baby boomers) in charge means that mores and ideas associated with such individuals will persist longer into the future. In some cases this may be a great thing as progressive ideas first pioneered by boomers continue to evolve...however in other cases it I believe is not a good thing. Strong supporters of philosophies of ignorance may be given quite literally much longer leases on life that will allow them to continue to pollute the human discourse that must happen increasingly more efficiently as we move forward in a growing populating of slowly dying individuals. I quote from the post I wrote on the idea when it dawned on me earlier this year:

"Still as this generation has a standing memory of these people what is likely to happen is an exaggerated remembrance in all human history to come of this time, as those who are alive now...and likely will be for centuries to come continue to push forward what they found important. If people who are the last active conveyor of knowledge live longer and longer than the time before obscure areas of knowledge are forgotten will also spread out into the future in an ever living memory concentrated around the last 50 years and moving forward into times yet to come."

http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2011/01/in-ever-living-memory.html

It must be clearly stated where we are:

Death by aging is about to be an option and not a requirement of living human beings.

The ripples through human cultural interaction and how those effect the one planet we inhabit must be dealt with if amazing levels of discord are to be avoided. I am excited about the development and look forward to see it develop but I am terrified at our level of immaturity. Let's hope we can draw on the inner will of humanity that got us here from the Savanah and make it through.

The 10 Commandments of Efficient Coding.

2011-10-16T00:13:00.001-04:00

I was recently asked for advise on how the manage a development project and decided to make it into a 10 commandments of efficient coding. This is ideal for any team size and if followed diligently leads to efficiently written code. Have any more that you would add to the list? Feel free to indicate yours in the comments below.

Thou shalt spend at least 50% of ones time thinking about a problem before actually beginning any code. Conceptual design is critical to properly grounding the code in the ballpark of the problem being solved such that the solution spans the problem space as much as possible. Not attending to this stage could lead to spectacularly bad choices of solution for the scope of a problem.
Thou shalt document everything. Every single thought on the development, ideas of implementation should be written down. I keep multiple "to do" lists in .txt files and as well in the memo field entries for my source control tool when I am checking in new code. Documentation is crucial to illuminating the dynamic thought process that informs code and allows forensic analysis in the event of problems to proceed quickly. Inside code, it goes without saying that any part of code that can't have it's function inferred on inspection should have supplemental comments added to do so...this is why comments are formal part of programming languages, use them or get lost in a sea of code mounting that would require developer time jut to figure out what it does before one even embarks on refactoring it.
Thou shalt master object oriented programming. Often the debate is made that one has an equal right to choose object oriented (OO) versus procedural methods when coding but this is nonsense. OO is the default truth of reality, biology is OO, engineering is OO, physics (energy transfer and mediation) is OO and coding in that way ultimately returns efficiency benefits down the line that often can't be seen when coding. The basic tenet of code reuse ultimately enables the developer to apply conservation of energy to the act of solving big problems. The extra time that might be taken to code solutions in OO more than returns itself in much easier extension of the code as new needs emerge down the line. In some areas procedural solutions are all that are needed say for various types of scripting but even these can be embedded into an OO process. For example I use an OO workflow and file version management system that allows me to manage changes to procedural scripts so in a way OO is enabling those scripts to be more efficiently managed and executed by composition inside an OO framework.
Thou shalt socially code as often as possible. Pair programming or extreme programming either through side by side programming of a task or via a visibility workflow system (like action oriented workflow) allows foolish mistakes to be caught as soon as possible. If a developer can get the aid of a buddy to assist in debugging something she's been working on for the last hour to solve the problem in a few seconds with fresh eyes than all those saved hours will add up. The milestones will be hit and more work can be done in less time. Never waste developer time with undo meetings, creative people should be given time to be creative...facilitate their creativity and more work will be done.
Thou shalt always unit test ones code. Never write more than a few lines of code before testing, OO languages like java, c# make this trivial by provide the main() facility for inline testing of new code. One should never code a new method without testing how it works in main() if that method has more than 5 lines of implementation testing should probably follow with each 5 lines of code written. Catching scope errors, caste errors or null exception errors for passed in attributes during the method implementation stage is far less costly than coding everything up and then deploying the code only to find that the client coding bubbles up nasty pathologies that are hard to find. So testing in main() should be reflexive, writing test code for each method that follows one or all of the possible use cases in client code mandatory as one is writing it and one will encounter much less errors at run time in client code and the ones that one does find will likely be sourced in the client code and will not require refactoring and recompiling in the core class hierarchy.
Thou shalt always close class instances that can be opened. Classes with "close()" usually do for a very important reason, to prevent some resource access from leaking memory. Be that resource access to a db via an open socket connection or access to a file on a file system, what is opened must be closed. This should not be done as part of an optimization step AFTER coding is complete it should be a core part of coding. Developers should not get lazy about closing opened resource connections otherwise nasty surprises await once client code starts being written and under massive instance creation key resources cause memory leaks that soon crash apps. and there are probably few bugs harder to track down and fix than memory leak bugs..being diligent with closing open resources can remove a significant time sink for debugging once code is deployed.
Though shalt always use "finally" condition for code that can be catastrophically interrupted. In java and c# some code execution events can be interrupted by catastrophic events (pulled plugs, blown hard drives, dead processor fans) well written code heals from these events either by not implementing the results of a method in non atomic ways (ie. using lots of synchronization and critical sections for code that absolutely MUST run as a unit or not run at all) or by guaranteeing recovery code is run should something happen. Thus both languages have "try" , "catch" , "finally" operations. Open resources in the body of the "try" should always be closed in the "finally". Interrupting exceptions should always be handled in the "catch"...the compile cost of using this condition is far outweighed by final running code that is robust to these type of failures which by the way are another major way in which memory leaks occur.
Thou shalt always catch and handle exceptions, even if "handle" means "write entry to log". Using exceptions to indicate where code went wrong is a critical aid to debugging, nothing tracks a problem back to it's source better than a well written exception design. Ideally each app. should have it's own set of Exceptions that report app. specific failures and report any such failures to a log file.
Though shalt always log. Every aspect of a running application should be logged to at least a text file, more elaborate means can include email or xml files meant to report to web pages but logging is critical to ensuring the health state of a running application. As a cross cutting concern to the problem solved by the app. logging is often seen by developers as icing but it is indeed the cake, efficient logging allows errors to be trapped and noted immediately and give a time line of their occurrence that can be used to tie problems to recently implemented code or other issues.
Though shalt always use a profiler when available. Profilers allow a running application to be inspected for the long term inefficiency trends in memory utilization and object creation and destruction that can kill an app. for highly scalable uses (ie all the startups that junior coders out of college are writing in hopes they are the next Google or Facebook). Profilers can identify which objects are being created without being destroyed or closed, can show where possible access conflicts loom in code that accesses common resources and can indicate a trend line for how efficiently an app. will scale over time. Most critically to the needs of a running business...profilers allow developers to see how efficient their code is running and where they can gain performance and resource efficiency by simply optimizing code.Tight code is code that does a lot in a little space and is fast and scalable over instances of processing and memory resource...that is critical to the operating cost of the software and the pricing on any services that it provides. Lower pricing for services comes from efficient code which benefits the consumer who chose your service over the other guy on pricing...thus tight code helps you beat the competition. Efficient code is code that puts more money in your pocket once it is pitted against what the competition is doing.

The Return of the Space Cowboy, for Facebook

2011-10-15T16:33:00.001-04:00

Because Facebook share widget refused to post this directly I had to "cheat". Apparently the video above contains a reference to the file sharing service "piratebay" in the video header and that prevented the Facebook link widget from allowing the share to embed. The reference is a solicitation to download the album at torrent bay and I agree such solication is wrong....but that is what the poster of the video intended...not what I intend. I just want my friends to listen to "Return of the Space Cowboy" the song I was humming this morning and thought...to find on youtube.

So, in a few seconds of being denied I figured I'd just embed the video in a blog post and link the post to facebook. My friends get to see the video as I intended and all is well with the world...of course I could have found another video reference to the song that didn't include any reference to PirateBay but then the question of "could it be done?" that sprang into mind the moment Facebook denied the link wouldn't have been answered. ;)

More about this particular youtube video though...it's of a kind I've not seen before. It actually provides a compilation of all the songs in the album along with an on screen set of links to each song in the album! An excellent use of youtube's in video linking capability that may not be too welcome by some music companies that is for sure! Note this video shows total time as 1:06:00 so the compilation is aware of the internal links and I suppose will play them as a set (or one can click on particular song links to play them out of set sequence)..which is pretty cool.

Addition: Apparently the links are scan to time markers in the single video, so clicking on the links scans to the particular song in the full video compilation...some might prefer this better than I originally thought (I thought it would just play the videos).

Self Healing infrastructure means the end of a compensation requirement...

2011-10-03T20:30:00.004-04:00

In a post I submitted to Facebook regarding the rise of automation and robotics and the fear of mounting unemployment a discussion occurred in the comments and the question below was asked by Bill Davidson:

"There will have to be a revolution in how we "compensate" people. "

In response I wrote the following hypothetical scenario in the vein of this post and this post that I've written that paint the possible future in a story. The gist being here that over time the *need* to compensate will become obsolete since the agents that we would be getting services from won't require payment. We like wise won't *need* to be performing work to get payment the self healing infrastructure that we construct would just provide it for us.

Imagine this scenario:

You go to bed at 11 pm and promptly at 7 am your robotic assistant raps at your door bidding you to wake. The assistant has already prepared breakfast which is waiting hot in your kitchen. You open the bedroom door and find your slippers placed for your use. You head down stairs and sit down and your assistant asks if you'd like coffee or orange juice, you motion which and it pours it for you. After breakfast you are ready for a shower, the robotic assistant had already left the kitchen while you were eating and prepared a bath and towel. You go up and take your shower and as you exit the bathroom the assistant heads in to clean it. After you've gotten dressed you head for the door to go take a walk, you open the door to find 2 of your other robotic assistants at work, one is planting germanium's near your hedges and another is trimming one of two apple trees you have in the front yard. As you head down the path the assistants of many of your neighbors are also at work. Here, one is replacing the screws on a mailbox door...there, another is walking another neighbors dogs, there further off two robotic assistants are helping a new neighbor move in and are carrying in a couch. Just as you are about to walk down the street a vehicle pulls up and a robot gets out and recognizing you, calls at you and indicates that your weekly groceries have arrived. You continue walking and tell it to go ahead and place the groceries on the stoop and notify your assistant to place them inside.

You continue walking down the street and see robots doing things like sweeping the street, watering lawns and repairing traffic lights. For you this is an average day, you don't have a job to do because the Robots do everything...the groceries you were delivered were not "compensated" for but instead were delivered as part of the active infrastructure established by the local community years before. The milk in the milk container was synthesized using custom organisms that are fed the constituent elements and excrete milk as a by product, these organisms were designed not by humans but by other robots which have rapidly advanced the field of synthetic biology. The meat you are delivered is varied in type and all fresh cuts of genetically engineered tissues all grown in factories run by robots, among the cuts you enjoy are lamb, pork , bison and chicken...all of it virtually indistinguishable from killed animals but none of it required the death of any animal to procure. The cells having been gathered using non invasion swabs and used to create stem cells which were then re-differentiated to express entire tissues and organs desired for human consumption.

The vegetables and tubers packed in the robots container also come from various hydroponic and aquaponic and traditional farms...all fielded and managed by robot farmers. The question of how this infrastructure is powered is the only remaining one and it is answered by the many highly efficient solar power panels on homes all over your neighborhood and in fields in the country side. Super efficient graphene and nanotube constructed batteries store excess energy for months of power even during the winter months. All robots run on highly efficient battery packs that are available at pack exchange stations all over, as you continue walking you pass the nearby one and notice a a few robot assistants leaving the location having received fresh packs...others have plugged themselves into outlets available for any use to charge up. One might still wonder though where all the raw materials for this seeming utopia come from, the answer is as one would expect from extraction of natural resources as always except the agents performing the prospecting, analysis, mineralogy, mining, refining and delivery are all robots all fed by the continuous power infrastructure. Where liquid fuels are still utilized they are derived fuels derived from again ...robot designed synthetic organisms designed to produce all manner of chemical or neutralize compounds molecule by molecule as needs demand.

As you continue your walk you smile to yourself as you recall your childhood of 185 years previous. 185 years and you barely look a day beyond 26 as that is about the age when you started taking various genetic upgrades and treatments to stave off senescence. Today you have blue eyes but was born with brown and in your life have had every shade in-between as suited your fancy. You were born in 2023 in the midst of the creation of the many technologies that today you are fully surrounded by and supported by, in those days people actually used to have to work for food, supplies and to keep their homes tidy!! The children that people your neighborhood mostly have no idea what that is like as their every need is catered for them either by their parents or via proxy of their robot assistants but you remember a time when a living self healing infrastructure didn't exist and you thank the march of technology for making it so.

Power to the Pad: Why the revolution of these devices will make them more ubiquitous than phones.

2011-09-29T04:26:00.003-04:00

In a recent article at Business Insider the acceleration in the pad device market is discussed. In a blog post from January of 2010, just prior to the release of the Ipad I explained why the pad device was going to be the hottest consumer electronic device of the next 5 years. Now, nearly 2 years later my prediction has become more than validated by the market. The fastest growth rate of any consumer device by far Pad devices are finally taking off in the mind of the consumer and many players are itching to get in the game. I had been wondering of the ways that the form factors of these devices constrain manufacturing and price conditions and decided to write those out in this blog post. The premise of the BI article was that Amazon had no clear line to profitability but that analysis leaves out what costs will be like for such devices even two years down the line. If Amazon can gain market share now they'll make profit when production costs are far lower than they are today but the devices are still selling for a good margin above those costs.

Tech. angle is not factored in, you'd just need to ask a clued in hardware engineer what is going to happen to the hardware that drives these form factor based devices in 5 years and he will tell you quickly and loudly.

"The prices are going to fall through the floor."

why? because the components will become commodity very quickly...even across different devices much of the chips, memory and SCREENS are going to become mass produced baked out items that suppliers like Samsung make and sell to whoever wants to pack them into a pad device. Amazon being the latest player to he space.

How does this help prices fall? Easy, the costs of production are amortized over all the people putting them together...the suppliers quickly recoup expensive fabrication facility costs since they have multiple profit lines coming in from their customers...all of which are one time payments with no restrictions other than defective unit agreements. So once fab. and R&D costs are swallowed these components will fall in price but that's what we've seen as standard for 30 years in electronics for IT. We saw it with the PC when the clones were manufactured by many suppliers using the IBM architecture as a common template, reducing costs for builders significantly and enabling competition to crash prices downward. Allowing the PC (and not the arguably better designed Mac, Amiga or Atari from a UI perspective) to win the computer wars of the mid to late 80's.

What is different here is that PC's have no natural limit on the needs of the machine. A desktop could continually be improved with better graphics cards to do CAD or GAMES over just web surfing, audio to do music over just play games, SCSCI addition to enable scanning and other add on's. This kept the 'form factor' of a PC dynamic as really there was no form factor...it was matched to whatever the needs of the user were. So there is always a "high end" pc for various things as there are always high end components that serve different needs.

Now refocus your gaze on a pad device, these are precisely restricted by their physical use conditions and that places on them necessary and desired hardware limitations that constrain costs downward in a whole new way once volume production picks up. A 7" pad is always going to be a 7" pad...it will serve mostly the use case of being used to read digital versions of books, play games, watch films and web surf. It will do nothing else (maybe some crazies will add a radio to it for some reason but that will not be a major use case for that form factor). The same is true of the 10" accept it's use cases open up new areas...such as good size for a digital tablet for drawing, or as a dashboard replacement surface for controlling some device remotely...none of these uses though require any more horsepower than devices have today so they are more application driven than Pad internal component driven. So what will happen is once Screen resolution has hit "retina" equivalent on both form factors (and that is already a year away for both sizes) screens will *not* need to get any better. superAMOLED (the best overall screen tech. in this engineers opinion) is improving power utilization and thinness and weight but those are subjective qualities not ones that improve visual quality. Once the tech. can do super high res. the consumer will be happy and the cost of production for each panel will fall to near nothing (ie. base raw materials and production costs + profit sliver) once the suppliers have recouped R&D costs. Since the form factor is fixed and people will be refreshing devices world wide periodically screens of that size will always be in similar demand (or at least at a predictable demand correlated with the replace rate and the growth of adoption in various markets). The same will happen at the 10" pad sizes...how the makers will likely eek out more profit is by offering larger panels for other reasons (um...tv's) or different types (flexible, transparent...etc.)

I blogged about why I felt OLED was going to be the LAST great display technology here those interested can click through for those reasons.

Now , display is not the only component of interest to pad devices...the brain and graphics chips are also on a road to commodity once a given processor core count and speed is fast enough to perform many actions nearly instantly *there will be no need to make them any more powerful for the given formfactor* costs will again crash as those parts become commodity and retain a permanent profit line for devices that are optimized by those component specs. for processor. Memory as well, will be constrained but I predict will be the largest factor of price variability for all pad devices because memory requirements vary with application use not form factor.

Battery technology is about to see a silent revolution, recent advances in being able to increase the charge surfaces of batteries by orders of magnitude make the promise of hyper charging batteries in only a few years ...just in time to go into super thin, super line pad devices. People will always want more power but once you get to a device that runs continuously for 4 or 5 days and when it does need charging can be charged in 1 minute instead of 3 hours...well the game has totally changed. We are going to see such devices within 5 years.

So the devices will be ubiquitious and extremely cheap fairly quickly...if Android has many devices in the hands of consumers using their other services they are happy to take an early loss. It beats watching Samsung and others fill that niche while Apple continues to grow, as production costs fall they can take their time reducing prices and thus rake in a great deal of profit on the long end, the future and a little appeal to what the constraints of the hardware are will bare this out.

Meat production local versus export and why SHI will make it not matter any more...

2011-09-23T04:39:00.002-04:00

From this blog post an interesting quote highlighted is:

it is twice as energy efficient for people in Britain to eat dairy products from New Zealand than from domestic producers. It is four times more energy efficient for them to eat lamb shipped from the other side of the world than it is to eat British lamb.

The main reason for this is one simple phrase from the economics of manufacturing:

Economies of scale.

New Zealand pretty much has defined industries around the lamb, they have massive herds and it is a big part of the economy as a result locally lamb is very cheap to produce. It is also over abundant there for the population, we means demand is low and that in turn means local pricing is low...local producers would have a glut if they don't export. Exporting is profitable since local producers can tie the price of export into the final distributor fees and those are padded on a bit before sitting in English meat stores, where lamb is much more rare...is not in abundance and there for greatly in demand to command a high price.

If we analyze any other produced good with few limited regions of production with out sized advantages to production we will see this type of advantage built in...how do we fix it?

Well, we are approaching a time (I say within 10 years) when our ability to produce high quality locally produced meat products will flatten the production playing field. Lamb grown in a sterile factory in England will be just as expensive to produce as lamb grown in New Zealand since the advantageous factors in the latter location that made natural grown lamb more efficient can be normalized away. Thus final costs post production will be similar in both places which would bias against export from one place being price competitive with locally grown product. So it simply won't happen. The same math will be in operation when photovoltaic cells finally achieve cost parity with gas/coal...the idea of paying a provider to line in electricity will exceed the cost of purchasing panels and maintaining them over the life time of need...this will kill remote delivery in favor of ubiquitous self generation.

Much further down the road, I predict in about 40 years or so once we have fully autonomous humanoid robots with artificially intelligent minds we'll be able to have them take over the bulk of the physical tasks that we currently perform. Contrary to what many fear this will not be the tragedy to work that it may seem...humans will be able to profit from the labor of their robot work force (like slaves but minus the ethical issues) and pinch off more and more of the production loop. Homes that run from photovoltaic panels on the roof will eliminate electric and heating bills. Robots set to plant and harvest from personal plots will reduce the costs of produce in general and make much cheaper for humans to buy good produce, robots will drive delivery trucks (actually the trucks will BE robotic and will drive themselves), robots will mine for ore and work in the smelting factories that produce our goods. Robots will even design and repair other robots...as more and more are done by the robots at zero cost to us the more our existing wealth is maximized in it's efficiency. Eventually we will pinch off from the cycle entirely...with robots doing everything for us and requiring nothing from us to maintain the system, that is when we will reach full SHI (self healing infrastructure).

http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2011/07/coming-age-of-shi-self-healing.html

http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2011/09/how-approach-to-self-healing.html

Action Oriented Workflow: Maximize your Value.

2011-09-15T21:35:00.008-04:00

As I approached the problem of creating a distributed web application platform I found it necessary to construct an efficient workflow and business process foundation that would enable any applications built on the platform to enable fluid collaboration and interaction between the agents responsible for designing, building, maintaining and using the created applications. Around 2004 as the critical aspects of the architecture were being finished I began to think about how to build this workflow tool. It turns out that choices I'd made in the architecture pushed me to think about the concept of "action" in the context of a business application and business process workflows.

Action is all that matters

A common business consists of a group of people separated into specific roles and responsibilities over business related objects, products or services working together to serve the business goals with regard to those objects, products or services. We can look at each function required to prosecute these aims as an action that needs to be completed by the people that serve as prosecuting agents for those actions. This is true in any business, a real estate broker is responsible for actions such as creating listings for homes that she is trying to sell or updating listing reports for homes that have sold. The broker also interacts with clients external to her business in the form of the home owners and prospective home buyers, toward this end she uses various computer based tools to manage each of the sub actions that she must perform to ensure the function is achieved. The business provides her with the tools necessary to ensure that these actions are performed as quickly as possible so that the business can make profit and hopefully expand. However, the fact that the broker is performing the actions is not really relevant to the business. If we could imagine the business as an entity that is dispatching action requests to brokers, what is most important is how quickly the actions are done and not who is doing them. There is no real reason for the agent that executes the action to be a particular person other than that the agent is efficient in performing it. Security is important as well in many cases but for many actions even that is less important than that the action be completed with alacrity. Also unimportant from the business perspective is the actual location of the agent. The requirement that they perform a required business action in an office is a silly one from the perspective of the business which just wants the action done. Where it is done is irrelevant. When we look at business from the perspective of actions we see a radical way in which we can design a system to ensure expedient execution of dispatched business actions while enabling agents to maximize the use of their internal value.

What is your intrinsic value?

A few years ago I had a discussion with my father over the value that I felt I possessed inherently and that I had a right to attempt to be paid in any job that I worked, for all the value I brought to the table, weather or not I was actually using that value on the job. He thought this was absurd, to him as to most people, an employer pays employees to perform a specific set of functions and the employee should expect to be paid for what they are doing for the employer and no more. I saw that though as a horrible waste of the intrinsic value of a person that defines all the things that they can do but are not being paid to do. As a result in my professional career I was always trying to maximize my value by doing more than I was "paid to do" to use more of my value in the organization and over time through raises be paid more for it. I saw this as being unfair to the worker, here they are forced to commute (time for which they are not paid) to a work location, where they will be tasked periodically to perform a specific set of actions for which they've garnered expertise. For the next 8 hours or so all their other talents lay dormant and uncompensated, I saw this waste as a huge problem. From the perspective of the employee...the need to commute is a major hassle, the need to be soloed in an office a type of work prison where by being contained they can't be with their children, they can't be on the beach, they can't be doing other things they would rather be doing. The answer to this problem was simple, if an employee is given freedom to do their work from any location then the business would be potentially improving the employees outlook on work as being labor in a temporary prison and see it as a hobby that returns money. The employer now can evaluate across a number of employees performing necessary work actions and dispatch work to them. In the real world most businesses that are not international have a day/night cycle. During the day the business is active since the working agents in the local region are active and at night the business effectively goes to sleep just like all it's worker agents. Allowing a global pool of potential agents to commit actions enables the business to have a 24 hour operations cycle. If they could call on a pool of potential agents all over the globe they would be guaranteed a number of individuals that can perform actions on behalf of the business. Also, the business would no longer have to house workers in massive buildings and offices, they wouldn't have to pay for the lighting, gas, HVAC costs to keep these buildings available for the periodic workforce that must gather in them. The costs savings that would attend removing these requirements is a significant chunk of capital expenditures for all modern businesses. On the employee or worker side of the equation, these agents would be performing work reciprocally on their free time or when they receive an action from the business. If different businesses in different fields were able to dispatch work this way...agents could opt to perform work across their intrinsic value map instead of restricted to one particular area of expertise. This would allow the agents to maximize their value by allowing them to derive profit from more of their talents. Thus both the employer (business) and the employee (action performing agents) are most efficient when the former is able to select from a global pool of agents to perform needed work actions and the latter are able to select work actions that are encompassed by their entire value map.

Implicit selection of efficient workers

Probably the most interesting aspect of being able to decouple the "actions" that businesses want done from the "agents" that perform them is the ability to map the interactions between action dispatch and action execution and to record aspects of the interaction, who performed it and how fast they performed it. This "action delta" as I call it, allows each "action" requested on business objects to be tied to agents that have performed the action efficiently in the past. Enough samples of this performance can then be used to route new actions to agents who have shown efficiency in the past thus allowing the normal dispatch and completion of actions across the pool of agents to teach the business which agents are most efficient. This is a very important learning process that then allows the business to focus on the efficient agents and prune action requests to inefficient agents. Thus those individuals in the agent space who have acquired great skill across their value map can derive payment for that skill as they perform actions efficiently. This would make possible a true meritocratic management process that is free of cronyism or nepotism in selecting which agents are granted more responsibility. Indirectly, being good at what one is performing for the business grants that person more responsibility (in the form of more action requests). I called this action focused system of task execution Action Oriented Workflow (AOW). The Action Oriented Workflow paradigm is nearly fully implemented as described above in the AgilEntity framework, it enables businesses to find workers to perform actions from a potential global pool, to identify the best workers over time as they perform actions without requiring a set of hierarchical human management layers (which eliminates another major expense in many large businesses) and finally to reward those workers with action requests and compensation for being good at what they do. On the agent side, it allows the agents to opt into work by performing actions submitted to them, it also allows them to opt out of work by delegating action requests forward to other agents. Thus allowing agents to work on their own time without degrading their efficiency deltas for the actions that they receive. It also allows them to work from any where, using any device to connect to the business and perform the action.

