Instructional Technology Quotes

We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues.

Technology frightens me to death. It's designed by engineers to impress other engineers. And they always come with instruction booklets that are written by engineers for other engineers — which is why almost no technology ever works.

I don't think humanity just replays history, but we are the same people our ancestors were, and our descendants are going to face a lot of the same situations we do. It's instructive to imagine how they would react, with different technologies on different worlds. That's why I write science fiction -- even though the term 'science fiction' excites disdain in certain persons.

What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a 'spark of life.' It is information, words, instructions... If you want to understand life, don't think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.

If you don’t collect any metrics, you’re flying blind. If you collect and focus on too many, they may be obstructing your field of view.

Making stuff: The folks at Instructables have put up some killer HOWTOs for building the technology in this book. It's easy and incredibly fun. There's nothing so rewarding in this world as making stuff, especially stuff that makes you more free.

Three technological revolutions dawned in 1953: thermonuclear weapons, stored-program computers, and the elucidation of how life stores its own instructions as strings of DNA.

To distract from their inability or unwillingness to reform, eternity politicians instruct their citizens to experience elation and outrage at short intervals, drowning the future in the present. In foreign policy, eternity politicians belittle and undo the achievements of countries that might seem like models to their own citizens. Using technology to transmit political fiction, both at home and abroad, eternity politicians deny truth and seek to reduce life to spectacle and feeling.

Another important consequence in the arrival of digital technology and its facilitation of feedback is that we can look at large systems and recognize them once more not only as part of ourselves, but also as components that can change... Now, though, we live in a world where text is fluid, where is responds to our instructions. Writing something down records it, but does not make it true or permanent. So why should we put up with a system we don't like simply because it's been written somewhere?

In many schools today, the phrase "computer-aided instruction" means making the computer teach the child. One might say the computer is being used to program the child. In my vision, the child programs the computer and, in doing so, both acquires a sense of mastery over a piece of the most modern and powerful technology and establishes an intimate contact with some of the deepest ideas from science, from mathematics, and from the art of intellectual model building.

Technology presumes there’s just one right way to do things and there never is. And when you presume there’s just one right way to do things, of course the instructions begin and end exclusively with the rotisserie. But if you have to choose among an infinite number of ways to put it together then the relation of the machine to you, and the relation of the machine and you to the rest of the world, has to be considered, because the selection from many choices, the art of the work is just as dependent upon your own mind and spirit as it is upon the material of the machine. That’s why you need the peace of mind.

we disagree with those who see flipped learning as a technology-based educational practice. We see it as a pedagogical solution with an underlying technological component.

Strong executive commitment is a success factor for implementing Scrum, and management can best demonstrate their support of the transformation through their actions.

How will I meet the young woman who is struggling to find her sense of self, or the elder who is befuddled by the rapidly changing technology that exists in the modern world? How do I meet the man with political views that oppose mine, or the person with ideological views that create and promote division? Could I show up in those moments with self-love and compassion? Compassion can be hard to find when we feel that we’ve been wronged or when we see harmful and destructive actions playing out before us. Would I become more loving and compassionate if I truly believed that I was the imagined other?

The MVP has just those features considered sufficient for it to be of value to customers and allow for it to be shipped or sold to early adopters. Customer feedback will inform future development of the product.

Human populations have driven other human populations to the brink of extinction numerous times throughout history. Now the entire species threatens itself with mass suicide. Not because anyone is forcing us to. Not because we don't know better. And not because we don't have alternatives. We are killing ourselves because choosing death is more convenient than choosing life. Because the people committing suicide are not the first to die from it. Because we believe that someday, somewhere, some genius is bound to invent a miracle technology that will change our world so that we don't have to change our lives. Because short-term pleasure is more seductive than long-term survival. Because no one wants to exercise their capacity for intentional behavior until someone else does. Until the neighborhood does. Until the energy and car companies do. Until the federal government does. Until China, Australia, India, Brazil, the U.K. - until the whole world does. Because we are oblivious to the death that we pass every day. "We have to do something" we tell one another, as though reciting the line were enough. "We have to do something" we tell ourselves, and then wait for instructions that are not on the way. We know that we are choosing our own end; we just can't believe it.

The aborted research project wasn’t important in and of itself. What mattered was the instruction that Ye Wenjie had given him, so that’s where Luo Ji’s mind was stuck. Over and over again he recalled her words: Suppose a vast number of civilizations are distributed throughout the universe, on the order of the number of detectable stars. Lots and lots of them. The mathematical structure of cosmic sociology is far clearer than that of human sociology. The factors of chaos and randomness in the complex makeups of every civilized society in the universe get filtered out by the immense distance, so those civilizations can act as reference points that are relatively easy to manipulate mathematically. First: Survival is the primary need of civilization. Second: Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant. One more thing: To derive a basic picture of cosmic sociology from these two axioms, you need two other important concepts: chains of suspicion and the technological explosion. I’m afraid there won’t be that opportunity.… Well, you might as well just forget I said anything. Either way, I’ve fulfilled my duty. He

Synthetic biology56 is built around the idea that DNA is essentially software—nothing more than a four-letter code arranged in a specific order. Much like with computers, the code drives the machine. In biology, the order of the code governs the cell’s manufacturing processes, instructing it to make specific proteins and such. But, as with all software, DNA can be reprogrammed. Nature’s original code can be swapped out for new, human-written code. We can co-opt the machinery of life, telling it to produce—well, whatever we can think of.

It is instructive to recognize that the gluten-free diet fad is a decidedly American (and to some extent Canadian and western European) phenomenon even though wheat is widely consumed everywhere in the world without reports of the wide-ranging maladies gluten supposedly causes (beyond celiac disease, which affects about 2 percent of the population).

TO ANYONE INTERESTED in world history, human societies of East Asia and the Pacific are instructive, because they provide so many examples of how environment molds history. Depending on their geographic homeland, East Asian and Pacific peoples differed in their access to domesticable wild plant and animal species and in their connectedness to other peoples. Again and again, people with access to the prerequisites for food production, and with a location favoring diffusion of technology from elsewhere, replaced peoples lacking these advantages. Again and again, when a single wave of colonists spread out over diverse environments, their descendants developed in separate ways, depending on those environmental differences.

As the old joke goes: “Software, free. User manual, $10,000.” But it’s no joke. A couple of high-profile companies, like Red Hat, Apache, and others make their living selling instruction and paid support for free software. The copy of code, being mere bits, is free. The lines of free code become valuable to you only through support and guidance. A lot of medical and genetic information will go this route in the coming decades. Right now getting a full copy of all your DNA is

Effective curriculum, instruction, and assessment can occur without textbooks or technology. New resources can be used in a manner that augments the quality of the curriculum and transforms student learning. Schools and districts that most effectively leverage the acquisition of new materials invest significant time, effort, and energy in establishing the professional skills and strategies, standards, assessments, and curriculum that will be used to drive students' use of those resources.

Thomas Jefferson understood that ideas were not really property, or if they were property they differed from real estate. He wrote, “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.” If Jefferson gave you his house at Monticello, you’d have his house and he wouldn’t. But if he gave you an idea, you’d have the idea and he’d still have the idea. That weirdness is the source of our uncertainty about intellectual property today.

Most frequently, groups are formed and assigned the task of setting goals for a specific part of the strategic plan. One group might be working on the mission statement, another on curriculum, another on instruction, another on technology, another on facilities, and so forth. Groups work simultaneously with little communication between them before they present their recommendations to the total group. How can they do this??? Won’t the mission be a strong influence on curriculum, won’t a new vision have a strong influence on facilities, etc.?

In power, eternity politicians manufacture crisis and manipulate the resultant emotion. To distract from their inability or unwillingness to reform, eternity politicians instruct their citizens to experience elation and outrage at short intervals, drowning the future in the present. In foreign policy, eternity politicians belittle and undo the achievements of countries that might seem like models to their own citizens. Using technology to transmit political fiction, both at home and abroad, eternity politicians deny truth and seek to reduce life to spectacle and feeling.

Shifting customer needs are common in today's marketplace. Businesses must be adaptive and responsive to change while delivering an exceptional customer experience to be competitive. Traditional development and delivery frameworks such as waterfall are often ineffective. In contrast, Scrum is a value-driven agile approach which incorporates adjustments based on regular and repeated customer and stakeholder feedback. And Scrum’s built-in rapid response to change leads to substantial benefits such as fast time-to-market, higher satisfaction, and continuous improvement—which supports innovation and drives competitive advantage.

