Sunday, July 31, 2011
Daniel Tammet: Different ways of knowing
Daniel Tammet has linguistic, numerical and visual synesthesia -- meaning that his perception of words, numbers and colors are woven together into a new way of perceiving and understanding the world. The author of "Born on a Blue Day," Tammet shares his art and his passion for languages in this glimpse into his beautiful mind
I'm a savant, or more precisely, a high-functioning autistic savant. It's a rare condition. And rarer still when accompanied, as in my case, by self-awareness and a mastery of language. Very often when I meet someone and they learn this about me there's a certain kind of awkwardness. I can see it in their eyes. They want to ask me something. And in the end, quite often, the urge is stronger than they are and they blurt it out: "If I give you my date of birth, can you tell me what day of the week I was born on?" (Laughter) Or they mention cube roots or ask me to recite a long number or long text. I hope you'll forgive me if I don't perform a kind of one-man savant show for you today. I'm going to talk instead about something far more interesting than dates of birth or cube roots -- a little deeper and a lot closer, to my mind, than work.
I want to talk to you briefly about perception. When he was writing the plays and the short stories that would make his name, Anton Chekhov kept a notebook in which he noted down his observations of the world around him -- little details that other people seem to miss. Every time I read Chekhov and his unique vision of human life, I'm reminded of why I too became a writer. In my books, I explore the nature of perception and how different kinds of perceiving create different kinds of knowing and understanding.
Here are three questions drawn from my work. Rather than try to figure them out, I'm going to ask you to consider for a moment the intuitions and the gut instincts that are going through your head and your heart as you look at them. For example, the calculation. Can you feel where on the number line the solution is likely to fall? Or look at the foreign word and the sounds. Can you get a sense of the range of meanings that it's pointing you towards? And in terms of the line of poetry, why does the poet use the word hare rather than rabbit? I'm asking you to do this because I believe our personal perceptions, you see, are at the heart of how we acquire knowledge. Aesthetic judgments, rather than abstract reasoning, guide and shape the process by which we all come to know what we know. I'm an extreme example of this.
My worlds of words and numbers blur with color, emotion and personality. As Juan said, it's the condition that scientists call synesthesia, an unusual cross-talk between the senses. Here are the numbers one to 12 as I see them -- every number with its own shape and character. One is a flash of white light. Six is a tiny and very sad black hole. The sketches are in black and white here, but in my mind they have colors. Three is green. Four is blue. Five is yellow.
I paint as well. And here is one of my paintings. It's a multiplication of two prime numbers. Three-dimensional shapes and the space they create in the middle creates a new shape, the answer to the sum. What about bigger numbers? Well you can't get much bigger than Pi, the mathematical constant. It's an infinite number -- literally goes on forever. In this painting that I made of the first 20 decimals of Pi, I take the colors and the emotions and the textures and I pull them all together into a kind of rolling numerical landscape.
But it's not only numbers that I see in colors. Words too, for me, have colors and emotions and textures. And this is an opening phrase from the novel "Lolita." And Nabokov was himself synesthetic. And you can see here how my perception of the sound L helps the alliteration to jump right out. Another example: a little bit more mathematical. And I wonder if some of you will notice the construction of the sentence from "The Great Gatsby." There is a procession of syllables -- wheat, one; prairies, two; lost Swede towns, three -- one, two, three. And this effect is very pleasant on the mind, and it helps the sentence to feel right.
Let's go back to the questions I posed you a moment ago. 64 multiplied by 75. If some of you play chess, you'll know that 64 is a square number, and that's why chessboards, eight by eight, have 64 squares. So that gives us a form that we can picture, that we can perceive. What about 75? Well if 100, if we think of 100 as being like a square, 75 would look like this. So what we need to do now is put those two pictures together in our mind -- something like this. 64 becomes 6,400. And in the right-hand corner, you don't have to calculate anything. Four across, four up and down -- it's 16. So what the sum is actually asking you to do is 16, 16, 16. That's a lot easier than the school taught you to do math, I'm sure. It's 16, 16, 16, 48, 4,800 -- 4,000, the answer to the sum. Easy when you know how.
(Laughter)
The second question was an Icelandic word. I'm assuming there are not many people here who speak Icelandic. So let me narrow the choices down to two. Hnugginn: is it a happy word, or a sad word? What do you say? Okay. Some people say it's happy. Most people, a majority of people, say sad. And it actually means sad. (Laughter) Why do, statistically, a majority of people say that a word is sad, in this case, heavy in other cases? In my theory, language evolves in such a way that sounds match, correspond with the subjective, with the personal intuitive experience of the listener.
Let's have a look at the third question. It's a line from a poem by John Keats. Words, like numbers, express fundamental relationships between objects and events and forces that constitute our world. It stands to reason that we, existing in this world, should in the course of our lives absorb intuitively those relationships. And poets, like other artists, play with those intuitive understandings. In the case of hare, it's an ambiguous sound in English. It can also mean the fibers that grow from a head. And if we think of that -- let me put the picture up -- the fibers represent vulnerability. They yield to the slightest movement or motion or emotion. So what you have is an atmosphere of vulnerability and tension. The hare itself, the animal -- not a cat, not a dog, a hare -- why a hare? Because think of the picture, not the word, the picture. The overlong ears, the overlarge feet, helps us to picture, to feel intuitively, what it means to limp and to tremble.
So in these few minutes, I hope I've been able to share a little bit of my vision of things, and to show you that words can have colors and emotions, numbers, shapes and personalities. The world is richer, vaster than it too often seems to be. I hope that I've given you the desire to learn to see the world with new eyes.
I'm a savant, or more precisely, a high-functioning autistic savant. It's a rare condition. And rarer still when accompanied, as in my case, by self-awareness and a mastery of language. Very often when I meet someone and they learn this about me there's a certain kind of awkwardness. I can see it in their eyes. They want to ask me something. And in the end, quite often, the urge is stronger than they are and they blurt it out: "If I give you my date of birth, can you tell me what day of the week I was born on?" (Laughter) Or they mention cube roots or ask me to recite a long number or long text. I hope you'll forgive me if I don't perform a kind of one-man savant show for you today. I'm going to talk instead about something far more interesting than dates of birth or cube roots -- a little deeper and a lot closer, to my mind, than work.
I want to talk to you briefly about perception. When he was writing the plays and the short stories that would make his name, Anton Chekhov kept a notebook in which he noted down his observations of the world around him -- little details that other people seem to miss. Every time I read Chekhov and his unique vision of human life, I'm reminded of why I too became a writer. In my books, I explore the nature of perception and how different kinds of perceiving create different kinds of knowing and understanding.
Here are three questions drawn from my work. Rather than try to figure them out, I'm going to ask you to consider for a moment the intuitions and the gut instincts that are going through your head and your heart as you look at them. For example, the calculation. Can you feel where on the number line the solution is likely to fall? Or look at the foreign word and the sounds. Can you get a sense of the range of meanings that it's pointing you towards? And in terms of the line of poetry, why does the poet use the word hare rather than rabbit? I'm asking you to do this because I believe our personal perceptions, you see, are at the heart of how we acquire knowledge. Aesthetic judgments, rather than abstract reasoning, guide and shape the process by which we all come to know what we know. I'm an extreme example of this.
My worlds of words and numbers blur with color, emotion and personality. As Juan said, it's the condition that scientists call synesthesia, an unusual cross-talk between the senses. Here are the numbers one to 12 as I see them -- every number with its own shape and character. One is a flash of white light. Six is a tiny and very sad black hole. The sketches are in black and white here, but in my mind they have colors. Three is green. Four is blue. Five is yellow.
I paint as well. And here is one of my paintings. It's a multiplication of two prime numbers. Three-dimensional shapes and the space they create in the middle creates a new shape, the answer to the sum. What about bigger numbers? Well you can't get much bigger than Pi, the mathematical constant. It's an infinite number -- literally goes on forever. In this painting that I made of the first 20 decimals of Pi, I take the colors and the emotions and the textures and I pull them all together into a kind of rolling numerical landscape.
But it's not only numbers that I see in colors. Words too, for me, have colors and emotions and textures. And this is an opening phrase from the novel "Lolita." And Nabokov was himself synesthetic. And you can see here how my perception of the sound L helps the alliteration to jump right out. Another example: a little bit more mathematical. And I wonder if some of you will notice the construction of the sentence from "The Great Gatsby." There is a procession of syllables -- wheat, one; prairies, two; lost Swede towns, three -- one, two, three. And this effect is very pleasant on the mind, and it helps the sentence to feel right.
Let's go back to the questions I posed you a moment ago. 64 multiplied by 75. If some of you play chess, you'll know that 64 is a square number, and that's why chessboards, eight by eight, have 64 squares. So that gives us a form that we can picture, that we can perceive. What about 75? Well if 100, if we think of 100 as being like a square, 75 would look like this. So what we need to do now is put those two pictures together in our mind -- something like this. 64 becomes 6,400. And in the right-hand corner, you don't have to calculate anything. Four across, four up and down -- it's 16. So what the sum is actually asking you to do is 16, 16, 16. That's a lot easier than the school taught you to do math, I'm sure. It's 16, 16, 16, 48, 4,800 -- 4,000, the answer to the sum. Easy when you know how.
