I found this today on the blog of a Canadian educator. Love it. Love how collaborative it is. Read the credits at the end, and they span the globe, a perfect example of what they’re talking about needing to set up.
I hope someone sees this who can set it in train for education in NSW.
I recently signed up to do a course in online marketing, called the ‘Thirty Day Challenge‘. In it, I had to research a niche, then start building a content-based blog around it. Considering the fun I’d been having finding way out options to annoy my car-loving boyfriend, I chose the niche “alternative vehicles” and set up alternativevehiclesreport.net. Then I got into my research.
What surprised me is how much development has been going on, just one level under the surface of the automotive industry that everyone knows. Even the major manufacturers are pushing innovation, like Toyota’s concept cars, which are rolled out every year. But there are also literally hundreds of smaller players who’ve been developing alternative technologies, options and vehicle designs for over a decade now – some of which are amazingly clever (some of them look like heaps more fun, too. I want a Carver!)
Then I turned my research onto discussions of alternative transportation, and found a lot of very lively, very intelligent debates. What a large part of it amounted to was that there is such a huge infrastructure built around the current model of private vehicle ownership that the only practical course open appears to be something supplemental or complementary to that infrastructure, that doesn’t require a huge outlay to re-outfit the roads and traffic systems already in place. More so than outlay, the resources needed also have to be factored in. Considering the current crisis has emerged from a shortage in fossil fuels, and a perception that we’ve moved past peak production, it’s probably not a good idea to suddenly start depleting reserves of copper, for example, to place wires along every road and street. There are huge consequences as to whatever model is chosen to supplant/supplement the current one. For new cities, like Masdar in the UAE (also known as the ‘zero carbon city’, it’s a lot more feasible to build in alternative transportation technologies from the ground up, as it were, than it is to convert something already existing, but the existing structures already service a huge majority of the travelling population.
Once I started looking at the forces arrayed against that model, though, a longer term picture emerged. Obviously, the cost of fuel, which has risen as it’s scarcity has become more apparent, is putting a lot of pressure on people trying to use the system – especially in view of the current mortgage crisis. Financially, private transport is moving to become a prerogative of the elite, rather than a right of the majority.
Then I looked at the environmental issues, and the intriguing shift of this movement from fringe ‘greenies’ on the outside of general society to mass acceptance and something now considered the domain of anyone with any degree of social awareness.
In seeing both of these movements shift in patterns similar to that of a normal or bell curve, I started thinking. The principle of the 99th monkey, also known as the tipping point, could be seen behind the sudden exponential growth of environmental awareness – and I remembered seeing a program not long ago about how private vehicles were brought to a similar shift when Henry Ford deliberately pushed his prices lower on the Model T’s, so that his vision of every family owning a car could happen. That was the tipping point or 99th monkey for the private transport model, and as time has grown on the curve has increased to the point where the vast majority of people in western developed cultures are so caught up in that model that it’s almost inconceivable for most people to see any viable alternative. But some people have been, and with the increasing pressures brought to bear against the status quo, the number is growing. Whether an alternative is found or not, the private transport ownership model is on the way out. Even the executives in the industry agree on it.
I started wondering, is there a point in the development of a trend that ‘mirrors’ the 99th monkey effect – the point where, like goliath, the very size of the trend works against it and it inevitably starts going into decline? Maybe a ‘millionth monkey’ principle? If so, where else could it be seen?
I looked at fame. Again, I saw a bell curve. Look at any single famous person over time and you get the same thing – growth and eventually decline as they shift out of public notice. Bearing in mind the “six seconds of fame” concept, this could theoretically apply to everyone, with individual different starting points along the fame axis depending on whether they were in that infamous, majority or famous group. You can even look at the curve in 3 dimensions. At any one point in time, there would be a few famous, a few infamous, and a vast majority not.
I looked at finance and it seemed to be happening there too, but again slightly varied. There are 3 legs in the financial market – cash, property and stock, which usually rotate. But looking at any one of them seemed to produce something that rose and fell but generally trended upwards over time. Then I remembered inflation. If you cancelled out inflationary impacts on the dollar value, would you have a bell curve? I haven’t done the studies, but from what I remember seeing of stock market charts, I think it’s very likely. So for this area, the three sectors of the market each following their own curve, the picture seemed to resemble a biorhythm chart more than a single sine wave.
Time? I know that balancing money and time is a big part of my ideal lifestyle, and the same for many others. But battling the 80/20 principle, where you usually only have a majority of one and a shortage of the other: selling your time in a job, or on the flip side having lots of time and no income, is the majority of people’s status quo. It makes sense, if the point of balance where the two are equal is actually towards the edges of the bell curve, that it’s going to be enjoyed by only a few.
My next thought was to wonder: Is this something like the fame axis, where you can shift your position over time? I’m hoping so. I’ve heard it said time and again that persistence is what separates the successful and unsuccessful, so could that be the factor that keeps people plugging further and further away from the masses?
So success is another bell curve. I’m seeing the things everywhere!
What are the bell curves you can see in your life?
