KnowledgeContext

Maya Blue

2008-12-31T22:56:00.000-08:00

The chapter “What is Technology?” in my book Technology Challenged forced me to deal with the definition of technology as “applied science.” I wrote that, even though some dictionaries use it, I find that definition poor. Here’s a colorful example of just how poor.

Buried deep in the darkness of an abandoned well is indigo. In Mexico’s Yucatan, this blue pigment was painted on both humans and pottery, which were sacrificed to the gods and cast down the well. The same pigment made the sky of ancient murals as enduring as the sky above, even as other colors faded. It is called "Maya Blue."

Mayans must have been both lucky and keen observers to devise a mixture with a property that reveals itself ever so slowly. Today, we have the technology to view the nanometer scale—measured in billionths of a meter—that underlies their accomplishment. And we have developed a scientific understanding of it.

What ancient Mayans knew: set incense aflame to cook the flowering plant Añil with clay to create a blue that lasts.

What modern scientists know: heat can embed aniline, a bright indigo chemical from the plant Indigofera suffruticosa, into the natural clay palygorskite, which provides a protective lattice. This hybrid of “plant for color” and “mineral for structure” is the magic of a coloration that pays little attention to time or weather.

Science is wonderful. It predicts much and, after the fact, can explain more. Technology can come from application of science, but it has, at times, preceded scientific explanation by centuries. Even today, with the pace of both technology and science so rapid, technology can precede science. High-temperature superconductors are one area I’m aware that exhibits this order. Click on the comment link below to add those you know about.

Walk This Way

2008-03-31T17:00:00.000-07:00

Pedestrians do not run across streets in Shanghai. Cars and scooters do not stop for pedestrians in Shanghai. And yet, I saw no one hit and no car swerve. I heard no brakes squeal.

A photograph might fool you into believing the rules there are the same as in California. Red, yellow, and green lights for cars appear as they do here. Red and green silhouettes of pedestrians shine on crosswalks as they do here. But switch to video and you quickly note that cars and scooters ignore pedestrian lights and pedestrians. Right turns are at full speed even though a green silhouette encourages pedestrians to cross straight with the prevailing traffic.

Not understanding the rules that kept locals alive, I walked close behind them, moving when they moved and stopping when they stopped. All that worried me were my compatriots, four of whom followed in tight dyads of conversation. I would not have talked to anyone while crossing six lanes of Shanghai. My head swiveled left and right like a radar antenna, ever wary of cars that might slip in behind our local escort.

Years of experience lets these conscious acts sink slowly away. We cross streets and navigate our home territory with little more thought than breathing or blinking. Foreign travel is a gift that reawakens us to the automatic in our lives…and reminds me of the techniques underlying our everyday acts.

I experienced all this during 9 days in China. The rules are different there. Our buses never hit anyone, were never hit, and rarely had to use their brakes. They threaded through the smallest spaces. They backed into and out of spots big enough for my Honda Civic. They never showed anger, exasperation, or—as far as I could tell—fatigue. They were masters at their craft.

The order within the chaos was hardly clear. Drivers in the China we saw broke all manner of western rules by cutting people off, stopping in odd places, and even backing up on a highway. The absence of accidents suggested that Chinese drivers were not getting by on luck alone. I’ve seen plenty of accidents in California, where we follow our rules…mostly. The absence of accidents revealed the invisible technology of rules behind the visible of cars, buses, lights, and crosswalks.

Bicycles had been more common than cars until recently. Outside of Beijing, Shanghai, Suzhou, and Hangzhou, where I visited, they may still be. I read that the car’s recent popularity has not changed behavior: people drive as if cycling, weaving through pedestrians and squeezing into tight spots. Maybe that helps to explain what we saw. At low speed, bicyclists can jostle without damage and learn to avoid even jostling by judging who is half a second closer to a coveted opening in traffic. Chaos means we do not understand the order.

Below is video I took from our tour bus in Beijing. Narration is courtesy of our guide Alice.

The Medicated Child

2008-02-18T23:11:00.000-08:00

I just watched a PBS Frontline investigation called The Medicated Child. Why do we use technology? In this case, for health.

Mental conditions once diagnosed only rarely in children are now identified in millions of US children. And we have technology--drugs--to treat them. Few systems are as complex as our bodies and few experiments are less controlled than medicating mental conditions.

One doctor was filmed prescribing drugs for children just a few years old. Interviewed afterward, he described the process as an experiment because there was insufficient data about what worked. After the newsmagazine 60 Minutes reported on a four-year-old dying from the drug their son was using, the family returned to the doctor to ask for alternatives to drugs. The doctor explained that 99% of addressing the boy's condition is with drugs and that alternatives, like therapy, can't work when the child can't control his impulses. I was impressed with his 99% confidence level, given that he's simply experimenting on this child, increasing dosage levels and introducing new drugs. The doctor was not asked, nor did he volunteer, how he predicts or accounts for synergistic effects of five or more simultaneous drugs.

Frontline noted that over time far more children have been diagnosed with mental conditions that require treatment (e.g. bipolar disorder increased 4000% in 10 years). On their website (not in the video), they suggest this is because diagnostics have simply improved. Supposedly, children have suffered from these conditions for centuries or millennia. On their website, they do add that

...some [experts] even speculate that environmental factors are playing a role in triggering childhood bipolar.

Since our fantastically intricate bodies are built from what we ingest and absorb from our environment, I would be surprised if our environment did not have a large influence. And yet, nobody commented on the food the children ate. One little girl bicycled to a convenience store and bought ice cream sandwiches. A four-year-old boy was fed corndogs, Goldfish crackers, a cookie, and Gatorade for lunch. Perhaps the antipsychotic drug (sounded like Rispordal) he was taking for bipolar disorder provided him all the nutrients he was missing from fresh fruit and vegetables, as well as whole grains. I find it hard not to be sarcastic, even though I know that seldom translates well in a blog.

The worried parents did not appear to consider diet, nor did the doctors ask. I'm sure there are plenty of other children eating junk food who do not present ADHD or bipolar. But if I were a parent, desperate to help my child, the first, safest, quickest, and cheapest step would be to provide a nutritious diet.

If I fueled and oiled my car with junk gasoline and junk oil, bearing little resemblance to good gasoline and good oil, I would not expect my car to run well, if at all. And I would not go to my mechanic seeking an expensive and experimental treatment so that I could continue to misfeed my car.

Let me pause to emphasize that this blog contains the technological literacy musings of KnowledgeContext's Executive Director Miguel F. Aznar, who is not a medical doctor. The blog does not necessarily represent the position of the nonprofit corporation KnowlegeContext or its supporters.

