NASA gathering synergy-driven Moon colonization ideas
Bryan Bishop
This is an opportunity for open source manufacturing to pipe up and
facilitate these opportunities. While moon colonization isn't the
priority for manufacturing per-se, it will allow the toolchains to be
the topic of interest, no matter where the setups happen to be
deployed, moon, Mars, Earth, ... where-ever people (or robots) live.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/36057
NASA's outline: http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/190083main_AIAA_ESMD_finalSPACE2007.pdf
Particular emphasis on the ending -- "Such spending is challenging as
the space agency faces a number of critical budget and technical
decisions that could impact the long-term progress of its next
generation space exploration technologies." <-- An open, free
community-based approach would allow these projects to survive, much
like Project Virgle and OpenVirgle, even if funding starts to go down
the drain.
NASA today put out a call for proposals on how to best develop space
settlement technology. Each proposal is expected to offer innovative,
meaningful, and enduring research and technology development
activities that could enable space colonization or space settlement by
providing a sustained human presence on the Moon as a stepping stone
to future exploration of Mars, NASA stated.
The space agency is offering about $1 million grants under the Ralph
Steckler/Space Grant Space Colonization Research and Technology
Development program that has been established to help support a broad
range of human activity in space that, for the most part, is not
reliant on Earth's resources NASA said.
The late Ralph Steckler, a successful assistant film director,
maintained a lifelong interest in space colonization and left NASA a
portion of his estate "for the colonization of space because [he
believed] this is for the betterment of mankind."
NASA has defined three aims for the Steckler/Space Grant:
To make a meaningful contribution to enabling the colonization or the
settlement of space;
To leverage activities, where appropriate, through teaming and
resource sharing; and
To support space colonization efforts in innovative and enduring ways
based on Mr. Steckler's vision.
Building a successful lunar facility is no small task as you might
well imagine. NASA has outlined a number of items to consider
including the development of system exploration elements such as:
transportation vehicles (Launch Vehicle, Landers), habitation, rovers,
power - solar vs. nuclear), and proper communication technology. The
architecture challenge is to assemble the best mix of elements so they
work synergistically, NASA said. That includes how the facility would
be built and delivered. For example, should it be one big item or
many smaller, modular containers that could be strapped together as
needed?
The grants facilitate a small part of the NASA Authorization Act of
2005 that includes the following goals:
Return Americans to the Moon no later than 2020;
Launch the Crew Exploration Vehicle, Orion, no later than 2015;
Increase knowledge of the impacts of long-duration stays in space on
the human body using the most appropriate facilities available,
including the International Space Station.
NASA in June said it was looking for a few good lunar research ideas
and is willing to pay $8 to $10 million for the effort. NASA's Lunar
Science Institute will handle the research proposals which should
address the institute's core interests: science of the moon including
objectives that meet NASA's future lunar exploration needs. NASA
anticipates making five to seven awards, including one focused on
exploration objectives.
In August, NASA said it wanted help designing the outer space network
it will use to back up future trips to the moon and perhaps beyond.
The space agency issued a broad Request for Information or RFI to
solicit ideas from private companies and researchers interested in
potentially providing communications and navigation services that
would support the development of exploration, scientific and
commercial capabilities on the moon over the next 25 years.
Such spending is challenging as the space agency faces a number of
critical budget and technical decisions that could impact the
long-term progress of its next generation space exploration
technologies.
=================
Who should you contact?
Doug Stanley
Doug Cooke
Geoff Yoder (Lunar Architecture)
Laurie Leshin (Lunar science)
Mike Gernhardt (Pressurized Rover and EVA concepts)
============
• In addition to supporting the basic goals and objectives of the
Vision, the Architecture must have the following:
– Programmatic Flexibility – The Architecture must be able to adapt
to changes in national priorities and budgets over several election
cycles
– Participant Flexibility – The Architecture must be able to adapt to
changes in external participation (Commercial or IP) and changes
to their priorities
– Exploration Flexibility – The Architecture must be able to adapt to
changes in exploration priorities and changes in exploration
methods
=========================
Architecture Desired Attributes
• Enable lunar sustained presence early
• Develop infrastructure while actively engaged in science and
exploration
• Ensure architecture is flexible to redirection
• Ensure architecture supports Objectives
• Support the establishment of *** Mars analog ***
• Allow the earliest partnership opportunities for commerce and
International Partners
• Continuous and measurable progress
• Continuous and focused public engagement
=========
* Why should NASA be interested in the Long Tail of open source and
flexible architectures?
** gnu toolchain is a prime example
** debian project statistics - $10 billion USD of human effort over 10 years.
*** (also, debian has been used by NASA before in space shuttles, so
bonus points for open)
* Prospects of open science research on the ground with repeatable,
cheap architectures for modules. Imagine university teams being able
to deploy their own rover and equipment ecology and test out
modifications on the ground without having to resort to multi-million
dollar research grants.
Some other things should also be mentioned here.
Bryan Bishop
(1) A write-up on what it would mean for NASA's Moon colonization
efforts to go open source, plug-and-play, open standards, especially
re: IP, but also what developments can come from it, with references
to the Long Tail, OpenVirgle, OSCOMAK, James P. Hogan stories, the
Culture series, etc. Referencing NewSpace and things like Team FREDNET
would be especially recommended since they're an example of open
source space tech having at it.
Could we throw together a moderately-sized document and get it sent
off to NASA? I'd like to see what Paul thinks about the structure of
the proposal as a synthesis of previous emails we've written on this
mailing list, and then we can hash out the connecting details.
(2) Some more technical details on what it means in terms of
implementation details. This would mean some public git repositories
for design sharing, a mailing list or two, details on OSCOMAK/SKDB and
the simulators that are being developed, and generally about the
'colonization software/hardware toolchain' (we could package this
eventually as 'coltools' as a play off of ctools).
(3) Then we'll release this writeup/document with a public petition
where we'll sign our names as interested collaborators. If the
introduction is properly structured we might be able to get a
significant number of volunteers signed up (with contact information?)
for contributing to an open access, open source moon infrastructure.
I previously wrote off a rather large email to ISDC2008 but don't
think it did much. It could have been better, so I'll link to it as an
example of what not to do:
http://heybryan.org/2008-05-09.html
Paul D. Fernhout
and open content. I'm sure we could all help with that, individually, or
maybe as your suggestion, together.
Also, maybe these people would have stuff to say about it?
http://www.opennasa.com/
As for the specifics, open things are getting so widespread now, I wonder if
there will be any one effort (unless it looks like, say, Debian, with a lot
of different efforts loosely coordinated by some common social
infrastructure for communications and some common ideals). But, if we needed
such an organization like Debian, why not just use Debian or a similar one
and put our content into its organizational system? I personally have no
interest in running an organization.