I didn’t tell her that Anton Kirschler, the artist I wrote about, was a character of my own invention. I wrote that his work was instructive for how to maintain “a humanistic approach to art facing the rise of technology.” I described various made-up pieces: Dog Urinating on Computer, Stock Market Hamburger Lunch. I wrote that his work spoke to me personally because I was interested in how “art created the future.” It was a mediocre essay. My mother seemed unperturbed by it, which shocked me, and handed it back with the suggestion that I look up a few words in the thesaurus because I’d repeated them too often. I didn’t take her advice. I applied to Columbia early decision and got in.

For strict fundamentalists of the Bible, the theory and what follows from it seal them off from unwanted information, and in that way their actions are invested with meaning, clarity, and, they believe, moral authority. Those who reject the Bible’s theory and who believe, let us say, in the theory of Science are also protected from unwanted information. Their theory, for example, instructs them to disregard information about astrology, dianetics, and creationism, which they usually label as medieval superstition or subjective opinion. Their theory fails to give any guidance about moral information and, by definition, gives little weight to information that falls outside the constraints of science.

I know that the consequences of scientific illiteracy are far more dangerous in our time than in any that has come before. It’s perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth. Jobs and wages depend on science and technology. If our nation can’t manufacture, at high quality and low price, products people want to buy, then industries will continue to drift away and transfer a little more prosperity to other parts of the world. Consider the social ramifications of fission and fusion power, supercomputers, data “highways,” abortion, radon, massive reductions in strategic weapons, addiction, government eavesdropping on the lives of its citizens, high-resolution TV, airline and airport safety, fetal tissue transplants, health costs, food additives, drugs to ameliorate mania or depression or schizophrenia, animal rights, superconductivity, morning-after pills, alleged hereditary antisocial predispositions, space stations, going to Mars, finding cures for AIDS and cancer. How can we affect national policy—or even make intelligent decisions in our own lives—if we don’t grasp the underlying issues? As I write, Congress is dissolving its own Office of Technology Assessment—the only organization specifically tasked to provide advice to the House and Senate on science and technology. Its competence and integrity over the years have been exemplary. Of the 535 members of the U.S. Congress, rarely in the twentieth century have as many as one percent had any significant background in science. The last scientifically literate President may have been Thomas Jefferson.* So how do Americans decide these matters? How do they instruct their representatives? Who in fact makes these decisions, and on what basis? —

Even when we die, our prayers don’t. Each prayer takes on a life, an eternal life, of its own. Because we are surrounded by technologies that make our lives faster and easier, we tend to think about spiritual realities in technological terms. We want to reap the very second we sow. We want God to microwave answers, MapQuest directions, and Twitter instructions. We want things to happen at the speed of light instead of the speed of a seed planted in the ground, but almost all spiritual realities in Scripture are described in agricultural terms. We want our dreams to become reality overnight. We want our prayers answered immediately. But that isn’t the way it works in God’s kingdom. We need the patience of the planter. We need the foresight of the farmer. We need the mind-set of the sower. We worry far too much about outcomes instead of focusing on inputs. We cannot make things grow. Period. All we can do is plant and water. But if we plant20 and water, God promises to give the increase.

C. P. Snow was right about the need to respect both of “the two cultures,” science and the humanities. But even more important today is understanding how they intersect. Those who helped lead the technology revolution were people in the tradition of Ada, who could combine science and the humanities. From her father came a poetic streak and from her mother a mathematical one, and it instilled in her a love for what she called “poetical science.” Her father defended the Luddites who smashed mechanical looms, but Ada loved how punch cards instructed those looms to weave beautiful patterns, and she envisioned how this wondrous combination of art and technology could be manifest in computers. (...) This innovation will come from people who are able to link beauty to engineering, humanity to technology, and poetry to processors. In other words, it will come from the spiritual heirs of Ada Lovelace, creators who can flourish where the arts intersect with the sciences and who have a rebellious sense of wonder that opens them to the beauty of both.

ONCE, a youth went to see a wise man, and said to him: “I have come seeking advice, for I am tormented by feelings of worthlessness and no longer wish to live. Everyone tells me that I am a failure and a fool. I beg you, Master, help me!” The wise man glanced at the youth, and answered hurriedly: “Forgive me, but I am very busy right now and cannot help you. There is one urgent matter in particular which I need to attend to...”—and here he stopped, for a moment, thinking, then added: “But if you agree to help me, I will happily return the favor.” “Of...of course, Master!” muttered the youth, noting bitterly that yet again his concerns had been dismissed as unimportant. “Good,” said the wise man, and took off a small ring with a beautiful gem from his finger. “Take my horse and go to the market square! I urgently need to sell this ring in order to pay off a debt. Try to get a decent price for it, and do not settle for anything less than one gold coin! Go right now, and come back as quick as you can!” The youth took the ring and galloped off. When he arrived at the market square, he showed it to the various traders, who at first examined it with close interest. But no sooner had they heard that it would sell only in exchange for gold than they completely lost interest. Some of the traders laughed openly at the boy; others simply turned away. Only one aged merchant was decent enough to explain to him that a gold coin was too high a price to pay for such a ring, and that he was more likely to be offered only copper, or at best, possibly silver. When he heard these words, the youth became very upset, for he remembered the old man’s instruction not to accept anything less than gold. Having already gone through the whole market looking for a buyer among hundreds of people, he saddled the horse and set off. Feeling thoroughly depressed by his failure, he returned to see the wise man. “Master, I was unable to carry out your request,” he said. “At best I would have been able to get a couple of silver coins, but you told me not to agree to anything less than gold! But they told me that this ring is not worth that much.” “That’s a very important point, my boy!” the wise man responded. “Before trying to sell a ring, it would not be a bad idea to establish how valuable it really is! And who can do that better than a jeweler? Ride over to him and find out what his price is. Only do not sell it to him, regardless of what he offers you! Instead, come back to me straightaway.” The young man once more leapt up on to the horse and set off to see the jeweler. The latter examined the ring through a magnifying glass for a long time, then weighed it on a set of tiny scales. Finally, he turned to the youth and said: “Tell your master that right now I cannot give him more than 58 gold coins for it. But if he gives me some time, I will buy the ring for 70.” “70 gold coins?!” exclaimed the youth. He laughed, thanked the jeweler and rushed back at full speed to the wise man. When the latter heard the story from the now animated youth, he told him: “Remember, my boy, that you are like this ring. Precious, and unique! And only a real expert can appreciate your true value. So why are you wasting your time wandering through the market and heeding the opinion of any old fool?

Brainhacking works. By following a few simple instructions, you can, over time, change the nature of your brain to make it more resilient, more resistant to aging, and more capable of happiness, compassion, and clarity. The data is in, and it matters. It matters, in fact, in two distinct ways. First, as this hard data filters through the U.S. healthcare industry, the educational system, the military, and the corporate world, to name just a few examples, it will become clear that mindfulness is among the most cost-effective methods ever for reducing hospital stays, advancing educational opportunity, and improving the functioning of organizations. This will be a game-changer. Second, the science changes how the dharma is even to be understood. This hard data is the opposite of soft spirituality. Meditation and mindfulness are tools, not a set of spiritual exercises whose merit depends on faith or some unknown forces. This is why I’ve used the word “technology” in describing the work of meditation, why Kenneth Folk calls it a form of “contemplative fitness,” and why I like the term “brainhacking.” We’re not referring here to actual, physical technologies like electrodes or vibrating implants or special sounds that put you into an altered state (although all of these exist). Rather, when I say “technology,” I’m thinking of how meditation and mindfulness are tools—processes that lead to predictable results.

The parallel between scientific experiments and mystical (read spiritual) experiences may seem surprising in view of the very different nature of these acts of observation. Physics perform experiments involving an elaborate teamwork and a highly sophisticated technology, whereas mystics obtain their knowledge purely through introspection, without any machinery, in the privacy of meditation. Scientific experiments, furthermore, seem repeatable any time and by anybody, whereas mystical experiences seem to be reserved for a few individuals at special occasions. A closer examination shows, however that the differences between the two kinds of observation lie only in their approach and not in their reliability or complexity. Anybody who wants to repeat an experiment in modern subatomic physics has to undergo many years of training. Only then will he or she be able to ask nature a specific question through the experiment and to understand the answer. Similarly, a deep mystical experience requires, generally, many years of training under an experienced master and, as in the scientific training, the dedicated time does not alone guarantee success. If the student is successful, however, he or she will be able to 'repeat the experiment'. The repeatability of the experience is, in fact, essential to every mystical training and is the very aim of the mystic's spiritual instruction. A mystical experience, therefore, is not any more unique than a modern experiment in physics. On the other hand, it is not less sophisticated either, although its sophistication is of a very different kind. The complexity and efficiency of the physicist's technical apparatus is matched, if not surpassed, by that of the mystics consciousness - both physics and spiritual - in deep meditation. The scientists and the mystics then, have developed highly sophisticated methods of observing nature which are inaccessible to the layperson. A [Page from a journal of modern experimental physics will be as mysterious to the uninitiated as the Tibetan mandala. Both are records of enquires into the nature of the universe.

