Tag: policy

Scientist For America

Scientists and engineers have a right, indeed an obligation, to enter the political debate when the nation’s leaders systematically ignore scientific evidence and analysis, put ideological interests ahead of scientific truths, suppress valid scientific evidence and harass and threaten scientists for speaking honestly about their research.

dedicated to electing public officials who respect evidence and understand the importance of using scientific and engineering advice in making public policy.

The equilibrium between Sur-veillance and Sous-veillance

an introduction by steve mann

Here are 10 Hypotheses.
(techlaw). Sousveillance will become a major force and industry, despite initial opposition. Like surveillance, sousveillance technology will outstrip many laws, and will be another example of technology moving forward more quickly than the legal framework that grows around it.
(privacy). Over the past 30 years, sousveillance practice has raised many new privacy, legal, and ethical issues, and these issues will become central as the sousveillance industry grows.
(incidentalism). Sousveillance of the most pure form, is not merely the carrying around of a hand-held camera, but, rather, must include elements of incidentalist imaging to succeed. For this reason, camera phones, pocket organizers containing cameras in them, and wristwatch cameras, for example, exhibit an incidentalist imaging effect not experienced with even the very smallest of handheld digital cameras. A device exhibits incidentalist imaging when it can capture images as well as perform at least one other important and socially justifiable function that does not involve capturing images. This “backgrounding” by another socially justifiable function is a technology that is essential for sousveillance to take root in most societies.
(accidentalism). Cameraphones, cameraPDAs, and wristcameras have brought sousveillance to a new level. The next major level is that which affords the user deniability for the intentionality of image capture. This feature may be implemented by a random or automated image capture, or by allowing others to remotely initiate image capture. In this way image capture becomes accidental, and this accidentalism affords the user with a strategic ambiguity when asked such questions as “are you taking pictures of me now”?
(nonwillfulness). Accidentalism will be taken to a new level when it can be a requirement of a role player, such as a clerk. Just as surveillance is hierarchical, thus creating an industry that can defend itself from criticism (e.g. “don’t ask me why there’s a surveillance camera in my store, I only work here”), sousveillance will also rise to this same level of deniability. Accidentalism by itself might be regarded as willful blindness. But when combined with, for example, a requirement to participate in sousveillance (e.g. sousveillance technology might, for example, become part of a clerk’s uniform) accidentalism becomes nonwillful blindness.
(nonwillful blindness). Various forms of continuous incidentalist imaging will give rise to an industry behind products and services for continuous sousveillance. Continuous sousveillance will make sousveillance the norm, rather than the exception, for at least some individuals in society.
(protection). Unlike surveillance, sousveillance will require a strong legal framework for its protection, and not just its limitation. Along these lines, certain legal protections will be required to ensure access to those who depend on sousveillance.
(disabled). These legal protections will first emerge in the form of assistance to the disabled.
(differently abled). The space of those considered to be disabled will gradually expand, over time, as the technological threshold falls and the sousveillance industry grows.
(other benefits). These legal protections will expand, to encompass other legitimate and reasonable uses of sousveillance, such as artistic and technosocial inquiry, photojournalism, and collection of evidence.

Second life euphemism

Second life is an euphemism for a busy retirement

Though it is widely understood that broadband technologies that allow rapid and ‘always on’ connections to the Internet will provide significant benefits to the US economy, this report is the first to estimate the economic benefits to the nation due to cost savings and output expansion resulting from the use of broadband technologies for an important specific sub-group of the US population: the 70m Americans who are over 65 or under that age but have disabilities. 3 types of benefits from broadband deployment and use are addressed: lower medical costs; lower costs of institutionalized living; and additional output generated by more seniors and individuals with disabilities in the labor force. Considered together, these 3 benefits are estimated to accumulate to at least $927B in cost savings and output gains in 2005 $ (with future benefits discounted for the ‘time value of money’) over the 25 year period, 2005 to 2030. This amount is equivalent to 50% of what the United States currently spends annually for medical care for all its citizens ($1.8 trillion). As large as these benefits may appear, they are line with previous estimates for the benefits of broadband for the population as a whole. Policies designed to accelerate the use of broadband for these populations, however, could significantly add to the benefits, by cumulative amounts ranging from $532B to $847B (depending on the wages earned by the additional working seniors). The policy benefits are as substantial as what the federal government is likely to spend on homeland security over the next 25 years. Total cumulative benefits, under the right set of policies, could exceed what the United States currently spends annually for health care for all its citizens. Clearly, with so much at stake, policymakers have strong reasons to consider measures to accelerate the deployment and use of broadband technologies for America’s seniors and individuals with disabilities.

when you retire, your second life will be online. i had heard many a commenter mention their time constraints when faced with World of Warcraft or second life. is it unreasonable to expect a bimodal distribution on these platforms in the future? the young and the old certainly have the time. if these systems are able to attract older segments of the population, things will get interesting. actually, they already do.

if we leverage these enormous resources, ideally by making things like the mechanical turk or wikipedia fun for a large part of them, we’ll easily be able handle pensions and health care for a rapidly aging population, and still have funds left over for many more charity and nonprofit projects than today.

i always believed that a major reason for the bursting of the first bubble was that the internet experience of the average person is riddled with viruses, spyware and spam. it’s hard to overestimate how much this destroyed the trust and interest in all things internet. so maybe part of the appeal of these online worlds is there relative lack of annoyances (surely not for long..). what is needed, therefore, is a massive, probably grassroots, effort, to clean up the world’s computers and re-establish a safe browsing experience, and get these people back online. the rest will follow.

