Lifeboat Foundation

I was a guest on the Robot Overlordz podcast again recently, and was asked about my post on Medium for KnowledgeWorks called “Preparing for Hybrid Schools and Jobs.” The conversation with Mike and Matt took some interesting turns, as always, and they got me thinking about some really important questions when it comes to blockchain and society, namely: assuming blockchain lives up to it’s reputation as a ‘truth machine,’ as I refer to it in my post, or a ‘revolution,’ as the Tapscotts say, why is there now a need for a revolutionary technology to enhance trust?

Although blockchain has captured the attention of the financial, management consulting and consumer goods industries, it hasn’t quite taken hold in education yet. KnowledgeWorks has published a fantastic report on the possibilities. I suggest in my post that the rise of hybrid jobs will generate support for hybrid schooling, and blockchain may be the technology that is best suited to track and communicate qualifications. The World Economic Forum said it best: “Farewell Job Title, Hello Skill Set.” If we are to be evaluated on our skills and experience, we must have some reliable way of guarding and transmitting that information.

But why is it that we need to enhance trust among students and teachers, employees and employers? I think that the facts that college students (some who didn’t even graduate) owe massive student loans, though worker’s wages have gone stagnant, play into this tension. How can students trust schools to provide the education they need, considering the high cost and the gamble that it may never really be recouped?

We are beginning to see slight signals that things are changing, at least a little, on the remuneration side, and it’s possible that a truth machine could help restore trust to hierarchical relationships (student/university and employee/employer) that are extremely out of balance. But what is at risk in assuming a technology can reverse human corruption?

Powered by developments in exponential technologies, the cost of housing, transportation, food, health care, entertainment, clothing, education and so on will fall, eventually approaching, believe it or not, zero.

People are concerned about how AI and robotics are taking jobs, destroying livelihoods, reducing our earning capacity, and subsequently destroying the economy.

In anticipation, countries like Canada, India and Finland are running experiments to pilot the idea of “universal basic income” — the unconditional provision of a regular sum of money from the government to support livelihood independent of employment.

Continue reading “Why the Cost of Living Is Poised to Plummet in the Next 20 Years” »

NSF’s mission is to advance the progress of science, a mission accomplished by funding proposals for research and education made by scientists, engineers, and educators from across the country.

Over the past several years, Northwestern Engineering’s Michael Jewett did the seemingly impossible. He overcame the critical barrier to making mutant ribosomes, the core catalyst in cells that are responsible for life.

Now, with funding from the Department of Defense’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiatives (MURI) program, Jewett is ready to take this research to the next level. Along with a multi-school team, he plans to use engineer and repurpose the ribosome to make new kinds of polymers for flow batteries.

“We are in a new era of biomaterial design,” Jewett said. “So far, the ribosome has been this untouchable biomolecular machine — one that we couldn’t engineer or modify. Now, armed with recent advances in our ability to construct new versions, new applications may only be limited by our imagination.”

Continue reading “Repurposing the ribosome for synthetic biology” »

NSF’s mission is to advance the progress of science, a mission accomplished by funding proposals for research and education made by scientists, engineers, and educators from across the country.

Roger Dumoulin-White, president and CEO of Theralase Technologies, explains his company’s two divisions: the currently operating therapeutic laser division and the anti-cancer division. The company’s TLC-1000 laser is used for pain relief, tissue healing and more, and upwards of 1,200 medicial facilities worldwide use the device. The next-generation TLC-2000 laser was recently FDA-approved. At this time, Theralase Technologies is conducting clinical trials for photodynamic compounds that help to destroy cancer cells.

Click play to learn how these new technologies have the potential to revolutionize cancer treatment.

Entrepreneur Network is a premium video network providing entertainment, education and inspiration from successful entrepreneurs and thought leaders. We provide expertise and opportunities to accelerate brand growth and effectively monetize video and audio content distributed across all digital platforms for the business genre.

Continue reading “This Company Users Lasers to Relieve Pain and Treat Cancer” »

“Appearances have always played a much more important part than reality in history, where the unreal is always of greater moment than the real.“
–Gustav LeBon, The Crowd (1895)

I’ve gotten no substantive response to my last post on vaccine safety– neither in the comments, nor the TruthSift diagram, nor anywhere else, nor have the papers I submitted to two medical journals… but I have gotten emails telling me I’m delusional and suggesting I seek psychiatric attention. And this of course is integral to the explanation of how such delusions as vaccine safety persist so widely when it is so demonstrably a delusion: the majority who believe the majority must be right because its the majority are emotionally unwilling to confront the evidence. They assume the experts have done that, and they rely on the experts. But the experts assume other experts have been there. Ask your Pediatrician if he’s personally read Bishop et al and formulated an opinion on vaccine aluminum. Neither has the National Academy, except perhaps their members have and decided, perhaps tacitly, not to review the subject. Their decision not to review the animal literature was not tacit, they said they explicitly decided to omit it, although elsewhere they say they couldn’t find human evidence that addressed the issues. So everybody is trusting somebody else, and nobody has picked up the ball. And can you blame them? Because when I pick up the ball, what I receive in return is hate mail and people’s scorn. The emotional response cuts off any possible inspection of the logic.

On most questions where a majority with authority is facing a minority of dissenters or skeptics, the majority is delusional.
In other words, you are living in the matrix; much of what you and people believe is fundamentlaly wrong.

Reason 1, as above, is that the majority forms its view by circular reasoning, and rejects any attempt at logical discussion without considering it seriously, so it is prone to delusion.
Once the crowd concluded vaccines are safe and effective, for example, the question of whether the aluminum is damaging can apparently no longer be raised (even as more gets added to vaccines). And when I or others try to raise it, we are scorned and hated, and ineffectual in changing the opinion supported by circular reasoning. When new research papers appear that call it into question, they are ignored, neither cited in the safety surveys nor influencing medical practice in any way. This paragraph is all simple reporting of what has repeatedly happened.

Continue reading “3 Reasons You Are Living in the Matrix / How to Make a Red Pill” »

Personally, I would love to see a majority of the elementary schools expose more children to robotics, Biocomputing, etc.

DRONE technology and other burgeoning fields beckon for Hunter kids.

Good work by Microsoft.

Autism is a spectrum disorder, meaning not all people that meet the classification have identical behaviors. Some of these folks are very functional, while others may struggle more to socialize, or not be able to hold jobs.

Continue reading “Microsoft uses BBC Micro Bit and virtual reality to prepare autistic kids for jobs” »