Re: FW: Data media (was re: Charles Leadbetter)
pete wrote: "Thomas Lunde" [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Just recently, I was reading a posting about all the early computer tapes, discs, hard drives, etc that we are losing for two reasons, one the storage devices are deteriotating and two we are losing the disk drives, operating systems, formats, in which this knowledge was stored. [snip] Each time the data is migrated, the experimenters have to decide what data they feel is worth spending the time to copy, and of course, a lot is discarded. Does this matter? It's hard to say. One could reasonably argue that there is no earthly reason why anyone would ever want to look at old particle physics data tapes again. On the other hand, we still have the log books of experiments from two hundred years ago, and people still like to go back and look at some of the notable ones, those from significant experiments, or famous experimenters. But the people who do this are rarely doing it to check the data, rather they are historians of science or commentators on scientific method. Future counterparts would find very little of value on data tapes. [snip] Certainly astronomy is one science in which this does not apply. I believe contemporary astronomers are still using ancient Babylonian observations to help figure out where the stars are moving. Second, I would like to quote (from defective memory) something Enrico Fermi said ca. 1940, speaking of one cloud chamber photograph from about 1930: He said that had he paid better attention to a certain detail of that picture, he would have made one of his most important discoveries ten years earlier than he did. If the entropy of electronic documents gets bad enough, we may find ourselves losing our history, and becoming in an ironic way like our primary-oral ancestors: With only the present version of a past (bards' tales for them; recent computer files for us -- it is worth noting that the epic poems of primary-oral societies, through various poetic techniques of rhyme, rhythm, etc. implement powerful *Error Detection and Correction* coding -- very much like computer data). \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: Charles Leadbetter
-- From: "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Steve Kurtz [EMAIL PROTECTED] I think we need also to add the enormous entropy of the obsolescence of knowledge. This is sometimes stated more "positively" as a shortening "half-life" of knowledge, so that by the time an engineer has been out of college 10 years, 50% of what (s)he learned is no longer current (or whatever the exact numbers are in each case). (The especial affront of this is that it is not a consequence of "natural processes" outside human control, but of human symbolizing activity.) Thomas: I had just finished my reply to Arthur's Posting re used clothing and was rereading some of the Posts when your comments jumped off the screen. The problem as you have noted is greater even than just material goods, or waste. It is also within our knowledge base. Just recently, I was reading a posting about all the early computer tapes, discs, hard drives, etc that we are losing for two reasons, one the storage devices are deteriotating and two we are losing the disk drives, operating systems, formats, in which this knowledge was stored. Why is this happening? Like material goods, it seems to be a by product of capitalism and continual growth. We may very well become in a position of an advanced society in which there is very little knowledge of how we got there and should there ever be a discontinuity - such as an atomic war, plague or other catasrophe, we may have destroyed the very resources and knowledge we would need to regain our then current position. There is also the problem, as you pointed out of continual learning. It sounds great, but it ain't easy and as you get a little older, the idea is not to keep learning as it is to take what is learned and act wisely from it. Respectfully, Thomas Lunde
Re: Charles Leadbetter
Tom Walker wrote: Context, Steve, context. Your response to Jim Stanford's piece seemed to miss the point that poor-bashing and welfare-bashing have been mainstays of the self-styled individualist, "free market" line since time immemorial. Maybe that's the opinion of some about the actions of a few. But sorry Tom, no literate reader of English could miss the "point" of Stanford's essay. Jim was presenting a "let's put that shoe on the other foot and see how it fits" commentary. That happens to be his style. It's a folksy way of making a point, You mean he uses a "baffle them with BS" style. :-) Are you saying that the end (ire against free market capitalists) justifies any means? Are you saying "Don't confuse me with the facts? it's not intended to be most sophisticated economic analysis. Journalism has an obligation to present clarity and truth as much as humanly possible. His essay is nonsense, I can't fathom you saying otherwise. You ain't no dope. The Fraser Institute issues a "report card" on "economic freedom" and Jim counters with a report card on economic freedom "for the rest of us" -- How do you define "economic freedom", Tom? Recall the words from my post: SK: Is "be made to" "would have to" the preferred sort of societal mechanisms you wish used on a minority of your fellow citizens? Look out, they may be used on you! TW: meaning those things that matter to people who don't receive most of their income from dividends and interest payments. What's wrong with that? regards, Everything is wrong if emotional misconceptions are reinforced. Retired folks breathe the same air, drink the same water, walk the same streets... Since when did this list become a place for pure polemic? Steve