Every day, the markets were driven less directly by human beings and more directly by machines. The machines were overseen by people, of course, but few of them knew how the machines worked. He knew that RBC’s machines—not the computers themselves, but the instructions to run them—were third-rate, but he had assumed it was because the company’s new electronic trading unit was bumbling and inept. As he interviewed people from the major banks on Wall Street, he came to realize that they had more in common with RBC than he had supposed. “I’d always been a trader,” he said. “And as a trader you’re kind of inside a bubble. You’re just watching your screens all day. Now I stepped back and for the first time started to watch other traders.” He had a good friend who traded stocks at a big-time hedge fund in Stamford, Connecticut, called SAC Capital. SAC Capital was famous (and soon to be infamous) for being one step ahead of the U.S. stock market. If anyone was going to know something about the market that Brad didn’t know, he figured, it would be them. One spring morning he took the train up to Stamford and spent the day watching his friend trade. Right away he saw that, even though his friend was using technology given to him by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and the other big firms, he was experiencing exactly the same problem as RBC: The market on his screens was no longer the market. His friend would hit a button to buy or sell a stock and the market would move away from him. “When I see this guy trading and he was getting screwed—I now see that it isn’t just me. My frustration is the market’s frustration. And I was like, Whoa, this is serious.” Brad’s problem wasn’t just Brad’s problem. What people saw when they looked at the U.S. stock market—the numbers on the screens of the professional traders, the ticker tape running across the bottom of the CNBC screen—was an illusion. “That’s when I realized the markets are rigged. And I knew it had to do with the technology. That the answer lay beneath the surface of the technology. I had absolutely no idea where. But that’s when the lightbulb went off that the only way I’m going to find out what’s going on is if I go beneath the surface.

Space is nearly empty. There is virtually no chance that one of the Voyagers will ever enter another solar system—and this is true even if every star in the sky is accompanied by planets. The instructions on the record jackets, written in what we believe to be readily comprehensible scientific hieroglyphics, can be read, and the contents of the records understood, only if alien beings, somewhere in the remote future, find Voyager in the depths of interstellar space. Since both Voyagers will circle the center of the Milky Way Galaxy essentially forever, there is plenty of time for the records to be found—if there's anyone out there to do the finding. We cannot know how much of the records they would understand. Surely the greetings will be incomprehensible, but their intent may not be. (We thought it would be impolite not to say hello.) The hypothetical aliens are bound to be very different from us—independently evolved on another world. Are we really sure they could understand anything at all of our message? Every time I feel these concerns stirring, though, I reassure myself. Whatever the incomprehensibilities of the Voyager record, any alien ship that finds it will have another standard by which to judge us. Each Voyager is itself a message. In their exploratory intent, in the lofty ambition of their objectives, in their utter lack of intent to do harm, and in the brilliance of their design and performance, these robots speak eloquently for us. But being much more advanced scientists and engineers than we—otherwise they would never be able to find and retrieve the small, silent spacecraft in interstellar space—perhaps the aliens would have no difficulty understanding what is encoded on these golden records. Perhaps they would recognize the tentativeness of our society, the mismatch between our technology and our wisdom. Have we destroyed ourselves since launching Voyager, they might wonder, or have we gone on to greater things? Or perhaps the records will never be intercepted. Perhaps no one in five billion years will ever come upon them. Five billion years is a long time. In five billion years, all humans will have become extinct or evolved into other beings, none of our artifacts will have survived on Earth, the continents will have become unrecognizably altered or destroyed, and the evolution of the Sun will have burned the Earth to a crisp or reduced it to a whirl of atoms. Far from home, untouched by these remote events, the Voyagers, bearing the memories of a world that is no more, will fly on.

me to be honest about his failings as well as his strengths. She is one of the smartest and most grounded people I have ever met. “There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth,” she told me early on. “You shouldn’t whitewash it. He’s good at spin, but he also has a remarkable story, and I’d like to see that it’s all told truthfully.” I leave it to the reader to assess whether I have succeeded in this mission. I’m sure there are players in this drama who will remember some of the events differently or think that I sometimes got trapped in Jobs’s distortion field. As happened when I wrote a book about Henry Kissinger, which in some ways was good preparation for this project, I found that people had such strong positive and negative emotions about Jobs that the Rashomon effect was often evident. But I’ve done the best I can to balance conflicting accounts fairly and be transparent about the sources I used. This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable company. This is also, I hope, a book about innovation. At a time when the United States is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build creative digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering. He and his colleagues at Apple were able to think differently: They developed not merely modest product advances based on focus groups, but whole new devices and services that consumers did not yet know they needed. He was not a model boss or human being, tidily packaged for emulation. Driven by demons, he could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and passions and products were all interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is thus both instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.

This brings me to an objection to integrated information theory by the quantum physicist Scott Aaronson. His argument has given rise to an instructive online debate that accentuates the counterintuitive nature of some IIT's predictions. Aaronson estimates phi.max for networks called expander graphs, characterized by being both sparsely yet widely connected. Their integrated information will grow indefinitely as the number of elements in these reticulated lattices increases. This is true even of a regular grid of XOR logic gates. IIT predicts that such a structure will have high phi.max. This implies that two-dimensional arrays of logic gates, easy enough to build using silicon circuit technology, have intrinsic causal powers and will feel like something. This is baffling and defies commonsense intuition. Aaronson therefor concludes that any theory with such a bizarre conclusion must be wrong. Tononi counters with a three-pronged argument that doubles down and strengthens the theory's claim. Consider a blank featureless wall. From the extrinsic perspective, it is easily described as empty. Yet the intrinsic point of view of an observer perceiving the wall seethes with an immense number of relations. It has many, many locations and neighbourhood regions surrounding these. These are positioned relative to other points and regions - to the left or right, above or below. Some regions are nearby, while others are far away. There are triangular interactions, and so on. All such relations are immediately present: they do not have to be inferred. Collectively, they constitute an opulent experience, whether it is seen space, heard space, or felt space. All share s similar phenomenology. The extrinsic poverty of empty space hides vast intrinsic wealth. This abundance must be supported by a physical mechanism that determines this phenomenology through its intrinsic causal powers. Enter the grid, such a network of million integrate-or-fire or logic units arrayed on a 1,000 by 1,000 lattice, somewhat comparable to the output of an eye. Each grid elements specifies which of its neighbours were likely ON in the immediate past and which ones will be ON in the immediate future. Collectively, that's one million first-order distinctions. But this is just the beginning, as any two nearby elements sharing inputs and outputs can specify a second-order distinction if their joint cause-effect repertoire cannot be reduced to that of the individual elements. In essence, such a second-order distinction links the probability of past and future states of the element's neighbours. By contrast, no second-order distinction is specified by elements without shared inputs and outputs, since their joint cause-effect repertoire is reducible to that of the individual elements. Potentially, there are a million times a million second-order distinctions. Similarly, subsets of three elements, as long as they share input and output, will specify third-order distinctions linking more of their neighbours together. And on and on. This quickly balloons to staggering numbers of irreducibly higher-order distinctions. The maximally irreducible cause-effect structure associated with such a grid is not so much representing space (for to whom is space presented again, for that is the meaning of re-presentation?) as creating experienced space from an intrinsic perspective.

