Iceland’s drafting a new constitution. To make it more transparent and involve the citizenry, they made the draft available online and used social media, like Facebook, to get comments. The Constitutional Council even broadcast their weekly meetings on YouTube.
Suggestions from the public that have been added thus far include livestock protection and a clause that specifies who owns the country’s natural resources (the nation), …
I’ve been having my students write their classroom constitution on our Wiki. It’s great for transparency and collaborative writing, but usually very few students are interested in looking beyond the section they write. The Iceland experiment is apparently running into a slightly different problem; well-wishers are clogging up the social media sites.
Here’s a real computer, the Raspberry Pi, for only $25. It has only two ports, one for a monitor and another for a keyboard. I’d suggest it needs one more USB port so you could hook it up to external devices (like robots), if you can’t split the single USB.
Its intention is to bring computer hardware and programming into schools. I’d love to get hold of one.
Shreerang Chhatre is working on a mesh that captures droplets of fog from the air to provide water in places where drinkable water is hard to get.
Chhatre is working on this at MIT which has some interesting programs for people interested in social action. He’s in the Chemical Engineering program but works with their Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship.
Last month I observed that the girls in my class were blogging a lot more than the boys. It’s still true, and now there’s an informative, if somewhat hyperbolic, article by Aileen Lee that asserts that the blooming of social media websites is driven, primarily, by women.
I’m always a bit leery about articles like this one. There are lots of statistics, a few anecdotes, and a brief reference back to some scientific research (Dunbar numbers), but the overly excited language coming from a venture capitalist is enough to remind me of the irrational exuberance of the dot-com bubble.
The writing is so over-the-top, that I’m truly surprised that there isn’t a single exclamation point in the entire article! Although, based on Ms. Lee’s first words in the comments section, this might be due to the herculean efforts of a good editor.
My antipathy might also be due to my irrational, visceral distaste of the language of business and commerce, which is so geared toward breaking people into faceless demographic groups to be marketed to that it verges on being dehumanizing. I suspect my feelings are truly irrational because I’ve seen scientists do similar parsing of demographic statistics and have had no trouble; although, perhaps, I may have been a little more empathic because the scientists were looking at issues of vulnerability to disease, infant mortality, and the like.
However, since the article’s anecdotes correlate with my own anecdotes, I find it hard to disagree with the underlying premise: women are more inclined than men to make and nurture social connections so they are a key demographic in understanding the future of the internet.
It’s also a reminder that the social atomization typified by the dominance of the nuclear family at the expense of extended family, is now being ameliorated by social networking, which suggests some interesting social and cultural changes in a, possibly, more matrifocal future.
OK. For someone like me this map is just ridiculously addictive. Produced by Revolver Maps, it shows the locations of everyone who’s visited the Muddle since March 5th (2011). If you click on the map it will take you to their page where you can find out more about the locations of all those dots.
The points on the map are a fascinating result of a combination of population distribution, language, technologic infrastructure (and wealth), and the miscellaneous topics on which I post.
Hits on the Muddle (blue circles) after two days, overlayed on a population density map of the U.S.. (Population density map from the USDA).
Overlaying at the location of hits after two days, on a population density map of the U.S. shows the obvious: the more people there are, the more likely it is that someone would stumble upon my blog. The eastern half of the U.S. with its higher populations are well represented, as is the west coast, while the hits in between come from the major population centers.
The pattern of hits from Australia shows very precisely that the major population centers are along the coast and not in the arid interior.
Map showing the hits on the Muddle (March 5-7) from Africa versus population density.
Africa, however, tells a much different story. The large population centers are along the equatorial belt of sub-Saharan Africa. But even now, there are very few if any hits from that region. I suspect that’s largely because of language and lack of access to the internet. The Muddle is not exactly the most popular on the internet, so it probably takes a lot of people on computers for a few to find their way to it. Contrast sub-Saharan Africa to South Africa, which is relatively wealthy, uses English as its lingua franca (working language), and has seen at least a few people hit the Muddle.
