Archive for January, 2011

Edison’s Predictions for the Year 2011 (1911)

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What will the world be a hundred years hence?

None but a wizard dare raise the curtain and disclose the secrets of the future; and what wizard can do it with so sure a hand as Mr. Thomas Alva Edison, who has wrested so many secrets from jealous Nature? He alone of all men who live has the necessary courage and gift of foresight, and he has not shrunk from the venture.

Already, Mr. Edison tells us, the steam engine is emitting its last gasps. A century hence it will be as remote as antiquity as the lumbering coach of Tudor days, which took a week to travel from Yorkshire to London. In the year 2011 such railway trains as survive will be driven at incredible speed by electricity (which will also be the motive force of all the world’s machinery), generated by "hydraulic" wheels.

But the traveler of the future, says a writer in Answers, will largely scorn such earth crawling. He will fly through the air, swifter than any swallow, at a speed of two hundred miles an hour, in colossal machines, which will enable him to breakfast in London, transact business in Paris and eat his luncheon in Cheapside.

The house of the next century will be furnished from basement to attic with steel, at a sixth of the present cost — of steel so light that it will be as easy to move a sideboard as it is today to lift a drawing room chair. The baby of the twenty-first century will be rocked in a steel cradle; his father will sit in a steel chair at a steel dining table, and his mother’s boudoir will be sumptuously equipped with steel furnishings, converted by cunning varnishes to the semblance of rosewood, or mahogany, or any other wood her ladyship fancies.

Books of the coming century will all be printed leaves of nickel, so light to hold that the reader can enjoy a small library in a single volume. A book two inches thick will contain forty thousand pages, the equivalent of a hundred volumes; six inches in aggregate thickness, it would suffice for all the contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica. And each volume would weigh less than a pound.

Already Mr. Edison can produce a pound weight of these nickel leaves, more flexible than paper and ten times as durable, at a cost of five shillings. In a hundred years’ time the cost will probably be reduced to a tenth.

More amazing still, this American wizard sounds the death knell of gold as a precious metal. "Gold," he says, "has even now but a few years to live. The day is near when bars of it will be as common and as cheap as bars of iron or blocks of steel.

"We are already on the verge of discovering the secret of transmuting metals, which are all substantially the same in matter, though combined in different proportions."

Before long it will be an easy matter to convert a truck load of iron bars into as many bars of virgin gold.

In the magical days to come there is no reason why our great liners should not be of solid gold from stem to stern; why we should not ride in golden taxicabs, or substituted gold for steel in our drawing room suites. Only steel will be the more durable, and thus the cheaper in the long run.

.:paleofuture.com->

A Gentler and More Logical Economics

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Neoclassical economics is built on very strong assumptions that, over time, have become "established facts." Most famous among these are that all economic agents (consumers, companies, etc., are fully rational, and that the so-called invisible hand works to create market efficiency). To rational economists, these assumptions seem so basic, logical, and self-evident that they do not need any empirical scrutiny.

Building on these basic assumptions, rational economists make recommendations regarding the ideal way to design health insurance, retirement funds, and operating principles for financial institutions. This is, of course, the source of the basic belief in the wisdom of deregulation: if people always make the right decisions, and if the "invisible hand" and market forces always lead to efficiency, shouldn't we just let go of any regulations and allow the financial markets to operate at their full potential?

On the other hand, scientists in fields ranging from chemistry to physics to psychology are trained to be suspicious of "established facts." In these fields, assumptions and theories are tested empirically and repeatedly. In testing them, scientists have learned over and over that many ideas accepted as true can end up being wrong; this is the natural progression of science. Accordingly, nearly all scientists have a stronger belief in data than in their own theories. If empirical observation is incompatible with a model, the model must be trashed or amended, even if it is conceptually beautiful, logically appealing, or mathematically convenient.

.:danariely.com->

Apple now in the Spyware game?

"Essentially, Apple’s patent provides for a device to investigate a user’s identity [and] would allow Apple to record the voice of the device’s user, take a photo of the device’s user’s current location or even detect and record the heartbeat of the device’s user…." [Read all about it- here]

TED : Charles Limb

Musician and researcher Charles Limb wondered how the brain works during musical improvisation — so he put jazz musicians and rappers in an fMRI to find out. What he and his team found has deep implications for our understanding of creativity of all kinds.

Mathematics is too broad and deep a subject for student to progress far by "discovering" mathematics. AMathematical knowledge is largely cultural knowledge, obtained through the thought and work of individuals or groups of people working together on mathematical problems. AWhen a solution to a hard mathematical problem, or a new method for approaching a problem, is found, that knowledge is spread to other interested people by the written and spoken word. AIn other words, mathematics is spread from people with ideas to others who are interested.

Slow memory devices are used in persistent data storage technologies such as flash drives. They allow us to save information for extended periods of time, and are therefore called nonvolatile devices. Fast memory devices allow our computers to operate quickly, but aren't able to save data when the computers are turned off. The necessity for a constant source of power makes them volatile devices.

Yet all these examples involve success made out of the technological revolution, which has opened the door for many to become filthy rich, as the industrial revolution did for their predecessors. Outside of the Information Technology sector, however, examples are absent, save for Obama, who again is used to illustrate the power of transformation of technology in politics and activism.

What is Who Rules America?

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Who Rules America?, the book presents detailed original information on how power and politics operate in the United States. The first edition came out in 1967 and is ranked 12th on the list of 50 best sellers in sociology between 1950 and 1995. A second edition, Who Rules America Now?, arrived in 1983 and landed at #43 on the same list. Third and fourth editions followed in 1998 and 2002, and the fifth edition came out in 2006.

The sixth edition of WRA was published in 2010, and is available at Amazon.com (and other bookstores). This new edition has information on the rise of Barack Obama, his campaign finance supporters, and the nature of his administration. The last chapter focuses on the potential for serious challenges to class and corporate dominance. It does not have answers, but it raises the key questions and states the possibilities, noting that the strategies and tactics adopted by activists are an essential part of the power equation.

.:sociology.ucsc.edu->

In Norway, Start-ups Say Ja to Socialism

Wiggo Dalmo is a classic entrepreneurial type: the Working-Class Kid Made Good.

Dalmo, who is 39, with sandy blond hair and an easy smile, grew up in modest circumstances in a blue-collar town dominated by the steel industry. After graduating from high school, he apprenticed as an industrial mechanic and got a job repairing mining equipment.

He liked the challenge of the work but not the drudgery of working for someone else. "I never felt like there was a place for me as an employee," Dalmo explains as we drive past spent chemical drums and enormous mounds of scrap metal on the road that leads to his office. When he needed an inexpensive part to complete a repair, company rules required Dalmo to fill out a purchase order and wait days for approval, when he knew he could simply walk into a hardware store and buy one. He resented this on a practical levelaand as an insult to his intelligence. "I wanted more responsibility at my job, more control," he says. "I wanted freedom."

In 1998, Dalmo quit his job, bought a used pickup truck, and started calling on clients as an independent contractor. By year’s end, he had six employees, all mechanics, and he was making more money than he ever had. Within three years, his new company, Momek, was booking more than $1 million a year in revenue and quickly expanding into new lines of business. He built a machine shop and began manufacturing parts for oil rigs, and he started bidding on and winning contracts to staff oil drilling sites and mines throughout the country. He kept hiring, kept bidding, and when he looked around a decade later, he had a $44 million company with 150 employees.

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