Besides, what do "we" really need money for? Sure you could make a list
(mostly people time and physical validation?) but are those really the big
bottlenecks in such an effort? I do think, as Wikipedia showed, a critical
mass of information in some format under a free license may be needed to get
the ball rolling (and that takes time), but once that critical mass is
there, then the rest of the world takes over, as with Wikipedia. And as
above, there are existing organizations like Wikipedia or Debian or the FSF
or others who could deal with the paperwork parts of all this. Paul Jones at
Ibiblio is another person who could host content:
http://ibiblio.org/pjones/blog/
I'm not against people giving me (or others) money to do stuff I will do
anway. :-) It might go faster and with less pain. In fact, I'm almost
certain it would. :-) But having said that, the dynamics of things change
with money. There's nothing like money to have us all fighting with each
other and see this mailing list dissolving pretty fast. :-(
Also, from here:
http://p2pfoundation.net/Towards_a_Free_Matter_Economy
"""
However, grant money, once given, is extremely hard to get back. So when a
person applies for a grant they must endure a gauntlet of tests, intended to
prove to the granting agency that that person is willing and able to fulfill
the promise they make in their proposal. If a grant is received, will the
project be completed? How much money will it cost? Real research is full of
unexpected set-backs and cost-overruns. Real researchers are full of
optimism and unrealistic deadlines. The skills for research, development,
logistics, and management are rarely found all in one person—good scientists
rarely make good accountants, let alone good receptionists. This encourages
the granting agency to be very selective and take few risks with whom they
fund. Researchers must have a proven professional background, track-record
of honesty, and a reputation to protect. This is why funding by grants
requires the use of large government, foundation, and university
bureaucracies, and only the professionals who have climbed the career ladder
to positions in these organizations have a serious chance of benefitting
from them. The “solitary inventor” is indeed dealt out of this game, just as
Eisenhower predicted."
"""
Note the RFP you refer to says:
http://www.grants.gov/search/search.do?mode=VIEW&flag2006=false&oppId=43632
"Proposals will only be accepted from the lead institutions of the 52
consortia of the National Space Grant College and Fellowship Program. Other
organizations that wish to participate should consult a Space Grant
consortium director about partnership options."
So, there is that principal in action already.
In any case, a proposal is a non-starter until, as above, an existing
academic with a PhD at one of the National Space Grant Colleges is found to
be the Principal Investigator. Then, the way these things go, why should
they want to work with any of us? They already have graduate students to
support, university overhead to pay, and so on. And also, once all this is
"filtered" (a twist on Marc's previous email :-) through what such a
university could typically accept from a political point of view, I don't
know what would be left.
There is also a fundamental conflict here. USA business as usual is built on
proprietary advantage. It's obvious to us that this current proprietary and
competitive approach can't last much longer before the world destroys itself
(at the very least, by Kurzweil proprietary nanotech as he rushes along with
developing proprietary technology because that is what he believes in right
now).
http://heybryan.org/fernhout/kurzweil1.html
NASA is overseen by Congress and the office of the President, which has time
and again directed it in problematical ways. For example, NASA wanted a
space station before going to the moon to stay, but the Kennedy
administration insisted on flags and footprint. NASA wanted to support
advanced automation and Gerry O'Neill's mass driver and space habitats, but
Senator Proxmire "Golden Fleece" awarded the whole thing and shut it down.
Right now, the Congress is busy giving out about US$50 billion to three big
companies that have shown not much vision and leadership towards
sustainability in this world so that those companies can (get this) fire one
third of their workers and return to profitability for their shareholders
(whatever else that is called). Does that make any sense? The (legal)
bribery of Congress and the President is done through lobbyist and campaign
donations, and is the free and open source community making such donations
in big amounts? No. So, I think while NASA will follow open manufacturing
once the momentum is there (what choice will they have?), I doubt they will
lead -- even if the want to -- because Congress and the President will stop
them because of lobbyists. I'm heartened that the Obama administration
picked a free license for change.gov
http://change.gov/about/copyright_policy
so maybe I am too jaded and pessimistic. :-) It is possible our society is
already past the tipping point on free and open source stuff and NASA's
followership is indeed assured at this point. :-)
I'm willing to try to be hopeful and helpful of course. I don't think it
would be a big problem to sketch the vision statement starting where you
outline (still, any serious proposal is likely many person-days of work, if
not person-weeks). The first part might be fun. The arguments would start
when we get to the budget part (who does what for how long and how much they
get paid, and who gets the loot first and then is trusted to divvies it up
:-). Do we really want to go there as a group? :-)
Also, I think you are being too specific as to approach and tools. I'd
suggest a broader statement about:
* create a community site
* explore open formats
* encode manufacturing data relevant to a lunar mission in one or more open
formats under free licenses
* do some simulation with the encoded data
* do some real world validation with the encoded data
* make a variety of tools to help with this process
Otherwise, beyond arguing about money, then we will also be arguing about
tool chains. :-)
(I still wish I could get you to try Jython; with JavaFX released,
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/04/2226228
possibilities for broad and easy deployment of non-proprietary Java-based
technology are opening up even more.)
--Paul Fernhout
Bryan Bishop
> I feel it's a good idea in general to get NASA involved with open standards
> and open content. I'm sure we could all help with that, individually, or
> maybe as your suggestion, together.
Hi Paul, I made a (yes, GPL'd) page on a wiki:
http://heybryan.org/mediawiki/index.php/Space_colonization
"Open Architecture: NASA will welcome external development of lunar
surface infrastructure"
> Also, maybe these people would have stuff to say about it?
> http://www.opennasa.com/
Worth checking out.
> As for the specifics, open things are getting so widespread now, I wonder if
> there will be any one effort (unless it looks like, say, Debian, with a lot
> of different efforts loosely coordinated by some common social
> infrastructure for communications and some common ideals). But, if we needed
> such an organization like Debian, why not just use Debian or a similar one
> and put our content into its organizational system? I personally have no
> interest in running an organization.
I'm not sure that I'm suggesting making an organization. Re: using
debian itself, there's a subproject that is kind of dead called
fabuntu (fabuntu.org), which is supposedly an operating system for
fablabs, but there's not much participation since the project leaders
are dead. Also, an operating system itself is kind of hard to develop
without my own access to the setups :-) but otherwise I'd be glad to
develop toolchains to dump STL, gxml, or whatever else, to whatever
silly actuation formats are in use there.
> Besides, what do "we" really need money for? Sure you could make a list
"Not much". But money isn't the point .. it's cooperation that we're
after, not necessarily the money. Any grant proposal that I do end up
writing won't have to be too extreme in the budget department, seeing
as how it might not even have to pay salaries for anybody working on
the project. Although a minimal budget request is going to be
expected, so that would probably go towards something like a cost on
deployment to other institutions and businesses interested in figuring
out how the software infrastructure works, as a way to subsidize their
traveling expenses to learn more? That would be funny. :-) But is one
possibility.
