Are we living on the hinge of history?

[Valin]

The Untapped Potential of the Mobile Phone

Beth Hoffman,

 

Ready for some mind blowing statistics?

 

A World Bank report says there are now 6 billion phones in use around the world, and an estimated 70 percent of the world’s poorest people (and who also, not coincidentally, work in agriculture) have access to them. The developing world is now using mobile phones at higher rates than those in developed nations – 96 percent of people in Indonesia and 89 percent of those in Kenya text.

 

To me, there is perhaps no trend more interesting and yet continuously ignored by the vast majority of western techies than this. The amount of information shared, not via Facebook, Pinterest or on ipads, but using simple SMS messaging is staggering. And the amount of opportunity for entrepreneurs looking to help those in need is enormous.

 

Thus far, most mobile knowledge sharing in developing nations has focused on sending pricing information to farmers about going market rates. Additionally, disease and weather data is also frequently shared via mobile phones, alerting farmers when to spray pesticides or harvest crops. Farmers then use chemicals more sparingly and make more money by harvesting crops at the right time.

 

(Snip)

 

 

[clearvision]

Gr8 Rtcl thx V

[righteousmomma]

LOL , Clearvision.

 

Valin, you are most welcome about my posting here. ( or should I have said: " No problem" - instead of "You are welcome."

 

So - on the hinge of history I throw out a term for you - post modernism and Christianity.

[Valin]

LOL , Clearvision.

 

Valin, you are most welcome about my posting here. ( or should I have said: " No problem" - instead of "You are welcome."

 

So - on the hinge of history I throw out a term for you - post modernism and Christianity.

 

Anyone who says they know what is going to happen, do me a favor and smack them up side the head hard for me...thanks. Not that it will do any good.

Post modernism an idea who's time has come...and gone....thankfully.

Christianity OTOH having been around for just a bit longer ( ) will continue to go on (stumbling around as we do). The question is...What Will It Look Like, what will the worship services be like, how will they view/relate (?) to the world? One of the things that has happened in the last 100 or so years is The Church has gotten a lot less white, and that will have a huge influence on The Church.

Quick story in 1920 Mom and Dad got married, Mom's family were Baptists and Dad's Catholic...huge major scandal in Lisbon ND....becoming Papists! Lackeys of Rome!! I mean this sort of thing just wasn't done. That sort of attitude (and worse) was very prevalent, by both Catholics and Protestants...and not that long ago. So given we are now talking influences coming into The Church for completely different cultures who will this change The Church...change it will, make no mistake.

[righteousmomma]

Afraid post modernism has not come and gone.

It is here and now and the danger is clear and present.

 

Edited to say that because of the huge and very diverse understanding of the terminology perhaps I should have left off the "ism" and just said post modern.

[Valin]

Just in case you're starting to feel good.

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgOp-nz3lHg

 

 

Have A Nice Day.

[Valin]

Harvard Is Now Online

 

This week brings the official launch of Harvard and MIT’s EdX program. According to BostInno (h/t John Ellis), the new program is off to a good start, with more than 100,000 students already registered for the first courses. And as students and teachers become acclimated to the platform, Harvard will continue to tailor the program to meet the changing needs of online learners:

 

(Snip)

 

Online education has made great strides this year. We’re happy to see one of America’s oldest and most prestigious universities joining in. Continued experimentation will lead to a better product as institutions learn from and compete with each other. It’s an exciting time to be learning online.

 

[nickydog]

We had an AF Academy senior over for dinner last Sunday. He is going into cyber warfare when he graduates and is absolutely brilliant in an unconventional sort of way. I invited him to come to the house if he needs a quiet place to study and showed him a table in the basement where he could spread out his "stuff." Then I realized much to my embarrassment that all he would need to "spread out" was his laptop. I was imagining papers, books, pens, pencils, etc. As my husband, the cadet, and I conversed the cadet was constantly looking up stuff on his iphone to facilitate the conversation, whether it was the author of a book or the address and map to a local restaurant. It made me realize how totally different his world is from mine.

[Valin]

We had an AF Academy senior over for dinner last Sunday. He is going into cyber warfare when he graduates and is absolutely brilliant in an unconventional sort of way. I invited him to come to the house if he needs a quiet place to study and showed him a table in the basement where he could spread out his "stuff." Then I realized much to my embarrassment that all he would need to "spread out" was his laptop. I was imagining papers, books, pens, pencils, etc. As my husband, the cadet, and I conversed the cadet was constantly looking up stuff on his iphone to facilitate the conversation, whether it was the author of a book or the address and map to a local restaurant. It made me realize how totally different his world is from mine.