Disclaimer made, it appears to me that if we better understood our technology, and perhaps drew some parallels to our own bodies, we would take a very different approach to using pharmaceutical technology on our children. Or on ourselves. Click on the comments link just below to post yours.

Waste = Food

2008-02-10T22:48:00.000-08:00

Waste equals food is one of the most striking (and memorable) principles that Bill McDonough presented at NASA Ames (Mountain View, California) February 5, 2008. His talk updated his book Cradle to Cradle and documentary The Next Industrial Revolution. (If NASA makes video of his inspiring and entertaining talk available online, I will link to it from here, so check back)

What does it mean? Life evolves to make use of waste. A cherry tree drops cherries, blossoms, and sometimes branches. These feed animals, fungi, and bacteria, which produce waste consumed by others. It fits in a cycle without vast stockpiles of material spreading unused and inedible.

Human systems produce many waste materials that do not serve as food for us or any life. Eventually, bacteria may evolve to eat plastics, but not until long after we bury ourselves in it. If such bacteria evolved soon, technological civilization would face disaster as our computers, vehicles, buildings, and much else were digested before our eyes. Resigned to throwing things away ("Where is away?" McDonough asked), environmental aims have been to waste less, to be less bad, rather than eliminate the concept of waste.

McDonough suggests that aspiring to be “less bad” is, well, bad on many levels. It doesn’t solve the critical problems we’re creating because it’s still going in the wrong direction, just slower. Also, it does not inspire. Wasting less is a negative approach that tries to restrict businesses from growing.

On the other hand, doing good solves the environmental problems we face and actually feeds of the growth of business. Doing good by eliminating the concept of waste could be done by designing our products so that at the end of their useful life, they could be separated into organic and technical nutrients. Organic nutrients, like paper, can be broken down by organic (often bacterial) systems. Think compost piles that enrich soil to grow more organic nutrients. Technical nutrients, like metals and plastics, can be recycled into new products.

A wonderfully familiar illustration of how we currently fail to design for organic and technical recycling can be seen in The Story of Stuff: single-serving juice boxes. Layers of cardboard (organic), metal foil (technical), and plastic (technical) are not designed to be separated easily and cheaply. So where do you toss that empty box with the straw poking out the top? Paper recycling? Aluminum recycling? Plastic and glass recycling? No, no, and no. You send it to a landfill or incinerator (which spreads toxins into our air before sending toxic ash to landfills). In either case, we’ve harvested materials we need for our products and put them out of reach for reuse. Cradle to grave instead of cradle to cradle. And, so, we go off hunting for virgin materials. That can’t last.

A subtlety of reuse that McDonough pointed out is that product design must consider how it mixes similar materials. If several kinds of plastic are blended, that may make the plastic recyclable into only a cruder product, like a picnic table. He calls this downcycling because technical nutrients start in a refined state for one product and are then downcycled into a product with less demanding materials requirements. If that product's materials are also carelessly blended, it may downcycle into a product even more promiscuous, but then it's off to the landfill for sure. If product designers are concerned only with cheaply getting a product into consumer hands, then there's no motivation to make materials separable. However, if there is no "away" to throw the product and, instead, we want to reuse the technical nutrients, then design considers this. The book and documentary give examples of how this can work.

This connects to technological literacy and ICE-9 in any number of ways. How does technology work? It can be designed for separation of organic and technical nutrients for complete reuse. Where does technology come from? Biological inspiration, where waste equals food. What are technology’s costs and benefits? The pattern from Technology Challenged that the progress leads to obsolescence takes on a different light if obsolete technology could be completely recycled. What do you think?

Has Technology Made Us So Clean That We’re Sick?

2008-02-07T19:17:00.000-08:00

In Technology Challenged I wrote about the impact of water supply, sanitation, and hygiene technology. The chapter on how technology has changed us described how this technology has improved human health and lifespan dramatically. The World Health Organization estimates its absence was responsible for 88% of the 1,800,000 deaths from diarrhoeal disease in 2004.

Sure, water supply, sanitation, and hygiene technology have benefits, but anyone who’s read Technology Challenged will note that technology almost invariably has both, too. So, what are the costs of these technologies?

A study comparing incidence of asthma and allergies in the former East and West Germanys, found children much less affected in East, where health care was poorer and pollution greater. Other studies have also suggested this correlation, now called the hygiene hypothesis, which suggests that a cleaner environment—treated water, hand-washing, vacuum cleaners, indoor floors not made of dirt—could lead to asthma, allergies, and autoimmune diseases. How might that work?

In Riddled with Life, Marlene Zuk describes our relationship with parasites, including those that rely on water to move from host to host. She offers a mechanism for causality behind the hygiene hypothesis:

Exactly what is it about early stimulation by bacteria, viruses, or other parasites that keeps the immune system calm in the face of harmless entities like pollen or ones own intestinal cells? Obviously the analogy of immune system cells being like bored unemployed workers that make mischief on the rest of the body is just that, an analogy, and even the most anthropomorphic among us stops short of assigning personality traits to bone-marrow products. The more accurate answer seems to lie in a characteristic of the immune system. Part of our response to foreign invaders of the body is mediated by a kind of white blood cell called a T cell. The T cells come in a variety of types, including killer T Cells and helper T cells. The helper T cells in turn are also divided into two types, called Th-1 and Th-2. The Th-1 and Th-2 responses are responsible for protection against different things, with the former concerned with bacterial and viral diseases and the latter with infections by worms and other large parasites. Each type of helper T cell produces a different set of chemical messengers used to regulate inflammatory response like tissue swelling and the production of mucus. These chemicals interact with each other and keep the entire system in balance.
In countries with scrupulous hygiene, where children are vaccinated and antibiotics are widely administered, the low level of Th-1 stimulation results in an increase in the Th-2 response. These Th-2 responses trigger an exaggerated mucus production and contraction of muscles in the airways, which can in turn cause allergic diseases and asthma. In countries where bacteria, worms, and other pathogens are abundant but vaccination and antibiotic levels are low, the Th-2 responses are activated, but they are regulated by repeated cycles of infection and inflammation, with the inflammation countered by natural antiallergic reactions. Thus they rarely escalate out of control as much as Th-2 responses in people from the industrialized areas. The immune systems of people from less developed countries still respond physiologically to allergens like pollen or house dust mites, but the people do not go on to develop a disease. It is as if the Th-2 arm learns to recognize an innocuous but foreign substance for what it is, and has a blasé “been there done that” reaction to it, rather than spiraling into a panicky cycle of swollen tissue and dripping glands. [pp. 46-47]

Where technology introduces a problem, there’s often a new technology invented to correct it (and then a newer technology to correct its problems). In this case, we have a story that will be hard to forget. A treatment for Crohn’s Disease, which may be an autoimmune reaction more common among those free of parasitic worms, is parasitic worms.

