On visualization (part II)

I’m going to watch today a film called “La Belle Verte“, which I saw a few years ago. It caused to me to think again about visualization.
So obviously (since Kant) the way we see the world affects how we understand & act within it, as our brain just renders one visualization of the world, which could have been programmed in many ways, with many different rendering results & bugs. I consider the visualization to be both statistical (i.e, subconcious emotion-based) & symbolic (i.e., conceptual language-based).
This implies that affecting this visualization is one of the best ways to affect the world, by changing the behavior of its cells. This is obvious (to every advertiser, missionary or activist), the question is about technologies for changing paradigms – interfacing with the visualization mechanism of the brain (our goggles), & planting modifications.
La Belle Verte presents such technologies, & also tries invoking them on the viewers, to shake their world visualization & perhaps even change it. The idea is scary, but the mind-thought done in this film, of how this technology could it be used for “good” purposes, renders it as very cool & fruitful. Recommended.

 

Workers of the whole world: grab some knowledge & find a better job!

For the times they are a-changin’ (Bob Dylan) 

There’s a revolution taking place – if you’ve got the knowledge, you can work from anywhere, serving companies in other parts of the world. I’ve worked for the past few months with some brilliant programmers from Viet-nam doing software projects for firms in California. I’ve heard of young people creating objects in Second Life, such as Guns & Magic Wands, & selling them for $5-$20 a piece.They didn’t have to immigrate from their poor economies, just get the knowledge & provide services for companies in wealthier countries. Amazon is enabling this , with the Mechanical Turk mechanism, but its used less for Knowledge workers. The problem with knowledge workers is that knowledge is something you normally acquire by experience. As Peter Norvig said, the only way to be an expert in some field, is to work in it for at least 10 years. However, you can’t start gaining experience without some initial knowledge, that enables you to be competent enough to start bringing value & be able to get a job. Enter the Free Web Academy: a new mechanism in which people would be able to get practical knowledge in highly demanded professions, that can be practiced from anywhere in the world. It’s a non-profit & completely free university, with courses, lessons & exams given over the Web. It’s still in beta, & the 1st pilot course is starting next week. Students are not required to have anything except for: will, english & Internet connection.Read more about it in this mind-map roadmap, & feel free to join!

 

Post by the cell

in light of the recent (past ~100 hours/days/monthes/years, all the same) events in my organism (jewish ethnic group of the israeli nation), I want to ask a small question: how can a cell make a change?

Those recent events include violent conflicts with neighboring organisms (Palestinians, Lebanese) in an endless vicious circle, with no real progress in solving it’s root causes. These violent conflicts include terrorist attacks on soldiers, followed by bombings of these terrorists taking the lives of children &/ their parents.

Normally, a cell has limited effect, as his micro behavior & choices are just aggregated along with those of millions of other cells, creating a statistical emergence of macro behaviors & trends.

Though, there seems to be exceptions, in which a small action brings a huge (normally very negative) snow-ball effect, e.g., an assasination of a king, or taking over airplanes using simple knives & flying them into buildings.

But normally, cells make changes only by small & steady growing effect on their neighboring cells, e.g., a pacifict attorney convincing people to non-violently fight for their emancipation.

As the macro behavior emerges from the communication & interactions between the cells, you might expect that changes in the messaging medium of the interactions may effect the emergence, & its speed. Do super human organisms, using mass media & Internet communications change their macro behavior faster as a result of cells micro behavior changes?

Maybe the influence is always similar in pattern: a cell’s micro behavior change may have some influence on his neighboring cells, which may recursively distribute it further, climbing a gaussian curve of adoption, depending on the power/value of the change, until it passes or not the line between micro & macro behavior.

This mechanism of change propagation happens in the mechanism of memes, which spread in the population, as a function of their value/survival power, & their success in propagation through communication.

In my super organism, it was a small meme held by very few cells that the conflicts with neighboring organisms are the results of root causes, which drive the conflicts & fuel it. For example, the meme of proffessor Yishayahu Leibovitch claiming in 1967 that the Israeli occupation is bad & must end, took almost 40 years until it has spread & held even by the politician leaders.

But, alas, it seems like it will take many more years, & many more tragedies, until the macro behavior of middle east organisms will change & adopt the intelligent powerful peaceful coexistence behavior, as adopted in other areas of the world, located somewhere else in the memetic evolution.

So, how can a cell make/accelerate a macro change? In the past, people that made such changes were assumed to have super-natural powers, such as Jesus & Jeanne D’Arc. Does the magic of new technology endows individual cells with super-natural powers?

I was thinking of several directions, such as:

• Execute memetic “terrorist” actions, that will effect people by non-violent art (social sculptures), toward the memes of peaceful coexistence, & compassion toward different organisms’ cells.
• Use social technologies, that group many cells & providing them more macro power.

The effectiveness of such directions needs to be assessed, & then be used as fast as possible, because every day that passes, so many people are being so much hurt.

“The law of God, is the law of change.” (G. B. Shaw)

 

Employees work visibility

In 1999 I was building a platform that allowed Web access to regular applications & IT resources (using Grid & other innovative concepts). It brought up an interesting issue, that may be regarded as a feature or as a concern: an employee’s managers could easily see everything the employee did (thru his computer), as if they had a spyware recording his mouse & keyboard actions, but on a higher level.

Today, as all applications are being transformed to the Web, this feature/concern starts being a reality. For example, when working these days on some training program using the great open-source application Moodle, I noticed that all managers can see everything I do, & have complete visibility on all users actions (this big brother interfaces exist there because they allow monitoring the activities & participation of students).

This is just another example of the implications of transparency, but it’s quite interesting & life-changing: say welcome to your boss new permanent virtual position over your shoulder!