 

A question occurred to me the other day. Given there is a whole new world being born, but in our heads are we still thinking like it is the 1950's-60's? Just one of those questions that pops into my (so called) mind.

 

 

[nickydog]

I think I've moved beyond the '50's and '60's but am darn sure I'm not very far into the 21st century.

[pollyannaish]

@Valin

 

Since I contribute to this discussion from both a different generation and a different vocation, I thought I'd share something about Visual Communication. Graphic design, while related to art, is something different. Those lines however are being blurred. This film Helvetica http://www.helveticafilm.com/ is available from Netflix streaming. It is one of the best films on typography and its representation of societal changes I've seen in a long time.

 

Fine Art today has become oddly self conscious. However design has become both the leader and the follower of,the masses. It has become populist. I believe many of the coming changes in our society are already being projected in our visual communications. You can find major clues there.

 

The film above looks at the history and evolution of type and specifically the modernist influence of the ubiquitous Helvetica. It hints to where we are going next. If you get a chance to see this I'd love to discuss it further.

[pollyannaish]

This film makers other two documentaries objectified about industrial design an Urbanized about city design are also available on Netflix.

[Valin]

@Valin

 

Since I contribute to this discussion from both a different generation and a different vocation, I thought I'd share something about Visual Communication. Graphic design, while related to art, is something different. Those lines however are being blurred. This film Helvetica http://www.helveticafilm.com/ is available from Netflix streaming. It is one of the best films on typography and its representation of societal changes I've seen in a long time.

 

I recall seeing something about this sometime ago on a PBS show about Design. As I recall pre-1960's a different Type was used, so that Helvetica was seen as "New...Bold...Clean". any other Type was old fashioned...and this of course is bad. Then There is Ed Driscoll.

 

 

Fine Art today has become oddly self conscious. However design has become both the leader and the follower of,the masses. It has become populist. I believe many of the coming changes in our society are already being projected in our visual communications. You can find major clues there.

 

Do Not Get me started on this! So much of what we see (at least I see) in "The Arts" is Shock..Shock..Shock...Confuse..Confuse..Confuse...Depress..Depress..Depress.

/Rant #817,337

 

The film above looks at the history and evolution of type and specifically the modernist influence of the ubiquitous Helvetica. It hints to where we are going next. If you get a chance to see this I'd love to discuss it further.

 

I Love history, actually read/study the damn stuff. I look at the world through the eyes of history, and we don't have a clue where this is going, anyone who says they do...you have my permission to smack them up side the head and call them stupid. I'm watch a class on the American Revolution taught at Yale, and one of the thing the professor keeps mentioning is these guys didn't know where this was heading. And neither do we.

 

I started this thread in the hope of being able to explain (in 25 words or less) what I saw in that one moment when Gary Hart said "I believe we are living on the hinge of history, on the cusp of history.

And it's, it happens no more frequently than every hundred years, sometimes every five hundred years, and we are so in the middle of this symbolically new century, new millennium, really new economic age, information versus industry or machines, and a new, a new order in the world uh, to pla...replace the old cold war order." And with the help of other get there, or at least make people aware of what I see going on.

 

We are in the middle of huge major changes, think 15th/16th century (Gutenberg, Martin Luther, The Renaissance, Columbus...Bang it's a whole new world, a brand new way of living/thinking, a whole new world) . And there is no pause button, no rewind, no TIVO...it's real time, and it is affecting everything we do and the way we live. And it is really just starting.

/ramble

[Valin]

Forward to 38:30

[nickydog]

I can't wait to watch this, but right now i have to start dinner. sigh.

[pollyannaish]

Shoot! I have to wait until Friday but me too!

[Valin]

[Valin]

*Money & Politics with Jim Pethokoukis

Episode 8: Erik Brynjolfsson

12/21/12

 

On this week's Ricochet Money & Politics Podcast, Jim's guest is Erik Brynjolfsson, director of MIT’s Center for Digital Business at the Sloan School of Management.

 

Brynjolfsson is also co-author, along with Andrew McAfee, of Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy. The 60-page ebook explores the apparent disconnect between 1) rising innovation and productivity, and 2) weak job and income growth.

 

The Financial Times called Race Against the Machine "compelling for its claim to explain two crumbling economic laws: the first that growth will create jobs; the second that rising wages will follow rising productivity. The authors think this stems from the erosion of a third pattern – that technology creates at least as many jobs as it destroys. Many intuitively doubt this idea, as the looms long ago smashed by Ned Ludd attest."

