The Story of Data

via

Everywhere you look, the quantity of information in the world is soaring. Mankind created approximately 150 exabytes (billion gigabytes) of data in 2005. In 2010 it created 1,200 exabytes. Merely keeping up with this flood, and storing the bits tåhat might be useful, is difficult enough. Analysing it, to spot patterns and extract useful information, is harder still. Even so, the data deluge is already starting to transform business, government, science and everyday life. It has great potential for good—as long as consumers, companies and governments make the right choices about when to restrict the flow of data, and when to encourage it. _Big Data

Modern societies are desperately dependent upon their data processing infrastructure. Should something happen to bring down that infrastructure -- such as a massive EMP that knocked out power grids for a year or so -- people might find it difficult to adapt quickly to the change.

Clueless Clown, Hapless Harlequin, Zombie King

A combination of wishful thinking and abject stupidity has landed the US (and the world) in a toxic pit of hazard. It is bad enough having an inexperienced, incompetent, and ideologically blindered clown of a president in control. Unfortunately, the US Congress is led by a group of corrupt and unscrupulous quasi-criminals the likes of which has not been seen in well over a century of government corruption in the US. To top it off, everyone that Obama appoints to the executive and to the courts appears to share in these global Obama-style inadequacies and failure to lead responsibly. This will be a very rough 4 years. Even a radical rearrangement of the House of Representatives in 2010 will not be enough to reverse the destruction of Obama's first 6 months, let alone the next two years. Decades will be required to recover from this episode of failure by American voters and media.

Abandoning a Nuclear Deterrent Out of Wishful Thinking

Obama's War On Business

Obama's Recovery Plan Can Only Fail

Obama Prefers the UN to the US

Entering an Obama Dark Age

China's Support for Jihad in Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan



H/T Reverse Spins

Is the UK Education Debacle to be the Future of Education in the United States?

The UK is fading as an important world power. Its human capital is being squandered, its very foundation of potential accomplishment allowed to crumble from neglect. The government pushes adolescents to attend university, but then stands by and watches as more and more choose nonsense courses that leave them without income potential are useful knowledge. Is this what Barak Obama wishes to emulate, to make the US "more like Europe and the rest of the world?"

In Reform's report, it said the drift was leading to a skills shortage in the UK, forcing many firms to rely on foreign labour...."Removing individual involvement and decisions from the process has the danger of undermining the values of successful education - personal discipline, curiosity, independence of thought and hard work," said the report.

"It has helped to create a something for nothing culture. One result is the growth of spoon-fed generation that wants to receive education passively and without effort. This generation prefers the X-Factor to A grades."

...Just 6.2 per cent of British university degrees are in engineering, manufacturing and construction, compared to more than nine per cent in North American and 15 per cent in continental Europe, said the study. _Telegraph

If you provide an environment for adolescents to hang out, drinking and using drugs, with free hooking up privileges, taking nonsense classes and generally wasting themselves into oblivion, most young people will take you up on the offer. Particularly if nothing in their past has instilled into them any deeper sense of values or self-motivation.

For the past few decades, at least, the adults of society have been distracted from the function of mind-formation of youth. Consequently, the youths have raised themselves into perpetual adolescence, of a most incompetent and self-destructive nature. Are you surprised at the outcome?

It appears that rather than lifting up the third world, the first world is heading downward itself.

H/T An Englishman's Castle

Bees Rules of Order

The bees' rules for decision-making--

• seek a diversity of options,
• encourage a free competition among ideas,
• and use an effective mechanism to narrow choices

—so impressed Seeley that he now uses them at Cornell as chairman of his department.

Source

National Geographic brings us a fascinating article on natural "swarming", the behaviours of ants, bees, birds, bats, penguins and other citizens of the natural world. Scientists and engineers are hoping to learn from natural swarming behaviour, to design robots that swarm.

Commerce and Industry hope to learn from swarming behaviour to improve the bottom line--make their operations more efficient and profitable. Bureaucrats and department heads want to bring order to bureaucratic chaos. They want to learn from nature's swarms too.

"In biology, if you look at groups with large numbers, there are very few examples where you have a central agent," says Vijay Kumar, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. "Everything is very distributed: They don't all talk to each other. They act on local information. And they're all anonymous. I don't care who moves the chair, as long as somebody moves the chair. To go from one robot to multiple robots, you need all three of those ideas."


....Within five years Kumar hopes to put a networked team of robotic vehicles in the field. One purpose might be as first responders. "Let's say there's a 911 call," he says. "The fire alarm goes off. You don't want humans to respond. You want machines to respond, to tell you what's happening. Before you send firemen into a burning building, why not send in a group of robots?"

Taking this idea one step further, Marco Dorigo's group in Brussels is leading a European effort to create a "swarmanoid," a group of cooperating robots with complementary abilities: "foot-bots" to transport things on the ground, "hand-bots" to climb walls and manipulate objects, and "eye-bots" to fly around, providing information to the other units.