> (mostly people time and physical validation?) but are those really the big
> bottlenecks in such an effort? I do think, as Wikipedia showed, a critical
> mass of information in some format under a free license may be needed to get
> the ball rolling (and that takes time), but once that critical mass is
> there, then the rest of the world takes over, as with Wikipedia. And as
> above, there are existing organizations like Wikipedia or Debian or the FSF
> or others who could deal with the paperwork parts of all this. Paul Jones at
> Ibiblio is another person who could host content:
> http://ibiblio.org/pjones/blog/
What paperwork in particular are you talking about? The grant proposal writing?
> I'm not against people giving me (or others) money to do stuff I will do
> anway. :-) It might go faster and with less pain. In fact, I'm almost
> certain it would. :-) But having said that, the dynamics of things change
> with money. There's nothing like money to have us all fighting with each
> other and see this mailing list dissolving pretty fast. :-(
Agreed. Let's wait and see before we project brutal battles amongst
each other .. somehow I doubt that possibility. ((silently picks up a
gauntlet))
> Note the RFP you refer to says:
> http://www.grants.gov/search/search.do?mode=VIEW&flag2006=false&oppId=43632
> "Proposals will only be accepted from the lead institutions of the 52
> consortia of the National Space Grant College and Fellowship Program. Other
> organizations that wish to participate should consult a Space Grant
> consortium director about partnership options."
>
> So, there is that principal in action already.
Btw, UT Austin counts.
http://www.tsgc.utexas.edu
> In any case, a proposal is a non-starter until, as above, an existing
> academic with a PhD at one of the National Space Grant Colleges is found to
> be the Principal Investigator. Then, the way these things go, why should
> they want to work with any of us? They already have graduate students to
Yes, that's true, but I have also been lucky enough to witness cases
where undergraduates write up giant grants and get funding for
something that the PI would otherwise not think will get funding, and
once it does, you see an undergrad managing one or two PhD students
:-). I'm not hoping for this sort of situation of course, but I'm not
doubtful that I can find a PI willing to cosign a document with me.
And if I'm willing to go outside of my university, which I am, there
are many interested professors that I should probably say hello to.
> support, university overhead to pay, and so on. And also, once all this is
> "filtered" (a twist on Marc's previous email :-) through what such a
> university could typically accept from a political point of view, I don't
> know what would be left.
I agree that this is an important deciding factor, since there's the
fear that the proposal could get mangled in academic land and turn
into something that it was never supposed to be.
Sure, there's significant doubts that NASA would want to -- or should
-- lead any open manufacturing initiatives on their own. However, I
see this as an interesting opportunity to "up promote" these ideas via
spending some time developing them under the name of a grant and
giving them an opportunity to shine in front of some NASA henchmen.
As for the proprietary concerns, I wonder how well we could craft a
Redhat response into that. I mean, clearly space infrastructure is
owned by the U.S. government, yes. Clearly, too, they want the
proprietary IP to be their own. But that should be creative commons
(at least) in an ideal world. And they also want to respect defense
contractors and their IP rights or whatever. While I can't ask them to
kindly turn around into a support organization for space
infrastructure (services rather than relying on being the only one
with a stack of schematics), this at least allows the seed to be
planted. Truthfully it sort of builds off of the old AAMS study
(Freitas et al.) from the 80s.
> I'm willing to try to be hopeful and helpful of course. I don't think it
> would be a big problem to sketch the vision statement starting where you
> outline (still, any serious proposal is likely many person-days of work, if
> not person-weeks). The first part might be fun. The arguments would start
> when we get to the budget part (who does what for how long and how much they
> get paid, and who gets the loot first and then is trusted to divvies it up
> :-). Do we really want to go there as a group? :-)
Ah, I see what you mean now. Yes, so I'm not really thinking that the
money is the big issue that keeps open manufacturing back (except
perhaps materials for construction projects and data entry task
forces). In fact I was thinking the budget in the grant application
would be one of the smallest they have ever seen, unless I can come up
with some legitimate cost of expenses, like traveling to a conference,
etc. Since the max award is $70k, I don't see this as paying salaries,
and I don't intend this either. Although I have been part of summer
research grants before on ridiculously small budgets to support living
expenses of a handful of researchers, which is a really neat way to go
[for youngsters].
> Also, I think you are being too specific as to approach and tools. I'd
> suggest a broader statement about:
> * create a community site
> * explore open formats
> * encode manufacturing data relevant to a lunar mission in one or more open
> formats under free licenses
> * do some simulation with the encoded data
> * do some real world validation with the encoded data
> * make a variety of tools to help with this process
> Otherwise, beyond arguing about money, then we will also be arguing about
> tool chains. :-)
Yes, there's a few way to orient the overall proposal. They want Lunar
architecture to some extent, but don't seem opposed to toolchain
architecture of the type that maybe VOICED would represent (the
conceptual aspects), or simulations of the type we've discussed
before, etc. By conceptual aspects I refer to the general process that
engineers would employ to gain value from the tools or as a way to
manage the collective national engineering efforts of (tens of?)
thousands of engineers who are contributing to one of the hardest
projects in the history of mankind.
Your proposed intro to the proposal is fine, but I feel there's
something missing, maybe it would be acceptable to add text more
comprehensive, like about developer tools, rather than just an
individual exercise of one guy using some tools?
marc fawzi
> I'm not against people giving me (or others) money to do stuff I will do
> anway. :-) It might go faster and with less pain. In fact, I'm almost
> certain it would. :-) But having said that, the dynamics of things change
> with money. There's nothing like money to have us all fighting with each
> other and see this mailing list dissolving pretty fast. :-(
>>
Well, that's the thesis at least. For debate, please see the rest of this thesis at: http://p2pfoundation.net/P2P_Social_Currency_Model
marc fawzi
Excerpted from latest edit to the currency model I'm working on:
"If we think of money as a neutral carrier of power (the power, as a buyer, to give to the seller of things you want/need to have) as well as information (the criteria for giving the power to the seller of he things you want/need to have), then money becomes a tool, like any other tool, and, while it can be used for good or bad, if we frame it as a tool and encourage the buyer to use consciously (per their use of this affinity matrix,) with transparency required on the part of the seller, then most people will use it for good."
marc fawzi
If we think of money as a neutral carrier of power (the power, as a buyer, to give to the seller of things you want/need to have) as well as information (the criteria for giving the power to the seller of the things you want/need to have), then money becomes a tool, like any other tool, and, while it can be used for good or bad, if we frame it as a tool and encourage the buyer to use intelligently (per their use of this affinity matrix,) with transparency required on the part of the seller, then most people will use it for good. Having said that, what is "good" (or what "goodness" is) is a non-computable judgment, whereas the non-universal axioms (starting truths) of this model are founded on deductive and probabilistic logic, so in order to keep this model in logical, the preceding statement shouldn't be taken as a basic fact (or starting truth) for this model and must rely solely on this author's judgment of what is true.
--
Which is to say, that I believe money if created and used intelligently can be a tool for good.
