Tele[a distancia]Comunicación - Innovación - Local[cerca]ización

Aquí el reciente Special Report from The Economist: A sense of place

Extracto introductorio:

"THERE WAS SOMETHING odd about the black car at the junction of Sutter and Hyde Streets. It was an ordinary saloon. Its windows were clear, and it looked in good condition. And yet, as the lights changed and the car pulled away into the bright San Francisco morning, a question remained. Why was it sporting a luxuriant pink moustache at its front?

The moustache is the trade mark of Lyft, a ride-sharing service that began in the city this summer. Its drivers are private individuals who, in effect, rent out seats in their cars for a few dollars a time. Lyft’s cut is 20%. It works through a smartphone app. When you register as a customer, you supply your phone number and credit-card details. When you want a ride, you open the app and see a map with the locations of the nearest moustachioed motors. You tap to request a ride, and the app shows you your driver’s name, his rating by past passengers (out of five stars) and photos of him and his car. He will probably greet you with a friendly fist-bump. Afterwards you rate him and pay through the app. He rates you, too, so if you are poor company you may not get another Lyft." ...

***

En verdad algo así no podría haber sucedido hace 30 años; no sólo porque aún no teníamos los c-phones, sino también porque vivíamos en una época en la que la "propiedad" o era desestimada por unos (hippies), o exageradamente estimada (hasta venerada) por otros: y tenida por símbolo de poder... En la carretera la cosa era (ligeramente) diferente... Lo interesante, y novedoso, de esta historia con la que comienza el Special Report, es la combinación (eventualmente m a s i v a) de 1)optimización económica, y 2)construcción de relacionamiento humano. Algo está pasando :-)

Desde el blog de Nicholas Carr: "A post on the occasion of Facebook’s billionth member" [or "Machine learning happening"]

Aquí la entrada completa, desde el blog de Nicholas Carr

Extracto genial:

"The company [Google] has begun applying its neural nets to speech-recognition and image-recognition tasks. And, according to Google engineer Jeff Dean, the technology can already outperform people at some jobs:

“We are seeing better than human-level performance in some visual tasks,” he says, giving the example of labeling, where house numbers appear in photos taken by Google’s Street View car, a job that used to be farmed out to many humans. ”They’re starting to use neural nets to decide whether a patch [in an image] is a house number or not,” says Dean, and they turn out to perform better than humans.

But the real advantage of a neural net in such work, Dean goes on to say, probably has less to do with any real “intelligence” than with the machine’s utter inability to experience boredom. “It’s probably that [the task is] not very exciting, and a computer never gets tired,” he says. Comments Simonite, sagely: “It takes real intelligence to get bored.”

Forget the Turing Test. We’ll know that computers are really smart when computers start getting bored. If you assign a computer a profoundly tedious task like spotting house numbers in video images, and then you come back a couple of hours later and find that the computer is checking its Facebook feed or surfing porn, then you’ll know that artificial intelligence has truly arrived."


***

Para entender la profundidad de la intuición de Nicholas Carr y Tom Simonite (a quien Carr está comentando) hay que leer a Martin Heidegger :-) "Los conceptos fundamentales de la metafísica: mundo, finitud, soledad" ¡En serio!

Mobile Phones Update (a sort of :-)

Así comienza:

"Hi. This is my mobile phone. A mobile phone can change your life, and gives you individual freedom. With a mobile phone, you can shoot a crime against humanity in Syria. With a mobile phone, you can tweet a message and start a protest in Egypt. And with a mobile phone, you can record a song, load it up to SoundCloud and become famous. All this is possible with your mobile phone..."

J.A. Schumpeter (desde su biografía - 4)

p.166

"In his autobiographical novel fragment, composed a few years after Annie [la esposa] and Johanna [la madre] died, he wrote:

And for modern man his work is everything -all that is left...
Doing efficient work without aim, without hope...
No family.
No real friends.
No woman in whose womanhood to anchor.

Constant work is what he continued to do, and not only to suppress his grief. He still had his enormous debts in Vienna to pay, and that task required a diferent type of work from the "scientific" economics and sociology he was pursuing."

T.I.M.E. de apocalipsis

Aquí columna resumen de Antonio Caballero en Semana sobre RIO+20.