So that the cure not be worse than the disease, patients were given tiny “pig whipworm” eggs, thousands of them mixed with Gatorade. Evolved to thrive in pigs’ colons, not the foreign and hostile human colon favored by a different species of whipworm, these reluctant pioneer worms could do little more than hatch, provoke a Th-2 response that regulated the patient’s Th-1 activity, and then die and pass out of the patient’s colon. In early tests (not double-blind with control groups), patients showed remission or improvement. More important, worms caused none of the hair loss / swelling / nausea side effects of the drugs used to treat Crohn’s Disease. Presumably the worms suffered no hair loss either.

Much more common than Crohn's Disease are stomach ulcers. The Nobel Prize in medicine went to the doctors that identified the bacterium Helicobacter pylori as responsible. Stress might exacerbate stomach ulcers, but the bacterium were the cause, allowing us to take antibiotics, kill the H pylori, and return to our stressful lifestyles. Not so fast! A 2007 study showed that H pylori helps to protect us against asthma and may play an important role in the development of the human immune system, preventing immune hyperreactivity. H pylori may be joining the legion of life that technology enables us to render extinct:

The key point, says Dr Blaser, is that H pylori colonization is the default human state of affairs, but it's a default position we're fast drifting away from. "About 10% of the US population now has detectable H pylori colonization. I was just in Sweden and Germany, where I'm told the figure is less than 5%. The proportion in the developing world is over 50%, and just a few generations ago the levels in our own societies were 70, 80, even 90%. So H pylori is disappearing really fast, and this disappearance is almost certainly mirrored in other microorganisms we can't detect as easily."

I am appreciating how multifaceted the costs and benefits of technology can be. Our bodies are complex systems that can react long after an exposure…or only to combinations of exposures. The same is true for the ecosystems in which we live, making it challenging to link cause and effect. Helping us evaluate our technologies is an important challenge to our investigative and modeling technologies.

I will blog more on this later, as I have been reading books on chemicals and disease. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am still seeking those who, like me, find this subject perfect for cocktail party conversation and pleasure reading.

Evaluating Toiletry Technology

2008-02-01T15:39:00.000-08:00

I am shopping for an electric razor. Years ago—maybe 20—my father gave me one for Christmas and last month a small piece shielding the blades broke off. Looking for its replacement, I’ve discovered the popularity of rechargeable shavers…for manufacturers, who want customers returning more often than every few decades. Nearly everywhere I shave, I find a power outlet, so a rechargeable would bring me only the extra weight of batteries and their limited life. While batteries wear out with every recharge, my shaver’s power cord shows no signs of fatigue.

Evaluating shavers economically or ecologically turns me away from rechargeable. I suspect that shoppers are lured by marketing that promotes rechargeable as somehow better or they are simply frustrated that fewer corded shavers are available.

What could be worse economically or ecologically than rechargeable? Not empty-able. I found a low (initial) price on the Remington CleanXchange Razor (pictured), but when it fills with hair stubble, you can’t simply empty it into your sink. Advertising presents this as a feature, not a bug:

Convenience: Messy cleanup is a thing of the past. When the cartridge gets full, simply eject the shaving head and replace with a brand new one.
Performance: Each time you replace a shaving cartridge, it is like getting a brand new shaver. This means you never have to worry about worn-out blades again!

It is not like “getting a brand new shaver” because the rechargeable batteries are not replaced. What quality of steel dulls from cutting no more stubble than fills the shaving head? The blades in my old shaver are cutting fine after mowing decades of stubble...which decomposes unless encased in countless tiny metallic shaver heads. Remington facilitates your packing small and rather mundane time capsules for your great-great-grandchildren.

This pitch to save me “messy cleanup” and “worry about worn-out blades” in exchange for higher monetary and ecological cost reminded me of when saline manufacturers invented the “no rub” feature. Saving me the effort and calories of rubbing my contact lenses between thumb and forefinger, I could simply squirt saline at the lens for five seconds (about the time it takes to rub). I doubt that spraying works as well as rubbing, but I’m sure it uses far more saline, costing me more and sending more plastic bottles to the landfill. In the US, the last thing we need to save is calories.

These technologies would not exist if someone did not evaluate them as good. I am interested in your comments on this (post below). Do you use an electric shaver while backpacking or in developing countries without power outlets? Have you seen the documentary The Story of Stuff? It streams from their website, where one can also buy the DVD. Please share your stories of stuff and how you evaluate it.

Nanotechnology Literacy

2007-11-06T21:55:00.001-08:00

Foresight Nanotech Institute's 2007 Unconference included sessions to brainstorm nanotechnology literacy. I facilitated a diverse group in discussing what patterns in nanotechnology everyone should understand.

I described the approach I take to teaching nanotechnology to precocious high school students at UC Santa Cruz's COSMOS program every summer. It's similar to the approach that KnowledgeContext uses to teach middle school students how to understand and evaluate technology, using the ICE-9 questions (shown above).

The conference group agreed to use the ICE-9 questions to organize our ideas. We also agreed to an audience at about the 8th grade (12 or 13 years old) for two reasons: (1) To reach adults, we probably have to emulate newspapers in writing for an 8th grade level (or below) and (2) To reach anyone, we would have to rely on some established organization and the school system (domestically and globally) is a proven mechanism for getting information to a broad populace.

Here is what we noted on our flipcharts (click on the image for a 3+ MB PDF):

Both brainstorming sessions sped by and we could have used much more time to discuss what issues are most important to know about. I felt as if I were cutting off fruitful lines of discussion, but wanted to make sure that everyone had the chance to voice their suggestions (a priority in a brainstorming session). Since many issues are complex, even philosophical, (e.g. how much should a person, like a typist, know about the technology they're using?) we could have benefited from several more hours. If we had that much time, we could have breakout groups to work through issues whose details do not interest the whole group, but whose summary would.

Even more time would be valuable for distilling conclusions down to what patterns we could teach as answers to the ICE-9 questions. Once we accomplished that, we'd want time for "implementation," which would be devising classroom activities to illustrate those patterns. How can we make participation in the activity convey a visceral sense of the answer we're trying to convey. This is important because much of what the teacher says will be missed or soon forgotten by students. Their memory for a physical, social interaction will be much longer and much more likely to be applied in the future. Please post comments that include suggestions for nanotechnological answers to the ICE-9 questions, ways to teach them, how to make this an appealing program for schools and districts to adopt, and anything else related.