Paul D. Fernhout
posted here:
"OSCOMAK BFI Contest entry"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/46e0c11f12796287
"OSCOMAK: Open Source Communities Organizing Manufacturing Knowledge"
And, by paperwork I did mean proposal writing which can easily take days and
weeks (at least for a first one).
Clearly these ideas are responsive to the proposal, of course. They also
mention in the grant RFP building partnerships, so there is some of the
motivation for going beyond the individual PI's lab. By the way, the grant
proposal says it can't send money to non-US citizens, so, that leaves out
Iceland, sorry.
Linking to the AASM but updating it as "free and open source" seems like a
good approach.
--Paul Fernhout
Bryan Bishop wrote:
Paul D. Fernhout
social assumptions. Currency also assumes that *rationing* is important. And
then, it might promote technologies to create scarcity to create a need for
more rationing.
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langdon_Winner
"""
In 1980 Winner proposed that technologies embody social relations i.e.
power[2]. To the question he poses "Do Artifacts Have Politics?", Winner
identifies two ways in which artifacts can have politics. The first,
involving technical arrangements and social order, concerns how the
invention, design, or arrangement of artifacts or the larger system becomes
a mechanism for settling the affairs of a community. This way “transcends
the simple categories of ‘intended’ and ‘unintended’ altogether,
representing “instances in which the very process of technical development
is so thoroughly biased in a particular direction that it regularly produces
results heralded as wonderful breakthroughs by some social interests and
crushing setbacks by others” (Winner, p. 25-6, 1999). It implies that the
process of technological development is critical in determining the politics
of an artifact; hence the importance of incorporating all stakeholders in
it. (Determining who the stakeholders are and how to incorporate them are
other questions entirely.)
The second way in which artifacts can have politics refers to artifacts that
correlate with particular kinds of political relationships, which Winner
refers to as inherently political artifacts (Winner, p. 22, 1999). He
distinguishes between two types of inherently political artifacts: those
that require a particular sociological system and those that are strongly
compatible with a particular sociological system (Winner, p. 29, 1999). A
further distinction is made between conditions internal to the workings of a
given technical system and those that are external to it (Winner, p. 33,
1999). This second way in which artifacts can have politics can be
visualized as a 2-by-2 matrix, consisting of four ‘types’ of artifacts:
those requiring a particular internal sociological system, those compatible
with a particular internal sociological system, those requiring a particular
external sociological system, and those compatible with a particular
external sociological system.
As are all typologies, this matrix is a simplification-by-boundary-work – in
this case, the two boundaries are drawn between requiring and compatible,
and between internal and external. It is this boundary-work that makes the
typology useful for avoiding extreme technological determinism, social
constructivism, and noetic flatness in conceptualizing an artifact’s
political qualities, and for thinking about how these qualities change
through time.
Applied to Wikipedia itself, the Winner’s first way in which artifacts can
have politics asks about the process of an Wikipedia’s development and
whether it was/is somehow biased. The second way asks whether Wikipedia
requires or is compatible with particular internal or external sociological
systems.
"""
--Paul Fernhout
marc fawzi
Not an abundant-resource backed currency (see arguments in my proposal on how value of energy increases, not decreases, with its abundance and inexpensiveness)
Paul D. Fernhout
http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
"""
Communitree was founded on the principles of open access and free dialogue.
"Communitree" -- the name just says "California in the Seventies." And the
notion was, effectively, throw off structure and new and beautiful patterns
will arise.
And, indeed, as anyone who has put discussion software into groups that were
previously disconnected has seen, that does happen. Incredible things
happen. The early days of Echo, the early days of usenet, the early days of
Lucasfilms Habitat, over and over again, you see all this incredible
upwelling of people who suddenly are connected in ways they weren't before.
And then, as time sets in, difficulties emerge. In this case, one of the
difficulties was occasioned by the fact that one of the institutions that
got hold of some modems was a high school. And who, in 1978, was hanging out
in the room with the computer and the modems in it, but the boys of that
high school. And the boys weren't terribly interested in sophisticated adult
conversation. They were interested in fart jokes. They were interested in
salacious talk. They were interested in running amok and posting four-letter
words and nyah-nyah-nyah, all over the bulletin board.
And the adults who had set up Communitree were horrified, and overrun by
these students. The place that was founded on open access had too much open
access, too much openness. They couldn't defend themselves against their own
users. The place that was founded on free speech had too much freedom. They
had no way of saying "No, that's not the kind of free speech we meant."
But that was a requirement. In order to defend themselves against being
overrun, that was something that they needed to have that they didn't have,
and as a result, they simply shut the site down.
Now you could ask whether or not the founders' inability to defend
themselves from this onslaught, from being overrun, was a technical or a
social problem. Did the software not allow the problem to be solved? Or was
it the social configuration of the group that founded it, where they simply
couldn't stomach the idea of adding censorship to protect their system. But
in a way, it doesn't matter, because technical and social issues are deeply
intertwined. There's no way to completely separate them.
"""
Perhaps if the Communitree people had understood Manuel De Landa's point on
meshworks and hierarchies, it would still be here today?
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"""
To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding
meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to
make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because,
as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real
life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot
be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation.
Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of
data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to
promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that
may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common
data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of
increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has
been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is
more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity
at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the
warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only
heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would
not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may
drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of
hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for
certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying
decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open
and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and
mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To
paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice
to save us.
"""
Anyway, this is not intended as an argument against your electric currency
idea. I like that idea. We may well need some rationing of various sorts in
the short term or the long term. We may even need some closed hierarchy
along with our meshwork openness (or open hierarchy and closed meshworkness?
:-). For example, Nathan owns this mailing list (a hierarchy in a sense) but
he is doing a great job at being owner and manager and we are all benefiting
from that (as a meshwork).
I'm trying to make the point that (almost?) all tools have built-in social
assumptions. Sure, in individual instances, you are right, a tool like a
photocopier might be used for "good or bad". But overall, if you want to
use, say, a photocopier, that implies all sorts of things about a society.
At least, it implies lots of things if photocopiers get made and paid for in
certain ways as they do currently; obviously open manufacturing is trying to
change aspects of that, but it won't change all aspects of that.
--Paul Fernhout
Paul D. Fernhout
personally draw a trillion Megawatt-years to laser-launch space ships just
cause I want to, with no expectation of repaying the electricity? Nope,
right? So, it is rationing my use of electricity. Later you talk about a
"peer credit rating" which is essentially a ration limit.
Now, rationing may be OK and sensible, like in Manna where everyone gets the
same share of resources and people need to pool that for special projects,
http://marshallbrain.com/manna5.htm
but even then it is still rationing. They have a generalized ration unit
currency where 1000 credits equals the per-capita total potential productive
capacity of the entire nation's robotic workforce in a week. That amount of
1000 credits is credited each week, and presumably expires at the end of the
week if it is not used. It is in that sense a real time currency with no
storage, because there is also the assumption that everything is leased.