The military is eager to acquire similar capabilities. On January 20, 2004, researchers released a swarm of 66 pint-size robots into an empty office building at Fort A. P. Hill, a training center near Fredericksburg, Virginia. The mission: Find targets hidden in the building.

Zipping down the main hallway, the foot-long (0.3 meter) red robots pivoted this way and that on their three wheels, resembling nothing so much as large insects. Eight sonars on each unit helped them avoid collisions with walls and other robots. As they spread out, entering one room after another, each robot searched for objects of interest with a small, Web-style camera. When one robot encountered another, it used wireless network gear to exchange information. ("Hey, I've already explored that part of the building. Look somewhere else.")

In the back of one room, a robot spotted something suspicious: a pink ball in an open closet (the swarm had been trained to look for anything pink). The robot froze, sending an image to its human supervisor. Soon several more robots arrived to form a perimeter around the pink intruder. Within half an hour, all six of the hidden objects had been found.

...."It's much harder for a predator to avoid being spotted by a thousand fish than it is to avoid being spotted by one," says Daniel Grünbaum, a biologist at the University of Washington. "News that a predator is approaching spreads quickly through a school because fish sense from their neighbors that something's going on."

When a predator strikes a school of fish, the group is capable of scattering in patterns that make it almost impossible to track any individual. It might explode in a flash, create a kind of moving bubble around the predator, or fracture into multiple blobs, before coming back together and swimming away.

Animals on land do much the same, as Karsten Heuer, a wildlife biologist, observed in 2003, when he and his wife, Leanne Allison, followed the vast Porcupine caribou herd (Rangifer tarandus granti) for five months. Traveling more than a thousand miles (1,600 kilometers) with the animals, they documented the migration from winter range in Canada's northern Yukon Territory to calving grounds in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

"It's difficult to describe in words, but when the herd was on the move it looked very much like a cloud shadow passing over the landscape, or a mass of dominoes toppling over at the same time and changing direction," Karsten says. "It was as though every animal knew what its neighbor was going to do, and the neighbor beside that and beside that. There was no anticipation or reaction. No cause and effect. It just was."

One day, as the herd funneled through a gully at the tree line, Karsten and Leanne spotted a wolf creeping up. The herd responded with a classic swarm defense.

...For each caribou, the stakes couldn't have been higher, yet the herd's evasive maneuvers displayed not panic but precision. (Imagine the chaos if a hungry wolf were released into a crowd of people.) Every caribou knew when it was time to run and in which direction to go, even if it didn't know exactly why. No leader was responsible for coordinating the rest of the herd. Instead each animal was following simple rules evolved over thousands of years of wolf attacks.

That's the wonderful appeal of swarm intelligence. Whether we're talking about ants, bees, pigeons, or caribou, the ingredients of smart group behavior—decentralized control, response to local cues, simple rules of thumb—add up to a shrewd strategy to cope with complexity.

"We don't even know yet what else we can do with this," says Eric Bonabeau, a complexity theorist and the chief scientist at Icosystem Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "We're not used to solving decentralized problems in a decentralized way. We can't control an emergent phenomenon like traffic by putting stop signs and lights everywhere. But the idea of shaping traffic as a self-organizing system, that's very exciting."

Social and political groups have already adopted crude swarm tactics. During mass protests eight years ago in Seattle, anti-globalization activists used mobile communications devices to spread news quickly about police movements, turning an otherwise unruly crowd into a "smart mob" that was able to disperse and re-form like a school of fish.

The biggest changes may be on the Internet. Consider the way Google uses group smarts to find what you're looking for. When you type in a search query, Google surveys billions of Web pages on its index servers to identify the most relevant ones. It then ranks them by the number of pages that link to them, counting links as votes (the most popular sites get weighted votes, since they're more likely to be reliable). The pages that receive the most votes are listed first in the search results. In this way, Google says, it "uses the collective intelligence of the Web to determine a page's importance."

Wikipedia, a free collaborative encyclopedia, has also proved to be a big success, with millions of articles in more than 200 languages about everything under the sun, each of which can be contributed by anyone or edited by anyone. "It's now possible for huge numbers of people to think together in ways we never imagined a few decades ago," says Thomas Malone of MIT's new Center for Collective Intelligence. "No single person knows everything that's needed to deal with problems we face as a society, such as health care or climate change, but collectively we know far more than we've been able to tap so far."

Self-organising behaviour of the hive depends upon individual behaviour, on a large scale. Each individual must know how to act responsibly and competently, or the entire group may be lost.

Understanding that principle helps us understand the importance of developing childhood competence, and avoiding excessive psychological neoteny and academic lobotomy. Parenting is vital, and competent education is important. There is no room for wasted generations.