The "Disruptive vs. Transformative" graph shown on chart "5 How Change?" came from another session led by Phil Bowmaster. PJ attended both sessions and drew this at ours:

What If the iPod Nano Really Were Nano

2007-09-13T15:55:00.000-07:00

What if Apple's MP3 player dubbed "Nano" really had dimensions on the scale of nanometers (billionths of a meter)? That question, coming to me on my bicycle ride to class, made for the best day of teaching I have yet to experience. The students in my nanotechnology class had so much to say that I shelved my planned lecture, giving almost two hours to the wide-ranging discussion. Although my students had not yet seen ICE-9, their points followed its form. Here is some of what came up...

You could not hold it, so it would to be implanted.
What kind of interface would it have? You could not push buttons or see a screen on something smaller than the wavelength of visible light.
How many songs could you store? What's the fewest number of atoms you need to store information?
How would you power it? You couldn't put batteries in it, but maybe it could parasitize energy...mechanical motion or temperature differentials.
How would you transfer information into it? Cables would not work. How about Bluetooth or another wireless system?
Infrastructure would have to all change. Accessories like earbuds would have to change.
What if it breaks? If it's implanted, it could cause nerve damage. You'd need an emergency eject function.
Why should it last forever? It should be flushed from the body periodically, just in case it breaks. Then you can buy another. Apple would love that. You'd buy a subscription and get a new, disposable iPod Nano every year. Or every month, like contact lenses.
You could use contact lenses with a heads-up display instead of a screen. Your song list would appear to float in front of whatever you're looking at.
To listen, you could use a tooth implant. Can't you hear vibrations through your teeth?
The book Digital Fortress by Dan Brown has a character controlling something by tapping a finger. You could use that with the contact lens display to start, stop, select songs, change volume, etc.
It would have to learn your finger tapping. There'd have to be an easy way to say, "No, mistake, undo." Then it would compare that mistaken finger tap with all the previous ones for that function that you accepted. It could figure out, over time, how to get it right every time.
Apple's Newton PDA tried to learn handwriting that way.
You could use thought control instead of finger tapping. What about distraction? Would you have to discipline your thoughts?
Listen with wireless earbuds. Or with a direct nerve connection.
If you do not upgrade to the next version, it could disintegrate. That's like what we said about a periodic emergency eject.
Would the manufacturer give you subliminal messages?
In the book Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, a character with an implanted heads-up display, not on removable contact lenses, get a computer virus or something in it. He sees a vacuum cleaner commercial in the Hindi language 24 hours a day, even when he tries to sleep. He committed suicide.
The iPod Nano should not do that.
Would your immune system react to an implant?
What are the ethics of implanting? Would this make you a cyborg? Would it distract you in the classroom? Continuous partial attention, like using your laptop during lecture. Could it give you an unfair advantage in a test?
Education is just information retrieval, so this implant could replace education [Note: this was the opinion of only one student!].
Schools have value. You can't learn everything by just getting information.
With Google and Wikipedia, education is less about memorizing stuff and more about learning where to get information and how to evaluate it. [Yay! Critical thinking!]
Social stratification: at first only the rich would be able to implant.
That's the way technology always works.
Devolution: medicine keeps the weak alive. Would storing information in an implant cause our skills to atrophy?

Much more escaped my limited note-taking speed. I will continue to use this question to open classes on nanotechnology. Next, I will figure out how to build on it by introducing the ICE-9 questions with references back to quotes from students.

Putting Rustlike Crystals on ICE

2007-08-07T10:53:00.001-07:00

Every year I spend four fabulous weeks teaching precocious high school students about nanotechnology. The COSMOS program at the University of California at Santa Cruz has classes on physics, chemistry, astronomy, math puzzles, marine biology, designing and creating video games, robotics, and nanotechnology. Similar programs run at UC Davis, UC Irvine, and UC San Diego.

My recent silence on this blog has been, in part, due to preparation for and running of the just-completed program. Students went home last Saturday and I am ready to share some of what I experienced.

Learning a strategy for understanding and evaluating nanotechnology is particularly important because students will forget most of the technical details about...

Genetically modifying extremophile bacteria to create nanoscale grids of magnetic storage elements
Sequencing DNA and RNA through nanopores (using control theory students learn in robotics)
Seeking inspiration from the mind-boggling accuracy of replicating a single cell to create a human being
Using the Peltier Effect to remove heat from very small hot spots on integrated circuits...and reversing the semiconductor phenomenon to capture energy from waste heat
Interfacing the mechanical to the electronic on very small scale with Micro Electro Mechancial Systems (MEMS)

One way we practiced ICE-9 was applying it to news reports about nanotechnology. Clicking on the above image will show a New York Times article dissected with ICE-9. It applies nearly anywhere...and familiarity with it may the greatest gift I can impart in just four weeks to my students. As most of them are academically at the top of their high schools, I look forward to the dispersal of the ICE-9 meme to universities everywhere.

Myth in Technology

2007-03-28T16:57:00.000-07:00

“The press, the coverage of the war, and the buildup to the war, was almost exclusively focused on the power of our weaponry and the might of our military. Not only were the graphics quite consciously designed to look like a video game, but the message was that not only are our weapons powerful, but we as a people are powerful…That mythic narrative of war is something that always boosts ratings and sells newspapers. It’s how William Randolph Hearst build his empire at the turn of the century, by creating a war where there was no need for one…War is packaged and sanitized the same way the poisons of tobacco or liquor are packaged and sanitized. We see enough of the titillation and excitement to hold our interest, but we never actually see what wounds do to bodies…So we go in with a stage set, and we are just looking for the characters to put against the backdrop of the scenery. We re-create over and over and over this mythic narrative that is false but that makes us feel good as a people and that everybody back home wants to read and hear. It’s war as boy’s adventure.”
— Chris Hedges, interviewed in Kristina Borjesson's book Feet to the Fire: The Media After 9/11. Excerpted from pages 520 and 532.

As I wrote in Technology Challenged, technology offers us vastly more information than ever before, but…“Perhaps because of a psychology evolved in a much simpler world, many find comfort in simplifying prejudices: good vs. evil, our religion vs. theirs, our ethnicity vs. theirs. Technology mediates between our environment and us, so it can reinforce the perception of any reality we want. If we want to believe that the CIA or Mossad orchestrated the flying of planes into the World Trade Center, we can find websites that document and confirm this.” The riveting interviews in Feet to the Fire shed light on how media present us with reality.

