A wave of the future

Well, it has been a while since I last posted. The spring always brings a ramp up of work related activity, bumps most other tasks aside.  Tine for spring cleaning, including my brain!

Anyway, I’m taking another direction, returning to teaching after 10 years at a consultant at the school board level. A whole new kind of stress, but as a teacher of communications technology, I will be back in the action of keeping up to date with the latest technologies, and helping the next gen to understand their opportunities in the new age we live in.

Brings me to an awesome development I just saw from the people at Google, the empire that never seems to sleep! Google Wave will replace everything we have been doing to now…email, blogging, twittering, IM, photo  albums, you name it.

Long video, (1 hour -20min) but I have seen the future and it is exhilarating. Remember the time we were all hearing about modeless software? Maybe this is it, eh?

Dear Mr. President

Dear Mr. President;

Congratulations on this fine day for being sworn in as the leader of the most powerful nation on earth. Your speech today was outstanding. I never thought I would say this but today I wish I was American. You have come to this point to bring hope for a brighter future not only for the people you politically represent, but also for the people of the world.

I am sure you know of the joy and the hopes you have wrought from all quarters of the globe. So many of us consider you the foundation of change we hoped for from the United States of America. So many are depending on you to bring about a dramatic change of direction, to make the mark of historical change that comes once in a generation, to finally usher in the 21^st century we were all expecting. It is a heavy burden no doubt. I am sure you must feel the weight of the ages, as Lincoln himself must have felt as he too tried to heal the wounds of misdirection and loss of purpose. I wonder what Lincoln would say right now? I am sure he too would be impressed with the hope you represent, and would worry about the mantle of responsibility you now wear. We on the outside of America can only trust that you will have the foresight and wisdom to fulfill your destiny as the leader of a new age.

Watching Obama's Inauguration Speech via web 09.01.20

Our hopes and fears are with you to live up to the promise of becoming the first global president of the United States. In trying economic times, with the constant threat of those who will work against freedom, we truly hope that you find the courage to defeat the forces of cynicism and insularity and protectionism that have threatened the foundations of freedom and democracy for nearly a decade now. We hope you will have the courage to end the pessimistic politics of Fortress America. We hope you will have the courage to finally make America green and to work with the rest of the world to create a truly sustainable future.

Watching Obama's Inauguration Speech via TV 09.01.20

Long live your words last November: “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.”

Amen, Mr. President.

A year for educating green

The CBC, Canada’s national broadcaster, with sponsorship from Cisco has developed an interesting project called One Million Acts of Green. The idea is that people can register their act of environmental kindness or sustainability on the website to reach the goal of one million acts. The contributions in terms of greenhouse gases saved are calculated and noted. (The site currently states that 666,527 acts have saved an estimated 36,043,512 kg of green house gas to January 09 2009).

Now, while I consider things like changing to CFC bulbs or turning off the lights to be of marginal impact on a huge global problem, and pales in comparison to what countries like Germany are doing as a nation. But perhaps this challenge is an interesting take on the idea. I fear that people will soon suffer from over-saturation about talk of the environment and will soon tune out on the message (much like in the 1980s). The current economic picture may compound this effect, where considerations about the environment and economic sustainability will take a back seat to “jobs”. (Never mind that gas prices here are half of what they were earlier this year). Perhaps challenges like One Million Acts of Green will keep the fires burning so to speak, but then again, I hope it does not trivialize the problems or challenges. When it comes to educating the public, and our youth, about the necessity of the smaller footprint, we need to go big or go home.

Hopefully each citizen will consider that the best way they can make change for a sustainable future is by political action. A great example is Hermann Scheer, a German parliamentarian who has been a major force in helping Germany become a shining green economic powerhouse. The same CBC mentioned above had an eye-opening show (”The Gospel of Green” on our national investigative documentary program called the fifth estate), about Germany’s resolve to create jobs and a sustainable future by dramatically switching to renewable energy systems. A full 35% of jobs in Germany is expected to be in the renewal energy field by 2025.

