Tuition-Free "University of the People" Now Open

Brainchild of Israeli entrepreneur Shai Reshef -- who has donated $1 million of his own money to the effort -- the UN Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technology and Development (GAID) sponsored University of the People opened for business the first of May, 2009 with programs of instruction in business and computers. The institution is "online only" and opened with 200 students from some 52 countries -- but it needs 15,000 students and $6 million to continue operating.

Admission opened just over two weeks ago and without any promotion some 200 students from 52 countries have already registered, with a high school diploma and a sufficient level of English as entry requirements.

Students will be placed in classes of 20, after which they can log on to a weekly lecture, discuss its themes with their peers and take a test all online. There are voluntary professors, post-graduate students and students in other classes who can also offer advice and consultation.

The only charge to students is a $15 to $50 admission fee, depending on their country of origin, and a processing fee for every test ranging from $10 to $100. For the University to sustain its operation, it needs 15,000 students and $6 million, of which Mr. Reshef has donated $1 million of his own money. _UN

It sounds as if the infrastructure is still being assembled, and the May 2009 opening is actually something of a trial period shakeout cruise. More about Shai Reshef:

Mr. Reshef hopes to build enrollment to 10,000 over five years, the level at which he said the enterprise should be self-sustaining. Startup costs would be about $5 million, Mr. Reshef said, of which he plans to provide $1 million.

For all the uncertainties, Mr. Reshef is probably as well positioned as anyone for such an enterprise.

Starting in 1989, he served as chairman of the Kidum Group, an Israeli test preparation company, which he sold in 2005 to Kaplan, one of the world’s largest education companies. While chairman of Kidum, he built an online university affiliated with the University of Liverpool, enrolling students from more than 100 countries; that business was sold to Laureate, another large for-profit education company, in 2004.

Mr. Reshef is now chairman of Cramster.com, an online study community offering homework help to college students.

“Cramster has thousands of students helping other students,” said Mr. Reshef, who lives in Pasadena, Calif., where both Cramster and the new university are based. “These become strong social communities. With these new social networks, where young people now like to spend their lives, we can bring college degrees to students all over the world, third-world students who would be unable to study otherwise. I haven’t found even one person who says it’s a bad idea.” _NYT

As long as the university is run far, far away from the UN and its kleptocratic bureaucracy, it may well succeed. No doubt some palms are being greased at GAID to allow the use of the UN's name in marketing the concept. But if the behind-the-scenes hands-on managers of the UOP can run things without interference from the Palace of Thieves on Turtle Bay, they may actually create something good that benefits a lot of people.

Where Is Switzerland on this List?

Impact LabThe top ten most peaceful nations:

• 1 New Zealand,
• 2 Denmark,
• 3 Norway,
• 4 Iceland,
• 5 Austria,
• 6 Sweden,
• 7 Japan,
• 8 Canada,
• 9= Finland,
• 10= Slovenia.

The Global Peace Index, a report prepared for the Australia-based Institute for Economics and Peace in conjunction with the Economist Intelligence Unit, ranks 144 countries in a league table of peacefulness.

The index defines peace as “the absence of violence”.

Twenty-three criteria on which the league table is compiled include political stability, risk of terrorism, murder rate, likelihood of violent demonstrations, respect for human rights, internal conflicts, arms imports and involvement in foreign wars. _ImpactLab

The ten least peaceful countries:

• 1 Iraq,
• 2 Afghanistan,
• 3 Somalia,
• 4 Israel,
• 5 Sudan,
• 6 Democratic Republic of the Congo,
• 7 Chad,
• 8 Pakistan,
• 9 Russia,
• 10 Zimbabwe

Like any such list, it was compiled more for political reasons than to be informative. You have to take it with a tonne of salt. But there is plenty to think about. These are calculations generally done by the subconscious mind, on local, regional, and global levels. Every time we consider a travel route or a vacation plan.

People do not emigrate from Switzerland or the Cayman Islands to Egypt or Gaza.

Pick Any Lock, Fleece Any Flock

You would like to believe in a world that is safe from terrorists, thieves, spies, and busybodies. But that would not be the truth. There is no lock that cannot be hacked. The security procedures of governments, corporations, and homes is more of a convenient fiction than a reality.