The journey we each take from cradle on, seizing new freedoms and the responsibility to wield them wisely, is mirrored by our civilization. How do we, as a society, wield the power of our technology? Consciously, critically, and thoughtfully if I have anything to say about it.

Bacteria & Hydrogen Cars

2007-03-20T16:55:00.000-07:00

“As ions move down a concentration gradient across the membrane, they can be made to do work…In most cases studied, the ion whose movement powers…is the hydrogen ion--a hydrogen atom from which the single electron has been stripped away, leaving a proton.”
“The proton exchange membrane (PEM) allows only the protons to pass through to the cathode. The electrons must travel along an external circuit to the cathode, creating an electric current.”

Which quote describes a fuel cell for a hydrogen car and which the cellular spinning of flagellum? Where does technology come from? Sometimes biology.

I was pleasantly surprised when reading two books at about the same time to find this echo. The first quote comes from Life at Small Scale: The Behavior of Microbes by David Dusenbery (page 27) and the second from The Hype About Hydrogen by Joseph Romm (page 25, figure 2.1).

That sent me daydreaming about scaling down a hamster on a treadmill by embedding billions of these hydrogen-powered bacterial motors in the sleeve of a car’s wheel axle. Each spinning flagellum would give a minute push to the spinning axle. Routine maintenance on your car might report, “Hundreds of thousands of your motors have failed. Nothing to worry about.”

I imagine that controlling the curved wall of bacteria might be easier than protecting the bacteria from predation or clogging with dust. Has anyone seen such a “bacteria drive” analyzed?

Rejiggering in North Korea

2007-03-02T15:08:00.000-08:00

How to Topple Kim Jong Il (Foreign Policy March/April 2007 subscription required) identifies radio as a key strategy. Updating my Thanksgiving blog, the article reports that it is "becoming common to modify the state-produced radios that have fixed tuning to the state's propaganda channels. With a little rejiggering, North Koreans can listen to foreign news broadcasts." This is part of the articles prescription to
"deliver information inside." Other elements of that prescription:

"Realize a quiet revolution is already under way" because control relies on rewarding the elite with money and goods the state no longer has. "Leverage the refugee community in the South"supporting those that still have connections and a network to the north. "Fund, plan, and carry out cultural exchanges" which may benefit only the elite, but familiarizing their children with life outside the Hermit Kingdom will undermine it. And "convince fellow Republicans that subtle measures can work" because dramatic confrontation bolsters Kim Jong Il's position as the country's protector against the imperialist west.

Author Andrei Lankov writes with the experience of a former Soviet citizen. Understanding and evaluating technology helps us understand our world.

Thanksgiving

2006-11-23T13:27:00.000-08:00

Today is Thanksgiving in the United States, bringing to mind how much we have to be grateful for. Freedom and liberty ranks high for me, particularly since I wrote about how limited those are in North Korea.

The nighttime satellite photo shows South Korea as an island just west of Japan. A limited economy in the north keeps the artificial light at a level common before Thomas Edison made the incandescent bulb a commercial success. In Technology Challenged, I analyzed the smuggling of small, disposable radios into a country where…

“…any radios that can be tuned to frequencies other than the one carrying official broadcasts must by registered with the government. The tuners are soldered into place and police make surprise inspections, looking for tampering. Information is so tightly controlled that defectors are surprised to find that South Korea is more prosperous than North (which has had widespread starvation) and that U.S. donations of rice are not subservient gifts of tribute. Combating this dearth of information, a group in South Korea is smuggling in disposable radios. With ICE-9:

9. How do we evaluate it? The government of North Korea evaluates the radios in terms of their power. By promoting dissenting views, this technology is a threat to their control.

8. What are its costs and benefits? Like many technologies, radio offers tradeoffs between such goals as control and freedom. In this situation, radios subvert control and promote freedom.

7. How do we change it? Engineers design radios, activists distribute them, organizations fund them, and North Korean police hunt them.

6. How does it change us? Independent news sources heard over the radios change listeners’ conception of reality: they discover that starvation is not normal and that their nation is not the world’s most powerful.

5. How does it change? Electronic technologies, in particular, have become smaller and less expensive at an amazing rate, making disposable radios feasible.

4. How does it work? Many technologies can be characterized as either centralized or distributed. Unlike a large transmitter, the radios are highly distributed, so many could fail or be destroyed without affecting the rest.

3. Where does it come from? These radios come from specialization, designed by experts in microelectronics. Broadcasting, however, was an accident: radio was invented a century ago for one-to-one conversations where telephone wires could not be run.

2. Why do we use it? Communication is one of the oldest reasons we use technology and it still drives such devices as radios, satellites, cellular phones, and email.

1. What is it? Radio is a tool to extend our abilities, allowing us to hear something from far away. But the physical radio that we can touch is just the tip of the iceberg. Out of sight are systems of technical standards and networks of energy distribution and manufacturing just as important.

Technology is inextricably intertwined with our lives. With conscious application and guidance of it, we can create a better world. Happy Thanksgiving.

Technological Literacy Poster Child

2006-08-02T20:32:00.000-07:00

I love nanotechnology not because it touches so many areas of science, engineering, politics, sociology, and technology. I love it because it grabs these areas. It forces us to view these areas differently. It promises us tools for impacting these areas. This summer I am again teaching the nanotechnology course in the COSMOS program at UC Santa Cruz, giving me opportunity to lead 17 precocious high school students through the field of nanotechnology…and learn a great deal myself. Holger Schmidt is coteaching with me. Guest lecturers include Robert Cormia, Mark Akeson, Jonathan Trent, Joel Kubby, and Ali Shakouri.

Two weeks ago I opened with an overview of nanotechnology using, of course, ICE-9. We covered what is nanotechnology, why do we use it, where does it come from, and started how does it work. To bring out the concepts underlying how nanotechnology works, we watched a clip from the movie Terminator 2. The liquid metal robot could reassemble itself after being blown apart. It could also assume different shapes. Though beyond our manufacturing technology, we discussed what approach we would take to design such a system. For well over an hour, students discussed and debated distributed computing, information, and decision-making. They considered resilience, energy sources, communication efficiency among billions or trillions of nanobots, and algorithms for deciding if a part is blown so far away from the rest of the system that it’s more efficient to replicate that part than retrieve and reintegrate it. Discussion even became a bit heated when differing approaches emphasized nearer-term practicality versus resilience.

That discussion opened at the end of my first lecture and then preempted my second lecture. If my students are enthusiastically wrestling with technological concepts, I’m hardly going to interrupt that with a lecture. They will remember their design tradeoffs long past when they forget facts I read from a PowerPoint slide. TA Matt Rutishauser and I sprinkled our own ideas into their discussion (e.g. a flatworm can regrow two heads if its head is cut in half & holograms offer a model for distribution of information across a physical object). Mostly, I played gatekeeper, making sure that one student did not monopolize discussion and that quiet students did not wait indefinitely for a sufficiently long pause before jumping in (I sometimes do this, so I am sympathetic).