When it comes to keeping people, industry and government moving forward to solutions to complex problems in energy, transportation, food production, communications and biotechnology, (the “Big Five” economic giants) I like to keep in mind Doug Hall’s three laws of marketing physics as outlined in his book: Jump Start Your Business Brain. Hall states people will stay the usual course unless something moves them off that course, (think Newton’s Laws of Motion). The Hall Three Laws are:

1. Overt benefit (must clearly state: What’s in it for me to change)
2. Real reason to believe (must clearly state why someone should believe you have a better answer)
3. Dramatic Difference (your solution must be dramatically different from previous efforts)

Simple in theory, perhaps not always implemented in practice, but it would behoove those that want to change the way our society operates is to ensure they are obeying Hall’s laws. To educate people and transform their way of life we need to make the project big, dramatic and rich in purpose. We need to clearly show that sustainable energy and food and transportation means jobs, and a future of possibilities. Most importantly, we need to show politicians and corporate decision makers a million reasons why this change is important to all of us in the worldwide future.

One Million Acts of Green
CBC fifth estate on Hermann Scheer

A future subverted

The real crime concerning the current economic crises, (real and media imagined), is that almost all talk of the looming environmental crises has disappeared from the political discourse. Instead of Silent Spring we have Silent Fall, (and maybe Silent Winter?) where the carbon heat death of the planet has taken the back seat to the gambling loses of the well-to-do. Greed is the new green, and we are all poorer for it.

Here in Canada this fall we had completed another $100 million election for naught. The opposition Liberals, who exhibited exemplary courage with a proposed “green shift” of taxes from income to polluting behaviours, also exhibited a lack of fortitude and leadership to keep it at the forefront against a Conservative government quite lacking in any environmental initiatives. The economic meltdown silenced the green shift as the Conservatives continually hammered the electorate with the dangers of the Liberal’s “carbon tax” during tough times. The silence of the Liberals sealed the fate of green shifting taxes forever. Despite a viable model in many countries, it will be political suicide for anyone to bring it up again.

The American presidential campaign has just wrapped up as well. I don’t recall hearing many pronouncements on the environment, though Obama has all appearance of becoming the first green president. (One can only hope). But…ten billion a month on the war in Iraq. One trillion dollars to bail out the mistakes of bankers and so called stock market analysts. You won’t be hearing much about conservation, biodiversity, ecology, sustainability, carbon sequestering, pollution control or alternate energy while jobs are being “outsourced” and “Joe six pack” is going to lose his job. The world wide future has receded into the background noise, and it may be long before we ever reconnect with the immediate problems of sustainable energy, food and water and air to breathe.

Funny thing is, the answer to these environmental issues may also be the direct and most possible solutions to the recessive economy.

Free cars! An answer to the economic recession

The so called Big Three North American auto producers may soon receive extraordinary monies from the governments of the United States and Canada to pull them out of bankruptcy.  The bailout is $14 Billion in the US, $3.3 Billion in Canada. A huge amount of money to throw at companies who have mismanaged any kind of monies they already had.

The Big Three claim that the money is needed because people aren’t buying their cars because of the recession or economic downturn or whatever you want to call it. Beyond considerations that maybe people are not buying their cars because of perceived lower quality or lower fuel efficiency compared to “foreign” makes, then I think there is a better solution than giving these corporations bailout money.

The real answer is free cars.

Buy new cars for people. Use the proposed bailout money to buy cars and give them to people in need, or people whose cars are over five years old or who currently have gas guzzlers. Kill two birds with one stone, so to speak. Better the environment and keep the factories producing.

Giving money directly to the corporations won’t keep the factories going, because people still won’t be buying cars. Just where will this money go? Who will they write checks to? By using the money to buy cars directly, then you will stimulate the industry and provide the desperately needed jobs of over a million people. At the same time, you will remove some older cars off the road and replace them with more efficient new cars. I imagine $17 Billion will buy a lot of cars and will keep the factories going quite a lot longer than providing the money to sinking industries who will still be stuck with non-moving stock.

The free economy is the future. See the February Wired magazine’s article from Chris Anderson: Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business.

While we are it, use the other trillion dollars of financial bailouts to buy people houses and clothes and food instead of shelling out taxpayer money to the financial wizards who have already shown they can’t handle it. That will really stimulate the economy.

(Source unknown. Just a little levity, I don’t subscribe to the idea that the Big Three make inferior products!)

Show me the money!

Everyone seems to be talking about billions in bailout money…for everyone from financial institutions to car manufacturers. The US is ready to dump billions…Canada, Europe, Japan, China, etc. ready to follow. Brings to mind some interesting questions…

Where is this money coming from? If this money already existed, why wasn’t it used to pump up the economy or help rebuild infrastructure in the first place? How can all these governments, crying the economic blues for so long, have all this incredible supply of money just sitting there?