(Laughter)
The second question was an Icelandic word. I'm assuming there are not many people here who speak Icelandic. So let me narrow the choices down to two. Hnugginn: is it a happy word, or a sad word? What do you say? Okay. Some people say it's happy. Most people, a majority of people, say sad. And it actually means sad. (Laughter) Why do, statistically, a majority of people say that a word is sad, in this case, heavy in other cases? In my theory, language evolves in such a way that sounds match, correspond with the subjective, with the personal intuitive experience of the listener.
Let's have a look at the third question. It's a line from a poem by John Keats. Words, like numbers, express fundamental relationships between objects and events and forces that constitute our world. It stands to reason that we, existing in this world, should in the course of our lives absorb intuitively those relationships. And poets, like other artists, play with those intuitive understandings. In the case of hare, it's an ambiguous sound in English. It can also mean the fibers that grow from a head. And if we think of that -- let me put the picture up -- the fibers represent vulnerability. They yield to the slightest movement or motion or emotion. So what you have is an atmosphere of vulnerability and tension. The hare itself, the animal -- not a cat, not a dog, a hare -- why a hare? Because think of the picture, not the word, the picture. The overlong ears, the overlarge feet, helps us to picture, to feel intuitively, what it means to limp and to tremble.
So in these few minutes, I hope I've been able to share a little bit of my vision of things, and to show you that words can have colors and emotions, numbers, shapes and personalities. The world is richer, vaster than it too often seems to be. I hope that I've given you the desire to learn to see the world with new eyes.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Can You Trust Crowd Wisdom?
Researchers say online recommendation systems can be distorted by a minority of users.
Here's how to pick a movie. You go to IMDb.com and you look up your potential title. Or you go IMDb.com > Movies > Showtimes & Tickets and ask IMDb to sort the movies in your neighborhood by "User Ratings." Either way, you'll get whether thousands of people liked the movie or not.
When searching online for a new gadget to buy or a movie to rent, many people pay close attention to the number of stars awarded by customer-reviewers on popular websites. But new research confirms what some may already suspect: those ratings can easily be swayed by a small group of highly active users.
How to Pick a Movie
Monday, July 25, 2011
Why the other line is likely to move faster
Bill introduces queueing theory and uses it to design the most efficient check out line.
Transcript:
I'm sure that this week you've been trapped in a slow moving line. In this box I have a gift that shows how to choose stores with the shortest wait in line ... an old-fashioned telephone!
Now, of course, it isn't the phone that's important, it's the study of early phone systems. It began in 1909 at the Copenhagen Telephone Company when an engineer there, Agner Krarup Erlang, asked the question how many trunk or main telephone lines are needed to adequately service a town.
Now, you could put in just one: That would mean huge delays because of blocked calls. You could install one for each phone. That's expensive and wasteful since not everyone calls at once. The telephone company needed a trade-off between these two extremes.
To see what Erlang did let's look at a town where there's an average of two calls an hour. You'd think two trunk lines would do, but Erlang showed that although the average rate is two an hour; the calls will bunch up.
A lot of time it will be only two calls, but also sometimes none or three or four or five will occur. He showed that given the average number of call and their average length one can estimate the number of trunk lines needed.
To make the calculation simple I'm assumed that Danes like to talk a long time - one hour on the average! Erlang showed that for only 1% of the people to have a blocked call you'd need to install 7 trunk lines.
What has this to do with our holiday season? A shopper approaching a cash register is like a phone call arriving, and an open cashier is like an available trunk line.
To keep the lines moving it would seem that the store should just measure the number of people arriving in a typical hour and then assign enough cashiers so that everyone will be served quickly, but as Erlang showed that's a recipe for gridlock. People will arrive in bunches, not spaced out evenly. So, if stores have just the right number of cashiers for the average number of shoppers in an hour, the stores will, at times, have too few cashiers, resulting in long waits.
Instead they should make a single line feed multiple cashiers. For three cashiers its about three times faster than having a line for each cashier. Here's why: In the single line/single cashier set-up any delay - like a price check - stops the line completely. In contrast when a line feeds to multiple cashiers it's likely that only one of the three customers in front of you will have a delay - because recall that in Erlang's model delays and events are distributed randomly - and that means a register will likely be open.
Most stores don't do this, though, because it bothers customers psychologically: Customers prefer unwisely to jockey for position.
This also explains why other lines always move faster than your line - or at least why they seem to move faster. Picture yourself in a line, with a line on each side.
We'll label them A, B and C - and assume you are in line B. Now if it's random that any of these lines will have a delay there are six possible arrangements of the fastest to the slowest line at any particular moment. It could be that A moves faster, or B moves faster, or C takes the lead. Now look at your line: Only twice out of six permutations did it come out in front. Thus there's only one change in three that it will be moving faster, and greater odds - two out of three - that one of the other lines will breeze past you.
So, here is Erlang's holiday message. Sure, today that other line moves faster, but some days you'll be in the faster lane. In other words, during this season: Relax and let the odds be with you.
I'm Bill Hammack, the engineer guy.
Transcript:
I'm sure that this week you've been trapped in a slow moving line. In this box I have a gift that shows how to choose stores with the shortest wait in line ... an old-fashioned telephone!
Now, of course, it isn't the phone that's important, it's the study of early phone systems. It began in 1909 at the Copenhagen Telephone Company when an engineer there, Agner Krarup Erlang, asked the question how many trunk or main telephone lines are needed to adequately service a town.
Now, you could put in just one: That would mean huge delays because of blocked calls. You could install one for each phone. That's expensive and wasteful since not everyone calls at once. The telephone company needed a trade-off between these two extremes.
To see what Erlang did let's look at a town where there's an average of two calls an hour. You'd think two trunk lines would do, but Erlang showed that although the average rate is two an hour; the calls will bunch up.
A lot of time it will be only two calls, but also sometimes none or three or four or five will occur. He showed that given the average number of call and their average length one can estimate the number of trunk lines needed.
To make the calculation simple I'm assumed that Danes like to talk a long time - one hour on the average! Erlang showed that for only 1% of the people to have a blocked call you'd need to install 7 trunk lines.
What has this to do with our holiday season? A shopper approaching a cash register is like a phone call arriving, and an open cashier is like an available trunk line.
To keep the lines moving it would seem that the store should just measure the number of people arriving in a typical hour and then assign enough cashiers so that everyone will be served quickly, but as Erlang showed that's a recipe for gridlock. People will arrive in bunches, not spaced out evenly. So, if stores have just the right number of cashiers for the average number of shoppers in an hour, the stores will, at times, have too few cashiers, resulting in long waits.
Instead they should make a single line feed multiple cashiers. For three cashiers its about three times faster than having a line for each cashier. Here's why: In the single line/single cashier set-up any delay - like a price check - stops the line completely. In contrast when a line feeds to multiple cashiers it's likely that only one of the three customers in front of you will have a delay - because recall that in Erlang's model delays and events are distributed randomly - and that means a register will likely be open.
Most stores don't do this, though, because it bothers customers psychologically: Customers prefer unwisely to jockey for position.
This also explains why other lines always move faster than your line - or at least why they seem to move faster. Picture yourself in a line, with a line on each side.
We'll label them A, B and C - and assume you are in line B. Now if it's random that any of these lines will have a delay there are six possible arrangements of the fastest to the slowest line at any particular moment. It could be that A moves faster, or B moves faster, or C takes the lead. Now look at your line: Only twice out of six permutations did it come out in front. Thus there's only one change in three that it will be moving faster, and greater odds - two out of three - that one of the other lines will breeze past you.
So, here is Erlang's holiday message. Sure, today that other line moves faster, but some days you'll be in the faster lane. In other words, during this season: Relax and let the odds be with you.
I'm Bill Hammack, the engineer guy.
Maajid Nawaz: A global culture to fight extremism
Why do transnational extremist organizations succeed where democratic movements have a harder time taking hold? Maajid Nawaz, a former Islamist extremist, asks for new grassroots stories and global social activism to spread democracy in the face of nationalism and xenophobia. A powerful talk from TEDGlobal 2011.
Maajid Nawaz works to promote conversation, tolerance and democracy in Muslim and non-Muslim communities. Full bio and more links
Have you ever wondered why extremism seems to have been on the rise in Muslim-majority countries over the course of the last decade? Have you ever wondered how such a situation can be turned around? Have you ever looked at the Arab uprisings and thought, "How could we have predicted that?" or "How could we have better prepared for that?" Well my personal story, my personal journey, what brings me to the TED stage here today, is a demonstration of exactly what's been happening in Muslim-majority countries over the course of the last decades, at least and beyond. I want to share some of that story with you, but also some of my ideas around change and the role of social movements in creating change in Muslim-majority societies.
So let me begin by first of all giving a very, very brief history of time, if I may indulge. In medieval societies there were defined allegiances. An identity was defined primarily by religion. And then we moved on into an era in the 19th century with the rise of a European nation state where identities and allegiances were defined by ethnicity. So identity was primarily defined by ethnicity, and the nation state reflected that. In the age of globalization, we moved on. I call it the era of citizenship -- where people could be from multi-racial, multi-ethnic backgrounds, but all be equal as citizens in a state. You could be American Italian; you could be American Irish; you could be British Pakistani.