The lecture I would have given would have finished how nanotechnology works and covered how it changes, how it changes us, how we change it, what its costs & benefits are, and how we evaluate it. Familiar questions to anyone who knows KnowledgeContext’s approach to technological literacy. With a full slate of guest lecturers addressing their areas of research, it will be hard to fit this lecture in, though having it in case of a no-show is reassuring. Another lecture/discussion I am looking forward to trying out is showing a video of venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson discussing nanotechnology at Stanford. My plan is to freeze the video whenever a student or I want to discuss a point. That would be much more interactive than standard lectures, in which I suspect students receive far more information than they are capable of assimilating. If we give them a chance to make meaning out of the content—to figure out its context and its impact on their own lives—they would get more value. Standard lecture technique seems archaic to me.

Lecture slides are linked from the course schedule. If you have or know of bright high school students interested in science, math, and engineering, check out COSMOS at UC Santa Cruz, Davis, Irvine, or San Diego.

If Bacteria Used the Precautionary Principle

2006-05-15T22:57:00.000-07:00

A sidebar on page 159 of my book Technology Challenged considers the thought experiment suggested by this blog’s title…

Give a little DNA. Get a little DNA. Bacteria are pretty easygoing about evolution—none of that formal male-female sexual reproduction. As a result of their sharing snippets of genetic instructions, plus a bit of random mutation, bacteria have explored and adapted to almost every environment on this planet, from deep inside rocks to steam fissures on the bottom of the ocean to the human intestine. But what if bacteria were not so cavalier about trying out new forms? What if they had the intelligence and consciousness to employ the Precautionary Principle to their evolution?

If there were just one evolutionary creation that bacteria could have prevented it would surely be cyanobacteria (more commonly known as blue-green algae, even though it’s not an algae). More than 2.2 billion years ago, a mutation allowed cyanobacteria to get the hydrogen atoms they consumed from water, while other bacteria continued to get their hydrogen from sugars, airborne hydrogen, or hydrogen sulfide. With water immensely abundant, cyanobacteria multiplied almost without bounds, and produced a lot of waste. Because they consume H2O and use hydrogen, their waste is oxygen.

From less than one billionth of one percent of the atmosphere, oxygen skyrocketed to its current level of 20%. All life on earth had evolved to that point with virtually no free oxygen, so this change was a global disaster. Volcanoes and asteroid impacts were mild in comparison. Even humans, whose lineage evolved in an oxygen-rich environment, suffer from oxidation, and may take anti-oxidant supplements (e.g. vitamins C, E, and beta carotene) to counter oxygen’s tendency to react with and change a variety of compounds.

Bacteria were—and are—not in a position to employ the Precautionary Principle, but humans are. What might we learn from the cyanobacteria episode? One lesson is that something that can both replicate itself and consume an untapped food or energy source will change the world. We may eventually be able to create our own “cyano-technologies” that brilliantly exploit some previously untapped resource, much as the runaway nanotechnology does in Michael Crichton’s fictional novel Prey.

With technology changing at an accelerating pace and with surprising behaviors emerging from new complexity, we may well create a variety of technologies with the potential to change the world. If we would like to survive—and not have to hide under a rock, side by side with the bacteria still waiting for oxygen to go away—then this is a fine time to become familiar with the Precautionary Principle…and start evaluating our technology ecologically.

Since I wrote that, I’ve encountered people thinking deeply about risk. At the Singularity Summit at Stanford, Nick Bostrom addressed existential risks and Max More discussed the Proactionary Principle. More is responding to what he sees as weaknesses in the Precautionary Principle, namely that it stifles innovation. Two days earlier, evaluating risk came up at SRI.

At an SRI presentation I made 2006 May 11, I was asked what the ICE-9 curriculum teaches about making decisions with unavoidable uncertainty. ICE-9 teaches students about the difficulty of predicting the behavior of complex systems, though for middle school students we do not talk about the impossibility of predicting certain technological behavior (we save epistemology for older students). In ICE-9’s Lesson 4 How does it work students play with Conway’s Game of Life to see how simple rules (applied recursively in a system that fosters emergent behavior) can have surprising results. In Lesson 8 What are its costs & benefits students explore three dimensions of technology’s impact (see diagram). This illustrates that benefits may be anticipated and accrue to those directly involved in adopting a new technology, while costs may be unanticipated and affect, indirectly, people unaware that a new technology was being adopted.

Who benefits and who suffers is a key issue in assessing risk. A common objection to the precautionary principle is that FDA precaution keeps terminally ill patients from trying unproven drugs. It strikes me as reasonable to allow a sick person to make an informed choice about taking a drug. But if the anticipated benefits go to the potential customer of a technology while any unanticipated costs are born by unsuspecting bystanders, then a different threshold of certainty and greater scrutiny should be required. If the beneficiaries of a technology are performing the assessment, results should be independently validated.

Certainly there is much more to say on this, specifically at levels appropriate to middle school, high school and college students, the ages for which KnowledgeContext offers curricula. Though I asked my SRI audience members what concepts and strategies they would recommend to young people, our limited time together made this question nearly rhetorical. It is important to educate society for such challenges, so I open the discussion in this blog, asking those at the SRI meeting and my other readers to comment on the evaluation of technological risk:

What concepts would apply to a wide range of technology, including that not yet invented?

What concepts could young people grasp?

What activities would illustrate these concepts, giving students both an intellectual and visceral understanding?

Thank you for contributing your ideas (click the comment link below).

Technology in Our Food

2006-05-03T23:45:00.000-07:00

Today, Cadbury Schweppes, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and the American Beverage Association agreed to stop selling high-calorie, high-sugar drinks in US schools by 2009. Do you suppose the children in our schools think critically about their food and drink? Our ICE-9 questions apply to our manufactured foods as readily as to any technology. Where does it come from? How does it change us? What are its costs and benefits?

In my last posting, I wrote about Nora knowing the names of the animals that grow the wool she spins. This gives her context so she understands the full cycle, from sunshine to clothing, of her technology. Since she’s using no modern chemicals, the recycling of her clothing can follow techniques tested in nature over the millennia we’ve been wearing wool.

I use lots of modern chemicals in my clothing, food, transportation, communication, shelter, entertainment, etc. Nora reminds me that the simpler we keep our lives, the easier it is to understand the impact of the technologies we use. Because I like tuna and my research into electrical power generation made me realize that coal-fired plants contribute mercury to fish, I had myself tested (and came out fine).

