Covering All Bets, Why American Politics Is Split Down The Middle

Many reasons are cited for the division in modern American politics. Reasons why almost every presidential election, where neither candidate was an incumbent, since Ronald Reagan has been won by a less than 8% difference in the popular vote. In fact however the divisiveness goes back much further with over 90% of the presidential elections, where neither candidate was an incumbent, since 1840 having been won by a 10% or less difference in the popular vote with the exception being during the Great Depression and when candidates had taken over due to an assassination.

The main reason for this even split is that the slate of candidates to be chosen FROM during any given election is not chosen BY the majority of the American electorate, not even BY a decent minority of say 10 to 10%. The choice of candidates presented to the American electorate is made by the very small number of wealthy individuals, corporations, and other organizations that contribute over 90% of all of the funds used by candidates and parties to run campaigns. This money is given with the intent of influencing a candidate's future behavior if they win office. And since these wealthy individuals, corporations, and other organizations are not in the business of gambling, they cover all bets by planning for all eventualities by giving funds and support to both sides in an election such that both sides are influenced in the same directions no matter what the candidates public discourse may indicate. Hence the American electorate is presented with candidates that represent a difference without distinction.

The choice then is between two substantively identical options which then really are not "options" and do not constitute a true "choice". A campaign finance overhaul must be implemented that changes the legal max contributions from political donors such that candidates are forced to get donations from a much larger number of individuals distributed across the population.

Stimulate Creativity in Yourself and Others

A few exercises and thoughts on being more creative:


1. Think of and write down as many uses as possible for an everyday object or define the function of something and then find other things that do or could perform a similar function.


2. Given a stack of similar shapes like squares or triangles, make as many things out of them as possible


3. Given an unfinished shape like an incomplete triangle or circle or stick house etc. complete the image.


4. Given three unrelated words try to discover a fourth that would connect all three.


5. Choose a random object word and connect it with a problem. Can this be used to solve or elaborate on the problem?


6. Six Thinking Hats - view a problem from different perspectives:

a. Managing - what is the subject? what are we thinking about? what is the goal?

b. Information - considering purely what information is available, what are the facts?

c. Emotions - intuitive or instinctive gut reactions or statements of emotional feeling (but not any justification)

d. Discernment - logic applied to identifying reasons to be cautious and conservative

e. Optimistic response - logic applied to identifying benefits, seeking harmony

f. Creativity - statements of provocation and investigation, seeing where a thought goes


7. Don't judge things right away, let them stew before making a conclusion


8. If you can't follow what makes you curious when it happens, take note of your own questions to be investigated later


9. Make mistakes and learn from failures, both yours and others, sound out crazy or absurd ideas


10. Make sure to define problems correctly, dissect the problem.


11. What can be modified, rearranged, and/or removed to fix something or find a solution?


12. Re-frame ideas within another context or situation.


13. Ask why something is done the way it’s done.


14. Challenge traditional views and constantly ask "What if" or "Why not"


15. Create new mindsets by being open to new experiences like new foods, tastes, music, arts, languages, crafts, fields of study, exercises, sports, locations.





Some material gathered from:

Todd Anderson, http://99u.com/articles/7160/test-your-creativity-5-classic-creative-challenges

Saga Briggs, From: http://www.opencolleges.edu.au/informed/features/divergent-thinking/#ixzz3HgRpFnKW

Edward de Bon and Wikipedia "Six Thinking Hats"

Science Channel - "Hack My Brain"

Software/Solutions, Fabrication or Assembly, What Are We Doing?

Is your company or organization fabricating solutions and/or software systems or are you simply assembling pieces and parts of pre-built components into some sort of "system" that performs some set of functions or capabilities? What constitutes true creation, development, or fabrication. One source defines fabrication as "Manufacturing process in which an item is made (fabricated) from raw or semi-finished materials instead of being assembled from ready-made components or parts."

Are the Tenets of Islam Undemocratic?

Are the tenets of Islam as expressed in the Quran and Sharia Law and as interpreted by the majority in majority Muslim nations inherently undemocratic? I mean if the tenets expressed for example in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights http://lnkd.in/dYJV5MF signed by most nations on earth and the similar US Declaration of Independence and the US Bill of Rights do represent moral tenets, a kind of political, social, and cultural morality then a religion, as a set of moral tenets could disagree but in any nation one must publicly, legally, politically take precedent.

To be clear, I am implying that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the US Declaration of Independence, the US Bill of Rights, and documents similar in meaning to them represent the defining characteristics of a democracy, in the absence of which or without public belief in a nation is NOT democratic.

The Next Frontier in Cyber-Warfare

With so many researchers and organizations working on AI or pseudo-AI, powerful analysis systems with vast resources and data, inevitably those systems may be directly or indirectly, intentionally or unintentionally, used against one another. Instead of Ray Kurzweil's all powerful AI technological singularity we may instead see a multiplicity of very powerful AI systems come to fruition.