New Orleans consequences

The displacement of population is the crisis that New Orleans faces. It is also a national crisis, because the largest port in the United States cannot function without a city around it. The physical and business processes of a port cannot occur in a ghost town, and right now, that is what New Orleans is. It is not about the facilities, and it is not about the oil. It is about the loss of a city’s population and the paralysis of the largest port in the United States.

george friedman has the best analysis by far. as usual, the MSM offer no insight beyond gory pictures.

Profits of fear

Elected representatives on committees that established policy at the highest level were motivated by base self-interest, expediency, and petty rivalries. They were not only ignorant, but uninterested in educating themselves. Given a choice between saving public money and spending it, they preferred to spend it. Allowed the option of destroying a city or leaving it unscathed, they opted to destroy it. Forced to choose between maximizing human suffering on innocent civilians or minimizing it, they chose to maximize it.

a must-read piece on sam cohen, the inventor of the neutron bomb, which he concluded, quite legitimately, was the most moral weapon ever developed. if history education were designed to prevent the eternal rehashing of mistakes, this is what would be taught. we get to obsess over times and places, instead of explaining the (lack of) thinking behind events that shaped the world. my history education was fairly short on recent developments, and i had to learn about game theory and nuclear deterrence on my own. considering how much they shaped the world we live in, i wish there was more emphasis on them. one way to do that might be to start from the present and work backwards. this would make sure you don’t run out of time just as you get to the present (happened in my high school, for sure), and would put the weight on what is probably most important today. on the other hand, one might argue that in order to understand the present, you need to be more mature, and therefore you are first presented with all these tales about ages past, until you grow up enough to hear the juicy stuff. another option might be to work with the arcs of history that philip bobbitt had in his excellent the shield of achilles.

Peak Oil

When first assuming office in early 2001, President George W. Bush’s top foreign policy priority was not to prevent terrorism or to curb the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Rather, it was to increase the flow of petroleum from suppliers abroad to US markets. In the months before he became president, the United States had experienced severe oil and natural gas shortages in many parts of the country, along with periodic electrical power blackouts in California. In addition, oil imports rose to more than 50% of total consumption for the first time in history, provoking great anxiety about the security of the country’s long-term energy supply. Bush asserted that addressing the nation’s “energy crisis” was his most important task as president.

interesting analysis that links hubberts peak with the carter doctrine.
2007-03-08: Exxon on Peak Oil. Evasive. hmm

Bartiromo … asked Tillerson how Exxon could be expected to keep growing its reserves of oil and gas when $20B a year in capital spending through the rest of this decade will only result in an extra 1M barrels a day in production volume, according to Exxon’s estimates. Tillerson didn’t really answer the question, merely repeating his assertion that Exxon’s volumes will keep growing through the end of the decade. In a later exchange, he added that the world’s oil would not run out in his lifetime.

2018-10-16: OPEC accelerating peak oil? That would be a great way to accelerate the move towards a post-oil society. And of course, make domestic oil even more competitive. Checkmate

While analysts doubt Riyadh would go as far as an energy embargo now, the government has used oil resources to exert political pressure before. During the 19 70s, a Saudi-led coalition slashed oil exports to the US in protest of Washington’s support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War. “We cannot entirely rule out that the leadership would dust off the 1973 playbook if the bilateral relationship with Washington deteriorates sharply from here

2020-12-01: Peak oil now

Most analysts had only predicted declining demand for oil in improbably green scenarios that could only be achieved with far stronger global climate policies. What made BP’s 2020 forecast unique is that peak oil now snuck into its business-as-usual baseline. If technologies and pollution rules improve, the dropoff in demand would be even more swift.

Well-researched Article about how the oil majors are being forced to change.

Inching towards Metric

The Metric Program of the National Institute of Standards and Technology has a bold, if Napoleonic, motto: “Toward a Metric America.” That is, a fanciful future in which we’ll buy decagrams of hamburger and liters of gas. Problem is, the Metric Program employs just 2 evangelists ‘hail, ye lone voices in the wilderness!’ to convert 281M recalcitrant American imperial-unit holdouts. Launched with much hope by the Federal Metric Conversion Act of 1975, the Metric Program 28 years later meekly soldiers on, advising federal bureaucracies and trying to pitch the system to – well, to anyone who will listen. The dynamic decimal duo really work only part-time on metric salesmanship. So it would seem: A spokesman for the program, when queried, didn’t know his own height in meters.

jeez people. NASA is switching to metric, and uses IP(v6?) too. i have long wondered what will happen first: us going metric, the world going IPv6, or the world going 100% unicode.

Metrication is the direct transition process that helps you to quickly, efficiently, easily, and relatively cheaply upgrade from any of the various old pre-metric measuring methods to the modern metric system.

heh. Personally, I’d like a Wikipedia for civilized people that uses metric units exclusively. Or actually, a chrome extension to auto correct pages to the proper units. And here’s 5 screw-ups that wouldn’t have happened with metric:

The fight over metric versus imperial measurements has some very real consequences. And with the US as the last holdout in the world, we’re likely to see more of these kinds of historical fuck-ups on occasion.