September 2008
Superstruct - The Gupta Option
The Gupta Option is the result of five years of operations from a one man think tank operating in much the same general spirit as Buckminster Fuller: how much impact can a single person have on global issues. The Superstruct crisis runs right into the Gupta Option predictive framework with results that could change everything.
OUTLAW PLANET
In 2019, the mobile internet and sensor networks we rely on to hold our societies together are being hacked, griefed, and gamed.
CheapID provides a totally private and secure global biometrics network that allows anybody to get a global passport which is totally anonymous until they break the law. A lot of online services now require a CheapID card to be lodged with them before they will do business with you, but the privacy is secure, right? Some people say that the global Identity Services Architecture which now runs alongside the credit card system is dangerously oppressive, but others look at the revolution that it causes in the lives of the poor through access to capital and say “cheap at twice the price.”
GENERATION EXILE
In 2019, our neighbors are climate refugees and economic collapse victims who are swarming the planet, looking for a place to live.
Hundreds of millions of hexayurts provide immediate emergency shelter for populations on the move, and because the building folds flat it can be transported on trucks with people as they relocate, much like the mongolian yurt it is based on. While concerns about huge tides of highly mobile refugees have turned out to be unfounded, the bottom continues to drop out of the global housing market as more and more people move off the grid. Simple portable utilities packages help keep the lights on and the water pure and the food cooked. For more details on infrastructure resilience in times of crisis, see the TIDES Packet (pages 26-35 particularly.) To understand the whole new generation approach to integrating disaster relief and development aid, you’ll need the Reykjavik Briefing which teaches a new approach to infrastructure design and development, among other things.
QUARANTINE
In 2019, Respiratory Distress Syndrome is here, and it’s not going anywhere. Outbreaks are just something we live with.
Health insurance on $10 per year helps deal with health care for the very poor, using the network and big statistical analysis tools. Severe Panflu Response Strategies addresses what to do in the worst-case pandemic scenarios, right into the territory you don’t even believe there are answers for. We pray that work will never be needed.
POWER STRUGGLE
In 2019, we’re all caught up in the “alternative fuel” wars as the world fights over what will take the place of oil.
Biofuels don’t turn out to be all that much of the global answer but the new generation solar panels continue to massively exceed expectations as they drop the price of daylight electricity to unprecedented lows all over the world, and help spur a distributed infrastructure revolution all over the planet.
RAVENOUS
In 2019, the food chain is broken. So we’re inventing new ways to feed ourselves.
The Global Swadeshi Movement continues to pioneer new approaches to agriculture that could double global food production using organic agriculture and satellite data.
OVERALL OUTCOME
The Unplugged continue to spread their ethos of high tech relocalization and extreme self-sufficiency globally. The underlying model, that we can find a Soft Development Path continues to keep the hope alive - that the developing world will steer around around the same pitfalls that are causing western society such terrible problems.
The future is a lot more complicated than anybody expected, but the power of every individual to contribute to saving the whole world get stronger with each passing decade.
Technorati Tags: 2019, superstruct, superstruct2019
Open Source Ecology - Factor E Farm update
Whoah. It’s a freaking open source tractor / rototiller / biodiesel generator…. working… running… for real.
CHECK IT OUT!
http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/?p=329 - and they need to raise some money to keep the work going, so send them some cash.
The Reykjavik Briefing
Clip from http://files.howtolivewiki.com/reykjavik_briefing/ - recommend watching it over there where there’s a proper picture of the diagram, and also a link to download the whole one hour briefing. Enjoy.
Oh My God brilliant infographics
the 20% dollar
I’m really scared about America if/when the dollar collapses.
How far does it have to go depends on how likely people think America is to pay its debts.
I just… shit. That was my country, my homeland, even if a series of regrettable events put me in Iceland. At some level I’ve always been an exiled American. That’s a mental position that’s slowly eroding with time and with the sheer unwillingness of the American people to get angry about the right things and ignore petty political bickering, but I still believe firmly in what the Revolution stood for, in what the Constitution represents, and in the greatness of spirit latent within the American people, wherever they may find themselves.
But all of that has been obscured by this filthy political process which has brought the best of the worst into positions of power, on the shoulders of people who would rather die than think - and do.
The wheel of the world has turned, and fortune’s favor has moved onwards, I fear, from the beacon of liberty. 200 years held aloft the torch, may it’s darkness be swiftly over and not too deep.
Good luck, America. Godspeed.
sort of fun - corporatized revolt parody site
You’ve got to be in the mood for this to find it amusing.
Tiny House Blog covers the Hexayurt
http://tinyhouseblog.com/yurts/the-hexayurt
Really nice piece, thank you!