If all this money is virtual, isn’t virtual money the problem in the first place?

If this money doesn’t exist, which generation is going to pay for the trillions in bailout money?

Here we have the case of giant corporations, who have paid exorbitant funds for the acquisition and retention of financial “experts”, only to be brought down to the brink by negligence or basic lack of foresight. How can we expect them to utilize the money wisely, and who do you really write the check to?

While I have not been scanning the net deeply, I have been watching the TV news and reading the odd newspaper. Seems to be some really important questions to answer, but like many instances in the recent past (like invading Iraq) we don’t have a viable “fifth estate” asking them. This does not bode well for the world wide future. The biggest question: where is the media when you need it?

Education Gone Wrong?

The students of Carleton University here in Ottawa, like most universities in Canada, run a fundraiser campaign for Cystic Fibrosis research, called Shinerama, during orientation week (Shinerama has been run annually since 1964, includes 35,000 students in 60 university and college campuses). This week, the Carleton University Student’s Association controversially voted to pull out of the fundraiser because they said the disease “has been recently revealed to only affect white people, and primarily men”. The rationale was that they decided their efforts should be more “inclusive” and be directed to a more “diverse population” (CBC report).

Of course, their information about the disease is untrue. They found their information “on the internet”.

This example of a lack of academic integrity highlights some problems with our education system which does not bode well for the world wide future. First, how can a group of university students, (arguably brighter ones probably heading for a future in politics, public administration or business leadership), base their decisions on erroneous information from the internet, without any further research or even contacting the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Association, StatsCan, or local medical establishments? Isn’t the declared reason for universities supposed to be to provide academic scholarship in training future citizens? Secondly, how far can “political correctness” go in affecting rationale decision making? (The lone student voting against the measure called it “political correctness gone horribly wrong”). Aren’t universities supposed to teach their students to critically consider information sources, to carry out research and debate ideas based on facts?

Maybe this is all making mountains out of molehills, but it is a story on the national stage, and I believe, just another example of an education system gone wrong. After all, this is a group of students making a deliberate decision that did not happen overnight. We may be seeing many examples of an education system wrongly rooted in the past: from business leaders or governments that seem to have never learned basic accounting (think Enron et al or the recent global economic calamity), to engineering mistakes that cause bridges to collapse from basic design flaws to very bad decisions concerning the environmental crises (think ethanol from food sources).

The question of the day is: how can we expect the right decisions to be made by politicos and business leaders when we can’t depend on tomorrow’s leaders having the right stuff to critically consider complex issues in an accelerated future? How do we know that decision makers will have the necessary scientific and technological literacy to make the right choices for the world wide future?

A call to arms for change in education

We live in a scientific and technological world…one affected daily by innovations in manufacturing, transportation, medicine, communications…every facet of our lives. In order to survive and thrive in today and tomorrow’s economy one must be scientifically and technologically literate. Scientific and technological literacy is about understanding how technology affects our society and our lives, and is about learning the skills to utilize technology effectively. It is about being better-informed consumers and producers; it is about finding one’s role in the infrastructure that makes our society run; it is about ensuring our economic future.

The consequences of a scientific and technological illiterate population are profound. Governments and corporations can “pull the wool over your eyes”, can obfuscate facts and get away with lies and misrepresentations. Look into any political campaign, and you will find loose facts and catering to the uninformed masses. The media can either be fooled, or can fool us, as to the workings of society, government and the planet. A looming environmental catastrophe can be glossed over a la whispering Jedi knight style: “There is nothing to be seen here, move on”. Statistics can be used and abused in endless ways; the daily news is full of so-called facts that the untrained eye or ear might not pick up. Look into the recent political campaigns in the US and Canada, once the ill managed banks and brokerages broke down everyone scrambled to play messiah…we will bring jobs! It is all about jobs! We will fix the [name your crises here]. Hard not to be cynical.

Without scientifically and technologically knowledgeable citizens, industry and businesses cannot find skilled employees. Without skilled and knowledgeable managers and administrators, companies lose direction or are misdirected. Money is wasted or lost, jobs are lost, and the economy suffers. Innovation goes elsewhere, and the best and the brightest goes where innovation lives. The right talent is not connected with the right career. Opportunities for the young in all destinations disappear; society lacks the means to maintain and grow.