Although I rarely drink soda, I looked for nutrition information on Coca Cola and Pepsi because those are two of the major drinks leaving our schools. As you can see from the links, the Coca Cola Company lists the calories, carbohydrates, sodium, potassium, phosphorous, caffeine, and artificial sweeteners in their drinks, but not the amount of sugar. Pepsico reveals nothing but the caffeine, explaining that they “expect to add information in the future about other product ingredients such as sweeteners and colors.” When Pepsico finds time to provide information on sweeteners, I hope they include sugar.

The American Beverage Association explains why removing soft drinks from schools is not an admission that they are unhealthy or that they contribute to obesity (“Obesity is a complex problem and singling out one food or drink defies science and common sense.”). Critical thinking may be the most useful skill we can develop.

I admit to just beginning to learn where my food comes from. One step was reading Food Revolution by John Robbins, which provides a great deal of context for food common in the US. The more I learn, the more connections I find among our food, economy, environment, and technology.

In blogging for KnowledgeContext, I am neither advocating nor condemning soft drinks or coal-fired electrical generation. I am thinking about the context of our technology, both techniques and artifacts. While technological literacy is important on the vast scale of our civilization’s survival (a case I make in the book Technology Challenged), it is also important on the scale of choosing the cans from which we eat and drink.

Spinning Wool & Playing a Bell

2006-04-28T16:17:00.000-07:00

I just returned from a week in Philadelphia, and of course I noticed technology.

Nora spins wool in the Independence Visitor Center, modeling the Colonial way of life. You can see in the photo that I’m transfixed by the spinning wheel (the smaller person not transfixed is Seika, daughter of KnowledgeContext director Trevor Oelschig). All that I know of spinning wheels comes from the movie Gandhi (starring Ben Kingsley), in which spinning cotton on a wheel comes to symbolize Indian independence. For Nora, spinning wool is meditation and connection.

A visitor asked Nora if she got bored spinning for hours. Nora thought that odd: spinning is a way to be at peace for her. I think they spoke past each other because of tacit values. The visitor might evaluate technology on efficiency (I could buy the wool product cheap in a store). Nora evaluated her spinning technology on relationship (Am I mentally present while spinning and do I understand its relationship to my world).

Her wool stock no longer comes from a mill, but from a farm, which she visits to meet the sheep and llamas that grow her wool. Going to source means she must clean the wool of straw and bits of dirt natural to the animals’ world. But it also means that the wool comes pure, without the chemicals used by mills to clean in bulk, something I would think about if Seika were to be exposed to it.

A father walked his large family by the spinning wheel and asked Nora what she was spinning. “Wool.” “But it’s not white,” he protested. “Wool’s not always white.” “Well, I guess you could bleach it,” he concluded. “But why would you want to?” One way or another, we get our chemicals in, usually without the technological literacy to understand even a few of their costs and benefits.

As I knew from Gandhi, spinning cotton takes practice and, at first, the cotton breaks under tension. As I learned from Nora, spinning wool takes practice, but she found it spiritually centering to make different styles of wool yarn, with loft depending on the tension and twist. Nora tore apart the unspun wool to show the fibers to be four or five centimeters in length. Lying alongside each other, those relatively short fibers grip each other strongly enough to stretch out to any length. Unlike hair, which does not readily spin into yarn, wool has both scales, which hook onto other scales, and crimp, which tangles with other fibers (and also makes for greater loft to trap air). Nora pressed the broken ends of wool back together. Magically it healed and she spun it into yarn.

A few days later, I met Donald (on the right) and Kamen (on the left and I’m guessing at the spelling), drumming in Fairmount Park. In the photograph’s background, you can see the Philadelphia Art Museum on the left and the Fairmount Water Works in the middle. Sated with almost six hours in the splendid art museum, I was happy to soak in the primal rhythms. Donald and Kamen were happy to include me. My love for drumming is unaccompanied by any skill, so Kamen asked if I could play the bell. I had not, but I wanted to try. “Just play one-one-one-one. And we’ll fill in the rest.” “How fast,” I asked. “It doesn’t matter, we’ll adapt to you. You are the leader.”

The pressure was on as they played around my metronome. All I could think about was, “Was that last pause shorter than the previous one? I’m sure that was quicker. These guys are good.” At which point, I lost it, and just laughed. “You were listening to Donald, weren’t you?” Kamen scolded me playfully. Yes, Donald’s and Kamen’s driving beats had mesmerized me and I’d stopped listening to my heartbeat or inner rhythm, as Kamen had coached me. “You are the leader. We follow you, so you don’t follow us.” I explained that I felt out of place with two such accomplished drummers. “If you are from this planet then you are in place,” Kamen assured me.

Kamen and Donald spoke of intent, awareness, and consciousness. I told them about Nora and the intent she brings to her spinning wheel. And, when I had to go, I thanked them for so warmly including me in their play. Although I felt awkward keeping a steady beat on the bell, I felt entirely comfortable with Kamen, and Donald…and Nora, whom I saw again just before leaving Philadelphia. When I told her about my drumming experience, she smiled and shook her head: “Synchronicity! I just started learning African drumming. Sometimes angels come into your life.” I’m no angel, but I am glad that I could find warm and thoughtful people in a city new to me, and tell them about each other.

Does technology inoculate us from reflecting?

2005-12-19T20:37:00.000-08:00

For me, it happens in my car. Away from my computer and refrigerator (a danger of a home office) and afar from any NPR stations, I reflect. What have I done? What do I plan? Is this a good approach? Is the goal still valid or am I making progress in the wrong direction? Am I happy? Am I acting with integrity?

Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. My corollary is that unexamined values are not worth applying [It boggles my mind that Google finds this phrase nowhere else]. I am enriched by those times driving, or bicycling, or walking when I reflect on life and values.

And, so, to the thesis: Does technology inoculate us from reflecting? Driving on the freeway last night, I saw a large video screen in the back of an SUV. Unable to make out the programming through the heavily tinted windows, I guessed that one or more children were being tranquilized. I imagined them liberated from talking to each other or to their parents, or from staring out the window and dreaming.

Once, I tried using an MP3 player while walking to the library, but I lasted only one direction. The sound of wind in the trees, the sound of birds, and the sound of another walker saying hello (I think it was “hello”) were all muted. I would not try it on my bicycle because my safety depends on hearing cars or bicycles approaching from behind. What I missed most, however, was the time to reflect, and my music robbed me of that.