I truly believe that systems of the type that I've created are the future of the work force, in a post I wrote originally in 2006 and posted here in 2008 I described the future where a telepresent workforce reshapes how business will be done. The age of what I call hyper efficient businesses is upon us with tools like AgilEntity using the action oriented workflow paradigm. They allow employers to emancipate their workforce and it allows employees to be free of work and maximize the use of their intrinsic value space. Popular writer and technology thinker Douglas Rushkoff recently started talking about the need for us to redefine how we think about "jobs" and I agree with him 100%, I designed AgilEntity to do just that so I am glad that others are finally starting to think in a new way.

Links:

http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2008/03/increasingly-telepresent-workforce.html

http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2009/04/agilentity-architecture-action-oriented.html

Google's plan for Google+ is not to steal you from Facebook....now...

2011-09-14T15:17:00.003-04:00

This is a response I posted to a thread on Facebook regarding Google+, I'd been reading from some who think that Google is trying to swipe users from Facebook and that is not only a failing strategy it is not the strategy that their actions indicate. Read:

Google is not interested in pulling you and your massive network over to their service primarily. They want to allow people who are using their distinct services to create a social networking home on G+.

The point is often made that many people who go to Google+ from Facebook come back. I've read many formerly very active users here with big networks go and stay there. They have much more to lose by switching but went anyway...yet still they aren't the fish Google are trying to catch. Those fish are mostly not even American's for the most part they are people in foreign countries using mobile devices for accessing google services...where FB penetration is still low (the numbers of people fitting bill hover in the billions) so there is a lot more potential market there than here.

The task of building a compelling service that enables social interaction among google service users that people like is done already, now it's a war of attrition in the works. As a result, I predict Google+ will continue a moderate growth in adoption over the next couple years and will be where Facebook is with total numbers (700 million) in about 5 years. Time will tell if this prediction is true or not.

Some people think that the main prize is going after the internet's "identity system" and though this is a valuable prize. There isn't going to be a *single* global internet identity system, as it stands google has what Facebook doesn't; a suite of web based tools used by a lot more people collectively than are on Facebook (including many who are on Facebook) and they are adding social to that. Facebook has the much harder task of going in the other direction ..of tacking tools onto their social component. I definitely find it convenient to login using Facebook but I have a big network here already, I centralized here already...that's not the case for *most of the planet* they are the low hanging fruit to google and as soon as they can put up similar "login using google" buttons all over the place people who use their services will surely use them. (I actually trust google over facebook by far...as far as I can trust any public corporation) This is why the attrition that will happen will mostly benefit google over facebook over time...IF Facebook doesn't quicky gain parity tool wise with Google...that is a tall order as much of what Google has built in the ad space will be energized significantly by the social elements they've already added in this *beta version with invitation only access* of their vision of social.

Google+ growth by comparison:

http://blog.hudsonhorizons.com/Article/Google-Growth-Rate-Shattering-Competition.htm

How an approach to Self Healing Infrastructure solves the jobs problem....eventually.

2011-09-04T23:50:00.004-04:00

In this series of articles on the robot revolution, popular science writer and founder of howstuffworks.com Marshall Brain does a great job of explaining the technological factors of automation that are fast eliminating manufacturing jobs world wide and are contributing to rising unemployment in the human work force as an automated work force ascends.

I wrote a blog post in July that explains why eventually the robot workforce will completely remove humans from the production loop. Once humans are no longer required to either design or build the machines that othttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifher humans use to build and farm the world around us, the costs of production will virtually collapse. Marshall paints a gloomy scenario of a future with rising numbers of unemployed humans that suddenly appear due to specific automation events, for the most part he is correct. The events have been happening, the last great one occurred after the dot com bomb of the early aughts and led to implementation of productivity technologies (like factory floor robots for placing, picking and packing products for delivery to humans and RFID technology for eliminating unit losses)that eliminated many thousands of jobs inside factories. The trend only is on the rise as indicated in the links provided in my last article. We are currently undergoing our second massive productivity consolidation world wide as corporations look for ways to make more with less across sectors. The forecast for the next few years regarding manufacturing and service jobs is gloomy and people must adapt if they are to maintain their standards of living on that point we agree. However, he seems to think that the use of robots (in particular the autonomous kind that will see construction for sale to people around 2030 as he predicts) will only have a negative effect on humans ability to survive but he's leaving out the other side of the equation.

If I own robots I essentially own my own workforce, if they are as adept as a human I can have them perform the daily tasks that I would otherwise either have to do myself OR pay some one else to do. Thus a way for humans to gain the benefits of productivity that the robots will be providing to the manufacturing and service industries from which we gain service is to also buy robots and have them at our side to enable us to maintain the standards of living we are used to. If as Marshall indicates that robots will become increasingly intelligent then when that happens we will be able to use their intelligence as proxy for the tasks we may need done. We could conceivably rent out our robots to those that can't afford them and derive profit from the act. The point is, having robots is not going to be the good fortune of businesses...people will be free to purchase them as well. As you might have seen in the movie "I Robot" the robots were completely integrated into society performing the mundane tasks that humans do today, mean while humans free of the burden of needing to be as physical do other things. In this way autonomous human like robots will be the same as a virtual slave work force. There is a reason slave owners keep slaves, slaves are highly efficient from a cost perspective...disproportionate work for pay (basic food, shelter) can be extracted from them. In the past, slave work forces were used to build massive human structures, many of the ancient wonders were done using slave labor and might not have been possible any other way. The riches of the rulers that used slave labor were then available to fund wars to gain more slaves and build more wonders. If personal robots reduce our costs of living then we all can be as those ancient rulers accept we'd be lording over (hopefully) non self aware simulations of humanity that we can task to the labors we would otherwise be forced to engage.

Thus, I see more unemployment to come in the short term (next 20 years) as automation accelerates and make no mistake it is accelerating...all of the work I have been doing on the AgilEntity platform has been designed to usher in the next form of this automation, but once fully autonomous robots can be put to roles for humans as slaves were in the past(and unfortunately present in many parts of the world as it has actually risen world wide)...humans can use those robots as a currency to maintain their standards of living even as robots continue to replace the remaining roles that are the last domain of human involvement in the production cycle. So from the perspective of individual humans the costs of living will actually go down over time as the robots begin to be used as personal workforces by people all over. This will then mean that the standard of living can be maintained near levels that most desire depending on how they are using their robot work forces. There will be impulsive shifts but eventually as the self healing infrastructure is constructed and humans pinch off the production circle entirely, costs for services and products will zero out completely and the word "unemployment" will not be a expletive but a fact of all human beings.

US job losses, automation is the culprit not outsourcing.

2011-09-04T17:48:00.001-04:00

The predominant reason jobs are dwindling in the states is over overwhelmingly due to advances in automation HERE. The number of jobs created else where as companies look for ways to save money or reduce production costs pales in significance to the number of jobs gone up in smoke because of better use of software and automation of hardware. The studies are 100% clear on this point, so why people can't do the home work to realize that their assumption is patently false in this internet age is beyond me.

Here some sources:

(Marshall Brain ...incase you don't know is the founder of the very popular site , "howstuffworks.com", his story is anecdotal but representative of why America really is shifting in how jobs are available)
http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm

Here's another:

http://www.policyarchive.org/handle/10207/bitstreams/8039.pdf

"Baily and Lawrence released a paper in late 2004 that asserted that the manufacturing job loss
suffered between 2000 and 2003 was driven only minimally (about 12%) by a rising trade deficit."

What is so unique about that time? Why would productivity go UP and manufacturing go down? The answer lies in what happened in late 2000, the dot com bust so a recession hit the economy that forced *belt tightening* and cost saving maneuvers by companies. Historically this always happens after a bust, the waste is assessed and ways to save on old methods that failed are use to replace them. In 1995 most manufacturers had large factories filled with humans packing, stocking and shipping products to fulfill orders...today? Robots take orders, robots retrieve product from shelves and robots package those products for delivery...humans only load the trucks and drive in advanced companies like Amazon, Walmart and others. These innovations started hitting the market...surprise surprise in the early thousands as companies looked for ways to reduce costs and boost profits in tough times.

That story by Marshall is a perfect example of how automation here is eliminating jobs, with a kiosk the job of a clerk behind the counter is eliminated and only the food makers matter...McDonald's can cut staff costs and make more profit and customers get faster service...win win. The workers are only enablers for two chief concerns, a) that the company make profit and b) that the consumer gets the service they are looking for...the workers do not factor into that mix and must cater to their own interests...within the interplay of the other two. It's how it is, how it always was. Any one that has believed an employer when they say they are looking out for them in a corporation are kidding themselves. When I incorporated my company Apriority LLC I did it with a charter that would make explict two things. 1) I was going to try to hire as FEW people as possible. (yes, you read that righ) and 2) The few people I hired would be given equity in the company (meaning they would be owners not just workers).

If you don't get equity in a company you work for you are a disposable cog...that turns and turns and wears out while the vast machine of which you are a part services customers. True power is owning the machine.

As a software engineer *who is actively working on reducing the amount of work that humans have to do* I see the movement toward more automation as a VERY good thing. It enables the country to remain dynamic and competitive with emerging markets and it gives our people the *first* opportunity to tool up for the new type of economies that will be de regeur in the next few decades. Knowledge economies. If you aren't retooling yourself after that factory you used to work at closes down that is YOUR FAULT. The country may owe you some basic services in return for your taxation but the world owes you NOTHING. If the thing you did all your life goes obsolete, learn something new and keep up. I believe that people should have a right to certain basics...especially in a nation as rich as the US but I also believe that people have an obligation to improve themselves for the benefit of themselves and their family yes, but also for the benefit of humanity. The sooner we embrace this type of selflessness and throw ourselves full force into continuous improvement we will find happiness, contentment and success. The people that lost their jobs and sit in their homes behind the internet gnashing their teeth because they can't find a job doing the same thing are idiots that deserve the fate that befell them. Retool for the new economy or go extinct, it really is that simple. Companies are free to seek efficiency by enabling automation and going over seas, you are free to increase your value with respect to those around you by improving your skills. If the factory replaces you with robots...learn to build robots.

If you think there is a light at the end of the tunnel as far as manufacturing or manual jobs guess again. Any job that a human does now can be done by a robot or software so obviously everyone should be retooling NOW for robotics, AI and other types of automation in the various fields in which this automation will require service. At some point, I predict about 50 years away we will reach what I call S.H.I. self healing infrastructure. At that point, robots and automation will literally do everything we need done for us and humans will be entirely pinched out of the production loop (even as designers) when that happens we should hope that a) the robots are our friends. and b) that the person or persons who control them is willing to emancipate them to the world in lieu of profits at some point in time.

Read:

http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2011/07/coming-age-of-shi-self-healing.html

In business, evolution versus free market, why competition matters.

2011-09-03T20:33:00.003-04:00

In a recent article the actions of the president to chose a stance that seems anti-environmental has gotten many eye brows to raise. The action involves giving up a little bit on the environmental conservation in hopes of enabling businesses to create more jobs in a particular sector. The nuance of the give and play of politics is only a side actor to the real story driving the debate which to me falls on a simple core difference between the free markets and species in evolution.

A capitalist economy...models in a very similar way, the natural process of survival of the fittest identified by naturalist Charles Darhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifwin. Though he and Adam Smith weren't contemporaries I am sure they would have seen eye to eye on many ideas and I am sure watching nature inspired Smith. The difference is that in evolution species emerge in environmental niches due to the selection processes produced by the fact that environments shift *under* populations of common ancestry. The similarity of needs of resources in an environment between species that emerge from sources of common ancestry (be it recent common ancestry as Humans are related to Chimpanzees or distal common ancestry as Humans are related to fish) are what breed potential competition between those species when they cross paths. Companies emerge to satisfy demands for product or services, these companies in turn require supplies and services and other companies satisfy those demands.

As multiple players emerge in the same place to satisfy similar demand needs competition also necessarily results. However, unlike in evolution where no single species (as a collective) is able to modify the groups behavior in response to environmental shifts, in capitalism ..corporations have minds, rather a small set of controllers probed on by the relentless "need" for continuous profits on the part of their nameless and faceless "investors". Corporations can be starved into extinction if they fail to execute in their markets of focus in contrast to other competing companies. Note, success in and of itself is not good enough..it is important to be the best and some how magically maintain that status indefinitely for a company to gain an increasing valuation.

Being continuously good at a given level is punished by investors...one must always be better than one was an arbitrary unit of time before. This is in my view the biggest weakness of capitalism as the need to constantly be better drives corporations to actively go out of their way to consume or destroy other companies as those are means for continuous gains. Why is this bad? It is bad because once sufficient consolidation has occurred and only a few players remain, the corporations can (unlike species) choose to enter cyclical relationships in which they depend on one another in a complex way that forgoes innovation in the effort of extracting greater profit. Collusion as it was termed in the late 19th century led to stagnant markets with increasingly high prices for product and service passed on to the consumers of those products and services with little options available for them to use other companies.

The movements to regulate monopolies in the 1880's and onward were precisely geared toward eliminating high pricing, collusion and anti-competitive practices between large companies that had dominated the competition and then (because the market only rewards continuous growth) continue to raise prices far beyond material and service costs...just to keep investors continuously happy.

In evolution, species never can make an agreement not to compete with one another...crossing into different selection domains does that automatically, thus evolutionary selection is relentless and uncontrolled where as capitalistic selection becomes *more controlled* the more individual companies in segments are eliminated by competition and consolidated into mega-corporations. Also, in natural selection the environment is constantly shifting...also there is natural mutation within individuals which forms the other side of the coin of the evolution process that continues on even if the environment is relatively stationary...as a result species emerge to expoit minute differences in the environment. The species diversity per unit of square area in a rain forest far exceeds that of the, tundra, northern forests, deserts or grasslands because mutation continues to tweak populations in micro environmental niches that are maintained in forests but transitions between seasons in other other types of biosystems.

Again, in capitalism this mechanism has no analog...companies diversify only so long as they can maintain a profit while providing services and products to a finite demand. When the number of companies are high...there is an incentive to innovate in services or products to gain more of the demand and keep the investors happy...when the number of companies are low, despite demand there is little incentive to innovate as demand is driven not by what people think they need (in the future) in a product or service it is driven by what they know they need (today). Thus under low competition, companies are more likely to choose to simply continue providing present need, rather than *wasting money* on innovation when innovation doesn't serve the aim of EVER increasing profits...in fact research&development is a cost center for it's duration until and if it succeeds in creating innovation that can be brought to market to boost sales. Only the competition provides the incentive for the innovation in order to make gains on that competition via product or service delivery costs..eking out more profit...with it gone that urge is non energy conservative so it is removed from the corporations strategy set.

Thus, unlike species which come to natural regulation under selective environments governed only by variations in environmental selection...corporations that dominate service and product markets have intention and can use that to enter completely foreign markets (and thus the mega-conglomerates are born) stifling and killing competition in those areas by leveraging their ownership or control of various supplies or products and again shutting the faucet on innovation. This is why regulation MUST happen at some point in the competitive landscape for every market, making things more difficult is the fact that it is difficult to determine at which point optimal innovation will be generated between competing companies in a given market. The waters are made more muddy when we consider that some companies enter and control multiple markets...consuming former suppliers to gain leverage on providing parts to their own products (and subtly ...denying those same parts to their competitors)...this can't happen in evolution. An invasive species doesn't dominate a niche left open in a new land or an existing species in that land by facilitated cooperation...it does it by pure domination and obliteration. More Mongol Empire than Alexander the Great...innovation (in the form of speciation) is a continuous necessity in a continuously changing environmental domain.

Conversely, in the free market...once corporations have controlled their environment essentially by consuming, neutering or coming to agreement with all potential competitors, innovation the driver of lower prices and better products is superfluous. Thus it is important to regulate the markets to prevent "too much" consolidation...as consolidation retards the advance of innovation while boosting prices to the consumer.

The different political parties and economists only really disagree on one fundamental question. "How much regulation is the right amount for a given market?"

Why aging is caused mostly by degredation and is only modulated differentially by physiological factors

2011-08-24T00:13:00.003-04:00

In an article recently posted about a talk given by Michael Rose, an analysis is performed of his theory that aging may not be caused by acquired systemic damage over time.

I give him dap for standing up for his view but I'll bethttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif my hands (my most important body parts) he's wrong. Aging must be due mostly to a cumulative degenerative process. The simple answer comes from analyzing something I am sure Michael hasn't factored into his analysis and that is the relative difference in the number of translation and transcription events (ie places where mutations can happen) that exists between a fly and a human being. When you are as short lived as a fly, with a short cycle of cell recycling it becomes easy to have physiological effects dominate the longevity of an individual if well controlled (the results Michael got by controlling diet) but over the longer term the organism still is subject to mutations that slowly build up and lead to the whole house of cards coming down. Humans churn a significantly larger number of cells over their vastly longer life time and diet modification has a smaller impact on the much broader effects of system mutations arising across the much larger set of tissues, it takes longer for those degenerative effects to lead to catastrophic failure (death) but even with controls in diet and exercise the gains that are achieved are a small fraction of the total life cycle of the average human (as we can see from many studies that have revealed the results of exercise and diet on life length) it helps but not that much, the systemic degradation from acquired mutations just dominates the process. Be those mutations ones that are resident in telomeres being shortened, or induced by reduced efficiency of mitochondrial energy production or build up of proteins in the brain and other critical organs...eventually they win system wide and kill the organism.

I think that as a modulating factor his idea does make sense, that a base line for the aging population is determined by non physiological factors...but then those give way in the super long term to the slow mutation factors...the induced mistakes, the build up of cruft, the influence of radiation...eventually it catches up and the whole system comes tumbling down. We know the chemistry of interaction is only probabilistically true...thus it is guaranteed that mistakes will happen, some of them will go on repaired and those will lead to events that effect the fitness of the individual...be it methylation of a key gene or some other effect that leads to the slow degradation of the individual.

A great analog for what is going on between these ideas can be had from recalling the relationship between classical newtonian mechanics and relativistic mechanics. In the regime of speeds << c newton is quite adequate...providing numbers accurate to several decimal points, enabling us to confidently use these (wrong) equations to send probes to the far hurtling moons of Jupiter, to land with exquisite accuracy. Yet...for higher speeds, Newton's mechanics fails spectacularly...in the particle accelerators relativistic adjustments are requires to ensure accurate results. Just as it was a subtle transition at a very high rate of speeds that revealed the dilation effects that modulate momentum, length and time in relative, so to are the steady effects of ever present mutation factors in different organisms going to differentially present based on their relative rates of cell turn over and cell mass over their observed average life times.

Here is a hypothesis....that anemone (or the fruitfly for that matter) if scaled to our mass equivalent would start visibly showing it's aging ways over a not too long time scale...also, by being under water they are protected from a major source of mutations that are muted with an exponential law with depth into the seas...conferring a protection by eliminating a major source of slow mutations that we are subject to continuously here at the surface, the sun.

http://www.int-res.com/articles/meps/144/m144p109.pdf

"The result illustrate the rapid attenuation
of solar UV radiation underwater
even in the clear oceanic water of the
Maldive islands. "

Google buys Motorola: Analysis

2011-08-15T11:01:00.005-04:00

Google buys Motorola

Major bold play by Larry Page and co. As explained in his letter this is a great move for giving Android a premium handset maker to showcase it's latest capabilities. It also enables Google to directly make it's own handsets, to have control over a hardware division that can cater handsets to any of the major carrier delivery protocols as well as create their own.

The best part of this though is the fact that from now on Motorola instead of or in addition to HTC will be Google's go to company for create thttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifhe reference models for the latest and greatest from Android (the Nexus sets) and these will tell the market where to go as they'll likely have the newest stuff first.

Also, Google surely realizes the importance of leading on volume to gain market share. They used the volume play to define their main search business (to make money on ads) and they used that play again when they open sourced Android and gave it away to carriers to spread the OS love wider than any iOS or winmobile could. Now they are going to flatten things with the devices by making low cost Android based devices (I bet you.) With rumors of a low cost iOS phone swirling from Apple...you can bet some part of this choice had to do with trying to beat Apple to the punch on getting a cheap smart phone to market.

Also, factor in what is happening on the protocol side of things. The carriers hegemony of service access to the net is hinged on their ability to control the cell towers and meter access to their services by the various handset makers. Google has always believed that wifi is the best way to enable a smart phone to connect to the net (it's definitely the cheapest from the consumers pov and usually provides way better bandwidth), they tried their best but failed to get around the carriers when they angled for plan free versions of the Nexus when it first arrived (G1). With their own phone maker they can more directly address other access methods to the net via wireless devices and guess what was just ratified two weeks ago, 802.22. A protocol that promises to enable pretty much any one with a connection to the internet to enable wireless devices to connect through it across *miles* thanks to the re appropriation of the former frequencies used by analog tv. This will auger in a major shift in how wireless devices connect , enabling them for the first time to gain coverage without requiring the major telecoms which basically are in collusion...let's face it.

I refused to purchase a cell phone precisely because I knew the pricing for the services were all exorbitant (I studied communications engineering as an undergrad so I am familiar with much of the details). We are paying for massive executive salaries and big dividend distributions more than anything else....texting costs the telecoms zero, text goes in a side band sent with any transmission. voice has been digitized and takes up a fraction of the bandwidth it once did and more over many people rarely use it..."data" is the same thing that they use on the back end to send text and voice via IP so why they charge separately for it when they are using it in their other services...is the most egregious infraction. We are all being triple charged for a service that should be nearly cost free. In other countries the pricing is significantly lower for this troika of services but US regulations enable the telecoms freedom to gouge that is not allowed else where. Dishonest businesses ....Google with it's "don't be evil" mantra knows this and could be planning to get around them....they could conceivably become a carrier once 802.22 adoption kicks off by simply building their own access points using the new protocol. Motorola would be providing both cheap handsets and a dirt cheap network access (or enabling the cable companies to provide) method with wider coverage than cell towers. It would be an amazing boost to adoption of smart phones and would trigger development of IP based applications yet again. It would force the telecoms to compete on pricing and will embolden others to put up 802.22 access points...one could conceivably set up ones own telecom...enabling access per device connection mediated with software. This is ideally how it should work...enabling any phone to connect to any network provider and pay a per provider charge for the connection not a per application price for the application used. Texting , Voice are applications not distinct services and should be reflected that way in pricing...this deal has given Google a way to push that future forward and it only means good things for the consumer if so.

Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/802.22

A wealth of empathy in the poor and the poor empathy of the wealthy.

2011-08-12T05:16:00.002-04:00

I came across this article recently and thought of a simple thought experiment that explains using a simple appeal to resource constraints and energy conservation why i is so.

It makes perfect sense that empathy would work this way, a thought experiment in which one starts with a group and the necessity to share available resources in short supply (food,water..etc.) reveals it. Now take away one individual after another from the group while keeping the resource supply fixed, as the number of individuals goes down the necessity, nay even the *thought* of sharing reduces in scope. As the available supply of the still limited resource to the lower number of individuals actually goes UP anyway. Eventually, removing the n - (n - 1) th user leaves one person with all the resources and zero ability to even express empathy (as the resources are all theirs to hoard). Running the mental program of "I need to figure out how we will share this" when there are individuals around is done out of the simple fact that NOT doing so can be dangerous. So each agent chooses the option that is optimal from each of their perspective and that is to share/express empathy for the plight of those with him they are bottled up and really have no choice but to share. Larger numbers of people only strengthen the urge as where one could fight off one or two aberrant sharing agents...it would not be possible with 100. So the tendency to be empathic is actually normalized by greater numbers need to share the limited resource pool. The opposite is true for those that have virtually unlimited resource by virtue of their wealth and running the empathy program becomes energy non conservative so it is not executed.

To Keynes or not to Keynes...is no longer the question.

2011-08-11T01:56:00.004-04:00

I was sent by a friend on Facebook to this article and started writing a response, it was getting involved so I decided to blog it instead.

First, note his use of the terms "insufficient deficits" he's putting words in Krugman's mouth by equating (conflating) the idea of spending in order to boost employment and thus help kick the economy out of the duldrums with an amorphous general idea of a "deficit" which every one agrees is a bad thing from the sound of it. However, the spending of mere few billion that was done nation wide in the early 50's on the US highway program (which aided the deficit as they were spending without an immediate eye to profit) returned in the succeeding decades trillions of dollars....in fact the facilitation of the inter continental commerce industry boosted the US economy and continue to explain much of it's success in comparison to nations that do not have such a built up commerce infrastructure.

"Do Krugman's assertions make any sense at all? After seeing the above two charts, how can anyone in his right mind think that our economic sluggishness is due to insufficient deficits and a timid Fed?"