Ya había dicho yo hace unos años: confío más (¡pero un planeta más!, cabría agregar hoy) en Toyota (y en otras multinacionales) que en cualquier gobierno (de los de por acá, por allá o acullá): ni un peso más (o dólar o rublo) en impuestos, que sea Troya de una vez: ¡todo nuestro arduo ganado-ahorrado dinero a acciones (y acciones) de Toyota! (y otras multinacionales así de serias) :-) Es en serio :-/

T.I.M.E. de poesía (y de verificación del nivel de logro de un particular progreso técnico)

Aquí el poema, escrito en inglés por el poeta, W.H. Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone

W. H. Auden


Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Aquí la traducción al español provista por (la "máquina") Google :-/

Detener todos los relojes, corte el teléfono,
Evitar que el perro ladre con un hueso jugoso,
Callen los pianos y con redobles en sordina
Llevar a cabo el ataúd, que los dolientes venir.

Que los aeroplanos que gimiendo sobrecarga
Escriban en el cielo el mensaje de que está muerto,
Arcos Poner crepe en los cuellos blancos de las palomas,
Que los policias se pongan guantes negros.

Él era mi norte, mi Sur, mi Este y el Oeste,
Mi semana de trabajo y mi descanso dominical,
Mi mediodía, mi medianoche, mi charla, mi canción;
Pensé que el amor duraría para siempre: me equivoqué.

Las estrellas no son deseadas ahora: poner a cada uno;
Empaquen la luna y desmantelen el sol;
Que sequen el océano y barran los bosques.
Porque ya nada puede llegar a nada bueno.

J.A. Schumpeter (muy a propósito de estos convulsionados tiempos)

Tomado del Preface to the Second Edition en Capitalism Socialism and Democracy; los subrayados son míos.

"I thought I had taken every care to make it quite clear that this is not a political book and that I did not wish to advocate anything. Nevertheless, to my amusement, the intention has been imputed to me -and more than once though not, so far as I know, in print- of "advocating foreign collectivism". I mention this fact not for this own sake but in order to notice another objection that lurks behind this one. If I was not advocating collectivism, foreign or domestic, or indeed anything else, why then did I write at all? It is not entirely futile to elaborate inferences from observed facts without arriving at practical recommendations? I was greatly interested whenever I met with this objection -it is much a nice symptom of an attitude that accounts for much in modern life. We always plan too much and always think too little. We resent a call to thinking and hate unfamiliar argument that does not tally with what we already believe or would like to believe. We walk into our future as we walked into the war, blindfolded. Now this is precisely where I wanted to serve the reader. I did want to make him think. And in order to do so it was essential not to divert his attention by discussions about what from any given standpoint "should be done about it" which would have monopolized his interest. Analysis has a distinct task and to this task I wished to keep though I was fully aware of the fact that this resolve would cost me a great deal of the response a few pages of practical conclusions would have evoked.

This, finally, leads to the charge of “defeatism.” I deny entirely that this term is applicable to a piece of analysis. Defeatism denotes a certain psychic state that has meaning only in reference to action. Facts in themselves and inferences from them can never be defeatist or the opposite whatever that might be. The report that a given ship is sinking is not defeatist. Only the spirit in which this report is received can be defeatist: The crew can sit down and drink. But it can also rush to the pumps. If the men merely deny the report though it be carefully substantiated, then they are escapists. Morever, even if my statements of tendencies amounted more definitely to prediction than they were intended to do, they would still not carry defeatist suggestions. What normal man will refuse to defend his life merely because he is quite convinced that sooner or later he will have to die anyhow? This applies to both the groups from which the charge has come: sponsors of private-enterprise society and sponsors of democratic socialism. Both of them stand to gain if they see more clearly that they usually do the nature of the social situation in which it is their fate to act.

Frank presentation of ominous facts was never more necessary than it is today because we seem to have developed escapism into a system of thought. This is my motive as it is my apology for writing the new chapter. The facts and inferences there presented are certainly not pleasant or comfortable. But they are not defeatist. Defeatist is he who, while giving lip service to Christianity and all the other values of our civilization, yet refuses to rise in their defense –no matter whether he accepts their defeat as a foregone conclusion or deludes himself with futile hopes against hope. For this is one of those situations in which optimism is nothing but a form of defection."