Born to run: endurance running as a human evolutionary advantage
People are astonishingly successful endurance runners, “and I don’t think it’s just a fluke,” Lieberman says. He and Bramble argue that not only can humans outlast horses, but over long distances and under the right conditions, they can also outrun just about any other animal on the planet—including dogs, wolves, hyenas, and antelope, the other great endurance runners. From our abundant sweat glands to our Achilles tendons, from our big knee joints to our muscular glutei maximi, human bodies are beautifully tuned running machines. “We’re loaded top to bottom with all these features, many of which don’t have any role in walking,” Lieberman says. Our anatomy suggests that running down prey was once a way of life that ensured hominid survival millions of years ago on the African savanna.
Although Bramble has studied locomotion in animals ranging from tortoises to jackrabbits for 40 years, he was first tipped off to the hypothesis that humans were born to run by one of his students, David Carrier. In the 1970s, Carrier was assisting with Bramble’s studies of how dogs, horses, and people regulate breathing while running. A marathoner himself, Carrier began to wonder about the role of endurance running in human evolution. People, he noted, can shed heat quickly—not by panting, like most animals, but by perspiring through millions of sweat glands. A lack of fur also helps dissipate heat more quickly.
Still, Bramble eventually came to realize that people turn in remarkable performances. He once filmed a horse cantering, with Carrier running alongside at the same pace. The movie showed that Carrier’s legs were churning more slowly than the horse’s, which meant that the student’s strides had to be spanning more distance per step than the horse’s.
Although Carrier moved on to other research, Bramble grew convinced that his student had discovered something. During a visit to Harvard in 1991, Bramble encountered Daniel Lieberman, then an anthropology Ph.D. student, making a pig trot on a treadmill. To glean insights into how bones grow—and thus to better interpret fossilized human jaws and skulls—the student wanted to see whether the repeated impact of running would spur a thickening of the pig’s skull. “You know,” Bramble said, “that pig’s not holding its head still.” He went on to explain that adept runners like horses, dogs, and rabbits keep their noggins remarkably steady as they lope, thanks to an obscure bit of anatomy called the nuchal ligament. It’s a tendonlike band that links the head to the spine. People, he said, have a version of this band.
Rummaging through a collection of replicas of fossilized primate bones in a nearby lab, Bramble pointed out that the nuchal ligament leaves a trace—a delicate ridge—where it attaches at the base of the human skull. Then the scientists noticed the ridge in a pitted, yellowed skull of our 2-million-year-old relative Homo erectus—but not in older hominids known as australopithecines, who walked the earth as far back as 4.4 million years ago. “Holy moley!” Lieberman thought. “There’s something going on here, and what’s more, we might be able to study it in the fossil record.”
http://discovermagazine.com/2006/may/tramps-like-us
Health insurance for $10 per year using the network
Here’s the plan, in it’s simplest form: deploy medical expert systems using the cell phone network to help people make medical decisions. Use the ability to integrate data from each user into broad statistical patterns to improve the models and plot the progression of epidemics, for example. Then add bicycle-riding computer-aided pharmacists who prescribe basic medications and are paid for using very small health insurance premiums.
Now the detail!
1> Assemble global epidemiological data into a big database. Who gets sick where, what they get sick with, what happens to them. Data will be great in some places, crummy in others, we don’t care right now as long as an estimate of data quality is stored with the data.
2> Assemble simple guides on disease management and health maintenance, translate into 80 languages, including audio versions, and correlate with a symptom database to aid simple diagnosis.
3> From these two resources, assemble a simple (Baysian?) classifier for likely diseases and treatments given symptom input. Where additional questions can distinguish two potential conditions, flag.
4> Prune the tree of all dangerous treatments which have a low chance of success in the field, but keep things which cannot do harm if misapplied.
Result: a map of what’s going on out there, which can be prioritized by effectiveness of intervention and the number of people affected.
One area of this map is the “good intervention” area. This is the place where there are common diseases with effective interventions with low risks if you do something wrong. Typical cases might be non-insulin dependent diabetes, where simple lifestyle changes can have huge health effects. Diarrhea is another area where there’s an effective set of measures which are low risk.
Now crunch this into an expert system which is deployable on cell phones.
The expert system phones home, so the epidemiological database improves rapidly with time - the symptom data which is collected helps refine disease and mortality maps, but many of the illnesses reported cannot be effectively treated without material. The network alone cannot provide antibiotics, and knowing you are dying of a blood infection does not cure it.
However, even this basic system could save millions of lives a year and greatly increase general welfare where available.
The second advancement is the Simple Pharmacopeia. The WHO Essential Medicines List is a likely starting point. Here’s the modification.
1> Filter the drugs in the following ways - no need for refrigeration, no bad effects from over-prescription or likely abuse, less than $10 per course.
2> This probably gives a list of a couple of dozen drugs.
3> Prepare a training course and computer aided (expert system) prescribing guide. Data from this system drives both the logistics and also watches out for things like over / mis-prescription. Comparing all similar villages, one can spot people who’re mis-prescribing, or systemic failures in treatment protocols, lousy training and similar results. Think of the kind of monitoring fast food franchises do of franchise performance, but now make it much, much stronger because all this stuff is safety critical.