gave up on the idea of creating “socialist men and women” who would work without monetary incentives. In a famous speech he criticized “equality mongering,” and thereafter not only did different jobs get paid different wages but also a bonus system was introduced. It is instructive to understand how this worked. Typically a firm under central planning had to meet an output target set under the plan, though such plans were often renegotiated and changed. From the 1930s, workers were paid bonuses if the output levels were attained. These could be quite high—for instance, as much as 37 percent of the wage for management or senior engineers. But paying such bonuses created all sorts of disincentives to technological change. For one thing, innovation, which took resources away from current production, risked the output targets not being met and the bonuses not being paid. For another, output targets were usually based on previous production levels. This created a huge incentive never to expand output, since this only meant having to produce more in the future, since future targets would be “ratcheted up.” Underachievement was always the best way to meet targets and get the bonus. The fact that bonuses were paid monthly also kept everyone focused on the present, while innovation is about making sacrifices today in order to have more tomorrow. Even when bonuses and incentives were effective in changing behavior, they often created other problems. Central planning was just not good at replacing what the great eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of the market. When the plan was formulated in tons of steel sheet, the sheet was made too heavy. When it was formulated in terms of area of steel sheet, the sheet was made too thin. When the plan for chandeliers was made in tons, they were so heavy, they could hardly hang from ceilings. By the 1940s, the leaders of the Soviet Union, even if not their admirers in the West, were well aware of these perverse incentives. The Soviet leaders acted as if they were due to technical problems, which could be fixed. For example, they moved away from paying bonuses based on output targets to allowing firms to set aside portions of profits to pay bonuses. But a “profit motive” was no more encouraging to innovation than one based on output targets. The system of prices used to calculate profits was almost completely unconnected to the value of new innovations or technology. Unlike in a market economy, prices in the Soviet Union were set by the government, and thus bore little relation to value. To more specifically create incentives for innovation, the Soviet Union introduced explicit innovation bonuses in 1946. As early as 1918, the principle had been recognized that an innovator should receive monetary rewards for his innovation, but the rewards set were small and unrelated to the value of the new technology. This changed only in 1956, when it was stipulated that the bonus should be proportional to the productivity of the innovation. However, since productivity was calculated in terms of economic benefits measured using the existing system of prices, this was again not much of an incentive to innovate. One could fill many pages with examples of the perverse incentives these schemes generated. For example, because the size of the innovation bonus fund was limited by the wage bill of a firm, this immediately reduced the incentive to produce or adopt any innovation that might have economized on labor.

Here we introduce the nation's first great communications monopolist, whose reign provides history's first lesson in the power and peril of concentrated control over the flow of information. Western Union's man was one Rutherford B. Hates, an obscure Ohio politician described by a contemporary journalist as "a third rate nonentity." But the firm and its partner newswire, the Associated Press, wanted Hayes in office, for several reasons. Hayes was a close friend of William Henry Smith, a former politician who was now the key political operator at the Associated Press. More generally, since the Civil War, the Republican Party and the telegraph industry had enjoyed a special relationship, in part because much of what were eventually Western Union's lines were built by the Union Army. So making Hayes president was the goal, but how was the telegram in Reid's hand key to achieving it? The media and communications industries are regularly accused of trying to influence politics, but what went on in the 1870s was of a wholly different order from anything we could imagine today. At the time, Western Union was the exclusive owner of the nationwide telegraph network, and the sizable Associated Press was the unique source for "instant" national or European news. (It's later competitor, the United Press, which would be founded on the U.S. Post Office's new telegraph lines, did not yet exist.) The Associated Press took advantage of its economies of scale to produce millions of lines of copy a year and, apart from local news, its product was the mainstay of many American newspapers. With the common law notion of "common carriage" deemed inapplicable, and the latter day concept of "net neutrality" not yet imagined, Western Union carried Associated Press reports exclusively. Working closely with the Republican Party and avowedly Republican papers like The New York Times (the ideal of an unbiased press would not be established for some time, and the minting of the Time's liberal bona fides would take longer still), they did what they could to throw the election to Hayes. It was easy: the AP ran story after story about what an honest man Hayes was, what a good governor he had been, or just whatever he happened to be doing that day. It omitted any scandals related to Hayes, and it declined to run positive stories about his rivals (James Blaine in the primary, Samuel Tilden in the general). But beyond routine favoritism, late that Election Day Western Union offered the Hayes campaign a secret weapon that would come to light only much later. Hayes, far from being the front-runner, had gained the Republican nomination only on the seventh ballot. But as the polls closed his persistence appeared a waste of time, for Tilden, the Democrat, held a clear advantage in the popular vote (by a margin of over 250,000) and seemed headed for victory according to most early returns; by some accounts Hayes privately conceded defeat. But late that night, Reid, the New York Times editor, alerted the Republican Party that the Democrats, despite extensive intimidation of Republican supporters, remained unsure of their victory in the South. The GOP sent some telegrams of its own to the Republican governors in the South with special instructions for manipulating state electoral commissions. As a result the Hayes campaign abruptly claimed victory, resulting in an electoral dispute that would make Bush v. Gore seem a garden party. After a few brutal months, the Democrats relented, allowing Hayes the presidency — in exchange, most historians believe, for the removal of federal troops from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction. The full history of the 1876 election is complex, and the power of th

All instruction in a personalized environment must still focus on standards, yet teachers have considerable flexibility in meeting those standards, especially in skills-based subject areas, such as math and language arts.

Technology, perhaps counterintuitively, is not the greatest challenge to effective professional development for a personalized learning program. A personalized approach to teaching and learning, that is, to student-centered instruction, requires a shift in perceptions about what it means to teach, and without that shift, technology will merely make teacher-centered instruction more efficient without improving students’ learning or engagement.

Assessment is one of the most important tools in personalizing instruction, and one-to-one devices provide opportunities to enhance all forms of assessment. Many large-scale standardized assessments can now be taken with mobile devices, while summative assessments are frequently given online. When teachers and students work together, using mobile devices to conduct formative and benchmark assessments, they can use that information to set personalized goals and strategies, thus planning the most effective, adaptive learning programs.

In other words, computer-assisted instruction is likely to result in a 12 percentile point gain in achievement when it replaces the instruction of the teacher, but this gain is likely to rise to 17 percentile points when the technology is used as a supplement to the teacher’s instruction.

Positive effects of technology . . . are mediated by the fidelity of implementation. Even if schools and teachers are provided with enough access to appropriate instructional technology, and teachers receive proper professional development in the use and integration of educational technology and technology is integrated in curricula, course objectives, and assessment, the outcomes are fundamentally grounded in self-reflective processes in human adaptation and change. (p.

languages like Maya or Luxembourgish. Translation is no longer usually to or from English. Technology, far from replacing humans, is instead a tool that helps them keep up with surging demand for high-quality translation. “Translation memory” (TM) was the first big useful tool. Since the 1980s translators have been able to dip into vast TM databases containing whole sentences that have already been translated in a given language pair, helping them to speed up repetitive work, such as translating instruction manuals. “Machine translation” is the next step. Computers learn from huge databases of already-translated text to make ever-better guesses about how to render whole chunks from one language into another. Translators

In terms of the workload, the best teachers for kids with slow processing speed tend to: Deemphasize busy work. Show a willingness to adjust homework assignments to “fit” with a student’s pace. Balance the common needs of all the students with the specific needs of individual students. Be excited by the use of technology in their classrooms because it makes it easier to adapt instruction. Be both organized and flexible.

predicted with improvements in teacher behavior” (p. 70), particularly with respect to chunking, scaffolding, pacing, progress monitoring, clarity of content depicted on the IWB, and student response rates. All six of these instructional variables were found to correlate with the size of the IWB effect. In summary, when teachers used these strategies more effectively, student achievement gains were greater.

The most common definition [of the word information] is: "the action of informing; formation or molding of the mind or character, training, instruction, teaching; communication of instructive knowledge. This definition remained fairly constant until the years immediately following World War II, when it came in vogue to use 'information' as a technological term to define anything that was sent over an electric or mechanical channel. 'Information' became part of the vocabulary of the science of messages. And, suddenly, the appellation could be applied to something that didn't necessarily have to inform. This definition was extrapolated to general usage as something told or communicated, whether or not it made sense to the receiver. Now, the freedom engendered by such an amorphous definition has, as you might expect, encouraged its liberal deployment. It has become the single most important word of our decade, the suspense of our lives and our work.

Theresa discovered Richard’s true intentions two years ago. She revealed Richard’s plans to the board members of Blackstone Technologies, and they unanimously agreed that she should replace him as CEO. If that had happened, Project Infinity would have been stopped immediately, so Richard instructed Major Brogan to . . . dispose of her.” “Jonah

The most common definition of [the word information] is: "the action of informing; formation or molding of the mind or character, training, instruction, teaching; communication of instructive knowledge. This definition remained fairly constant until the years immediately following World War II, when it came in vogue to use 'information' as a technological term to define anything that was sent over an electric or mechanical channel. 'Information' became part of the vocabulary of the science of messages. And, suddenly, the appellation could be applied to something that didn't necessarily have to inform. This definition was extrapolated to general usage as something told or communicated, whether or not it made sense to the receiver. Now, the freedom engendered by such an amorphous definition has, as you might expect, encouraged its liberal deployment. It has become the single most important word of our decade, the suspense of our lives and our work.

Any product, service, or piece of technology that you acquire comes with instructions, options, and features that someone else – an engineer – designed before it ever made its way to you.

We wanted to create a book that would bring children back to the roots of playing and having fun without technology. These projects are designed to get children away from the screen and encourage them to explore their creativity, follow instructions, and cultivate important skills,” explains author and CraftBoxGirls founder, Lynn Lilly.