So, the author screws up horribly on that point. Another term he uses is "inflation" he sounds like one of those monists that thought that stagflation of the 70's was caused by the Fed flooding the market with dollars and boosting inflation, as if any attempt to boost dollars creates inflation but this last period has been pretty much devoid of any inflationary pressures despite large increases in the circulation of the dollar by the fed. Again, he's asserting a word that many people take as a boogie man, he's conflating boosting the circulation of the dollar directly with "inflation" and that is absolute nonsense it is not working that way now..they are correlated only through multiple variables and in this regime they are actually anti correlated.

"Soaring commodity prices — which of course are consistent with the Peter Schiff view of the world, and not at all with the Keynesian "it's all about demand" view — just "muddied this issue to some extent." But we can just throw that out because we just know, deep down, that the Keynesian models are right and the right-wing models are wrong."

No, he throws it out because commodities prices soaring is also not directly correlated with anything predicted by a Keynsian view. Commodities have their values set primarily by two things a) demand and b) perception. We are in a regime now where the *perception* of safety of wealth in commodities is high. Investors and people perceive high prices in oil predominantly because of now historical incidents. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and turmoil in oil exporters. Also all the talk of the oil boon soon running out is not helping things...perception is skewing the demand curve so that it anti correlates with true value. Ditto for gold, accept the perception in this case lies in the false idea that gold "holds its value" .....go ahead convert your money to gold and when perception crashes as the economy recovers ...what how much of your value poofs into smoke as demand doesn't match it if you don't sell in time.

"A more typical response was to accept some elements of the criticisms while refining Keynesian economic theories to defend them against arguments that would invalidate the whole Keynesian framework—the resulting body of work largely composing New Keynesian economics."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes#The_Keynesian_ascendancy_1939.E2.80.931979

Also, the quote from your article above is disingenuous as the ideas of perception modulating value/demand has been factored into refined Keynsian models(see quote above)...so why is this guy talking as if modern day Keynsians are 100% married to the original conception?? That's like calling all Darwinists married to the kooky ideas that Darwin had in his theory that weren't true to explain some species and interactions, but that is not what modern Darwinists do...for example we know today that our DNA (which Darwin knew nothing about) is subject to dna inclusion within the life of individuals for cross inheritance between *different* species..Darwin didn't think this was possible yet it is today part of modern Darwinist theory. Anyway...the author is smart in that his methods would fool a lot of Americans who don't catch these type of subtleties (particularly as they are so egregious in the right wing media) but not smart enough. If one looks at the history (fortunate for me this stuff just bubbles up to mind) one sees that though it is not cut and dried it really isn't rocket science either.

Conclusion:

A complex interaction between real supply, real demand and *perceived* value determines how markets move. Determine how effective floods of capital will be in a given economic environment and determine how those markets will react to various forms of stimulus...be they attempts to boost employment by spending on projects that promise returns on investment in the form of boosted productivity and consumer spending or otherwise. The key modulating factor that economic models have a hard time getting a finger on is this perception. Today, commodities like gold and oil are at all time highs not because they are rare and in demand but because there is a *perception* that they are rare. The private corporations that hold the true keys to supply of both aren't about to tell the governments everything they know about the availability of supply even if they are mandated to tell details of quantities extracted (easy enough to leave deposits in the Earth and let supply dwindle to tweak demand and prices back up as the political winds churn). This is a major failing in the metering tools used by the government to keep corporations honest and it explains much of the behavior of the markets that is anti correlated to *classical* Keynsian views...but as indicated above, he never really formalized in a mathematical way his views...others did, some got things right others got things wrong (Phillips curve) but the general idea of Keynsian principles are sound...the only gotcha is the spending that is done must be smart spending otherwise there will be a net negative effect, there will be inflation and unemployment as Friedman predicted in the 60's. All of these modulations are part of the same spectrum of interacting variables and are not mutually exclusive...if only more people would realize that.

The merits of marketing by influence in the internet age.

2011-08-02T17:44:00.003-04:00

A recent article got me to thinking about the power of networked influence in democratizing access to potential success in a service or product business.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/02/amazons-appstore-youll-make-0-when-we-give-your-app-away-and-youll-like-it/

The relatively new mathematics of network theory has been showing this with elegant equation after the next. That it is more important who you are connected to than to how many. In this case the who is a hyper connected distribution engine like Amazon's app store, the how many comes by hierarchical association through the store for any apps hosted and given featured placement there in. Once that brand recognition is made it is as if the company and product were validated by Amazon itself, the power of that influence...granted as quoted above for 0% rev. share could be invaluable to a company just getting started. It enables the quality of the product or service on offer to forgo the need of being absolute best of class (it just needs to satisfy the need adequately), as the network effects (especially as an early player) could lead to a spike in revenue to the featured player before any one else gets to shine their product before consumer eyes. After that spike the creators could be rich, quite a return on investment should one be fortunate enough to get the nod.

However, this leads a larger discovery, that the internet has democratized *access to influence* of other highly networked individuals, institutions or entities, it only requires the mention of those less connected by a connected node to propagate strong lines of interest through the super node to the lesser entity and changing it's influence in the graph of nodes for ever.

This latter realization means it may be optimal as a strategy to seek to bolster influence by access to super nodes over even attempting to improve the core elements of a product or service first. In many industries the differences between players and marginal, for example fashion. There are millions of people producing t shirt designs and selling them for profit but because designs are more or less the same in that they all are printed on t-shirts, it's more important to spread the idea of the designs as wide as possible rather than play up the quality of the shirts. Promulgating the designs through a super node would enable a poorly designed set of shirts to gain more sales than a really well designed set. The power of access to influence is strong in t shirt sales. In contrast other businesses must have a differentiated product in place before attempting to sell to any audience. A DVD player that fails to work or even has a high failure rate will not last long on the sales lists as it's failures will reveal themselves in the first set of purchasers...even if those purchases come through the efforts of a super node. Microsoft is a perfect example of this, they spend billions marketing their windows phone product and because of short comings of the product in comparison to the competition, it failed despite the massive marketing muscle brought to bare on the problem in an effort to use Microsoft's influence to boost sales of phones using the OS.

I think the failure of the company to gain influence came because of several key reasons unique to the service at this time: the duration of the sales period was too short, amazon just launched the app store and few people are actually downloading from it (it's a bear just to get on your phone). That is why he failed to get a good boost from the influence offered by the one day free presentation in my view. I predict things would change significantly as time elapses and more users begin using the app store and if the promotion time is long enough for network effects to take over.

Determining the proper strategy to take will then vary with the type of product or service on offer, it's level of differentiation in the market and the availability of super nodes that can promulgate those products or services and thus mitigate (to the extent possible as described above) against failings in the product or service itself.

Links:
Network Theory

The coming age of SHI, Self Healing Infrastructure

2011-07-17T20:24:00.005-04:00

I've had several lively discussions in the last few months about the possible implications of an increasingly automated society. As a designer of a system that is made to automate much of the repetitive actions taken by employees in various lines of business this topic has been a focus of my analysis for nearly 10 years now. In the context of software designed to enable users to work on business critical object in applications designed for the vertical, this idea of automation requires the study of workflow interactions and business processes across multiple user and system interactions that can be distributed across the world. The problem space is huge and with AgilEntity platform I've created a solution that will generalize across verticals. The analog of AE in the physical realm though lies in the advances that are being made in the field of robots and the sister field AI, that is now enabling the creation of astonishingly life like robots in the ways that they "experience" the world and as well navigate within the world.

I recently had a discussion where I made the assertion that human beings are in a precarious position as far as automation of manual tasks is concerned. The last 10 years has seen the development of amazing technologies for enabling robots to ambulate and sense their surroundings without the massive amounts of computational muscle that were previously believed to be required prior to 15 years or so. The emergence of neural network and statistical methods for storing solution patterns to real time experienced situations and then comparing those patterns to in coming experiences has enabled the refinement of robotics to the point that natural walking quadrapedal and bipedal robots are on the horizon. Outstanding examples of both are found in the bigdog and petman projects of the DARPA funded Boston Dynamics. However, the advances will continue and they will accelerate as the various areas of cognitive function that we have in our brains are modeled using these techniques...eventually (within the next 20 years) we will have fully autonomous walking robots that ambulate and are as dexterous as the fluidity of human beings. I believe that beyond this point the ability for robots to completely take over the role of humans in the manufacturing sector will be complete. Once this is so, humans will be able to have robots find and extract the natural resources needed to build our world.

As AI continues to refine and cross sensory advances continue, robots will be able to understand and enhance their own construction, people like Ray Kurzwiel have talked on this subject matter but what interests me is not so much that robots will be able to build robots but that once they are able to do this, then we will be removed from the loop. Once robots can be enabled to build and repair their brethren, humans will be able to benefit from the efforts of the infrastructure of robots created to perform various tasks without requiring any investment, time or mental effort. We will be able to command the robots to perform actions for us and rest secure in their ability both to extract any necessary raw materials and fashion those raw materials into the required products.

The objections I've encountered involve the capitalistic aims of any organization or company that builds these robots. Will the heads of industry ever feel the need to relinquish their massive profit cow to the world in an effort to free man from all types of burden, will they emancipate their bots???? My argument is:

"The closer you get to the top of the mountain the easier it is to start an avalanche."

As these captains of future industry build their infrastructures and wealth, the pressure to perform a philanthropic act will mount. Just as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have promised to donate the majority of their personal fortunes to the benefit of man, so to will these future philanthropists be willing to aid man once they've fattened their coffers enough. Some will chose not to, but all it takes is one individual to bring this idea to fruition. I believe that the age of the self healing infrastructure won't be with us for another 30 years but when it comes it will usher in a change in the history of humanity, we will go from reliant on our selves in every metric to gain survival to relying on the tools we have created and given the ability provide for us.

Diversity saves....

2011-07-06T12:53:00.001-04:00

Access to people from different regions of the world is good thing for several reasons. First, having other people from other places nearby or easily able to come by allows the chains of xenophobia that naturally forms between geographically disparate groups of people to wither in the face of constant interaction. Interaction does serve to strengthen some stereotypes but it tends to do it only in a minority of the respective populations that actually do inhabit the stereotypes of their group. The vast majority, silent majority as ever...only experiences what we (here online) already know...most people are just like us, have the same loves, hates, desires...and interests...despite their locations of origin.

The second reason has to do with linguistics, when people from different groups live together the pressure to pick up additional languages or words from those languages increases...for the young this is actually beneficial for the mind as multiple language cognition has been found to benefit individuals who've gained the skills as adults. It also enables those children to again be culturally exposed to those different languages and makes them less likely to acquire strong biases against the different groups.

Another reason comes from genetics, two populations that share genes create a more fit third population that shares traits from the original two. If in isolation groups have created specific mutations that tend to be carried within the group as detrimental or positive traits, mixing of the populations enables detrimental traits to thin out (as the percentage of their propagation goes down as in group individuals mate with out group individuals that do not carry the trait) and positive traits to propagate (as they are positive because they confer some survival advantage which likely extends beyond the originating geographic origin point).

The final reason in my view is that this type of interaction is actually beneficial for humanity, dare I say essential over the next few decades to allow the last fires of nationalism that burn in the hearts of many parts of the world to finally die out without conflagration into the conflicts we have going on currently derived from such heat. Chechnya...Kosovo...Darfur....ethnic/linguistic conflict has been the bread and butter of human violence for as long as humans could hurl a stone across a river and discover a people there that spoke differently, looked differently and prayed to different Gods. This last reason is secretly my prime reason for wanting to release numeroom.com eventually (once I launch it) to the consumer masses to enable a true language agnostic communication platform (not separate islands of language on one service) that will be used across devices to just make the idea of different language on such services irrelevant...whatever language you speak that is what you should see...weather or not those you are communicating with actually are typing in that language. Small scale systems for doing this have been built but no geographically scalable implementation with an "implicit" translation existed until I created one in numeroom.com (troubles with licensing translation tech. from google and other dictionary providers aside!)

Mixing humanity is key to our survival in this difficult time as we kill the oceans at rates unimagined 5 years ago, as we choke the skies with coal and as we denude the land of it's oxygen producing arboreal protections. Let us hope that we can embrace this diversity of experiences, lives, people and ideas to grow beyond the self destructive ways we currently exhibit.

Calorie recalculate....discovering wonder foods.

2011-03-01T22:13:00.002-05:00

After suffering a running injury early last year (around March) I was forced to stay off my alternate day routine of running. During these runs I would burn about 1,000 Calories per workout and it was enough to enable me to maintain my weight between 175 and 178 lbs from 2002 until the date of injury. After the injury I only slightly compensated in diet modification for the lost Calorie burn, however due to the high level of fitness that my muscle cells had achieved over the years it took almost 5 months before I started to gain weight appreciably. I started noticing more than usual snug fit in my jeans and tops but it wasn't until August that things started to fall off a precipice as the lack of exercise and the lost fitness in my cells coupled with the maintained high Calorie diet began to take their toll. Nearing the middle of December I gained the bravery to weigh myself and was shocked to find that I had ballooned to 210 lbs. the highest weight I'd been in 8 years. As is usually the case with me I was immediately angry....livid at my failure to maintain my fitness despite not being able to run. The injury had healed sufficiently though by this point that I was ready to engage an alternate work out routine. I decided to research purchase of an elliptical machine.

Elliptical machines are very efficient Calorie burn machines because they engage the whole body much like running does, however unlike running, good elliptical machines have a long natural stride length that ensures zero impact on the knee and ankle joints. The impact suffered by runners is why injuries like mine occur, it didn't matter I decided I would purchase an elliptical and engage a rapid weight loss plan. I set my goal to lose 40 lbs, to go from 210 to 170 in 2.5 months. It may seem like an aggressive goal but I am not new to rapid weight loss regiments. As a college student I was always physically active and worked out with weights, I had the drive to be committed to the task but could I achieve the goal? At my heaviest I was 226 lbs. and embarked on a radical diet where I reduced my Calories to about 1,500 per day and started running every day, I set a goal to lose 50 lbs. in 4 months, I was able to just barely do it. So I have been able to lose large amounts of weight with the necessary effort running and the modification to my diet. Flash forward to the future and it's time to make metrics again.

Metrics

One really awesome aspect about weight loss is the fact that it is all based in very well grounded Science. Nutritionist can craft plans that ensure nearly precise determination of input Calories based on analysis of foods and use those to determine the necessary Caloric burn during work out routines to effect a negative direction in the weight factor. That said, I only ever did rough approximations of Calories and judged my intake by volume of food rather than type of food. I was careful to keep intake of fatty foods low and to avoid large quantities of starchy foods but I wasn't doing as good a job as I thought. Case in point the latest work out plan.

I received the elliptical on the 15th and put it together on the 18th of Saturday, December 2010. I did a workout right after getting on the machine. The machine was not an expensive one but I felt reasonably confident the reported Calories burned were within the ball park of truth after my 1 hour workouts were complete. From the beginning, in order to gain some additional burn I added a book bag containing 20 lbs. of weight while engaged...it helped me burn on some days a reported 1800 Calories, 2 weeks later the weight of the bag went up again to 30 lbs and Calories burned went as high as 2100. Because Calories have a precise scientific meaning:

"The amount of energy required to raise one gram of water one celcius degree"...times a 1,000.

The physics aside, we know thanks to calorimetry that a pound of human fat contains about 3,500 Calories of energy, thus we can determine based on inputs and outputs the necessary values to effect weight loss or gain of any desired amount. In my latest effort, I knew that I was 210 lbs. and I also knew that I had to lose 40 lbs in 2.5 months. I also knew that I was eating any where from 2500 to 3500 Calories a day. I was burning less obviously as I was gaining weight slowly over the previous few months. The first target was to cut my Calorie intake to a known amount, I did this by adopting a "first meal fruit" diet that I had done 8 years previous when I lost 52 lbs as recounted earlier. I would have about 3 lbs of fruit over the course of an hour or so, I mixed an assortment of fruits, banana, apples, oranges, tangerines, grapes, pears, plums, blueberries, cherries, strawberries, persimmon, kiwi and even the occasional cactus fruit (Opuntia). The first meal fruit diet was instrumental in cutting out over 1,000 Calories per day from my meals straight away. Prior to it's adoption I would routinely have a heavy breakfast of eggs, cheese, ham or sausage, toast with butter and coffee. Replaced by delicious fruits I was taking in significantly more stuff but the Caloric density was much lower...this is the key to efficiently triggering the satiety pathways and preventing glucose peaks in the blood stream (which are bad for reasons I will explain later).

More metrics...

So, starting on the 18th I cut out the big breakfasts I was again having and replaced them with a much simpler fruit combination than 8 years ago. Usually 2 large apples and two large oranges. I knew this would allow me to gain a good 1,000 average Calorie reduction per day input, I then moved on to the lunch and evening meals. In the previous routine I was able to subsist on an amazing diet of a fist full of Chinese fried rice (yes, I said fried) and a skinless piece of Kentucky Fried Chicken (yes, KFC). I was able to be consistent with the portion (a fist full of cooked rice is about 1 cup of rice which most people will inhale without realizing it. I would occasionally have a dessert which was often home made oat meal raisin cookies, no more than 3 per sitting with a small glass of milk. To accompany my meals I had some sort of sweetened juice. In the current routine I only have juice with one meal (dinner), lunch meal is with water only. Also, there is no KFC here or fried rice. I cook my own rice mixture with vegetables and add cubes of lean chicken breast, along with the usual addition of either carrots, peas , corn and brocolli I had a consistent afternoon and dinner meal. Dessert if i have it is usually a simple bowl of Kellogs corn flakes lightly dusted with sugar.

The loss...

I started the routine and carefully tracked my workouts, writing down the Calories burned the revolutions turned and he date. I used this to track my progress and goal set for the coming days. I am extremely competitive with myself and having an eye on my past performance was a great motivation to do better from day to day. I "felt" as if I could feel a difference after the first week, after the second week I knew there was a difference and by week 4 it was obvious I had shed a great deal of weight. When the 30 day weigh day arrived on January 18, I prepared myself for some level of good news...I was expecting to have lost maybe 14 lbs. it turns out I lost 23 lbs instead! Nothing like a surprise on the upside! I was happy with the progress and now with the loss established I calculated the amount of weight I lost per given interval. 1.55 lbs per 2 day interval. This is great as it allowed me to work backward and determine how many Calories per weight loss value. If I was burning around 1,800 - 2,000 Calories per workout and worked out every day and 1 lbs is equal to about 3,500 Calories I was burning 3 lbs every 4 days. No wonder I ended up losing 23 lbs. after the 30 days. (4 goes in 30 about 7 times X 3 lbs = ~23 lbs...no magic just physics)

After the loss...

So I was understandably elated at the results, I had been quite zealous in my efforts and they paid off to nearly double my expectations. I continued to work out for the next two weeks then 14 days into the second month my elliptical broke. I was devastated! Just as I was getting great traction on my weight loss my machine breaks, I made plans to buy a second machine from different brand and simultaneously arrange for repair of the existing machine. Which ever would happen first I wanted it, so I did both. Eventually the repair was done before I could take delivery of the new machine so I canceled it. It took nearly 3 weeks before I was back in action and that takes me to the main impetus for this post...

Calories in a few choice foods...

So I was curious after the first month I lost 23 lbs, great. Two weeks later I had actually gained 3 lbs. I attributed the gain to build up of muscle in the legs...after all I was using the machine with maximum resistance dialed up and carrying a 30lbs pack for at least an hour. However maybe I could have gotten more out of my diet? I decided to look at my meals in detail and was shocked to discover the following:

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_calories_in_rice&isLookUp=1

Scroll through the list and note the items indicating the Calorie amounts in "cooked" rice of only 1 cup measure. (For some people one cup of cooked rice is a mouthful!) Rice (excluding wild) is at least 550 Calories per "mouthful", one might think this is not bad but in context to other foods it is amazingly dense in Calories. Take for example the delicious and good for you Brocolli:

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_calories_in_a_cup_of_broccoli

54 Calories per 1 chopped cup

This is easy 10 times lower Calorie density than the *same* volume of cooked rice! Brocolli isn't called a super food for no reason. It allows you to fill your belly with "stuff" (lots of indigestible cellulose which keeps your gut regular as well) slow down the rate of glucose production (instead of in spikes as occurs with Calorically dense foods like rice) and helps triggers the satiety pathways that tell you to stop eating. Here's another favorite of mine:

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_calories_in_carrot&alreadyAsked=1&rtitle=How_many_calories_in_carrots

The humble and delicious carrot is another super food, providing a very low amount of Calories for a cups volume and doing it with excellent mineral and nutrition content.

Most people have heard these things about vegetables for a long time but context is important. In my daily routine I was having about 3 times the amount of rice indicated above as for the rice I use, a 700 Calorie portion (a mouthful!) I realized that I could effect a much faster weight loss within healthy parameters by simply adjusting my diet so that I have a larger contribution of the vegetables over the rice. So that being established until I achieve my goal I will experiment with reducing the amount of cooked rice I ingest and increase the amount of great veggies. I will do this by simply halving the number of cups of rice added to my regular meal and double or tripling that of the vegetables. This will allow me to cut in half the Calorie intake from the rice and will accelerate my weight loss (there is no other choice as I am still working out the same way through out) I can't wait for the 2 week weigh in to come!!!

The Earth will be fine.

2011-02-08T20:32:00.003-05:00

[Comment posted to friends Facebook article thread today. He thought we were ruining the environment, and in this slice of time indeed we are...but a grander context shows this to be a blip on a long history of much bigger changes effected by other life systems on Earth before us.]

In the eye blink of Geologic time that we've been here, Earth...over which we kvetch so, is going to "belch" and free herself of the scourge that is us. The belch may be a super massive Caldera explosion or it may be ...due to her crossing the path of a cosmic pebble dislodged from the Asteroid belt or it may be the next deep Ice Age...but the belch will come. We may go on to reign for 5,000 years of glory and yet...Earth then, can belch and throw *whatever* we evolve into ...headlong into chaos...no matter how powerful. The hiccup in the environmental system that we are indeed causing now will be rectified...and in the vast space of Geologic time to come will be remembered in her records as not much different from thousands of hiccups that came before and thousands that are yet to come. You think we are the first animals to severely change the climate...the biological prolixity of animals is why we have a climate...and the propensity for Earth to periodically upend the Chess board is means we are up next.

During the anoxic transition over a billion years ago...those early aerobic bacteria had no idea they were setting the ground work for oxygen breathers like our selves...from the perspective of the anaerobic forms they were displacing...apocalypse was occurring. When the great dying of the Permian Triassic occurred over 230 million years ago...the small, agile, bipedal progenitors of the dinosaurs benefited from the removal of the larger and previously dominant synodont forms...but after nearly a reign of 150 million years their candle out went with the coming of a cosmic pebble...clearing the way for frightened shrew like nocturnal mammals to ascend. Such hubris we walking Apes have to think that we matter a mote to Earth, we are forgetting that the Earth isn't in here with us, we are in here with the Earth. This isn't our home, or the home of life as much as it is life's prison...from which periodic belching has eliminated the lives of TRILLIONS of living things by fiat. We are going to save the Earth? We are just now able to gawk in wonder at the ghosts of other rocks circling suns far distant...the hope of visiting them, non existent...if the Earth belched now, we are doomed...to the continuous process of change that Earth has gone through...the trillions of us alive today are no different from the trillions that were alive during the Dinosaurs reign...or the trillions that were alive during the Eocene....or the trillions that were alive during the Pleistocene...and we are going to save the Earth??? Really???

We need to save ourselves *from* the Earth.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynodont

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_catastrophe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Tertiary_extinction_event

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene

In ever living memory...

2011-01-30T19:37:00.003-05:00

A recent article in Salon has me thinking a bit more about how members of current and future generations will be remembered by posterity. In light of the many advances in science that are occurring quickly in physiology and medicine, microbiology and genetics, there are some interesting wrinkles to the question that are not probed by the author of that article. In the article the author references a quote stated by Machiavelli concerning his views of those that would go on beyond their death to be alive in the minds of future men.

In fact, in his Discourses on Livy (c. 1517), he even provided a formula for predicting who might be famous in, say, 500 years' time. The first rank of glory belonged to those "who have played the chief part in founding a religion." Next came those "who have founded either republics or kingdoms." At the end, he adds: "Some modicum of praise is also ascribed to any man who excels in some art ... and of these the number is legion."

This quote is interesting in what he leaves out, science. At the time the renaissance about a century away from the true peak of the enlightenment where the fruits of scientific investigations long dormant in Europe began to bare fruit as a resurgent interest in science by people like Galileo and Newton would put science above many fields as a way for Man to truly commute with the mechanistic function of nature. Machiavelli was judging the future based on the lens of art and religion in which Florentine Italy and the movement of the Renaissance was fully steeped. He could not have possibly understood the significance of Science and surely had no regard for what would emerge later from application of Science to the physical world...engineering.

I assert that lasting achievements by Man will from this point on predominantly be retained within areas where new processes or methods solution are found repeatedly useful over time. There was a time when being able to build an ox cart was critical knowledge but today the importance of knowledge of construction has moved to the tractor. Only when old technologies are rendered obsolete by newer ones will those technologies slip from the collective memory of the future...however, our current time holds an important caveat.

