Central planning in a complex world

If the world is too complex to allow for long range planning, what should central management be spending its time doing?

As all the parts of the world, on many scales, start colliding and interacting, we now find ourselves inside what scientists would call a "complex adaptive system."

In that kind of world, nothing works the way you think it will, and everything has "unintended consequences" or "unforeseen side-effects." So, we might think that long-range central planning is impossible.

As usual, we're both right and wrong, and the situation is, well, "complex" and nuanced, and depends on what you mean by "planning."

Certainly "central planning" as practiced by Stalin in the Soviet Union or Mao in China ran into many unintended side effects, of the kind where millions of people died because the plans didn't seem to relate to reality on the ground.

But, today, with advanced supercomputers and high-speed global communications, now we can do central planning, right? Nope. Before the problem was too little information. We zoomed right past the sweet spot of "just the right amount" of information, and now we're deep into "too much information!" and heading deeper at an ever faster rate.

So, yes, we could deliver the equivalent of a moving van full of 3-inch binders to a small leadership committee every day, and ask them to read that, digest it, and plan based on it -- but I think the problem is obvious. That will simply never work. There is not enough "bandwidth," regardless how "smart" those people are , even to read that much new information, let along digest it well enough to grasp the implications in "real-time."

All technology is doing is further swamping the system, and that will never get better.

Actually, it's getting worse, because of the problem I've talked about before that information is "context-sensitive" -- that is, the meaning of some "fact" is really only evident if you understand the context of the observation of that "fact. " You can't just snip a fact out of context, slide it over to a central place, and expect it to mean the same thing there that it meant in context.

We all are familiar with this problem, yet, socially, we keep on pretending that it is some sort of local breakdown and that this is not a universal law. The problem is that it is a universal law. Information is not only context dependent -- it gets worse. Information is basically "fractal", like an evergreen where every branch, if looked at by itself, is the same shape as the tree, and each of its branches is the same shape, etc. There is, in other words, an infinite amount of information buried behind every detail, and under every rock, and in every "can of worms."

To try to "consolidate" this information and avoid the "moving van" of binders, each level of management "condenses" the information and "simplifies it." That process, alas, is "lossy", meaning, frankly, it doesn't work most of the time. What gets lost in translation are the key "details" that seem unimportant but that add up to changing the entire conclusion and outcome.

So, this cannot be fixed by having "even smarter" people at the top of this pyramid of information distortion. By the time information gets to the "war room" all the relevant detail has been stripped out by well-meaning intermediaries. And, you can't skip the middle because the volume of detail is too much to handle, again regardless how smart you are.

So, what to do? The only way to deal with this is to realize that the concept of central planning and central "control" is fatally flawed, and to push decision making outward, and delegate it down to as close to the decision as possible, where it still makes sense.

So, we find in The Toyota Way, an emphasis on Genchi Genbutsu, or "go down and look for yourself, because whatever they told you is going on left out something important that will change your decision once you see it."

This is not because the people "at the top" are not smart -- it's because "smart" doesn't matter if you were handed the wrong problem to work on, and the wrong facts about it to use.

It is what is known as a "system problem" and it is "structural." It will not go away with better information processing. The details cannot always be ignored. In fact, most of the time the details matter. Information is not "compressible" on the huge scale we're trying to operate on these days.

So, again, what to do? If central planners cannot plan actions, there is still one thing they can do, and that is to plan processes that, when distributed out, will result in coherent and successful action.

(Actually I think it's even one more step removed, and the best they can do is to plan processes that will lead to emergence of local processes that when carried out locally, times a billion, will result in correct and coherent action - even in the total absence of a "central plan." )

This is the problem that Computer Science is dealing with today, under the handle "emergent computing" or "evolutionary computing" or "swarm computing" or some such thing. This is the problem IBM has to solve for the "operating system" for their supercomputer (Big Blue?) that is really 860,000 computers consulting with each other about what each of them should do next.

So, the literature and research on this topic is buried in Computer Science, where managers and policy makers seldom tread.

The key take-away message, though, is that the problem for today, as viewed by Complex Systems people and Computer Scientists, is how to develop, discover, or evolve processes that lead to processes that lead to coherent adaptive action of the whole swarm.

Interestingly, as I understand it, that is largely the central focus as well of the Baha'i Faith, which focuses on finding what processes lead to the emergence of locally relevant decision-making processes that still combine and work together instead of fragmenting so that the whole thing hangs together with central unity and yet the power of local eyes dealing with local issues, while percolating larger issues upwards and getting guidance on those downward.

This is the exact same focus that the Institute of Medicine has realized needs to be done to make health care safer, as described in "Crossing the Quality Chasm" -- local teams, which they call "microsystems", have to be realized and empowered to be self-managing based on real-time local information and feedback -- while, at the same time, still participating in larger scale coherence that can follow patients and patient care as it crosses from one such team to the next.

And, this is the same focus that Public Health has, as I learned at Johns Hopkins over the last few years. Aid and support for any group, whether teen-smokers in some rich suburb, or indigenous people in some remote country, has to be "culturally relevant" and rooted in local action, or it will suffer "tissue rejection" and be thrown out as soon as the intervention is over.

Central planning can realize there is, say, a problem with malaria that crosses teams, cultures, and nation-state boundaries - but the action has to be locally meaningful and sensible and fit with what else is going on locally, or it cannot work. Solutions cannot be imposed from above, as those that attempt to do so keep on discovering. Too much information is lost at the top.

I think these seemingly disparate groups need to pool their notes and cross-fertilize each other's thinking, because this is all the same problem surfacing in different places, manifesting itself in different worlds.

I guess if no one else is going to do that, or has already, it's time for me to start a "Wiki" so everyone can hang their fragment of knowledge on that framework and we can start to see what it adds up to, and where someone else has already solved that part of the problem.

Wade
(rainbow photo by me, on Flickr)

Science meets religion

Speakers at the National Press Club presented new initiatives by the Center for Inquire-Transnational, according to an article in [November 16,2006] Washington Post. I'll summarize the article here and go on below to comment on the philosophy.

Think Tank Will Promote Thinking
Advocates Want Science, Not Faith, at Core of Public Policy

By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 15, 2006; A19

Concerned that the voice of science and secularism is growing ever fainter in the White House, on Capitol Hill and in culture, a group of prominent scientists and advocates of strict church-state separation yesterday announced formation of a Washington think tank designed to promote "rationalism" as the basis of public policy.

The brainchild of Paul Kurtz, founder of the Center for Inquiry-Transnational, the small public policy office will lobby and sometimes litigate on behalf of science-based decision making and against religion in government affairs.

The announcement was accompanied by release of a "Declaration in Defense of Science and Secularism," which bemoans what signers say is a growing lack of understanding of the nature of scientific inquiry and the value of a rational approach to life.

"This disdain for science is aggravated by the excessive influence of religious doctrine on our public policies," the declaration says. "We cannot hope to convince those in other countries of the dangers of religious fundamentalism when religious fundamentalists influence our policies at home."

"Unfortunately, not only do too many well-meaning people base their conceptions of the universe on ancient books -- such as the Bible and the Koran -- rather than scientific inquiry, but politicians of all parties encourage and abet this scientific ignorance," reads the declaration, which was signed by, among others, three Nobel Prize winners.

Kurtz, ...said the methods of science,..., "are being challenged culturally in the United States today as never before."

Several speakers also had strong words for the media, ...

Lawrence M. Krauss, an author and theoretical physicist at Case Western Reserve University, said the scientific community has done a "poor job" of explaining its logic and benefits to the public....

The goals of the new group are to establish relationships with sympathetic legislators, provide experts to give testimony before Congress, speak publicly on issues when they are in the news, and submit friend-of-the-court briefs in Supreme Court cases involving science and religion. The Center for Inquiry-Transnational, a nonprofit organization, is funded by memberships.

=================
My analysis of that:

There are at least three hypotheses in contention in the policy arena:
1) All religion is bunk and should be replaced by science
2) All science is bunk and should be replaced by religion
3) Science and religion are compatible

The "Center for Inquiry - Transnational" seems to be firmly in position #1.

Position #2 is subdivided into incompatible parts by actually being
2) All science (and also your religion) is bunk and should be replaced by (my) religion.

Position #3 is also subdivided into two distinct cases
3a) -- Separate but equal: so long as religion stays in its place, and science stays in its place, and the two never meet in the middle, they are "compatible". A significant number of researchers and scientists are in this camp.
3b) -- ultimately compatible: there is only one reality which has multiple valid views, the "incompatibility" between religion and science is largely due to misunderstanding, and religion(s) and science need to be brought together and reworked into a new paradigm that embraces both.

Position #3 is certainly is my own working hypothesis and is the way I understand the Baha'i Faith as well. I present this here less as an advertisement and more to make the case that "religion" is perfectly capable of embracing multiple viewpoints and scientific principles, and does not automatically equate to "fanatic" or "closed-minded" or "intolerant."

We need to distinguish, as it were "the baby" and "the bathwater."

Baha'i Social principles include:

• full equality between women and men in all departments of life and at every level of society.
• harmony between science and religion as two complementary systems of knowledge that must work together to advance the well-being and progress of humanity.
• the elimination of all forms of prejudice.
• the establishment of a world commonwealth of nations.
• recognition of the common origin and fundamental unity of purpose of all religions.
• spiritual solutions to economic problems and the removal of economic barriers and restrictions.
• the abolition of extremes of wealth and poverty.

One of the most insidious forms of prejudice is racism, about which the Baha'is stated position is:

Racism is the most challenging issue confronting America. A nation whose ancestry includes every people on earth, whose motto is E pluribus unum, whose ideals of freedom under law have inspired millions throughout the world, cannot continue to harbor prejudice against any racial or ethnic group without betraying itself.

The nature of "competing" versus "complementary" views

Let me bring this topic back to "systems thinking," the theme of this weblog. It is generally recognized in software systems analysis that most complex systems are larger than the human brain can comprehend in a single view or perspective.

Here's a quote from a current best practices technical textbook by Nick Rozanski and Eoin Woods, entitled Software Systems Architecture - Working with Stakeholders Using Viewpoints and Perspectives (Addison-Wesley, 2005) :

If you read the more recent literature on software architecture, one of the first useful discoveries you will make is the concept of an architectural view. An architectural view is a description of one aspect of a system's architecture and is an application of the timeless problem-solving principle of "divide and conquer." By considering a system's architecture through a number of distinct views, you can understand, define, and communicate a complex architecture in a partitioned fashion and thus avoid overwhelming your readers with it's overall complexity.... Using viewpoints and views to guide the architecture definition process is a core theme of this book.

Many people are working right now on the problems we've created for ourselves by partitioning the scientific viewpoint of the world into silos which may seldom speak with each other. A major axis along which such silo-building has occured is the scale of activity within life on the earth. So we have cellular scientists, and tissue scientists and individual-being studying scientists and those that study small groups of people and those that study huge collections of people. It's increasingly clear that public health problems cross those artificial historical divisions.

Until recently, scientists who dealt with parts of reality that could be studied in isolation (with open causal pathways and no feedback) couldn't even comprehend or tolerate the work of scientists who deal with parts of reality that cannot be studied in isolation (with complex systems, intractable feedback). The whole nature of "causality" and "the scientific method" are being revamped and revitalized to deal with complex systems. Let's see where that gets us.

The R21 research RFA I mentioned in an earlier post (Houston, we have another problem!) is an effort precisely to cross those artificial barriers between models of the world at different scales and levels of abstraction.

Earlier this week, the National Institutes of Health (in the U.S.)
announced the availability of $3M to fund approximately 10 projects
designed to facilitate "Interdisciplinary Research via Methodological
and Technological Innovation in the Behavioral and Social Sciences."
Complete details about the grant program are available online at:
http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-RM-07-004.html

In some ways all I'm saying is that, if you keep going up in scale, you'll come to a scale where issues commonly termed "religious" or possibly "theological" are the current common way of modeling and investigating and understanding what mankind has observed about itself over millenia.

It is not surprising that the tools, concepts, and approaches are different from those used by civil engineers. Sociologists and psychologists and biologists disagree all the time. That doesn't say anything about whether the data are ultimately compatible in a more comprehensive model.

We have all heardthe story of the blind men who encounter an elephant, with one finding the tail, one finding a leg, one finding the ear, and arguing about whether they have come across a
huge rope, or a tree, or a huge blanket, or whatever.

What's really pivotal here is that these differences do not automatically make the viewpoints incompatible. "Incompatible" would mean that the viewpoints cannot be reconciled into being fully valid points in a larger picture. The viewpoints of the elephant can be reconciled, and must be, if one is to understand what an "elephant" is.

The question of incompatible is this: after accounting for the different observers' perspectives and viewpoints, are the observations still irreconcilably different?

Humans are not born understanding that others see the world differently than they do. Two very hard facts to accept are (1) sometimes both viewpoints are "right", and (2) sometimes the other person's viewpoint is "right" and your own, regardless how obviously true it is to you, is wrong.

Some of this accounting for viewpoint or "frame" or "reference frame" or "perspective" is something we do every day. If I look at people in the distance, I could say - "Look, people get smaller as they move farther away from me." Then other people could say "No, you're wrong, you get smaller as you move away from me!" Possibly they could fight a war in which "size matters" and battle over who it is that "get's smaller". In point of fact, of course, no one "gets smaller" they just "look smaller".

Why discarding "religion" as a whole is a very bad idea:

Actually, it's ironic that many scientists, who spend all day trying to isolate their work from the rest of reality in order to study it, now abruptly seem to realize that science itself is a social activity and only takes place in a social context.

Yes, religion and spirituality are similar to gasoline and can alternately blow up in your face, or move your fleet of automobiles. The recent work in top-performing organizations, and high-reliability organizations, all point to a need for some key traits to make them work: honesty, integrity, and compassion - variables that religions have kept central for thousands of years, despite their having "no place" in science as it was practiced. "Scientific" and machine-based models of humans, business, and commerce have resulted in as much human carnage as spiritually based models - more, in fact, when the destructive power of mankind was amplified and the integrative, compassionate side demeaned and neglected.

In fact, isn't it precisely because "science" has built huge new technologies of mass destruction and climate change, but neglected the equivalent tools of reintegration and wholeness preached by religion, that we now face the prospect of demolishing our entire planet?

I'd argue that our best route is not to despise and discard religions of the world, but to understand what it is they were trying to tell us and ask ourselves if that's not something we need to hear.

[originally posted 11/16/06 on my other weblob, cscwteam.blogspot.com ]

Two more arguments for unity

I discussed in an earlier post some arguments for why it may be a bad idea to put off efforts to deal with large-scope problems "until we have all the smaller-scope ones completed."

This, again, is flying in the fact of exactly the opposite trend among many business leaders, who have jettisoned concern about long-range planning, or else reduced it to a horizon of 3 months and call that "long-range". And, it flies in the fact of advice from many PhD advisors, who try to train their students to focus on smaller, shorter-term, more "realistic" problems.

The implicit sense is that the total energy and effort required to complete a task gets larger as the scale of the activity gets broader. In mathematical terms, it is assumed that effort to do a credible and useful job is a "monotonically increasing function of scope."

I completely disagree with that, and feel that by the same logic, no one should study astronomy, or even make a map of the stars, until we understand atoms perfectly. Or, perhaps, no one should study sociology and government until we understand everything there is to know about individual people.

It seems obvious, on reflection, that we can learn a lot about people by observing precisely the emergent phenomena around us. We can learn a lot about air by observing the weather, clouds, thunderstorms, and tornadoes that we would have a hard time "seeing" in a beaker of air, regardless how well and how long we studied it.

Also, we would have to explain why it is that it is far easier to describe the equations governing water in pipes in our plumbing than it is to describe molecular quantum mechanics. That, alone, seems to be a counter-example that disproves the hypothesis that larger things must be harder to get a useful handle on.

This is particularly true when large scale phenomena are actually causal, by all our standard definitions of that word, and the small scale phenomena of which the large is composed is not causal. Pretty much any electronic device is an example of that, where we rely on the statistical behavior of "current", without actually caring whether particular electrons move or kick back and chill, so long as most of them do what we expected every time.

Newtonian and Laplacian bases of description.

These are big words but relatively simple concepts. Newton described things in terms of points, so we might describe a ball's motion by listing where it was at time "t" for t=1, t=2, etc. to whatever precision we desire. To describe anything "large" in size therefore takes a "large"number of such measurements, and is correspondingly expensive and difficult.

Note importantly that the Newtonian method is always, literally, "full of holes" at the times we did not specify. It is an incomplete description, but works for many purposes, especially if we "interpolate" and "extrapolate" to "fill in the missing pieces" and "connect the dots."

That's not the only way we can describe the position of a ball. An alternative method, equally capable of being "complete" to whatever accuracy we desire, is to start by stating where the ball's average position will be over the time period of interest. That's the first data point.

The second data point could be the "standard deviation" or other measure of the variability of the ball's position over the time period of interest. (Or, we could pick as second and third data points the maximum and minimum positions of the ball over the time period of interest.)

Now here's an interesting thing. The way Newton described things, with three data points of the temperature today, we'd have the temperature at Midnight, at 12:01 AM, and at 12:02 AM., and not know very much that people care about, regardless how precisely those three measurements were taken. On the other hand, if I tell you the average temperature today will be 83, with a low of 55 and and a high of 92 F, I've also told you exactly 3 things, but they contain global information, not local information, and are way more helpful to you in selecting
clothes to wear, etc.

This is another counter-example, where a global measure is actually far easier and more useful than an arbitrarily precise local measure.

The specification of something, starting with the "low frequency, large scale" average color, then adding successively higher frequency variations around that base color, is basically how the jpeg images are encoded. Again, if a progressive jpeg is downloaded, you may be able to see in the first few seconds that it's not what you want as it emerges from the mist, and move on to something else. Meanwhile, viewers of TIFF images, are waiting for the top row of pixels to arrive, then the second entire row., then the third entire row, etc. You could need to download most of the picture to see what it is and whether you want it.

JPEG's can be arbitrarily precise, as precise as TIFF images, but it is seldom necessary for what humans do with images.

All the above is one set of arguments for why "large scale" properties are no harder than "small scale ones", and are often easier, and should not be neglected just because they are "large."

And, for phenomena that are "context dependent", as so much is, it may be far more valuable to us to get the first few "moments" of a distribution (the average, the standard deviation, etc.)
than to get the first few data points of the time-series. So, it can be far faster for many real decisions we need to make.

And, in physics, there are conserved properties such as "total energy" and "total momentum" that don't care at all how these rearrange themselves at the local internal level, so long as the overall total remains constant as seen from outside.

A completely different case for working from the top-down, instead of the bottom up, is called precisely that - "top down design" and "top down computer programming". A few hundred thousand person years of experience programming have led experts to believe that it is much more effective to describe a problem starting at the top, in very broadest terms with the least depth, and work our way "down" into successively more detail -- than it is to go the other way.

The other way, bottom up, in fact, is viewed as the major source of time-consuming "bugs" and conceptual errors that are very hard to resolve and hard to locate. In fact, if an organization ever gets an "Escher waterfall" shape in place, and realizes it is flawed, they might simply choose to live with the pain of the flaw, because of the amount that has been vested in "getting the pieces right" so far, the pieces that everyone has adapted to and is willing to accept as "the devil we know" rather than "starting over." At that point, as Zorba the Greek might say, we have "the full catastrophe" of a flawed design that no one wants to let go of, even though it is demonstrably broken.

With top-down design, the details rest on the the larger and larger contexts, not vice versa.
This is great, because the things most likely to change are the details, not the largest contexts.
If we rested everything on the details, every time a detail changed we'd have to redo the entire program. If we rest on top-down hierarchy of contexts, usually all but the very last few, the most detailed, remain constant over the life of the program, and the amount of change to code required is minimized. Most of the code, the upper levels, remains stable and validated and doesn't need to be touched. In the "bottom up" world, if you change one detail, you probably need to rewrite everything.

So, what I'm arguing is that these principles seem to apply as well to descriptions and measurements of our social organizations. Top down metrics may be much easier to do and reveal everything we need to know much faster than trying to get a huge number of detailed data points at the bottom levels.

In my mind, then, the mathematics and science argue strongly for working top down, and getting the large conceptual pieces resolved before worrying about the details, not the other way around. This progression seems, also, to match up with what Fisher and Shapiro are arguing in "Getting to Yes", that our problems only seem intractable because we're trying to resolve them at the most detailed level of "positions" when we could and should move up a few levels to "interests", where it is far more likely that we can find common ground.

For these reasons, from the discussion of fraying and gaps in human responsibility of synthesized tasks, and many others, I urge exploration of the "larger issues" at least in parallel with the "smaller" ones.

There are two final reasons I'll add to the mix.

First, although scientists tend to forget it, the entire enterprise of science is a social entity, and, as scientists seem always shocked to rediscover, the enterprise rests on a political and social matrix in which it is embedded.

Put most simply, if the social interests and the scientific interests clash too much, it is the scientists who will be out of jobs, not the society. If the society collapses politically, or has a global thermonuclear war or global biological war, the rest of science becomes moot. It doesn't matter how precise you are when you're dead.

There is, in other words, some timetable, some urgency, to getting sufficient data together to make some very large, very important decisions that will need to be made soon, that will dramatically effect us all. A response to the global rising epidemic of drug-resistant Tuberculosis is one, and what trade off civil liberties should have versus the rights of "the public" to be protected from people who are carrying infectious diseases. Ditto for AIDS.
What we should do about the "middle east problem" is another.

We don't have time for Science to analyze molecules sufficiently well to be able to tell us who to vote for in 2008, and that won't happen regardless how long we wait. The data and factors and variables of interest to us don't even exist at the molecular level. The universe is not deterministic upwards, as physics has shown us finally.

So, if we have some hard, global decisions coming up, we cannot wait for a bottom-up assembly of concepts and fragments of knowledge to succeed, because even if it were possible to happen, which it seems not to be, it would take "longer than we have."

We have, maybe, a decade or two to decide our fate, in some rather permanent and irreversible ways.

Given all the above, this argues that at least some effort should be given to looking for a "top down" approach to understanding how things work and what our options are. In that conclusion, I find myself in complete agreement with the teachings of the Baha'i Faith, which I will close with, as quotes from http://www.bahai.org.

But First, Unity

Is unity a distant ideal to be achieved only after the other great problems of our time have been resolved?

Bahá’u’lláh says the opposite is the case. The disease of our time is disunity. Only after humanity has overcome it will our social, economic, political, and other problems find solution.

Today, several million people around the world are discovering what He means. We invite you to explore His message with us.

I didn't set out to "prove" that the Baha'i's are "right" and that is not why I raise the issue now. I raise it because the group has been focused for 150 years on precisely this core issue of "unity in diversity", the one that the rest of academia is finally recognizing, and the group has studied first hand by direct experience what it takes to make that work in various parts of this actual planet we live on. That experience is hard-won and we don't have time to replicate it.

In that regard, it seems "due diligence" to at least read what they have to say.

W.

Spiritual solutions for technical problems

If we reframe an intractible "technical" problem as a "spiritual" problem, it can reveal a hidden solution.

Here's an example. I worked in a lab once where we had special glass vials we needed to do our tests. The supplier was back-ordered over 3 months and we ran out and were stopped cold. So, this was clearly a "technical problem." Then I found out that there were crates of these vials 40 feet away in the next lab down the hallway. But, we weren't allowed to use those, because that researcher had a long-standing gripe with out lab's boss over some incident 10 years prior, and they weren't on talking terms.

The point is, solving the underlying spiritual problem of lack of reconciliation of these two researchers was an alternative way to get our lab functioning again.

This is not an isolated case. In fact, when you think about it, there are many "techical" and "economic" problems in our own lives that would go away if we addressed some interpersonal spiritual issues that are in the way. I hate to think of what fraction of corporate and national resources are spent trying to make it possible for us to avoid facing our broken personal relationships and dysfunctional organizations.

What brought this to mind this morning was an article in the New York Times on new $400 antennas that increase your cell phone's reception.

Coaxing More Bars Out of That Cellphone
New York Times
March 1, 2007

Garbled conversations and dropped calls are the bane of cellphone users — not to mention the dead zones where calls cannot go through to begin with. But some recent products are designed to overcome these annoyances, improve cellular reception, and, in some cases, even extend coverage....

So, probably, if everyone spent an additional $400, we could get better reception. That would be the "technical solution."

Take a minute before rushing on and consider what a "spiritual solution" would be. Hint - it would involve cooperation instead of fragmentation between people, with each person trying to reinvent the wheel on their own.

Here's another clue. Glance at my prior post
One laptop per child - grid computing for the poor.

The New York Times covered this yesterday (november 30,2006) in an article "For $150, Third world laptop stirs a Big Debate" by John Markoff. Compare to "Microsoft would put Poor Online by Cellphone", also by John Markoff, Jan 30, 2006.

According to Markoff's article yesterday "Five countries — Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria and Thailand — have made tentative commitments to put the computers into the hands of millions of students, with production in Taiwan expected to begin by mid-2007." Much of the rest of the article deals with pricing, technology, and competing views about the impact of this computer on education.

That misses the most important aspect of this, in my mind, which Markoff mentions near the end of the piece:

One factor setting the project apart from earlier efforts to create inexpensive computers for education is the inclusion of a wireless network capability in each machine.

The project leaders say they will employ a variety of methods for connecting to the Internet, depending on local conditions. In some countries, like Libya, satellite downlinks will be used. In others, like Nigeria, the existing cellular data network will provide connections, and in some places specially designed long-range Wi-Fi antennas will extend the wireless Internet to rural areas.

When students take their computers home after school, each machine will stay connected wirelessly to its neighbors in a self-assembling “mesh” at ranges up to a third of a mile. In the process each computer can potentially become an Internet repeater, allowing the Internet to flow out into communities that have not previously had access to it.

The distinction between "computers" and "cell phones" has become almost irrelevant these days, so what does this suggest.

It suggests that a different way of connecting cell-phones to the national grid would be to have them able to self-assemble a communications grid, in real-time, borrowing a little spare capacity from any other phone or computer in the neighborhood.

In other words, I don't really need my phone to be in line-of-sight to a cell-phone tower if the phones cooperate and silently set up their own relay chain behind the scenes. My phone can talk to my upstairs neighbor, which talks to the phone 2 floors above that, all the way to the top of the building, where someone's phone can talk to another distant building's phones which in turn are in line of sight of the cell-phone tower on the other side of the mountain. Voila, I have a path for my call.

We don't need new $400 antennas for each cell phone - we only need the existing cell phones to talk to each other.

Aside from finding a clear path, the phones could also automatically deliver much more power. This is the sort of thing that radio astronomers use, to connect 20 different radio antenna "dishes" across the world into a single virtual antenna that can be "virtually" pointed directly at the target, delivering thousands of times the effective power because it all goes the right direction instead of off into space.

The downside is that different phones and phone systems and even people would have to be willing to let "their" phone participate as part of a larger social grid. The upside is that this would work even in some Katrina type disaster, and auto-assemble a pathway from the existing phones to a cell-tower or satellite that could relay calls out of the disaster area.

The changes are essentially all in software and procedures. Probably this could be done with existing phones today, if we, collectively, decided that's what we wanted to do.

Without a single new cell-phone tower, or a single dollar being spent for new hardware or phones, everyone in the country could get 100 times better service.

There are no "technical" reasons we couldn't do that.
There are only "spiritual" reasons we put up with that make us dysfunctional.

This kind of problem is very widespread, especially in the USA today, where cooperation and collaboration seem to have gone the way of the phonograph in many places. We're all working overtime, way more hours than any other country, trying to make the payments on purely technical solutions that we mistakenly think we need to solve our issues.

Quoting my earlier post, looking at the chaos caused by lack of communications following Katrina in New Orleans,

By W. David Stephenson International Conference on Complex Systems June 26, 2006

So we know that emergent behavior is possible even under the trying circumstances of a terrorist attack or a natural disaster.

... Equally important but less understood by decision makers, unlike landline phones or the broadcast media, these devices are themselves increasing networked, self-organizing, and self-healing. In many cases, such as mesh networks that were originally developed for the military in battlefield conditions and now are being used by civilians, the networks don't require any kind of external networking: simply turn them on and the network self organizes.

I am convinced that such a networked homeland security strategy is feasible today, using existing technology and requiring much less time to create and deploy than some of the costly, dedicated emergency communications systems government is creating. Equally important, by facilitating those three qualities needed in a crisis: flexibility, robustness, and self-organizing, it could transform the general public from hopeless victims, waiting for aid that may never come, into self-reliant components of the overall response. To paraphrase Dr. King, which will it be, chaos, or community? [emphasis added]

On a larger scale, communications is just one problem we saw in New Orleans. Tens of thousands of cars left the city with one passenger, while a hundred thousand people were stranded without transportation. Food and water were hoarded not shared.

One explicit principle of the Baha'i faith is where this line of thinking ends up, and it's a lesson
that Michigan and the USA need to pay attention to. The economic downturns can be viewed
as "technical" problems, yes, but that hides the much closer, much cheaper solutions, that don't
require new technology.

PRINCIPLES OF THE BAHÁ'Í FAITH

#10 -
A spiritual solution to the economic problem.



I'm reminded of the monkey traps used in some countries. A cocoanut has a hole cut into the side, just large enough for a monkey's paw to fit into it. Then the cocoanut is chained to the ground, and some delicious nuts put inside it. Then we wait. The monkey comes along, smells the nuts, reaches in, grabs a handful, and then can't get it's overstuffed hand back out the hole. At that point people can just walk over and drop a net on the monkey, who will refuse to let go of the nuts that are "so close."

Americans have this fixation on having to fix everything with individual solutions - everyone has to have their own car, their own house, their own everything -- and even the phones or computer lines, if not being used, can't be shared with others for a whole variety of invented "legal" reasons.

There's a lesson here. In our case, it's not some guy with a net coming after us, it's the entire economy going south on us, loss of jobs, etc. Within each company, there's a collapse of innovation, all to protect this competitive concept and a myth of rugged individualism, that probably was never true. Like our SUV's that dress like they're going off-road, but never do, we have these attitudes that dress like we don't need anyone else to survive, but we do.

If we admitted that, and went from there, most of the rest of these problems could be solved. It's like everyone is trying to be the most fanatastic word or note in the universe, and forgetting that great books and great music need lots of different words and notes to work.

We need each other. We don't need more technology to make up for our lack of friends. We need to help each other learn how to make friends again. It seems to be a lost art for at least one in five people in the USA today. We should fix that, then see how much "depression" is left.