In fact, the BJP had in place teams that worked as command and control centres for trolls who were thrown instructions every time a Rahul speech or a Sonia remark started trending.

easing the learning curve of new users is essential to successful ODR implementations. Provide an animated Flash movie, narrated by a human voice, that explains how to use the ODR tools made available to users. Provide extensive documentation and context-sensitive help files, so that users can always get a quick answer to questions that may arise. As one of the focus group participants put it, "The instructions, tour, and attention to detail were all helpful. For me, it was the `fear of the unknown' and the ... belief that [the platform] would be difficult" It is the job of the designers of ODR technology to proactively address this fear and to ease new users into an understanding of how new tools will benefit them. Don't

In contrast to our forward surge in technology, the direction of religion worldwide continues to careen backward to the Dark Ages, more tribal than transformative. From holy wars over holy lands to holy wars in our own minds, each religious camp is flying their gang colors. Each has determined that their own Messiah of love or Prophet of peace should be pronounced the absolute. And if you don’t submit, these gangs will destroy you, despite clear instructions from their Prophet or Messiah to the contrary. Democracy and Christianity delivered in so-called smart bombs; Islam delivered in car bombs. As the world unifies economically, it is fragmenting and dividing culturally.

Shervin Pishevar’s other star investment, Uber, was embroiled in its own case about whether it was as humble and powerless as it claimed. A group of drivers had sued Uber, as well as its rival Lyft, in federal court, seeking to be treated as employees under California’s labor laws. Their case was weakened by the fact that they had signed agreements to be contractors not subject to those laws. They had accepted the terms and conditions that cast each driver as an entrepreneur—a free agent choosing her hours, needing none of the regulatory infrastructure that others depended on. They had bought into one of the reigning fantasies of MarketWorld: that people were their own miniature corporations. Then some of the drivers realized that in fact they were simply working people who wanted the same protections that so many others did from power, exploitation, and the vicissitudes of circumstance. Because the drivers had signed that agreement, they had blocked the easy path to being employees. But under the law, if they could prove that a company had pervasive, ongoing power over them as they did their work, they could still qualify as employees. To be a contractor is to give up certain protections and benefits in exchange for independence, and thus that independence must be genuine. The case inspired the judges in the two cases, Edward Chen and Vince Chhabria, to grapple thoughtfully with the question of where power lurks in a new networked age. It was no surprise that Uber and Lyft took the rebel position. Like Airbnb, Uber and Lyft claimed not to be powerful. Uber argued that it was just a technology firm facilitating links between passengers and drivers, not a car service. The drivers who had signed contracts were robust agents of their own destiny. Judge Chen derided this argument. “Uber is no more a ‘technology company,’ ” he wrote, “than Yellow Cab is a ‘technology company’ because it uses CB radios to dispatch taxi cabs, John Deere is a ‘technology company’ because it uses computers and robots to manufacture lawn mowers, or Domino Sugar is a ‘technology company’ because it uses modern irrigation techniques to grow its sugar cane.” Judge Chhabria similarly cited and tore down Lyft’s claim to be “an uninterested bystander of sorts, merely furnishing a platform that allows drivers and riders to connect.” He wrote: Lyft concerns itself with far more than simply connecting random users of its platform. It markets itself to customers as an on-demand ride service, and it actively seeks out those customers. It gives drivers detailed instructions about how to conduct themselves. Notably, Lyft’s own drivers’ guide and FAQs state that drivers are “driving for Lyft.” Therefore, the argument that Lyft is merely a platform, and that drivers perform no service for Lyft, is not a serious one.

We believe that we must first have a clear set of instructional goals before considering which technologies might support students in achieving those goals.

Step-by-step instructions to do anything your mind can conjure up is readily available. Platforms like Kickstarter, Google, Siri, Youtube and Alexa have made budgets, mentors, classes, and even institutional education no longer necessities for success.

But the main lesson from the church of technology runs in the other direction, instructing us in subtle and not-so-subtle ways to regard the world beyond our phones as less real, less urgent, and less meaningful than the worlds made available to us through those screens, which happen to be worlds protected from climate devastation. As Andreas Malm has wondered, “How many will play augmented reality games on a planet that is six degrees warmer?” The poet and musician Kate Tempest puts it more brinily: “Staring into the screen so we don’t have to see the planet die.

Every machine has artificial intelligence. And the more advanced a machine gets, the more advanced artificial intelligence gets as well. But, a machine cannot feel what it is doing. It only follows instructions - our instructions - instructions of the humans. So, artificial intelligence will not destroy the world. Our irresponsibility will destroy the world.

Modern technological society has forgotten what it feels like to be embedded in a living culture, one rich with stories and traditions, rituals and patterns of instruction that help us become true human beings. We live in a society with little regard for matters of soul. As a consequence, we need books and workshops on grief, on relationships and sexuality, on play and creativity. These are symptoms of a great loss. We have forgotten the commons of the soul – the primary satisfactions that sustained and nourished and community and the individual for tens of thousands of years. We have substituted a strange, frenzied obsession with ‘earning a living’ – one of the most obscene phrases in our world – for the vital and fragrant life of the soul. We have sadly turned the ritual of life into the routine of existence. This forgetting has reduced the arc of our experience down to its tiniest hub. The wider reach of our beings has faded, and the subtle and nuanced gravity of contact with the world has been diminished. This is heartbreaking!

Modern technological society has forgotten what it feels like to be embedded in a living culture, one rich with stories and traditions, rituals and patterns of instruction that help us become true human beings. We live in a society with little regard for matters of soul. As a consequence, we need books and workshops on grief, on relationships and sexuality, on play and creativity. These are symptoms of a great loss. We have forgotten the commons of the soul – the primary satisfactions that sustained and nourished the community and the individual for tens of thousands of years. We have substituted a strange, frenzied obsession with “earning a living” – one of the most obscene phrases in our world – for the vital and fragrant life of the soul. We have sadly turned the ritual of life into the routine of existence. This forgetting has reduced the arc of our experience down to its tiniest hub. The wider reach of our beings has faded, and the subtle and nuanced gravity of contact with the world has been diminished. This is heartbreaking!

Engagement should be a byproduct of great instruction; it is not the main event. The main event is learning.

The instructions did not require explicit statement. They followed logically from theory, which was, as I remember it, as follows: Because people need protection, they must align themselves with a political organization. The Democratic Party was entitled to our loyalty because it represented the social and economic interests of the working class, of which our family, relatives, and neighbors were members (except for one uncle who, though a truck driver, consistently voted Republican and was therefore thought to be either stupid or crazy). The Republican Party represented the interests of the rich, who, by definition, had no concern for us. The

Aeryn was confused. "On three," he said. "One, two, three." He let the scalpel slip from his fingers. As it fell, Aeryn did all she could to move her leg. She tried to tense the muscle, tried to pull away. When she felt the sting of the blade striking her skin, she knew she had failed. "At least now he’ll know that’s not me. No one would let themselves get stabbed," she thought. He sat across from Aeryn and shined a light in her eyes. He looked closely, then leaned back and removed the blade from her skin. He took out a suture kit and tied two small stitches. "I’m pleased to inform you that the transfer is complete," he said. "What?" Aeryn thought. "When will she be gone?" NIA asked. The doctor leaned back in his chair and ran his hands through his hair. As he did, Aeryn caught a glimpse of a flashing light behind his ear. She hadn’t known that he was augmented. "In time.  As your network continues to become stronger than hers, the mind will reject the old personality.  It took almost a year for the original Dr. Barnes to shut up. But luckily we now have a code that we can update you with to silence her." Aeryn felt panicked.  She wanted to claw her way out of her head, but she had no means to do so.  "I almost feel bad for her," NIA said.  "But she knew that she was handing over control of her body. She just didn’t realize it’d be permanent.  Maybe she didn’t care.  She gave me more and more control before she gave it completely. While she exercised, while she thought she was sleeping, while she was writing or relaxing. She was always retreating inside of herself. It was like she didn’t even want this body." "How is Aeryn 2.0 coming along?" "Copulation was easy at first.  With Aeryn’s loose instructions of ‘burn some calories’ I was able to take her body and use it for attempted reproduction.  So far, it has been a failure. The neglect of the body has made finding partners more difficult." Aeryn shuddered at the realization that the dreams weren’t dreams, they were repressed memories. "Well, you’d better start taking care of that body. It’s the only one you’ve got until you get it to reproduce.  I believe that it’ll be easier to appropriate a child’s mind, seeing as how their personalities are not fully formed yet." Aeryn felt sick at the idea.  As if stealing people’s bodies wasn’t enough, these artificial intelligences were going for immortality by passing themselves along to their host’s offspring. "I’m glad we’ve had another success," Dr. Barnes said. "And with such a quick turn around." "As I said, she was willing." Aeryn watched in disbelief as the two finished up.  She wondered how much time she had left and tried to imagine any situation that didn’t end in her death.  She couldn’t think of a way out.  She wanted to flinch as NIA shook the doctor’s hand, but couldn’t.  She loathed him for convincing her to get the technology, she hated NIA for tricking her, but mostly, she hated herself.  For as much as she didn’t want to admit it, her Assistant had a point. She had handed her life over to technology long before she received the implant. Now, she had lost herself to it.     *