We are among the last generation of humans who genuinely lack a choice about dying, conservative estimates of the advances of knowledge in determining how and why we age may achieve increasingly long lived humans in the next 20 years...before 30 years humans will be able to live indefinitely if that is their wish. In such a world, and coupled with technologies for retaining massive amounts of information about the present and past in tiny areas, the collective memory of generations will still have detailed memory of many of the achievements that had we not become superhuman beings (essentially) would die out over the hundreds and thousands of years to come as those achievements are made increasingly mundane before the grander achievements of advanced human societies. Who will care that Michael Jordan was a star in the NBA in 1,000 years when hundreds of years of vastly different sports will be the leisure games of interest? Who cares about Marilyn Monroe or Kurt Douglas in 600 years...when a cavalcade of thousands of other actors and actresses from all over the world would have come and gone? Still as this generation has a standing memory of these people what is likely to happen is an exaggerated remembrance in all human history to come of this time, as those who are alive now...and likely will be for centuries to come continue to push forward what they found important. If people who are the last active conveyor of knowledge live longer and longer than the time before obscure areas of knowledge are forgotten will also spread out into the future in an ever living memory concentrated around the last 50 years and moving forward into times yet to come.

Deconstructing Landmark Forum

2011-01-18T11:42:00.003-05:00

Deconstructing Landmark Forum:

Prologue:

Recently I was introduced to the Landmark Education organization by a girlfriend, she was effusive about the many lessons she learned and the "breakthroughs" she had while taking their "forum" and other self help and improvement seminar programs. I was immediately credulous, as a student of science I often find myself playing the advocate of reason when discussion emerges over any particular topic. Often the subjects that provide the most fuel for application of this reason based approach to information analysis are seemingly difficult to quantify without descending into machine gun fire ejaculation of "ideas" with little but anecdotal support behind them. The books of experience that people in various areas serve as the guide for their views a priori of new evidence, this bias against the future by correlation with the past often serves to hold people back from changing their views to suit
new observations...the difficulty in doing that act is why so few people seek training in science.

I mention this because it is related to one of the lessons that is taught in the Landmark Forum, the first seminar of the several seminar series that are provided by the organization. However before I get to how I feel about that lesson I'll describe some aspects of the Forum experience that were familiar in a very creepy way.

My first experience with Landmark Education came in October, I was invited to attend an event where people who were enrolled in the courses are prompted to bring others in their lives in order that they might attend the first level in the Landmark "education" that is called the "Forum". At the event (which chilling to my bones was held in a church) several hundred people milled about in the basement gym space made available by the church, always one to get to the business of making myself comfortable I began introducing myself and soon had met several interesting
people. I asked the few of them that had attended previously what I'd get from attending the forum and usually the answer was something completely unsatisfying like another question "What if you could have anything you want in your life?" This was scary to me, because when I heard it my Spider Sense (which already was raging) was ringing out of control that there could be a religious element to the programs. However, I was convinced by my girlfriend that this was not the case...so the scientist in me (I admit I was curious) continued to meet people. After a few moments, we all settled down for seats and a person introduced as a coach began speaking...she told the people who had brought guests to feel free to get up and grab a microphone and explain who they brought along and why. It was moving watching people get up and introduce their friends and loved ones. I noticed straight away the open and vocal nature of pretty much every one there that was a previous attendee and wondered if that was a result of the "education".

After a few hours of these testimonials we adjourned for lunch. At lunch I had a conversation with a group of Landmark former graduates and tried to get at exactly what the program was about but disappointingly only got the same vague responses. There seemed to be no detailed recollection of what was so valuable. After lunch we went back to the auditorium and the testimonials resumed, soon after the first few my girlfriend asked for the microphone and when she received it began to explain who I was and why she felt I was important in her life, I was embarrassed and moved. The experience of this public praise endeared in me pride and happiness and curiosity again as to why these people seemed so nice.

I gave a lower probability that religion played any role in the program and was intrigued to find out more. Days later my girlfriend asked if I wanted to attend another event where another "coach" would be attending and I would have the chance to find out exactly what the program was about, I was still very credulous of a religious angle but decided to attend. At this event I started noticing correlations between the protocol of the Landmark Forum and the protocol of attending Church.
Upon entering the offices (on 8th Ave. and 35St.) I noticed people standing at nearly every exit with their hands piously clasped together in front of them...this triggered memories of a similar approach in evangelical churches, which I stopped attending over 12 years ago and did not bode well for the organization. As we were led by the various proctors to the meeting hall I wondered what waited for me, a room full of prostate people praying to another imaginary God? The reality was pleasant, people were seated and listening to the "coach" who was talking about the program and what we'd get for attending it. The coach sat alone in a chair placed in the center of a short stage in the front of the room. To his left and right just off the stage were placed microphones for people to come up to and give their testimonials. A few people came up and relayed their conundrums and the coach walked through what the area of blockage in their relationships were, he was very good at it but none of his techniques were novel. He was simply getting people to admit their inner failing or source of shame and determine why they feel the way they do. At the end of the event we were prompted to start the sign up process for the forum and I was sufficiently curious to sign up out of curiosity and a desire to please my girlfriend. The total cost for a 4 day seminar would cost $550 dollars. This took me aback but I signed up any way...the curiosity of the scientist won out. ;)

My Forum was scheduled to start on Friday, January 7th and run through the weekend and then conclude on Tuesday, January 11th. I was immediately annoyed by the fact that I was forced to take a day off work to attend the Forum on Friday. This takes me to another aspect of the experience that was off putting, soon after signing up I had a falling out with my girlfriend and we broke up, I was disappointed and in thinking of the value I'd derive from attending the forum vassilated on whether or not I should attend, after all part of my desire to do so was to please her as foolish as that sounds. I decided I would think about it for a few days, before I could take action though I was contacted by a representative from the organization. I immediately at the time just wanted to get a refund of my money but the representative was amazingly patient and listened to my reasons but strongly suggested I stay in the program. It got to a point where here insistence was annoying to a degree that we debated why they would not simply grant my initial request no questions asked and give the refund. Her answer was that she believed I would gain a positive benefit from the experience and that I should at least give it a chance. I was worn down by her insistence in the face of my abrasive manner and again thought maybe there was something to it, I agreed to stay in the program for the forum starting on the 7th of January....

Forum Day

I have a theory as to why the forums 4 days contain a weekday, by forcing the participants to take off work if they have it to attend that day they show indirectly how willing they are to accept the rules of the program. In a way

this tests their "faith" in potentially having a life changing experience by attending a "breakthrough" as are termed in the Landmark speak. I found it simply annoying and selfish from their stand point, people have work on weekdays and there is no reason why the 4 days could simply be done over two consecutive weekends such that all people that work during the week would not have to take a day off work. For some one without the knowledge of similar tactics in religious groups I guess this isn't a big deal but for me it simply added another x to the strike column for the experience. Another issue is the amount of time the forum takes out of ones day, it is an all day event on the first 3 days and an evening 4 hour event on the final graduation day. The all day element seems simply

to cement enough time for the group to become more familiar with one another and comfortable enough to have a

"breakthrough" and publicly relay that to the group over the 4 day period. In fact during the event the coach indicated that people would "pop off" like pop corn over the next few days as they became emboldened to speak about their life issues and the epiphanies they have made regarding achieving the things they want to achieve. I don't see this as surprising at all, fostering a sense of family through association is a very good way to get people to relax and think about the blocking elements to their lives. Though it may be an awesome freedom to discuss these issues in an open forum of people sharing your experience that doesn't necessarily improve ones chances of actually taking *action* to rectify the issues illuminated. I think in some cases it may but in many others it does not even if the experience of a joyful "breakthrough" is made during the event. So the event was scheduled for 8 am and did not get under way until just after 9 am. When I came into the building and was directed to the meeting room, I noticed that the coat room had an attendant immediately outside the door though he was not assisting with the coats (you just went in and put your belongings on a chair or on a rack)...I think having the agent there served two purposes. The implied purpose was to safe guard the guests coats but a more subtle purpose I felt was to catch people should they decide part way through the event to leave. I smiled as I realized this possible alternative purpose and proceeded on to the meeting room. The coach this time was an older gentleman about in his 60's and sat in his centrally place seat as a King. He was supremely confident and spoke with a level of certainty that I am sure was comforting to many there. After a few moments he began to explain how the forum would proceed. He told us that the entirely of the program was listed on two large placards over head and behind him on the stage. The placards basically listed rules on how to separate ones past experiences from ones present needs and goals so as not to be restricted by the past in present or future actions. This advise is actually obvious and is often taught by motivational speakers and life coaches, it is also easier said than done to achieve. The second placard indicated methods to analyze the areas where people experience a loss of power, hopelessness, anger or fear in order to confront the reasons behind them and deal with them. Again, these bits of advise are much easier to indicate than to apply.

After summarizing the contents of the two placards and repeating that they were the subject matter of the entire 4 day forum, the coach then told us we now would be given the opportunity to gain a refund to the program at that moment if we wished. He indicated that an attendant at the back of the room would take care of the refund process and that if we wished for it we should get up and go have her proceed. However, he was quite literal...he meant at the moment. I found this very interesting as the room was filled with over 200 people, by challenging (indirectly) people to get up to go request a refund, he again tests the "faith" of those there by using their potential fears (of not appearing non conformist in a crowd) against them. I giggled in my seat as I turned to two gentleman sitting next to me and told them that the coach was using "implied social constraint" to shame people into NOT getting up for a refund...even if they probably felt they would get nothing from the experience. As it was only one woman got up to ask if the entire forum was just what was written on the placards...the coach repeated that it was and she went to get her things. As she approached the agent in the back of the room, other people actually tried to question her for leaving...claiming she should give it a try...the coach though cautioned them to leave her alone. In any event, to conduct the cancellation publicly is a tactic that is incredibly unfair and indirectly controlling. It turns out only that one woman got up to leave, after she did the coach with a smug look and smirk on his face stated "now we have all your money." it was really weird and I felt again put off.

The Forum begins...

After the cancellation process, the coach then began to cover the placcard points on the first placard, of isolating past experiences from present needs. It was useful but to me nothing new, I'd been operating in that mind of thought for most of my life simply because it is an efficient way to operate. As he conducted his lesson he had people come up to talk about their experiences and present issues they were confronting. As more stories were told and people became more comfortable we could experiencing the tigheting of bonds between the people
(inevitable)...but this is no different from what also happens in churce services as "testimonials" are also given in those venues. Later the coach began to tell us about our obligation to have integrity during the forum. He made us promise several things:

1) That we would be on time every day.
2) That we would not reveal the details of stories recounted in the room.
3) That we would cease "self medicating" (alcohol,cigarrettes..and other drugs)
4) That we would stop taking notes of the event proceedings.
5) That we would promise not to miss any part of the event.
6) That we would promise to share the opportunity for making a breakthrough with others.

Of this list of promises, I found 3) interesting as it seemed completely out of place for the focus of the forum. I am thinking that such drugs are often used to escape from ones issues rather than deal with them, by promising to give them up for a short time the mind would be clear to actually deal with the issues instead of chemically running away from them. I also found 4) Interesting as it could indirectly serve as a way to keep the details of the forum out of a printable format that can be easily passed on to others who had not taken the forum. It also would make it more difficult for those that did take it from being able to recount what they'd experienced. As the entire process involved random strangers talking about their lives, often for 30 minutes or more at a time it was easy for each day to be filled with "breakthroughs" being made by people in the room. The time spent to cover the placard contents by the coach was about 15 to 30 minutes each, every other minute was spent listening to others talk and the coach ask them hard questions about what they were confronting...which any one could do. Finally, 6) was most reminiscent of any cult or religious group, the need to continue the process and spread the gospel as it were to others...in fact the coach stated that the Sunday would be reserved for a day where we could bring others to potentially join the forum at a later date. At $550 per person per 4 day session one could quickly see how lucrative this could be for the organization. During the day they only provided a room to sit in, a coat room and rest rooms. Breakfast, lunch and dinner breaks are provided but Landmark doesn't provide any food, we were let out to go get food and were expected back at an (unusually short I felt, less than an hour) specific time. In fact after we came back from the lunch break, the coach sat, apparently livid on stage and excoriated the group for being "late". He questioned our "integrity" and stated that he'd expect us to be on time in the future...it was rather a bizarre moment. As the afternoon roled into the evening and 6pm approached I realized that I'd seen enough, though it was interesting to see how people were bonding over being able to share their darkest secret stories with strangers I realized it would not help me gain what I was looking for. During the dinner break we were assigned in groups of 3-4 and told to discuss secret fears of ours. I explained my purpose joining the forum was to become a more sure public speaker and one of the group told me about Toastmasters, I decided it would be the more appropriate venue for my needs...when I left them at dinner I was resigned not to go back to attend the course and that is precisely what I did. ;)

So is it worth it??

I felt the level of coercion involved in the program made it very uncomfortable, it was designed to weed out people who are very much at their wits end and willing to try anything. Often these are the people who go looking for religion when their own actions in life are simply not working. The lack of religious focus but appearance of religious artifice is not a mistake, I think it is the perfect structure to lasso people in the vulnerable state and get them to participate. It also enables them to be bold advocates of the program...even if all they can vaguely describe what they learned in the process. I don't think it is worth $550 dollars to learn what really is common sense to people who are honest with themselves and the fact that the events continue to gain users is a testament to the power of selling people a dream of what they would like to archive out of life...at least it isn't selling an imaginary thing (like a God). Finally, another worrisome element of the entire program is that the "forum" is only the beginning in a series of similarly vague achievement programs (all I am sure also at great expense to attend) that are weaved together with similar "opportunities" to invite others...induced proselytizing and recruitment by a corporation, it would be funny if it weren't so evil!! The additional programs are listed on other placards that were on the wall behind the coach. I guess that is how they keep their milk flow running, I say if you want to communicate and commiserate with people and get to know new people it works for that purpose...but then so does a bar or a meetup event regarding related interests that you can sign up for free to attend. The hollow nature of the program and the common sense relayed are simply not worth the price in my opinion and the religion like tactics are unnecessary, controlling and an insult to ones intelligence, for me the answer is no it was not worth it.

Delusions of Grand Audience

2010-12-29T14:26:00.003-05:00

Over two years ago I mentioned how the social interaction on FB enables what I called the fostering of an illusion of grand audience. The idea is that the pseudo public nature of discourse on an FB wall leads people to place more importance on personal appearance than they would on a less socially constructed web site.

It's all part of the interesting psychology that people manifest while participating in this pseudo-public space called a Facebook profile. It is the digital equivalent of a podium on a stage that has flood lights obscuring your view of the audience. You know that people are there because you hear them but you can't exactly see them all (analog of not knowing who sees what you post or reads it) this does an interesting thing to people. First, when challenged while on their "stage" they are far more likely to react with a defensive posture on many subjects that in reality they would be for more reasonable discussing. I've been perplexed by the harsh tone some people I know on FB have taken that seems like a contrast to the character of them I know in person...that said, it is easy for this magnified personality and feeling of self importance, coupled with the fear of "public" shame to really lead people down a path of paranoia.

If you do draw their ire, they may feel sufficiently offended to de-friend. There was an FB friend I had on my list for about a year, he was a smart computer programmer from Canada. I friend requested him because he was good at defending his self logically for the most part but he would never admit being wrong if pushed to that logical end. He also had a habit of asserting his greatness in programming out of the blue, we had many debates regarding Engineering and programming where I would enjoy mildly ribbing him over one statement or another (we were fully in super pedantic mode and though he didn't slip often when he did I made him pay for it)...but it seems he never liked it.

Finally a couple of months ago I posted an article about Star Trek Enterprise (the tv series now off the air) he took great offense at the fact that I interpreted the way the series ended in a different way from him...so much so that soon after that discussion (which was cordial outside of his making the accusation that he knew more about Star Trek than me...but failing to actually show it) I found I couldn't view his profile. He had defriended me over a Star Trek discussion! So I say good riddance to any one that takes themselves so seriously that they expect to always appear correct in every interaction that happens on their profile and feel slighted at being censured in this pseudo public forum. It is a delusion of grand audience that magnifies existing quirks in personality to ugly viewable size...I like it...helps us separate the horribly included stones from the diamond quality friends we ideally would all like to have!

So when you are next on FB do a little observation of your friends responses to various statements online as compared to how they would react in person. How big is the gap? I think the difference hints at the level of delusion of self importance that person has...hmmm...now if only there was a way to capture this delta and exploit it. *grin*

The circle of reason....

2010-12-19T20:11:00.004-05:00

A recent conversation I had with a friend concerning the existence of deities prompted me to think a bit more deeply about how man has used logic to help describe or extract truths in the world and then use use to our advantage.

In the process we have been able to describe thousands of real natural systems and exploit them, from our understanding of the biology of corn and other plants and then using that knowledge to modify them to suit our purposes...to the realizations of the patterns of truth that govern the behavior of planes in the sky or missiles on a launch trajectory. All these things are enabled by the slow acquisition of knowledge concerning the invariant truths and relationships of the real world.

However, we often fail to realize that the certainty of control that we appear to have over the world is mostly an illusion. As a scientist I was trained to prize empirical data above all else, data informs hypothesis and sets of hypothesis inform theories...these theories are then tested against more incoming empirical data to refine them over time...it is a beautiful system that has a constant vector toward the direction of increasing truth so long as that which is observed remains stable enough to enable the statement "increasing truth" true. David Hume showed that this is an arbitrary selection on our part enabled by the fact that for most of the things we do study there is invariance in the underlying basis that we latch our logical "formal systems" on to in order to make predictions.

We do it in quantum mechanics, we do it in kinematics, we do it in biochemistry and it is the hope that the electron charge won't suddenly change, among other hopes that enables our theories to have the great deal of accuracy we put on them. Yet beyond the protection from the variability of key elements of reality there is a need to recognize that outside of empirical data gathering our ability to cognate the possibilities is actually restricted...in fact according to Greg Chaitin possibly infinitesimally so.

However the start of our search for logical certainty goes back a bit further and for that we should start with the work of a brilliant mathematician who happened to be the friend of Albert Einstein, his name?

Kurt Godel and Incompleteness

Kurt Godel was an amazing character in the history of mathematics, particularly quirky he focused his work on one of the most abstract areas of mathematics, logic itself. In mathematics logic is formalized to a degree that goes far beyond what you may have learned when you took courses where you were introduced to "modus tolens" and other such concepts. The tools used by Godel were applied to attempt to explore the limits of mathematics itself. In the mid 30's Godel wrote his seminal paper on mathematical incompleteness in it he set off a quiet bomb in the mathematical community. Decades earlier people like Bertrand Russell and David Hilbert tried to set programs for systematizing all of mathematics, they felt that it were possible to classify all the possible structures that span mathematical ideas...by doing so they would show that math was "complete" in that it was fully descriptive of all elements that could be defined within it. Godel's incompleteness theorems showed that these efforts would never succeed.

A simple idea

The idea of incompleteness spans from a simple idea, that in order for our formal systems to fully describe the world they must be able to determine answers for all questions posed with those systems. It may be found that some answers are incredibly difficult to answer but the hope was that in theory given enough processing time all questions in the system could be answered. Godel showed that this was not true and in fact had a reciprocal relationship governing it. In the mathematics he used the word "complete" indicates that a formal system is able to satisfy the requirement above of being able to answer all possible questions posed within it. Godel showed that only formal systems with infinite axiom sets (losely the rules that define how that system functions) can be complete. Where a complete system is simply one that satisfies the ability to answer all questions that can be asked with those tools. The reality though is that if the systems have a finite set of axioms (and all our formal systems are) then there are questions within them that can NOT be answered. If this wasn't devastating enough for the systematization program that Hilbert and others sought it gets worse. Not only are there questions that can't be answered in the system but there is no way to infer where those "holes" lie in the system before hand, trial and error is the only guide. For decades after Godel wrote these papers mathematics (and the physics that uses mathematics to build it's descriptive system of the world) were in denial. The fact that some things could not be answered was not fully appreciated...but then things only got worse when a British genius started looking at the matter from a different view...

Alan Turing tackles thought...

Alan Turing is a giant in computing, often called the father of the computer and one of the principle designers of the ENIAC computer that helped break codes, he also deciphered a complex cipher used in the German Enigma machines during the war, providing the allies incredible insight into German operations which they used to misdirect and ambush the Germans opportunistically for more than a year. However, Alan Turing also thought a great deal about the limits of computing machines, he was familiar with Godel's work and wondered what incompleteness meant for the human mind...in several papers he showed that the answer was even more amazing and devastating to our efforts to divine all truth than Godel's. Turing showed that not only are all systems filled with holes, gaps in their ability to divine truth of questions posed within them...but that because we as human beings are computing agents our minds are limited by the same constraints of systems we design to model the world. His "halting problem" states that some problems fed to a computing agent would never yield an answer and those problems are then undecidable...an undecidable problem is worse than one that can't be inferred with a given system because one has no recourse to gaining the answer. In Godel's incompleteness , the hope still remained that some clever over lap of systems could illuminate gaps in different systems...but Turing showed that this task for some "holes" would indefinitely continue (you could never create enough systems and thus never fully be able to infer the truth or false nature of the original question posed.

As occurred with Godel, the world met Turings results with silence...ultimately his result is not about just computers it is about us, we are computing machine but are we limited by these findings. Godel tried to find the answer and some say the task drove him insane...one of the most brilliant minds in all of mathematical history driven mad by his work.

The failing of logic...

Contemporary mathematicians like Gregory Chaitin took the problem further by asserting that not only are their undecidable problems but there are an infinite number of such problems...that we are in fact living in a space of possibilities that are infinite in answers and our ability to answer is infinitesmal...what a bizarre conclusion...that in our certainty...in all the things that we think we have inferred about the world. How it formed, how our sun formed, how life evolved, how the Universe expanded all these things are are within the sliver of empirically derived transitory "Facts" in a space of such "facts" that our systems are useless to ever divining. So it would seem that logic fails us miserably...it enables us to posit absurd statements based on nothing more than a whim and be unable to prove or disprove our own assertions! We can do this infinitely and thus we connect to the space of possibilities that may have decidable answers to them but that we can't determine because our systems are not constructed to do so.

That yellow invisible alien standing next to you loves you and you can't disprove his existence...even though I just asserted it from thin air...such is the contradiction of logic, a thing which is simultaneously absolutely useful to our inferring truths about the world and just as useless to divining all possible truth states. I find the symmetry of this contradiction both terrifying and beautiful.

Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_godel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Chaitin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw-zNRNcF90

Unpublished

2010-12-13T21:44:00.003-05:00

because google apparently thinks that I shouldn't be able to unpublish a published post. (If there is such a function...please elucidate me.)

Wait until Facebook starts mining our tagged photos...

2010-11-07T15:17:00.004-05:00

Many words have been written on the ad revenue that could be generated from Facebooks knowledge of the deep set of factors we provide to them when we sign up for the service. The knowledge of our interests and disinterests as explicitly shared in our information pages and as indirectly shared through our interactions on the site is a major unique boon for Facebook's ability to target algorithms that will have a unique ability to present relevant ad's to users when they are most likely to find the ad content interesting or useful.

This however is only the beginning of ways that Facebook can target the data we are providing them. One potential ad targeting gold mine lies in how we "tag" individuals in our galleries. Facebook could conceivably observe over time the tagging patterns to determine real world associations between people tagged who often share the same photos. It could for example determine if two people are in a relationship over time by watching the tag pattern of photos that mutually contain them. It could also over time predict when relationships start and stop...this is starting to sound very big brother like but it is simply enabled by the fact that we post photos of ourselves, others post photos of us (when we are in their photos) and then others still "tag" those photos. It is true that people can opt out of tagging but for the most part the patterns of our appearance in photos with others over time can be used to determine various types of relationships.

How can this be useful to ad targeting? Well if Facebook can determine through tag proximity analysis (as I'll coin this analysis method) the high likelyhoood that two people are either related or in a relationship they can use that measure to refine their other ad targeting algorithms. This would allow them to for example target ads on the profiles of two people who through their tag associations have shown some affinity...on the chance that the things that one person likes the other (with whom it is **known** physical proximity is shared) likes as well. This algorithm could also, once able to predict that two people are in a relationship can make suggestions when mutually important dates to these individuals arise...for example, it can suggest gifts for individuals when their birthdays come up with a strong likelyhood that those individuals are in a relationship. All of this would be done in the back ground and the user would just notice that Facebook's ads are unusually accurate and it would come out of using the tag data that is being provided by the users and their friends.

Recently Peter Thiel former executive at PayPal made the prediction that Facebook was severely undervalued and I think he may be right, mining tagged photos for behavioral information that can be used to target ads is only one of the many tools that Facebook is enabling and that people are freely contributing unique data about their social interactions to the service through...it will be interesting to see what will be as time goes by.