Tobias thinks of himself as a humble public servant. When he attacks the Kryptonite bike lock or the Club (or those in-room safes at Holiday Inn or Caesars Palace), he's not a bad guy—he's just Ralph Nader with a slim jim, protecting consumers by exposing locks, safes, and security systems that aren't actually locked, safe, or secure. At least, not from people like him.

The problem, if you're a safe company or a lock maker, is that Tobias makes it all public through hacker confabs, posts on his Security.org site, and tech blogs like Engadget. He views this glasnost as a public service. Others see a hacker how-to that makes The Anarchist Cookbook read like Betty Crocker. And where Tobias sees a splendid expression of First Amendment rights, locksmiths and security companies see a criminal finishing school. Tobias isn't just exposing problems, they say. He is the problem.

But forget bike locks and hotel room safes: These days, Tobias is attacking the lock famous for protecting places like military installations and the homes of American presidents and British royals...

...Kids study Tobias' online video, crack the lock off Dad's Glock, and put holes in things that shouldn't have them. Enterprising junkies embark on habit-feeding crime waves. Hotel rooms, no longer secure, become magnets for burglary and rape. High school truants walk the halls shimming combination locks off rows of lockers. Crime gangs use Tobias' case study to copycat the 2003 Antwerp diamond heist, while tech terrorists simply co-opt the master list of Marc Weber Tobias problems to outwit America's Keystone Kop-homeland security and generally blow stuff up. The world is unzipped. And our innocence—not to mention a good deal of our cash, jewelry, and portable electronics—is lost.

Tobias shrugged off such concerns, along with the hate mail. Scaring citizens to attention is part of his educational program. "Do you really think ignorance will keep you safe?" he asks. "Is it even an option?" ...

..."It's not about me. It's about what these locks protect," Tobias says. "Medeco locks are the best in the world—that's why they're used by the Pentagon, the embassies. These agencies believe that the locks can't be picked in under 15 minutes, that they can't be bumped, that you can't trace keys onto plastic. It's the definition of high security—and it's wrong! We proved it."

"Look," he says, taking it down a few notches. "If we can do it, so can the bad guys. Medeco needs to acknowledge it and let the locksmiths know it—and the DOD, FBI, CIA, Secret Service, and all their clients." _Wired

And so we are left with a world without security. Nothing is safe, not really. But if that is true, are we not better off knowing the facts and learning to take the necessary precautions? Is it not past time for us to outgrow our psychological neoteny, and to move through our rites of passage into adulthood?

That is when the fun really starts.

Steps to A Better Matrix

One of the challenges of creating artificial organs for replacement of human body parts is the need for a structural matrix to build the functional tissue around. Australian and Korean scientists have developed an interesting approach to the problem by pairing carbon nanotubes and DNA strands together, then treating them with calcium chloride solution to create cross-linking between the fibres.

The new concept uses DNA strands as a matrix; the strands completely “wrap” the scaffold-forming carbon nanotubes in the presence of an ionic liquid, networking them to form a gel. This gel can be spun: just as silk and synthetic fibers can be wet-spun for textiles, the gel can be made into very fine threads when injected into a special bath. The dried fibers have a porous, sponge-like structure and consist of a network of intertwined 50 nm-wide nanofibers. Soaking in a calcium chloride solution further cross-links the DNA, causing the fibers to become denser and more strongly connected.

These spongy fibers resemble the collagen fiber networks of the biological extracellular matrix. They can also be knotted, braided, or woven into textile-like structures. This results in materials that are as elastic as the softest natural tissues while simultaneously deriving great strength from the robust DNA links. An additional advantage is the electrical conductivity of the new material, which can thus also be used in electrodes for mechanical actuators, energy storage, and sensors. _Wiley

A similar matrix might be seeded with living cells to create tendons, cartilage, or more complex structures such as noses, ears, blood vessels, eyelids, lips, or as support reinforcement for hernia or breast surgeries etc. Reconstructive surgery and vascular surgery would create a demand for such living replacement parts immediately, should they prove safe and durable.

For more complex organs such as kidneys, livers, lungs, and hearts, more breakthroughs will be needed. For intermediate structures such as bladders, rectums, and other GI or GU segments, the jump from simple replacement parts may not be too difficult once the best ways for making the simpler parts are perfected.

Clever Hemp-Based Wood Replacement

Hemp is a fast-growing source of plant fiber that may help preserve the majestic forests of the world. Stanford University researchers are busy at work creating a very intriguing faux wood from hemp, combining a bioplastic called PHB with sheets of hemp fiber. The resulting wood substitute may also prove to be a plastic substitute!

The hemp-PHB biocomposite material has several characteristics similar to wood from trees, according to Craig Criddle, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, who collaborated on the project. “It’s quite attractive looking and very strong,” he said. “You can mold it, nail it, hammer it and drill it a lot like wood. But, bioplastic PHB can be produced faster than wood, and hemp can be grown faster than trees.” _Biomass

The age of advanced biomaterials is arriving at the same time as the age of advanced bio-fuels and bio-chemicals. Many technologies for turning biomass into plastics and structural fiber, can be used to turn biomass into fuels and high value chemicals.

Laws against the growth and use of hemp are just one example of the government's counterproductive meddling in the markets -- eventually resulting in depressed economies. The current Obama reich's meddling in energy markets is another fine example of government stupidity. Here's a novel idea: why doesn't the government concentrate on protecting its citizens from violence, fraud, and greedy, corrupt bureaucrats? The mainspring of human progress is the human spirit and human imagination. Big greedy government is the antithesis of an open and vibrant future.

Rats Can be Trained as Soldiers Too

The rat brain is a highly effective survival tool. Rats can learn to navigate complex maizes, can be taught to respond to complex sequences of stimuli, and now can learn to target a robot arm with a high degree of precision. How much longer before rats can target projectile weapons and detonate command mines and booby traps?

Fitted with tiny electrodes in their brains to capture signals for the computer to unravel, three rats were taught to move a robotic arm toward a target with just their thoughts. Each time they succeeded, the rats were rewarded with a drop of water.

The computer's goal, on the other hand, was to earn as many points as possible, Sanchez said. The closer a rat moved the arm to the target, the more points the computer received, giving it incentive to determine which brain signals lead to the most rewards, making the process more efficient for the rat. The researchers conducted several tests with the rats, requiring them to hit targets that were farther and farther away. Despite this increasing difficulty, the rats completed the tasks more efficiently over time and did so at a significantly higher rate than if they had just aimed correctly by chance, Sanchez said.

"We think this dialogue with a goal is how we can make these systems evolve over time," Sanchez said. "We want these devices to grow with the user. (Also) we want users to be able to experience new scenarios and be able to control the device."

Dawn Taylor, Ph.D., an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve University, said the results of the study add a new dimension to brain-machine interface research. That UF researchers were able to train rats to use the robotic arm and then obtain significant results from animals lacking the mental prowess of primates or humans is also impressive, she said. _Source

This type of research is meant to develop into human research, of course, to help paralysed and disabled humans to learn to manipulate prosthetic arms and other aspects of their environment, mentally. Such goals are quite worthwhile and should be pursued. Sophisticated brain implants will learn to adapt to an individual's unique intra-brain communication signaling -- it will self-customise itself to fit each person whose brain it finds itself within.

But the rat brain is far more capable of precise, real time adaptive behaviour in the real world than any human-made computer of such small size. In combat, a brain implant equipped rat could create total mayhem within the ranks of an opposing military, given the proper weapons and munitions. Will such rodent warriors take the form of Cyborgs or Grobycs? It depends upon the approach of their developers. Either way, such four legged commandos could pack quite a wallop.

President Obama's Brave New Brain Implant

Image SourceBarak Obama's addiction to the teleprompter is becoming a sore point with White House insiders. Not the addiction itself, but rather the fact that people are beginning to notice. In fact, Mr. Obama cannot give a simple four minute announcement without spoon-feeding from a teleprompter.

This unseemly dependency has prompted White House aides to pursue a less conspicuous way of feeding the president his lines. That is how the idea of a brain implant for Mr. Obama came up in conference recently. Caught between a rock (Mr. Obama's inability to speak publicly without prompting) and a hard place (the fact that Mr. Obama's handicap is being noticed beyond deniability), the White House Office of Perpetual Campaigning is considering the technology option. The only question now seems to be, "how to do it?"

A bionic eye implant may seem at first glance a plausible plan. But a few moment's thought should make it obvious that the "camera glasses" Mr. Obama would have to wear to make the bionic eyes work would be an unsightly obstacle to the president's facial expression magic.

When faced with the shortcomings of plan A, one White House counsel suggested a brain implant without the glasses. But there was the problem of how the implant would receive the signal transmitting the president's speech to his brain. Would he wear an antenna on his head? "No," scoffed another aide, "The president's hair is too short to conceal an antenna and power supply for the implant."

"Then what about using an implant that uses photoelectrodes instead of electrical signals? You could covertly beam the speech to an array of fiberoptics cunningly concealed in the president's hair!" yet another aide enthused.

"I've got a better idea," interjected Rahm Emanuel over the intercom. "How about using a focused ultrasonic brain stimulator? You wouldn't need any kind of receiver or antenna then!"

Everyone turned to look at the only scientist in the group, a neuropsychologist on loan from MIT. What did he suggest? "Well, there have been some embarrassing side effects from brain implants in the past. If the president started to ... you know ... in the middle of a State of the Union Address, or in high level talks with the Chinese Premier ... "

For a moment, there was only silence in the room as White House aides contemplated the enormous risks of their mission. Then, over the intercom came the voice of WHCOS Emanuel: "we could always include a 'kill switch' in the device signal." The suggestion was greeted with gasps and moans. "No, no, not that kind of a kill switch. Just a type of 'reset switch' that causes him to lose consciousness temporarily so that a medical team can rush him out, in case he starts to do something too embarassing."

With that explanation, the tension blew out of the room as from a runaway balloon. They were all in agreement, it would be done. Just how it would be done, and who could be trusted to do it secretly was another matter, for another conference. But that is how government works. That is just how government works.

First published at Al Fin

Obama on Verge of Nervous Breakdown!!!

Allies of Mr Obama say his weary appearance in the Oval Office with Mr Brown illustrates the strain he is now under, and the president's surprise at the sheer volume of business that crosses his desk.

"Obama is overwhelmed. There is a .... tension between his ability to attend to the economic issues and his ability to be a proactive sculptor of the national security agenda.

"That was the gamble these guys made at the front end of this presidency and I think they're finding it a hard thing to do everything." Telegraph

The simple fact is that Barak Obama was not prepared to be US President. He was not prepared to be US Senator, for that matter, but in the Senate a member can spend most of his time running for president -- occasionally sparing the time to vote "present" on important issues -- and still be considered a US Senator in good standing. A president is expected to stay on top of things, and to actually ... you know ... make decisions.

Up to this point, Nancy Pelosi and Rahm Emanuel have been making almost all of the decisions for Mr. Obama. Obama makes decisions about vacations, parties, eating out, and setting the thermostat near 80 degrees F. Or perhaps Michelle makes those decision -- who knows?

White House insiders say Obama may not be getting enough sleep. What -- twelve hours a night is not enough? Perhaps a bit of modafinil might help, but I suspect that a nice long vacation is what the president really needs. Say, a forty year vacation in Hawaii? Perhaps he could run for president of the Honolulu Marxist Association? That might suit him to a tee.

Image h/t Rob's No Bull Zone

First published at Al Fin

Guys and Their Real Dolls

This 47 minute video tells the story of four different adult male owners of Real Dolls, plus a visit to the factory where Real Dolls are made and an interview with Matt, the creator of Real Dolls.

These silicone mannequins weigh about 100 pounds, and can be made to look surprisingly life like. All four of the featured owners appear thoroughly addicted to their dolls, although one of the owners denies it, unconvincingly.

A "Real Doll Doctor" is also featured, a mechanic who maintains, repairs, and restores used mannequins to a like-new condition -- for a price. The doll doctor appears reasonably normal, and is shown at home with an attractive living girlfriend. But even the normal "doctor" admits to being seduced a time or two by particularly alluring Real Dolls that he has restored. He sounded almost sheepish in the admission, but not apologetic.

I see these dress-up and dress-down mannequins as an early incarnation of something which in five or ten years will be a booming business, presenting a very real threat to several existing industries including pornography, prostitution, computer dating services, and the wedding industry. As in the animation titled "Don't Date Robots!!!", it is clear that the human male can be seduced by substitutes for real women, if the substitute passes a certain threshold of "realness."

Real Dolls will not pass that threshold for most men. But what will the next incarnation of girl surrogate be capable of? Blinking, smiling, frowning, and pursing her lips? Thrusting her hips and moaning at the proper times? Perhaps engaging in simple verbal exchanges, expressions of love, even offering devotion approaching the false adoration of a Stepford Wife? How long before they can go out dancing and to a movie?

Little by little, the dolls cum robots cum androids will pass the thresholds of surrogate acceptability for more and more men of all strata of society. How severely that impacts marriage and family and fertility inside a society probably depends upon how women react to made-to-order sex objects that never grow old and flabby -- with a little maintenance and occasional restorative work.

North American societies are oriented toward the needs of girls and women. Women enjoy affirmative action in school admissions, work hirings, government contracts. Government education in K-12 has been totally re-structured to benefit girls, to the severe disadvantage of boys. Women are taking over higher education in almost every field except math-intensive fields. This advantaging of women over men in education is beginning to show itself in the changing gender makeup of various professions and careers.

Women are favoured in divorce settlements and in child custody arrangements, often at the expense of not only the father but of the children as well. It is socially acceptable to tell cruel jokes about men, but not about women. And so on.

For those and many other reasons, many men have already turned away from marriage, and from most social relationships with women other than perhaps quick hookups. Men sense that the playing field is not level, and feel little desire to play in a rigged game.

But for now, Real Dolls simply are not good enough to fool the senses, to overcome the natural repulsion that most men feel in the presence of something that looks like a woman superficially, but doesn't breathe, move, talk, or respond meaningfully.

I prefer my non-sexual android, Valerie. She takes care of the house, and she is surprisingly well read. If she would just stop hacking into my web sites and posting under my name. Nobody's perfect.

Also published at Al Fin, You Sexy Thing!

La Griffe to Feminists: Men Are Better at Math. Get Used to It!

Two recent publications on the math gender gap have claimed that there is actually no math gender gap. These findings were celebrated by feminist academics and journalists, but were always suspect in that they contradicted a huge body of scientific evidence. Now perennial fact-checker and ne-er do well, La Griffe du Lion, takes a look at the two studies and declares them wanting in logic, reason, and hard facts.

In brief, we have seen tonight that the gender gap in mathematics has been stable for at least half a century; that sex differences in ability-distribution means and variance ratio are independent of race, culture and geography; that female math performance is closest to that of males in high-IQ countries; that culture plays a role in math performance, albeit small; and that the theory of Everyone accounts for all of the above. If these results are unsettling, take comfort knowing that no presentation of fact, regardless how compelling, will keep the gap buster from her noble calling. _LaGriffeduLion via Dennis Mangan

To follow the reasoning that leads to LGdL's conclusions, you will need to read his article at the link above. It is accompanied by a large array of graphs which aid an intuitive grasp of the statistics involved.

The gender gap is ubiquitous geographically and culturally, and is persistent over time. The gap is somewhat narrower in societies with higher average IQs, such as Europe, North America, East Asia, and Oceania, but still quite undeniably present and persistent.

The continuing effort of feminists in academia and journalism to deny what is obvious to anyone who looks at the issue scientifically, undermines the credibility of feminists on a wide range of issues which straddle both the scientific and political spheres.

"Pre-Learning" Online: Priming the Learner

If you have ever been curious about how biological research is carried out -- or if you are considering entering a bio-medical research field yourself -- you should take a look at the research videos at the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JOVE). By JOVE, you can see for yourself how various key procedures are carried out. If you are still in high school, or earlier, you can get a definite jump on the competition by learning many of the basic, intermediate, and advanced methods of biological research.

If you are an educator or homeschooler, you will find some worthwhile teaching materials, and some tips on basic experiments you may wish to set up in your teaching environment.

JOVE is a good example of what today's web can offer to self-starting learners, and to teachers and homeschoolers.

Bonus: From the Online College Blog -- a blog for students of all ages who are seeking an online education -- here is an article looking at 100 useful tools for digging down into the deeper levels of the web than Google will usually take you. From "meta-search" to "semantic engines" to special database search tools to academic /scientific / and custom search engines, this list of tools has something for everyone.

Smart young cookies can find their way out to some quite rarefied reaches of knowledge, quite on their own. Of course it helps to have a tutor and a bit of healthy competition, along with other gentle spurs to progress.

Many people believe that the biggest deficiency of home or solitary web learning is the lack of socialisation, but that is not a big problem unless one spends all one's time at the computer. As long as the web learning is guided by a reasonable structure and sequence, the biggest shortcoming is the lack of hands-on practical doing, to accompany the mental "knowledge." Computer simulations can only go so far toward building practical competencies.

That is why bricks and mortar schools still have some life left, at least for science, engineering, biomedical, and other technical subjects that require practical hands-on competencies.

For the other topics such as philosophy, math, sociology, history, literature, and liberal arts in general, their days are numbered for on-site educational institutions. A good thing too, since other than math, those are the subjects that have been taken over by the neo-aristocracy indoctrinators. Overpaid, over pampered, cretins of the academy, whose time has just about run out.

As virtual reality improves, and as distributed technical simulation centers grow up to take the place of many failed institutions of higher learning indoctrination, the ability to train an incredibly wide range of competencies will find its way farther and farther out into the boondocks, where anyone with a mind to do so can become competent at just about anything.

Previously published on Al Fin blog

The Singularity as A Collective Hive Mind?

Utopian visions of a technological singularity occupy the individual minds of tens of thousands of Earthers. At the recent Singularity conference in San Jose, attendees were reminded that the human mind remains far and away the most capable cognitive machine in the known universe. But that did not stop them from dreaming utopian visions of all-powerful artifical intelligences, and machines capable of "storing" human consciousness, simulating a full-sensory paradise for its uploaded minds.

From there, the idea of a collective mind, a mental "super-organism" of global proportions, arises easily. Particularly for anyone who has been exposed to the Star Trekkian vision of "The Borg." Kevin Kelly's essay on the Superorganism elaborates on the concept of consciousness evolving out of the growing internetwork of networked co-evolving humans-machines.

An interesting web attempt at creating an evolving future-oriented collective intelligence, is The Space Collective. Combining clear speculative thinking with crisp visual artistic values, TSC is a future oriented website worth visiting more than once.

Our own brain-minds are an example of a hive mind of sorts, at least a modular consciousness. Humans spontaneously organise socially as families, clans, tribes, guilds, militias, hunting parties, religions, etc. Further, had any ancient astronaut observers of human civilisation taken the time to film time-lapse documentaries of the rise and fall of human city-states and cultures, a definite social insect-like quality of the onset and decay of culture would be clear.

Humans are desperately in need of an "organising principle" to lead them to a more enlightened and sustainable era of safe-branching futures. While socialist economics is known to be a destructive dead-end, it continues to attract more blindly utopian and less mentally endowed humans like moths to a flame. And while capitalist economics combined with libertarian politics provides the excess wealth needed to finance evolutionary projects, the deeper level of guidance needed to help choose workable long-term directions of effort is lacking.

Hives too often degenerate into mobs, as more personally powerful individual interests assert themselves in counter-productive directions, assuming amplitudes strong enough to skew the crowd away from ordinary and more productive activities.

Religions have always failed in the end, as have philosophies and ideologies. Whatever guiding principle an enlightened group mind may adopt, it should be simple, subject to test by reality, and resistant to co-option by charismatic or ruthlessly powerful individuals.