But I believe now that we're moving into a new age, and that age the New York Times dubbed recently as "the age of behavior." How I define the age of behavior is a period of transnational allegiances, where identity is defined more so by ideas and narratives. And these ideas and narratives that bump people across borders are increasingly beginning to affect the way in which people behave. Now this is not all necessarily good news, because it's also my belief that hatred has gone global just as much as love. But actually it's my belief that the people who've been truly capitalizing on this age of behavior, up until now, up until recent times, up until the last six months, the people who have been capitalizing most on the age of behavior and the transnational allegiances, using digital activism and other sorts of borderless technologies, those who've been benefiting from this have been extremists. And that's something which I'd like to elaborate on.
If we look at Islamists, if we look at the phenomenon of far-right fascists, one thing they've been very good at, one thing that they've actually been exceeding in, is communicating across borders, using technologies to organize themselves, to propagate their message and to create truly global phenomena. Now I should know, because for 13 years of my life, I was involved in an extreme Islamist organization. And I was actually a potent force in spreading ideas across borders. And I witnessed the rise of Islamist extremism as distinct from Islam the faith, and the way in which it influenced my co-religionists across the world.
And my story, my personal story, is truly evidence for the age of behavior that I'm attempting to elaborate upon here. I was, by the way -- I'm an Essex lad, born an raised in Essex in the U.K. Anyone who's from England knows the reputation we have from Essex. But having been born in Essex, at the age of 16, I joined an organization. At the age of 17, I was recruiting people from Cambridge University to this organization. At the age of 19, I was on the national leadership of this nation in the U.K. At the age of 21, I was co-founding this organization in Pakistan. At the age of 22, I was co-founding this organization in Denmark. By the age of 24, I found myself convicted in prison in Egypt, being blacklisted from three countries in the world for attempting to overthrow their governments, being subjected to torture in Egyptian jails and sentenced to five years as a prisoner of conscience.
Now that journey, and what took me from Essex all the way across the world -- by the way, we were laughing at democratic activists. We felt they were from the age of yesteryear. We felt that they were out of date. I learned how to use email from the extremist organization that I used. I learned how to effectively communicate across borders without being detected. Eventually I was detected, of course, in Egypt. But the way in which I learned to use technology to my advantage was because I was within an extremist organization that was forced to think beyond the confines of the nation state. The age of behavior: where ideas and narratives were increasingly defining behavior and identity and allegiances.
So as I said, we looked to the status quo and ridiculed it. And it's not just Islamist extremists that did this. But even if you look across the mood music in Europe of late, far-right fascism is also on the rise. A form of anti-Islam rhetoric is also on the rise and it's transnational. And the consequences that this is having is that it's affecting the political climate across Europe. What's actually happening is that what were previously localized parochialisms, individual or groupings of extremists who were isolated from one another, have become interconnected in a globalized way and have thus become, or are becoming, mainstream. Because the Internet and connection technologies are connecting them across the world.
If you look at the rise of far-right fascism across Europe of late, you will see some things that are happening that are influencing domestic politics, yet the phenomenon is transnational. In certain countries, mosque minarets are being banned. In others, headscarves are being banned. In others, kosher and halal meat are being banned, as we speak. And on the flip side, we have transnational Islamist extremists doing the same thing across their own societies. And so they are pockets of parochialism that are being connected in a way that makes them feel like they are mainstream. Now that never would have been possible before. They would have felt isolated, until these sorts of technologies came around and connected them in a way that made them feel part of a larger phenomenon.
Where does that leave democracy aspirants? Well I believe they're getting left far behind. And I'll give you an example here at this stage. If any of you remembers the Christmas Day bomb plot: there's a man called Anwar al-Awlaki. As an American citizen, ethnically a Yemeni, in hiding currently in Yemen, who inspired a Nigerian, son of the head of Nigeria's national bank. This Nigerian student studied in London, trained in Yemen, boarded a flight in Amsterdam to attack America. In the meanwhile, the Old mentality with a capital O, was represented by his father, the head of the Nigerian bank, warning the CIA that his own son was about to attack, and this warning fell on deaf ears. The Old mentality with a capital O, as represented by the nation state, not yet fully into the age of behavior, not recognizing the power of transnational social movements, got left behind. And the Christmas Day bomber almost succeeded in attacking the United States of America. Again with the example of the far right: that we find, ironically, xenophobic nationalists are utilizing the benefits of globalization.
So why are they succeeding? And why are democracy aspirants falling behind. Well we need to understand the power of the social movements who understand this. And a social movement is comprised, in my view, it's comprised of four main characteristics. It's comprised of ideas and narratives and symbols and leaders. I'll talk you through one example, and that's the example that everyone here will be aware of, and that's the example of Al-Qaeda. If I asked you to think of the ideas of Al-Qaeda, that's something that comes to your mind immediately. If I ask you to think of their narratives -- the West being at war with Islam, the need to defend Islam against the West -- these narratives, they come to your mind immediately. Incidentally, the difference between ideas and narratives: the idea is the cause that one believes in; and the narrative is the way to sell that cause -- the propaganda, if you like, of the cause. So the ideas and the narratives of Al-Qaeda come to your mind immediately.
If I ask you to think of their symbols and their leaders, they come to your mind immediately. One of their leaders was killed in Pakistan recently. So these symbols and these leaders come to your mind immediately. And that's the power of social movements. They're transnational, and they bond around these ideas and narratives and these symbols and these leaders. However, if I ask your minds to focus currently on Pakistan, and I ask you to think of the the symbols and the leaders for democracy in Pakistan today, you'll be hard pressed to think beyond perhaps the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Which means, by definition, that particular leader no longer exists.
One of the problems we're facing is, in my view, that there are no globalized, youth-led, grassroots social movements advocating for democratic culture across Muslim-majority societies. There is no equivalent of the Al-Qaeda, without the terrorism, for democracy across Muslim-majority societies. There are no ideas and narratives and leaders and symbols advocating the democratic culture on the ground. So that begs the next question. Why is it that extremist organizations, whether of the far-right or of the Islamist extremism -- Islamism meaning those who wish to impose one version of Islam over the rest of society -- why is it that they are succeeding in organizing in a globalized way, whereas those who aspire to democratic culture are falling behind? And I believe that's for four reasons. I believe, number one, it's complacency. Because those who aspire to democratic culture are in power, or have societies that are leading globalized, powerful societies, powerful countries. And that level of complacency means they don't feel the need to advocate for that culture.
The second, I believe, is political correctness. That we have a hesitation in espousing the universality of democratic culture, because we are associating that -- we associate believing in the universality of our values -- with extremists. Yet actually, whenever we talk about human rights, we do say that Human Rights are universal. But actually going out to propagate that view is associated with either neoconservativism or with Islamist extremism. To go around saying that I believe democratic culture is the best that we've arrived at as a form of political organizing is associated with extremism.
And the third, democratic choice in Muslim-majority societies has been relegated to a political choice, meaning political parties in many of these societies ask people to vote for them as the democratic party, but then the other parties ask them to vote for them as the military party -- wanting to rule by military dictatorship. And then you have a third party saying, "Vote for us, we'll establish a theocracy." So democracy has become merely one political choice among many other forms of political choices available in those societies. And what happens as a result of this is, when those parties are elected, and inevitably they fail, or inevitably they make political mistakes, democracy takes the blame for their political mistakes. And then people say, "We've tried democracy. It doesn't really work. Let's bring the military back again."
And the fourth reason, I believe, is what I've labeled here on the slide as the ideology of resistance. What I mean by that is, if the world superpower today was a communist, it would be much easier for democracy activists to use democracy activism as a form of resistance against colonialism, than it is today with the world superpower being America, occupying certain lands and also espousing democratic ideals. So roughly these four reasons make it a lot more difficult for democratic culture to spread as a civilizational choice, not merely as a political choice.
When talking about those reasons, let's break down certain preconceptions. Is it just about grievances? Is it just about a lack of education? Well statistically, the majority of those who join extremist organizations are highly educated. Statistically, they are educated on average above the education levels of Western society. Anecdotally, we can demonstrate that if poverty was the only factor, well Bin Laden is from one of the richest families in Saudi Arabia. His deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was a pediatrician -- not an ill-educated man. International aid and development has been going on for years, but extremism in those societies, in many of those societies, has been on the rise. And what I believe is missing is genuine grassroots activism on the ground, in addition to international aid, in addition to education, in addition to health. Not exclusive to these things, but in addition to them, is propagating a genuine demand for democracy on the ground.
And this is where I believe neoconservatism had it upside-down. Neoconservatism had the philosophy that you go in with a supply-led approach to impose democratic values from the top down. Whereas Islamists and far-right organizations, for decades, have been building demand for their ideology on the grassroots. They've been building civilizational demand for their values on the grassroots, and we've been seeing those societies slowly transition to societies that are increasingly asking for a form of Islamism. Mass movements in Pakistan have been represented after the Arab uprisings mainly by organizations claiming for some form of theocracy, rather than for a democratic uprising. Because since pre-partition, they've been building demand for their ideology on the ground. And what's needed is a genuine transnational youth-led movement that works to actively advocate for the democratic culture -- which is necessarily more than just elections. But without freedom of speech, you can have free and fair elections. Without human rights, you don't have the protection granted to you to campaign. Without freedom of belief, you don't have the right to join organizations.