Cool Android app, turn your phone into a tiny wifi network mobile web file server

2010-10-28T23:51:00.004-04:00

I recently purchased my first smart phone, an Android based Samsung Captivate. I've been having a blast exploring the new paradigm of touch enabled UI and the many orthogonal dimensions of sensation (eyes..via cameras, ears via microphones, location via GPS, accelerometers and attitude sensors) that the mobile device presents for application development that doesn't exist on a desktop. One cool app. I downloaded today is called File Share. The reason requires a bit of back story:

So last week I downloaded an app called "Sketcher" to doodle on my Captivate using the touch screen, I quickly created a few bits of art that I want to share on Facebook. I could plug in the phone via micro usb and set it as usb storage but that doesn't always work as seamlessly as it should...thankfully Samsung packed removable ram via the tiny mmd flash slot, I could take that out and pop it in my adapter and into a USB stick ..instant files ready to upload to Facebook...that works reliably but still required that I unmount the flash in the phone and then remove it...too much work. My next thought was "if only I could just share files on the phone like files on a windows network share" ...I took the phone and entered the Android market to search for "share file" within seconds I found this app. It goes one better than my idea, instead of going through the complexity of windows file share mappings (which won't work on a linux/unix/mac network without some help) they simply coded a tiny *web server* into the phone and opened a port "9999" on the dhcp IP address that the phone gets when it connects via Wifi to my network! So I simply browse *to my phone* on any other device connected to the network (mac,pc,unix,linux...another phone!) and pull the files I've added to the share directly as I wish. It's a very beta product and is perfectly useful ...some issues to watch out for:

1) If you set a password, be aware that it is not encrypted..this means that if you are connected to a non trusted AP you would be flying your authentication plain text over it...if you connect to a foreign AP that has sniffing software enabled , it would then get your credentials (and people are usually using the same "golden ticket" password for *all* their services (bank, social networks, cc...etc....bad practice!) So I'd use this only on trusted networks that you know for sure aren't sniffing the line with a packet analyzer for clear text credentials.

2) You have to select the files to share on your phone one at a time, it would be nice if a multi selector option could present instead.

3) I use the default "gallery" file browser on my phone to select items to share but I also have the more full featured "astro" file browser app, unfortunately astro failed (with a cryptic error message) to share files that "gallery" did just fine...so be aware of that if you use astro.

4) You can also set the server to enable file UPLOADS, this sounds totally awesome and makes a ready way to upload files to the phone without having to do anything more than connect to the network...but it also opens your phone up to an attack where a too big file or files are stuffed in your folder until your phone memory is full...of course, you'd be impervious to this if you use a strong enough password (but then the caveat regarding the clear text nature of authentication still remains)

The points mentioned above aside it is going to save me some time copying stuff to and from my phone from my pc's on my home network so I think it is well worth the price.

FREE!

Links:

http://www.appbrain.com/app/file-share/com.navjagpal.fileshare

Why Facebook + comment ratings = a big F-ing deal.

2010-10-13T20:41:00.004-04:00

Facebook has been quietly but consistently creating tools that enable the service to know normally difficult to capture metrics about what people are doing, who they know, what they know and now with comment ratings, how well their knowledge is valued by their peers. Prior to this upgrade Facebook was able to provide excellent data for their ad targeting algorithms to enable highly coupled ad placements to the desires of those users shown them. The use of user submitted information regarding their geographic location, their likes in movies, music and other interests enabled Facebook to target large swathes of users to show relevant ads that target to those particular topics...this in itself was a pretty big deal as no one before Facebook had as large an audience to mine for this data and ad targeting and no one had as many points of information from the users base. Google has a much larger user base arguably but their ability to infer the interests from those users is much less focused as they have to use search data gathered by user submitted opt in to determine if an ad would be likely to be clicked by a particular person. By having direct access to an individuals expressed interests and more importantly being able to query a users comments and postings for key words enabled them to create highly targeted ads.

Enter the comment ratings, this expands the landscape of discoverable data points about users by now allowing Facebook to let the user community vote on the merits of other users comments, this is important as it allows Facebook to isolate those people that are deemed by their peers to exhibit key influence, these highly influential people are the people who's recommendations are likely to spawn a wave of similar activity in their friends and friends of friends, the comment system shines a light on this activity that has been going on and remained invisible to the previous social data points that Facebook was mining. The combination of comment ratings and the ad targeting system now allows Facebook to simulate something much like what is possible on Twitter. Many major and minor Celebrities , Sports stars and Politicians are making a little change selling sponsored tweets..these celebrities usually sign up with a service that manages the bidding of the ad tweets made available by the celebrity and then they sit back and rake in cash as businesses bid to buy those tweets from the various celebrities. Imagine an air conditioning retailer that sells GE exclusively getting the ability to by sponsored tweets by retired head of GE Jack Welch and you get the idea.

Facebook comments invert this by taking the actual influencial person out of the monetary loop, the influential person does not get paid a dime for their "services" rendered to Facebook other than continuation of the "free" service. However, I gather the gains coming Facebook's way from differentially pricing advertisements to particularly influential people will be beyond anything that we are seeing today as earned by Google using their Ad Sense or by the Twitter services like Magpie and the Celebrity sponsored tweet services. An ad buyer will be able to bid on influential people anonymously it would be in Facebooks best interest to keep this part of their mined data private as if those with influence discovered just how influential they were they might try to extract a cut of the profits from Facebook or forfeit the service. The latter option becoming increasing unlikely as users build up influence and a network that they would be loath to leave, so Facebook has them by the hook. They get to measure the influence by noticing how people comment rate their posts and writings but they earn no share of the resulting visibility for the ad targeting system....this is the holy grail of ad targeting now being born.

Facebook will probably gather metrics on the comment ratings for a time before actively feeding that data into the ad targeting system to refine the results and we can expect a revamp of the ad tools to include some option to purchase ad space on influential persons pages (without naming who they are)...this is when Facebook's ad revenue goes from the current Mach speed to Light speed.

social networks and coming deep personality analysis

2010-09-12T18:25:00.003-04:00

An exerpt from this article on the social consequences of social networks and the increasing amount of time that people are spending on them follows:

"but would you want a potential employer to see pictures of you off your head in Ibiza from back in the day? With the latest figures showing that one in 13 of us are using Facebook, this redefinition of public and private is already happening."

This statement assumes that such an incident as some one partying a bit beyond their normal mode in some exotic land would be taken alone as a representation of their character. However this is not at all assured. I see the many data points that people provide on social networks as ways to gain statistical shaping of their average behavior over algorithmic judgments of their behavior over time. It is over time that the invariant nature of personality truly shows up, not in a single picture viewed out of context. That said, the question remains will such a statistical analysis be possible ?

I see absolutely no reason to think it isn't absolutely inevitable. As people built profiles on social networks that track their evolution over years and possibly decades, that deep information about the minutia of human lives will be a gold mine of data for analysis. Already Facebook uses the data from likes and the keywords used in status and wall postings to infer the amenability of individuals to advertisements but this is only a stones throw from inferring how a persons attitudes are changing over time, how those attitudes correlate with indicated life events, how those events shape new behavior. Over the massive sample of people online interacting across all the areas of their life that they can indicate on a social network a new type of predictive analysis will be able to be pieced together. I can imagine a future where such an analysis is done on a persons profile, compiled over 10 years on a site to determine how likely they are to perform certain actions but as well to infer how likely their friends might be. The potential to gain deep insights into the nature of personality will allow businesses with access to such profiles to infer for example, that the revelry in Ibiza was taken out of context or was simply a rare example (out of the set of examples known from the analysis of the sample data) of that person on the edge and should be weighed as insignificant toward the decision to hire that person for a job or some other evaluative reason.

Psychologists and sociologists will lead the way to creating these new deep life analysis tools and their work will be used by marketers to pick out the best targets both for buying their products or services but also for evangelizing those products or services to their friends. A future will come where such analysis will reveal precisely who is more likely to be a gold mine for distributing "the word" for a business. Who is more likely to buy a dress in the next 6 months and why. Who is more likely to be leaving on a vacation in the next 6 months, actions that are difficult to predict without having a specific bit of information stating intention will be predictable form the massive amount of historical data being gathered across multiple areas of interest by the social networks. It is going to be very interesting indeed to see how this shapes what is to come.

Why Chrome OS is not going to do so well.

2010-08-18T22:20:00.003-04:00

From the moment I first read an article mentioning Google's plan to create a Chrome OS...I was puzzled. At the time Android's success was not at all assured and there were no carriers producing phones for the device but a rumored G1 was said to be in the works from Verizon.

At the time my reasons were simple and pragmatic and all derived from the perspective of the possible consumers of such a device.

First, I was convinced from what I saw happening in the panel space that thin TFT LCD technology was on it's way out. As an Engineer I'd been keep in eye on the developments of Organic Light Emitting Diode technology that was in my view going to be the screen technology to end them all. If not it than some variant of it, I also knew from the production processes of such panels and their amenability to running off of standard CMOS fabs that they could eventually be produced in mass at prices far lower than what is possible with TFT LCD. Also, because OLED's can be produced in a variety of substrates (from plastic to glass) the material costs were lower...to me this all added up to a really cheap and beautiful display technology being read for devices within the next 5 years (that was 2 years ago). But what devices?

Around the time that Chrome OS was announced the smart phone segment was all but one phone, the Iphone and it was eating all the cake. I knew that the manufactures of panels would be itching to provide high margin OLED panels as soon s they could produce them to the cell phone makers...a few of the panel makers (Samsung, Sony) actually make cell phones themselves. This product segment would be the first target but by the middle of last year I realized that a large size smart phone would provide a killer touch sensitive surface to enable a new class of uses and I wrote a blog post on the coming lappad attack early this year to signal what was to come after hearing of the Ipad rumors. Now 8 months later, the Ipad is out and is a wild success and rumors of multiple pads from other hardware providers are already alive. Most of them slated to run Android as the OS...an Indian company already has made the bold claim that it's device will eventually be produced for $35 each. The strong pressures on all the competing pads that will be out to have low pricing will make differentiating difficult..however, when comparing one pad with Android and another with Chrome OS there will be glaring differences.

1) Android can run local apps without need of a web browser, Chrome OS may not.

2) Android can run stand alone games, Chrome OS may not.

3) Android can tether to a pc as a shared storage device for file transfers, Chrome OS may not.

4) Android will have a massive collection of apps written, Chrome OS runs the web but the uniqueness of it's mobile nature is harnessed by more apps which it may not have.

5) Android can be used on all major cell phone networks thanks to all the versions out there, Chrome OS may not even enable cell based phone calls (though it may do app based if it has that)

6) Android is perfect as an embedded system and is already going into proposed TV's. It's the perfect OS to run touch based TV's to come on OLED flat screens. Chrome OS also is good but in a tv will lack the software and drivers needed for local interface to the hardware of the tv.

Finally,

the main reason Chrome OS will fail is not because it will be bad or have some technical glitches it will be because Aunt Millie is going to walk into a store ask for a pad, be told the Android pad can do everything the Chrome OS can do plus half a dozen more things and production costs would not be any greater on the Android pad (though some companies might use the illusion of a difference to substantiate a slightly higher price)..in any event Aunt Millie is going to go with the pad that gives more over the one that gives less. I can see the Chrome OS maybe being useful to places where apps and all the bells and whistles of Android beyond the browser are specifically not wanted...say for use in libraries or other public uses but aside from that I just don't see it taking off. It will be interesting to see how things unfold.

The why of emotion, from whence did it come?

2010-07-30T21:18:00.003-04:00

A recent article positing a theory for the origin of emotions as a system to induce cooperation got me to thinking about this subject which I've been mulling for quite some time recently in an effort to understand the requirements for building a truly stable Artificial Intelligence. A post from a few months back covers how emotion once emerged is used to tie emotional import to newly sensed memories while comparing those sensations to previously stored memories and the associated emotional triggers to them. Conditions like Kapgras syndrome highlight the unique role that deep brain regions like the hippocampus and the amygdala play in tying emotion to memory. The new study however knocks at the heart of the question, why do we have emotion in the first place? Why did it evolve? What necessity did it serve?

Fundamentally, we should be able to agree that our emotional system emerged to trigger the individual as to important occurrences in the surrounding, to serve as a stimulant to a given type of action when environmental signals trigger those reactions because doing so is beneficial in some way to the individual (before social systems emerged there were individuals!). It is beneficial either by being outwardly pleasurable or by enabling us to avoid being eaten or being crushed by a falling tree.

When we look at the mammalian brain we see this hierarchy of emotional controls in the location of the machinery, deep in the mid brain associated with the hippocampus and amygdala...which it just so happens also form a critical tie point for the processing of long term memories.

I don't see this as a coincidence, I think the architecture of the brain points us toward the causation factors for the emergence of the guiding signals that I believe emotions are.

Stepping away from the mammalian brain let's look at a brain that is ostensibly very different from ours, the reptilian brain...and what do we see? that the differences aren't so "very" at all...in fact, architecturally the reptilian brain looks a lot like the mammalian brain minus the large fleshy neo cortex...it seems to be mostly emotional response and sensory signal processing regions. This hints at the ancient evolutionary factors that shaped emotional development in humans and lead us to a different conclusion from that reached in this study. Rather than be a tool that emerged to elicit cooperation (an actively evolved feature) it was a tool that emerged to promote survival (a subtle but important generality from "elicit cooperation" that may in fact contain such actions as a subset) it is only later that this mechanism was co-opted to serve social purposes (like eliciting cooperation) ...we have evidence to support this view since reptiles are not very social animals, though large numbers of some species can live together few species form the networks of social hierarchy that mammals do thus cooperation as a factor for emotional development has no formative environment in the very family of animals that were precursors to the development of the mammalian mind!

So there is a catch 22 to that theory that I can't reason passed, also it seems more evolutionarily expedient for a simple chemical system to reward or punish behaviors to benefit individual survival before the development of social coercion even evolved and goes in line with what we see as a major difference between Reptiles (and Amphibians before them) and progressively Birds (not as old as Reptiles) and Mammals (not as old as Birds). I think these questions for the emergence of particular traits are best answered by comparative anatomy of animals at different stages in the evolutionary race...I admit a bias to this as being an engineer it only makes sense as a method to trace back the origins of various structures in the biology but it affords a unique view into finding possible answers to these questions which absent the engineering and systems view would seem entirely subjective and difficult to answer.

Lucky Earth

2010-07-03T00:19:00.003-04:00

A random sample of the collection of improbable and mutually exclusive events that led to our emergence here on this rock.

If the Sun formed in a region with less or different gas contribution the Earth would likely have an ammonia Ocean instead of a water one.

If the proto planetary disk didn't have so much accreted asteroids and comets proto Earth would not have gained so much water and would likely be dry.

If the Earth didn't accrete as much dust as it did, we'd have a smaller radius and likely not have a radioactive active core..the active core is what produces our magnetic field and thus protects us from the deadly solar wind of the sun. Life would not exist.

If the proto Earth had not been struck by another body just before 4.4 billion years ago, the planet would not have reconstituted into the present Earth 2 + moon system. Without the gyroscopic stabilization of the moon against the distant but influential gravitational nudges of Jupiter we'd have no predictable seasons and life would have no way for evolution to consistently emerge complex life forms...Earth would have stayed a planet of bacteria.

It goes on an on...if the Anoxic transition didn't occur, if the planet was not subject to the great extinction of 240~ Mya that cleared the landscape for the emergence of the dinosaurs...if the KT asteroid didn't hit 65 million years ago and clear the way for the rise of mammals and grasses and Magnoliaphylum...it goes on and on

Each one if it didn't occur would eliminate us from the rock...the Universe doesn't care about our presence here and the fact that we are finding so many worlds now, in so many states of pathology underscores this fact. Swollen giants mere millions of miles from their parents stars, Giants at impossible distances away from their stars and soon rocky planets in all states of formation thanks to Kepler Sat. If there is a God it surely lost track of our development in the endless list of billions upon billions of planets that exist in this Galaxy in various states of formation of life in a visible Universe of over 100 billion Galaxies...the mind simply boggles.

My short walk in faith...

2010-07-02T23:33:00.002-04:00

I was too inculcated into the ways of religion to seriously give it thought as being *unreal* until about the age of 9. My parents (read: my mother, my father was religiously apathetic) did a good job of taking us around to various prayer services with her evangelist friend who happened to be married to a pastor. Tangentially, I found out much later that he used to physically beat her in accordance with the scriptures he preached at the pulpit, now he's suffering from severe dementia induced by Alzheimer's disease. Karma? No...just bad luck. During those times I was forced to endure 3 hour long services that consisted of grown adults and their kids sat on white sheets in hot living rooms (many times our own) with their kids forced to pay attention (some how) to the constant singing, talking or Bible reading in Haitian Creole and French. I was partially curious about the various stories I'd read and wondered if they could be real, I was an avid comic book fan from an early age so the fantastic was not unfamiliar to me, in fact I relished it...and thinking that it could be real was actually exciting.

I started having my doubts when I was sent to Catholic school at 8, my mother didn't like the Public schools in Brooklyn (for obvious reason then) and the Catholic school system had a record of excellence...so despite the fact that she was not a Catholic (though she was until shortly after my birth) she allowed me and my younger brother to go to Catholic school. This experience was the second accelerator to my realizing all religion was likely wrong. In the Catholic school I learned about the unique and strange (relatively) rituals but also noticed the many similarities. During "religion" class I learned about Jewish rituals and holiday's Yarmulke's and Dreidel's, unleavened bread and Menorah's, Hanukkah and Passover...the context was all described in terms of the Catholic belief system and contrasted with the Protestant beliefs I was hearing espoused at home nicely. I became agnostic to religion early and focused instead on art and science my twin passions, I had an intense love of biology and was significantly influenced by the function of DNA...the self replicating molecules. To me they were machines that ran due to conservation of energy principles and needed no other mover, the question of their origin still loomed but less and less I saw any place for the need of the guiding hand of some conscious creator and the death knell to the entire idea was sounded once I started learning about Darwin around 11. So it is clear that religious education is necessary and required for the truth to bubble up, it is the contradictions that was able to see between the systems I was exposed to that led me down the path of investigating their foundations and realizing each one was a creation of Man to serve some purpose.

Back at home I also was influenced by the weird religious inculcation suffered by my cousin Jean, who was being raised as a Jehovah's witness. His mother bought a house 3 homes over from us and my siblings and I were constantly back and forth...I read "Awake" tracts as if they were comic books because I admired the art (it actually helped inspire me to improve my drawing) but the contradictions between the protestant, catholic and Jewish faiths I was learning made it certain that either one or all of them were wrong. I too stayed silent with my scientific agnosticism until my mid 20's and formerly announced my adherence to belief only supported by data as I gained my bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering (not a coincidence!) Since then I've learned so much more about evolutionary history, the origin of religious thought, how the brain promotes such thought for survival purposes and every other aspect of the physical world. The grand view of the world as it is without the limits of a creator is so far beyond the ideas of religious texts I just laugh....but on 9/11 I stopped laughing.

I felt and saw first hand what the dangers of religion left to fester down the blind allies of it's own dogma could do to people I knew and that was the end of "live and let live" when it came to religion for me. We are at a point where we are perfecting technology in genetics that should it fall into the wrong hands, a passionate zealot to some imaginary faith...the end of all life could result over night. Now is the time for us to say enough to the moderate views that religion is okay as long as every one stays to their corner...the problem is no one actually does. The only inoculation for religion is knowledge, of how the world really works and it is the obligation of all those who hold that knowledge to share it with those who don't but more importantly to explain why their current state of belief and reliance on "faith" is dangerous. I have spent a good part of the last few years trying to accelerate this spread of knowledge between people across language barriers. A passage from the Bible fueling my efforts:

"And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from the, which they have imagined to do." Genesis 11:6

My solution is to flatten human communication by eliminating language as a barrier for social communication online. I hope to release this service by years end.

I've been fortunate and patient enough to have actually contributed to the enlightenment from deeply held religious views of some people...it is a minor mission in my life beyond my work as a software engineer and graphic designer. As we approach this time where any one can build a virus or bacteria from scratch in their basement it is important for all humanity to see all living things as precious beyond the rules put forward in bronze age dogma. To realize that the rice farmer in China has the same loves, wishes, dreams and desires as you and is entitled to the same basic happiness. That none of us are better than any other beyond the circumstances of life in which we are born. That even with life we share so much as to make it un-profound to say that we are brothers. Here on a lone island of life our planet as we know today we need to esteem life (all life) as more precious than any other resource before backward religious dogma leads zealots down a path of our destruction. I hope we succeed in time.

Accident: A view into the future of organ replacement...

2010-07-02T15:36:00.009-04:00

Listen to the podcast: Accident:A view into the future of organ replacement.

Mira Chu is always in a rush, she got up today filled with particular excitement as it is her first day giving the inaugural speech at the Institute of Exoplanetary Studies. Mira joined the institute 3 years ago in 2045 and had been deep in her studies of the spectral characteristics of the 50 or so Earth class planets found decades previous by the Kepler Satellite mission. She was anxious to report her findings regarding the specific bio signatures emanating from 43 of those 50 worlds.

Unfortunately for Mira today, she tends to get her mind very wrapped up in her work and today was so focused on the talk that she failed tohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif heed the pick up truck making a quick turn before the light as she charged across the intersection unaware that the light was about to switch. The truck struck her with more force than one would expect given the fact it was turning. She was knocked out of the intersection and into a light pole on the other side of the street, her side taking the brunt of the impact. Blunt force trauma can be particularly nasty on the internal organs. Mera's impact with the street pole caused her liver to immediately rupture, as individuals that witnessed the event rush to administer her aid and call ambulances Mira passes out...

In 2010 one of several advances that we'll soon see applied to aid Mira was made. A team of researchers was able to de-differentiate blood back to a stem cell state, which could then be re-differentiated to any other cell tissue type. This wasn't the first time such a process was performed, it had been done from skin and some other tissues as well in the previous couple of years. The technology was originally invented in 2006/7 and was dubbed iPSC (induced pluropotent stem cells) it quickly advanced as a method for creating stem cells from already differentiated somatic cells. The revolution that lay in this process was inherent in the fact that if you can coax a stem cell into various cell types you can watch the expression patterns of the dna genes activated between tissue types in the lab. It would be like having the biological equivalent of the "diff" function for document comparison tools. This would then allow researchers to quickly isolate the expressed genes that are unique to each cell type and determine how the stem cell triggers their differentiation "song"...once that is figured out per tissue type researchers would start looking at how each "song" plays in sequence to create developmental processes like the growth of a lung or a heart from the initial cellular seed. These advances were made quickly by 2017 researchers could coax any cell to become any other cell for a given period of time before dedifferentiating back to a stem like state using chemical markers. In 2022 all of the tissue types of the human body were genetically mapped using iPSC stem cell research methods. It was in 2017 however that the real fun started. If a cell could be differentiated to a specific tissue type could it be possible to trigger the developmental pathway of an entire organ? This research was started and by 2020 the first organ (a liver) was developed fully from a de-differentiated stem cell it was an achievement that ushered in the industry of organ replacement using ones own grown organ. It also meant the death of the previous industry of scaffold grown organs which prior to this advance was the only way (well that and the earlier mechanical organs...hearts,etc. of the previous century) to create artificial organs as using stem cells alone failed to trigger the developmental pathways of the organ growth process that produced the vascular and nervous systems of the organ, the new method activated the same developmental process that is activated in a growing fetus in the womb and so was complete with formation of all associated internal structures and geometry for the produced organ.

This takes us back to Mira, who now is in the back of an ambulance being treated for her wounds, the medics have determined she has severe internal hemorrhaging on her right side. As they notice her coming in and out of consciousness they rummage through her bag to find her organ insurance card. Once organs could be expressed in their full developmental glory in a vat of nutrients shortly after 2022, start ups sprang into action to try and satisfy the demand for facile access to organ replacements in case of accidents. The process of organ donor search had all but disappeared as people simply bought insurance with a company that would set up a plan with a client to allow them to purchase insurance and schedule a lab visit. At the lab the company would take a sample of the clients DNA using a cheek swab or a blood sample and then the researchers would de-differentiate the cells from the swab back to specific cell types(heart, lung, kidney, liver, skin, pancreas, bone) even specific bones could be regrown to specific developmental levels. Of course the insurance would charge additional rates for insuring more organs. Once the organs are matured they would be stored in life vats where they are kept in stasis for potential implantation at any time to the tissue donor. The rapid growth of organs would be achieved as direct oxygenation and providing of nutrients could be made, the organs would be pristine.

As the ambulance rushes to the nearest trauma facility, her information and the hospital where she is going to be treated is transmitted to the insurance company so they could be prepped to take her organs out of stasis. Shortly after arriving at the hospital and given triage it is determined that her liver is too badly damaged to be repaired in vivo and the call is made to have her insured liver copy shipped to her present location. Luckily her premium covers copies of her organs being available within 1 hour of her areas of defined areas of coverage. As the insurance company receives the call a helicopter is loaded with the pristine liver and begins it's trip the 178 miles to her hospital location, eta: 48 minutes.

The date is Tuesday, June 16th 2048 and Mira Chu is coming out of sedation. As she comes to, she sees her husband Andre looking down at her with a smile on his face. She fights the confusion of waking in a hospital bed for a few seconds and remembers what happened. She feels a slight bit of discomfort along her side and looks to notice the bandages around the area. She's glad to be alive, Andre leans forward and tells her she'll be just fine. She had the surgery for the liver replacement and it was routine, most such transplants are successful and there hasn't been a rejected organ from any recipient of the organs provided by the insurance companies since the inception of such services nearly 25 years earlier. Inside Mira's body her pristine liver is situating itself to the first body it has been a part of, the high efficiency and lack of exposure to disease like real organs makes transplanted organs particularly good at their functions. In fact they tend to be particularly robust to abuses of substances by their owners. In the case of the liver alcohol and a high Calorie diet, neither is a problem for Mira who was a teetotaler, though after this experience she might want to have a drink but at the moment, after realizing everything is okay all she can think about is giving her talk on the exoplanet bio-signatures, it is her only worry in the world.

Links:

http://sent2null.blogspot.com/search?q=pathogenic

http://sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/60751/title/Stem_cells_from_blood_a_huge_milestone

Democratization of voice has changed everything...why Jaron Lanier is wrong.