Members of the Commonwealth of Nations. Most of these countries were once part of the British Empire. (Image from Wikimedia Commons User:Applysense.)
Language also plays in big role in the pattern of hits from Europe and Asia. There are many English speakers in western Europe, a very high population density, and so a lot of hits, but the British Isles, as might be expected, are particularly well represented. Similarly in Asia, the members of the Commonwealth are show up disproportionately.
From the middle east, there have been a several hits from the wealthy small states like Bahrain and Qatar, but also a number from Egypt. The Egyptian interest in particular seems to stem from my posts on the recent revolution. No-one from that part of the world has commented on any of it so far, so I have no idea if they find the posts positive, negative, indifferent or whatever. I’d be curious to find out, since even negative feedback is important.
On the note of current events, my post on the plate tectonics of the earthquake in Japan has engendered quite a number of hits, and some positive feedback in the comments section and via email (one from a Japanese reader). In the week since the earthquake more than half the hits to the Muddle have been to that post, largely because it’s been popping up on the front page of the Google search for “plate tectonics earthquake Japan”.
Recent visitors to the Muddle on March 15th, 5:00 AM.
It has been fascinating seeing people from so many different countries hitting my blog. Since most don’t comment, or drop me a note, blogging often feels quite lonely, like I’m just talking to myself. Self-reflection was the original purpose for this blog, and I find that combining writing and graphics really works for me as a way of expressing myself.
Yet, this blog would not be public if I did not have an insatiable urge to share. So thanks for reading, and don’t be afraid to comment. I am a Montessori middle school teacher after all, so I tend not to bite. Although, if you do try to post a comment and it doesn’t show up it may be because it got caught in my spam filter; there is a 1000:1 ratio of spam to legitimate comments so it’s hard for me to catch any mistakes. Sending me an email should fix that though.
I’ve long thought that with all the things we can do with personal, handheld technology that we’re acceleratingly becoming cyborgs. And I don’t think it a bad thing. Consider how much cell phones and the internet helped in the Egyptian protests. Consider being able to look up maps and definitions when you need them, and being able to share them live in the classroom.
Garry Kasparov, the chess grandmaster who was the first to be defeated by a computer in 1998, adds another useful datapoint in an article on the human-machine partnerships in chess competitions:
The teams of human plus machine dominated even the strongest computers. The chess machine Hydra, which is a chess-specific supercomputer like Deep Blue, was no match for a strong human player using a relatively weak laptop. Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer was overwhelming.
–Kasparov (2010): The Chess Master and the Computer
but also fascinating is this, after a tournament:
The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and “coaching” their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants.
The take home message is worth pondering:
Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.
–Kasparov (2010): The Chess Master and the Computer
art … never simply transcribes what is “out there,” but selects certain details and arranges them into a harmony that transfigures them.
— Frank Wilson (2010) in “Still life and the alchemy of art“.
We might see arrangements like the stuff sitting on the counter every day, but the image/photography/painting becomes art when the collection is view from a specific perspective that transforms them and highlights details.
Aside from its obvious beauty, what really intrigues me about this picture is where it was taken: In the living room of the Menchers’ apartment, just a few feet from where I was standing. I would never have guessed.
When Eric told me that, I turned and looked, and could see where the vase and the other objects had been placed. But the setting was altogether different from the picture. The living room is a perfectly nice and neat space, and I had just been sitting there, but when I looked at it again there was absolutely nothing about it that would have brought to mind that photo.
Note: The image at the top of this post is computer generated Gilles Tran, using the free, open-source, 3D rendering program POV-Ray. I’ve played around with POV-Ray and it can be a bit tricky, but you can do interesting things.
We’ll be studying poetry soon, and Wikileaks is in the news. I therefore post the mind-expanding website, Haïkuleaks, which condenses diplomatic cables into seventeen syllables and three lines each.
The site uses Haiku Finder to scan through the cables for inadvertent Haikus.
‘People need to see
the results of decisions,’
the Sultan stated.