4> Villagers pay $10 per year for health insurance. One worker per 1000 villagers, say. Villagers report problems over the network (SMS today, tomorrow interactive diagnostic forms) and the health worker bicycles from village to village with a backpack full of drugs and diagnostic equipment (sugar test strips, pregnancy tests and so on.) They might even collect lab samples.
5> Each village may also have an old lady who gets free insurance for maintain a cell phone and knowing how to operate the expert system, knowing what words like “swelling” mean and how to take a pulse. Her primary job would be to get accurate data into the expert systems in advance of the more highly trained worker arriving, and critically she would be the person who’s job it would be to make people take their full course of antibiotics, by going to their house each morning, handing them their pill, and watching them take it. You can make sure she’s doing her job by, for example, getting her to take a picture of each person taking their pill or something if you’re paranoid, and maybe have a 2D barcode etched on each pill with a laser (in the future.)
6> When the health worker comes, they work through the expert system, doing diagnosis, and then offering whatever treatment they can. Their ability to do more sophisticated diagnosis is largely what drives their job - they can use a stethoscope fairly well, maybe identify where in the abdomen pain is, that kind of thing. All that goes into the machine, which suggests treatment where possible. Where nothing can be done at this level, it becomes a question of referral or palliative care.
7> Things like dentistry, which require special gear, are probably provided by a traveling service. I think there’s a ton of work to be done on low-cost dental technology, however, things like epoxy-based fillings which incorporate a bacteriocidal component to kill whatever is trapped under the filling, and possibly tooth extraction based on bonding things to the tooth to be pulled rather than using pliers.
8> Drugs are sold at no markup to the people who need them. Profit is made on the health cover, not the drug retail, which prevents people in the supply chain looking to make a profit by over-prescribing.
9> $10 per villager for 1000 people == $10,000 budget. $3000 for salary for the worker - this is a skilled job. $3000 for training and equipment and monitoring. $3000 for centralized services (the computer systems,) translations and so on. $1000 profit. 3 billion people on a few dollars a day, multiplied by $1 per person per year profit on health services equals $3bn a year or more in cold, hard cash. There’s room here for a whole new industry, and big business should be looking at this closely.
10> Birth control and sexual health services are a big part of this, but that’s one to discuss another day.
11> Environmental health services (public health, basically) is not a separate field in the developing world. The same health worker who looks in your ear is also the person who trains you how to wash your hands after emptying your composting toilet. It’s all one basic function: protection from illness.
12> The core of this service is accepting that the care is third rate from day one. People will die because we don’t carry the right drugs. They’ll die because the expert system diagnostics are only 80% in practice. They’ll die because the trained worker is sick that day and sends his brother. They’ll die because the software had bugs. We accept that for every ten lives saved, one to three are lost.
It’s this tolerance for a bad healthcare system which allows this system to work at all: you can’t provide 99.9% health care on $10 per year. But you can provide 80% health care, and right now, that’s far, far better access to medical support than the poor can get any other way.
I’m open to talk about this at any time to anybody: hexayurt@gmail.com
PS: a similar expert system plus big databases approach to pandemic flu care is also extremely plausible, and as the model is refined by measured performance (i.e. double blind trials conducted by giving different people different advice and seeing what happens to them) it might actually provide far better care for at least some patients than exposure to the overcrowded and collapsing pandemic-affected hospital environment. The ability to track disease progress through a population is a critical tool in fighting severe pandemics, and providing medical advice by machine helps keep people in their homes, which is critical.
Surveillance culture
Theres gotta be a record of you some place
You gotta be on somebodys books
The lowdown - a picture of your face
Your injured looksThe sacred and profane
The pleasure and the pain
Somewhere your fingerprints remain concrete
And its your face Im looking for on every streetA ladykiller - regulation tattoo
Silver spurs on his heels
Says - what can I tell you as I’m standing next to you
She threw herself under my wheels
Oh its a dangerous road
And a hazardous load
And the fireworks over liberty expode in the heat
And its your face I’m looking for on every streetA three-chord symphony crashes into space
The moon is hanging upside down
I dont know why it is I’m still on the case
Its a ravenous town
And you still refuse to be traced
Seems to me such a waste
And every victory has a taste that’s bittersweet
And it’s your face Im looking for on every street
Facebook, you know… who was that person at your party… big spiders that scrape it all into secret biometrics databases… how could it be otherwise, really, if the people who run that stuff are remotely rational.
Solution: humane control of those capabilities. They’re too powerful to allow knuckle draggers to run the show any more. We totally screwed up the nuclear weapon, and wound up putting the whole world at risk, and the same kind of thinking is going into combat robotics, nano-bio technology, and biometrics. That has to stop - we need productive, better alternatives, not this current vector towards destruction.