I’ve just finished watching a documentary on SBS called the Six Billion Dollar Experiment. I’m fascinated by all things scientific, especially cutting edge and where the search currently lies in a field, so I couldn’t miss this one. What really got me, though, was that despite having early on in the show made the link between energy and mass, via Einstein’s theory of special relativity, they went on to talk of how the model developed – the standard model – of the smallest building blocks in the universe, was missing some fundamental factor that would give these weightless particles the mass to actually build things. The idea they’re trying to put forward to explain it is the Higgs Field, described as being like a ‘mass of treacle’ through which these particles travel, sticking to some to form mass.
I started thinking. Being a large scale woman, mass is an issue of great personal interest to me. I pondered the fact that maybe our obesity issue is that on a particle level, we’re driven to accumulate energy, which of course in our biological system manifests as fat. But then I started thinking about all the people that aren’t overweight, and the apparent fact that stasis is the hardest state of all to achieve. Our mass is in one of two states – storing energy, or expressing energy. Can’t be both. In other words, if you’re not losing weight, you’re probably gaining, and vice versa. Maintenance is just balancing out gains with losses so they’re eventually small enough to seem stable – like the bouncing ball that seems to have come to a stop but theoretically never actually does.
Then I wondered – what if the process of acquiring mass in particles is like the process of acquiring mass in, say, my hips. Storing energy. The way to lose it, I know, is to change from storing it to expressing it. Particles in motion, obviously, are expressing energy. If they’re ‘fed’ energy but held still, instead of being shunted at high speeds around a collider, would they take on form? Turn them into couch potatoes and see what happens? (Surely it’d be cheaper to build the particle equivalent of a couch and TV than a huge, kilometers long racing track…)
Of course, I’m not an authority, having no scientific qualifications whatever except a raging curiosity and a very broad range of interests that allows me to ‘cross fertilise’ ideas, but at the very least, I’ve now realised, I can think of my weight loss journey in less personal terms. I’m only fighting an atomic level imperative to energy storage (mass acquisition) in order to try to force a reversal of the energy handling mechanisms of the biological system currently housing my consciousness.
No wonder it seems so hard sometimes!!!
Just found a video by a professor of cultural anthropology talking about his view of how the web is changing us, and we’re changing the web. I couldn’t blink it was that riveting.
Connecting to the internet means you’ve already taken the red pill.
Welcome to the machine.
I was reading about a car crash this morning where the driver was convinced they’d gone through a green light, but the car behind them (and the car they plowed into) both saw it as red. Having also had someone almost walk right into me as the train doors opened heading into work, because they were so busy talking and didn’t see me standing right in front of them on my crutches, behind the glass doors, I got to thinking.
Attention is definitely getting scarcer. People are distracted more easily, juggle more things, and pay less attention to the things they are doing. Driving being one of the things most people feel they can do on ‘automatic’ this has big implications. I’d suggest that over the next 5-10 years we’re going to see car smashes on the rise as our road hazards expand from just plain bad drivers to include distracted ones, multitasking ones and, with the increasing pace of life and work expectations, overtired ones.
So what’s the solution?
More training isn’t. It’s training that gets people to that ‘automatic’ stage where they no longer focus on their driving. I don’t think we’re going to be able to turn back the clock and get people’s lives back to where they could look at doing only one thing at a time, with total concentration on only that one thing until it’s done. That time’s been and gone. No, I think the solution is going to have to be another one of those developments that sci-fi predicted years ago – automated traffic control. Drivers are only going to get worse at this, so now is definitely the time to look at innovating – there will no doubt be a world market once it’s ready.
A colleague once told me the technology already existed to control cars via satellite, the car-makers just weren’t interested in implementing it. I think Australia would be a perfect testing ground for innovation on it – how many regional areas would welcome researchers who wanted to test out small scale systems which could attract attention on a world scale if they worked? How many researchers would love the chance to work in an environment like Australia, where the system they develop could be almost guaranteed to be robust enough for any other place in the world (ice continents excepted), especially if they received government encouragement and assistance?
What do you think?
Reading through the paper yesterday, I came across yet another ad for the government’s ‘environmental’ approach. Australia’s been suffering drought for years now, so water is a big issue and was huge in the lead up to the last elections. What’s the solution proposed? Everybody seems to love it but me, but the response to critically low levels in our dams is to give people a rebate to install water tanks in their own homes.
Um, excuse me, but this seems to be a bit short sighted. There’s not enough water in circulation, so we’re going to throw money at millions of people to take yet more OUT of the natural recirculation process??? I guess that means that if you have a problem with not having enough money, you need to open more bank accounts. Or, in the absence of food to live on, you buy another fridge. Why, oh why, don’t these policy makers ever look at the REAL issues and try to keep the bigger picture in mind???
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New technologies to communicate have already changed the approach ofthe last few generations. The advent of spell check has reduced spelling skills to the point that governments throughout the western world are frantically trying to address the rebound against them from devotees of the “Three R’s” approach. As you know, it’s no easy task
to teach, especially when there’s a total lack of interest in the topic on the part of your students. Now we have phonetxt messages and online chats also changing communication patterns, moving away from the perfectionist approach of knowing how a word is spelt (no easy task, in the English language) and using the correct word to convey shades of
meaning, to using the least amount of words and characters to convey your intent.
