Engineering School

David Wong gives 5 reasons the Future will be Ruled by the BullShit of Artificial Scarcity. Everything from that second tier to the capstone (of Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs), they can get at a cost that rounds down to zero, if they so choose... The future is going to hang on whether or not businesses will be able to convince you to pay money for things you can otherwise get for free. (So maybe a Basic Income can go further than you might expect...)

Oligarchy ruled by the rich. (more)

OmidyarNet is shutting down. (more)

I had been noticing how slow this WikiLog was performing for months. I finally realized that Blue Host has been "CpuThrottling" the server - 90% of the time! They weren't able, at least in a couple emails, to narrow it down beyond it being MoinMoin (duh), nor did they tell me anything that gave me a clue to go looking after (most of their documentation on it is about slow MySQL queries). (more)

Melanie Kahl on building a Schooling Curriculum around Design Thinking. *In this series, we will explore what it means to export various lenses of design in learning settings. From empowerment to empathy and iteration to co-creation–– how might we better illuminate this fertile intersection of design and learning? (more)

author (more)

Teresa Torres: How to Set Goals (Goal Setting) That Drive Product Success - Product Talk (more)

Given my SimpleNote hassles, and my new Nexus Seven Tablet, and Phil Jones nagging me about jumping to the WikiFarm category in Picking A Wiki For Your Private Notebook, I want to take a shot at using Drop Box as a Data Synch system for my Private Wiki instead of SimpleNote. (more)

PunchKick: UX and AI: using artificial intelligence research to build smart products (more)

Michael Crichton against Environmentalism. I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from Propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the Information Age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance... As an example of this challenge, I want to talk today about environmentalism... I think our past record of environmental action is discouraging, to put it mildly, because even our best intended efforts often go awry. But I think we do not recognize our past failures, and face them squarely. And I think I know why. I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human Social Structure-s (Social System) always reappear. They can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is Religion... Paul Ehrlich: 60 million Americans will die of starvation in the 1980s... With so many past failures, you might think that environmental predictions would become more cautious. But not if it's a religion... Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century history of America... I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it. I can tell you that the evidence for Global Warming is far weaker than its proponents would ever admit. I can tell you the percentage the US land area that is taken by Urbanization, including cities and roads, is 5%. I can tell you that the Sahara desert is shrinking, and the total ice of Antarctica is increasing... Religions think they know it all, but the unhappy truth of the environment is that we are dealing with incredibly complex, evolving systems (Complex System), and we usually are not certain how best to proceed. Those who are certain are demonstrating their personality type, or their belief system, not the state of their knowledge.... At this moment, the EPA is hopelessly politicized. In the wake of Carol Browner, it is probably better to shut it down and start over. What we need is a new organization much closer to the FDA... Because in the end, science (Scientific Method) offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost.

Nonverbal communication is the process of communication through sending and receiving wordless (mostly visual) cues between people. It is sometimes mistakenly referred to as body language (kinesics), but nonverbal communication encompasses much more, such as use of voice (paralanguage), touch (Haptic-s), distance (proxemics), and physical environments/appearance.[1] Typically overlooked in nonverbal communication are proxemics, or the informal space around the body and chronemics: the use of time. Not only considered eye contact, oculesics comprises the actions of looking while talking and listening, frequency of glances, patterns of fixation, pupil dilation, and blink rate. Even speech contains nonverbal elements known as paralanguage, including voice quality, rate, pitch, volume, and speaking style, as well as prosodic features such as rhythm, intonation, and stress. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonverbal_communication

see Home-School

Haptics is any form of Non-Verbal communication involving touch. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haptics (more)

Cost estimates on the Medicare Prescription Drugs benefit bill were kept hidden from Congress. Richard Foster, the chief actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said Friday night that he received a handwritten note from Thomas Scully, then the centers' administrator, in early June ordering him to ignore information requests from members of Congress who were drafting the drug bill... When George W Bush signed the bill in December the drug benefit bore a $395 billion price tag. In January, the president's Federal Budget director, Joshua Bolten, upped the estimate by $139 billion. (more)

lite To-Do List/list manager (List Making) - subset of BaseCamp (more)

Propaganda is a form of communication aimed towards influencing the attitude of the community toward some cause or position by presenting only one side of an argument. Propaganda statements may be partly false and partly true. Propaganda is usually repeated and dispersed over a wide variety of media in order to create the chosen result in audience attitudes As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda, in its most basic sense, presents information primarily to influence an audience. Propaganda often presents facts selectively (thus possibly lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis, or uses loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented. The desired result is a change of the attitude toward the subject in the target audience to further a political, religious or commercial agenda. Propaganda can be used as a form of ideological or commercial warfare. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda (more)

When you think you're making the Moral stand to Do No Harm, but you're just doing nothing (more)

David Brin has made the point that lots of the Mass Media consumed in the US carries the propaganda messages of Suspicion Of Authority and Tolerance (2002-10-15-BrinLibertarian). This theme is so prevalent, and so obvious, that even though you can probably see where I am going with this - and hate the inevitable conclusion - you aren't going to dispute the core fact. You have to sit there and accept one of the most galling things that a bunch of dedicated individualists can ever realize - that you were trained to be individualists by the most relentless campaign of public indoctrination in history, suckling your love of rebellion and eccentricity from a society that - evidently, at some level - wants you to be that way! But another theory is that this is more of a release valve, like the princes in Saudi Arabia giving money to the Extremist Islam schools to try and buy some peace...

aka Psy Op (more)