Re: Jim Stanford (was Re: Charles Leadbetter)
Steve, You were wondering why no one had replied to your earlier criticism of Jim Stanford's op-ed piece. So I replied. My point is simply that you have taken a light-weight rhetorical piece to task over some heavy-duty substantive issues and have ignored the fact that we are daily inundated from the right with a steady diet of light-weight arguments cutting the other way. As I said, you've missed the point of Jim's article. Jim's point is that the arguments we hear incessantly from the right can be readily turned around and used against the purveyors of those arguments. You said, Journalism has an obligation to present clarity and truth as much as humanly possible. Well, isn't that a fine sentiment! And public officials have a duty to look after the general welfare. And we all should be kind to one another. Here's one more story that the mainstream journalism falls all over itself to present: Thursday July 15, 12:16 pm Eastern Time Company Press Release SOURCE: First American Corporation First American Trustee Seeks Assistance From Saudi Ambassador NEW YORK, July 15 /PRNewswire/ -- Harry W. Albright, Jr., Trustee for First American Corporation, appointed by the federal court in Washington, D.C., has made a personal request to His Excellency Prince Bandar Bin Sultan Al-Saud, Saudi Arabian Ambassador to the United States, for assistance in collecting additional funds for the worldwide creditors of the failed Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). On July 7, 1999, Mr. Albright sent a letter to Prince Bandar requesting that, in the interest of comity and justice, the Prince intervene to ensure that Saudi businessman and ex-government official [a discrete way of saying "former head of Saudi intelligence"] Sheikh Abdul Raouf Khalil honors and pays the $1.16 billion judgment obtained by BCCI's liquidators in Washington on June 23, 1999. BCCI collapsed as a result of massive fraud in July 1991, leaving a deficit of more than $10 billion. Court-appointed liquidators have to date recovered and repaid approximately half of BCCI customer deposits. Khalil, who has stated his net worth is in excess of a half billion dollars, is retired and lives in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he owns one of the world's largest private museums. For more information, contact Harry W. Albright, Jr., Trustee for First American Corporation. Phone: 914-948-6474 SOURCE: First American Corporation Related News Categories: banking Steve Kurtz wrote: Tom Walker wrote: Context, Steve, context. Your response to Jim Stanford's piece seemed to miss the point that poor-bashing and welfare-bashing have been mainstays of the self-styled individualist, "free market" line since time immemorial. Maybe that's the opinion of some about the actions of a few. But sorry Tom, no literate reader of English could miss the "point" of Stanford's essay. Jim was presenting a "let's put that shoe on the other foot and see how it fits" commentary. That happens to be his style. It's a folksy way of making a point, You mean he uses a "baffle them with BS" style. :-) Are you saying that the end (ire against free market capitalists) justifies any means? Are you saying "Don't confuse me with the facts? it's not intended to be most sophisticated economic analysis. Journalism has an obligation to present clarity and truth as much as humanly possible. His essay is nonsense, I can't fathom you saying otherwise. You ain't no dope. The Fraser Institute issues a "report card" on "economic freedom" and Jim counters with a report card on economic freedom "for the rest of us" -- How do you define "economic freedom", Tom? Recall the words from my post: SK: Is "be made to" "would have to" the preferred sort of societal mechanisms you wish used on a minority of your fellow citizens? Look out, they may be used on you! TW: meaning those things that matter to people who don't receive most of their income from dividends and interest payments. What's wrong with that? regards, Everything is wrong if emotional misconceptions are reinforced. Retired folks breathe the same air, drink the same water, walk the same streets... Since when did this list become a place for pure polemic? Steve regards, Tom Walker http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/worksite.htm
Re: Charles Leadbetter -- the End of Unemployment
Chris, that's not cynicism, that's business. One of the reasons they can downsize so easily is because of the excess they hire. All of these exercises with numbers, hours, and work weeks are just more of the same. The size of the company separates you so much from those who truly control the tasks that waste is rampant. After a 13 year experience with academia, I decided not to trust my work to anyone other than myself and my own close colleagues. My wife on the other hand worked both as a manager and as an expert flexible for several of the world's larger companies. I was amazed at how little she really needed to do to complete her job. She loved it however and always gave more than the system required and ultimately cared about having. I'm glad that she is now my GM. I'll take all I can get. REH Christoph Reuss wrote: Brad McCormick wrote: I worked on a big educational website (just a lot of HTML an Javascript -- pretty "simple" stuff, as computer programming goes!), where, every time Netscape came out with a new "maintenance release" of their web browser, it was time for me to find out how it would cause my application to break "this time", so that I'd expect to spend from a few hours to a few days getting back to where I had