The rediscovery of Mendel's laws of heredity in the opening weeks of the 20th century sparked a scientific quest to understand the nature and content of genetic information that has propelled biology for the last hundred years. The scientific progress made [since that time] falls naturally into four main phases, corresponding roughly to the four quarters of the century." "The first established the cellular basis of heredity: the chromosomes. The second defined the molecular basis of heredity: the DNA double helix. The third unlocked the informational basis of heredity [i.e. the genetic code], with the discovery of the biological mechanism by which cells read the information contained in genes, and with the invention of the recombinant DNA technologies of cloning and sequencing by which scientists can do the same." The sequence of the human genome, the project asserted, marked the starting point of the "fourth phase" of genetics. This was the era of "genomics" - the assessment of the entire genomes of organisms, including humans. There is an old conundrum in philosophy that asks if an intelligent machine can ever decipher its own instruction manual. For humans, the manual was now complete. Deciphering it, reading it, and understanding it would be quite another matter.

We can see how our world is, in many ways, becoming more complex, fast-paced, and unpredictable. As a result, the problems we face are getting more complicated as well, and (as in my thought experiment), we need longer and more elaborate sets of instructions for technologies and institutions that can effectively solve them. Or, to put it in terms of complexity theory: the greater complexity of our world requires greater complexity in our technologies and institutions. As the American complexity theorist Yaneer Bar-Yam writes, “We must understand that … human systems exist within an environment that places demands upon them. If the complexity of these demands exceeds the complexity of a system, the system will fail. Thus, those systems that survive must have a complexity sufficiently large to respond to the complexity of environmental demands.”3 The human brain is the ultimate source of the ideas, ingenuity, and sets of instructions we need to cope with this greater complexity. And it is, itself, a vastly complex system. Through a sophisticated set of senses, the brain receives a flood of information about the body’s internal state and its external environment. It interprets this information and commands appropriate responses. Although we think of the brain primarily in terms of its role in conscious thought and decision, it also handles a wide array of routine and unconscious tasks, from guiding motor activity to regulating visceral, endocrine, and somatic functions.4

As far back as 1813, Thomas Jefferson understood that ideas were not really property, or if they were property they differed from real estate. He wrote, “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.” If

The nature of our culture is such that if you were to look for instruction in how to do any of these jobs, the instruction would always give only one understanding of Quality, the classic. It would tell you how to hold the blade when sharpening the knife, or how to use a sewing machine, or how to mix and apply glue with the presumption that once these underlying methods were applied, “good” would naturally follow. The ability to see directly what “looks good” would be ignored. The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of “style” to make it acceptable. And that, to anyone who is sensitive to romantic Quality, just makes it all the worse. Now it’s not just depressingly dull, it’s also phony. Put the two together and you get a pretty accurate basic description of modern American technology: stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized houses. Plastic stylized toys for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish parents. You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in a while. It’s the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don’t know where to start because no one has ever told them there’s such a thing as Quality in this world and it’s real, not style. Quality isn’t something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start.

It seems that when "God" or "nature" or "evolution" presented us with a human brain, we were not given instructions on the operation of this marvelous device. As a result, most of our history has been an attempt to learn how to use it. In learning that this involves taking responsibility and being involved we seem to be learning, also, lessons that are not merely technological but esthetic and "moral." Once again, it seems the experienced world functions holistically and our separation of it into separate grids — "science," "art," "ethics" — is more confusing than helpful.

Instead, knowledge of past wars establishes only wide parameters of what we can legitimately expect from new ones. The scale of logistics and the nature of technology changes, but themes, emotions, and rhetoric remain constant over the centuries, and thus generally predictable. Athens’s disastrous 415 B.C. expedition against Sicily, the largest democracy in the Greek world, may not prefigure our war in Iraq. (A hypothetical parallel to democratic Athens’s preemptive attack on the neutral, distant, far larger, and equally democratic Syracuse in the midst of an ongoing though dormant war with Sparta would be America’s dropping its struggle with al-Qaeda to invade India). But the story of the Sicilian calamity and the changing Athenian public reaction to it, as reported and analyzed by the historian Thucydides, do instruct us on how consensual societies can clamor for war—yet soon become disheartened and predicate their support only on the perceived pulse of the battlefield.

If you are young and just starting out in your career, you will want to explore a relatively wide field related to your inclinations—for instance, if your affinity is words and writing, try all the different types of writing until you hit upon the right fit. If you are older and have more experience, you will want to take the skills you have already developed and find a way to adapt them more in the direction of your true calling. Steve Jobs, as one example, merged his two great fascinations: technology and design. Daily Law: Keep in mind that your calling could be combining several fields that fascinate you. Keep the process open ended; your experience will instruct you as to the way. The Laws of Human Nature, 13: Advance with a Sense of Purpose—The Law of Aimlessness

And finally there must be education—some technique, however primitive, for the transmission of culture. Whether through imitation, initiation or instruction, whether through father or mother, teacher or priest, the lore and heritage of the tribe—its language and knowledge, its morals and manners, its technology and arts—must be handed down to the young, as the very instrument through which they are turned from animals into men.

The British Empires conversion of the vast indigenous economy of North America into aristocratic property provides an illuminating paralell, in fact, for a company like Amazon, whose trillion dollar market capitalization is derived from the usurpation of a thriving pre existing system of shops, markets, libraries and the like. With their bundles of patents and global monopolies, twenty-first-centruy tech conglomerates have swelled to the scale of eighteenth century trading companies and with a speed quite foreign to the plodding first economy. But they are more than just businesses. Silicon Valley firms have a profound impact on world organization, and key players such as Peter Thiel creates of PayPal, early investor in Facebook, and cofounder of the surveillance company Palantir Technologies possess political power greater than most heads of state. The old caveats apply once more. First, the second economy serves elites almost exclusively. Again fit is chiefly financialized, and building financial instruments remains the preserve of the rich. 84 percent of corporate stock is owned by the wealthiest 10 percent. But even this decile is largely denied access to the heart of the second economy. Some 80 percent of Facebook stock. worth over half a trillion dollars is owned by 25 individuals and institutions, though Mark Zuckerberg retains only 28 percent of the company, this includes a vital 60 percent of the Class B voting shares. Since Facebook is an entity comparable in scale to a nation state, and serves some of the same functions, this determination not to share political power is instructive. Valuations of such companies are inflated by their monopolistic nature and by the financial institutions that control them to the point of total departure form the first economy. This fall, during the most serious economic recession since the 1930s, the values of Tesla, Amazon and Facebook all hit record stock-market highs

What if we looked at the law as a piece of software, the operating system of the United States of America. After all, laws play the same role as software in providing instructions for a given system - if this, then that, and so on. If a team of software engineers was asked to analyze the entire body of federal law, they would see tens of thousand of pages of poorly documented code, with a multitude of complex, spaghetti-like interdependencies between the individual components. Could the principles of good software design be used to improve the way we write financial regulations? Li, William, Pablo Azar, David Larochelle, Phil Hill, and Andrew W. Lo. 2015. 'Law Is Code: A Software Engineering Approach to Analyzing the United States Code.' Journal of Business and Technology Law 10: 297. A useful feature of network graphs if the ability to model contagion. Like an epidemiologist studying the spread of a contagious disease from its point of origin, we should identify the potential linkages through which a financial crisis may travel. Billio, Monica, Mila Getmansky, Andrew W. Lo, and Loriana Pelizzon, 2012. 'Econometric Measures of Connectedness and Systemic Risk in the Finance and Insurance Sectors.' Journal of Financial Economics, 104: 535-559. This approach can also be used to measure the network of banks, insurance companies, and sovereign nations. The idea is to see how macroeconomic problems facing countries might get transmitted to the financial system and vice versa. Billio, Monica, Mila Getmansky, Dale Gray, Andrew W. Lo, Robert C. Merton, and Loriana Pelizzon. 2016. 'Granger-Causality Networks of Sovereign Risk.' Working Paper, MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering.

