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Built in Obsolescence

I was not convinced in the sixties when people said that companies were building things to break, to maximise profit.  But they did. Out fridge is had it after about 15 years, but one from 1950s I know is still working.  With computers it is a little different.  Everyone I’ve bought has replaced a working one, but was a major improvment on the last. 

Any form of crippling information that is easy to copy is simply wrong for humanity.  Information is not intellectual property. The plan is not the building, or the recipe the meal.  The ebook however is the ebook, and writers need to be paid.  The old scheme was useless though.  Writers were paid very unevenly, on a scheme based on popularity rather than merit. Science writing for example needed funding from other sources, and we found ways, imperfect as they are, to do that.

We will find other ways to create ebooks.  HarperCollins has had it. They don’t have a model that is native to the net.  Soemone will think of one, but it wont be them.  How to pay authors and editors, there are new models brewing like LuLu, and the breakthrough will come. 

Boycott HarperColins, so this artificial obsolescence does not gain a hold and launch a new dark age.

Education Petition: Tell HarperCollins: Limited Checkouts on eBooks is Wrong for Libraries | Change.org:

On March 7, 2011, the publisher HarperCollins instituted an expiration policy on eBooks that are licensed to libraries. Under this new arrangement, eBooks would “self-destruct” after being checked out 26 times. This would require libraries to re-purchase the eBook if they wanted to continue to make it available. Libraries across the country are boycotting future purchases of HarperCollins eBooks, but our voices alone will not change their policy. We need your help.

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MOW RIP

Chris trotter got it right here.  Note too that most of the MOW buildings did not go down in the earthquake.  But that old Government Life one in the Square certainly was NOT a good idea.

Maybe it is time for a revolution | Stuff.co.nz:

Did anyone pause to wonder why the huge snowstorm that cut the power supply to so many thousands of Cantabrians a few years back didn’t wreak more havoc on the region’s energy infrastructure?

No. Because we take the excellence of its engineering and the gold-standard quality of its construction completely for granted. It never occurs to us that a privately owned construction company – mandated to provide a healthy rate of return to its shareholders – would never have provided this nation with such a robust and reliable system.

The Rogernomes couldn’t get rid of the Ministry of Works fast enough – and for very good reason.

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Can humans evolve faster than technology? Yes!!

This is a great little article, and gives me hope.  We can evolve things like Facebook, and things like the Imago dialogue and NVC then we can evolve every form of our social sphere.  That’s not what the article is about but what comes up in me, as a human.

Computer says: um, er… | Computers v humans | Technology | The Guardian:

Computer says: um, er…

Since the 1950s, scientists have been striving to create computers that can think like humans. And each year they pit their efforts against a panel of real humans. Brian Christian went head to hard drive…

    Brian Christian at computer

    ‘The chatbots’ attempts to simplify language were eerily reminiscent of human conversation at its most lacklustre.’ Photograph: Mark Mahaney

    It’s early September and I wake up in a Brighton hotel, the sea crashing just outside. In a few hours, I will embark on what I have come here to do: have a series of five-minute-long instant-message exchanges with strangers. It may not sound like much, but the stakes for these quick chats are high. On the other side of the conversation will be a psychologist, a linguist, a broadcaster and a computer scientist. Together they will form a judging panel, evaluating my ability to do one of the strangest things I’ve been asked to do: convince them that I’m human.

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Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

Alan Gullette
University of Tennessee-Knoxville
Fall 1979
Psychology 4103: Independent Study
Dr. Shrader

In Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Wesleyan, 1959), Norman Brown carries the work of Freud to its logical conclusions in an attempt to arrive at a general psychoanalytic theory of history and culture. Making certain adjustments and reinterpretations of Freud’s theories, Brown replaces Freud’s pessimistic instinctual dualism with an instinctual dialectic that opens up the possibility of a solution to the problem of human neurosis. He takes us through the theory of repression, the development of Freud’s theories of the instincts, the stages of infantile sexuality, and the important theories of sublimation and fantasy. Finally, Brown offers a “way out” through the reunification of the life and death instincts, a cessation of repression, and the “resurrection of the body” though the reinstatement of the natural Dionysian body-ego.

