technology – Page 3 – Four Cultures

Normal service is about to be resumed

Thanks for staying put while my computer had a very big melt down, while I reset my system with Ubuntu, and while floods and storms meant my broadband connection was down for several days. It’s enough to make me embarrassed to be mentioning the phrase ‘resilient systems’. But fear not, Fourcultures is back online and what passes for normal service will continue very soon….

Slow Reading and the End of Print

It seems you can do all sorts of things slowly. Why weren’t we told?

Actually, Slow Reading by John Miedema is a thoughtful consideration of the enduring place of print in our culture. You’d be forgiven for assuming print was dying out under the pervasive i-influence of e-everything. Indeed, the author quotes Jeff Bezos of Amazon as saying the book is ‘the last bastion of analogue’.

Actually what I find interesting about the times we’re in is the arrival of radical new forms of physical textuality which call into question the simple story of the death of print. Two examples that keep catching my eye are the espresso book machine and the youtube graffiti wall.

The Espresso book machine is basically a photocopier that can spit out well made paperback books while you wait. This is a hi-tech mix of the digital (the back catalogue of every digitised book on the planet instantly available) and the traditionally physical (the physical paperback book to take away and enjoy). But it’s important to remember that paperbacks themselves are relatively new technology, having only achieved mass appeal in the 1930s (and the first paperback book shops were introduced to the US in the 1950s).

Where the publicity for the Espresso Book Machine goes wrong, I think, is that it tremendously underestimates the revolution that it heralds. Supposedly the new technology will make small independent book shops more competitive with the larger chains and the larger chains more competitive with supermarkets. This is exactly wrong. What it means is that notionally, every shop can and will become a book shop. And the cost of the technology is only going to come down. What will make the difference is not the ability to stock books, since there’s no more stock, nor the ability to discount them, since overheads are now minimal. The difference will be in the ability to promote them. The rise and rise of the expert bookseller has just begun.

The graffiti wall is a very weird phenomenon. This is the ability of internet video to bring to life monumental artwork inscribed on physical surfaces using stop motion filming techniques. This form of art has been feasible for a long time – since the invention of photography – but only now, with ubiquitous digitization, has it taken off. What’s interesting about this is the sense that the digital somehow requires the monumentally and immovably physical wall for its rhetorical effect as spectacle to work. It shows, I think, that the end-of-the-book anxiety is just a sub-set of a larger end-of-the-physical anxiety. It also shows that the physical doesn’t end, it just gets transformed. We are living in a time of digital-physical hybridization and we should probably get used to the feeling of not being able to get used to it.

Sucks so hard it blows…

Never thought I’d find a use for that phrase, but a certain (unco-)operating system has given me the perfect excuse. I think we all know what I’m talking about. In fact it sucks so much I’m finally going to give the new Ubuntu a serious try. Having used Knoppix before to resurrect a dead PC and finding it worked a treat, Linux does not scare me, oh no…

Official: Top Search Engine reveals Atheist Bias!

Try searching for “God is now here”.
Then try seaching for “God is nowhere”.
Spot the difference.
Discuss…

Twitter at last

Now Twitter is available on WordPress.com sites I might just give it a go.

This article got me interested.

But why say something in 140 characters when you can say it in 500 words or more? Brevity: it’s overrat

Bias, learning to walk at the edge of Chaos

This is a guest post by Meika, for which, many thanks.

Cambridge-based researchers recently published a study providing experimental data which supports the idea that the human brain lives “on the edge of chaos”.
Its press release ends:

According to [co-author] Kitzbichler, this new evidence is only a starting point. “A natural next question we plan to address in future research will be: How do measures of critical dynamics relate to cognitive performance or neuropsychiatric disorders and their treatments?”

Well, taking that ‘cognitive performance’ a bit more specifically to include learning, and learning to walk in particular, the following story leads in an interesting direction for us fourculture fans.
Five years ago… Continue reading Bias, learning to walk at the edge of Chaos

Virtual Goods and the Greatest Story ever Told

Virtual goods make money

In a recent post about the profitability of online social networks in the US, China and Japan, venture capitalist Bill Gurley presents evidence that the more financially successful social network sites are those that downplay advertising revenue and focus on revenue from virtual goods. He points out that Users in Second Life are doing $450m annually in this business and taking out of Second Life $100m a year.

But why would anyone buy them? Continue reading Virtual Goods and the Greatest Story ever Told

Energy Efficiency: Running to stand still?

Is energy efficiency a key factor in reducing greenhouse emissions?