I'm not saying that is ideal, I'm just showing it as an example. It has its
own politics embedded in it.
Let's say we have a currency of an electric dollar, and these dollars can be
banked and accumulated. The biggest power producers with the most
accumulated assets now have an incentive to stop small scale producers with
patents so they can enjoy their relative superiority.
"Choosing the Right Pond: Human Behavior and the Quest for Status"
by Robert H. Frank"
http://www.amazon.com/Choosing-Right-Pond-Behavior-Status/dp/0195049454
They might have laws passed that only "proven and certified" equipment can
connect to the grid (where they run the regulatory bodies). People who have
amassed a lot of currency might pass laws to plant trees everywhere and
shade out the solar collectors of others. A "wind tax" might be proposed
that could shut down windmill farms to prevent microclimate change. PV
panels might be banned due to safety concerns of people falling off of roofs
by the nuclear lobby. And so on. As long as you have rationing, people will
figure out how to amplify it. :-(
They may also figure out how to get around it too. Some worse (say,
stealing), some better (say, transcending the need for power. :-)
And, when you introduce more advanced concepts, like future trading and
derivatives on people's peer credit ratings (like the current mortgage
meltdown?) you may even have bigger problems show up. :-)
Again, I like the idea of an electric currency compared to what we have of a
"fiat" dollar. I'm just saying it doesn't get around all of the issues with
any currency as ration units.
--Paul Fernhout
marc fawzi wrote:
> But which currency?
>
> Not an abundant-resource backed currency (see arguments in my
> proposal<http://p2pfoundation.net/P2P_Social_Currency_Model#Explaining_The_Idea>on
marc fawzi
The peer credits are not a rationing mechanism. They're an incentive to keep money circulating.
I agree with one thing though: the second law of thermodynamics remains in charge.
;)
marc fawzi
marc fawzi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoeconomics
Don't agree with all the opinions referenced there but I find it interesting that there are others whose models of economy recognize the laws of thermodynamics, at whatever level of noise
Hmm
marc fawzi
"This model subscribes to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics and thermodynamic theory in general, including statistical thermodynamics, but it's different enough than previous attempts (in Thermoeconomics) to warrant a new attempt. In addition, its timing, which coincides with the collapse of the current economic model (see: global economic meltdown 2008,) is decisively better.
Having said that, if the economy as a whole fails to produce more goods and services as a result of cheaper more abundant energy, e.g. people decide not to, then this model will not work.
More generally, while nature always abides by the laws of thermodynamics, man always has a choice.
However, over the long range, and statistically speaking, human civilizations are driven by the same laws as nature.
So while it's up to the people to make this model work, since man has been part of nature for so long, and has tried to overrule it for so long, unsuccessfully, and is now trying to make up to it, I think that man is ready to adopt an economic model driven by the laws of nature, not the dictations or desires of man. In other words, the success of this model is based on the wisdom of man, which is something that cannot be modeled (see also: Affinity Matrix.)"
--
Helen Titchen Beeth
marc fawzi
Is the word "neutral" neutral?
Each word is a "tool" that we use to convey "meaning," where the word "meaning" is a tool, too, that conveys --you guessed it-- meaning.
Traditional "language" is full of circular definitions for words that ought not to exist as 'words' and which existence cause paradoxes in language and undecidability in semantic computation.
If it was up to me, I would do away with language and, as a consequence, traditional logic, too, (which according in my world view is strongly dependent on language, be it English or mathematics),
I would replace it with something like music, which is a holistic natural language.
(Even animals dance to music. They get music. They don't get poetry.)
Then we can all relax and communicate holistically using a language that conveys the full meaning of the moment, not a language, such as English or mathematics, that attempts to describe/compute the meaning of it, which lead to paradoxes and undecidability that rape all meaning and leave us with the opposite of meaning.
There is a lot of information in your question.
I'm just too tired to think. :)
Paul D. Fernhout
Thank for the insightful contribution.
Let me see if I can apply that approach to something I was just thinking
about. Maybe it fits, maybe it does not, but I'll try.
I was just looking at these free images announced yesterday:
"German Gov't Donates 100,000 Images To Wikipedia "
http://news.slashdot.org/news/08/12/06/1654246.shtml
"This is the largest picture donation ever to Wikipedia, and possibly the
largest in the history of the free culture movement."
These pictures are interesting to look at because they are under a Creative
Commons license, so unlike most pictures on the web, you can take these and
modify them (subject perhaps only to privacy issues if any individual is
recognizable).
So, yesterday, I looked at probably thousands of thumbnails, just flipping
through page after page of the uncategorized ones for over an hour,
occasionally looking at enlarged ones. I saw smiling faces and people proud
of their accomplishments in agriculture, construction, sports, child-rearing
and so on. My parents are both from the Netherlands (Holland), but I
undoubtedly have ancestors from Germany at some point given my last name,
and I learned German in school as it was the closest thing offered to Dutch,
so I could guess at some of the captions for the few I looked at.
I kept seeing faces here or there which reminded me of relatives. My wife
agreed this one looked a lot like me: :-)
"Dr. Hans Posse, 1910"
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-2003-0709-500,_Dr._Hans_Posse.jpg
"Scherl Bilderdienst Dr. Hans Posse, der neue Direktor der Dresdener
Gemäldegalerie. 1910. ... Scherl picture service Dr. Hans Posse, the new
director of the Dresdener picture gallery. 1910."
Perhaps Dr. Posse perished in the firebombing if he still lived in Dresden
during WWII? I haven't researched that. But here is a picture of him
standing next to Hitler I just found this moment by coincidence through
Google as I tried to look up his bio:
"Posse (links [left]) mit Hitler"
http://residence.aec.at/rax/kun_pol/UND/BIOS/posse.html
Thought-provoking stuff to see someone who looks a lot like you standing
next to Hitler... Especially if you *also* have relatives who perished in
concentration camps...
Actually I just translated that with Babelfish which said:
http://babelfish.yahoo.com/translate_url?doit=done&tt=url&intl=1&fr=bf-home&trurl=http%3A%2F%2Fresidence.aec.at%2Frax%2Fkun_pol%2FUND%2FBIOS%2Fposse.html&lp=de_en&btnTrUrl=Translate
"It died on 7 December 1942 at tongue cancer. It received a state funeral,
with which Joseph Goebbels gave the intending speech." From which I assume
Posse did not live to see the beauty (and population) of Dresden reduced to
ashes only twelve weeks before the surrender:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden
As I flipped through those pictures, and knowing a little about history, I
realized that WWII could not have happened without the manufacturing
competence of the German people; they needed their tanks and submarines and
synthetic fuel from coal plans to work well. They also needed effective
logistics for their military plans, and so they needed intellectual
competence too. But, the Germans would not have invaded other countries
without some less positive world views too -- both a sense of superiority
and a sense, from World War One, of previous unfair treatment. (Echoes of
Iraq for the USA?) It's been said that intelligence is knowing how to do
things, wisdom is knowing what is worth doing, and virtue is actually doing
it. So, the Germans in WWII and the times leading up to it then had
intelligence and a sort of hard-working virtue, but not a lot of good wisdom.