What if these systems were taught to deceive other AI systems through manipulation of the data that the other system uses or depends on? What if one system hacked another? What if they cooperated? What if they fought? What if they just caused errors by accident in each other's analysis simply be acting in ways that subverted each other's data, assumptions, logic, etc? Or created feedback loops within each other systems such that they caused each others predictions or analysis or conclusions to be true or false when they would or would not have been otherwise merely through their unintentional interaction?


Maybe this is all science fiction but for how long? And what about AI counter-measures?

What will human beings do?

T

he last episode of "Parts Unknown" on CNN with Anthony Bourdain on Shanghai contained a discussion between Anthony Bourdain and Professor Zhou Lin, Economist and current Dean of the College of Economics and Management at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Professor Lin was educated in American universities and has taught at Yale, Duke, and Arizona State. During the discussion Professor Lin raises an interesting point at the end of the conversation.


He says "the difficulty, nowadays, is" ... that ... "the technology is so advanced ".. that ... "we don't really need that many people to do things that many people used to do," ... with the population being ... "7 billion people, the world probably doesn't need that many people working anymore... So the question is what should human beings do? You know, how can you let them not do anything and then still live a good life? I don't know. It's going to be a big issue" ... that the ... "whole world" ... will have to face"


Do we all become poets, artists, philosophers? Vegetate? Dream? If all of the worlds needs and wants can be fulfilled by a few because of technology then how does the rest of the population occupy itself? Or how does it access what the few has produced? If they must buy or trade for it, then how do they get something to trade or buy with? What then is the currency? Or is everything distributed based on some other system? What system?

Fallacies of Scale: Agile vs SAFe

The Agile development approach as described in the Agile Manifesto, has greatly improved the efficiency of software development in many small to medium sized projects around the world. By connecting development teams with product owners, customers, and gaining continuous feedback with continuously delivered functionality, the Agile approach has transformed software engineering and development.


On the other hand, the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) approach, in trying to apply the Agile method to enterprise scale, with teams of teams and scrums or scrums, and release trains etc. has only recreated the waterfall method with new names and designations. The crux of the Agile approach is lost with SAFe. There is no logical reason why Agile should work with large systems development but nevertheless it is being attempted in some cases just so an enterprise can claim to be agile. However, once the connection with the customer is broken and truly useful complete functionality to the end user is no longer what is being delivered, the approach will no longer reap the benefits of the Agile method.


Maybe instead of trying to scale up the Agile approach we should instead be looking at how to scale down large projects into sizes that will work with the Agile method and then leave the integration of these smaller systems to methodologies designed for such.

Fallacies of Scale: OO vs SO(A)

The introduction of Object Oriented design as a continuation of modular programming paradigms, has greatly improved the software development and design process. It has made it much easier and more possible to describe highly complex systems and processes by allowing us to model and work with associated domains and problems in software by abstracting functionality and data. This has decreased complexity, increased reliability, and through efficiency saved resources. Service Oriented design and architectural approaches are an extension of the principles of Object Oriented design to the architectural and systems spaces along with distributed computing principles. As such, Service Oriented design and architecture represents an attempt, whether conscious or not, to translate the success associated with Object Oriented design to a larger scale problem space; to the systems, the systems-of-systems, and/or the distributed systems domains. However, there is no logical reason why this translation should succeed in the transference of benefits from the one scale to the other and it has not done so. Furthermore, I argue that SO(A) has achieved the opposite effect as compared to OOD in that it has increased complexity, decreased reliability, and wasted vast amounts of resources. It may have made it easier for non-technical higher levels of management to think that they understand or can manage systems but this is with great inefficiencies and unnecessary expenditures of time and resources.

Subjective Well-Being and Online Social Networks

Fabio Sabatini at Sapienza University of Rome in Italy and Francesco Sarracino at STATEC in Luxembourg have published a very interesting study on the use of online social networks and people's subjective sense of general well-being.

An article in MIT Tech Review, discusses the results published here


I would be curious to see what the impact of online social networking may be on such things as elections, marriages, geographic trends, etc. based on statistically valid data and analysis.


Further still, how online social networks are or are not manipulated and how feedback loops might cause types of self-reinforcing and/or self-magnifying effects

In Plain Sight

The wine press existed for over 5000 years before it inspired the printing press.

What technologies are we staring at in plain sight that might inspire the next great invention that will dramatically alter civilization as we know it?

Change Isn't Everything

Our attention and focus are often caught by movement and change. But often what is not changing, what is constant, what is immovable, is what is more important. Think of this as looking at the negative of a picture on film. Take for example fractals.

What's interesting about fractals are the repeating patterns. Patterns that appear at infinite scale within the pattern itself. In other words the unchanging aspect is more important than the changing. Or imagine an event where a crowd is being watched for threats. A few individuals in the crowd seem to have NOT moved throughout the day. The rest of the crowd has ebbed and flowed during the same time. What if those individuals are THE threat? Maybe they were preposition to do some harm. If you were only paying attention to what was changing you might have missed the threat. That could be categorized as pattern recognition but maybe the only "patterns" being tracked were change patterns. Sometimes constants can reveal underlying fundamental structures and lead to extensible truths concerning common phenomena. Some hidden aspects that might lead to a breakthrough.