helping the Church help the poor help themselves

"The idea of an AI singularity has become common currency in SF over the past two decades – that we will create human-equivalent general artificial intelligences, and they will proceed to bootstrap themselves to ever-higher levels of nerdish god-hood, and either keep us as pets or turn us into brightly coloured machine parts. I’m going to palm this card because it’s not immediately obvious that I can say anything useful about a civilization run by beings vastly more intelligent than us. I’d be like an australopithecine trying to visualize daytime cable TV. More to the point, the whole idea of artificial general intelligence strikes me as being as questionable as 19th century fantasies about steam-powered tin men. I do expect us to develop some eerily purposeful software agents over the next decades, tools that can accomplish human-like behavioural patterns better than most humans can, but all that’s going to happen is that those behaviours are going to be reclassified as basically unintelligent, like playing chess or Jeopardy.""Democracy is a lousy form of government in some respects – it is particularly bad at long-term planning, for no event that lies beyond the electoral event horizon can compel a politician to pay attention to it – but it has two gigantic benefits: it handles transfers of power peacefully, and provides a pressure relief valve for internal social dissent. If enough people get angry they can vote the bums out, and the bums will go – you don’t need to hold a civil war.""in 1860 the United Kingdom, cradle of the industrial revolution, occupied about the same position relative to the rest of the world that the USA occupied in 1945. Today, the UK is down to 3.5% of planetary GDP, albeit with less than 1% of population. The good news is, we’re a lot richer than our ancestors. Relative decline is not tragic in a positive-sum world.""pocket television sets were one of the routine signs that you’re in the future now, as far back as Dick Tracy.""The social consequences of a new technology are almost always impossible to guess in advance.""we’re currently raising the first generation of kids who won’t know what it means to be lost – everywhere they go, they have GPS service and a moving map that will helpfully show them how to get wherever they want to go. It’s not hard to envisage an app that goes a step beyond Google Maps on your smartphone, whereby it not only shows you how to get from point A to point B, but it can book transport to get you there – by taxi, ride-share, or plane – within your budgetary and other constraints. That’s not even far-fetched: it’s just what you get when you tie the mutant offspring of Hipmunk or Kayak into Google, and add Paypal. But to our time traveller from 1961, it’s magic: you have a little glowing box, and if you tell it “I want to visit my cousin Bill, wherever he is,” a taxi will pull up and take you to Bill’s house (if he lives nearby), or a Greyhound bus station, or the airport. (Better hope he’s not visiting Nepal; that could be expensive.)""What of the non-employment-related impact of smartphones? Most people spend most of their lives away from the desk, away from work, doing other stuff. Surfing the web for silly cat photographs or porn, trying to keep the multiple facets of their identity from colliding messily on Facebook – forget online dating, how many teens have met their girlfriend or boyfriend’s parents for the first time via FB? – checking competitors’ prices from the aisles in WalMart, and texting while driving. We’re still in the first decade of mass mobile internet uptake, and we still haven’t seen what it really means when the internet becomes a pervasive part of our social environment, rather than something we have to specifically sit down and plug ourselves in to, usually at a desk.""you can’t outsource your brains.""This leaves aside a third model, that of peer to peer mesh networks with no actual cellcos as such – just lots of folks with cheap routers. I’m going to provisionally assume that this one is hopelessly utopian, a GNU vision of telecommunications that can’t actually work on a large scale because the routing topology of such a network is going to be nightmarish unless there are some fat fibre optic cables somewhere in the picture. It’s kind of a shame – I’d love to see a future where no corporate behemoths have a choke hold on the internet – but humans aren’t evenly distributed geographically.""The basic idea behind lifelogging is simple enough: wear a couple of small, unobtrusive camera chips and microphones at all time. Stream their output, along with metadata such as GPS coordinates and a time sequence to a server somewhere. Working offline, the server performs speech-to-text on all the dialogue you utter or hear, face recognition on everyone you see, OCR on everything you read, and indexes it against images and location. Whether it’s performed in the cloud or in your smartphone is irrelenvant – the resulting search technology essentially gives you a prosthetic memory.""Projects such as the UK’s Interception Modernization Program – essentially a comprehensive internet communications retention system mandated by government and implemented by ISPs – mean that if you become a person of interest to the security services they’d have access to everything. The prudent move would be to lifelog to encrypted SSDs in your personal possession. Or not to do it at all. The security implications are monstrous: if you rely on lifelogging for your memory or your ability to do your job, then the importance of security is pushed down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. When only elite computer scientists on ARPANet had accounts so they can telnet into mainframes at another site, security was just a desirable luxury item – part of the apex of the pyramid of needs. But when it’s your memory or your ability to do paid employment, security gets to be something close to food and water and shelter: you can’t live without it.""Is losing your genomic privacy an excessive price to pay for surviving cancer and evading plagues?

Is compromising your sensory privacy through lifelogging a reasonable price to pay for preventing malicious impersonation and apprehending criminals?

Is letting your insurance company know exactly how you steer and hit the gas and brake pedals, and where you drive, an acceptable price to pay for cheaper insurance?