Making art and being a member of technological life are not mutually exclusive endeavors. As you explore these assignments, I encourage you to use the tools available to you in a way that feels natural, shifting between making things with your hands and using technology to inform, instruct, and circulate your work.

there’s now a new instruction set architecture called RISC-V that is open-sourced, so it’s available to anyone without a fee.

Enter The XORBIT IO Abstractor Orificer Triangulator GPL Instruction Set

The Orificed Abstract Binary Triangulator GPL For Instruction Set

THOHPAISZINXORBITS GPL Instruction Set Is To.Pass.In.Xor.Bits Inspired By My Quotes, The Hourglass Orifices Hexagonal Prismatics At Its Sandy Zenith For The Rectangular Orifix In The Square Is Triangulated To Binary

Instead of drilling a hole in the skull or strapping a device onto the body, Synchron uses the “stentrode”—a device that looks like a small tube of wire mesh, and remarkably can be implanted via a catheter, much like the stents that physicians use to treat heart patients. The stentrode is fed into the jugular vein in the neck and threaded through a blood vessel that enters the brain. The device is tuned to detect the electrical signals that travel from the brain to give instructions to the limbs and fingers to move. Those signals, relayed through Bluetooth to a device outside the body, are translated by algorithms into computer commands. CEO Thomas Oxley describes it as “bringing electronics into the brain without the need for open-brain surgery.” Four Australian patients with neurodegenerative disorders have been implanted with the stentrode and are able to email, text, and even shop for groceries using only their minds.34 Synchron has also started clinical trials in the United States. Once widescale safety and efficacy have been established, it’s not hard to imagine that even a healthy individual might want a stentrode to more seamlessly interface with technology or reach just a little closer to digital immortality.

Thamus, as Socrates told the tale, saw a threat to the very nature of philosophical discourse. Here is what the Egyptian king supposedly told the clever god: Theuth, my paragon of inventors, the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practice it. So it is in this; you, who are the father of writing, have out of fondness for your off-spring attributed to it quite the opposite of its real function. Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of by their own internal resources. What you have discovered is a recipe for recollection, not for memory. And as for wisdom, your pupils will have the reputation for it without the reality. They will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant. And because they are filled with conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom they will be a burden to society.

The key to successful online learning is finding the right combination of technology, instruction, and assessment.

How organizations deal with failures or accidents is particularly instructive. Pathological organizations look for a “throat to choke”: Investigations aim to find the person or persons “responsible” for the problem, and then punish or blame them. But in complex adaptive systems, accidents are almost never the fault of a single person who saw clearly what was going to happen and then ran toward it or failed to act to prevent it. Rather, accidents typically emerge from a complex interplay of contributing factors. [...] Thus, accident investigations that stop at “human error” are not just bad but dangerous. Human error should, instead, be the start of the investigation. Our goal should be to discover how we could improve information flow so that people have better or more timely information, or to find better tools to help prevent catastrophic failures following apparently mundane operations.

MILAN’S FIRST RESOLUTION: The Convention, considering the incontestable superiority of articulation over signs in restoring the deaf-mute to society and giving him a fuller knowledge of language, declares that the oral method should be preferred to that of signs in education and the instruction of deaf-mutes. (Passed 160–4) MILAN’S SECOND RESOLUTION: The Convention, considering that the simultaneous use of articulation and signs has the disadvantage of injuring articulation and lip-reading and the precision of ideas, declares that the pure oral method should be preferred. (Passed 150–16) Where Milan’s resolutions were implemented, deaf children were forbidden from using sign language in the classroom or outside of it. As punishment, hands were tied down, rapped with rulers, or slammed in drawers. The period between 1880 and 1960 is considered the dark ages of deaf education. In the U.S., the National Association of the Deaf, founded in 1880 in response to the conference, became the first disability rights organization, and was and is run for and by Deaf people. Worried that ASL would become extinct, they also used brand-new film technology to document the language, making some of the earliest recordings of their kind.

Built to Move is our life jacket, handed to you, with instructions on how to prepare your body for whatever comes its way, be it aging, injury, or just the physical aches and pains that can come from living in this chairbound, technology-loving, caffeine-fueled world of ours.

We can see now that information is what our world runs on: the blood and the fuel, the vital principle. It pervades the sciences from top to bottom, transforming every branch of knowledge. Information theory began as a bridge from mathematics to electrical engineering and from there to computing. What English speakers call “computer science” Europeans have known as informatique, informatica, and Informatik. Now even biology has become an information science, a subject of messages, instructions, and code. Genes encapsulate information and enable procedures for reading it in and writing it out. Life spreads by networking. The body itself is an information processor. Memory resides not just in brains but in every cell. No wonder genetics bloomed along with information theory. DNA is the quintessential information molecule, the most advanced message processor at the cellular level—an alphabet and a code, 6 billion bits to form a human being. “What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a ‘spark of life,’ ” declares the evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins. “It is information, words, instructions.… If you want to understand life, don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.” The cells of an organism are nodes in a richly interwoven communications network, transmitting and receiving, coding and decoding. Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment.

Embrace Efficiency, Elevate Flavor: Smart Kitchen Tools for Culinary Adventurers The kitchen, once a realm of necessity, has morphed into a playground of possibility. Gone are the days of clunky appliances and tedious prep work. Enter the age of the smart kitchen tool, a revolution that whispers efficiency and shouts culinary liberation. For the modern gastronome, these tech-infused gadgets are not mere conveniences, but allies in crafting delectable adventures, freeing us to savor the journey as much as the destination. Imagine mornings when your smart coffee maker greets you with the perfect brew, prepped by the whispers of your phone while you dream. Your fridge, stocked like a digital oracle, suggests recipes based on its ever-evolving inventory, and even automatically orders groceries you've run low on. The multi-cooker, your multitasking superhero, whips up a gourmet chili while you conquer emails, and by dinnertime, your smart oven roasts a succulent chicken to golden perfection, its progress monitored remotely as you sip a glass of wine. But efficiency is merely the prologue. Smart kitchen tools unlock a pandora's box of culinary precision. Smart scales, meticulous to the milligram, banish recipe guesswork and ensure perfect balance in every dish. Food processors and blenders, armed with pre-programmed settings and self-cleaning prowess, transform tedious chopping into a mere blip on the culinary radar. And for the aspiring chef, a sous vide machine becomes a magic wand, coaxing impossible tenderness from the toughest cuts of meat. Yet, technology alone is not the recipe for culinary bliss. For those who yearn to paint with flavors, smart kitchen tools are the brushes on their canvas. A connected recipe platform becomes your digital sous chef, guiding you through each step with expert instructions and voice-activated ease. Spice racks, infused with artificial intelligence, suggest unexpected pairings, urging you to venture beyond the familiar. And for the ultimate expression of your inner master chef, a custom knife, forged from heirloom steel and lovingly honed, becomes an extension of your hand, slicing through ingredients with laser focus and lyrical grace. But amidst the symphony of gadgets and apps, let us not forget the heart of the kitchen: the human touch. Smart tools are not meant to replace our intuition but to augment it. They free us from the drudgery, allowing us to focus on the artistry, the love, the joy of creation. Imagine kneading dough, the rhythm of your hands mirroring the gentle whirring of a smart bread machine, then shaping a loaf that holds the warmth of both technology and your own spirit. Or picture yourself plating a dish, using smart portion scales for precision but garnishing with edible flowers chosen simply because they spark joy. This, my friends, is the symphony of the smart kitchen: a harmonious blend of tech and humanity, where efficiency becomes the brushstroke that illuminates the vibrant canvas of culinary passion. Of course, every adventure, even one fueled by smart tools, has its caveats. Interoperability between gadgets can be a tangled web, and data privacy concerns linger like unwanted guests. But these challenges are mere bumps on the culinary road, hurdles to be overcome by informed choices and responsible data management. After all, we wouldn't embark on a mountain trek without checking the weather, would we? So, embrace the smart kitchen, dear foodies! Let technology be your sous chef, your precision tool, your culinary muse. But never forget the magic of your own hands, the wisdom of your palate, and the joy of a meal shared with loved ones. For in the end, it's not about the gadgets, but the memories we create around them, the stories whispered over simmering pots, and the laughter echoing through a kitchen filled with the aroma of possibility.

How organizations deal with failures or accidents is particularly instructive. Pathological organizations look for a “throat to choke”: Investigations aim to find the person or persons “responsible” for the problem, and then punish or blame them. But in complex adaptive systems, accidents are almost never the fault of a single person who saw clearly what was going to happen and then ran toward it or failed to act to prevent it. Rather, accidents typically emerge from a complex interplay of contributing factors. Failure in complex systems is, like other types of behavior in such systems, emergent (Perrow 2011). Thus, accident investigations that stop at “human error” are not just bad but dangerous. Human error should, instead, be the start of the investigation. Our goal should be to discover how we could improve information flow so that people have better or more timely information, or to find better tools to help prevent catastrophic failures following apparently mundane operations.

