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Old mass education

Everyone under 18, and anyone 18 and older, needs a massive re-schooling in all things new.
Yes that includes the savants that can hack (99,9% of which is just script kiddies, more on that below), and it includes those that may be slow learners due to age.

But first, a picture:
DSCN9832[Pfanner, Lucca]

The subjects to mass re-school for:

  • Programming of all sorts. Not just CSS/HTML. Also, perl/PHP, SQL, C, Prolog, etc. Etc. Etc. From fundamentals (yes indeed) all the way to slick quasi-savvy app programming. To know what’s under the hood, to be able to work in the field, at all ages to one’s level.
    Oh, and let’s not forget all would need to know how to configure a network, and how to secure it.
  • Design, that is such an important part of Making things these days.
  • IoT and 3D printing (see the previous ones coming together?), for the future; to be able to navigate and play an active role. Otherwise, masses get isolated and out of anything resembling jobs. If you can’t operate in tomorrow’s society, if you can’t do anything worth a living wage, you’ll be cast out.
  • Ethics and sociology, in particular re privacy, the coming Singularity, and World problems like global warming, waste and environmental destruction, and resource depletion. Whether by Augmented Humanity or full humanity oblivion, the future comes to us too fast to first see and then adjust. All now present may NOT defer this to others. You ARE all the others like never before.
  • And all that we know already. All science, humanities, etc. Because schooling has lowered its standards so much. Having more and more (%) in ever ‘higher’ education but teaching less and less. Overall, isn’t coping with society and its complexity the sum total aggregated goal of education ..? Where society has become so much more complex than it was; exponential growth in this one, too has not been dealt with in Ed, on the contrary. Re-creating a plebs. Of all shapes and sizes, including moneyed plebs. The latter seem to rule… I’ll come back to this issue, later. Book by Quote’s pending…

Hey, it’s just a matter of survival beyond mere bare physical needs, for the very near future of all.

And, how to educate all ..?

  • Through gaming, of course
  • Through non-gaming rote learning all the essentials as well. Otherwise, you’ll fail miserably in practice when reality somehow doesn’t quite conform the game show. Which it won’t for decades to come. And no, shallow learning will not work; if only because it’s not learning at all.
  • Through gaining reality experience, of course in the course(s). As application is everything also re turning ratio learning into experience and control.
  • Through in-depth specialisations, to all sorts of levels and breaths. As almost all (except the very, very few script/kit builders) of today’s hackers are script kiddies and the ‘markets’ in that area continue to develop, some knowledge and experience may actually get lost! No, the ‘net does not ‘save’ everything; information production is just too large every day for the storage available globally…
  • All this delivered in traditional classrooms, mixed with MOOCs, mixed with interactive self-learning in class or at home or elsewhere. Which means teachers will have to be re-schooled too, if only because a too large share of them already are backward, too lowly educated (in content) laggerds. As in: VTuIPMt

What a task for society. But if ignored, the amount of ignorance will just be too big for the world to handle. Your comments, please.

Wired / Tired / Expired, September 2014 edition

Photo7c
[Not as much from another planet as from half a century ago]

Yes we’re back with this; here’s the September edition of my Wired / Tired / Expired jargon watch overviews, a mixed bag; see what you missed this Summer:

WIRED TIRED EXPIRED
Humanity Analytics Cloud
The latest wave is about humanity again, fortunately, as the first signals of a massive increase of human vs. machine intelligence and capabilities, precursors of a societal debate on the singularity or the parts of its checkered implementation (timeline) hopefully, come out into the open. Via the predicted AI integration bubbling up everywhere. All aboard the night train. It keeps on running, and so are some. But not necessarily you. It’s just that the whole thing has become too diffuse to still get a grip on. So media attention has been lost. Not totalitarian’s attention – civil rights movementers (movers?) watch out. If you think this is still hot, or even hype, you belong in the Museum of Ancient History
Note-taking in paper notebooks Note-taking on tablets Note-taking on laptops
Yes, moving beyond the sect of St. Steve …! As per the above, the Slow Living idea, as elaborated into the co-operation/-everything environments of organizational life, is spreading. For the good of mankind. Also, this, and #4 of this. A fool with a tool is still a tool. You Late Majority! And, it’s going this way. Hopefully. Hm, valid, for professional note-takers. Not for the casual meeting browsers, though.
Instant hyper-amateur ‘shops Memes GIFs (-as-Jifs),
tied with
Viral videos
0,15 seconds of fame. Expressing the idea, permanence not as much. Which is efficient and (hence?) laudable in its own way. I don’t often need to explain, but if I do … Memes may have been a full product (sic) cycle that many may have missed completely. Who has time for those? To make, to take.
Don’t care Dissing ‘mainstream’ Digging Hip
(incl Beards…)
Just be yourself. Ensure that’s enough. For you. Having become mainstream, it’s a Tu Quoque (jokes on yourself) now. Ehhh, you were backpacking for half a year in an area without WiFi or something..!?!? How could you do that, and not recover in half a day?
Deca. Or reading classical, well-bound hardcover books. PDF reading Kindle et al.
As in this.
And, the ultimate long-form, reading classics of all ages as treasured elements of Culture. The humanity and its wisdom that transpires through the centuries.		 For the operational content. Nothing else. Nice try, but on its way to the great heap of just-didn’t-make-it-to-be-great-inventions.
Deal with it Dogue What Happen
In the Why Should I Care What Your Problems Are They Won’t Go Away If Not When I Would Much annoy. Moved into this sector.
Modern tech moving into business 3D printing for gadgetry IoT promises
As in: Apple joining forces with IBM, Microsoft re-invigorating its business offerings, et al. As in this fad(s); sad. Spoils the idea instead of pushing widespread household use Sort of the same hypepromises not being delivered by far while we would still wanted to have it all happen(ed).
NASA’s UFO Amazon drone delivery Attack of the Drones
Woot! We humans are finally making it happen ourselves …!? Maybe it will happen. Maybe not. What increase in service ..? Now that it’s a fact; have we learned how to deal with it …? (I mean, in a way that would let us stay comfortable even if brought home ubiquitously?)

OK, any suggestions for next month’s edition ..?

Jargon Watch: Dorking

Google Dorking, to be more precise. Though some startup Internet company (you know, that has a ‘web site’) may want the adjective dropped.
[Maybe they’d better do a ‘); DROP TABLE STUDENTS; — on themselves but that’s another matter entirely]
Which is exepelainifyed in this doc, and at this site (from where I took the doc, duh).

Okay, since it’s Friday afternoon, I’ll leave you with:
h108B4EAA

Off the mApp

Suddenly, we don’t hear anything anymore about ‘apps’. Has the world moved on? Has the concept moved onto the Plateau of Productivity already so quickly ..?
It just struck me. As the news broke that 90% of apps will be free. And there’s hardly any news anymore or Top-10 lists of the hottest, on apps out there for any public. Already some months ago, even acocuntants publicized their shortlist for most useful ones; talk about death spells…

But really, didn’t it all get lost when the distinction between Client and Server got lost again (sic), when no-one (i.e., users) did care anymore whether actual computing was, is done on the phablet or on the mid-/back-end servers..? Because of course large db’s still sit there far away (collecting all your inputs…) and presentation is obviously still done at the end points. But the in-between… E.g., I now have anything on the scale from pure browser(s…) to PDF-downloads; independent of whether the content is permanent or ephemeral latest news and weather predictions [hey it seems they’re ever more off of actual weather …!?!?], content size, specifity (for me individually and/or qua SelectFromWhere IYKWIM), etc.
This also means no-one (…) will care anymore about SaaS or anything below. ‘Cloud’ is something for techies, too. The browser, only recently the up-and-coming single app-li-ca-tion on the (mobile / immobile) desktop, the single one that would seem to matter in the near future, has been pushed aside, for browsing – all ‘other’ serious personal/private business now goes via apps, even if those are sometimes just single-page browser’lets. This’ll all be under the hood, not to be looked at for fear of irresistible stupefied faces. After all this, Consumers and (organisational) End Users will all be one; tapping icons to do one’s … ‘business’..? Because I, too, would fall in that category, the apps may better be very idiot-proof…

Oh well one, the app suppliers may want to re-think their pricing and subscription models; per-consumer delivery of a wide scale of functionality (Ouch! Very Old word!) for either personal non-business, personal-business and employee-scale business uses must be tunable, along with price for value. Ouch again; Even Older word. But the way forward.

Oh well two, IoT took over. Apps are into the productivity phase: Rhetoric or not? (The latter, not.) Is it still wise to invest in a career as future app designer/builder or is the life span of such a career counted in lower single digits and should we assume such capabilities to be staple, basic high school level stuff, like word processing without spelling errors!

I’ll leave you with:
DSCN0399
[Where original tilt-shift, not the kindergarten (?) phone minitiaturisation kind but the  perspective correction sort, may still help. In a sublimated way, too. Vienna]

Mo’Data, Mo’Problems

Some time ago, I was triggered by this tweet (by @meneer; no surprise in that):

that somewhat-translates (i.e., manually, however clunky still better than machine translation as that doesn’t get Dutch unstructuredness…) to: “Bizarro weather picture again: forecast #somechannel/app from the South-East to the North-West, #someotherchannel/app from the North-East to the South-West” referring to some predictions about clouds and (turned out quite torrential) rain passing over the minute geography of the Netherlands.