So what's needed is those organizations on the ground advocating for the democratic culture itself to create the demand on the ground for this culture. What that will do is avoid the problem I was talking about earlier, where currently we have political parties presenting democracy as merely a political choice in those societies alongside other choices such as military rule and theocracy. Whereas if we start building this demand on the ground on a civilizational level, rather than merely on a political level, a level above politics -- movements that are not political parties, but are rather creating this civilizational demand for this democratic culture. What we'll have in the end is this ideal that you see on the slide here -- the ideal that people should vote in an existing democracy, not for a democracy. But to get to that stage, where democracy builds the fabric of society and the political choices within that fabric, but are certainly not theocratic and military dictatorship -- i.e. you're voting in a democracy, in an existing democracy, and that democracy is not merely one of the choices at the ballot box. To get to that stage, we genuinely need to start building demand in those societies on the ground.
Now to conclude, how does that happen? Well, Egypt is a good starting point. The Arab uprisings have demonstrated that this is already beginning. But what happened in the Arab uprisings and what happened in Egypt was particularly cathartic for me. What happened there was a political coalition gathered together for a political goal, and that was to remove the leader. We need to move one step beyond that now. We need to see how we can help those societies move from political coalitions, loosely based political coalitions, to civilizational coalitions that are working for the ideal and narratives of the democratic culture on the ground. Because it's not enough to remove a leader or ruler or dictator. That doesn't guarantee that what comes next will be a society built on democratic values.
But generally, the trends that start in Egypt have historically spread across the MENA region, the Middle East and North Africa region. So when Arab socialism started in Egypt, it spread across the region. In the 80s and 90s when Islamism started in the region, it spread across the MENA region as a whole.
And the aspiration that we have at the moment -- as young Arabs are proving today and instantly rebranding themselves as being prepared to die for more than just terrorism -- is that there is a chance that democratic culture can start in the region and spread across to the rest of the countries that are surrounding that. But that will require helping these societies transition from having merely political coalitions to building genuinely grassroots-based social movements that advocate for the democratic culture. And we've made a start for that in Pakistan with a movement called [unclear], where we are working on the ground to encourage the youth to create genuine buy-in for the democratic culture. And it's with that thought that I'll end.
And my time is up, and thank you for your time.
(Applause)
Maajid Nawaz works to promote conversation, tolerance and democracy in Muslim and non-Muslim communities. Full bio and more links
Have you ever wondered why extremism seems to have been on the rise in Muslim-majority countries over the course of the last decade? Have you ever wondered how such a situation can be turned around? Have you ever looked at the Arab uprisings and thought, "How could we have predicted that?" or "How could we have better prepared for that?" Well my personal story, my personal journey, what brings me to the TED stage here today, is a demonstration of exactly what's been happening in Muslim-majority countries over the course of the last decades, at least and beyond. I want to share some of that story with you, but also some of my ideas around change and the role of social movements in creating change in Muslim-majority societies.
So let me begin by first of all giving a very, very brief history of time, if I may indulge. In medieval societies there were defined allegiances. An identity was defined primarily by religion. And then we moved on into an era in the 19th century with the rise of a European nation state where identities and allegiances were defined by ethnicity. So identity was primarily defined by ethnicity, and the nation state reflected that. In the age of globalization, we moved on. I call it the era of citizenship -- where people could be from multi-racial, multi-ethnic backgrounds, but all be equal as citizens in a state. You could be American Italian; you could be American Irish; you could be British Pakistani.
But I believe now that we're moving into a new age, and that age the New York Times dubbed recently as "the age of behavior." How I define the age of behavior is a period of transnational allegiances, where identity is defined more so by ideas and narratives. And these ideas and narratives that bump people across borders are increasingly beginning to affect the way in which people behave. Now this is not all necessarily good news, because it's also my belief that hatred has gone global just as much as love. But actually it's my belief that the people who've been truly capitalizing on this age of behavior, up until now, up until recent times, up until the last six months, the people who have been capitalizing most on the age of behavior and the transnational allegiances, using digital activism and other sorts of borderless technologies, those who've been benefiting from this have been extremists. And that's something which I'd like to elaborate on.
If we look at Islamists, if we look at the phenomenon of far-right fascists, one thing they've been very good at, one thing that they've actually been exceeding in, is communicating across borders, using technologies to organize themselves, to propagate their message and to create truly global phenomena. Now I should know, because for 13 years of my life, I was involved in an extreme Islamist organization. And I was actually a potent force in spreading ideas across borders. And I witnessed the rise of Islamist extremism as distinct from Islam the faith, and the way in which it influenced my co-religionists across the world.
And my story, my personal story, is truly evidence for the age of behavior that I'm attempting to elaborate upon here. I was, by the way -- I'm an Essex lad, born an raised in Essex in the U.K. Anyone who's from England knows the reputation we have from Essex. But having been born in Essex, at the age of 16, I joined an organization. At the age of 17, I was recruiting people from Cambridge University to this organization. At the age of 19, I was on the national leadership of this nation in the U.K. At the age of 21, I was co-founding this organization in Pakistan. At the age of 22, I was co-founding this organization in Denmark. By the age of 24, I found myself convicted in prison in Egypt, being blacklisted from three countries in the world for attempting to overthrow their governments, being subjected to torture in Egyptian jails and sentenced to five years as a prisoner of conscience.
Now that journey, and what took me from Essex all the way across the world -- by the way, we were laughing at democratic activists. We felt they were from the age of yesteryear. We felt that they were out of date. I learned how to use email from the extremist organization that I used. I learned how to effectively communicate across borders without being detected. Eventually I was detected, of course, in Egypt. But the way in which I learned to use technology to my advantage was because I was within an extremist organization that was forced to think beyond the confines of the nation state. The age of behavior: where ideas and narratives were increasingly defining behavior and identity and allegiances.
So as I said, we looked to the status quo and ridiculed it. And it's not just Islamist extremists that did this. But even if you look across the mood music in Europe of late, far-right fascism is also on the rise. A form of anti-Islam rhetoric is also on the rise and it's transnational. And the consequences that this is having is that it's affecting the political climate across Europe. What's actually happening is that what were previously localized parochialisms, individual or groupings of extremists who were isolated from one another, have become interconnected in a globalized way and have thus become, or are becoming, mainstream. Because the Internet and connection technologies are connecting them across the world.
If you look at the rise of far-right fascism across Europe of late, you will see some things that are happening that are influencing domestic politics, yet the phenomenon is transnational. In certain countries, mosque minarets are being banned. In others, headscarves are being banned. In others, kosher and halal meat are being banned, as we speak. And on the flip side, we have transnational Islamist extremists doing the same thing across their own societies. And so they are pockets of parochialism that are being connected in a way that makes them feel like they are mainstream. Now that never would have been possible before. They would have felt isolated, until these sorts of technologies came around and connected them in a way that made them feel part of a larger phenomenon.
Where does that leave democracy aspirants? Well I believe they're getting left far behind. And I'll give you an example here at this stage. If any of you remembers the Christmas Day bomb plot: there's a man called Anwar al-Awlaki. As an American citizen, ethnically a Yemeni, in hiding currently in Yemen, who inspired a Nigerian, son of the head of Nigeria's national bank. This Nigerian student studied in London, trained in Yemen, boarded a flight in Amsterdam to attack America. In the meanwhile, the Old mentality with a capital O, was represented by his father, the head of the Nigerian bank, warning the CIA that his own son was about to attack, and this warning fell on deaf ears. The Old mentality with a capital O, as represented by the nation state, not yet fully into the age of behavior, not recognizing the power of transnational social movements, got left behind. And the Christmas Day bomber almost succeeded in attacking the United States of America. Again with the example of the far right: that we find, ironically, xenophobic nationalists are utilizing the benefits of globalization.
So why are they succeeding? And why are democracy aspirants falling behind. Well we need to understand the power of the social movements who understand this. And a social movement is comprised, in my view, it's comprised of four main characteristics. It's comprised of ideas and narratives and symbols and leaders. I'll talk you through one example, and that's the example that everyone here will be aware of, and that's the example of Al-Qaeda. If I asked you to think of the ideas of Al-Qaeda, that's something that comes to your mind immediately. If I ask you to think of their narratives -- the West being at war with Islam, the need to defend Islam against the West -- these narratives, they come to your mind immediately. Incidentally, the difference between ideas and narratives: the idea is the cause that one believes in; and the narrative is the way to sell that cause -- the propaganda, if you like, of the cause. So the ideas and the narratives of Al-Qaeda come to your mind immediately.
If I ask you to think of their symbols and their leaders, they come to your mind immediately. One of their leaders was killed in Pakistan recently. So these symbols and these leaders come to your mind immediately. And that's the power of social movements. They're transnational, and they bond around these ideas and narratives and these symbols and these leaders. However, if I ask your minds to focus currently on Pakistan, and I ask you to think of the the symbols and the leaders for democracy in Pakistan today, you'll be hard pressed to think beyond perhaps the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Which means, by definition, that particular leader no longer exists.