Creating Obsolete Kids--Education with Incompetence in MInd

Q and O blog points to a NY Daily News article by Sol Stern about new "social justice" curriculum in middle schools.

The root of the problem is "social justice" education. It starts in teacher preparation programs, where rigorous training in math, science and literacy takes a backseat to theories about victimization and inequality. Teachers-to-be are told that conventional instruction is an outgrowth of capitalist oppression; "true" education helps students see the unfairness all around them and challenge society to change.

But it doesn't stop there. Far too many New York City public schools - including some of the new small schools created by Chancellor Joel Klein and funded with money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation - distort education by imbuing social justice into everything they do.

Source.

Q and O then goes on to comment on the phenomenon of political indoctrination of children into dysfunctional ideologies:

There's a propensity among educators to reinvent education every decade or so. I'm not sure why except each decade a new generation of educators are in the position to make changes and feel compelled to do so. There has also been a movement away from what previously worked - in terms of providing a student with the basic tools needed to be literate as well as assimilate into our civic culture - and more toward exactly what Stern notes. I don't know a thing about these three schools except what Stern writes, but in each, I don't see much of a focus on education, or at least not what I consider education. It's almost like the cart is before the horse. What good is an understanding of activism and "social justice" if you can't read the poster announcing the next peace rally?

Again this seems a logical outgrowth of the multiculturalism movement who's basic premise is the need for "social justice". But probably a larger and more important need than hearing one side of the social justice story is that of getting a good basic education. The school day is a finite amount of hours. The more "social justice" finds its way into the curriculum, the less time there is for math, science, reading, literature, writing and other core subjects necessary to enable someone to maneuver successfully in this society.

Source.

Of course this type of indoctrination into dysfunctionality began in the universities, but it has wasted little time working its way down the ladder to high schools and middle schools. It is clear that people who are indoctrinated in the "social justice" ideologies are less able to reason effectively in the real world. This method of inculcating incompetence into children has a delayed effect on society, but the effect is real--generations can be lost, and social stratification becomes ever worse.

Of course if dysfunctional education creates a large enough underclass, it will be possible to elect leaders such as Hugo Chavez as president of the US, or prime minister of Canada. Imagine when the wealthiest and most powerful nations on earth become third world dictatorships like Venezuela. To quote the wicked witch, "what a world, what a world!"

Stunted Growth: Perpetual Incompetence

Here is where the modern trend is taking us: as soon as parents take a newborn home from the hospital, they sign it up for infant-school. From the start, parents drop the infant off at school in the morning and pick it up in the evening, being careful to check its diapers. From birth on, school continues uninterrupted for the little tyke as it progresses through toddler stage, on into traditional K-12 schooling. The high school graduate progresses directly into university, achieving its undergraduate degree (of little value on its own), and progressing to graduate school.

Graduate school can never take too long, so it will be extended over several decades until retirement age. The late middle-aged student will now graduate from school, so as to go directly on retirement pension. Longer lifespans will carry the retiree on for two or three decades of well-pensioned retirement, before mandated euthanasia--to make way for newer generations.

Lifelong students, without any of the unwelcome requirement for employment or risk of running a business. There will be plenty of breaks and vacations to exotic places, as part of the extended curriculum. But no working will be allowed. Society cannot risk allowing these perpetual students cum retirees to shoulder any real responsibility, since nothing in their backgrounds will have prepared them for it.

Immigrants will do whatever work machines cannot do. Immigrants will drive the students to school through K12 and throughout graduate school, until retirement. Then immigrants will drive retirees between places of interest and their retirement homes. All police departments, fire departments, maintenance and custodial services etc. will be staffed by immigrants.

Whenever the immigrants decide to assimilate, they will step into the student/retiree matriculation as well. Students will form unions and agitate for shorter school weeks, and earlier retirement. That is to be expected, and society will do what is necessary to placate the students, since they will be the largest voting block within society.

All military service will be forbidden, since the military is seen as competition for the educational establishment. Any need for military action will be fulfilled by international troops unter international governmental control. Citizens of North America will not need to dirty their hands with that sort of thing. Likewise, religions will be forbidden, as "confusing and unnecessary intrusions into belief systems" that the education department should control.

All students will receive a stipend, which will help pay local and federal taxes to cover immigrant's salaries, as well as international government taxes. All goods and services will be available at the school store, free of charge to students. Students will live in school housing, provided free of charge. Bussing to and from classes is also free. The few married students will be housed separately, close to infant school.

All television, internet sites, magazines and newspapers, will be run by the Education Department, with content carefully selected so as to increase a student's self esteem and willingness to conform to the common good. All medical and dental services will be provided to students and retirees free of charge by immigrant doctors, nurses, dentists, hygienists and assistants.

I have glossed over how the economic system of this brave neotenous society will work. More on that later.