Joseph A. Schumpeter
Taconic, Connecticut
July 1946

Desde la biografía de J.A. Schumpeter

Tomado del "Álbum" incluído al final en Diez grandes economistas: de Marx a Keynes, de Alianza Ed. 1997

p.31

"Después comenzó a escribir lo que sería Capitalismo, socialismo y democracia, que aparecería en 1942; pero esto no le requirió ni mucho tiempo ni mucho esfuerzo. Este libro sí que fue un éxito inmediato y todavía hoy se vende y se lee. En él sostiene la tesis de la decadencia progresiva del capitalismo porque el progreso técnico destruye los pilares del individualismo, de la meritocracia y de la desigualdad, y sin estos pilares el socialismo tecnocrático ya era una realidad, sin necesidad de revolución."

Mnemosyne y la técnica: esto también sucedió en el siglo XX y comienzos del XXI

Lo propio.
Lo privado.
La memoria.
La técnica.

Se las arreglan para auto-configurarse
s o r p r e n d e n t e m e n t e
a veces :-)

Aquí el sitio en la Web



***

"How do you read a two-thousand-year-old manuscript that has been erased, cut up, written on and painted over? With a powerful particle accelerator, of course! Ancient books curator William Noel tells the fascinating story behind the Archimedes palimpsest, a Byzantine prayer book containing previously-unknown original writings from ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes and others."

"Responsabilidad Social Empresarial": como presentada en esta columna, mucho más cerca de la realidad

Aquí desde The Economist: Good business; nice beaches
Corporate social responsibility is evolving, and becoming a little less flaky

Extracto:

"ON JUNE 17th a hubbub of activists will gather in Rio de Janeiro for a conference on “good business for a sustainable future”, sponsored by something called the Ethical Fashion Initiative. They will listen to a farmer talking about the social consequences of cotton and a theologian debating the meaning of the word “value”. No doubt they will also admire Rio’s beautiful beaches and the beachgoers who waste “very few of the Earth’s precious resources on clothes”, as P.J. O’Rourke once put it.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has a hard-earned reputation for flakiness. CSR types don’t just swap agreeable-sounding platitudes (“doing well by doing good”). They do so in agreeable places, “for the same reason that the American Association of Hose and Nozzle Manufacturers has to hold all its important meetings in Las Vegas,” observed Mr O’Rourke, a humorist. “Rio is, um, convenient to major air travel facilities.”"

***

El suscrito sostiene que:

1. La RSE es un pleonasmo-de-acción, esto es, algo que hay y que se prescribe luego (en el discurso) como si novedad.

2. Gracias a las empresas que compiten, prosperan e innovan, hay, (de todo): bienes y servicios que apreciamos, empleos que deseamos, impuestos que hacen babear a la casta de los políticos.

3. Los emprendedores, y los empresarios, reciben (a veces) a cambio de su "arriesgón" el merecido premio que son las utilidades: sólo después de que nosotros (los consumidores, empleados y políticos de oficio) hemos satisfecho nuestras urgencias.

¿Quién, individuo, institución o pandilla, puede afirmar ser más "socialmente reponsable" que una empresa próspera?

La belleza, la técnica, la procreación, el (escaso) nomos

Aquí

"Las autoridades chinas fallaron a favor de Jiat Feng, quien demandó ante la corte a su esposa por “haberle escondido sus atributos físicos reales”.

El curioso caso salió a los estrados judiciales luego de que Feng, recientemente convertido en padre, sospechó de la infidelidad de su mujer debido a que su hijo recién nacido no tenía gran parecido a ninguno de los dos.

Ante las dudas del hombre, su esposa aceptó que se había sometido a un amplio número de cirugías plásticas. Reconoció que gastó cerca de 100 mil dólares en este tipo de intervenciones para quedar completamente distinta.

Feng tuvo acceso a fotografías de su esposa antes de someterse a las múltiples cirugías y confirmó que la "fealdad" de la bebé había sido flagrantemente heredada por el lado materno.

Ante esto el desilusionado esposo demandó a su mujer, alegando que era demasiado fea y que lo había timado al jamás confesarle que su sensual apariencia era producto de la habilidad de un médico y no de la generosa naturaleza.