One of the problems we're facing is, in my view, that there are no globalized, youth-led, grassroots social movements advocating for democratic culture across Muslim-majority societies. There is no equivalent of the Al-Qaeda, without the terrorism, for democracy across Muslim-majority societies. There are no ideas and narratives and leaders and symbols advocating the democratic culture on the ground. So that begs the next question. Why is it that extremist organizations, whether of the far-right or of the Islamist extremism -- Islamism meaning those who wish to impose one version of Islam over the rest of society -- why is it that they are succeeding in organizing in a globalized way, whereas those who aspire to democratic culture are falling behind? And I believe that's for four reasons. I believe, number one, it's complacency. Because those who aspire to democratic culture are in power, or have societies that are leading globalized, powerful societies, powerful countries. And that level of complacency means they don't feel the need to advocate for that culture.
The second, I believe, is political correctness. That we have a hesitation in espousing the universality of democratic culture, because we are associating that -- we associate believing in the universality of our values -- with extremists. Yet actually, whenever we talk about human rights, we do say that Human Rights are universal. But actually going out to propagate that view is associated with either neoconservativism or with Islamist extremism. To go around saying that I believe democratic culture is the best that we've arrived at as a form of political organizing is associated with extremism.
And the third, democratic choice in Muslim-majority societies has been relegated to a political choice, meaning political parties in many of these societies ask people to vote for them as the democratic party, but then the other parties ask them to vote for them as the military party -- wanting to rule by military dictatorship. And then you have a third party saying, "Vote for us, we'll establish a theocracy." So democracy has become merely one political choice among many other forms of political choices available in those societies. And what happens as a result of this is, when those parties are elected, and inevitably they fail, or inevitably they make political mistakes, democracy takes the blame for their political mistakes. And then people say, "We've tried democracy. It doesn't really work. Let's bring the military back again."
And the fourth reason, I believe, is what I've labeled here on the slide as the ideology of resistance. What I mean by that is, if the world superpower today was a communist, it would be much easier for democracy activists to use democracy activism as a form of resistance against colonialism, than it is today with the world superpower being America, occupying certain lands and also espousing democratic ideals. So roughly these four reasons make it a lot more difficult for democratic culture to spread as a civilizational choice, not merely as a political choice.
When talking about those reasons, let's break down certain preconceptions. Is it just about grievances? Is it just about a lack of education? Well statistically, the majority of those who join extremist organizations are highly educated. Statistically, they are educated on average above the education levels of Western society. Anecdotally, we can demonstrate that if poverty was the only factor, well Bin Laden is from one of the richest families in Saudi Arabia. His deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was a pediatrician -- not an ill-educated man. International aid and development has been going on for years, but extremism in those societies, in many of those societies, has been on the rise. And what I believe is missing is genuine grassroots activism on the ground, in addition to international aid, in addition to education, in addition to health. Not exclusive to these things, but in addition to them, is propagating a genuine demand for democracy on the ground.
And this is where I believe neoconservatism had it upside-down. Neoconservatism had the philosophy that you go in with a supply-led approach to impose democratic values from the top down. Whereas Islamists and far-right organizations, for decades, have been building demand for their ideology on the grassroots. They've been building civilizational demand for their values on the grassroots, and we've been seeing those societies slowly transition to societies that are increasingly asking for a form of Islamism. Mass movements in Pakistan have been represented after the Arab uprisings mainly by organizations claiming for some form of theocracy, rather than for a democratic uprising. Because since pre-partition, they've been building demand for their ideology on the ground. And what's needed is a genuine transnational youth-led movement that works to actively advocate for the democratic culture -- which is necessarily more than just elections. But without freedom of speech, you can have free and fair elections. Without human rights, you don't have the protection granted to you to campaign. Without freedom of belief, you don't have the right to join organizations.
So what's needed is those organizations on the ground advocating for the democratic culture itself to create the demand on the ground for this culture. What that will do is avoid the problem I was talking about earlier, where currently we have political parties presenting democracy as merely a political choice in those societies alongside other choices such as military rule and theocracy. Whereas if we start building this demand on the ground on a civilizational level, rather than merely on a political level, a level above politics -- movements that are not political parties, but are rather creating this civilizational demand for this democratic culture. What we'll have in the end is this ideal that you see on the slide here -- the ideal that people should vote in an existing democracy, not for a democracy. But to get to that stage, where democracy builds the fabric of society and the political choices within that fabric, but are certainly not theocratic and military dictatorship -- i.e. you're voting in a democracy, in an existing democracy, and that democracy is not merely one of the choices at the ballot box. To get to that stage, we genuinely need to start building demand in those societies on the ground.
Now to conclude, how does that happen? Well, Egypt is a good starting point. The Arab uprisings have demonstrated that this is already beginning. But what happened in the Arab uprisings and what happened in Egypt was particularly cathartic for me. What happened there was a political coalition gathered together for a political goal, and that was to remove the leader. We need to move one step beyond that now. We need to see how we can help those societies move from political coalitions, loosely based political coalitions, to civilizational coalitions that are working for the ideal and narratives of the democratic culture on the ground. Because it's not enough to remove a leader or ruler or dictator. That doesn't guarantee that what comes next will be a society built on democratic values.
But generally, the trends that start in Egypt have historically spread across the MENA region, the Middle East and North Africa region. So when Arab socialism started in Egypt, it spread across the region. In the 80s and 90s when Islamism started in the region, it spread across the MENA region as a whole.
And the aspiration that we have at the moment -- as young Arabs are proving today and instantly rebranding themselves as being prepared to die for more than just terrorism -- is that there is a chance that democratic culture can start in the region and spread across to the rest of the countries that are surrounding that. But that will require helping these societies transition from having merely political coalitions to building genuinely grassroots-based social movements that advocate for the democratic culture. And we've made a start for that in Pakistan with a movement called [unclear], where we are working on the ground to encourage the youth to create genuine buy-in for the democratic culture. And it's with that thought that I'll end.
And my time is up, and thank you for your time.
(Applause)
Sebastian Thrun: Google’s driverless car
http://ebongeek.com/2011/04/03/sebastian-thrun-googles-driverless-car/
Sebastian Thrun helped build Google's amazing driverless car, powered by a very personal quest to save lives and reduce traffic accidents. Jawdropping video shows the DARPA Challenge-winning car motoring through busy city traffic with no one behind the wheel, and dramatic test drive footage from TED2011 demonstrates how fast the thing can really go.
One Day On Earth
ONE DAY ON EARTH creates a picture of humanity by recording a 24-hour period throughout every country in the world. We explore a greater diversity of perspectives than ever seen before on screen. We follow characters and events that evolve throughout the day, interspersed with expansive global montages that explore the progression of life from birth, to death, to birth again. In the end, despite unprecedented challenges and tragedies throughout the world, we are reminded that every day we are alive there is hope and a choice to see a better future together.
Founded in 2008, ONE DAY ON EARTH set out to explore our planet’s identity and challenges in an attempt to answer the question: Who are we? http://vimeo.com/26378195
Founded in 2008, ONE DAY ON EARTH set out to explore our planet’s identity and challenges in an attempt to answer the question: Who are we? http://vimeo.com/26378195
Sunday, July 24, 2011
GOOGLE+ or Facebook?
The sociological breakthrough of Google+
http://andreaskluth.org/2011/07/20/the-sociological-breakthrough-of-google/
Google+: everything you need to know
Google Plus is Google's new social network. But why start a Google Plus account when you already have a Facebook account? Well, Facebook was developed on the premise that everyone is your "friend" which isn't how your social circles work in real life. Google plus is built so that you can intuitively break up all your connections into "circles" and treat each circle separately. (Facebook allows you to do some of the same things but the privacy settings are confusing and constantly changing.)
Google Plus has a lot of slick features, but the biggest reason to open a Google Plus account is that if you use a lot of Google products you will inevitably get one some day.
http://andreaskluth.org/2011/07/20/the-sociological-breakthrough-of-google/
Google+: everything you need to know
Google Plus is Google's new social network. But why start a Google Plus account when you already have a Facebook account? Well, Facebook was developed on the premise that everyone is your "friend" which isn't how your social circles work in real life. Google plus is built so that you can intuitively break up all your connections into "circles" and treat each circle separately. (Facebook allows you to do some of the same things but the privacy settings are confusing and constantly changing.)
Google Plus has a lot of slick features, but the biggest reason to open a Google Plus account is that if you use a lot of Google products you will inevitably get one some day.
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Tim Harford: Trial, error and the God complex
Economics writer Tim Harford studies complex systems -- and finds a surprising link among the successful ones: they were built through trial and error. In this sparkling talk from TEDGlobal 2011, he asks us to embrace our randomness and start making better mistakes.
Rebecca MacKinnon: Let's take back the Internet!
In this powerful talk from TEDGlobal, Rebecca MacKinnon describes the expanding struggle for freedom and control in cyberspace, and asks: How do we design the next phase of the Internet with accountability and freedom at its core, rather than control? She believes the internet is headed for a "Magna Carta" moment when citizens around the world demand that their governments protect free speech and their right to connection.
So I begin with an advertisement inspired by George Orwell that Apple ran in 1984.