Obviously, any brief effort trying to summarize decades of time and the
behavior of millions of people is going to be big generalization. Can it be
a wise generalization? Maybe.
I'll try musing about this in those four quadrants from Ken Wilber you outline:
====
* (i) an interior-individual intentional aspect (e.g. the worldview and
motivations of an individual person)
The view of the individual soldier and German citizen, say, my look-alike
double, Dr. Hans Posse, caught up in a pyramid scheme:
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,347726,00.html
"A well-respected German historian has a radical new theory to explain a
nagging question: Why did average Germans so heartily support the Nazis and
Third Reich? Hitler, says Goetz Aly, was a "feel good dictator," a leader
who not only made Germans feel important, but also made sure they were well
cared-for by the state. To do so, he gave them huge tax breaks and
introduced social benefits that even today anchor the society. He also
ensured that even in the last days of the war not a single German went
hungry. Despite near-constant warfare, never once during his 12 years in
power did Hitler raise taxes for working class people. He also -- in great
contrast to World War I -- particularly pampered soldiers and their
families, offering them more than double the salaries and benefits that
American and British families received. As such, most Germans saw Nazism as
a "warm-hearted" protector, says Aly, author of the new book "Hitler's
People's State: Robbery, Racial War and National Socialism" and currently a
guest lecturer at the University of Frankfurt. They were only too happy to
overlook the Third Reich's unsavory, murderous side. Financing such home
front "happiness" was not simple and Hitler essentially achieved it by
robbing and murdering others, Aly claims. Jews. Slave laborers. Conquered
lands. All offered tremendous opportunities for plunder, and the Nazis
exploited it fully, he says. Once the robberies had begun, a sort of
"snowball effect" ensued and in order to stay afloat, he says Germany had to
conquer and pilfer from more territory and victims. "That's why Hitler
couldn't stop and glory comfortably in his role as victor after France's
1940 surrender." Peace would have meant the end of his predatory practices
and would have spelled "certain bankruptcy for the Reich." "
Dr. Hans Posse got to run a picture gallery; life was good for him,
personally, right? Presumably, if he died of tongue cancer, he could afford
tobacco? Unless that was from art materials?
====
* (ii) an exterior-individual behavioural aspect (e.g. the behaviour and
appearance of an individual person)
An individual competence in skills, coupled with a skill of obedience
resulting in part from "Prussian Schooling", like a "Dr." in Germany such as
Hans Posse no doubt went through.
See:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7a.htm
"The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse
was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century
style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon’s amateur soldiers bested the
professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business
is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your
soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be
done. The most important immediate reaction to Jena was an immortal speech,
the "Address to the German Nation" by the philosopher Fichte—one of the
influential documents of modern history leading directly to the first
workable compulsion schools in the West. Other times, other lands talked
about schooling, but all failed to deliver. Simple forced training for brief
intervals and for narrow purposes was the best that had ever been managed.
This time would be different. In no uncertain terms Fichte told Prussia the
party was over. Children would have to be disciplined through a new form of
universal conditioning. They could no longer be trusted to their parents.
Look what Napoleon had done by banishing sentiment in the interests of
nationalism. Through forced schooling, everyone would learn that "work makes
free," and working for the State, even laying down one’s life to its
commands, was the greatest freedom of all. Here in the genius of semantic
redefinition lay the power to cloud men’s minds, a power later packaged and
sold by public relations pioneers Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee in the seedtime
of American forced schooling."
Also:
"Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the
Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives" by Jeff Schmidt
http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/
http://www.amazon.com/Disciplined-Minds-Critical-Professionals-Soul-Battering/dp/0742516857
"This book details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker,
showing how an honest reassessment of what it means to be a professional in
today's corporate society can be remarkably liberating. Poignant examples
from the world of work reveal the workplace as a battleground for the very
identity of the individual. Schmidt contends that professional work is
inherently political--that the unstated duty of professionals is to maintain
strict ideological discipline. Career dissatisfaction evolves as workers
lose control over the political component of their creative work."
At the earlier grades, from:
http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/18/loewen.html
"Well, education–particularly when it comes to any sort of social study–is
very much a mixed blessing in America. Probably the best way to explain this
is to give you an example. I once did an exercise where I asked people about
what kind of adults, by education level, supported the war in Vietnam. By an
overwhelming margin–almost 10 to 1–audiences responded that college-educated
people were more likely to be for withdrawing the troops, were more
"dovish". When they explained their reasoning, they usually wrote that
educated people are more informed and critical and therefore better able to
figure out that the war wasn’t in our best interests. Well, the truth was
very different. Educated people disproportionately supported the war in
Vietnam, were more "hawkish." Today, most people agree the Vietnam war was a
mistake. So, if we follow conventional wisdom, it turns out that the more
educated a person was, the more likely s/he was wrong about the war. Now,
when I asked my audience why educated Americans supported the war, they
couldn’t figure it out. One thing I heard is that since working-class young
men had to go to war, naturally they and their families opposed it. But
research shows that when people expect to go to war–whatever educational
level they are–they tend to support that war. Because of cognitive
dissonance, people come to believe in what they have to do. So I pointed out
that there are two social processes, both tied to school, that could help
explain why educated people supported the war. One, educated Americans tend
to be more successful and affluent, and thus have more allegiance to
society. They have a strong incentive for believing that American is fair
because it means they earned their success. Two, education is socialization,
and socializing teaches people how to conform to the needs of society. The
more schooling, the more socialization. We like to believe schooling is a
good thing. But when it comes to understanding any problem with historical
roots, we might expect that the more traditional schooling in history that
Americans have, the less they will understand it. Students who have taken
math courses are better at math. The same is true for English, foreign
languages, and almost every other subject. But in history, stupidity is the
result of more, not less, schooling. "
So, we see there perhaps why Dr. Posse was standing next to Hitler. This is
not to say in every other way he might not have been good to his family and
enriching the world through pictures.
====
* (iii) an interior-collective cultural aspect (e.g. the shared assumptions,
unseen conventions and worldviews of a given society)
Here is the source of a collective world view (which may have been the
amplification of one individual, but resonating with prejudices at the time,
as even the USA would not take very many Jewish immigrants when people knew
what was happening):
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=hitler%27s+world+view
"Along with Lebensraum, Hitler believed in a Darwinist Weltanschauung. This
was the view that life was an eternal struggle where the fittest survived
and the strongest ruled. Hitler believed that nature's favorite child, the
strongest in industry and courage, was the Aryan. This was his idea of a
master race which the Third Reich was based upon. He believed that the Aryan
created all advances in art, science, and technology by trampling over
everyone else. Ultimately, Hitler wanted to create a folkish state which
preserved "culture, beauty, and dignity of a higher mankind.""