File here

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Notes from the conference on resilience

Resilient futures: supporting recovery in greater Christchurch:

Resilient futures: supporting recovery in greater Christchurch The resilient futures event happened on Monday 18 April 2011. The conference on Monday was well-attended by a diverse crowd of elected, non-elected, community and institutional representatives. Christchurch City Council Deputy Mayor Ngaire Button opened the conference with an inspiring address where she touched on the need to maintain a fair ratings policy that focuses on restoring affected areas without neglecting those areas with less damage. She concluded with a number of personal ambitions for the future of Christchurch which included making the city more cycle-friendly and putting aside space for a School of Performing Arts.

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Evolution of the Good

More on evolution and the basis for altruism.  I heard this show ages ago, I can recall listening to it while scrambling up a steep loose rockface!  (Miles reminded me about it on Facebook) The kinship theory makes total sense to me, but it does not mean the group theory is wrong does it?  Why the either/or here?

The Good Show – Radiolab:

In this episode, a question that haunted Charles Darwin: if natural selection boils down to survival of the fittest, how do you explain why one creature might stick its neck out for another? The standard view of evolution is that living things are shaped by cold-hearted competition. And there is no doubt that today’s plants and animals carry the genetic legacy of ancestors who fought fiercely to survive and reproduce. But in this hour, we wonder whether there might also be a logic behind sharing, niceness, kindness … or even, self-sacrifice. Is altruism an aberration, or just an elaborate guise for sneaky self-interest? Do we really live in a selfish, dog-eat-dog world? Or has evolution carved out a hidden code that rewards genuine cooperation?

Copy of the audio:
The Good Show

Studio-d/flikr

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Steven Rose & Richard Dawkins (Video)

Further to the last post, look at this video (thanks Josh)


Steven Rose by blindwatcher

It seems to me they all agree on the question where does “good” come from. Steven Rose is systemic in his thinking, Dawkins more reductionist.

Background to this discussion:

Steven Rose – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Research and scientific controversies With Richard Lewontin and Leon Kamin, Rose championed the “radical science movement.”[3][page needed] The three criticized sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and adaptationism, most prominently in the book Not in Our Genes (1984), laying out their opposition to Sociobiology (E. O. Wilson, 1975), The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins, 1976), and other works promoting an evolutionary explanation for human social behaviour. Not in Our Genes described Dawkins as “the most reductionist of sociobiologists”. In retort, Dawkins wrote that the book practices reductionism by distorting arguments in terms of genetics to “an idiotic travesty (that the properties of a complex whole are simply the sum of those same properties in the parts)”, and accused the authors of giving “ideology priority over truth”.[4] Rose replied in the 2nd edition of his book Lifelines. Rose wrote further works in this area; in 2000 he jointly edited with the sociologist Hilary Rose, a critique of evolutionary psychology: Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology. In 2006 he wrote a paper dismissing classical heritability estimates as useful scientific measures in respect of human populations especially in the context of IQ.[5] Rose was for several years a regular panellist on BBC Radio 4’s ethics debating series The Moral Maze.[1] Rose is a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association.

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Die for the group and spread your genes

I enjoyed this essay:

Where does good come from? – The Boston Globe: Instapaper

On a recent Monday afternoon, the distinguished Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson was at his home in Lexington, talking on the phone about the knocks he’s been taking lately from the scientific community, and paraphrasing Arthur Schopenhauer to explain his current standing in his field. “All new ideas go through three phases,” Wilson said, with some happy mischief in his voice. “They’re first ridiculed or ignored. Then they meet outrage. Then they are said to have been obvious all along.”