In each of these three examples of situations where personal privacy may be invaded, there exists a strong argument for doing so in the name of the common good – for prevention of epidemics, for prevention of crime, and for prevention of traffic accidents. They differ fundamentally from the currently familiar arguments for invasion of our data privacy by law enforcement – for example, to read our email or to look for evidence of copyright violation. Reading our email involves our public and private speech, and looking for warez involves our public and private assertion of intellectual property rights …. but eavesdropping on our metagenomic environment and our sensory environment impinges directly on the very core of our identities.""With lifelogging and other forms of ubiquitous computing mediated by wireless broadband, securing our personal data will become as important to individuals as securing our physical bodies. Unfortunately we can no more expect the general public to become security professionals than we can expect them to become judo black-belts or expert marksmen. Security is going to be a perpetual, on-going problem.""it’s nearly impossible to underestimate the political significance of information security on the internet of the future."

"Annie’s character in Bridesmaids feels like the timing and progression of her life has gone into a ditch. That the next step in her baking career happened to coincide with the collapse of the mass securitization of bad debt and an over-the-counter credit derivative protection market is really bad luck. But it shouldn’t mean that her ability to launch a new business, to exercise and refine her talents and skills and have her employment give her a proper sense of self and purpose, should be ruined indefinitely. Full employment is the friend of new business owners. It would be great if either of our political parties would emphasize that in a time of 9% unemployment."

"I am going to take a different perspective on the relation between young firms and job creation, however. I want to explain its mathematical inevitability, and I’m going to do that using the probabilistic idea of the drunkard’s walk."

"...A colleague once suggested that if our aim is to create more entrepreneurs or at least better prepare potential entrepreneurs, we should replace all entrepreneurship education programs with basic sales courses. After all, and to Fox's point, entrepreneurs are engaged at every step of the way in selling something: an idea, themselves, a product, a vision."

"First of a series of chats on leading edge ideas in regional economic development with Ed Morrison and Valdis Krebs. "

"Richard Florida's exotic city, his creative city, depends on ghost people, working behind the scenes. Immigrants, people of colour. You want to know what his version of creative is? He's the relocation agent for the global bourgeoisie. And the rest of us don't matter."

"It turns out that many of the great waves of creative destruction that have reinvented Silicon Valley didn't start there. More important, they didn't even start with the profit motive.

Rather, they started with interesting problems and people who wanted to solve them, exercising technology to its fullest because exploring new ideas was fun."

"The retention and attraction of talented, creative people is a principle resource that grows a successful regional economy enhancing the quality of place over the long term. While the Ann Arbor region provides a variety of housing, there is a serious gap in providing afforable places for talent to live. Residents that are just starting their career have limited affordable housing choices in the City of Ann Arbor. The talent workforce prefers vibrant places to live which are also in close proximity to public transit."

However, as Broadband Reports points out, muni-fiber alone is not enough. The Washington Post compares two cities that installed muni-fiber and had very different results. In one, the jobs came, but it also involved setting up other efforts to lure companies to move offices to their city. As one commenter noted, it worked where city planners "took a holistic view of its workforce with support programs, and they see it as a long process." So, yes, muni-fiber projects can work and contribute to economic development, but it's a lot more than a "build and they will come" sort of project.

"A capable community applies the strengths (assets) of its members to improve the overall wellbeing of the community. It mobilizes community members and groups to begin an informed and purposeful journey from at-risk, to safe, and ultimately to thriving."

"What would likely be the most desirable to out-of-town event planners, is a facility that's at least 60,000 square feet with 400 hotel rooms, parking and food service all under one roof, near downtown, says Mary Kerr, president of the visitors bureau."

"The big theme for 2009 economically will be contraction. The end of the cheap energy era will announce itself as the end of conventional "growth" and the shrinking back of activity, wealth, and populations. Contraction will come as a great shock to a world of conventionally programmed economists. They will toil and sweat to account for it, and they will probably be wrong. Unfortunately, this contraction will do its work in unpleasant ways, driving down standards of living, shearing away hopes and expectations for a particular life of comfort, and introducing disorder to so many of the systems we have depended on for so long. People will starve, lose their homes, lose incomes and status, and lose the security of living in peaceful societies. It will become clear that the Long Emergency is underway."

"You might think that with the economy crashing, the free-labor business model would be crashing, too. Will people continue to invest in their personal brands during hard times? Gould is betting they will. Between investor visits during a late November trip to New York, he sips a soy latte and speculates. During the downturn, he says, firings are sapping loyalty to companies and steering people toward goals of self-sufficiency. In Gould's acerbic phrasing: "The only person I can rely on not to screw me—hopefully—is myself."

Beyond brand-hungry strivers, masses of free laborers continue to toil without ever seeing a payday, or even angling for one. Many find compensation in currencies that predate the market economy. These include winning praise from peers, earning an exalted place within a community, scoring thrills from winning, and finding satisfaction in helping others."

"The result is a kind of frat house for modern-day mad scientists. Outside the collective’s home is the bustling Fulton Street Mall, where vendors hawk sneakers and bundles of incense. Inside the converted laboratory, circuit boards, gadgets and spare parts overflow from every shelf. A minifridge near the entrance is stocked with beer. Members eager to quench their thirst can also consult Bar Bot, a silvery drink-dispensing robot that resembles the Jetsons’ maid, Rosie."

Space Saving
•portable, lightweight donut factory that requires minimal counter space
Easy To Operate
•fully automatic
•only 7 basic components
•variable speed control to pace output to sales demand

More than 70 community leaders, and six individual co-chairs have launched this region's most comprehensive initiative to ensure the smart and successful growth of the Ann Arbor region well into the 21st century. At the very time when the economic climate sees private and public sector organizations pulling back, these leaders in local business, education, government and non-profit enterprise are pulling together to launch Ann Arbor Region Success.