(Snip)

 

 

* Click to listen

[Valin]

Digital Media & Learning Research Hub
This collaborative blog and curated collection of free and open resources is produced by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub, whose mission is to advance research in the service of a more equitable, participatory, and effective ecosystem of learning keyed to the digital and networked era.
(Snip)

[Valin]

The End of the University as We Know It

Nathan Harden

Jan./Feb. 2013

 

In fifty years, if not much sooner, half of the roughly 4,500 colleges and universities now operating in the United States will have ceased to exist. The technology driving this change is already at work, and nothing can stop it. The future looks like this: Access to college-level education will be free for everyone; the residential college campus will become largely obsolete; tens of thousands of professors will lose their jobs; the bachelor’s degree will become increasingly irrelevant; and ten years from now Harvard will enroll ten million students.

 

We’ve all heard plenty about the “college bubble” in recent years. Student loan debt is at an all-time high—an average of more than $23,000 per graduate by some counts—and tuition costs continue to rise at a rate far outpacing inflation, as they have for decades. Credential inflation is devaluing the college degree, making graduate degrees, and the greater debt required to pay for them, increasingly necessary for many people to maintain the standard of living they experienced growing up in their parents’ homes. Students are defaulting on their loans at an unprecedented rate, too, partly a function of an economy short on entry-level professional positions. Yet, as with all bubbles, there’s a persistent public belief in the value of something, and that faith in the college degree has kept demand high.

 

The figures are alarming, the anecdotes downright depressing. But the real story of the American higher-education bubble has little to do with individual students and their debts or employment problems. The most important part of the college bubble story—the one we will soon be hearing much more about—concerns the impending financial collapse of numerous private colleges and universities and the likely shrinkage of many public ones. And when that bubble bursts, it will end a system of higher education that, for all of its history, has been steeped in a culture of exclusivity. Then we’ll see the birth of something entirely new as we accept one central and unavoidable fact: The college classroom is about to go virtual.

 

(Snip)

[Valin]

The Next Big Thing From The Official Who Predicted Communism's Demise

Jerry Bowyer

1/3/13

 

Herbert E. Meyer served during the Reagan administration as special assistant to the director of Central Intelligence, and vice chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council. He is widely credited as having been the first senior official to predict the fall of the Soviet Union. He’s also, written a number of good books (including How to Analyze Information: A Step-by-Step Guide to Life’s Most Vital Skill, and The Cure for Poverty: It’s the Free Market: History’s Greatest Invention), plus he often speaks to groups of business executives.

 

Recently he took time out of his busy schedule to sit down across a Skype connection with me, at the hinge point between 2012 and 2013 to reflect on intelligence, forecasting, what he saw in the 1980s which others did not, and what he sees coming next, which might be even bigger than the fall of the Berlin Wall.

 

I suggest you set aside some time to listen to the whole discussion (more of a thinking session than an interview), but in case you don’t have time, I jotted down some notes hitting just a few of the highlights from the conversation. These are notes, not perfect transcriptions, so they sometimes paraphrase a bit. For the real unfiltered thing click on * this link.

 

(Snip)

 

* MP3 Download

[Valin]

WSJ: Check These Out at the Library: Blacksmithing, Bowling, Butchering

To Draw Crowds, Some Facilities Offer Much More Than Books; Expanding the Tool Selection

OWEN FLETCHER

1/7/13

 

(Snip)

Which raises the question: Have you checked out the library lately?

 

In an age where people use search engines instead of reference books and download novels on Kindles and iPads, some public libraries are taking extreme measures to stay relevant.

 

They are offering Zumba dance classes, seminars on landscaping and tips for holiday shopping. Besides hog-butchering, some have hosted demonstrations of blacksmithing and fly fishing. A library in Joliet, Ill., last summer held a "Star Wars Day" featuring games for kids, volunteers dressed as storm troopers and lemonade served at a mock-up of the famous Star Wars Cantina.

 

(Snip)

 

Attendance at public library programs rose 29% from 2004 to 2010, as overall visits to libraries also rose, according to the most recent survey by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

 

Some old-school types have mixed feelings about the push to diversify. "I hope the library doesn't turn into something that is a type of cooking-class meeting place with computers attached and no books," says Michael Gorman, former president of the American Library Association and university librarian emeritus at California State University, Fresno.

 

"If it appeals to youth and the youth are using the library…good luck to you," Mr. Gorman says, "though personally I would pay good money not to attend a standup comedy evening or a hog butchering."

 

(Snip)

 

_______________________________________________________

 

So the question is do we need publicly funded libraries?

[righteousmomma]

To me the question is

"Will libraries survive?"

[Valin]

To me the question is

"Will libraries survive?"

 

Libraries will, even libraries full of books, as long as there are those who love books. Public libraries probably will, they will not however be the same as what we grew up with.

[Valin]