Las autoridades locales de una ciudad al norte de China dimitieron en favor de Feng y ahora será recompensado con 120 mil dólares."

***

¿Y si ella le hubiera sido de verdad infiel con un "adonis", y logrado así el bebé más hermoso? (otra historia)

¿Y sí él también es "operado" cosméticamente? (la misma historia)

¿Y sí el bebé crece, se fortalece, ama -no obstante- a sus padres y a la humanidad, y resulta un súper-atleta o un súper-líder o un súper-empresario? (la "historia" por verse)

Update del libro y bibliotecas: análogos y digitales: el fantasma de un único libro vuelve a recorrer el mundo

Aquí, nos reporta Nicholas Carr, desde MIT Technology Review.

***

1. Parece que el libro no se deja atrapar.
2. Parece que el libro reta toda convención de "titularlo" objeto, o bien cultural, o discurso, o lo que sea.
3. Parece que el verbo y el libro siguen SIENDO lo único que en verdad hemos CREADO.
4. Parece que el libro y el verbo, así, nos RESUMEN.
5. Parece que vamos a descubrir algo insospechado, desde las tecnologías para registrar y luego recuperar, discursos, verbo, los libros.

***

Extracto introductorio:

"In his 1938 book World Brain, H.G. Wells imagined a time—not very distant, he believed—when every person on the planet would have easy access to "all that is thought or known."

The 1930s were a decade of rapid advances in microphotography, and Wells assumed that microfilm would be the technology to make the corpus of human knowledge universally available. "The time is close at hand," he wrote, "when any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica."

Wells's optimism was misplaced. The Second World War put idealistic ventures on hold, and after peace was restored, technical constraints made his plan unworkable. Though microfilm would remain an important medium for storing and preserving documents, it proved too unwieldy, too fragile, and too expensive to serve as the basis for a broad system of knowledge transmission. But Wells's idea is still alive. Today, 75 years later, the prospect of creating a public repository of every book ever published—what the Princeton philosopher Peter Singer calls "the library of utopia"—seems well within our grasp. With the Internet, we have an information system that can store and transmit documents efficiently and cheaply, delivering them on demand to anyone with a computer or a smart phone. All that remains to be done is to digitize the more than 100 million books that have appeared since Gutenberg invented movable type, index their contents, add some descriptive metadata, and put them online with tools for viewing and searching.

It sounds straightforward. And if it were just a matter of moving bits and bytes around, a universal online library might already exist. Google, after all, has been working on the challenge for 10 years. But the search giant's book program has foundered; it is mired in a legal swamp. Now another momentous project to build a universal library is taking shape. It springs not from Silicon Valley but from Harvard University. The Digital Public Library of America—the DPLA—has big goals, big names, and big contributors. And yet for all the project's strengths, its success is far from assured. Like Google before it, the DPLA is learning that the major problem with constructing a universal library nowadays has little to do with technology. It's the thorny tangle of legal, commercial, and political issues that surrounds the publishing business. Internet or not, the world may still not be ready for the library of utopia."

Google ideas :-/

Sin palabras. Bueno, una o dos: ¿Es esto una avanzada de la "técnica" que instrumentaliza la política? Sin duda de parte del vacío que es la política hoy, toda ayuda es bienvenida. Pero la técnica, por su parte, podría estar intentando el imposible de morderse la cola: ¿Cómo puede "solucionar" nada más ella en un espacio en dónde sus soluciones son todo lo que hay? :-/

Aquí

"Google Ideas is a think/do tank that convenes unorthodox stakeholders, commissions research, and seeds initiatives to explore the role that technology can play in tackling some of the toughest human challenges." :-/

"Counter-radicalization

Violent extremism is one of the world’s most significant unanswered challenges, from the gangs of San Salvador to the violent Islamist extremists of Quetta to far-right fascists around the world who constitute the violent white power movement.

In the summer of 2011 Google Ideas convened more than 84 former violent extremists—former gang members, former violent religious extremists, former violent right-wing nationalist extremists, and former violent far-right fascists—with victims of terror and gang violence for the Summit Against Violent Extremism (SAVE).

