Category: Uncategorized

Ways to make college free

If we were we scrapping our current system and starting from scratch, Washington could make public college tuition free with the money it sets aside its scattershot attempts to make college affordable today.

this is of course a flawed assumption. why would you set up college as screwed-up again if you had a chance for a do-over? why would you lump in housing, expensive facilities etc that add 0 to education outcomes? an ideal college system would have 90% fewer assets and costs.

2014 predictions

2014 predictions
every year, a few friends and i indulge in a little predicting (and then come back to it 1 year later). here are mine, i’d be interested to hear yours:

Whole genome sequencing becomes available for $1000
The supreme court rules that large scale surveillance is constitutional
Governments around the world do the same, under NSA envy, while also passing opportunistic privacy legislation
A Chinese site passes fb in traffic
1m spatial / 4h temporal resolution satellite pictures (cubesats) become commercially available
2 of the also-ran mobile os fold
NLP reaches the text understanding of a third grader
2 attacks by apt against commercial targets in the us create billions of damage
The number of detected extrasolar planets soars past 10000
A utility enters bankruptcy due to the price of solar becoming competitive with coal for the first time
Conversational uis pass the Turing test 80% of the time under a time limit of 5min
It will be possible for < 10m$ to send a message to the personal devices of 5b people within 24h. (What would it say?)
A service reaches 500m users within 1 year of launch
Popular opinion blames technology instead of banksters for the problems of the 99%
2 teams complete the second DARPA robotics challenge with the max number of points possible

Desert reclamation at scale

Cyanobacteria are now being used in China to shore up the verges of roads and railways in northern China as well as the margins of oases and farmland. A team plans to seed 133 square kilometer of desert over the next 5 years. The bacteria creates 0.5 to 1.0 centimeter thick biocrust over the desert which helps topsoil to reform and prevents top soil erosion. In its next step, China plans to have 200k square km of desertified land, or 50% of the country’s desert area that can be reversed, harnessed by 2020 and improve living standards for people living in the desert

Android / Windows

this is just spectacularly bad. par for the course for intel who really really suck at software: moblin, meego, tizen, smart tv, the list of stillborn projects out of intel is pretty long.

Intel plans a CES coup: Android and Windows in the same computer. Dual OS could dilute Windows dominance, if Microsoft doesn’t kill it first

Germany infrastructure decaying

it’s not just the us that has massive infrastructure problems, it’s everyone except perhaps the chinese, who have invested massively and have the benefit of learning from others by being last. the great rebuilding of the world’s infrastructure will be a major theme for the next 30 years, but will be underreported.