been before. Well, that's how the guild of programmers makes sure they'll _never_ run out of work. Micro$oft is the master of this particular "art" of "creating" work (and income!). I know of a big corporation that first migrated all their applications from DOS to Unix, and a few years later "back" from Unix to Windows. Some "smart" programmers got really rich of this back-and-forth (or rather, forth-and-back!), without "creating" anything -- just migrating the same applications. Another big company is now desperately looking for some "genius" to "sidegrade" their 600 PCs from Windows 95 to Windows NT (talk about "industry standard"!) -- to later "backgrade" to Windows 00, probably. If other industries would finally "learn" this art, it could be the end of unemployment. ;-) (Who will *pay* this idling nonsense is a different question, of course.) Cynically yours, Chris ___ CORPORATION, n. -- A miniature totalitarian state governed by an unelected hierarchy of officials who take a dim view of individualism, free speech, equality and eggheads. The backbone of all Western democracies. --==(The Cynic's Dictionary)==--
Re: Charles Leadbetter
Title: Re: Charles Leadbetter PS: I assumed on first reading that Ian had written this lengthy post, it was only after I had read it again and written my comments that I realized it was written by Charles Leadbetter, so rather than spend the time re-writng, please accept my apoligies Ian and to other readers please substitute Charles where I have assumed Ian. Dear Ian: Great essay, thought provoking and it ties in with a lengthy essay using similar thoughts and language as one I read by Rifkin just a few days ago on the net. I'm troubled with your combined visions. Though they have a logical consitency and hold ideas that I could certainly endorse, they are based on several presuppositions that I am beginning to question. In todays Citizen was a lengthy article on the immortality cell in which researchers have found ways to extend the replication of skin cells from their normal dividing life of approx 70 times to over 400 times. They indicate that this could increase healthy lifespan to 120 years within the lifetime of the researchers, who I would assume are in their 50's. Therefore, within 20 years, we may have a creme or a simple medical treatment that would literally double the lifespan of people. At 6 billion people, with a doubled lifespan, we are looking at the equivalent gain of another 6 billion people to the demographics with this development. On the net, I read about 6 employees of the Alaska gas pipeline saying that safety violations have created conditions for a major disaster - not a question of how, but when they maintain. This points to a critical problem the whole world over. Infrastructure is wearing out and their is no money to replace it, whether it is bridges, sewer systems, roads or pipelines that carry vital energy supplies to create electricity, fuel industry, and heat homes. Jay Hanson, continually supplies me with information in which oil will peak in 2005 while the conventional experts extend that a meagre 5 years. Now matter how pollyanish a person is, regarding alternate energy sources, the possiblity of retooling our world and refinancing an alternate source while dealing with the extra costs of the existing system, just boggle the mind. And then there is global warming in which much of our capital may be going into remedial work of repairing the damage caused by a weather system going mad. And then there is war. Which causes us to drop everything and focuses all our resources on the destruction of an enemy. The byproducts of that, damaged human beings, pollution, infrastructure damage, best brains redirected to finding more effective ways of killing and on and on. And then there is mutant germs, showing up in our hospitals, large germ warfare stocks, often in countries that can no longer be trusted to keep them safe, or other countries who may feel driven to use them. And then there is nuclear power, nuclear waste. And then there is shortage of drinkable water And then there is loss of agricultural land and topsoil. And then there is deforestation. And then And Now, none of these issues are assumed to be critical in your respective essays. Rather, there is the assumption that, yes, they are there but ---. In this case, I think we had better stay in front of the but. Ian wrote: It is no coincidence that all the three forces I have identified are intangible: they cannot be weighed or touched, they do not travel in railway wagons and cannot be stockpiled in ports. The critical factors of production in this new economy are not oil, raw materials, armies of cheap labour or physical plants and equipment. Those traditional assets still matter but they are a source of competitive advantage only when they are vehicles for ideas and intelligence. Thomas: Plainly stated in the above paragraph is the disclaimer traditional assets still matter. I would question that assumption very strongly. I would say that reality is stronger than knowledge and those items are the reality through which knowledge works and that without them, knowledge ain't worth a tinkers damn. Ian wrote: Knowledge is our most precious resource: we should organise society to maximise its creation and use. Our aim should not be a third way, to balance the demands of the market against those of the community. Our aim should be to harness the power of both markets and community to the more fundamental goal of creating and spreading knowledge. Thomas: Knowledge may turn out to be not our most precious resource, but the very thing that has created the conditions of the most terrible future. This article is an edited extract from Charles Leadbeater's Living on Thin Air: the new economy, published this month by Viking, £17.99 http://www.newstatesman.co.uk/199907120019.htm