One product to emerge from SAVE was Against Violent Extremism, a network of former violent extremists, survivors of violent extremism, NGOs, academics, think tanks, and private sector executives who share a common goal: to prevent youth from committing violence. Political leaders, journalists, and technology entrepreneurs joined Google Ideas for the summit in Dublin to examine the similarities between violent extremist groups, and how technology could be both part of the problem and part of the solution. Visit YouTube to watch videos from the Summit Against Violent Extremism."

"Illicit Networks

The persistence of illicit networks—including organized crime, narcotics, human trafficking, arms trafficking, terrorism, and cybercrime—affects every country and every demographic. While various illicit networks may differ from each other in terms of the goods they move and the objectives they pursue, their tactics are often remarkably similar.

Illicit networks strive for maximum secrecy and efficiency to evade law enforcement. Despite all of this, most efforts to investigate and intercept illicit networks have been siloed rather than holistic, depriving those who seek to combat them of opportunities to learn from one another.

The increasing ubiquity of connection technologies will both empower those driving illicit networks as well as the citizens seeking to curb them. These networks have been around for centuries, but one thing has changed—the vast majority of people now have a mobile device, empowering citizens with the potential to disrupt the secrecy, discretion, and fear that allow illicit networks to persist. As illicit networks grow in scope and complexity, society’s strategy to reduce their negative impact must draw on the tremendous power of technology."

"Fragile States

Many states that we consider fragile—states that have difficulty enforcing the rule of law and/or delivering basic goods and social services—have experienced an explosion of mobile adoption. We’re examining to what extent can mobile technology be used to address some of the local challenges that the state has been incapable of addressing, such as education, health, and basic humanitarian services.

Challenges in these states are driving a tremendous amount of local innovation that can be scaled and adapted to other countries. Technology will not solve the problem of state fragility, but it can help address some local needs to improve the quality of life for citizens living in these states and perhaps provide solutions that are scalable to other parts of the world."

Esto es para mí: un esfuerzo, otro más, para que no se me olvide

Tomado de El Trabajador, Ernst Jünger, p.314

"La frase de Overbeck: 'A Nietzsche no hay que tomarlo en serio como hombre docto, pero sí que hay que tomarlo muy en serio como pensador', tenía una intención crítica. Sin embargo, es lo mejor que puede decirse de un espíritu que no se alimenta de los textos, sino de la fuente. El filósofo o bien permanece en la línea fundamental del pensamiento, de la cual son únicamente brotes laterales aun las evoluciones más fuertes, o bien se degrada hasta convertirse en un mero peón de gentes chabacanas y, a la postre, también de los filibusteros políticos. Con el mero saber no se mantiene firme nadie.

La libertad espiritual no se otorga; o está presente, o falta. Tampoco se la reclama, sino que se la prueba; y de eso vive el mundo. No hay cosa más sencilla que esa demostración, pero tampoco nada más difícil. Lo que cualquiera podría hacer, ¿quién lo haría?

Todos acuden en masa a sentarse con Sócrates en el banco de los burlones, pero las filas quedan diezmadas cuando se trata de acompañarlo, como hizo Jenofonte, con el escudo y la espada; y cuando se entrega la copa de veneno, la sala se vacía."

Fold It: ¡alucinante!

Aquí

"Foldit is a revolutionary new computer game enabling you to contribute to important scientific research. This page describes the science behind Foldit and how your playing can help."

The Science Behind Foldit

Frequently Asked Questions

Lo que reporta Slate

Aquí

"The Crowdsourcing of Talent
Scientists are using video games to make major breakthroughs. Are they revolutionizing how we manage labor at the same time?

By Jeff Howe|Posted Monday, Feb. 27, 2012, at 1:11 PM ET

This article arises from Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, the New America Foundation, and Slate. On Feb. 29, Future Tense will host an event on the Make movement and do-it-yourself innovation in Washington, D.C. For more information and to sign up for the event, please visit the NAF website.

In the summer of 2007, I went to Calgary, Canada, to report on a startup. It was a heady time: Venture capital was plentiful, and the company, Cambrian House, was generating a lot of excitement. The previous year I’d written an article in Wired called “The Rise of Crowdsourcing,” which proclaimed the dawn of a new era: The many would soon do the work of the few; the crowd would display its vast wisdom in every area of human endeavor; the community would replace the company.