(Video) Big Brother: We are one people with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death, and we will fight them with their own confusion. We shall prevail. Narrator: On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like "1984."
Rebecca MacKinnon: So the underlying message of this video remains very powerful even today. Technology created by innovative companies will set us all free. Fast-forward more than two decades. Apple launches the iPhone in China and sensors the Dalai Lama out along with several other politically sensitive applications at the request of the Chinese government for its Chinese app store. The American political cartoonist Mark Fiore also had his satire application censored in the United States because some of Apple's staff were concerned it would be offensive to some groups. His app wasn't reinstated until he won the Pulitzer Prize. The German magazine Stern, a news magazine, had its app sensored because the Apple nannies deemed it to be a little bit too racy for their users, and despite the fact that this magazine is perfectly legal for sale on newsstands throughout Germany. And more controversially, recently, Apple censored a Palestinian protest app after the Israeli government voiced concerns that it might be used to organize violent attacks.
So here's the thing, we have a situation where private companies are applying censorship standards that are often quite arbitrary and generally more narrow than the free speech constitutional standards that we have in democracies. Or they're responding to censorship requests by authoritarian regimes that do not reflect consent of the governed. Or they're responding to requests and concerns by governments that have no jurisdiction over many, or most, of the users and viewers who are interacting with the content in question.
So here's the situation. In a pre-Internet world, sovereignty over our physical freedoms, or lack thereof, was controlled almost entirely by nation states. But now we have this new layer of private sovereignty in cyberspace. And their decisions about software coding, engineering, design, terms of service all act as a kind of law that shapes what we can and cannot do with our digital lives. And their sovereignties, cross-cutting, globally interlinked, can in some ways challenge the sovereignties of nation states in very exciting ways, but sometimes also act to project and extend it at a time when control over what people can and cannot do with information has more effect than ever on the exercise of power in our physical world. After all, even the leader of the free world needs a little help from the sultan of Facebookistan if he wants to get reelected next year.
And these platforms were certainly very helpful to activists in Tunisia and Egypt this past spring and beyond. As Wael Ghonim, the Google Egyptian executive by day, secret Facebook activist by night, famously said to CNN after Mubarak stepped down, "If you want to liberate a society, just give them the Internet." But overthrowing a government is one thing and building a stable democracy is a bit more complicated. On the left there's a photo taken by an Egyptian activist who was part of the storming of the Egyptian state security offices in March. And many of the agents shredded as many of the documents as they could and left them behind in piles. But some of the files were left behind intact, and activists, some of them, found their own surveillance dossiers full of transcripts of their email exchanges, their cellphone text message exchanges, even Skype conversations. And one activist actually found a contract from a Western company for the sale of surveillance technology to the Egyptian security forces. And Egyptian activists are assuming that these technologies for surveillance are still being used by the transitional authorities running the networks there.
And in Tunisia, censorship actually began to return in May -- not nearly as extensively as under President Ben Ali. But you'll see here a blocked page of what happens when you try to reach certain Facebook pages and some other websites that the transitional authorities have determined might incite violence. In protest over this, blogger Slim Amamou, who had been jailed under Ben Ali and then became part of the transitional government after the revolution, he resigned in protest from the cabinet. But there's been a lot of debate in Tunisia about how to handle this kind of problem.
In fact, on Twitter, there were a number of people who were supportive of the revolution who said, "Well actually, we do want democracy and free expression, but there is some kinds of speech that need to be off-bounds because it's too violent and it might be destabilizing for our democracy. But the problem is, how do you decide who is in power to make these decisions and how do you make sure that they do not abuse their power? As Riadh Guerfali, the veteran digital activist from Tunisia, remarked over this incident, "Before things we simple: you had the good guys on one side and the bad guys on the other. Today, things are a lot more subtle." Welcome to democracy, our Tunisian and Egyptian friends.
The reality is that even in democratic societies today, we do not have good answers for how you balance the need for security and law enforcement on one hand and protection of civil liberties and free speech on the other in our digital networks. In fact, in the United States, whatever you may think of Julian Assange, even people who are not necessarily big fans of his are very concerned about the way in which the United States government and some companies have handled Wikileaks. Amazon webhosting dropped Wikileaks as a customer after receiving a complaint from U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman, despite the fact that Wikileaks had not been charged, let alone convicted, of any crime.
So we assume that the Internet is a border-busting technology. This is a map of social networks worldwide, and certainly Facebook has conquered much of the world -- which is either a good or a bad thing, depending on how you like the way Facebook manages its service. But borders do persist in some parts of cyberspace. In Brazil and Japan, it's for unique cultural and linguistic reasons. But if you look at China, Vietnam and a number of the former Soviet states, what's happening there is more troubling. You have a situation where the relationship between government and local social networking companies is creating a situation where, effectively, the empowering potential of these platforms is being constrained because of these relationships between companies and government.
Now in China, you have the "great firewall," as it's well-known, that blocks Facebook and Twitter and now Google+ and many of the other overseas websites. And that's done in part with the help from Western technology. But that's only half of the story. The other part of the story are requirements that the Chinese government places on all companies operating on the Chinese internet, known as a system of self-discipline. In plain English, that means censorship and surveillance of their users. And this is a ceremony I actually attended in 2009 where the Internet Society of China presented awards to the top 20 Chinese companies that are best at exercising self-discipline -- i.e. policing their content. And Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, China's dominant search engine, was one of the recipients.
In Russia, they do not generally block the Internet and directly sensor websites. But this is a website called Rospil that's an anti-corruption site. And earlier this year, there was a troubling incident where people who had made donations to Rospil through a payments processing system called Yandex Money suddenly received threatening phone calls from members of a nationalist party who had obtained details about donors to Rospil through members of the security services who had somehow obtained this information from people at Yandex Money. This has a chilling effect on people's ability to use the Internet to hold government accountable. So we have a situation in the world today where in more and more countries the relationship between citizens and governments is mediated through the Internet, which is comprised primarily of privately owned and operated services.
So the important question, I think, is not this debate over whether the Internet is going to help the good guys more than the bad guys. Of course, it's going to empower whoever is most skilled at using the technology and best understands the Internet in comparison with whoever their adversary is. The most urgent question we need to be asking today is how do we make sure that the Internet evolves in a citizen-centric manner. Because I think all of you will agree that the only legitimate purpose of government is to serve citizens. And I would argue that the only legitimate purpose of technology is to improve our lives, not to manipulate or enslave us.
So the question is, we know how to hold government accountable. We don't necessarily always do it very well, but we have a sense of what the models are, politically and institutionally, to do that. How do you hold the sovereigns of cyberspace accountable to the public interest when most CEO's argue that their main obligation is to maximize shareholder profit?
And government regulation often isn't helping all that much. You have situations, for instance, in France where president Sarkozy tells the CEO's of Internet companies, "We're the only legitimate representatives of the public interest." But then he goes and champions laws like the infamous three strikes law that would disconnect citizens from the Internet for file sharing, which has been condemned by the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression as being a disproportionate violation of citizens' right to communications, and has raised questions amongst civil society groups about whether some political representatives are more interested in preserving the interests of the entertainment industry than they are in defending the rights of their citizens. And here in the United Kingdom there's also concern over a law called the Digital Economy Act that's placing more onus on private intermediaries to police citizen behavior.
So what we need to recognize is that if we want to have a citizen-centric Internet in the future, we need a broader and more sustained Internet freedom movement. After all, companies didn't stop polluting groundwater as a matter of course, or employing 10 year-olds as a matter of course, just because executives woke up one day and decided it was the right thing to do. It was the result of decades of sustained activism, shareholder advocacy and consumer advocacy. Similarly, governments don't enact intelligent environmental and labor laws just because politicians wake up one day. It's the result of very sustained and prolonged political activism that you get the right regulations, and that you get the right corporate behavior. We need to make the same approach with the Internet.
We also are going to need political innovation. 800 years ago, approximately, the barons of England decided that the divine right of kings was no longer working for them so well, and they forced King John to sign the Magna Carta, which recognized that even the king who claimed to have divine rule still had to abide by a basic set of rules. This set off a cycle of what we can call political innovation, which led eventually to the idea of consent of the governed -- which was implemented for the first time by that radical revolutionary government in America across the pond. So now we need to figure out how to build consent of the networked.
And what does that look like? At the moment, we still don't know. But it's going to require innovation that's not only going to need to focus on politics, on geopolitics, but it's also going to need to deal with questions of business management, investor behavior, consumer choice and even software design and engineering. Each and every one of us has a vital part to play in building the kind of world in which government and technology serve the world's people and not the other way around.
Thank you very much.
So I begin with an advertisement inspired by George Orwell that Apple ran in 1984.
(Video) Big Brother: We are one people with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death, and we will fight them with their own confusion. We shall prevail. Narrator: On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like "1984."