2010-06-23T15:06:00.003-04:00

In a recent interview, computer scientist Jaron Lanier expresses his view that the social internet has not been a benefit to human society. In particular the open software movement upon which much of it is based is for him mostly a negative for human society.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIwikI7IVYs&feature=youtu.be&a

I think he is missing a critical aspect of what is enabled by the internet and in general communication technologies as they have developed in human societies (predating even homo sapiens sapiens) that aspect is the democratization of an asserted "voice" as explained below.

His attack is more than just on web 2.0 , he has this view that there has been no beneficial social impact to the internet. He couldn't be more wrong, if it were not for the internet, for the hyper connected real time web of communications and the fora of discussion that are made available on the social networks that he called "packs" the following incidents of the last few years would have been worse:

1) Aung Suu Kyi the political prisoner and activist of the state of Myanmar (Burma) would be an unknown person who likely would have suffered and died in the prisons of the military junta leadership of that country, free to do as they wish without the external pressures placed on the regime via the internet.

2) Georgia and the Russian invasion of Abkashia. The Russians would not have stopped at Tblisi...they would have quietly taken over the entire country before the international disagreement would have even built to the crecendo that stopped their advance. Lanier totally doesn't understand the power of democratizing the ability to assert ones voice across the globe be that with digital text media, digital video or digital audio spread virally over the internet. Though it may be true that humans tend to naturally form packs, it is also true that we continue to form packs of familiarity and never before have we been able to embrace as a species our brothers and sisters in foreign lands through our solidarity with their plight..shared instantly via electronic communications. The internet is the pillar upon which this stands and social networks are the conveyor.

3) Sudan, yet another incident that would have been vastly different had the international community not descended on the rising attacks by Sudanese forces on the Darfur region. The eyes of the world stayed the hand of the leadership who could not apply the propaganda in conjunction with their barbarity to sufficiently maintain an artifice of "right" in the eyes of their "friends" and neighbors. We are social animals and now we have a global social interaction that is being expressed by individual countries...many ruled by ruthless men who's actions are actually being mollified by the fact that the world is watching. No other time in history was this possible...imagine Alexander, Gangis Kahn or Cesar Augustus under such international scrutiny...would they have been as ruthless had the world had it's eye on them, I so absolutely not.

4) Even though there was no internet at the time we know that even the Nazi's had a shame about what they were doing the Jews and others they deemed 'unfit' as they hid their programs of extermination from the world. Even though they felt they would rule the world they still hid their greatest crime...this is very telling of the group psychology of even the most evil regimes.

I can go on, Israel and it's invasion of Lebanon. Iran and the Green Revolution all conflicts significantly attenuated in the ferocity that would have resulted had the worlds eyes not been watching and talking, the internet and specifically real time social networks is the cause of that protection and Lanier doesn't see it. The myopia he is suffering from is not new, technological myopia has occurred during ever great technological advance, a more recent change that in my view was second only to the emergence of the internet in human history in it's scope and depth of change is the industrial revolution. One of the major consequences of that age was the mass production of machines of war. The invention of the repeating rifle, the machine gun, the cartridge based bullet and the automated methods of production for these devices..along with the invention of artillery put in the hands of still barbarian minded Europeans weapons of mass carnage which were unleashed upon one another in the many conflicts across the globe prosecuted in pursuit of nationalist and expansionist views of domination had by each nation. The barbarity of the first world war was not an indication of a greater evil on the part of the actors involved...no it was simply a result of a greater ability to prosecute that evil using the "efficient" weapons of war that had been developed in the 3 decades leading up to the great war. In the lead up many bloody experiments were conducted in then far flung regions of the world. The British practiced in South Africa on Zulu's and Boers, the German's engaged in their butchery on Herare...the Belgians worked their technology on human beings in the Congo and Rwanda..it goes on and on.

The technology changed the way that war was waged and increased the scope of murder to the tens of millions that lost their lives in those early years. It was ironically the continued democratization of "voice" that served as a restriction on the barbarity that wars would inflict. A major example from the later half of the 20th century is the Vietnam conflict, the war was quietly being waged until massive media coverage began to turn the public view of just what was going on there, forcing significant and immediate changes by the government. It was so controlled by the opinion of the public that the effort was significantly marred with micro managed decisions near the later half of the conflict that made it very difficult for the soldiers. The internet (invented during the Vietnam conflict coincidentally) and later the web allowed the democratization of voice that today is significantly changing the willingness of groups far off regions of the world to engage in the barbarity that the previous age of unobserved war once enabled. This is a game changer for humanity not a mediocre shift as Lenier believes.

Technology: will it kill before it saves?

2010-06-14T18:54:00.004-04:00

"And I am very much a skeptic in regards to technology being able to save us from killing ourselves as a species."

A recent email exchange with a new friend contained the previous quote from my friend. It inspired me to finally write out what I'd been saying in bits and pieces to people on Facebook for quite some time.

As for the question, will technology be our saving grace? I am still somewhat ambivalent about it myself, the current time of rapid developments in genetics and biology have me terrified and amazed. Terrified because as a software and hardware engineer I am well aware of the history of change that attended certain technological developments in both areas in the past and how those changes revolutionized human productivity in two phases. The first was the invention of the semiconductor transistor in 1947 by Shockley and Bardeen. The second was the invention of the integrated circuit and soon after photo-lithography that led to the astounding miniaturization of components that made the pc revolution (not to mention the DSP revolution that made possible useful cell phones and other digital devices) of the 80's and 90's possible.

Here we are, 10 years after the grand success of having sequenced a first human genome on the verge of figuring out life from the opposite direction which we took to figure out electronics.

It is quite an interesting story and one filled with amazing parallels that are difficult to see as coincidence but upon closer analysis show their fibers of similar construction in the inevitability of the physical laws that makes both realms possible.

I am talking specifically of conservation of energy and how abeyance to it, makes possible discrete atoms, which makes possible discrete molecules with specific atomic affinity for other atoms or molecules. Which makes possible specific amino acids, which make possible a specific dna and rna family , with make specific enzymes and proteins, which makes possible specific combination's of said enzymes , proteins and nucleotides in the form of living beings. In hardware and software , conservation of energy yet again is the mother of the massive landscape of combinations possible at the circuit level and in software how I chose to write a bit of code can significantly impact it's speed and its usefulness for a given problem domain. The codes that I write are symbolic representations of a designed function space inside the memory space of the computer the code eventually runs on. My applications are alive in the same sense as you, both sense input from the environment, but produce output in response to that input, both require resources to survive (you food, air, water...application, memory and data) up to now...few would have dared to think that life and programs were so similar but now that we approach a time when we can actually code new life functions from scratch (see Craig Venter's recent announcement of synthetic life) that analogy has become starkly real.

But what does this have to do with my fear, now that we know how molecules have come together to create living things we are not only creating our own codes but are figuring out how the extant codes work. The great process of deciphering the book of our genes and how they are expressed into tissues, hormones, organs and bones has now been enabled. The last 5 years have been particularly astounding...I could barely contain my dread and excitement when I read of the successful creation of induced pluripotent stem cells in 2007. I was not expecting that advance for at least another 10 years...but there it was. Then about a year later more advances came as iPSC's were produced by other teams and new methods were invented to get around inefficiencies (like the accidental triggering of cancer) in the old methods. Then more advances came in 2008 and 2009...all far ahead of the schedule I had set in my mind for when I was expecting them. I am an optimist and yet I misjudged the pace of advance...iPSC is important because what it does is it levels the playing field for the process of determining exactly WHERE the genetic sheet music for specific processes exist in our genes and how to play those genes to create the "music" of a growing lung or a cornea or a heart or a femur...you get the picture now?

If I were tasked to write a program that encoded an audio file from .wav to .mp3 I could do it, I would have to consult the specs. for both file formats and then knowing their functioning write code that performed the specific transformations or compositions using various tools available to me in the language I chose to write the program of conversion in..but it would be done. The mystery of doing so would have simply been in the specifications or specs. of the two formats.

The invention of iPSC's allows us to in detail figure out not just the specs. behind expressed biological functions but also to see the code that is known to create those biological functions. The lung grows, the heart beats...we only need "listen" to the regions of dna that are "playing" to see how the keys are pushed. As you would inspect the keys of a player piano to extract the sheet music for a given piece.

And thus comes our big problem, once we've extracted all the sheet music...for lungs, for hearts, for brains, for pisiform bones, for skin, for hair , for blue eyes or green or gray ...we will have the components necessary to write life from scratch or modify existing life by point changes to our dna.

In the classic science fiction film "Blade Runner" a scene has the renegade "replicant" Roy meet his maker, the rich and aristocratic bio geneticist that "invented" the replicants and grew rich selling these artificial people for use in various ways. Some were made strong to serve as labor on off world farms, others were trained to be skilled fighters and warriors, others were made to be "pleasure models". In the film the year is 2015...which considering where we are today in the technology is astonishingly prescient of Philip K Dick the original writer of the piece "Do Robots Dream of Electric Sheep?" from which the movie was made. Roy is dying because though the geneticists were able to make him faster, smarter and stronger than ordinary humans...they could not make his life longer, he only had a 4 year life span. He found his way to the corporate headquarters to plead with the maker for more life. The maker tells him that it is impossible to make an in vivo genetic change to an organism without killing it. Now though this was true in 1981 it is no longer true today...we are on the verge of going far beyond he replicants of that film in ways that scare me. (For completion of the story of Roy, if you are not familiar with the film ...rent it as soon as possible...you'll see the end result of Roy's conversation with his maker.)

First, just after the human genome was sequenced it was believed that it would be extremely difficult to find out how to express the proteins and enzymes of the genetic code. The number of genes were first believed to be high but consensus put the number at around 100,000...when the genome was actually sequenced however the real number came out closer to 25,000.

25,000 genes and the song of you and me is sung.

This includes all the variation that exists between you , me and every human on Earth ....the problem should dawn on you now. How are those genes "played" differently per person? I find the musical analogy most apt. Though it is true that between human populations there are different genes, these differences are minor ...insignificant, making up fractions of a percent difference between all human lineages...far too few to account for why we are so different. Thus there must be some modulation mechanism that exists outside of the known genes that allows them to flower the diversity of forms that can result when they are expressed in the life of a human being. This modulation mechanism has only just recently been identified and exists in several areas of the cell. First, we now know that genetic expression can be modulated by other genes, so genes can constrain other genes expression of various enzymes and proteins but the greater question is how, the answer to this question was found in the recent discovery that the padding between genes...up until recently actually called "junk Dna" was serving quite a non junk role. This DNA is in fact the developmental modulation mechanism for the play back of genes to specific expression pathways that ensure the growth of a heart, or a lung or a kidney ...or that guide the development of breasts or a face in relation to a head. A third set of controls lies in the use of functional RNA's that perform specific gene activating and silencing functions within the nucleus of the cell but these are also triggered by either other genes or activity in "junk DNA" regions.

So now the puzzle is complete, we have the genes , we have the modulation mechanism(s) and we have an ability to observe expression in any cell type (iPSC)...every thing that follows will be book keeping. The next 20 years will be a race between competing teams of geneticists as they try to identify key developmental pathways about important genes to figure out precisely how to control modulation of those genes within specific cell types. In individuals that have genetic diseases owing to the fault of a gene or genes they will repair them in the person and cure them, for individuals that wish to have a new capability that they were not born with, it can be added...just as I write code to spec. living beings will be able to have their code tweaked, adapted, modified to suit a personal aim.

If the fear part of my concern hasn't dawned on you yet, consider this, once the price of sequencing and building organisms falls (and it is already 100 times cheaper than it was 10 years ago) the ability to tinker together new enzymes will be democratized. I learned the bulk of my programming at home and mostly from online sources. I did take several courses in formal programming as an undergrad but the bread and butter coding I do in java, xml, sql, xsl,javascript and html was learned outside of an academic environment.

Soon the resources for creating living things will be just as ubiquitous and any one with a desire to learn will be able to "write" new organisms in their basement labs. Imagine, just as 10 years ago rash teens were writing computer viruses and worms to infect computers and cause crashes...in another 15 to 20 years similarly rash teens will be able to write super pathogens that infect people in various frightening ways. The democratization of the power of computer code will be followed by the democratization of the power of the genetic code and unless humanity radically shifts its nature in this time we are as dead as the dodo. Imagine what Bin Laden would whip up if he had such technology at his disposal today?

This is why I feel it is critical that we use the technology to help move us away from the selfish and xenophobic past that made the horrors that we've visited upon one another in the past *less likely*. I am not so naive as to think we would ever eliminate all sociopathic tendency in time but our control of the genes holds the answer to that question as well. We will soon be able to determine those with sociopathic tendency to absolute clarity and rectify cures that will not require the permanent incarceration of the individuals. The question is which will come first?

A pathology free human family with all members fully cognizant of the sanctity of all life and with no desire to invent superbugs that kill unlike anything ever before possible?

or

Will we move so quickly into the future, before we've unfettered ourselves of the stone age ignorance of hard religious belief and ingrained xenophobia, that some one will create such a beast and in a short moment end life on Earth?

Now it is possible that my fear under estimates the importance of opposing forces, in a world where a super bug can kill you in 2 hours...that bug will be able to be isolated, analyzed and a counter to its effects created also in a short period of time but would that time be short enough to prevent the disruption of entire human societies?

Thus I see it as critically important to foster any effort to connect people to people, to mollify xenophobic tendencies based on ignorance with fact, to obliterate religious ignorance with reason and yet more fact. To help us connect with one another without the barrier of language (a critical problem in this time), far flung across the globe in the emotional ways that will make all humans more human to each of us. It's a small step that just may take us from the brink and the ability to attempt it is provided by internet, which shares the same mother(technology) as our potential doom...how ironic is that?

Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_runner

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photolithography

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signal_processing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_Pluripotent_Stem_Cell

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_DNA

http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2010/05/story-of-language.html

http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2008/03/another-late-night-and-building-with.html

A Poem in the key of Erdos

2010-06-06T11:50:00.004-04:00

I am a believer of the BOOK,

though there is no Supreme Fascist as it's author.

Before I should die, I would have several epsilons,

though now is not the time as I have no boss as other slaves do.

I do wish to be captured however, before those epsilons come

as is custom and in my view, only the right thing to do.

Having been captured I should not be liberated as my choice

of boss will be a careful one, as any proof should be.

I have no plans to ever leave as science quickly

unravels the mystery to that disease.

Despite this, I occasionally partake in poison in doses

sufficient to enjoy but prevent my leaving.

Though under the influence of poison I must admit to dying temporarily.

Often I listen to noise but never while my mind is open.

I enjoy the act of preaching though in engineering and art but yet mathematics, excluding instruction to my sisters little epsilons at which time I often take great joy in torturing them.

My brain is open!

;)

Links:

http://geekvarietees.spreadshirt.com/images-erdos-3-I3833954

http://www.math-inst.hu/~p_erdos/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erdos

Communication as a promoter of human empathy.

2010-06-01T23:08:00.004-04:00

The following is excerpted from a comment to a friends Facebook wall post concerning humanities pending control over life itself. (Recent announcement of synthetic life being created) I advocate the view that if we do not learn to embrace the sanctity of all life and in particular human life before the costs of weilding this power come down we may end up destroying ourselves.

We have already seen the distal effects of empathy in averting what would otherwise have been great tragedy just by the hyper connected communication streams we share today. What would have happened in the former Yugoslavia if our communication technology were still morse code? Total extermination of Bosnian Muslim by Christian Serb, and the world wouldn't have known until far too late and then not really cared. "Those slavic people who are they ?"

What would have happened in Georgia when Russia decided it was going to invade and take over Abkhasia? More massacre, and we would not know about it for months or years after.

What would have happened in Rwanda, surely not the amicable peace that exists between Hutu and Tutsi today, total genocide in the vacuum of international deafness to the plight and inability to assert actions (even if late) to stem the blood shed.

What would have happened to Lebanon two years ago when Israel invaded, bombing an entire country supposedly in order to get Hezbollah militants pestering it with bottle rockets at its northern border? More total killing without any way for the international community to indicate it's view and thus modify the behavior.

We are now globally social animals and the same proclivities against bad behavior we have in small groups that object to actions we may wish to take against the group or an individual in the group we now have on a global scale.

Would Iran have simply tolerated the protests of the Green revolution last year had the eyes of the world in the form of cell phones and the mouths of the world in the form of tv and blogs on the internet were not ever listening ? Unable to be quieted down with propaganda? No.

Our communicative isolation in the past let astonishing atrocities like the Bolshevik revolution toll occur in relative silence as Lenin asserted his way, they similarly allowed Stalin and Mao to the the same. The same killing that was done across the centuries by the Egyptians, Greeks, the Romans, the Caliphates, the Vandals, the Franks, the Mongols ...now aided by modern killing machinery reached a new level of efficiency. Luckily ...Something different happened with the birth of the internet and more specifically the web 20 years ago...we went from communicating by major media outlets or government run versions of the same to a million broadcasting individual agents. A million cracks in the dam of potential propaganda and information restriction that otherwise would enable concentration of atrocity as occurred in the first half of the 20th century.

Today, because of our hyper communication all the worlds eyes are on all of us and we all know it and that modifies behavior in itself. Now take this to the next step and make language irrelevant...not only are we communicating without care for linguistic or cultural borders but we are free of the mental bias that would otherwise exist if we did know. The ignorance , probably for the first time in history is actually good for us...as we now engage others on terms of who they are and how they relate to us alone, not by what language they speak or where they are from. Yes, of course empathy will be more local between geographically proximal human beings when it comes to being *practiced* (but only marginally so in the sense that today if I feel pity for a man on the street I can directly interact with him by giving him money for food, similarly I can interact virtually with a homeless person in Guatemala by donating to a charity that does the same) but the *desire* to practice empathy on those far away is near parity with those that are local. Language stands as a barrier to you even knowing of a small child in a village in western China who could use a donation, it would stop you from communicating with that boy if he had an OLTP (free third world laptop) as he probably reads (if he does read) in Chinese character sets and not the Roman alphabet. If we flatten this last barrier, a major gap in how human we perceive others far away will be taken away as the masses will be free to communicate across geographical *and* language borders.

The Story of Language...

2010-05-23T11:44:00.008-04:00

Languages have also been a very fascinating subject in my life. For one , I feel as if I should be able to speak more languages than I do. My parents are Haitian but I was born in Brooklyn, I speak English fluently (without a Brooklyn accent) but my Haitian creole is halting, my French is halting. I'd need some serious practice in both to be truly fluent. However, the similarities between the Latin languages allows me to figure out maybe 30% of spoken Italian, Portuguese, Spanish if the speaker speaks slowly enough. My facility with spoken languages would improve if I had the practice but the last few years have been spent getting around the problem rather than attacking it directly and it has a fascinating history that I will detail below.

The history of the formation of languages is something I've done a lot of reading on, the other reason for my interest is that I am a software engineer and program in several different computer languages: c++,java,xsl,javascript,css,xml are all on my plate for my work. The various programming languages define the function of the software I've designed in the distributed web platform AgilEntity. In fact as a theme language is the entity upon which I've centered my first startup (numeroom) built on the AgilEntity platform.

Language in the human family is an amazing story, it allowed our ancestors to communicate silently on hunts (using gestures), it allowed coordination using specific sounds later using the voice and later still it was useful to encode ideas into those sounds for the purpose of casual communication which for the first time allowed large amounts of acquired individual experience to be shared with a local group, then as these groups grew in size and languages became more complex, methods were invented to codify them put them to stone and parchment and now a permanent record of human thought arose, writing. The advancement of the human family is entirely owed to this shift in going from language as symbolic sounds to language as symbolic shapes. The irony is though as all these separately evolving language and writing families expanded, they touched...and in so touching their *differences* became great source for discord, misunderstanding and war. Language the tool that liberated us from the savanna now became our bane! It hampered cross cultural growth (except through war) and for the last 4 or 5 thousand years as these different civilizations touched, they mostly fought! We became prisoners of our language and character families, requiring translation to relay nuances of information exchange, slowing down communication. As the industrial revolution approached and we found ways to relay information quickly (even if it then needed to be translated) we learned to send communication over electric wires using the telegraph, then later the telephone and just over 100 year ago, through the air itself using invisible light. These advances helped mitigated against misunderstandings related to the speed of communication but still the difference in languages persisted, particularly for the purpose of commerce. The common people of nations were still for the most part trapped both geographically and linguistically from the other nations of the world. This isolation kept xenophobia alive and well into the last century as war reached its pinnacle with the deaths of millions over perceived but false ideas of cultural and ethnic superiority. We had some technology but were still prisoners of our languages. It's only in the last 40 years that the final piece to eliminating the barrier came into being, the internet closed the gap on communication so that people other than statesmen could communicate rapidly and over time cheaply. As the web emerged in the early 90's the bulk population of all nations now had a way to interact with the bulk of all other nations, yet still language formed a barrier. In the late 90's companies like Alta Vista began to create translation dictionaries between various languages, in 2002, Google joined the space and made available web based services for translating web pages or snippets of text. These one shot services though only served the needs of the one, in the moment of the request. I saw the need in 2005 for a different solution that could facilitate agnostic language communication in a social context.

As a child I remember clearly the Biblical story of The Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9), it fascinated me that even in the writings of the stone age writers of that story there was an implicit understanding of the *divisive* power of language. If you'll recall, a coming together of Peoples in the plains of Shinar in those days (when all people spoke the same language according to the Bible) the people wanted to build a monument to Man, a tower that pierced the sky. The Hebrew God did not like this 'arrogance' of Man to believe in his own power (another Irony as our own power is all we have evidence for) and so in the midst of their gathering for the construction he struck them all to speaking different languages. The lack of understanding scattered them off to all far regions of the world and thus we have different languages. The childlike simplicity of Biblical stories (written by grown Men) must be appreciated, it shows how child like all of human understanding was at this time in history only 3,000 years ago. In any event the irony is that the writers of the story knew that having us all speaking the same language would allow us to build the tower! So to explain the failure of this neighboring culture (which spoke a different language!) to build the tower, the Hebrews say that their God struck them dumb...this highlights an interesting historical truth about the time, the middle east was a nexus point of transit from Africa to Asia and back, many peoples and languages formed, evolved, warred and were driven extinct due to these conflicts of migration. Yet still the concept of a single language as a unifying force for Man was implicitly known and in fact actively feared.

I always found this fascinating and it is only in the last 4 years, while engaged in a chat room with a non English (Romanian) speaker, almost 5 years ago that I realized a way I could build a modern digital tower of babel. One day in 2005 I thought it would be awesome if I could simply type in English and have her read Romanian and have her type in Romanian and I read English. I knew that I could co-opt Googles Translate service to get this done and hacked their consumer page to "borrow" the translation service, 3 days later I had a working version of this translated web chat. Unfortunately it didn't support Romanian as Google Translate didn't support Romanian at the time. Since then I've managed to create an efficient and highly scalable distributed solution to the many to many real time language problem of a group chat, unlike a single IM...a group chat requires some way of managing all the spoken languages, translating between them simultaneously. I invented a way to do this that took advantage of the distributed nature of the AgilEntity platform and would not require the conversing clients poll one another (doing it this way would plateau and then quickly lose efficiency as client cross talk increased). The business collaboration service I plan to launch features this and many other implicit translation and collaboration features that are all designed to make language as irrelevant as possible. I am fund hunting and hope to release it as a public service soon, in so doing I want to change human communication by achieving the fear of the Hebrew God, of allowing humans to communicate freely without the barrier of language and thus allow us to achieve our true potential.

Links:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAD4pFfRh4

Synthetic life ..........are we ready ?

2010-05-22T22:09:00.001-04:00

J. Craig Venter announces the boot up of the first artificial genetic sequence:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/science/21cell.html

Regarding the ethical issues of doing this now, he is right for TODAY...

but when the costs come down dramatically in the next 10 years (as they did for pc programming)

as the knowledge continues to be refined with bulletproof techniques...

as GDE 's(genetic development environment) are developed to allow a high level genetic language syntax to be used to build organisms using an abstraction (like coding applications but with a "maker" step) there will be a huge potential for trouble as any "gene kiddie" (analog of script kiddies today) will be able to tinker together something "for fun" that I don't know, invades all pigs and causes their intestines to shut down, or causes cows to die on the field after eating grass...who knows...as varied and nefarious as malware methods and vectors are in software coding, expect the same ecosystem of miscreants to exist for programming living things...be they synthetic or not. Venter's comment is incredibly naive and full of hubris...people like myself and Bill Joy who's expressed similar concerns feel differently.

I hope I am wrong.

A bit on "faith" , "belief" and the inapplicability to real science.

2010-05-12T07:53:00.003-04:00

This posts builds on a response to a thread started by a mutual friend on facebook that I thought merited exposition here.

I am a firm proponent of the methods of science having been trained in them and employ them in my work and life, but I have no faith. The collections of data that form the theories posited by science are not accepted by what they will predict they are accepted by what they have predicted...this is a subtle difference that makes assertions of all scientists having "faith" as some define it a fallacious one. I have no faith that any of the systems which have succeeded at answering questions about the workings of the world will continue to do so, I have only past evidence that they have. This is the difficulty of scientists...of falling into the "I believe this will happen." trap instead of asserting the "In the past, data of this sort was explained by this process." in the first, "faith" and "belief" are implicit...in the latter they are superfluous. One is a correlation between events past and present and the other is contingent on a "belief" casting into the future.