So now, we’re moving towards having only one standard left for most young people today: functionality. Purity is seen as irrelevant.
What implications is this likely to have for our language, which has evolved over centuries, amalgamating terms from other languages and cultures as it grew? It’s one of the most difficult to learn (I should know, I speak a few others), counter intuitive in many cases – especially in colloquialisms and sayings, with so many redundant terms that we have a whole book to address them: the thesaurus. It’s not a small book, either. Theoretically, all these terms are supposed to have nuances that distinguish them from each other, but in reality many people each have their own understanding of what these nuances are and it’s frequent that they don’t match.
Here’s the question, though: if our language evolves towards a more concise, purely functional model as it seems to be doing, then as we lose common awareness of the ‘long form’ words that add shades of meaning to a concept, does our culture lose awareness of the depths of understanding we’ve already explored in favour of a surface level grasp
of the basics? Remember George Orwell’s “1984″ where control of the language was used to control thought? I know from personal experience that one of the hardest aspects of learning a second language is grasping the concepts that aren’t used in your own.
Would / Could specialisation counter this linguistic culling by developing levels of jargon for the deeper level concepts in each field, or would exploration of the deeper layers of our culture fade away as the language to express it disappears? I already see a trend that many people are choosing to live ’surface level lives’ where they seek no more than functionality and conformity in surviving, working, recreation and procreation – and never explore what they want to do with their lives or pursue interests and passions of their own. They “live” vicariously through things like soaps and more recently realityTV
shows, but refuse to chase any dreams themselves. Many people’s relationships have become equally shallow – it’s about the number of contacts in your network, not the depths of your friendships anymore. To someone who cares passionately about life, social issues and self-realisation it’s tragic and frustrating to watch. On the brighter side, though, there also seems to be a counter-movement of people who are almost addicted to personal development and growth (I’m one), exploring the deeper issues and finding or creating meaning. Not the majority, but a very vocal minority.
It’s a form of stratification along the same lines as class divisions used to be, except the criteria is levels of engagement with life. Or maybe levels of conformity. Is there a difference?
So if the majority of people conform to expectations and there’s a smaller pool of people seeking to expand learning and understanding, will enrolment into sciences and exploratory fields start to decline?
I don’t have statistics, but I believe from my reading of newspaper and magazine articles on the topic that it may already be the case. I’ve already spoken on the evolution of humanity into a hive format. Is this another facet? Could our technology be changing our
language towards a stratified, hierarchical, functional division of the next evolution of our race – into worker humans, soldiers, artisans, thinkers & ‘queens’?
One of the most frequent questions I see in the communities I use online is whether or not the internet is likely to become a ’supermind’ type entity. It’s an interesting question, because the answer depends largely on how much we as a race are willing to modify ourselves.
The simple answer is always going to be ‘not likely’. Yes, the Internet holds a large amount of information (knowledge) and is constantly building new connections between items (learning), but there’s a key element missing, and that’s consciousness. That makes it the equivalent of a brain without a mind. As far as any of us can tell, our machines have not yet decided they exist and started reasoning for themselves.
However, the web at the moment is evolving away from being a large knowledge repository and towards a collaboration & networking tool. That’s called “Web 2.0″. This evolution is being orchestrated by us – people. No longer limited to just programmers, customisation is the province of every user in the new wave of social media. If you look at it from a bigger perspective, it’s shifting away from being a tool for users, towards increasing involvement. We’re getting ‘plugged in’.
Very, very broadly, if you looked at humanity as a whole in conjunction with the internet, you could argue that it is a form of collective intelligence, or ‘hive mind’. Except it’s reliant on us to provide the ‘mind’ part. So is it the internet, or us, that’s evolving?
The next step, of course, if it/we were to go down the path of becoming this supermind entity, a la the Borg in Star Trek, is a frighteningly short one. Improving the interface. We’ve already unplugged ourselves and given ourselves a connection that can move around with us (WiFi, Bluetooth, Laptops, Phones, even wearable devices are all part of it), so considering the fact that so many sci-fi books have predicted it, how far away are we from direct connection implants?
If that happens, then where does the boundary between the Internet and Humanity go to? Do we, collectively, become parts of a greater whole? In merging ourselves into this larger pool of awareness, do we lose anything of ourselves or do we purely gain?
I believe the answer will be driven by how we, as individuals, feel about the possibilities involved. If we are driven by fear, then we will pull knowledge down, but not provide anything of ourselves back. The Internet remains distinct from us, and devoid of consciousness. On the other hand, if this and future generations decide they are willing to be part of larger communities, pool and participate what they each have to offer as individuals, then these communities can and will develop as forms of group consciousness. It won’t be the machines becoming self aware, but us using technology to create something bigger than our individual awarenesses, through plugging ourselves into a collective. Isn’t that a form of ‘hive mind’?
So why are so many people scared of it?