Rebecca MacKinnon: So the underlying message of this video remains very powerful even today. Technology created by innovative companies will set us all free. Fast-forward more than two decades. Apple launches the iPhone in China and sensors the Dalai Lama out along with several other politically sensitive applications at the request of the Chinese government for its Chinese app store. The American political cartoonist Mark Fiore also had his satire application censored in the United States because some of Apple's staff were concerned it would be offensive to some groups. His app wasn't reinstated until he won the Pulitzer Prize. The German magazine Stern, a news magazine, had its app sensored because the Apple nannies deemed it to be a little bit too racy for their users, and despite the fact that this magazine is perfectly legal for sale on newsstands throughout Germany. And more controversially, recently, Apple censored a Palestinian protest app after the Israeli government voiced concerns that it might be used to organize violent attacks.
So here's the thing, we have a situation where private companies are applying censorship standards that are often quite arbitrary and generally more narrow than the free speech constitutional standards that we have in democracies. Or they're responding to censorship requests by authoritarian regimes that do not reflect consent of the governed. Or they're responding to requests and concerns by governments that have no jurisdiction over many, or most, of the users and viewers who are interacting with the content in question.
So here's the situation. In a pre-Internet world, sovereignty over our physical freedoms, or lack thereof, was controlled almost entirely by nation states. But now we have this new layer of private sovereignty in cyberspace. And their decisions about software coding, engineering, design, terms of service all act as a kind of law that shapes what we can and cannot do with our digital lives. And their sovereignties, cross-cutting, globally interlinked, can in some ways challenge the sovereignties of nation states in very exciting ways, but sometimes also act to project and extend it at a time when control over what people can and cannot do with information has more effect than ever on the exercise of power in our physical world. After all, even the leader of the free world needs a little help from the sultan of Facebookistan if he wants to get reelected next year.
And these platforms were certainly very helpful to activists in Tunisia and Egypt this past spring and beyond. As Wael Ghonim, the Google Egyptian executive by day, secret Facebook activist by night, famously said to CNN after Mubarak stepped down, "If you want to liberate a society, just give them the Internet." But overthrowing a government is one thing and building a stable democracy is a bit more complicated. On the left there's a photo taken by an Egyptian activist who was part of the storming of the Egyptian state security offices in March. And many of the agents shredded as many of the documents as they could and left them behind in piles. But some of the files were left behind intact, and activists, some of them, found their own surveillance dossiers full of transcripts of their email exchanges, their cellphone text message exchanges, even Skype conversations. And one activist actually found a contract from a Western company for the sale of surveillance technology to the Egyptian security forces. And Egyptian activists are assuming that these technologies for surveillance are still being used by the transitional authorities running the networks there.
And in Tunisia, censorship actually began to return in May -- not nearly as extensively as under President Ben Ali. But you'll see here a blocked page of what happens when you try to reach certain Facebook pages and some other websites that the transitional authorities have determined might incite violence. In protest over this, blogger Slim Amamou, who had been jailed under Ben Ali and then became part of the transitional government after the revolution, he resigned in protest from the cabinet. But there's been a lot of debate in Tunisia about how to handle this kind of problem.
In fact, on Twitter, there were a number of people who were supportive of the revolution who said, "Well actually, we do want democracy and free expression, but there is some kinds of speech that need to be off-bounds because it's too violent and it might be destabilizing for our democracy. But the problem is, how do you decide who is in power to make these decisions and how do you make sure that they do not abuse their power? As Riadh Guerfali, the veteran digital activist from Tunisia, remarked over this incident, "Before things we simple: you had the good guys on one side and the bad guys on the other. Today, things are a lot more subtle." Welcome to democracy, our Tunisian and Egyptian friends.
The reality is that even in democratic societies today, we do not have good answers for how you balance the need for security and law enforcement on one hand and protection of civil liberties and free speech on the other in our digital networks. In fact, in the United States, whatever you may think of Julian Assange, even people who are not necessarily big fans of his are very concerned about the way in which the United States government and some companies have handled Wikileaks. Amazon webhosting dropped Wikileaks as a customer after receiving a complaint from U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman, despite the fact that Wikileaks had not been charged, let alone convicted, of any crime.
So we assume that the Internet is a border-busting technology. This is a map of social networks worldwide, and certainly Facebook has conquered much of the world -- which is either a good or a bad thing, depending on how you like the way Facebook manages its service. But borders do persist in some parts of cyberspace. In Brazil and Japan, it's for unique cultural and linguistic reasons. But if you look at China, Vietnam and a number of the former Soviet states, what's happening there is more troubling. You have a situation where the relationship between government and local social networking companies is creating a situation where, effectively, the empowering potential of these platforms is being constrained because of these relationships between companies and government.
Now in China, you have the "great firewall," as it's well-known, that blocks Facebook and Twitter and now Google+ and many of the other overseas websites. And that's done in part with the help from Western technology. But that's only half of the story. The other part of the story are requirements that the Chinese government places on all companies operating on the Chinese internet, known as a system of self-discipline. In plain English, that means censorship and surveillance of their users. And this is a ceremony I actually attended in 2009 where the Internet Society of China presented awards to the top 20 Chinese companies that are best at exercising self-discipline -- i.e. policing their content. And Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, China's dominant search engine, was one of the recipients.
In Russia, they do not generally block the Internet and directly sensor websites. But this is a website called Rospil that's an anti-corruption site. And earlier this year, there was a troubling incident where people who had made donations to Rospil through a payments processing system called Yandex Money suddenly received threatening phone calls from members of a nationalist party who had obtained details about donors to Rospil through members of the security services who had somehow obtained this information from people at Yandex Money. This has a chilling effect on people's ability to use the Internet to hold government accountable. So we have a situation in the world today where in more and more countries the relationship between citizens and governments is mediated through the Internet, which is comprised primarily of privately owned and operated services.
So the important question, I think, is not this debate over whether the Internet is going to help the good guys more than the bad guys. Of course, it's going to empower whoever is most skilled at using the technology and best understands the Internet in comparison with whoever their adversary is. The most urgent question we need to be asking today is how do we make sure that the Internet evolves in a citizen-centric manner. Because I think all of you will agree that the only legitimate purpose of government is to serve citizens. And I would argue that the only legitimate purpose of technology is to improve our lives, not to manipulate or enslave us.
So the question is, we know how to hold government accountable. We don't necessarily always do it very well, but we have a sense of what the models are, politically and institutionally, to do that. How do you hold the sovereigns of cyberspace accountable to the public interest when most CEO's argue that their main obligation is to maximize shareholder profit?
And government regulation often isn't helping all that much. You have situations, for instance, in France where president Sarkozy tells the CEO's of Internet companies, "We're the only legitimate representatives of the public interest." But then he goes and champions laws like the infamous three strikes law that would disconnect citizens from the Internet for file sharing, which has been condemned by the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression as being a disproportionate violation of citizens' right to communications, and has raised questions amongst civil society groups about whether some political representatives are more interested in preserving the interests of the entertainment industry than they are in defending the rights of their citizens. And here in the United Kingdom there's also concern over a law called the Digital Economy Act that's placing more onus on private intermediaries to police citizen behavior.
So what we need to recognize is that if we want to have a citizen-centric Internet in the future, we need a broader and more sustained Internet freedom movement. After all, companies didn't stop polluting groundwater as a matter of course, or employing 10 year-olds as a matter of course, just because executives woke up one day and decided it was the right thing to do. It was the result of decades of sustained activism, shareholder advocacy and consumer advocacy. Similarly, governments don't enact intelligent environmental and labor laws just because politicians wake up one day. It's the result of very sustained and prolonged political activism that you get the right regulations, and that you get the right corporate behavior. We need to make the same approach with the Internet.
We also are going to need political innovation. 800 years ago, approximately, the barons of England decided that the divine right of kings was no longer working for them so well, and they forced King John to sign the Magna Carta, which recognized that even the king who claimed to have divine rule still had to abide by a basic set of rules. This set off a cycle of what we can call political innovation, which led eventually to the idea of consent of the governed -- which was implemented for the first time by that radical revolutionary government in America across the pond. So now we need to figure out how to build consent of the networked.
And what does that look like? At the moment, we still don't know. But it's going to require innovation that's not only going to need to focus on politics, on geopolitics, but it's also going to need to deal with questions of business management, investor behavior, consumer choice and even software design and engineering. Each and every one of us has a vital part to play in building the kind of world in which government and technology serve the world's people and not the other way around.
Thank you very much.
Saturday, July 16, 2011
The Brain Creates Religion
Voltaire: If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him
http://bigthink.com/ideas/20159
God's Brain
Book Review: God's Brain by Lionel Tiger and Michael McGuire
http://bigthink.com/ideas/20159
Believing in God generates soothing "juices" in the brain that make us feel good.
Question: What evolutionary purpose does religion serve?
Lionel Tiger: It is of course a very vexing issue because people who believe devoutly in religion will tell you that there is no question there. It is already answered, which is that we’re obligated to respect and believe and follow the word of God however that word is determined. I did with a colleague of mine who had been at the UCLA Medical School, head of the Psychiatric Research Institute, Michael McGuire, a book called God’s Brain in which we were I think able to suggest, if not demonstrate that religion is really made by the brain. It is a secretion of the brain and this gets us away from the issue of whether religion is true of not true. The fact is that there are 4,200 religions in the world, each of them believing they’re absolutely correct and everyone should follow their views and some 90% of human beings are describable by themselves, if not other, as religious, so we’re not dealing here with a casual phenomenon even though no one has any evidence of the stories behind the religions and so we got interested in this massive unreality, which is in fact finally a real reality, namely religions and so there are cathedrals and towns. There are tax exemptions. There are people donating money to religions still in America. Religions receive more donations than any other part of the community and so we were fascinated with what animated this and as I said I think we were able to suggest, if not also demonstrate that the brain creates religion and the brain consumes religion.