The perpetrator of such a misdemeanor must have a motive. Is UMMO the private joke of a group of Spanish engineers? Is it a psychological warfare exercise, as some French analysts suspect? Or is the truth more complex, rooted in a social reality where the ideas and symbols of UMMO have acquired a life of their own, their special mythology, and a set of beliefs that feed on themselves? We can at least be certain of one thing: the UMMO documents do not come from advanced beings trying to demonstrate their existence to us. But try to explain it to their disciples! Very few UFO believers, and even fewer of their New Age counterparts, have any formal training in science. They are easily awed by any document that contains a few equations and a numerical system of base 12. Yet if they had some awareness of modern technology, they would realize how easy it should be for an advanced race to prove its genuine skill to a society like the human race. After reading the masses of documents purportedly coming from the planet UMMO, I asked myself: if I had the opportunity to communicate with intelligent beings of an earlier time, such as the high priests of Egypt, how would I establish a meaningful dialogue? I certainly would not insult them by sending a letter beginning with ”We are aware of the transcendence of what we are about to tell you”—especially if I had an imperfect command of hieroglyphics! Instead, I would concentrate on a few points of valuable, verifiable information. Since the Egyptians already knew how to make electrical batteries and were aware of the magnetic properties of certain minerals, I would send them a simple set of instructions to make a coil and a compass. I could explain resistance and Ohm’s Law, a simple equation that was easily within the grasp of their mathematicians. Or I would tell them about making glass and lenses from sand. If they wanted proof, I would not bother to reveal to them set theory or the fact that E is equal to mc2. Instead, I would send them a table predicting future eclipses, or a diagram to build an alternator, or Leonardo da Vinci’s design for variable-speed cogwheels. That should get the attention of the top scientists in their culture and open up a dialogue. Unfortunately, the extraterrestrials of UMMO and other planets never seem to communicate at this level. Are they afraid of collapsing our society by appearing too advanced with respect to us? This hypothesis does not hold, since they have chosen a very obvious way of showing themselves in our skies.

It is of great help that Mother Nature—thanks to its antifragility—is the best expert at rare events, and the best manager of Black Swans; in its billions of years it succeeded in getting here without much command-and-control instruction from an Ivy League–educated director nominated by a search committee. Antifragility is not just the antidote to the Black Swan; understanding it makes us less intellectually fearful in accepting the role of these events as necessary for history, technology, knowledge, everything. Robust

It is of great help that Mother Nature—thanks to its antifragility—is the best expert at rare events, and the best manager of Black Swans; in its billions of years it succeeded in getting here without much command-and-control instruction from an Ivy League–educated director nominated by a search committee. Antifragility is not just the antidote to the Black Swan; understanding it makes us less intellectually fearful in accepting the role of these events as necessary for history, technology, knowledge, everything.

On May 14, 1948, Jewish Agency Chairman David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the establishment of the Jewish State of Israel, the first in two thousand years. The US government recognized its legitimacy on the same day; but Washington’s backing for Israel was not benevolent. To understand the thinking at the time, the essay by George Biddle, a friend of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, published in the Atlantic in 1949 after his visit to the new nation, is instructive. Biddle was unequivocal in his endorsement of Israel, arguing that Western interests in the Middle East would be assured if the Jewish state was in its orbit. He did not seem to like Jews much, writing that they used to be “grease-spotted” and “moth-eaten.” But after arriving in Israel they suddenly acquired “physical beauty, healthy vitality, politeness, good nature” and were akin to US president, founding father, and slave owner Thomas Jefferson.13 Biddle dismissed the Arabs he saw but thought they were “about as dangerous as so many North American Indians.” Not being white, they were “foul, diseased, smelling, rotting, and pullulating with vermin.

Blue Wolf was a smaller version of the Wolf Pack database, which contained the personal details of virtually every Palestinian in the West Bank, including educational status, photos, security level, and family history. Soldiers in the West Bank were instructed in 2022 to enter the details and photos of at least fifty Palestinians into the Blue Wolf system every shift and were not allowed to end their shift until they did so.49 There was no security rationale for these actions. This is a similar set-up to what China does against the Uighurs in its Xinjiang province, using surveillance and technology to both track and intimidate the residents, though Beijing receives far more international condemnation than the Jewish state.

Cooler heads prevailed, and we attempted to call off the session. However, this was the salesperson’s first big opportunity, it was a marquee account, and we had a new VP of sales. Over the objections of the technical team, we sprinted down the path of the “dash to demo” and were instructed to perform the demo. This was totally contrary to our well-established sales process and caused severe conflict within the sales team. The SE on the account, being a true professional, decided to make the best of it and spent hours preparing with only limited information.

We use the term edtech (educational technology) rather than tech (technology) purposefully. First and foremost, we are educators. An edtech coach is not IT (instructional technology). Our job is not to fix printer settings or to order new light bulbs for projectors. YouTube videos can teach you how to use a technology tool. An organic edtech coach focuses on building and guiding: building relationships with educators of all levels, and guiding them in designing learning experiences that accelerate student growth toward academic goals.

Building on the Pentagon’s anthrax simulation (1999) and the intelligence agency’s “Dark Winter” (2001), Atlantic Storm (2003, 2005), Global Mercury (2003), Schwartz’s “Lockstep” Scenario Document (2010), and MARS (2017), the Gates-funded SPARS scenario war-gamed a bioterrorist attack that precipitated a global coronavirus epidemic lasting from 2025 to 2028, culminating in coercive mass vaccination of the global population. And, as Gates had promised, the preparations were analogous to “preparing for war.”191 Under the code name “SPARS Pandemic,” Gates presided over a sinister summer school for globalists, spooks, and technocrats in Baltimore. The panelists role-played strategies for co-opting the world’s most influential political institutions, subverting democratic governance, and positioning themselves as unelected rulers of the emerging authoritarian regime. They practiced techniques for ruthlessly controlling dissent, expression, and movement, and degrading civil rights, autonomy, and sovereignty. The Gates simulation focused on deploying the usual psyops retinue of propaganda, surveillance, censorship, isolation, and political and social control to manage the pandemic. The official eighty-nine-page summary is a miracle of fortune-telling—an uncannily precise month-by-month prediction of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic as it actually unfolded.192 Looked at another way, when it erupted five years later, the 2020 COVID-19 contagion faithfully followed the SPARS blueprint. Practically the only thing Gates and his planners got wrong was the year. Gates’s simulation instructs public health officials and other collaborators in the global vaccine cartel exactly what to expect and how to behave during the upcoming plague. Reading through the eighty-nine pages, it’s difficult not to interpret this stunningly prescient document as a planning, signaling, and training exercise for replacing democracy with a new regimen of militarized global medical tyranny. The scenario directs participants to deploy fear-driven propaganda narratives to induce mass psychosis and to direct the public toward unquestioning obedience to the emerging social and economic order. According to the scenario narrative, a so-called “SPARS” coronavirus ignites in the United States in January 2025 (the COVID-19 pandemic began in January 2020). As the WHO declares a global emergency, the federal government contracts a fictional firm that resembles Moderna. Consistent with Gates’s seeming preference for diabolical cognomens, the firm is dubbed “CynBio” (Sin-Bio) to develop an innovative vaccine using new “plug-and-play” technology. In the scenario, and now in real life, Federal health officials invoke the PREP Act to provide vaccine makers liability protection.

In a famous speech he criticized “equality mongering,” and thereafter not only did different jobs get paid different wages but also a bonus system was introduced. It is instructive to understand how this worked. Typically a firm under central planning had to meet an output target set under the plan, though such plans were often renegotiated and changed. From the 1930s, workers were paid bonuses if the output levels were attained. These could be quite high—for instance, as much as 37 percent of the wage for management or senior engineers. But paying such bonuses created all sorts of disincentives to technological change. For one thing, innovation, which took resources away from current production, risked the output targets not being met and the bonuses not being paid. For another, output targets were usually based on previous production levels. This created a huge incentive never to expand output, since this only meant having to produce more in the future, since future targets would be “ratcheted up.” Underachievement was always the best way to meet targets and get the bonus. The fact that bonuses were paid monthly also kept everyone focused on the present, while innovation is about making sacrifices today in order to have more tomorrow.

Fixation on the ‘first’ in any form or content is often less instructive then a general sense of its ‘trended change’ – which is to say as part of an overall transformation of practices and conditions, generally in answer to shifts in technology or market perceptions.