Matthew Taylor of the RSA thinks home energy efficiency should take priority, and Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute is also very keen on large scale efficiency gains.

The Jevons Paradox is the idea formulated in 1865 that making coal-burning more efficient will lead inexorably to the burning of yet more coal. Newcomen’s steam engine dramatically increased the use of coal in England and William Jevons’ (1835-1882) book The Coal Question noted this. but Jevons also saw that James Watt’s more efficient version was what made coal-burning really take off, truly inaugurating the ‘age of steam’. He wrote: Continue reading Energy Efficiency: Running to stand still?

Resolving the GM debate with Open Access Knowledge

Might the polarised debate over GM crops be partially resolved by freeing up the commercial restrictions on GM patents? These can make GM highly profitable but also tie in farmers and other end-users (See also How to Resolve the GM Debate).

A problem many Egalitarians have with GM crops is that they seem to representa shifting of power from farmers towards biotech companies. And the trend seems to be towards a strengthening of these binds.

An article in the Economist referred to the issue of biotech ‘piracy’. This is supposedly compounded by weak IP protection:

‘just as with software, GMOs suffer from piracy. In Argentina and China, the hostile stance toward intellectual-property rights has been blessed by the government itself.’

Meanwhile a report into the financial implications of adopting GM in Australia noted that one of the challenges facing GM adoption in emerging economies was:

‘Strengthening intellectual property rights to enable a greater level of foreign investment in research and development.

However, this is only one possible (Individualist) approach to the issue. An alternative would be not the strengthening of IP rights, nor (as in Argentina and China), their weakening, but rather the diversification of IP models to include and expand open-source knowledge and technology. This would enable knowledge to be shared and advanced, while avoiding much of the commercial lock-in that key biotech corporations aggressively seek. For instance, the main concern of Canadian farmers using Monsanto-derived GM canola was that they had become tied into commercial exploitation in ways they previously had not been. Terry Boehm, Vice President of the Canadian Farmers Union, said:

“Farmers now are forced to largely to sign technology use agreement to pay expensive fees in order to access seeds for their canola production. There is no possibility essentially to grow canola that is non-GE, there is simply are very few known varieties of non-GE canola available and farmers are actually under the threat of legal action frequently if they’re utilising seeds, as farmers always have, saving and reusing seeds. This is forbidden with GE canola.”

The key argument against open GM technology is that research and development costs money and no-one will pay unless they believe they will receive a return on their r&d investment.

‘commercialisation requires secrecy in the interests of appropriating the benefits of knowledge’ (OECD, 2008: 161-162).

Some arguments in favour of open access are as follows:

It’s happening anyway, in sub-optimal fashion, where jurisdictions have weak IP regulation. This is termed ‘piracy’. In music, software, etc it is increasingly clear that the momentum is unstoppable and that the best strategy is: if you can’t beat them, join them. In other words, the vanishing economic value of information is not destroying commercial opportunities but creating new ones, supported by new business models.
Monopolistic hoarding of IP leads to a stagnation of innovation. The classic example is that of the Cornish Engine. Booulton & Watt held the patents for steam engines to pump water out of Cornish tin mines. Their machines were inefficient, but for thirty years there was no stimulus to improve them, since mine owners were tied in to paying licence fees for the existing technology. Tiring of the status quo a group of innovators, gathered around Richard Trevithick, modified and improved the steam engine design, carefully avoiding breach of patent. The result was greater efficiency and lower cost. The products were not patented but were used freely by Cornish mines. The Cornish engine was the outcome of this patent-free shared innovation. Note that Trevithick was not in principle opposed to patents and indeed patented several of his inventions.
GM commercialisation is a good example of what Michael Heller calls ‘the tragedy of the anti-commons’ resulting in ‘the gridlock economy’.

How to resolve the GM debate

There are many contemporary issues where the four cultures can be seen hard at work, jostling with one another to claim the high ground, to dominate the debate, to shape our understanding of reality. One such arena is the polarised issue of genetically modified crops.

A report has been issued by the UK think tank Chatham House warning that the nation needs to pay more attention to food production if it is to address potential future food supply constraints.

As part of this discussion it is argued that the public should now drop its unsubstantiated opposition to GM crops to enable more people to be fed. Any other course of action is regarded as no more than elitist privilege.

The analysis suggested by grid-group cultural theory is that when facing the facts as a matter of urgency is advocated, what people are really trying to do is to shape the world to be more in keeping with one of four basic worldviews, or cultural biases.
Continue reading How to resolve the GM debate