Question: When you say the brain creates religion, is that a neurochemical process?
Lionel Tiger: Yes, that is the argument that Michael McGuire discerned in the matter of serotonin. He discovered that serotonin in primates was associated with high status and that when animals had high status they felt better. It’s not unreasonable. If you took away their high status their serotonins levels would crash. Their brains would begin producing more cortisol and other neurotransmitters that are associated with feeling mean and feeling bad and feeling low and so we decided that one of the ways of looking at religion is to what extent and how does it generate the serotonergic juices that make us feel good. Hence, you go to a mass in a major cathedral or anywhere or a slum Baptist church and there is music and there is color and there is activity and it appears that people actually get some brain juice out of it and that brain juice again self created and self consumed is the story we think of religion.
Question: If we have drugs that can create this kind of soothing, do we need religion?
Lionel Tiger: Well there is an argument about Europe, which has tended in the years, recent years to become less formally religious, so the French for example rarely go to mass. There are certain fictional religious observances, but they don’t really abide by it. On the other hand, they’re the most enthusiastic pill poppers in Europe and it may be that they’re taking the mass into their skull with a pill, so there is the pharmacological element of brain soothing. Let me just backup for a second. What we described was a kind of malaise of the brain we call brain pain. That is when you’re late for work. You’re driving somewhere vital and you get a flat tire. You’re working with somebody who is a certified moron. You have brain pain and everybody has that. It is in the nature of the human brain to observe, to seek out and to conjure up problems, evaluate the environment. In contrast, we suggested that one of the things that religions do is provide brain soothing and they soothe the brain the way a spa does or a massage or exercise or going for a walk in the park and so there is a kind of bracket here between brain pain, brain soothe and religion may be one of the main producers of the brain soothing phenomenon in a way that is not that expensive or destructive or difficult. All you have to do is show up Sunday morning.
Lionel Tiger: It is of course a very vexing issue because people who believe devoutly in religion will tell you that there is no question there. It is already answered, which is that we’re obligated to respect and believe and follow the word of God however that word is determined. I did with a colleague of mine who had been at the UCLA Medical School, head of the Psychiatric Research Institute, Michael McGuire, a book called God’s Brain in which we were I think able to suggest, if not demonstrate that religion is really made by the brain. It is a secretion of the brain and this gets us away from the issue of whether religion is true of not true. The fact is that there are 4,200 religions in the world, each of them believing they’re absolutely correct and everyone should follow their views and some 90% of human beings are describable by themselves, if not other, as religious, so we’re not dealing here with a casual phenomenon even though no one has any evidence of the stories behind the religions and so we got interested in this massive unreality, which is in fact finally a real reality, namely religions and so there are cathedrals and towns. There are tax exemptions. There are people donating money to religions still in America. Religions receive more donations than any other part of the community and so we were fascinated with what animated this and as I said I think we were able to suggest, if not also demonstrate that the brain creates religion and the brain consumes religion.
Question: When you say the brain creates religion, is that a neurochemical process?
Lionel Tiger: Yes, that is the argument that Michael McGuire discerned in the matter of serotonin. He discovered that serotonin in primates was associated with high status and that when animals had high status they felt better. It’s not unreasonable. If you took away their high status their serotonins levels would crash. Their brains would begin producing more cortisol and other neurotransmitters that are associated with feeling mean and feeling bad and feeling low and so we decided that one of the ways of looking at religion is to what extent and how does it generate the serotonergic juices that make us feel good. Hence, you go to a mass in a major cathedral or anywhere or a slum Baptist church and there is music and there is color and there is activity and it appears that people actually get some brain juice out of it and that brain juice again self created and self consumed is the story we think of religion.
Question: If we have drugs that can create this kind of soothing, do we need religion?
Lionel Tiger: Well there is an argument about Europe, which has tended in the years, recent years to become less formally religious, so the French for example rarely go to mass. There are certain fictional religious observances, but they don’t really abide by it. On the other hand, they’re the most enthusiastic pill poppers in Europe and it may be that they’re taking the mass into their skull with a pill, so there is the pharmacological element of brain soothing. Let me just backup for a second. What we described was a kind of malaise of the brain we call brain pain. That is when you’re late for work. You’re driving somewhere vital and you get a flat tire. You’re working with somebody who is a certified moron. You have brain pain and everybody has that. It is in the nature of the human brain to observe, to seek out and to conjure up problems, evaluate the environment. In contrast, we suggested that one of the things that religions do is provide brain soothing and they soothe the brain the way a spa does or a massage or exercise or going for a walk in the park and so there is a kind of bracket here between brain pain, brain soothe and religion may be one of the main producers of the brain soothing phenomenon in a way that is not that expensive or destructive or difficult. All you have to do is show up Sunday morning.
God's Brain
Friday, July 8, 2011
Thursday, July 7, 2011
July : My WordPress Blogs
****** JULY ******
Who wants to live forever?
Is the Internet Re-wiring Our Brains?
The Sad Truth To Why Most People May Not Wake Up!
Confessions From a Pharmaceutical Industry Representative
Best & Worst National Anthem Singers
Happy 4th of July with USA Fun Facts!
Invest Your Money…And, Poof….It’s Gone!
Best Math Jokes
Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner: Reckle$$ Endangerment
http://benvitalis.wordpress.com/2011/07/04/gretchen-morgenson-and-joshua-rosner-reckle-endangerment/
The End of the American Dream?
Awesome Dice Optical Illusions
Wondering about the American economy?
Top 10 Illusions of 2010
Top 10 Illusions of 2011
Why We See What Isn’t There
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
WOULD WE WANT TO LIVE IN PLATO’S IDEAL SOCIETY?
Plato’s vision of a harmonious state would scandalize liberals and conservatives alike. But some of his advice might be worth taking.
—Georg C. Lichtenberg
An Alternative to Capitalism (which Plato might approve!)
Several decades ago, Margaret Thatcher claimed: “There is no alternative”. She was referring to capitalism. Today, this negative attitude still persists.
I would like to offer an alternative to capitalism for the American people to consider. Please click on the following link. It will take you to an essay titled: “Home of the Brave?” which was published by the Athenaeum Library of Philosophy:
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/steinsvold.htm
—Georg C. Lichtenberg
Slavoj Zizek on Capitalism, Healthcare, Latin American "Populism"
Slovenian Philosopher Slavoj Zizek on Capitalism, Healthcare, Latin American "Populism" and the "Farcical" Financial Crisis
Philosopher Slavoj Zizeck on Democracy Now
"Everybody in the World Except US Citizens Should Be Allowed to Vote and Elect the American Government"–Leading Intellectual Slavoj Žižek
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Slavoj Zizek - First as Tragedy, Then as Farce
Slavoj Zizek, one of the worlds most influential living philosophers, visits the RSA to discuss capitalism's flawed priorities.
Democracy Now:
"First as Tragedy, Then As Farce": Philosopher and Cultural Theorist Slavoj Žižek Speaks at Cooper Union
In this short RSA Animate, renowned philosopher Slavoj Zizek investigates the surprising ethical implications of charitable giving.
Democracy Now:
"First as Tragedy, Then As Farce": Philosopher and Cultural Theorist Slavoj Žižek Speaks at Cooper Union
In this short RSA Animate, renowned philosopher Slavoj Zizek investigates the surprising ethical implications of charitable giving.
Slavoj Žižek
Living in the End Times by Slavoj Žižek
Is the world ignoring the signs of the so-called "end times"? Renowned philosopher and critic, Slavoj Zizek, explains what he thinks is causing the downhill slide, and points to the faltering economy, global warming and deteriorating ethnic relations as evidence.
If capitalism failing and if so what are the alternatives?
Is the world ignoring the signs of the so-called "end times"? Renowned philosopher and critic, Slavoj Zizek, explains what he thinks is causing the downhill slide, and points to the faltering economy, global warming and deteriorating ethnic relations as evidence.
If capitalism failing and if so what are the alternatives?
Sunday, July 3, 2011
Wisdom of Crowds in action
The crowd knows best
Saturday, July 2, 2011
Friday, July 1, 2011
GOOD Blog
I’m Gonna Need You to Fight Me On This: How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD
Bike-Part Vending Machine Arrives in Minneapolis
Skate for Japan: The Latest Creative Relief Effort
http://www.good.is/post/how-violent-sex-helped-ease-my-ptsd/
Zero-Packaging Grocery Store to Open in Austin, Texas
Zero-Packaging Grocery Store to Open in Austin, Texas
http://www.good.is/post/zero-packaging-grocery-store-to-open-in-austin-texas/
Chipotle Plans to Double Its Use of Local Produce
Chipotle Plans to Double Its Use of Local Produce
http://www.good.is/post/111/
Unicorn Lookalikes Make a Comeback
Unicorn Lookalikes Make a Comeback
Could Google's New Social Network Actually Improve Our Social Lives?
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