I remember first reading David Hume's causality argument and at first being confused by his seemingly devastating argument...but then I realized that his argument assumed that it was important to have causality at all...pure science doesn't require causality. If the laws of physics changed randomly every few moments ...would that negate our effort to try to understand the new configurations of the world from moment to moment? No. If we could in the short intervals infer a way to navigate the new space that works for a short time it would be worth it ..as we would have no other choice. In a limiting process, as these intervals of fluctuation accelerate we go from being able to say something about the world to asserting nothing but the moment..because the next moment could be explained differently. "Belief" and "faith" is an artifact of having finite durations of relative stability in the world we find ourselves coupled with the complacency and convenience of causal correlations and predictions about the future based on them...however the predictions ("faith","belief") are not necessary, as science is about the moment compared to the past. As the moment changes to invalidate the explanations of the past, then the description of the moment becomes the past to explain the new moments...no faith, no belief.

If I were to plot a course in a rocket ship to the moon and being on my way, realize that my ship is guided off course despite the calculations being correct. I must assume that something has changed, prior to the launch I didn't have "faith" that the ship would get to the moon..I had a set of correlations and rules under which the data of those correlations could be explained in the past. If the same rules (theory) could not explain the new situation in which I find myself then the conclusion is that the rules changed. So really if there is any "faith" in science...it is not "faith" in the corpus of rules that have explained the world, our theories being right...it is faith that they don't go wrong when we can't afford them to! Or more technically that we don't sample them in regimes in which their ability to infer solutions have sparse supporting empirical data. But this is not faith at all as it doesn't exist prior to the experience of "oh look the laws of physics just changed" or "oh I am off course on way to the moon"...no one actively thinks "gee I sure hope the laws of physics don't change on my way to the moon" which would be a faith statement.

In this way science models the iterative learning process of a neural network, acquiring patterns and changing them as data comes in, not judging, not predicting, not extrapolating, not believing why the data changes...just assimilating it in comparison to older data if it matches and changing older data if it doesn't. It is in comparison of *different* sets of these acquired pattern systems that the fallacy of faith can wiggle into the picture and I've always found that ironic.

In a comment response to that thread the statement was made that my position, which seemed to down play prediction in the use of scientific theory was a rare one for some on trained in a hard science (Electrical Engineering). I must admit it seems that most engineers see these philosophical micro analysis as a pedantic waste of time, if you think of it I am being a consummate engineer...rather than placing faith in any predictive capability of any theory that I used to design things in the world, I simply see the theory as a tool itself readily discarded or modified when it fails to help me "build" things (which is precisely how we are supposed to use them as prescribed by science itself!). The predictions are backward looking (on the past data) as opposed to forward looking (with some hope they'll work) so the proper position of constant doubt is never changed, and where can faith prosper where doubt is a constant refrain?? ;) Another delicious irony. ;)

Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume

It only gets better from here...

2010-04-25T12:30:00.002-04:00

The following is a comment to this article on the new "cosmecuticals" industry that is emerging due to advances made from the sequencing of the genome and the amazing discoveries of stem cells in the last few years. Early this year a paper was published that isolated key genes in the expression of skin tissues that contain both sebaceous (oil) and perspiration (sweat) glands. Last year a method was published that allowed the genetic mutation changes in tissue pathology (in that case two cancers) to be tracked down to the number of changes (the 1 mutation per 15 cigarettes paper) tie these methods together and you have a recipe for finding differentiating pathological and normal development in tissues.

We already know that the genetic code is amazingly dense but most of it consists of "non coding regions", now the story is coming clear....it is a hierarchical code. Most of it is devoted to developmental pathway ('how long to grow or release it') as opposed to description pathways ('what to grow or release') it turns out that these rules are packaged (encapsulated is the word we use in OO programming which is amazingly analogous to the biological process) very nicely in the form of stem cells which are essentially factories for producing the somatic cells that form the normal population of most tissues, but another paper from last year showed that stem cells have only a few switches that allow them to produce differentiated cells of specific tissue types and even more awesome, is that those switches can be compared between stem cells to determine the key factors that make a heart stem cell different from a glioma or a lung tissue cell across the much smaller (thankfully) set of stem cells (a couple hundred!) that end up producing all the differentiated cells that make us up. Much like in the old analog tv sets where a tuner was used to select frequency in a given channel range and thus change the station, stem cells seem to do something similar modulating specific genes and thus modifying the downlevel genes that are expressed in a cascade to realize a given differentiated tissue, apparently some stem cells are root stem cells and others are downlevel (producing differentiated cells in given tissues)...it may sound complex but the hierarchical nature (similar systems ensure the internet is able to efficiently route data between billions of connected nodes at different levels of the OSI stack!) will effect a very rapid determination of the relationships and illumination of the expression pathways (and will help fully explain the seemingly impossible process of in vivo gene modulations that occur like transposon and retrotransposon actions, rna transcription..all while the cell is running!)

I predict a very rapid acceleration of findings regarding the relationships between known and to be found stem cells and how the expression can be modulated by other low level controls. Deciphering all the facts on this front in skin because of its cosmetic potential are likely going to be the first (for example it's known that collagen break down leads to wrinkles...thus by figuring out how and then effecting a reversal treatment genetically..wrinkles can be cured as an age associated pathology) thus we won't achieve virtual immortality as some grand achievement it will be a slow process of incremental developments effecting tissues more and more critical to survival (heart, break, lung, liver...etc.) as those tissue types are fully explored and explained from the genetic (and not the even more complex physiological) perspective. I expect the majority of results to come over the next 20 years.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7278/abs/nature08629.html (1 mutation per cigarette paper)

http://www.novell.com/info/primer/prim05.html (Novell primer on the OSI stack and it's efficient hierarchy of hierarchical protocols and methods for communication on the internet)

Emotion no longer has to be our guide?

2010-04-12T19:27:00.006-04:00

Two recent discussions I've engaged in on Facebook have elicited more thought on the subject of how the human brain ties together emotion to memory. A study released recently showed that an emotional component could be untied or subtracted from the associated sensory experience or memory under current retrieval if a stimulus is provided at a given time. This discovery hints at some amazing possibilities for how the human brain works and helps point to a possible hypothesis for the purpose of emotion in the evolutionary history of the brain.

The new frontier of brain science

We know today loosely that the neocortex is responsible for processing and relating sensory input (between adjacent senses) we know that "adjacent" is more than an abstract categorization of their hierarchy in the mind but is quite literal, when flattened out the surface consists of patches of cells devoted to processing various types of sensory input in several layers (5 or 6)...where their edged touch, synergistic processing can occur. New research is pointing out that these synergies may explain synesthesia but for the purpose of this discussion the most relevant discovery is that how we remember things involves a dance between the neocortical processing, the retrieval of long term memories for the associated sense and comparison of incoming sensation to stored experience and tied together with a coupling to an emotional import factor. Researchers that have illuminated these areas with their work include the neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran. As an engineer I've always found brain science fascinating but the mysteries have found their most powerful tool in the fMRI imaging that is rapidly illuminating the ways in which information is processed in the brain and determining which regions are highly localized for specific processing activities experienced by a subject under testing. Many of the models are done using rats but it is safe to say given the similarity in our brains (which are different only in scale)will indicate similar mechanisms in humans.

The mechanism thus discovered

When analyzing the of emotional experience for the proper development of a primate mind we must accept that an experienced emotional event has a different effect on how the associated memory is recalled but there does not seem (at least from the current data) any adverse response to methods of learning that bypass the use of this emotional mechanism. The current evidence suggests that Emotion is tied in upon retrieval, the centers of this integration have been localized to the twin Amygdalae deep within the brain, the integration of the memory and the emotion happens apparently in the hippocampus. This method is also the one that from an engineering perspective is most efficient toward allowing emotion to be arbitrarily tied to experience, this could be accomplished by having retrieved memories stored with an "emotion" bit, a signal that triggers the amygdala to provide a response when incoming sensory data matches stored memory that is correlated with it. The emotion bit would trigger the required response (fear, joy, worry...etc.) from the amygdala as it is sent to the cortical mind for mediation. Thus the entire experience set of sensory data can be easily multiplexed with an emotional component upon retrieval eliminating the need for storing emotion with every memory bit (which would be inefficient) The study I refer to above was able to show that emotion could be subtracted from the memory recall using a specific timing in when a stimulus is provided. In short the emotional import tied to a given memory could be untied at will which support the "integration" theory. However, if emotion can be freely tied and untied it would seem to serve a positive purpose only when **higher cortical analysis is not present**.

The Idea

We have to remember that the brain was built up over evolutionary time, we can see this evolution of the brain today in living terrestrial organisms. Some, like lizards have barely any cortical mass and have varied sizes in the underlying brain regions which we know now govern autonomic response and timings for the body and as well govern emotion. I am going to posit my theory here and this may in fact be incorrect but it is a hypothesis I put out for discussion. Prior to our building a neocortex where complex reasoning could be performed on acquired multi-sensory data in a cognitive space. The different memories retrieved from the pallet of sensory experience that painted them into our minds, coupled with the emotional contribution that may have been associated with those experiences was the only way to judge moment to moment sensory input, judge by emotion essentially. We have moved on, the neocortex serves as a proxy to this "judge by emotion" ancestral mechanism that is in use by the lower animals (just observe a Lion in action to be convinced of this) our neocortex allows us to presage the future based on projection and our abstract reasoning allows us to imagine an un-experienced pain without having to go through the ordeal...thus, I would assert that there is no longer a unique benefit for the process of learning to have an emotional component because we now have a neo cortical mind in which to navigate the probability space of possibilities without having to experience them. Emotional import serves as a marker to our memory that says "pay a little more attention to this" that existed before we could hold the abstract possibilities in the scratch board of our large fore-brain. We now can chose to either teach by full experience (let them get hurt to know what it means) or we can use this large fore-brain object handling by ensuring only a minimum of hurt is experienced (even if it is in a single sensory area we can mentally map it to others!..cool) and then using the cognitive mind to explain why new experiences in seemingly disparate areas may result in analogous emotional pains. In the context of human parenting of children it is obvious that different levels of effort on the part of the parents are required but I think this approach serves to build the critical reasoning that is pivotal to creating cognitively dynamic children as opposed to children that learn on reaction to new experience. It also avoid the dangers of learning by emotional import as all new experiences do not require personal experience to understand why they may be dangerous or painful.

What this means for AI

The current efforts to develop artificial intelligence I think will benefit from this new understanding. If emotion is critical to developing a sense of significance for various actions then it will be important to simulate it in the any created artificial intelligences. Such intelligences must be able to have the components of internal emotion as well as external neo cortical processing. Some researchers are taking approaches toward creating artificial minds that model only one or another aspect of the mind and I think these are incorrect and potentially dangerous routes. We know from watching how people change when they experience various brain injury that the personality of a person is fluid with how the cortical processing is modulated through the filter of low level emotional experience, when these experiences are obfuscated by injury changes can occur that significantly modify the persons essence. If we are to create AI we want to make sure that they are 'stable' cognitively in ways that will make them adjusted to the experience of life that we will be creating for them. An AI that acts purely on assessments based on processing inputs and outputs may deem it necessary to kill thousands to achieve some goal without an emotional compass to guide why such an act would be wrong in the context of our society. At the least, a sense of self and a desire for self preservation coupled with understanding that same desire in others should be a requirement of any advanced AI. Currently one promiment effort seeks to model an entire brain (including the lower brain) called the "blue brain" project, if done properly this effort may yield a stable AI. Another effort headed by Jeff Hawkins creator of the Palm Pilot also seeks to create advanced AI but plans to model only the neo cortex, I think this latter effort may succeed in achieving the singularity (the name given to the point where the first conscious AI is realized) but the consciousness may be devoid of the ability to gauge or process emotion or the importance of empathy another key emotion to ensuring human agents treat one another equitably even when calculation would dictate more base actions as being more personally beneficial.

Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Hawkins

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_Temporal_Memory

http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2010/04/12/study.patients.with.amnesia.still.feel.emotions.despite.memory.loss

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amygdala

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocampus

http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jan/how-to-erase-a-single-memory
(Interesting because it was revealed before the latest study that showed how to erase a connection to emotion. My assertion is that both cognitive and "implicit" memory are tied to the amygdala which serves as the factory that produces simply the response.)

Nanobots are not the future of medicine.

2010-03-24T20:44:00.004-04:00

This article covers the recent advance in using nanotechnology as a delivery vector for treatment of cancer pathologies. I have seen many of articles like this on promising ways being probed to use nanotechnology or nanomaterials in order to treat cancer but I see it as a research dead end. The reason has everything to do with where we are in the process of discovering precisely how tissues are expressed from the underlying genes in our DNA.

As a therapy to kill tumors that have formed it apparently works (as shown in this article) but that doesn't fix the underlying pathology that led to the emergence of the cancer (which in many cases can be purely genetic with a low environmental component) To cure cancer one would need to effect repair to these genetic causation factors. It makes no sense at all given what is *rapidly* being discovered about the pathological details that cause cancer as well as other diseases to stop at *treating* cancer when we will very shortly be able to cure it with methods just as non invasive. (in fact likely using denuded viral vectors instead of nanotech ones to deliver the genetic cure as done here as well as kill targeted cancer cells). There is also the potential danger of the constituents of artificially constructed nano-machines are they really broken up completely and flushed out harmlessly or can they serve as the seed for developing new pathology? A viral vector delivered gene therapy would not be subject to this fear as the default payload is removed.

Using nanobots to try and cure cancer is like choosing to hammer a nail by using a pair of vice grips clamped to the end of a hammer. It makes no sense at all given what is *rapidly* being discovered about the pathological details that cause cancer as well as other diseases. I give it 10 years tops to be cured using some form of genetic therapy and I am not restricting this prediction to just the easy cancers; brain cancer, pancreatic cancer, late stage melanoma and lung cancers...all of them are on the same chopping block. Just last year a team of researchers was able to sequence in detail the genetic changes that led to the emergence of lung and skin cancers, they could even tell when the genetic damage occurred and when the cancerous change was induced. I'll try and find the link but it easily stands as the most exciting paper from 2009.

The stem cell research of the last 6 years has opened up an amazing ability to parallel process the discovery phase of all the genes and proteins associated with cell development for particular types of tissue but more importantly allows the gene expression sequence to be spied as the cells go through their stages. The work now is simply performing the necessary reading of the expression patterns (and generated enzymes and proteins) and compare normal to pathological patterns to determine in which genes things go wrong most often and to devise ways to inject repairs using gene therapy in situ. 10 years ago when the human genome was sequenced the worry was that the next step of deciphering the proteome would be next to impossible (given the massive number of possible proteins that can be expressed with our tiny set of 25,000 genes) what was missing was knowledge of how genes might be compartmentalized such that their triggered activity is correlated with particular cellular processes.

Ironically (a huge irony) the investigations of stem cells to determine just what can be learned about their function was spurred in the US by the Bush administration cutting funding for embryonic stem cell development. So what did researchers do? They started playing with other types of stem cells and a few years ago were able to turn normal differentiated cells INTO stem cells in the process known as iPSC (for which the Japanese researcher who pioneered the work will SURELY win a Nobel in a few years time) so this is allowing the expression catalog of the entire human genome to be built by watching stem cells induced to be the required tissue and then "listening" (as in music) for the notes that play out the expressed genes to produce the particular behavior of that cell type. Imagine a floor full of baseball cards and then being tasked with categorizing them by team. One would start out by picking up the cards and looking at the colors on their faces, the player on the surface or even better the team. If they focus on colors they could get the cards cataloged over time but it would take far longer if they focused on team as the teams are relatively invariant over time compared to card color...also the set of teams is reasonably manageable compared to cataloging by publish year or player. The use of stem cells is performing the smart categorization for us of the genes, each tissue type is an analog to a team in which are expressed (from year to year) a particular set of players in positions to execute the game (in hopes of winning and becoming world series winners hopefully) ...If we know the genes that are expressed in the stem cells, it is a short leap to find the differences that make them unique from the differentiated cells of the same stem line which has associated genes which may or may not be consistent between lines (my guess they are) the point is the previously believed to be impossible task of processing through a huge set of possible protein combination blindly was illusory, the system is a record (through it's use of stem cells for each cell type) of the categorization process that is employed to produce all of us...and the smaller set of genes are easier targets to explore when studying pathologies like cancer or other diseases. We are on the verge of a sudden fall off in the lethal capability of tissue born disease like none ever seen before, my only worry is what society will do once these revolutions occur. The death rate due to pathological causes will plummet significantly over the next 10 - 15 years and thus people will live longer and reproduce more vigorously..the Earth is already strained from our misuses of her resources...will we be able to refine ourselves as a species to the point where we drop the selfish ways of the present and past in time to enjoy it?

How the internet killed Jonny Depp (for a few hours)

2010-01-24T11:35:00.004-05:00

About 10 minutes ago I came across an article on Huffingtonpost.com that simply mentioned that famous actor Johnny Depp is not dead. Apparently a rumor of the unfortunate demise of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" and "Edward Scissorhands" star in a road accident in Paris was a hoax. This incident though highlights something I've wanted to blog about for some time, namely the hoax was enabled by the real time communication media that we have today on the internet. All it takes are for sufficiently trusted agents online in social networks such as Facebook or Twitter to get the faulty information, for that information to spread rapidly as a "meme" through the internet and soon off the internet into the real world.

This ability for information to spread so rapidly is only recent and was born on the backs of real time social media services like Facebook and Twitter. We saw most recently the power of information spread using these tools in the U.S. election of Barak Obama. His campaign team was intuitively aware of the power behind these technologies and wielded them masterfully to shape the image of the candidate that they wished to get out. When traditional methods were employed by opposition candidates or entities to smear Obama, the electronic media was used to quickly spread information to counter the claims. The response to the claims was immediate and prevented the claims of the opposition from cementing in the minds of the people. How far will this go? The Johnny Depp rumor and rapid declaration of it as a hoax in many ways shows how the collective consciousness of all humanity connected digitally can and will react to information. No longer will information that is faulty persist for long periods to fester and trigger unfortunate consequences or delay necessary action. I think this is a great thing for humanity for the most part, as it allows us all to listen to the collective heart beat of the world as it experiences events as one global unit. I think this will have far reaching consequence for our desire and ability to address events through out the world in ways we can only imagine today, the recent earth quake in Haiti garnered an amazing amount of support and a world wide effort to secure the nation and provide assistance that would have been vastly different had we lived in the technologically devoid time of say the early 30's. For one, knowledge of the event would have taken weeks or months to reach certain corners of the globe, teams for rescue came from as far as South African and China, would there have been a public desire by the governments of these countries to lend assistance if the eyes of the world were not shining on them through the visibility made possible by the internet? I say no, the internet shines a public light on countries, regimes and rulers and if there is anything a regime or government wants to have it is a positive perception in the eyes of the world. Note the incredible response the world gave to recent events in the middle east, when Israel orchestrated a botched invasion of their northern neighbor Lebanon in a stated effort to extricate Hesbollah, unfortunately for Israel, and despite their attempts to prevent media from inspecting their activities on the ground, the eyes of the world was able to get moment by moment reports from ordinary Lebanese, held hostage in buildings, homes as they wondered why Israel felt the need to bomb civilian roads and bridges when their beef was with people that had nothing to do with their building. Similar reports of the actions of the Russian Army in Georgia quickly drew the ire of the international community and I believe severely restricted the intensity of attack that would otherwise have occurred had the world not been watching and listening from cell phones, blogs and laptops.

This hyper perception of global events may contain the key to our salvation, it could be that by listening to the global heart beat through the use of these real time media that we are learning to engage the compassion we have for our family and our countrymen to our fellow Earthlings, in so doing we are gaining a heightened ability and desire to redress wrongs, where ever they may be occurring on the planet. At a time where the poisoning of our ecosystems world wide are leading to vast changes that have not been seen in hundreds of millenia such visibility and potential for action could not have come sooner. It will be interesting to see how much more rapidly we can tap into the global heart beat, the infrastructure required is already in place and growing but what will improve is the visibility to far flung regions of the world, as yet unconnected to the global network. As these areas tap in and as it becomes more facile for individuals to engage with the global consciousness via smart phones, the ability for us to experience as a species global events will be complete. I am optimistic that this hyper awareness of the global heartbeat will allow us to avoid the looming tragedies of climate change and ideological conflict that threaten in many tenuously connected areas to the global net, here's to an increasingly connected future and the rapid quashing of rumors of Johnny Depp's demise! ;)

Why OLED is going to be big for consumer technology.

2010-01-12T13:53:00.008-05:00

It has been quite a while since a technology has built up a buzz as loud as that of OLED display technologies. OLED displays promise to significantly advance display technologies by impacting costs of production, quality of display and utilization of power in ways that previous technologies could not ever match. Unlike previous generations of technologies such as CRT, Plasma and LCD which have variously been successfully used in certain product areas, OLED is the first display technology that enables similar efficiency of use across all existing areas. OLED displays can be made cost effective for use in cell phone displays and as well laptop or desktop monitor displays or even large tv displays. Unlike CRT and Plasma which are fixed to specific use cases (neither can be used on Laptop's or cell phones for example).

The main advantages of OLED stem from the fact that the technology uses an organic polymer based diode process to create light of the specific color required directly from electron jump events that occur between two materials selected to produce light of a specific frequency. Much like the LED lights that we are all familiar with from their use in power indicators on all sorts of products this method of light production is extremely efficient compared to CRT and Plasma.

Additional advantages of OLED technology lie in the fact that the purity of the produced light enables high gamut displays with very accurate color. Also since light is produced only when it is needed, OLED displays have very high contrast ratio's while offering very high angle of view (unlike LCD's which have significant light fall off due to masking elements in the LCD layers) just like older CRT's. The parsimonious production of light as it is needed and the creation of that light from specific pixel elements means that OLED displays are amazingly power efficient compared to any other technology save for passive technologies like e-ink.

Thus coupled with the requirement for TFT (thin film transistor) backplanes to define the pixel grid of the display, the OLED display technology offers superior performance to the older technologies but comes at an advantage in the characteristics mentioned providing a strong incentive for consumers to purchase the technology (at appreciable cost) over the other technologies once it is released. The strong list of advantages will provide a great impetus for the display manufacturers that plan to start mass producing OLED displays to move to the technology as quickly as possible to take advantage of the strong demand that will arise from the consumer space for such vastly out performing displays.

Currently, small production numbers on small screen areas have shown the power of the advantages mentioned to effect products that they are used in. Several model cell phones have been released using AMOLED displays (active matrix-OLED) these devices are often lauded for two advantages that come directly from using OLED first the color and contrast advantages and second the power frugality advantage which directly enables longer battery life in the cell phone.

The advantages however must be contrasted with several prominent disadvantages which are really so in a relative sense. The first is the fact that AMOLED displays have variable lifetimes for the polymers used for producing each of the 3 primary colors used to produce usually 16 million colors on the true color displays, the most recently perfected polymers for producing blue light have relatively short life times of only 5 years at 8 hours per day utilization before half light output is reached (see wikipedia link below), though continued refinement of the polymers continues apace and will likely quickly eliminate this issue as a factor in the coming years. The next issue lies in the burn in problem that can occur as the differential light production of the pixel elements increases over time, again so long as development continues to find more robust polymers to produce the primary colors (and it does) the average life time for optimal use of these displays can extend beyond a decade matching or exceeding the life times of previous technologies. Also, this is a user adjustable issue as the color of items displayed can vary battery life, use of dark backgrounds being more power efficient than using light ones for example.

Still the main reason that the producers of these products , Samsung, LG, Mitsubishi being big names so far is that stacking a two layer polymer onto a TFT grid is always going to be cheaper than stacking an LCD above a TFT when both are running on a fab line. The reason is that though the TFT cost is the same between the two, the integration cost between the TFT and the OLED or LCD layers is not. OLED's have already been shown to be able to be deposited spray paint like, though these applications are ideally suited for surface area lighting solutions, it is conceivable that a similar method applied to TFT's in some novel way could lead to extremely easy to produce panels from low to high resolutions. The number of innovations being produced to reduce costs on production is quite high this gives the manufacturers an incentive to get going NOW with ramp up and fab retooling efforts to create more OLED displays over waiting for cheaper production methods to arrive. They know that if they could retool their fabs with the snap of a finger they would immediately reduce costs of production versus producing LCD's and plasma's and they could provide those reduced cost displays for a critical time period at a significant price premium versus a competitor who waits to ramp up OLED displays. Secondly, and possibly even a bigger factor is that not only are the costs of producing the AMOLED displays lower than LCD's of the same size but because of the quality advantages there will be an immediate disadvantage to having production capability for LCD's and plasma ONCE the first large AMOLED displays are available. The difference in quality is so obvious and apparent that consumers will simply see no reason to consider buying LCD's or plasma's. This will allow the manufacturers to ramp down those alternate technologies as fast as possible to ramp up more OLED models thus saving more money. Also great savings will be had in the associated variable supply costs for all the current form factors supported by those display technologies that are produced at different form factors, namely LCD's. An LCD that goes into a cell phone still needs a back light but it can't use the same type of CCFL (cold cathode fluorescent light) bulbs used in a laptop LCD and that is different from the CCFL's used in monitors, the variable procurement costs will be eliminated with OLED which have no such auxiliary product and stocking costs,this will realize a significant reduction in total cost between scaled production of the two technologies for different form factors that again gives the manufacturers a strong incentive to ramp over to OLED as quickly as possible.

