Their website is down, but here's the KickStarter that got them going earlier this year: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/smartdeco/smartdeco-furn...
I like this, though I'm often disappointed with the size of desks. A wider, deeper offering would be nice! I want to fit two 30" landscape-oriented monitors, a keyboard, mouse, laptop, and speakers.
I think their issue was not having control over when they leave the vehicle. If the locks are computer controlled, there's risk of a false alarm preventing your exit, potentially in an emergency.
I agree that this is better left to a warning indicator.
Since it's been available, I've preferred Netvibes for RSS: there are already lots of great options outside Google Reader.
I hope that you incorporate some of the ideas Bret Victor has been advocating. He might even be interested in helping directly.
If you're not familiar with him or his work, here's a good start: http://vimeo.com/36579366 http://worrydream.com/#!/KillMath
The previous paragraph covers the issue of conflict between boomers and young generations, touching on the controlling forces of boomers conflicting with newer ideologies. So I think they meant to say that the x and y generations will remain in conflict with the boomers until the boomers grow too old to hold their power.
The problem I have with the invocation of post-materialism specifically to support this argument is that if post-materialism were manifest in the youngest generations, we'd have a lot of empowered voting and office-running youth overthrowing the boomer establishment. Post-materialists value freedom of speech and people collectively having power in political decisions more than they value material goods and even national order. Post-materialists would be fighting tooth and nail and leveraging every advantage they have against a corrupt, centralized material-obsessed authority.
A powerful post-materialist youth would leverage technology to empower their voices directly through the voting system and the lawmaking process. They would enable an open-source voting system with access to vote online and with publicly published by-vote data that associates votes to a generated unique key. When you voted, you would be given that key and then your association to that key would be destroyed. Thus, you'd be able to verify your vote was cast correctly and we could all verify voting data validity. The open-source voting system would ensure that there were no holes in this process.
A powerful post-materialist youth would reform lawmaking such that all bills had a single specific agenda with no riders (i.e., hidden pieces covering separate topics not covered in the abstract). They would ensure that every person could easily search for all the bills in consideration that covered topics they cared about and that the government actively marketed this data to the public.
A powerful post-materialist youth would have a crowd-sourced information platform for politics that tightly integrated with the searchable, taggable data. Think Reddit+Wikipedia for politics. With this there could be a wiki page for every issue and bill in discussion and a "subreddit" for every party and political action group to organize through.
A powerful post-materialist youth would develop these solutions and steamroll them into the status quo long before the boomers retired.
Maddox is highlighting that youth have not been exerting strong post-materialist influence in politics and joining a growing quorum of people saying, "Do more, care more, and you can actually shift ideologies and power structures to better align with your ideals."
The missing element to making this mainstream is a technology-focused social approach to reforming the voting system such that it is possible for the average working and school-going youth to develop and grow their understanding of the issues affecting all those that they care about by connecting them to those same people.
Your analogy fails because the relationship is different.
In your example, you're turning off your phone because it's a case of turning off something which makes noise and light at an event where you're not supposed to do distracting things. It's something you do for the benefit of those around you. So there's a reasonable reason to affect your behavior in this case. Also, in social situations like this it is made very obvious that you're expected to not do anything distracting, whatever that is. A bit of small text on a mall map that might not obviously say "we're tracking where you go via your phone signal while you're here" to a layman is not an equivalent cue by any measure.
In the case of needing to turn off your phone to not be tracked by a third party, you're being forced to change your behavior by a service provider who has no good reason (for you or those immediately affected by you) to force this behavioral change.
The project lead gave a presentation at ICFP 2010 (because the project uses Haskell for some of the key algorithmic portions). The associated PDF is here: http://k1024.org/~iusty/papers/icfp10-haskell-reagent.pdf
Correct. In the last entry I referenced, he opened saying, "We're getting close to the end of my blog. After today's entry, I only have three left to write. After that, I'll only blog anonymously or (more likely) not at all."
Obviously! How didn't I guess earlier? Maybe they're in talks with Patri Friedman (aspiring rationalist around the SIAI crowd, notable for role in Seasteading Institute).
Silly, but maybe I should ask Patri...
good one.
Sounds like you should be going to the Singularity Summit to talk to other people who devote their lives to this issue.
Nick Bostrom's Simulation Argument details the most obvious probabilistic implications of substrate independence in consciousness: http://www.simulation-argument.com/
The most blatantly obvious indicator that consciousness is substrate-independent: We are DNA-based life forms. DNA stores information. It's program code stored in molecules. You are the product of the code of your parents. If for some bizarre reason we find out that we HAVE to use DNA to create other conscious systems, we will still have the ability to do exactly that. Not "machine" in the sense of being composed of metal, but certainly "machine" in the sense of not being the immediate product of natural selection.
David Chalmers' work should be particularly relevant to you, and you will find him at the Singularity Summit this year. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers
Even if you don't live to see machine consciousness as a reality, the only other pursuits that might compare are anti-aging and intelligence enhancement research. If you're not going to create something that can figure out how to give you an indefinite self-contiguous narrative, you have to support its creation or face certain death.
I'm guessing you already have your CS undergrad or will have it soon, and you're interested in AI, so that seems the natural choice. I'd say you're overdecided if that's what you want to study.
You would just need to break out the gensyms to resolve the differentiation issue.
For those truly interested in improving their rationality, http://www.lesswrong.com is in a similar format to Hacker News and is dedicated to the subject.
More directly addressing this article, K.E. Stanovich has conducted some excellent research showing relationships between cognitive abilities and thinking styles. It is fully available online. General reasoning/rationality works are available here: http://web.mac.com/kstanovich/iWeb/Site/Research%20on%20Reas...
Here's a particularly relevant piece: http://web.mac.com/kstanovich/iWeb/Site/Research%20on%20Reas... (Various cognitive bias tests are conducted to explore relations between cognitive functions and challenge assumptions on normative models of rationality. Really interesting exploration of competence-performance dichotomy with focus on effects of thinking dispositions vs. algorithmic limitations. The effect of thinking disposition in achieving normative rationality is an important consideration that applies to considerations for improving your own thought/action models)
Your statement makes some unsafe assumptions. Mental state has a strong effect on ability to reproduce and raise offspring. Cancer rarely has an onset early enough to be a factor in this and the traits aren't something that can be "sensed" by potential reproductive partners. Evolution is blind to debilitations that don't impact reproductive ability (this is the same reason our natural healthy lives aren't much longer, on average, than the time it takes for us to be successful grandparents).
Maybe in a few hundred years with a society that stagnated with the exception of a strong stigma being placed on reproduction with people pre-disposed to cancer you'd see a natural reduction in the traits.
On dispute, dereference your word->concept pointers: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/02/taboo-words.html