So, if the Germans are very fit, and life is only about the survival of the
fittest, they would argue it was irresponsible not to take over everywhere,
would be the way that line of thinking would go.
Or today, the ideology is free markets everywhere (well, that doesn't seem
to have worked out for Iceland in the end, but it was working for a time).
====
* (iv) an external-collective social aspect (e.g. all the artefacts,
institutions, systems and structures of a given society)
Germany created a rebuilt war economy which reflected those beliefs, powered
in part by relatively advanced manufacturing and increasing energy independence.
See:
"The Role of Synthetic Fuel In World War II Germany"
http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/1981/jul-aug/becker.htm
After the war, a German general said he could not understand why the Allies
were bombing civilians to cause terror, because had the allies bombed the
power plants and synthetic fuel plants, the war would have been over in
weeks instead of years. This was an obvious failure on the part of the
Allied politicians to understand manufacturing (or logistics).
====
If the Germans had not been individually and collectively competent at
industrial arts, WWII would not have happened. But if they had not had gone
beyond pride into arrogance (thinking collectively they had a right to
others land from some innate superiority), then it would not have happened
either. Anyway, that's a lesson for US Americans to reflect on too, with all
too many parallels to those times in some ways. See:
"Holocaust Survivor Leaving US - Sees What's Coming"
http://www.rense.com/general65/surviv.htm
I'm not saying that will happen in the USA (we're a more diverse society
than Germany was then, to begin with, and it would probably be a pogrom
against a different category of people this time around), but I can see how
we run the risk, if we let pride slide into arrogance.
Again, for me, this is all a good reason to focus on "open manufacturing",
to keep any one group from dominating technology by proprietary copyrights
and patents and trade secrets.
I hope I didn't say anything up there I don't believe in once I think about
it more. Just trying to apply Wilber's concept to something on my mind at
the moment.
--Paul Fernhout
Helen Titchen Beeth wrote:
> Hi guys!
>
> Do you think it would ever be possible to have 'neutral' tools?
>
> Integral philosopher Ken Wilber (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
> Ken_Wilber) shows how we can see the world as arising in four aspects
Helen Titchen Beeth
journey... and right on the money, too.
I'm also really enthused about the whole notion of open manufacturing
- particularly as it is an idea whose time appears to have come, as
it's popping up in so many different manifestations all over the place.
When it comes to how to spread the practice, I must profess to being
more of an evolutionary than a revolutionary. I can't see us just
sweeping away the bad old system and replacing it with a new, freshly
designed (and therefore largely untried) one. So I'm always interested
in identifying successful practices, distilling the patterns and
seeing how they can be amplified so that others can pick up on them
too...
:-)
h
Paul D. Fernhout
practice. That's also why we don't have enough open technology to offer
Smári in Iceland, sadly. Still, we are seeing slow incremental change with
free and open source software and content as the ideas spread. And as you
say, more open manufacturing initiatives are popping up. The German
government putting those historic pictures under a free license is just one
more drop in a slow moving flood. :-)
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=international+open+source+adoption
The USA is behind the curve in some ways (in part due to fear, uncertainty,
and doubt spread by US organizations like Microsoft, Disney, and RIAA/MPAA):
"Forrester: Europe leads in open-source adoption"
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-9992379-16.html
US-based IBM is of course an open source leader now in some ways, so there
is diversity in US approaches.
Ironically, the IBM software landscape used to be "open source" (but not
free-as-in-freedom) in the 1960s through 1980s before it went "Object Code
Only". IBM's success was built in no small part an the 1% of its customers
who made improvements, but they discounted that. Some, even people within
IBM, have never forgiven IBM for that change in policy. See Melinda Varian's
writings about that:
http://www.princeton.edu/~melinda/
http://www.princeton.edu/~melinda/25paper.listing
"""
On February 8, 1983, a few days after the announcement of
VM/SP Release 3, IBM announced the Object Code Only (OCO)
policy. Much of the heart went out of the VM community on
that day. In the years that followed, IBM and its customers
lost opportunity after opportunity because of that
unfortunate decision.(137)
The VM community devoted enormous effort to attempting to
convince IBM's management that the OCO policy was a mistake.
Many, many people contributed to the effort in SHARE and in
the other user groups. The greatest of SHARE's source
heroes was unquestionably Gabe Goldberg, who persevered and
maintained hope and a sense of humor in the face of IBM's
seemingly implacable position. In SEAS, Hans Deckers was a
particularly hard worker in the battle against OCO, and
Sverre Jarp, the former President of SEAS, also deserves
much praise for his role.
In February, 1985, the SHARE VM Group presented IBM with a
White Paper that concluded with the sentence, "We hope that
IBM will decide not to kill the goose that lays the golden
eggs." Though we had tried to make our White Paper
reasonable and business-like, IBM chose not to reply to it.
A few months after the announcement of the OCO policy, IBM
released the first OCO version of VM, VM/PC. VM/PC had a
number of problems, including poor performance and incorrect
or missing or incompatible function. Without source, the
users were unable to correct or compensate for these
problems, so nobody was surprised when VM/PC fell flat.
IBM continued throughout the decade to divert much of its
own energy to closing up its systems, not noticing until too
late that the rest of the industry (and many of its
customers) were moving rapidly toward open systems.
"""
So, incremental change can go both ways.
Paul D. Fernhout
> When it comes to how to spread the practice, I must profess to being
> more of an evolutionary than a revolutionary. I can't see us just
> sweeping away the bad old system and replacing it with a new, freshly
> designed (and therefore largely untried) one. So I'm always interested
> in identifying successful practices, distilling the patterns and
> seeing how they can be amplified so that others can pick up on them
> too...
Well, I don't mean to be too disagreeable on this point, especially since I
more or less agree, as I said before, but here is a counterpoint from
perhaps the world expert in energy efficiency and revitalizing the US
automotive industry:
"Energy guru Lovins to carmakers: Time for big bets"
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10112893-54.html?tag=rtcol;newsNow
"""
The biggest danger to cash-strapped U.S. auto companies is making
incremental changes to their product lines, he argued. Instead, they need to
make radically more efficient cars by adopting several technologies aimed at
efficiency. (Lovins coined the term "negawatts," which refers to watts that
are not used.)
"Right now they view accelerated transformation as a risk and a distraction.
I think it's actually a low-risk strategy. When your competitors new and old
all around the world are coming up with radically more efficient, safe,
(and) durable cars, you can't afford incrementalism," Lovins said in an
interview after his talk.
"It would be tragic to bail out the industry now and see it go under in
another five years as competitors' faster innovation takes hold," he said.
Pinning incumbent automakers' turnaround on electric powertrains through
plug-in electric cars is a myopic view of the available technologies.
Cars can be made half as heavy as they are today by using composite
materials such as light but strong carbon fiber, a choice that gives
manufacturers more flexibility and reduces costs in production.