Thus I predict that the panel makers are ramping up production to exceed their published OLED production goals as doing so enables them to eek out an advantage both in profits and mind share once the stunning glory of these displays is realized by the masses. Case in point is the fact that Samsung is finalizing a fab that can produce 42" panels, assuming 1 year to operation such a fab would be able to go into mass production on panels up to that size by early 2011, it would literally be an over night appearance of OLED displays at an assortment of sizes which makes sense given the major advantage the first producer out the gate is likely to garner.

Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLED

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin-film_transistor

http://www.oled-info.com/

http://www.oled-info.com/barry-young-updates-us-oleds-samsung-sony-lg-and-rumored-apple-device

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_cathode

On the idea of "world wide mush" resulting from "open" development models

2010-01-09T23:15:00.006-05:00

A recent article posted in the Wall Street Journal posits that the collectivization of various types of goods or services created by the internet is long term a damaging trend for human societies.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703481004574646402192953052.html

I think that the author misses truths that have been in place that show that collectivization is not a process that started with the internet but has been with us since we started inventing things.

It seems that Mr. Lanier is not properly defining the contexts under which different problems can benefit or suffer from collectivization. He speaks in general terms of the loss of the potential for creators to extract profit from their work but misses that this is and was true of human civilization since we first picked up a rock to use as a crude hammer. New things make old things obsolete and people MUST adapt to what is displaced (be it a former human performance of that task or use of an older product) so as to maintain relevance.

In some areas collectivization has no peer, the example he mentioned of Wikipedia is a good one. The incentive for contributing to an article is simply self serving but because it is applied over time to an evolving concentration of value (whatever subject topic is being edited) a convergence toward a more full telling of the "truth" of a given topic occurs. Revisions are not random and vandalism in fact engages repair mechanisms that prevent it long term such as closed edits for articles subject to vandalism. Another area where collectivization is great is in social networking where the "likes" and trends of user behavior are tracked and used to determine behavior highly correlated with interest..such as the desire to purchase a given product or go to a given country on vacation. This data can be very useful to marketers for targeting advertisements of for shaping recommendations to a users needs allowing them to spend less time searching and more time finding. The open collaboration model used within the confines of a closed enterprise can lead to massive improvements in the rate of development for companies that use these tools. The productivity gains realized from team collaboration and sharing services similar to the mentioned "Google Wave" are real and benefit the economy. "Mush" is not always the result.

In the hypothetical future that he postulates concerning medical robots displacing the need for many health care workers, the focus of the societies of that time ..from their educational institutions to their Health care facilities should be on the path to presage such change or sit back and go obsolete. The past is filled with examples of both happening, Rolls Royce went from building engines for British planes to building luxury automobiles. Nokia went from a rubber works and mining company 150 years ago to the wireless telecommunications company we know today..these are examples of recognition of the changes that technology forced on society and adapting but at the same time many countless companies didn't adapt and went extinct. The jobs of the people who worked at those companies disappeared and the people had to retool. The same will be true in the future for health care workers when those lithe robots start taking over, the move from physical to mental labor in the form of white color work has been slow and gradual and as things get better people will simply need to find new things to do or become virtually extinct.

It is interesting what happens to society when such virtual extinction takes place, vast oceans of people , their every need catered to by technology...do they become like the humans of the recent film "Wall E" ? or do they become like the Eloi of H.G. Wells "Time Machine" or do people end up more like they did in the nightmare shown in "Soylent Green" ? the answer depends on how well people can retool to whatever is next, whatever need we can serve with our biology that artificial bodies and minds can not...hard to think of anything that fits that boat and that could be reason for worry especially with a rapidly expanding population but I don't anticipate it as a problem for at least another 50 years, in that time we can still retool so that like Nokia we stay relevant despite what the future brings in new Technology. Also because technology is not homogeneous across the globe the lack of technological parity will enable the chance for a mediating market between the demand in poorer regions and supply of advanced technology in the richer ones, this will enable markets that people can exploit for time far beyond 50 years.

The story of a technology conservative...

2010-01-09T16:35:00.004-05:00

I only just last month purchased my first personal cell phone (Samsung Magnet) and that decision pained me..why?

The curse of the Engineer, my training means that I have a bit more awareness of what is possible with a given technology when it is released..so often I find myself refusing to purchase things because I *know* the manufacturers can do much better or that something is coming down the line that will obsolete my current purchase. So rather than suffer the slow trickle of certain technologies I give them time to catch up to my standards.

During the age of VCR's (I was a teen..I reluctantly bought one in HS in the mid 80's but I knew that in 5 - 10 years the DVD would emerge to make it obsolete) so the one I bought (one of those inside the tv models) was my first and only VCR. I had read of the research being done on the DVD technology in electronic magazines available in my H.S. library. I vividly remember seeing a massive washing machine sized monstrosity of circuit boards and wires in a photo claiming this technology a video technology presented on digital compact disc format would 'soon' be in products and about 8 year later in mid 1994, it indeed was. I didn't purchase my first DVD player however until 4 years later or so in 1999 (a dual internal tray unit that I still own) and in 2003 I purchased a second one when I moved into a new apartment. The next generation video tech of HD DVD's I read about in the late 90's and didn't expect to get one any time soon (especially since screens capable of extracting the HD quality were yet on the market and would be expensive for a long time) I still haven't purchased either a "Blueray" (the player tech. I had my money on winning the "format war" that the magazines ranted about (I knew time would solve the problem by having drives that supported both formats just like the CD and DVD drives did before)

The same slow process was was taken with CD's, I bought one CD stereo unit which I still use today (I connected its aux audio to my Television for better sound quality) back in the early 90's...refused to get another one since by about 96' I started using mp3's. Around the same time cell phones started to take off and shrink, by 1999 they were so small as to be able to be held with two fingers (there was a particularly small Motorola unit I remember) ..it was around this time that I started prognosticating on where that tech. was going...that one day would come where the cell phone had a screen, input methods and other functionality and I'd wait until one of those came along before buying my own. The closest culmination of that idea was the Iphone released 3 years ago but still I didn't pull the trigger (I hate Apples proprietary strategy) and wanted a more open pc like platform for wireless devices. I remember vividly the hardware and software fiefdomes that were present as supposedly winning strategies in the early 80's. All computer makers had their own set of unique hardware that they built their devices around, many from model to model used different components, the idea of modularity was not in their best interest as keeping the customer locked into the hardware and software dependence seemed like the more profitable strategy. It actually took outside forces and the hacking community to open up the process and ironically enable computers to become the commodity , cheap and ubiquitous devices they are today. The reverse engineering of the relatively modular design of the IBM AT enabled costs for the common protocols used on the motherboard and slot architecture for the expansion cards to be amortized over dozens of Asia based manufacturers while still allowing the produced "clones" to run Windows software. This fueled the spread of windows off of the IBM machines and onto the clones and the reduced price of the clones brought the consumer into the space of buying pc. Before this act, the IBM models were expensive business focused computers but the cloning of the AT set in motion a change that soon enabled "pc's" to beat their proprietary competitors which included Apple, Atari, Commodore and several others. See this post for more on how this history is relevant to Apple and cell phones today.

The handheld computer capable of doing anything I would want in a dedicated device was the dream I held out for and we are finally at the point where such devices are being produced but there is still a huge problem that prevents a technology conservative like myself from moving forward aggressively with purchases in the space. The obscene cost for service, the wireless providers have created an ominious set of service options and plans and force users to stay in contracts when really they should be nothing more than a dumb pipe provider just as the cable companies should be for delivery of data to the home. The consumer should be able to purchase a wireless device add to it the necessary radio for the service they wish to use and then pay a single data access fee. It is particularly egregious to me that the providers charge more for data than for voice (an absurd irony that can only be truly appreciated by any one who knows how much more easily data can be compressed compared to voice) in fact there should be no such thing as a distinction as even voice is digitized and sent over a packet network over the air. Yes, you are being over charged for all those texting "minutes" so I refused to eh...bend over as it were for that treatment until the need for a phone just to triangulate with friends and family (it is very convenient) kept nagging and I finally pulled the trigger on the Magnet...which thanks to the plan option I am under only cost $27 US...it's a frustrating phone to do anything but make phone calls with but that is all I bought it for...until the nirvana of a powerful wireless device with a pay one price data rate comes out I will stick with it. Let's see how long it takes ;)

The final example of my technology conservative nature is exemplified by the recent order of a 23" LCD monitor for my workhorse computer towers (connected to a KVM). This will be my first LCD monitor/TV of any sort and like the other areas I waited so long to let prices come down and the technology move up to where it was better than CRT. Also, I tend to use my video cards at 1600 x 12000 pixel resolution or better and on a 19" that means very small text and my eyes can get strained from reading text that small for hours at a time. Though today LCD panels are thin and bright and relatively cheap (the 23" model coming only cost $208) there is another technology on the horizon that will change *everything* , the coming OLED panel revolution gave me a moments pause about buying this 23" model..but since it was so cheap and it will improve my productivity and save my eyes..I decided it was worth the investment. I started reading about OLED nearly 10 years ago, an article in Scientific American discussed the use of a bio-molecule called bacteriorodopsin extracted from a type of jelly fish that could be made to fluoresce with the right current applied. This was postuled as a great "pixel" for a future panel...fast forward and the hardware issues required to make such panels in color have all been addressed while simultaneously ensuring a very cheap production process (unlike LCD and Plasma) , high resolution, incredibly lower power output...in short the holy grail of display technologies. In 5 years 80" OLED wall panels will be routine and they *should* be very cheap to boot. *Sigh* I'll probably still bemoan my choice to buy this LCD so soon to the OLED attack in two years when the first huge and gorgeous and flat OLED models seriously ramp up in size and down in cost but oh well ...technology marches on!

Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_AT

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp3

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLED_display

The coming Lap-pad attack..

2010-01-05T02:04:00.002-05:00

(The following are reasons I quickly cited in response to an article posted at SAI here, I plan on writing another post to expand on the significance of OLED to come for other areas of technology.)

**Posted questions**

1. People are not interested in reading anymore
2. Any PC, heck smartphone can get all the news you want. I have at least 200 RSS feeds currently!
3. The content is just not there. Why buy a magazine for things you read about a month earlier online?

***

To your point: 1) People are reading now more than ever, they just aren't reading books, magazines and newspapers they are online reading blogs, links, articles and chat room transcripts. A tablet enables the old format of reading a book or a magazine to merge with the digital medium. Imagine a magazine that you "read" on a tablet but where the images can be tapped to play video, the links expand to side stories, the "pages" slide and swipe across the display as the "reading" process commences. Apple sees an opportunity here to do exactly what they did for music, provide the music producers a place to showcase their "traditional" media at a price that people were willing to play for because of the scope of offerings and the convenience of access. This is exactly what the Istore did with mp3's which had begun to seriously eat into industry profits but now thanks to the Istore have allowed many companies to eek out an existence over going extinct.

To point 2) You can sit for an hour reading things on your smart phone? Would you want to? For the smart phones with pinch and zoom (like the Iphone) the process of constantly sliding the screen to read the text at the desired size is annoying and battery life suffers. People find the convenience of being able to access the web or read documents on a smart fun awesome, it's a huge advantage over how it was a few years ago with WAP phones but it is still not mated to how people like to "read" real content...a tablet will firmly merge the two worlds and there is definitely a niche for it.

To point 3) The internet is there, the tablets wlll access it...instant content! The new ways of displaying existing magazines to take advantage of the new format will happen very quickly...in fact I've already seen models of digital magazine reading paradigms (there is a youtube video of one that was going around last week I'll post if i find it)...in the mean time the tablet is going to be perfect for doing all the normal things you do with your laptop. Surfing the web, navigating, playing games (it will really open a new class of games that expand on what you can do with a Ipod touch game).

To your question "why buy a magazine for things yo uread about a month earlier online?" I respond with another also asked before the Ipod.

"Why buy mp3's when I can download them free from napster, bit torrent, aries or a bunch of other free ware sites?"

The answer: convenience and if the price is right people will pay a non zero price to get that convenience. Apple realized this with their .99 price point for mp3's and that brilliance enabled the later success of the Iphone. You have to look at this progression in their choices....

Now one more thing on how the time for this technology is now, though the first pads to come will surely be LED backed LCD displays we are on the verge of a MASSIVE change over to the most advanced display technology ever, OLED. The OLED ramp up is being initiated in force by all the major semiconductor and panel makers because of how game changing the technology is on the performance, life time, form factor, efficiency fronts. Starting pad development now enables Apple to be in line for a gen 2 or 3 device with a nice bright OLED screen , the space taken up by the current LED backed LCD's as thin as they are is going to be several times more than that used in a brighter, bigger , more dynamic and energy efficient OLED. The savings in production costs can then go into packing beefier processors while still realizing insane battery life, it will also enable packing the kitchen sink into the pad, GPS, accelerometer, IR...all things I'd want in a pad especially if it could give me 10 hours of continuous use and would not fatigue my arm while carrying it about (every where!).

In 5 years these pads are going to be everywhere and laptops will be the rare beast, remember you read it here first. ;)

Why I think the Google Phone is poised to shake up mobile

2009-12-13T17:39:00.002-05:00

The whispers of a Google branded wireless device have been out for years, before Android was announced many bloggers and tech. journalists prognosticated on Gooogle's entry in the space with a branded handset. However, when Google did enter the space it did it vicariously through the development of the open source Linux based and now rapidly maturing "Android" operating system. To some the rise of Android started slow but I was confident before even the first phone using the OS arrived that it was poised to open the wireless handheld space wide open. I posted my reasons for this in a post in late 2008.

Today the phone is seeing rapid adoption by handheld makers, Motorola has redesigned its entire line of phones around Android. HTC has a couple of compelling options using its take of Android using the "Sense UI" and talk of dozens of other Android based phones to debut next year hint at 2010 being the year that the Android Tsunami storm surge hits the shores of the wireless market. In this time of what will be intense competition , why would Google still decide to create it's own branded hardware for a wireless device. Here are the reason I think they are doing it.

Google has always embraced open standards and approaches to their software and services, the recent bundling of free turn by turn GPS navigation with Google Maps with the Motorola Droid hints at the open view that they are taking. Their whole thing is providing a service and then finding a way to monetize it unobtrusively with ads. We saw this with search, we are watching it develop with mapping (Google Earth), we have seen it with GMail and now we are going to see it in the handheld space. That said, they probably look at the existing market of closed down , silo'd devices in the wireless space with disdain. I know I do, despite being involved in cutting edge developments for the last 10 years I went without a cell phone because as a purist, I felt none of them gave me the freedom I am looking for, basically what I want is a laptop in a touch screen handheld device that allows me to do all the things a laptop can do plus all the things that a smart phone can do, that means REAL web browsing (not that WAP crap I coded feeds for back in 2000) , it means real support for applications running on the device and for RIA's fed through the browser, it means my choice of media playing capability (video, audio, image) and control over the available hard drive space on the device to do with as I please. It means ability to connect the device to a computer and transfer files to and from it without anything more special than a mini usb adapter. It means a user serviceable access to battery and removable memory. It means a customizable interface that I can configure just as I do my XP desktop and all of this spiced up with what we've come to expect in a smart phone, multi-touch screen,accelerometers, GPS, bluetooth, wifi and cell radios for all the major 3G network technologies so that I can tie the phone to any provider I want without being locked in to over priced service options.

I think Google's phone is meant to be a shot across the bow of all the companies that have so far made Android phones to show them just how open the OS can really be when mated to hardware that harnesses that openness, almost to shame them into really unleashing the OS (though to be honest the Motorola Droid pretty much achieves 90% of what I want in a handheld today...it will be interesting to see if the Google phone can top over that 90%)

It's funny how companies feel that the user is satisfied with the closed off artificial environments and differentiations they create, they didn't learn from the pc example that not all people want those limitations, power users want total control and there still isn't a smart phone that provides that level of control...Google may put the pressure on them to start getting serious. I'd really be happy if Google is able to get a deal with a carrier that doesn't differentiate between voice and data , that's a canard that any hardware engineer knows is yet another artificial boundary created by the telecoms to have reason to bundle services in ways that people don't want and over charge them for things they don't want. It is a vestige from an inefficient time when voice and data were separate beasts, that time is long gone but the telecoms are still charging as if it is not. It should be one plan over which I can do what I want, a la cart just like my monthly payment for one fiber line to my house via FiOS that feeds my voice, tv and internet needs, after all on the back end it is all "data" anyway it is time for the savings the telecoms got in consolidating on fiber years ago to finally reflect in lower prices of service (which hasn't really happened).

Novel idea, imagine a phone that is open as mentioned above and ad supported for every feature with a low monthly access fee, I'd bet the phones would make enough money on ads to pay for the data services. Just as the infrastructure of a web site that uses ads as it's primary revenue stream amortizes the costs of running the necessary servers by the revenue derived from the ads. If you see the phone itself as "infrastructure" and you enable it to deliver ads , the revenue derived from millions of users of the various services built on it maybe able to pay for the entire infrastructure chain (phones, bandwidth for plans, touch points to the net) this might be what Google is aiming for and the best way to move the industry to it is to do it and show that it works. If they succeed I think they would have come close to the level of audacity they showed when they came out of no where thinking they could do search better than the giants of the internet back in 1999, they were right then and if they are thinking along the lines of what is described above I am sure they'll be right again...10 years later. In any event, the coming year will be filled with new Android products and lots of competition for user share that should bring prices down, the Google Phone in the mix will likely help put more downward pressure on those prices and that for the consumer is a very good thing.

AgilEntity framework: Open Code Challenge #1

2009-12-07T17:20:00.004-05:00

In an effort to showcase the self management capabilities of the AgilEntity framework these open code challenges will periodically be run to highlight how AgilEntity enables a new secure, collaborative development paradigm. Here’s how they work, below 5 user accounts have been created with workflow participation and view permissions established to several jsp templates of the AgilEntity platform, these templates contain the actual code that runs on the associated pages that the user accounts will be able to execute by navigating to them on the UI once logged in. The view permissions on each template enables the logged in user to make changes to the code and then submit those changes for update on the actual run time template file. The Action Oriented Workflow system takes care of the rest, enabling the changes to be routed to an agent (me) for evaluation of the solution provided in the code.

Here’s how the contest will work.

1) First, use one of the user accounts below to login to the development node on the AE cluster I’ve installed here: https://apriority.dyndns.biz/login.jsp?node=1&siteid=1

(you may get an ssl cert. warning, make an exception for it in your browser to proceed or get rid of the “s” in “https” and use the insecure link)

Username:

Scorpius

Aries

Aquarius

Libra

Password for all usernames: occoder09

2) View the available challenges (below); they come directly from the feedback page for the numeroom.com development site and are very easy. All the user accounts above will be given “view” permissions to all the necessary system templates to actually fix the problems posed.

3) After selecting a problem, view the associated suggested template(s) where the code changes are to be done and make your changes, since many of the changes are UI related that makes it easy.

4) You’ll have to test your changes in your own environment, simply eliminate any calls to AE API functions in your test environment and test away.

5) Integrate your changes into the templates making sure not to change any dynamic functionality, reasonably good separation between “view” code and “controller” code makes this easy. Use the javadoc for the Utilities class to find useful utilities in the AE API to minimize having to code new functions that already exist in the API, solutions that use the API methods will be judged over those that do not unless they are actually more efficient.

6) Write a Memo containing the following information:

· Name

· Email address

· Problem selected (indicate the problem title)

· Short summary of changes/additions.

7) Important! Make sure to press “save” in the template window to save your included change to the working object and then submit your change to the update workflow by pressing “update to workflow”. Each person is allowed one entry per challenge problem so if you have multiple solutions, pick the best one and submit it.

8) After the challenge period is over, the submitted entries will be evaluated and the winner selected per challenge.

Rules:

1) Since there are only 5 coder accounts, show some courtesy when using them. You should only login 2 times, 4 time at most. First, to view/get the code for the templates associated with the challenge(s) you are solving and then later to upload your solution and submit to the update workflow. As such authentications that last more than 30 minutes will attract administrative attention, if the same ip logs in excessively (more than 6) or stays logged in for too long the ip will be silently disqualified from the challenge even if you subsequently submit code, so be courteous of others wanting to use the accounts to get and submit challenge code. All the accounts have full auditing as shown in this video so big brother is watching you, play fair!

2) Payment method to winners will be via paypal exclusively, so if you don’t have a paypal account and you want to get paid, set one up now..you can still win but you won't get paid if you don't have an account.

3) It is possible for a user account to have a session extend beyond the challenge end date, the coder accounts will automatically deactivate at the end of this date, you must submit your code before the challenge end date even if you are logged in when the deadline passes.

Now, take a look at the feedback page:

[https://numeroom.uservoice.com/pages/24288-general?lang=en&utm_campaign=Widgets&utm_content=tab-widget&utm_medium=widget&utm_source=numeroom.uservoice.com]

The items included in this challenge will follow along with a little guidance on how to proceed with a solution:

Challenge problem 1:

Coloring the conference room

https://numeroom.uservoice.com/pages/24288-general/suggestions/394207-coloring-the-conference-room?ref=title

Templates to modify:

conf.jsp , econf.jsp

Templates to view:

Prize:

$25 to paypal account.

Suggestions:

For conference rooms currently the user must specify hexadecimal values for selecting their table and background color customizations. This is so 1999…update it to use a javascript color picker widget that enables selecting the color by eye that populates the respective form fields with the hex for update.

Challenge problem 2:

Export table files via zip archive

https://numeroom.uservoice.com/pages/24288-general/suggestions/396962-add-a-way-to-export-all-files-from-a-table-in-a-zip-file-to-prevent-individual-downloads-?ref=title

Templates to modify:

conf.jsp , econf.jsp, im.jsp

Templates to view:

table.jsp

Prize:

$50 to paypal account.

Suggestions:

Ideally a link (stating “make zip bundle”) should appear just below the table section (possibly in the square space just under the table column and adjacent to the message entry field) When clicked this link should compile the current table files into a zip archive that is then deposited into the room (if the table is full or not). The naming of the archive should be of the form “file_bundle.zip”. Methods exist in the Utilities class that already perform zip and unzip of files in a specified directory location, use the “fileZip” method to generate the required bundle file. Also, clicking the link should provide a download dialog to allow the generated bundle to be downloaded on click of the link.

Challenge problem 3:

Fix the smilies…

https://numeroom.uservoice.com/pages/24288-general/suggestions/268117-fix-the-smilies-?ref=title

Templates to modify:

conf.jsp , econf.jsp, im.jsp, iml.jsp, gim.jsp

Templates to view:

Prize:

$25 to paypal account.

Suggestions:

Modify the current smiley box to enable click and insert behavior . Currently the desired icon key sequence must be selected in an awkward manner…turn this into a box that automatically generates and inserts the key sequence for the smiley into the message box using some javascript eliminating the need to actually select the key sequence.

The Challenge will start when the user accounts above are automatically activated by the system on:

Monday , December 7 at 7 am EDT

, the challenge will end when the user accounts all deactivate, 7 days later on

Monday December 14 at 7 pm EDT

A NYC moment: Random act of Kindness

2009-12-06T13:34:00.003-05:00

NYC is a place of wonders that continues to surprise me with how easily the trendy, elite and technologically advanced could buttress the mundane, downtrodden and unfortunate. Often as I walk the streets scanning faces set in stone, flowing in the endless waves of people that mark the city scape with their darting , halting and ever meandering life lines, I think of the stories that all these people have, the places they have been and the places they are going. Last night, after a great time spent with old and new friends at a Village bar near 14th st. as if often the case for me after imbibing a good amount of alcohol and having danced the night away, I had the munchies. Unfortunately, the night of revelry ensured that I had no cash to buy the pizza so the hunt for an ATM was on the way, in the city that usually means a walk of no more than a block and sure enough a block later I found a Chase ATM.

I entered and began my transaction , as I finished I noticed motion in the peripheral area of my right side and was startled to see a young woman sitting there on 3 satchel's reading a paper. It was obvious from her appearance that she was homeless, though she was not overly disheveled. As I made light of the fact that she was in an ATM hall where she would otherwise not be allowed to stay, I inquired about her circumstance and how it was that she ended up homeless, her name was Sarah. She told me of her move to New York from South Florida and in the process betrayed disappointment in her parents and her one older sister, both of whom from which she was estranged. As we continued to talk about various ranging topics it was obvious she was an intelligent person, familiar with disparate occurrences both locally and nationally and internationally. After some time I told her I was on my way to a pizza joint and asked if she'd like something to eat. She hesitated and then agreed, as we left the ATM hall she mentioned another pizza place a block further from where I was originally going. We headed there and I let her order what she wanted, she opted for two slices with chicken and broccoli and a bottle of coke. As we ate we continued to talk and on our way out I over heard a table of patrons speaking a language I couldn't identify, as Sarah came to the doorway I asked her if she could identify the language, she didn't proffer a guess but I guessed Icelandic, to which the patrons told me "a little bit south" and Sarah responded "Dutch", to which they agreed. She apparently had spent some time in Europe, as we wished the patrons a good visit to NYC we left the store and walked toward the subway.

I was happy that I was able to provide a slice of joy in what is doubtless a difficult life on the street, during our talks I got the possibility that she could have been mentally ill as she expressed certain unusual fears about the "pull" of the moon on our walk to the station but she is just another human being trying to make it in this city that never sleeps. I shook her hand and wished her much success on her goals of trying to get out of her current situation and she wished me success in my endeavors and down I went into the bowels of the city. I'll probably never see her again but it feels really great to have performed a self less random act of kindness during this holiday season (not that I would not have done it any other time) and in particular this economic turmoil, helping others when one has no reason to is an act that is its own payment.