Soup.GroundPlane.org

“ "Democracy is the Rule of the Unwise over the Wise"

Strauss again: "It would be absurd to hamper the free flow of wisdom by any regulations; hence the rule of the wise must be absolute rule. It would be equally absurd to hamper the free flow of wisdom by consideration of the unwise wishes of the unwise; hence the wise rulers ought not to be responsible to the unwise subjects." Strauss interprets Plato to mean that ". . . true democracy is an act against nature and must be prevented at all costs." ”

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"I don't have a problem with the existence of the right, but the right has a problem with my existence."

-- Steve Earle, quoted in Editor and Publisher

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“ As is the inner, so is the outer; as is the great, so is the small; as it is above, so it is below; there is but One Life and Law; and He, that is worth it, is One. Nothing is inner, nothing is outer; nothing is great, nothing is small; nothing is high, nothing is low; in the Divine Economy. ”

“ Descartes, writing to Picot, who translated the Principia Philosophiae into French, observed: "Thus the whole of philosophy is like a tree: the roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches that issue from the trunk are all the other sciences . . ." ”

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"The greatest enemy of truth is very often not the lie - deliberate, contrived, and dishonest - but the myth - persistent, pervasive, and unrealistic."

- John F. Kennedy

"None of us is as smart as all of us."

- Japanese proverb

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This is the best that professionals can come up with? Really lame! --bdt

Why is Information Valuable to us?

We all recognise that information is valuable – if you’ve ever paid for a newspaper or magazine, you have demonstrated this. But why – specifically – is information valuable, and why is one piece of information more valuable than another?

There are three ways information can be valuable to us….

1. It entertains us
2. It helps us make better decisions
3. It helps someone else make better decisions, and we can exchange this information for something else

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Garry Tan and Sachin Agarwal excitedly told me about their master plan in the summer of 2008. They were going to build a new blogging service where users would send posts by email instead of by using a web interface. It was to be called Posterous, and I don’t think they had written single a line of code at that point. I laughed at them. “Another blogging service? Don’t we have enough of those,” I asked. “And by email? That’s just a feature any other service can add. You’re crazy.”

Tan and Agarwal hunkered down in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in Cambridge, MA and wrote thousands of lines of code. They launched Posterous on June 28th, 2008. Within weeks, thousands of people were actively using the service. It has now been about two years since they launched, and Posterous is visited by millions of people every month. I use it almost every day. You’re reading this on a Posterous blog.

Posterous took an idea and executed it extremely well. They launched early, with the minimum viable number of features, and then tested their theory that email was a better interface for posting — and of course it is, because everyone has an email account. Then they rapidly iterated. They added features one-by-one until finding themselves with a complete product that really is the dead simple way to post anything anywhere. They found a missing market in the blogging industry.

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“ Why Media Sift? Web search, website evaluation, issues of privacy, authorship and identity are known as 21st Century skills, necessary for today’s students and difficult for teachers to teach. Either teachers do not have the skills or dont have tools to teach students in an engaging way. Students often complain that they already have these abilities, in which case Media Sift is a way for them to demonstrate that knowledge and put it into practice. In addition to learning web skills, students also come in contact with a full range of topics, with the best work regarding those topics easily accessible. ”

“ I'm not sure it's in the best interest of this country to be spending hours, days, weeks, and months discussing some of the most controversial issues in this country as to whether they should be part of our constitution. Regardless of whether it is a red state or a blue state ... this is not how legislatures in the 50 states should be debating very controversial issues. ”

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“ . . . in promoting the good of this whole aggregate, the good of individuals is contained and promoted.”

"Treatise of the Laws of Nature"
Richard Cumberland
Philosopher and Bishop of Peterborough
1691–1718

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[I]f you listen to mainstream media, our education system, politicians, and even college textbooks, everything else is the “asset” and human knowledge is treated like some expendable line item that is unworthy of economic development – or equality for that mattter.

Knowledge is invisible because there is no inventory. Why are we unable to see things like this? This is the most stunning cognitive deficit imaginable for the World’s most developed country. Why is this such an impossible philosophical chasm that we cannot seem to cross with our modern accounting system?

Now, what would happen if we did?  Perhaps we would find find a cognitive surplus.

Social Surplus vs. Demand

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"...New social networking technologies can be used to solve down-to-earth human needs, by enlisting millions of [citizens] in service to the country."

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In 1931, Alfred R Lindesmith developed [it as] a methodology to refute existing hypotheses

Harold Lasswell formulated the core questions of content analysis: "Who says what, to whom, why, to what extent and with what effect?." Ole Holsti (1969) offers a broad definition of content analysis as "any technique for making inferences by objectively and systematically identifying specified characteristics of messages." Kimberly A. Neuendorf (2002, p. 10) offers a six-part definition of content analysis:

"Content analysis is a summarizing, quantitative analysis of messages that relies on the scientific method (including attention to objectivity, intersubjectivity, a priori design, reliability, validity, generalizability, replicability, and hypothesis testing) and is not limited as to the types of variables that may be measured or the context in which the messages are created or presented."

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"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."

Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850), French economist

 

"The single most important quality needed to resist evil is moral autonomy. Moral autonomy is possible only through reflection, self-determination and the courage not to cooperate."

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) German philosopher

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“ Bohm Dialogue (also known as Bohmian Dialogue) is a freely-flowing group conversation that makes an attempt, utilizing a theoretical understanding of the way thoughts relate to universal reality, to more effectively investigate the crises that face society, and indeed the whole of human nature and consciousness.

see also ""Dialogue - A proposal" By David Bohm, Donald Factor and Peter Garrett

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File under "Doing the Obvious"

"In June, 2009, San Francisco CIO Chris Vein launched an application that allows citizens to access the City’s 311 Call Center through Twitter. Instead of making a phone call, members of the public can send a tweet to alert the city about a pothole, or to find out about the City’s green initiatives. This led to the Open311 API, which provides access to government data by third-party applications.  Entrepreneurs have already built some useful apps with this, such as CitySourced, MyCityWay, SeeClickFix and TweetMy311. Buoyed by this success, the city is going one step further – to open up all non-private data. The City’s director of innovation, Jay Nath, is building DataSF.org – what he calls “the city’s one stop web site for government data”." ”