In the wake of the article, crowdsourcing became a buzzword and a flood of specious business plans started arriving in my inbox. Cambrian House seemed different. CEO Michael Sikorsky had built a large community of some 5,000 would-be entrepreneurs. Ideas for new software programs were suggested, discussed, then carefully culled through a rigorous voting process. People would cheerfully volunteer to work on the winning projects. Designers would design; coders would code; the biz dev folks would do whatever the hell biz dev people do. They would all be compensated in royalty points, IOUs that could be cashed in once the dough started rolling.

It was a radical rethinking of one of capitalism’s central assumptions—that labor is best organized from the top down, which is to say, by management. “It’s like the dark ages before Newton, when we mistook physics for magic,” Sikorsky told me. “We know there’s magic in crowdsourcing. We know it works. We just don’t know how it works.”

Except that ultimately, it didn’t work. A year after my visit, Cambrian House had failed to bring a single product to market. Crowds might self-organize, it seemed, but they didn’t necessarily do it well. (The company found later success by reinventing itself as Chaordix, which essentially provides a backend computer system for crowdsourcing projects at large companies.)

But the idea of totally reorganizing a labor market from the bottom up remained elusive. Crowdsourcing has ushered in dramatic changes to fields as disparate as graphic design, journalism, and corporate R&D, but it has yet to fundamentally challenge the top-down, command-and-control paradigm of how most of the world does business. Instead, crowdsourcing has become a best practice to accomplish discrete, often rudimentary tasks, such as designing logos or scouring government documents for scandalous malfeasance.

Recently, though, I’ve begun to see glimmers of that old magic in some novel experiments that occupy the nexus where crowdsourcing, games, and big data all meet.

Last year, the prestigious journal Nature Structural and Molecular Biology published an article that revealed the structure of an enzyme used by retroviruses similar to HIV. The achievement was widely viewed as a breakthrough. Who solved the riddle? A bunch of video gamers. Foldit, a novel experiment created by a group of scientists and game designers at the University of Washington, had asked the gamers—some still in middle school and few boasting a background in the sciences, much less microbiology—to determine the how proteins would fold in the enzyme. Within hours, thousands of people were both competing against (and collaborating with) one another. After three weeks, they had succeeded where the microbiologists and the computers had failed. “This is the first example I know of game players solving a long-standing scientific problem,” David Baker, a Foldit co-creator, wrote at the time.

It wasn’t to be the last. Foldit is humming along nicely and in January revealed an accurate model for another highly complex enzyme. Another of Foldit’s co-creators, Adrien Treuille, has gone on to start a similar game, eteRNA, in which gamers create designs for synthetic RNA. Every week eteRNA’s scientists actually create the top-scoring designs in the test tube. “When we can predict protein folding, we’re going to be able to build the equivalent of the airplane inside your body, and do amazing things.”

Foldit, eteRNA, and their ilk may well revolutionize how we treat disease. But they’re holding out another promise as well: a realization that conventional management practice is often dead wrong about who is best suited for a task. The best way to match talent to task, at least in the world of nanobiotechnology, isn’t to assign the fanciest degrees to the toughest jobs, but rather to observe the behavior of thousands of people and identify those who show the greatest aptitude for the cognitive skills that task requires.

“You’d think a Ph.D. in biochemistry would be very good at designing protein molecules,” says Zoran Popović, the University of Washington game designer behind Foldit. Not so. “Biochemists are good at other things. But Foldit requires a narrow, deeper expertise.”

Or as it turns out, more than one. Some gamers have a preternatural ability to recognize patterns, an innate form of spatial reasoning most of us lack. Others—often “grandmothers without a high school education,” says Popovic—exercise a particular social skill. “They’re good at getting people unstuck. They get them to approach the problem differently.” What big pharmaceutical company would have anticipated the need to hire uneducated grandmothers? (I know a few, if Eli Lilly HR is thinking of rejiggering its recruitment strategy.)

In a January speech, Treuille noted that he and his colleagues at eteRNA were able to “filter through hundreds of thousands of people who are experts at very esoteric tasks.” They are able, in other words, to match talent to task with exceptional efficiency. Not based on someone’s CV, and not based on the magic of “self-selection,” but rather through the thousands of data points generated by the gameplay.