And another about this article – that explains, in a more scientifically styled prose, that having ever more data makes it ever more difficult to connect the dots you’d want to connect…

Both of which are poignant reminders that:

  • Big Data is not a tool but a mere tool, to be used very carefully even (or in particular?) by the few that have really big data sets. If you collect focusedly, it can hardly be called Big, rather ‘Smart-‘ or just plain ‘data analysis’, no more; if you collect as much as you can, you are destroying objectives achievement – the required method destroys the results;
  • If, very big if, Big Data would result in anything, why haven’t weather predictions improved ..? The enormity of data that had already been around in that arena for decades, will have exploded over the past one, and should have resulted in far better predictions instead of the worse that the predictions seem to have gotten. And we’re talking patterns, not even the zoom-in to tinier details that one commonly associates with BD (the major patterns are usually skipped for being too well known already). Hence, what hope would we have for other areas..?
  • Reliance on apps for info is getting more and more dangerous, almost literally so far, but in an indirect sense, already, widely. What if… when now as already well-known, some search giant might have monopolized Search and skews the results you get…? That would theoretically be a disaster. Oh.

So, think again, be ever more critical of Shallows app usage and reliance… I’ll leave you with:
??????????[Lucca: ‘modern’ Italian parade]

Book by Quote: Tegen Verkiezingen

Yet another ‘Book By Quote’ then. A full of … ‘marvellous content’ one again.

An attempt to subjectively summarise a book by the quotes I found worthwhile to mark, to remember. Be aware that the quotes as such, aren’t a real unbiased ‘objective’ summary; most often I heartily advise to read the book yourself.
This book, should be translated to a great many langauges and be mandatory reading for all high school student least. Many more to include. E.g., ‘grown-ups’, and politicians. Et al.

Here we go then, with David van Reybrouck, Tegen Verkiezingen, Bezige Bij 2014, ISBN 9789023474593:

‘Le peuple anglais pense être libre, il se trompe fort, il ne l’est que durant l’élection des membres du Parlement; sitôt q’ils sont élus, il est esclave, il n’est rien.’
Jean Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social (1762)

Er is iets vreemds aan de hand met de democratie: iedereen lijkt ernaar te verlangen, maar niemand gelooft er nog in (p.9)

Politici gaan er dus massal van uit dat burgers er andere, in hun [sic; red.] ogen minder hooggestemde waarden op nahouden dan zijzelf. (p.11)

Democratie, aristocratie, oligarchie, dictatuur, despotisme, totalitarisme, absolutisme, anarchie: elk politiek stelsel moet een evenwicht zien te vinden tussen twee fundamentele criteria: efficiëntie en legitimiteit. (p.13)

De crisis van de legitimiteit blijkt uit drie onmiskenbare symptomen. Ten eerste gaan steeds minder mensen stemmen. … Ten tweede, naast kiezersverzuim is er kiezersverloop. … Ten derde zijn steeds minder mensen lid van een politieke partij. (pp.14-15)

Op zich gaat het hier om een heel merkwaardige evolutie: de tijden zijn onvoorspelbaarder dan ooit, flexibel inspelen op acute noden is aan de orde van de dag, maar kennelijk moet het beleid op voorhand tot in de puntjes worden uitgestippeld en dichtgespijkerd, zo groot is het wantrouwen onder de coalitiepartners geworden, zo groot ook de nervositeit voor een afstraffing door dekiezer. (p.17)

Waren zulke projecten vroeger een bron van prestige en kundigheid, tegenwoordig zijn ze op hun best een bestuurlijke nachtmerrie. (p.18)

Bij het begin van de eenentwintigste eeuw is souvereiniteit, ooit het fundament van de natiestaat, een zeer relatief begrip geworden. (pp. 18-19)

Politiek is altijd de kunst van het haalbare geweest, en tegenwoordig is het de kunst van het microscopische geworden. (p.19)

Met het beroep van politicus vergaat het zoals met dat van onderwijzer: Vroeger een nobele functie met aanzien, nu een hondenbaan. (p.20)
Continue reading “Book by Quote: Tegen Verkiezingen”

Progress: Hacked (short note)

OK, so there’s progress… hackers (of the ethical kind …! …?) actually improving security, as per your Nest thermostat.
Contrary, of course, to the hacking of your home security system as spelled out here and already ‘predicted’ by means of requiring solutions, quite some time earlier here…

For their, and your, viewing pleasure:
019_19[The ‘old’ shouldn’t be underrated by not being rated well enough…]

Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord