16 NOV 2017 by ideonexus
Understanding the Education Customer
VCs and entrepreneurs tend to be well educated. Well educated people think about education as an investment. You put as many of your resources in to an investment as you can. It may take 20 years to pay off, but if the return-on-investment is high (which it is for education) then you invest. This group of people — if you’re reading this, you fall into this group — generally understand that education is an investment, and as a result are price insensitive and will optimize for quality ... 1 
notes
notes10 MAR 2017 by ideonexus
Gamification Set Collection
I recently codeveloped a game with a colleague who teaches a course in global studies to advanced high school students. We called the game Global Shuffle, and it was meant to simulate two realities of the 21st century global marketplace. First, the developed world creates certain kinds of resources, and the developing world creates different resources. Though this is true, these resources relate to each other and have a reflexive quality; resources that are available or made in the developed ...Folksonomies: education gamification
Folksonomies: education gamification
1 notes
notes08 JUL 2016 by ideonexus
Perspectives of History
The trouble I think is that historians dont actually agree on much about those processes. The post-marxist school of thought sees history as a process of struggles over resources between interest groups. Foucaultians see history as a process born of the "techniques" of power the elites wield over the non elites, Traditional liberalism saw history as a Hegelian (Not to be confused with marxisms very different view) process of gradual movements towards technological, social and cultural perfec...Folksonomies: history perspective
Folksonomies: history perspective
1 notes
notes29 APR 2015 by ideonexus
Time is the Most Precious Commodity
Your Earth is a very small part of a very large industry. ... In your world, people are used to fighting for resources, like oil, minerals, or land. When you have access to the vastness of space, you realize that there's only one resource worth fighting over--even killing for--more time. Time is the singlemost precious commodity in the Universe. 1 notes
notes26 FEB 2014 by ideonexus
Science is Growing Bigger and Bigger
The history of physics is littered with unrealized grand experiments: old blueprints buried in file drawers, half-built machinery packed in crates, excavated earth filled with pooling rainwater—the detritus of Big Science. As the frontier of human knowledge pushes forward, so, too, does the cost and the complexity of further exploration. Telescopes grow larger. Space is probed at greater depths. Atomic particles are smashed more forcefully. Many scientific questions now demand resources tha... 1 notes
notesAnd in order to keep expanding it is requiring more and more collaboration between countries and more resources to build more and more epic experiments.
09 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Demographic-economic paradox
The demographic-economic paradox is the inverse correlation found between wealth and fertility within and between nations. The higher the degree of education and GDP per capita of a human population, subpopulation or social stratum, the fewer children are born in any industrialized country. In a 1974 UN population conference in Bucharest, Karan Singh, a former minister of population in India, illustrated this trend by stating "Development is the best contraceptive."[1]
The term "paradox" com... 1 notes
notesAs societies grow more developed, birthrates decrease, despite the increased resources.
16 NOV 2013 by ideonexus
Rule #1 Expand
Well, first thing’s first: we need to expand. We need to create a second base, and a third, and a fourth. We need to use our resources to build more resource-gathers, and fast. The enemy scouts are likely approaching already.
How might we do that? Well, there are only so many ways to make money in this world. We already have a day-job, which will act kind of like our home base, so now we need to expand to other types of revenue-producing activities that will serve as our satellite bases. T...
2 This is sort of the strategy I take to my online persona, publishing blog posts, guest articles, CC books, etc, etc, creating an expansion of content to improve my online presence and reputation.
03 OCT 2013 by ideonexus
Humanity has Reached the Hatching Point
To begin our position-fixing
aboard our Spaceship Earth we must first acknowledge that the
abundance of immediately consumable, obviously desirable or
utterly essential resources have been sufficient until now to allow us
to carry on despite our ignorance. Being eventually exhaustible and
spoilable, they have been adequate only up to this critical moment.
This cushion-for-error of humanity's survival and growth up to now
was apparently provided just as a bird inside of the egg is provided
wi... 1 notes
notesThinking of our Earth as an egg, we have been living on the yolk so far. We are reaching the point, by burning our fossile fuels off and exceeding the production capacity of our agriculture, where our intellect must launch us into the stars.
13 MAY 2013 by ideonexus
Public Policy Shouldn't Bet on Science
You ask whether, given a choice, I would put more resources into space or AI. My answer is that either choice would be stupid. Politicians always want to make such choices too soon, because they imagine they can pick winners. Usually they pick losers. The only way to improve the chances for finding winners is to keep all the choices open and try them all. That is particularly true for space and AI, which are not really competing with each other. They are done by different kinds of people in d...It will always bet wrong. All science should be open, free, and supported.
18 MAY 2012 by ideonexus
The Importance of Studying the Brain
Whoever would not remain in complete ignorance of the resources which cause him to act; whoever would seize, at a single philosophical glance, the nature of man and animals, and their relations to external objects; whoever would establish, on the intellectual and moral functions, a solid doctrine of mental diseases, of the general and governing influence of the brain in the states of health and disease, should know, that it is indispensable, that the study of the organization of the brain sho... 1 notes
notesIt is the only way to understand ourselves and many of the diseases that afflict us.
