June, 2008
Top 10 TED Talks
There’s a great highlights reel here with links to the top 10 most popular so far.…
National Popular Vote
Yesterday I blogged about personal vote verification. At the group level, I recommend supporting the National Popular Vote. While most people (70%) favor a popular vote for president, the U.S. Constitution calls for an electoral college system. The National Popular Vote movement is extremely clever in that it doesn’t require a constitutional change:
…Under the U.S. Constitution, the states have exclusive and plenary (complete) power to allocate their electoral votes, and may change their state laws concerning the awarding of their electoral votes at any time. Under the National Popular Vote bill, all of the state’s electoral votes would be awarded to the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The bill would take effect only when enacted, in identical form, by states possessing a majority of the electoral votes—that is, enough electoral votes to elect a President (270 of 538).
Crowdsourcing Election Verification
I take it as accepted fact at this point that the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election would have gone to John Kerry if everyone who attempted to vote that day were able to and all the votes were counted correctly. Here’s the the Wikipedia entry on the subject and here’s a documentary to get you started.…
TED Talk: Susan Blackmore
Memes and “temes”
Apropos of Kevin’s post yesterday on the “Singularity“, we need to be taking more seriously cultural agency (which includes technological and socio-technological agency):…
Complex Systems Defend Themselves
I’ve talked on here about the importance of taking seriously the notion of agency as it applies to systems other than biological. In reading a recent Wired retrospective on what they called wrong, I was struck by feeling that their error was the same in all three cases, and that is underestimating the degree to which complex systems will defend themselves in the face of attack as if they were living, breathing organisms.…