Fulcra
By RYAN J. A. MURPHY”[John F. Kennedy’s] challenge disturbed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s original plan for a stepped, multi-generational strategy: Wernher von Braun, NASA’s chief of rocketry, had thought the agency would first send men into Earth’s orbit, then build a space station, then fly to the moon, then build a lunar colony. A century hence, perhaps, humans would travel to Mars. Kennedy’s goal was also absurdly ambitious. A few weeks before his speech, NASA had strapped an astronaut into a tiny capsule atop a converted military rocket and shot him into space on a ballistic trajectory, as if he were a circus clown; but no American had orbited the planet. The agency didn’t really know if what the president asked could be done in the time he allowed, but it accepted the call.”
This required the greatest peacetime mobilization in the nation’s history.
â Jason Pontin.The (further) verification that spooky physics has important implications for cryptography.
A profound change is sweeping across the entrepreneurial landscape. In the quest to improve lives or preserve the earth’s natural resources, today’s top minds are not only coming up with game-changing products and services. They are also reinventing systems and harnessing diverse tools — from cross-sector partnerships to capital markets — to meet their goals. Many of these innovative thinkers are young, coming of age in the aftermath of Sept. 11, amid the destruction of two protracted wars and the economic uncertainties ushered in by the Great Recession. They are digital experts, who, thanks to social media, smartphones and access to limitless information, have grown up with a sense of global community that transcends geographic boundaries. And they seem to have social consciousness embedded in their DNA. They are united in wanting to do more than acquire material riches. They measure success by their ability to transform the lives of others. Their question is not ‘’What do I want to be when I grow up?‘’ but ‘’How will the world be different because I lived in it?‘’
As a result, financial success and social impact are becoming ever more linked, with the lines blurring between the business and nonprofit sectors. Twenty years ago, businesses, nonprofits and government made up three distinct parts of society, with their own responsibilities, goals and strategies. In the 1990s, the conversation started to move from how to create the right organizations and programs to which approaches could — with different sectors working together — help solve some of the world’s most profound social problems. In the past couple of decades, there’s been a remarkable acceleration in the overlap between these different sectors.
What is unfolding is a blending of the goals and business models for traditional for-profit enterprises and nonprofit organizations. In the process, nonprofits with empathy-based, revenue-generating models have emerged at the same time as C.E.O.s and entrepreneurs who want to build companies that generate social value through their products and services.
—From Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen’s New York Times article on new social entrepreneurs.
The article oddly lumps AirBnB and Palantir in with three other more definitively social enterprises, and not all of the founders profiled are as young as the initial first few paragraphs make them seem. Still, it’s an inspiring group of people to read about.
James Greyson on “precycling”. An interesting concept — how have the products we use been prepared to be wasted? It strikes me that most products are designed with their use in mind, but rarely is the entire product lifecycle part of the design discussion.
The data mindset is good for some questions, but completely inadequate for others. But try arguing that with someone who insists on seeing the numbers.
The promise is that enough data will give you insight. Retain data indefinitely, maybe waterboard it a little, and it will spill all its secrets.
There’s a little bit of a con going on here. On the data side, they tell you to collect all the data you can, because they have magic algorithms to help you make sense of it.
On the algorithms side, where I live, they tell us not to worry too much about our models, because they have magical data. We can train on it without caring how the process works.
The data collectors put their faith in the algorithms, and the programmers put their faith in the data.
At no point in this process is there any understanding, or wisdom. There’s not even domain knowledge. Data science is the universal answer, no matter the question.
— From Maciej Cegłowski’s talk at the Strata+Hadoop 2015 conference in NYC.In a world where everything is tracked and kept forever, like the world we’re for some reason building, you become hostage to the worst thing you’ve ever done.
Whoever controls that data has power over you, whether or not they exercise it. And yet we treat this data with the utmost carelessness, as if it held no power at all.
Eric Schmidt of Google suggests that one way to solve the problem is to never do anything that you don’t want made public. But sometimes there’s no way to know ahead of time what is going to be bad.
In the forties, the Soviet Union was our ally. We were fighting Hitler together! It was fashionable in Hollywood to hang out with Communists and progressives and other lefty types.
Ten years later, any hint of Communist ties could put you on a blacklist and end your career. Some people went to jail for it. Imagine if we had had Instagram back then.
— From Maciej Cegłowski’s talk at the Strata+Hadoop 2015 conference in NYC.A more recent and less fictitious example is electronic logging devices on trucks. These are intended to limit the hours people drive, but what do you do if you’re caught ten miles from a motel?
The device logs only once a minute, so if you accelerate to 45 mph, and then make sure to slow down under the 10 mph threshold right at the minute mark, you can go as far as you want.
So we have these tired truckers staring at their phones, bunny-hopping down the freeway late at night.
Of course there’s an obvious technical countermeasure. You can start measuring once a second.
Notice what you’re doing, though. Now you’re in an adversarial arms race with another human being that has nothing to do with measurement. It’s become an issue of control, agency and power.
You thought observing the driver’s behavior would get you closer to reality, but instead you’ve put another layer between you and what’s really going on.
These kinds of arms races are a symptom of data disease. We’ve seen them reach the point of absurdity in the online advertising industry, which unfortunately is also the economic cornerstone of the web. Advertisers have built a huge surveillance apparatus in the dream of perfect knowledge, only to find themselves in a hall of mirrors, where they can’t tell who is real and who is fake.
—“Data disease”. What a term.
From Maciej Cegłowski’s talk at the Strata+Hadoop 2015 conference in NYC.
Ryan J. A. Murphy
ryan@fulcra.design
ryanjamurphy
Canada
Memorial University of Newfoundland
fulcra.designHelping changemakers change their worlds through systemic design and with innovation, leadership, and changemaking education.