"Lightweighting" lowers the engineering bar for alternative powertrain
technologies as well, he argues. With less weight to haul around, expensive
batteries can be smaller and fuel cell vehicles become feasible.
The other technology changes required to set automakers on the right path
are aerodynamics and software for remote diagnostics and other tasks.
"Whatever your advanced powertrain is, especially if it's all-electric, it
will be a great deal smaller and cheaper and lighter if you first get the
platform physics right--making the car light and slippery," he said. "If you
don't do that and your competitors do, you're toast."
Many businesses fail to make high-performing products because they don't
practice what he calls "integrative design," or making design choices to
optimize the entire vehicle rather than individual components. In the case
of U.S. auto companies, there's a cultural bias toward powertrain engineering.
"""
Now, by my standards, Amory Lovins' radical proposal is still incremental
evolution. Compare that with say, making US Social Security and Medicare
available to every US resident, throwing open the borders, abandoning
patents and copyright, and hoping for the best -- presuming that the
automotive industry (or any other) would be far more efficient if the only
people who showed up really cared about cars, and that they'd automate the
parts no one wanted to do, like Bob Black suggests here:
"The Abolition of Work"
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
But by Amory Lovins' own standards and the rest of the world's standards,
what he suggests is revolutionary.
I was in a graduate program in Ecology and Evolution for a time, and one
professor suggested that the resolution to a classic argument about
punctuated versus gradual equilibrium was that it mostly depended on the
timescale you were looking at (or, in that sense, your perspective).
Guess evolutionary or revolutionary depends on what your standards are. :-)
--Paul Fernhout
Paul D. Fernhout
> So I'm always interested
> in identifying successful practices, distilling the patterns and
> seeing how they can be amplified so that others can pick up on them
> too...
I often use Google to look up people who post here, and I noticed you are
based in Belgium.
So, on this point you raise on understanding best practices, Dr. Michel
Loots is a leader on these open content ideas based in Antwerp, Belgium. His
project's address, email, and telephone number is on the main page:
http://humaninfo.org/
"""
For the past 10 years, we have focused on providing information, data
processing and dissemination services to UN and development organizations.
Our goal is to empower UN agencies, governments, governmental agencies, and
humanitarian and development organizations with know-how, technology,
open-source software and open source website, digital library and
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We welcome any collaboration to create CD-ROMs and digital libraries in
humanitarian and development fields. In this respect, we invite you to
explore our website which will offer you more information on our activities.
"""
We had some correspondence about five years ago. His group was focusing
mostly on getting the documents available; I'm more interested in a
fine-grained cross-referencing of such information to use in design, so
there is some overlap, but his is the more practical and immediately useful
approach.
A big push he was making back then (and maybe still is) was to get the
United Nations to put all their development assistance information under
free licenses (rather than as proprietary works they sold). A lot of that
information was essentially about manufacturing in an "appropriate
technology" way -- how to make a stove, how to make medical supplies, how to
make a sanitary latrine, how to grow food, and so on. From:
http://humaninfo.org/join_us.html
"Solutions for 50% of basic world problems have been gathered, at high
subsidized cost, by UN agencies. Most UN publications are either too
expensive or unavailable electronically in a decentralized way. This will
remain so as long as all useful UN publications are not all freely made
available in digital form. In order to give the world a chance, free digital
redistribution and use of UN solutions, information and publications without
centralized permission should become the global standard. ... In order to
achieve broad public participation to the pressing global issues, we propose
that core UN knowledge should be released in “copyleft” standard formats.
Should the UN agencies do this, they will be more appreciated, respected,
and consulted for implementation of global projects. A kind of electronic
“Marshall” information plan for global issues and for developing countries
could be born. Copyleft would mean that UN agencies retain copyrights, and
control over the commercial book sales but, at the same time, free use and
electronic dissemination is allowed for non-commercial purposes without the
actual inefficient centralized copyright control."
He and his group put together a lot of information on the web and as CDROMS
which could be sent to poor (in material goods, not in spirit :-) nations.
His group worked with people at the New Zealand Digital Library Project to
use their software, called Greenstone, to organize that information:
http://www.greenstone.org/examples
You can browse that humaninfo collection here:
"Humaninfo online"
http://nzdl.sadl.uleth.ca/cgi-bin/library?a=p&p=about&c=hdl
"The Humanity Development Library is a large collection of practical
information aimed at helping reduce poverty, increasing human potential, and
providing a practical and useful education for all. This version, 2.0,
contains 1,230 publications--books, reports, and magazines--in various areas
of human development, from agricultural practice to economic policies, from
water and sanitation to society and culture, from education to
manufacturing, from disaster mitigation to micro-enterprises. It contains a
total of 160,000 pages and 30,000 images, which if printed would weigh 340
kg and cost US$20,000. It is available on CD-ROM at US$2 for distribution in
developing countries. The objective of the Humanity Libraries Project is to
provide all involved in development, well-being and basic needs with access
to a complete library of around 3,000 multidisciplinary books containing
practical knowhow and ideas. We invite many more development organizations
to share their useful publications, to help distribute these libraries, and
to participate in this humanitarian project."
Here is an example from "Alcohol fuels: Options for Developing Countries" on
"Ethanol Production":
http://nzdl.sadl.uleth.ca/cgi-bin/library?e=d-00000-00---off-0hdl--00-0--0-10-0---0---0prompt-10---4-------0-1l--11-en-50---20-about---00-0-1-00-0-0-11-1-0utfZz-8-00&a=d&c=hdl&cl=CL1.1&d=HASH8ff55f2b2ac92817ec17da.6
"The preparation of ethanol from cellulose-, starch-, and sugar-containing
raw materials involves the following general steps: ..."
It looks like he is still very active; for example from the front page of
that site (about tomorrow): "Monday, 8th December 2008, our Managing
Director, Dr Michel Loots MD, and our Communication officer, Beatrice Gabor,
will be present at the WHO Headquarters where they will be holding a
presentation on “Client centered information dissemination for world health
empowerment”. The presentation will emphasize the advantages of using
low-cost open source models in documents dissemination. It will explain how
learning from commercial hosted applications to connect with your user data
base will make the task of serving 100.000 “information clients” (doctors,
hospitals, researchers, others) semi-automatically, very easily.
Consequently, the next step will be to market your information, actively
search for new users/ clients, and create automatic follow-up e-mail
sequences to increase worldwide targeted outreach and access to your work.
Further more, in order to keep the costs and work load to a minimum, Dr
Loots will explain how to engage non-profit back-office support and
cross-collaborations with other departments."
Maybe he is now focusing more on the open side of supporting medical
practitioners? I don't know, but he is, I believe, a medical doctor, so that
would make some sense.
In any case, I'd suggest he may know a lot about best practices, especially
in relation to large governmental organizations.
Anyway, you might want to talk with his group if you get the chance. :-)
--Paul Fernhout
Helen Titchen Beeth
violence and death, then I say it's incremental!
:-)
h
Helen Titchen Beeth
other friends of mine!
h