The success of Foldit and Treuille’s eteRNA, then, depends on a far more sophisticated use of crowdsourcing than anyone was envisioning as recently as 2008, when I published my book on the subject. “In the future,” Treuille said in his speech, “I can imagine as grand challenges emerge we can come up with games and puzzles that essentially exploit the skills required and find people who are experts at these kinds of problems and the person who owns this network owns something very valuable.”

Popovich and his UW colleagues are at work on a new game in which people design motors that work at the molecular level. “We’re using nature’s tools to create designs that didn’t exist in nature for purposes of effectively fighting new diseases.” Currently, he says, there are 50 people, in the world, qualified to do this work. “I can increase that by two orders of magnitude,” Popovich says. “I can get to 5,000 people really easily.” "

"Just war": entrada de gran actualidad (escrita en 1994) desde el Ludwig von Mises Institute

Aquí

Extracto introductorio:

"My own view of war can be put simply: a just war exists when a people tries to ward off the threat of coercive domination by another people, or to overthrow an already-existing domination. A war is unjust, on the other hand, when a people try to impose domination on another people, or try to retain an already existing coercive rule over them.

During my lifetime, my ideological and political activism has focused on opposition to America's wars, first because I have believed our waging them to be unjust, and, second, because war, in the penetrating phrase of the libertarian Randolph Bourne in World War I, has always been "the health of the State," an instrument for the aggrandizement of State power over the health, the lives, and the prosperity, of their subject citizens and social institutions. Even a just war cannot be entered into lightly; an unjust one must therefore be anathema."

...

"The classical international lawyers from the 16th through the 19th centuries were trying to cope with the implications of the rise and dominance of the modern nation-state. They did not seek to "abolish war," the very notion of which they would have considered absurd and utopian. Wars will always exist among groups, peoples, nations; the desideratum, in addition to trying to persuade them to stay within the compass of "just wars," was to curb and limit the impact of existing wars as much as possible. Not to try to "abolish war," but to constrain war with limitations imposed by civilization.

Specifically, the classical international lawyers developed two ideas, which they were broadly successful in getting nations to adopt:

Above all, don't target civilians. If you must fight, let the rulers and their loyal or hired retainers slug it out, but keep civilians on both sides out of it, as much as possible. The growth of democracy, the identification of citizens with the State, conscription, and the idea of a "nation in arms," all whittled away this excellent tenet of international law.

Preserve the rights of neutral states and nations. In the modern corruption of international law that has prevailed since 1914, "neutrality" has been treated as somehow deeply immoral. Nowadays, if countries A and B get into a fight, it becomes every nation's moral obligation to figure out, quickly, which country is the "bad guy," and then if, say, A is condemned as the bad guy, to rush in and pummel A in defense of the alleged good guy B."

T.I.M.E. de filosofía - just questions :-)

¿Cuál es la pregunta que más tememos hacernos?

¿Cuándo aprendimos a temer?

¿Por qué nos cuesta tanto pensar?

¿Hay dónde donde el pensar fluya más?

¿Cómo sabemos de ese dónde, de ese cuál y que ese cuándo ya es tiempo pasado? :-)

Ya tenemos una medida...

... de la extensión del impacto de la técnica (vista ésta como "Gestell" - Heidegger) resultado de toda acción particular del ser humano de nuestros tiempos: por ejemplo cuando nos comemos un coctel de langostinos :-)

Aquí la columna completa de Jose Fernando Isaza en El Espectador del miércoles 22 de febrero de 2012

Extracto:

"A pesar de los compromisos del Protocolo de Kioto, las emisiones atmosféricas de gases de invernadero siguen en aumento. En 2009 se enviaron 24.100 millones de toneladas de CO2, lo que equivale a 3,5 toneladas por persona. En EE. UU. la cifra es 21 toneladas por habitante y en Colombia 1,36.

...

