Recently there are increasing talks about the decline of an American "Empire" and a lot of speculations about the post-American world. The fact that we have witnessed increasingly chaotic world after the collapse of Soviet "Empire" while still USA was there to maintain order make these speculations interesting. The world that we live today has shrunk immensely since collapse of Soviet Union so in an increasingly interdependent and connected world, whatever would be the outcomes, all would be affected in many ways.... It is not necessary that we agree with these speculations but they are definitely interesting to learn about....
One thing that is missing in this talk (that you will notices) is that... while a lot of people talk about the role of USA and her allies in collapse of Soviet Union, who is then responsible for American Decline? In a uni-polar world and in absence of a real contestant, the wrong policies have been blamed... It seems that individual's efforts in changing others mostly results in changes within... fits to nations also... Definitely, it is interesting times in live history to be a witness, learn and pass on..... Hope you enjoy it...
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Friday, February 10, 2012
Breaking the machine of "Observations" and "Speculations"
What is beauty?
There might be a lot of explanations to that but what if you have a machine of truth? A machine that could produce reality. That would be very easy to answer. Since the emergence of machines, human tend to make machines for doing everything, even for reality. Religion was a machine of reality for many thousands of years and worked very well...until it got a competitor in the market by another powerful machine, "Science"... By widespread use of evolutionary theory, Science seems like having grown from a machine into a factory that produces such machines as "theory of evolution" that can explain everything with ease,
Dennis Dutton seems like to use "Evolutionary machine" in explaining beauty and he thinks it does efficiently answer that but he doesn't limit himself to beauty and thinks that even art can be explained in evolutionary perspective... That is really plausible but when I see at works of art (Art like Science is a factory to produce aesthetics) then I think, Picasso might not agree with this explanation. Art is not merely an expression of beauty (What would be the difference between the work of an artist and the work of an artisan? An artisan might produce much more skilled and beautiful artifacts). Art also serves two other distinct purposes, "An expression of wealth and social class" and "An object of rebellion; pushing for more freedom"... I don't see that these two values have rooted in beauty. Abstract and modern art came to rebel two aspects of modern society,
- Machines; that is capable of creating much skilled, accurate and complex works of art that can produce on mass scale and with very low prices.... So artists broke the lines and played with colors to distort the "beauty", "organization" and "perceived world" as an expression of their "humane feelings" that machines don't have and can't produce.... Now, the people with high class buy these abstracts arts at high prices to create a distinct culture from those of machine produced cheap works of arts that commoners can afford...
- Political and Social system; Arts that are used in political and social rebellions for more freedom are not usually the expression of beauty but of oppression, blood, pain and misery... This works of arts are not to seduce but to reduce the hold of power and influence over others....
Over the years, I have realized that two things can never be wrong and can find uncountable number of evidences to support them...so people who play around these two categories have a lot to play with...
"God-Centric" VS "Human-Centric".... One can easily trace the battle of "God-centric" VS "Human-Centric" even from Pre-historic times to our present day and I am confident that it will continue in the future....
"God" as an Almighty and invisible can never be "proved" or "disproved" because there is no way to do it. So all the efforts of proving and disproving is mere battle of words... It depends on the individuals whether to believe on Him or not...
"Human" on other hand, observe the world and understand it through themselves (Human is the observer and human is the judge), so it is not difficult to understand that linking things to human goes very well to human sense... In other words, it makes sense to some point to all...
So I would rather tend to limit myself to observations for "facts" and enjoy the "explanations" and "theories" as acts of "creativity and speculations" that have more to do with schools of thoughts than reality.....
Last words; If one says, according to this theory or faith, this is so and so, I would rather agree but if one says that this and that theory or faith represent the "facts" or "reality", I would rather say, it represent a school of thought and help us to satisfy ourselves in having some explanations for our observations...
Conclusion; Until now, Science has proved to be the best among "ways" that human knowledge proceeds and "evolutionary theory" is among the best to "explain" things very well but I think, we have to be aware of "working very well" and "presenting it as reality".... Who knows in near future or in distant future, we see another "competitor" in the market...