Wilson is 81, an age at which he could be forgiven for retreating to a farm and lending his name to the occasional popular book about science. Over the past year he’s tried his hand at fiction writing, publishing a novel about ants — his scientific specialty — and landing a short story in The New Yorker. But he has also been pressing a disruptive scientific idea, one he reckons is currently in phase two of the Schopenhauer progression: outrage.

The idea is that if the group that benefits from altruism, the tribe will live to spread the genes. This “outrageous” idea by Edward O Wilson is not so silly.  Nor is it new.  It is the bread & butter of what I learned at the University of Canterbury in the 60s from Dr Bigelow.
I enjoyed his classes and book. He taught the simple idea that the unit of evolution is the “gene pool”, not the individual carrier of the genes. Amazon

Social cooperation, which leads to the Golden Rule and what we call the highest human qualities, was demanded by what we call the lowest of human qualities: the ferocity of human enemies. Shakespeare’s two opposed foes that still encamp us therefore evolved together. They were not even two different sides of the same coin, but were as intimately interdependent as our brains and hearts are. Cooperation was not substituted for conflict. Cooperation-for-conflict, considered as a single, hyphenated word, was demanded — for sheer survival.

page 7 & 8 The Dawn Warriors.

Researching this a bit more, it is evident that Wilson is adhering closely to Darwin:

It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribe, yet that an advancement in the standard of morality and an increase in the number of well-endowed men will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another. There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to give aid to each other and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection (Darwin, 1891, Vol. I: 203; italics added).

Found that quote in an interesting paper on the history of these ideas while searching for Robert Bigelow AND Edmund O Wilson: Human Evolution and the Origin of War: a Darwinian Heritage

[A fitting post for Easter Sunday!]

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Love or hate Like?

I have just added the Facebook Like button to my blog posts. I’ve succumbed because it is the way the web works, and I want to be using it the best way I can. Facebook is the main hangout online for my community of friends & family. Yes my Facebook is a community of friends, I know each one of them reasonably well, and some very well!

That Facebook has been able to create this community is quite a credit to them. They have used software strategy and deep insight into human interaction to lead us to use their service. How can I not respond to someone being my friend when I see have 12 friends in common and I know and like them? How often have you heard this: I don’t really want to be on Facebook but now my kids are using it I have joined.

In the last year or so Facebook has escaped its own domain. On this post you will see a Facebook Like button. If you Like this post then it will show up in your Facebook. Your photo shows up here. That means Facebook is now very integral to the web. How could I not use something so communal? So connecting?

Well, I’ve resisted it. What I hate is that Facebook owns this thing. It would be great to have the equivalent of Facebook, Google Apps, Twitter in the commons. There probably are open source alternatives but they don’t have the critical mass to scale right into my community of friends. It is as if all the National parks were privately owned, say by Monsanto, or the roads belonged to General Motors. I find that distasteful and dangerous. The reason I think this is because the profit motive will trump the social motivation when it comes to the crunch. It would be so much better if Facebook was run by people who did not need to think of how the network related to the ads.

Yet no open source or community based group has succeeded in this task so far as well as Facebook or Twitter, that is puzzling and a worry. At least in the encyclopedia domain there is Wikipedia – mercifully free of ads, and run by its members. Why did that work so well and we have so little in the other social network areas?

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Marxism and the natural world

Marxism and the natural world – gone

Wayback

A century before the release of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Marx and Engels were two of the harshest critics of capitalism’s destruction of the environment – yet little is known of their legacy.

Many who see themselves as socialists today feel the need to don the label “eco-socialist”, implying that the environment is an issue ignored by Marx and needs to be added on.

The truth is that many of Marx’s writings contain a strong environmental critique; his understanding of humans’ relationship to nature was a core feature of his analysis. Marx’s starting point was seeing that humans, like all living things, have a dialectical relationship to the earth. We come from and are affected by the natural environment, and in turn we impact on and shape the environment around us.