Un lujo gastronómico como el langostino tiene una huella de carbón elevadísima. Según B. Kauffman, de la Universidad de Oregón, la mayor parte de los langostinos que se consumen se producen en estanques construidos en zonas de manglares. El cultivo modifica las características del agua, por lo cual la vida media del estanque no supera los 5 años. La producción de langostinos por hectárea y por año varía entre 50 y 500 kilos. La destrucción de una hectárea de manglar envía a la atmósfera 1.472 toneladas de CO2. Con los anteriores supuestos, y tomando una productividad media de 200 kilos por hectárea, se tiene que un coctel de 100 g de estos crustáceos provoca una huella de carbón de 150 kilos de CO2. Esto sin considerar la energía para producir los alimentos que consume, transportarlo y mantener la cadena de frío. El aporte a la atmósfera de gas de invernadero equivale a la emisión que hacen 17 galones de gasolina. En términos comparativos, la contribución al calentamiento atmosférico de este manjar equivale a la que produce un paseo de cerca de 500 kilómetros en carro."

T.I.M.E. de filosofía

Ernst Jünger, La Movilización Total, extracto inicial

"1. Repugna al espíritu del heroísmo que se busque una representación de la guerra en un nivel donde la actividad humana ejerce aún un control. Porque, corrientemente, la forma pura de la guerra sufrió a través de la geografía y de la historia humanas múltiples transformaciones, y adopta máscaras y disfraces que ofrecen un espectáculo fascinante al espíritu.

Tal espectáculo hace pensar en volcanes que vierten siempre la misma lava, mientras las regiones donde se desarrolla esa actividad telúrica son muy diferentes. Haber participado en una guerra se asemeja de alguna manera al hecho de encontrarse en una zona amenazada por una de esas montañas vomitando fuego. No obstante, el Hekla de Islandia es muy diferente del Vesubio, que domina la bahía de Nápoles. Pero la diversidad de los paisajes se va diluyendo a medida que uno se acerca a la mandíbula ardiente del cráter. Allí donde irrumpe la pasión en sentido estricto, es decir, primeramente en la lucha inmediata y simple por la vida, es accesorio conocer la fecha del combate, las ideas que lo justifican y el tipo de armas utilizado. Pero no es ese el tema del siguiente ensayo.

Por el contrario, trataremos de reunir un cierto número de hechos que distingan la última guerra -nuestra guerra, el acontecimiento más importante y decisivo de nuestra época- de todas las otras cuyas vicisitudes han llegado hasta nosotros."

Nasa images (always astonishing!)

The Giant Nebula, NGC 3603

"Thousands of sparkling young stars nestled within the giant nebula NGC 3603. This stellar "jewel box" is one of the most massive young star clusters in the Milky Way Galaxy. NGC 3603 is a prominent star-forming region in the Carina spiral arm of the Milky Way, about 20,000 light-years away. This image shows a young star cluster surrounded by a vast region of dust and gas. The image reveals stages in the life cycle of stars. The nebula was first discovered by Sir John Herschel in 1834. The image spans roughly 17 light-years.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage "




The Space Station's First Crew

"Expedition 1 Commander Bill Shepherd (center) is flanked by Soyuz Commander Yuri Gidzenko (right) and Flight Engineer Sergei Krikalev (left) in this crew photograph. The three, seated in front of an artist's concept of the International Space Station, are wearing the Sokol space suits like those donned for trips in the Soyuz to the station. National flags representing all the international partners run along the bottom of the portrait. Expedition 1 was the first crew to live aboard the orbital platform and launched to the station on Oct. 31, 2000.

Image Credit: NASA"



When Galaxies Collide

"This interacting pair of galaxies is included in Arp's catalog of peculiar galaxies as number 148. Arp 148 is the staggering aftermath of an encounter between two galaxies, resulting in a ring-shaped galaxy and a long-tailed companion. The collision between the two parent galaxies produced a shockwave effect that first drew matter into the center and then caused it to propagate outwards in a ring. The elongated companion perpendicular to the ring suggests that Arp 148 is a unique snapshot of an ongoing collision. Infrared observations reveal a strong obscuration region that appears as a dark dust lane across the nucleus in optical light. Arp 148 is nicknamed Mayall's object and is located in the constellation of Ursa Major, the Great Bear, approximately 500 million light-years away. This image is part of a large collection of 59 images of merging galaxies taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and released on April 24, 2008, the observatory's 18th anniversary.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration, and A. Evans (University of Virginia, Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University)"