There might be a lot of explanations to that but what if you have a machine of truth? A machine that could produce reality. That would be very easy to answer. Since the emergence of machines, human tend to make machines for doing everything, even for reality. Religion was a machine of reality for many thousands of years and worked very well...until it got a competitor in the market by another powerful machine, "Science"... By widespread use of evolutionary theory, Science seems like having grown from a machine into a factory that produces such machines as "theory of evolution" that can explain everything with ease,
Dennis Dutton seems like to use "Evolutionary machine" in explaining beauty and he thinks it does efficiently answer that but he doesn't limit himself to beauty and thinks that even art can be explained in evolutionary perspective... That is really plausible but when I see at works of art (Art like Science is a factory to produce aesthetics) then I think, Picasso might not agree with this explanation. Art is not merely an expression of beauty (What would be the difference between the work of an artist and the work of an artisan? An artisan might produce much more skilled and beautiful artifacts). Art also serves two other distinct purposes, "An expression of wealth and social class" and "An object of rebellion; pushing for more freedom"... I don't see that these two values have rooted in beauty. Abstract and modern art came to rebel two aspects of modern society,
- Machines; that is capable of creating much skilled, accurate and complex works of art that can produce on mass scale and with very low prices.... So artists broke the lines and played with colors to distort the "beauty", "organization" and "perceived world" as an expression of their "humane feelings" that machines don't have and can't produce.... Now, the people with high class buy these abstracts arts at high prices to create a distinct culture from those of machine produced cheap works of arts that commoners can afford...
- Political and Social system; Arts that are used in political and social rebellions for more freedom are not usually the expression of beauty but of oppression, blood, pain and misery... This works of arts are not to seduce but to reduce the hold of power and influence over others....
Over the years, I have realized that two things can never be wrong and can find uncountable number of evidences to support them...so people who play around these two categories have a lot to play with...
"God-Centric" VS "Human-Centric".... One can easily trace the battle of "God-centric" VS "Human-Centric" even from Pre-historic times to our present day and I am confident that it will continue in the future....
"God" as an Almighty and invisible can never be "proved" or "disproved" because there is no way to do it. So all the efforts of proving and disproving is mere battle of words... It depends on the individuals whether to believe on Him or not...
"Human" on other hand, observe the world and understand it through themselves (Human is the observer and human is the judge), so it is not difficult to understand that linking things to human goes very well to human sense... In other words, it makes sense to some point to all...
So I would rather tend to limit myself to observations for "facts" and enjoy the "explanations" and "theories" as acts of "creativity and speculations" that have more to do with schools of thoughts than reality.....
Last words; If one says, according to this theory or faith, this is so and so, I would rather agree but if one says that this and that theory or faith represent the "facts" or "reality", I would rather say, it represent a school of thought and help us to satisfy ourselves in having some explanations for our observations...
Conclusion; Until now, Science has proved to be the best among "ways" that human knowledge proceeds and "evolutionary theory" is among the best to "explain" things very well but I think, we have to be aware of "working very well" and "presenting it as reality".... Who knows in near future or in distant future, we see another "competitor" in the market...
Monday, February 6, 2012
Playing God -- BBC Horizon
If you are curious about BioBricks following are some resources,
1. the BioBricks Assembly Manual...
2. MIT BioBrick Manual
3. IGEM
Is Bangladesh offering some lessons?
The Grameen Bank of Nobel Laureate, Dr Muhammad Yonus from Bangladesh was a paradigm shift in how to do field of Philanthropy and entrepreneurship. Despite facing shortage of land, overpopulation and natural disasters, Bangladesh is proving to be very creative in terms of human development. In terms of literacy, it is just second to Sri Lanka and doing much better than India, Pakistan and other South Asian Countries. What makes Bangladesh unique is her success in reducing gender disparity in education sector. In secondary schools, 53% are female students and 47% are male students...
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Does Gen Y needs a smart democracy?
Last year, we witnessed a global rebellion. Young generation, with their smart networking devices were at the core of these rebellions. London Riots, Arab Spring and then Occupy Wall Street Movements that are now moving to other parts of world were the demonstrations of a generation that feel things are not going "right" for them and they had no other means but to go to streets to voice for it… If Arab youths ask for democracy that is quite understandable (Because of dictatorships) but what about youths in UK and USA that are the forefront of two different models of democracy (If there are institutions that represent people then what these people are doing on the streets?)?
One of the biggest problems in democracy is the participation of citizen. It is the participation of people in the democratic processes that give a government legitimacy. What makes me wonder by reading the charts of voter turnouts is the lowest turnouts in US presidential elections... In last US presidential election (2008), despite of a new popular face (That created a global buzz), the voter turnout was only 53.37%. That means 46.63% population didn’t care about voting or was not interested about the results of election. Following is a chart from Wikipedia about US election turnouts,
As you see from chart only 10 past presidential elections had more than 75% turnouts while 37 elections had less than 75% turnouts. In past 18 presidential elections in US, the median turnout of voters was 48%. That is really a Big Question Mark about the rule of people on the people by people. That is rather the rule of politically active people over passive people. Don't believe it? Let's have a look on the following chart from Wikipedia which shows a declining trend in voter turnouts in Americas (South and North America) and Western Europe... It seems passive people are slowly becoming majority. This is the beginning of fall in traditional democracy... This under-representation of people ask for some serious changes in the democratic processes...