Jim Moore, a deep thinker and poet, told me of his son talking with friends on a bus. When the son stepped off the bus, conversation stopped and he saw his friends move in unison to insert their iPod earbuds. Entertainment technology allows us to be entertained anywhere at anytime. Communication technology, including cell phones, allows us to communicate anywhere at anytime. We have evolved to seek entertainment and communication, much as we have evolved to seek calories. The effects of cheap and accessible food are obvious. We are being supersized. The effects of cheap and accessible entertainment and communication may be insidious.

If you were asked to join a medical experiment that numbed your mind, how long would you be willing to participate? How much compensation would you require for such a sacrifice? These technologies have succeeded—diffusing into our society—because we actually pay for their effect, such is their marketing image and intrinsic allure. Conscious evaluation of our tools is the safe way to use them.

I would very much like to know if these technologies anaesthetize like Soma from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or if they can stimulate thought. Please post to this blog with your thoughts and experiences on this. If the answers come back Soma, then there’s a bigger question to ponder: What sort of world will people that do not reflect create?

John Smart in the Library of Babel

2005-10-22T10:35:00.000-07:00

Whenever John Smart visits I am curious which of my books he will look at. I collect books on history, technology, science, sociology, politics, philosophy—anything to help me understand how the Universe works—at a much faster pace than I read. My collection is not as large as Jorge Luis Borge’s Library of Babel, which includes all books that could be written, but I’m working on it.

With so much treasure at hand, I am limited by time and my reflexive desire to luxuriate in the ideas (rather than skim). Smart is visiting this weekend for the Foresight Conference, so I am tempted to invisibly spray my bookshelves so I can return with a blacklight (or other magic from CSI) to trace his path through my books.

The Second Curve: Managing the Velocity of Change by Ian Morrisson was pulled from the shelf. That fits with our conversation about experience curves from Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near, developing a graduate program in “technology roadmapping,” and Future Salons in high schools and eventually middle schools to prepare young people to think about the future in terms of decades and more. Technology roadmapping is an approach to planning that combines scenario “what if” techniques with technology trends “what probably will be” (S-curves and exponential curves from The Singularity is Near).

The graduate program could first appear at the forward-looking University of Advancing Technology, and I see a possible connection with the Information Systems Management program at UCSC, newly directed by KnowledgeContext advisor Suresh Lodha. ISM, renamed ISTM to include technology, has an undergraduate program and is developing a graduate one. At the high school level, he pointed me to an existing foresight development program in many high schools across the country: the Future Problem Solving Program.

The Santa Cruz Future Salon is nearing birth. I’ve been meeting with the newly-formed Santa Cruz Futurists, a UCSC student group. This university and this region have many thoughtful, foresightful, brilliant people I’d like to interact with. It will be good to have a locus. Connecting back to high schools, the UCSC group showed interest in eventually helping local high schools form their own Future Salons.

All the world's knowledge in a brick

2005-10-21T22:06:00.000-07:00

A New Yorker cartoon from between 1975 and 1985 captioned a brick with “Four hundred selections of the world’s finest orchestral music, over one thousand full-color reproductions of mankind’s greatest paintings and sculpture, and two hundred and thirty-one timeless classics of western literature compacted into a two-by-three-by-six-inch brick.”

Twenty or thirty years ago that was funny because there was no way to squeeze that much information into such a small space and, more important, no way to get it out. That left the hypothetical brick as a wondrous technological achievement without any utility.

Today we would wonder why such a brick need be so large. But even as we create technology that could put that much information and more into a postage-stamp-sized flash drive, we still face the difficulty of finding our way through vast, complex, and interrelated information. One innovative way to explore the history of innovation and science is being developed by the Knowledge Web, a project inspired and guided by James Burke, author of Connections, The Day The Universe Changed, The Axemaker’s Gift, The Pinball Effect, Twin Tracks, and (not surprisingly) The Knowledge Web.

I had visited the website a year ago, but found more promise than function. Last week I met Patrick McKercher, who self-effacingly describes himself as the janitor of the Knowledge Web, but this really means the leader of about 800 contributors. Patrick showed me behind the scenes to an interface still under development. As a fan of Burke’s Connections style (referenced in my book Technology Challenged), I was fascinated. A database of people, places, technologies, concepts, and events drove a presentation of any of those with links to many more. The web’s hyperlink was made for this manner of navigation. In seconds Patrick traversed a half-dozen connected events. He showed me what looked like Google Earth, explaining that it had been developed long before Google's recent debut of their technology, and that it showed areas of innovative activity (as Google shows roads or schools).

Yet to be developed would be the ability to hover over, say, China and then roll back the years looking for volcanoes of innovative activity. Freeze a period, perhaps when the Treasure Fleets were sailing the world (using technology like sealed bulkheads not to be found on European ships for another four centuries), and then fly around the world in that time period, looking for other hot spots. All the information from Burke’s books will be (or perhaps already is) in the database, but that leaves plenty of room for more. They are looking at the viability of wikis for spreading the net even wider.

I hope the behind the scenes magic that Patrick revealed will soon show up on the public Knowledge Web. When Patrick tells me, I will blog it.

Technological literacy

2005-10-08T16:22:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the first KnowledgeContext blog. The mission of this nonprofit corporation is improving young people's understanding of the context of technology. The greater context is technological literacy, and that’s what this blog will be about, ranging from formal updates of KnowledgeContext activities to my own musings on current events as seen through the lens of technological literacy. I hope this will start conversations.

Say, what is “technological literacy”? William Wulf, President of the National Academy of Engineering, put it well in Technically Speaking:

There is a major difference between
technological competence and technological literacy.
Literacy is what everyone needs.
Competence is what a few people need
in order to do a job or make a living.
And we need both.

In my view, “Technological literacy is understanding and evaluating our tools; technological competency is knowing how to operate them.” Technological literacy is important for many reasons, as we all make a multitude of choices that are based on or influenced by technology. Being able to understand and evaluate means we can make informed, conscious decisions. If this strikes you as a bit mundane, then consider this quote from Carl Sagan:

It might be a familiar progression, transpiring on many worlds—
a planet, newly formed, placidly revolves around its star;
life slowly forms; a kaleidoscopic procession of creatures evolves;
intelligence emerges which, at least up to a point,
confers enormous survival value; and then technology
is invented…In a flash, they create world-altering con-trivances.
Some planetary civilizations see their way through,
place limits on what may and what must not be done,
and safely pass through the time of perils.
Others, not so lucky or so prudent, perish.

Somewhere on the spectrum from “individuals being empowered with critical thinking” to “a populace that can choose life over extinction” you may find a reason to believe in the value of technological literacy.