Society has a role to play in preparing young people to be successful scientific and technologically literate citizens. (And yes, it is society, not just education that needs to play the role. If industry and business needs strong workers, then get involved and help teach, provide opportunities for experiential learning.

Through a strong and sustainable technological and scientific education, we can strengthen and build the human infrastructure of our society, and ensure a strong economic future. The old Industrial Age model of education, the well-oiled cookie-cutter stamping machine called public education has to finally go and be replaced by a future-thinking, adaptable, multi-pathway and experiential approach where learning the tools of inquiring science and technology is not optional.

My great grandfather, school headmaster Robert McAlister of Balleyclaire, Northern Ireland. Would he understand the needs of today's student?

We must take the necessary steps to ensure that all students have the opportunity to participate in a robust, consistent and sustainable technological and scientific education. A bright future for tomorrow’s leaders will be the result of concerted effort to provide a 21^st century education that teaches today’s student to be adaptable, to be discerning, to be inquisitive. (Just ask the tigers and dragons of the east what that entails).

At least in America they have a “change they can believe in”, (we here in Canada have another 2-4 years of the same old story). Hopefully soon we will have a President Obama making the Dramatic Difference. Will it happen? Will the west return to historic engineering and heroic science? Will we go to the moon or remain stuck in the sands of the desert?

The 21st century can begin now

The Americans finally got it right. It seems that for a long time now we have lived in a world of deception and greed and suspicion and dirty tricks. The Bush years should be known as the Fortress America years. It felt like intelligence crawled under a rock and the sun was going to be forever hidden by cloud. But did you hear that? It was the collective giddy excitement felt around the world: the Americans got it right and elected someone we all felt they never would, an African-American clearly not of the ol’ boys club and a man of vision and hope for the future.

Remember the questions: “where were you when Kennedy was shot?” or “where were you when the planes hit the towers?” We will be saying “where were you when Barack Obama was elected President of the United States?” I have to beg forgiveness if it all sounds over-dramatic. Perhaps I am reading too much into it, but in talking to people one comes away with the feeling that the world has suddenly shifted. Only this time it suddenly radiated hope that the future is going to be brighter.

I envy the Americans and their history. Born in revolution against the rule of empire and a history lived through a spirit of individualism and freedom, their story is something to marvel at. But their recent history…the cynicism and pessimism of Nixon’s Watergate and Vietnam, of Clinton’s executive privilege and especially Bush’s unjust and unjustified war in Iraq had dimmed Liberty’s torch. It seemed to signal the end was at hand for the American century, and it was only a matter of time before a new world order, a dark one at that, would be taking over.

Obama ran a positive campaign of hope and promise, not once stooping to the negative sarcasm that characterized the Republican’s messages. Some people never learn. Whether Obama can live up to the image and the promise remains to be seen of course. But the tears in the eyes and the cheers worldwide and the joyful look of the people of Chicago that night in November said it all… at least for now we can all imagine the heavy weight has been lifted and the world-wide future awaits in anticipation. Perhaps we can now see the promise of the 21^st century.

“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.”

- Barack Obama November 4, 2008

Bravo Barack!

Electrifying the Road

It’s not that I am a firm believer or a devout champion of the cause..I still need to be convinced…but I find the history and the growing future of electric vehicles fascinating. I posted previously about the Canadian built Zenn and electric car proponent Shia Agassi, but there is interesting developments right here in my own backyard (Ottawa Ontario). I have worked with the folks of the Electric Vehicle Council of Ottawa (EVCO) for the past couple of years with our National Capital Electrathon electric car race. (Pictures soon at photowagon.ca). This is an annual event (except for last year) where high school students design and build an electrically powered non-recharged car in a race for the number of laps in a given time period (one hour). (You run a single 12V car battery until it dies…it is a design exercise of engineering efficiency).

Collage from EVCO

Anyway, the EVCO folks were featured on a CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corp) news item. The EVCO guys and gals take beat up cars, strip out the gasoline engines and replace it with an electric motor. A true hacking experience, you have to admire these back garage pioneering entrepreneurs. Perhaps these Mad Max creations won’t go very far on a charge, and won’t be featured on a NASCAR track any day soon, but you gotta admire the perseverance and the ideology. Their creations might not be the direct answer to the problem of transportation in the world wide future, but then again, one never knows where the next Henry Ford will come from.

Check out the EVCO folks at evco.ca/, and see about the CBC coverage at evco.ca/site/CBC-24jun2008