Why there is a general trend of decreasing participation of people in democratic processes, despite of so much advertisement and the buzz that popular media create?
The large minority of people don't go to vote because they don't think that their vote has any impact or change anything. Things will go as influential people want to be. That is a great trust deficiency in part of elected representatives and democratic governments...
OK, what will happen, if there are great trust deficiencies? Well, that is really obvious... As we have witnessed, the trust deficiency cause Arab Spring, London Riots and Occupy Wall Street Movements... When people do not go to vote, they go to streets...
As we have seen from above statistics, it seems that "The rule of people over people by people" leave a large part of populations without any representations in the government...
In a time, when people love smart devices and governments love smart power, smart policies and smart sanctions then why not there should be a "Smart Democracy" that both people and government benefit from it...
This knol will become lengthy if I go to talk about other generations ( I have posted the following video, if you like to have an introduction about other generations....Although, it is about different generations in US but I think by slight changes, it fits most countries... At least each generation has its own characters in all countries and here is one documented example from US) but I am confident that Gen Y would definitely participate in greater numbers if a large part of democratic processes go hybrid, meaning allow people who want to express their opinions online besides traditional methods (There are people who prefer traditional methods)...
But I don't think, that a democracy becomes smart only by inclusion of smart networking that Gen Y prefers. It needs to allow the participation of neglected and underprivileged segments of society who by no means can compete openly (even if they are politically active) to get enough votes to have a voice in policy makings... Rule of "Politically Active People" may become more problematic in future when people become more active on social media and less active in democratic process. That will bring Chaos...
We are already witnessing the process of develop or die and let's see if systems choose dying over labor of developments....
One of the biggest problems in democracy is the participation of citizen. It is the participation of people in the democratic processes that give a government legitimacy. What makes me wonder by reading the charts of voter turnouts is the lowest turnouts in US presidential elections... In last US presidential election (2008), despite of a new popular face (That created a global buzz), the voter turnout was only 53.37%. That means 46.63% population didn’t care about voting or was not interested about the results of election. Following is a chart from Wikipedia about US election turnouts,
As you see from chart only 10 past presidential elections had more than 75% turnouts while 37 elections had less than 75% turnouts. In past 18 presidential elections in US, the median turnout of voters was 48%. That is really a Big Question Mark about the rule of people on the people by people. That is rather the rule of politically active people over passive people. Don't believe it? Let's have a look on the following chart from Wikipedia which shows a declining trend in voter turnouts in Americas (South and North America) and Western Europe... It seems passive people are slowly becoming majority. This is the beginning of fall in traditional democracy... This under-representation of people ask for some serious changes in the democratic processes...
Why there is a general trend of decreasing participation of people in democratic processes, despite of so much advertisement and the buzz that popular media create?
The large minority of people don't go to vote because they don't think that their vote has any impact or change anything. Things will go as influential people want to be. That is a great trust deficiency in part of elected representatives and democratic governments...
OK, what will happen, if there are great trust deficiencies? Well, that is really obvious... As we have witnessed, the trust deficiency cause Arab Spring, London Riots and Occupy Wall Street Movements... When people do not go to vote, they go to streets...
As we have seen from above statistics, it seems that "The rule of people over people by people" leave a large part of populations without any representations in the government...
In a time, when people love smart devices and governments love smart power, smart policies and smart sanctions then why not there should be a "Smart Democracy" that both people and government benefit from it...
This knol will become lengthy if I go to talk about other generations ( I have posted the following video, if you like to have an introduction about other generations....Although, it is about different generations in US but I think by slight changes, it fits most countries... At least each generation has its own characters in all countries and here is one documented example from US) but I am confident that Gen Y would definitely participate in greater numbers if a large part of democratic processes go hybrid, meaning allow people who want to express their opinions online besides traditional methods (There are people who prefer traditional methods)...
But I don't think, that a democracy becomes smart only by inclusion of smart networking that Gen Y prefers. It needs to allow the participation of neglected and underprivileged segments of society who by no means can compete openly (even if they are politically active) to get enough votes to have a voice in policy makings... Rule of "Politically Active People" may become more problematic in future when people become more active on social media and less active in democratic process. That will bring Chaos...
We are already witnessing the process of develop or die and let's see if systems choose dying over labor of developments....
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