PunchKick: UX and AI: using artificial intelligence research to build smart products (more)

Michael Crichton against Environmentalism. I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from Propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the Information Age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance... As an example of this challenge, I want to talk today about environmentalism... I think our past record of environmental action is discouraging, to put it mildly, because even our best intended efforts often go awry. But I think we do not recognize our past failures, and face them squarely. And I think I know why. I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human Social Structure-s (Social System) always reappear. They can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is Religion... Paul Ehrlich: 60 million Americans will die of starvation in the 1980s... With so many past failures, you might think that environmental predictions would become more cautious. But not if it's a religion... Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century history of America... I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it. I can tell you that the evidence for Global Warming is far weaker than its proponents would ever admit. I can tell you the percentage the US land area that is taken by Urbanization, including cities and roads, is 5%. I can tell you that the Sahara desert is shrinking, and the total ice of Antarctica is increasing... Religions think they know it all, but the unhappy truth of the environment is that we are dealing with incredibly complex, evolving systems (Complex System), and we usually are not certain how best to proceed. Those who are certain are demonstrating their personality type, or their belief system, not the state of their knowledge.... At this moment, the EPA is hopelessly politicized. In the wake of Carol Browner, it is probably better to shut it down and start over. What we need is a new organization much closer to the FDA... Because in the end, science (Scientific Method) offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost.

Haptics is any form of Non-Verbal communication involving touch. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haptics (more)

see Home-School

Nonverbal communication is the process of communication through sending and receiving wordless (mostly visual) cues between people. It is sometimes mistakenly referred to as body language (kinesics), but nonverbal communication encompasses much more, such as use of voice (paralanguage), touch (Haptic-s), distance (proxemics), and physical environments/appearance.[1] Typically overlooked in nonverbal communication are proxemics, or the informal space around the body and chronemics: the use of time. Not only considered eye contact, oculesics comprises the actions of looking while talking and listening, frequency of glances, patterns of fixation, pupil dilation, and blink rate. Even speech contains nonverbal elements known as paralanguage, including voice quality, rate, pitch, volume, and speaking style, as well as prosodic features such as rhythm, intonation, and stress. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonverbal_communication

Bruce Sterling gave the closing talk at Reboot-11. (more)

Cost estimates on the Medicare Prescription Drugs benefit bill were kept hidden from Congress. Richard Foster, the chief actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said Friday night that he received a handwritten note from Thomas Scully, then the centers' administrator, in early June ordering him to ignore information requests from members of Congress who were drafting the drug bill... When George W Bush signed the bill in December the drug benefit bore a $395 billion price tag. In January, the president's Federal Budget director, Joshua Bolten, upped the estimate by $139 billion. (more)

Displaying a level of Cynicism that tries to excuse caring about anything, thinking about anything, etc. (more)

aka Psy Op (more)

Emotional detachment, in psychology, can mean two different things. In the first meaning, it refers to an "inability to connect" with others emotionally, as well as a means of dealing with anxiety by preventing certain situations that trigger it; it is often described as "emotional numbing" or dissociation, depersonalization or in its chronic form depersonalization disorder. In the second sense, it is a decision to avoid engaging emotional connections, rather than an inability or difficulty in doing so, typically for personal, social, or other reasons. In this sense it can allow people to maintain boundaries, psychic integrity and avoid undesired impact by or upon others, related to emotional demands. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_detachment (more)

lite To-Do List/list manager (List Making) - subset of BaseCamp (more)

Broad Way has been closed by a musicians Labor Union strike. The union wants to keep control over the minimum number of musicians used, while the producers are pushing for more use of synthesizers/samplers.

cf Hippocratic Oath, Acting Dead

Propaganda is a form of communication aimed towards influencing the attitude of the community toward some cause or position by presenting only one side of an argument. Propaganda statements may be partly false and partly true. Propaganda is usually repeated and dispersed over a wide variety of media in order to create the chosen result in audience attitudes As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda, in its most basic sense, presents information primarily to influence an audience. Propaganda often presents facts selectively (thus possibly lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis, or uses loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented. The desired result is a change of the attitude toward the subject in the target audience to further a political, religious or commercial agenda. Propaganda can be used as a form of ideological or commercial warfare. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda (more)

When you think you're making the Moral stand to Do No Harm, but you're just doing nothing (more)

David Brin has made the point that lots of the Mass Media consumed in the US carries the propaganda messages of Suspicion Of Authority and Tolerance (2002-10-15-BrinLibertarian). This theme is so prevalent, and so obvious, that even though you can probably see where I am going with this - and hate the inevitable conclusion - you aren't going to dispute the core fact. You have to sit there and accept one of the most galling things that a bunch of dedicated individualists can ever realize - that you were trained to be individualists by the most relentless campaign of public indoctrination in history, suckling your love of rebellion and eccentricity from a society that - evidently, at some level - wants you to be that way! But another theory is that this is more of a release valve, like the princes in Saudi Arabia giving money to the Extremist Islam schools to try and buy some peace...

The U.S. Army illegally ordered a team of soldiers specializing in "psychological operations" (PsyOps) to manipulate visiting American senators into providing more troops and funding for the war, Rolling Stone has learned – and when an officer tried to stop the operation, he was railroaded by military investigators. The orders came from the command of Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, a three-star general in charge of training Afghan troops – the linchpin of U.S. strategy in the war. Over a four-month period last year, a military cell devoted to what is known as "information operations" at Camp Eggers in Kabul was repeatedly pressured to target visiting senators and other VIPs who met with Caldwell. When the unit resisted the order, arguing that it violated U.S. laws prohibiting the use of propaganda against American citizens, it was subjected to a campaign of retaliation. (Afghanistan)

Eran Hammer, within Yahoo's Sled program, is working on a collaborative To-Do List app/server. I’ve been obsessed with project management and personal productivity for a almost two decades. My experience ranges from tiny lists to gigantic project plans with hundreds of people and resources. In the past I’ve been a certified PMP and managed large engineering teams. What I’ve learned above all, is that we tend to overcomplicate everything... Sled is a collaborative List Making tool with a strong focus on life events and collaboration between friends and family. Planning a party, a move, getting ready for a new baby, planning a trip, organizing a junior soccer league, or preparing for a marathon, are some of the efforts I hope Sled will be useful for. The idea is to start with a really solid tool for making lists. Then add collaboration with a few people, a little bit of social features, and later a crowd-sourced knowledge base of lists and recommendations. For the past few months we’ve been focusing on list making and the result is a simple tool to create lists alone or with a small group of friends. Sled is still in its very early stages, but it is usable and (we hope) fun. (more)

Buddhism is a nontheistic religion that encompasses a variety of traditions, beliefs and practices largely based on teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, who is commonly known as the Buddha, meaning "the awakened one". According to Buddhist tradition, the Buddha lived and taught in the eastern part of the Indian subcontinent sometime between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE.[1] He is recognized by Buddhists as an awakened or enlightened teacher who shared his insights to help sentient beings end their suffering through the elimination of craving and ignorance by way of understanding and the seeing of dependent origination, with the ultimate goal of attainment of the sublime state of nirvana. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism

cf To-Do List, CheckList