Re: Charles Leadbetter
Steve Kurtz wrote: Thomas once again has given us his insightful, sobering commentary on a unidimensional, rather ephemeral perception of the human predicament. It is not realistic to continue discussing the future of work without including the future of the caloric input required for brain activity - a requirement in a knowledge based or any other sort of economy. Water, shelter, fuel, security must be included as well. I think we need also to add the enormous entropy of the obsolescence of knowledge. This is sometimes stated more "positively" as a shortening "half-life" of knowledge, so that by the time an engineer has been out of college 10 years, 50% of what (s)he learned is no longer current (or whatever the exact numbers are in each case). (The especial affront of this is that it is not a consequence of "natural processes" outside human control, but of human symbolizing activity.) I have seen this *with a vengeance* in computer programming. I have found it discouraging to have to keep learning new ways to be able to keep on doing what I was previously able to do quite well with programming knowledge that can no longer be used because the new computers do not recognize it. It reaches the level of absurdity that programs written in the presently "sexiest" (-- perverse locution) programming language, Java, which hardly existed in 1996, had to be signifcantly rewritten by 1998 because one of the most important and pervasive parts of the language (the "event model", i.e., the program's ability to respond to something happening) was incompatibly redesigned. I worked on a big educational website (just a lot of HTML an Javascript -- pretty "simple" stuff, as computer programming goes!), where, every time Netscape came out with a new "maintenance release" of their web browser, it was time for me to find out how it would cause my application to break "this time", so that I'd expect to spend from a few hours to a few days getting back to where I had been before. In general, data processing departments live with the pervasive "confidence" that upgrading anything will break something that nobody could have guessed it would, and which, to fix, may break even more things (Joseph Weizenbaum's notion of "incomprehensible programs", from his now over 20 year old, but by no means outdated book: _Computer Power and Human Reason: From judgment to calculation_, W.H. Freeman, 1976). The switch from "command line" oriented computer programs to "graphical user interface" has come at the price of at least one and maybe two "orders of magnitude" jump in the amount of disconnected detail knowledge (facts that cannot be reduced to guessable specifications of a few easily grasped "models") a programmer has to master. The information is nowhere available in a form that assures: "These are the complete answers, and there are no surprises hiding behind them." -- this is a *big* problem with, e.g., programming for Microsoft's Windows operating systems. Oh yes, then there is the librarians' nightmare of the rapid deterioration of "electronic media", coupled with the fact that even if the media can be preserved, it becomes ever more difficult to find media-readers (tape drives, etc.) that can *retrieve* the information. So much *waste* and (to borrow Nietzsche's phrase:) "the eternal recurrence of the same" (which Buddhists call:) "the wheel of karma" So much contribution to the Gross(sic) National Product If computer programs are among the free-est constructions of the human mind (they aren't much constrained by things like laws of physics...), they certainly are rarely models of *lucidity* (there are exceptions, of course -- Ken Iverson's APL programming language, e.g.; IBM's original MVT/360 operating system was pretty good in this regard...). It's like we got a chance to be G-d and blew it (and, yes, surely "the force of the market" has been a powerful factor, rarely rewarding programmers for quality craftsmanship, but just expecting it as a no cost given, no matter how much deadline pressure the programmers are subjected to...) And why not note the barbaric working hours (both in duration and in deviation from a 9 to 5 bell-shaped curve) to which computer workers are frequently subjected? -- Once when I was in IBM, I overheard two business planners talking as they walked down the hall in front of me. They were not happy. One said to the other: "Fishkill is not bringing in the inventions on schedule." \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: Charles Leadbetter
Steve Kurtz wrote: Are there no reactions to my post about the Workfare for Capital piece? Perhaps all listmembers grasped its ideological hyperbole immediately! Context, Steve, context. Your response to Jim Stanford's piece seemed to miss the point that poor-bashing and welfare-bashing have been mainstays of the self-styled individualist, "free market" line since time immemorial. Jim was presenting a "let's put that shoe on the other foot and see how it fits" commentary. That happens to be his style. It's a folksy way of making a point, it's not intended to be most sophisticated economic analysis. The Fraser Institute issues a "report card" on "economic freedom" and Jim counters with a report card on economic freedom "for the rest of us" -- meaning those things that matter to people who don't receive most of their income from dividends and interest payments. What's wrong with that? regards, Tom Walker http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/worksite.htm
