Proactive spending

Discussions about the economy lately have been interesting: We want to give money to people, banks, etc. in hopes that they'll spend it willy nilly rather than save it. Wait a minute. Didn't we get in this mess by spending what we haven't earned on what we don't need?

A more proactive approach might be to give folks better reasons to spend what they have, regardless of where they got it. Most people already know that there are good as well as bad reasons to shop for ipods, video games, automobiles, and new places to live rather than to keep one's money in the bank or under a mattress. Perhaps it's time to dust off some of those reasons.

For instance, most of the challenges that face us in the years ahead involve taking care of correlations between ourselves and the world around on as many as possible of six levels. Connection diversity can at once be a measure of community health and resilience, as well as of individual accomplishment and satisfaction.

Putting money in the bank or under the mattress does very little for connection diversity, especially in times of economic uncertainty. What does? The answer is strengthening correlations that look inward and outward from three physical boundaries: that of your skin, your family, and your culture. Correlations on all six of these levels face severe challenges in the days ahead, and that's what each of us may want to spend some of what we have on now.

How can we get the media engaged in helping us do this as smartly as possible?

Culpability?

Why should lawmakers and taxpayers be angry at car companies, when lawmakers OK and taxpayers buy/drive guzzlers each time gas costs go down?

Positive thinking

Count on management to be (i) ignorant, (ii) incompetent, and (iii) self-aggrandizing. That way you can look forward to pleasant surprises when you occasionally get less than three out of three.

Sustainable ed

Teach for today's jobs too, and not only to yesterday's tests.

Undamped oscillation

Someone I know was heading west on the interstate just past downtown when ahead they saw a pickup pulling a trailer, veering a bit left then right then left as it traveled down the road. It was clear that the driver was aware of the problem, and figured that his job was to keep returning the truck to its own lane. This logic, as simple and impeccable in intent as it was, was alas dead wrong because the driver's response-time fit beautifully with the resonant-frequency of the weave. Like someone kicking one's legs at exactly the right time to pump up the motion of a playground swing, the driver's logic loop repeatedly pumped energy into the weave, which got wilder and wilder until all of a sudden the truck and trailer spun out into a parked position across five lanes of traffic.

So what?

Think about the stock market. The news media reports where it's at every day if not every minute. Like the truck driver above, however, attention is not being focused on dynamics, like the system's resonant frequencies. A kid on a playground swing knows that you can make the oscillation bigger by kicking at the right point with the right frequency. The truck driver above found this can happen inadvertantly if you pay attention only to displacement.

If you don't want the oscillation to get bigger, you can either (i) not act, or (ii) act at a different frequency. Even better computer programs that paid attention to frequency amplitude and phase as well as displacement, or even more sophisticated dynamical models, might be programmed to actively damp oscillations. So could the newsmedia.

What might be some useful first steps to this end, so we don't spin out the truck just 'cause we and our computer programs are paying attention to the wrong thing?

Clue from the past

In explaining their project 10¹⁰⁰, Google says that never in history have so many had so much information. This may have been true once before. Until nervous and circulatory systems came along, never had so many (cells) had access to so much molecular information.

Cells so blessed thankfully learned to inform their reactions with those molecules to processes going on: (a) in and outside their membranes, (b) in and outside of the tissues they grew up in, and (c) in and outside of the organism supported by those tissues. What if we too learned to cultivate the six community connection layers that look in/out with respect to those boundary types important to us i.e. our skin, our gene pool, and our idea pool?

In that case then, unlike cancer cells searching for oxygenated blood, we could confidently look beyond warnings (e.g. about money becoming tight) to a layer-multiplicity that counts YES ANSWERS to six bottom-line questions: Do you have chances to: (i) find food, shelter, medicine and education, (ii) cultivate long-term friendships, (iii) support family and raise children, (iv) help build residential and work-oriented communities, (v) choose a set of beliefs and interests by which to live, and (vi) develop and take pride in a profession? Good news: The number is above zero! It's also not 6 on average, so how can we bring it up?

If media outlets and surveys measured their balance by the extent to which they support developments on all six of these levels, if political accomplishment was gauged by quantitative impact on these chances for everyone, and if individuals considered their connections in all six areas together, there would be much less to be frightened or depressed about but also much more work to be done.

Code/excitation soup

This week I've noticed two narratives that drop an important ball: They blur the distinction between: (i) excitations in the world around and (ii) the concepts that we use to communicate about those excitations.

The first one, no surprise, involves the current (perennial) focus on national politics. Here, with new intensity, candidates are being cartoonified as media monkeys while the opportunity to discuss data and concepts for dealing with the world around passes by. If questions like "Do you have the needed experience?" have no operational meaning, why on earth would people keep asking them while questions about our affect on the global pool of ideas go unasked?

The second, interestingly enough, arose with media discussions (in NPR's On Point) about the large hadron collider (LHC) coming on-line at CERN. It was fun to listen to some top physicists try to answer questions for the lay public, one element of disconnect being expressed in the query: Are the questions that will be answered mainly for physicists?

In this case I was reminded of the invisibility of "concepts as tools" in the way that theorists often talk. Let's translate this to a question that everyone understands: "How many extended spatial dimensions do you experience?" The answer, of course, is that three is an operationally-useful everyday answer to this question. The collider might help identify conditions under which different answers will be useful as well.

However, the question is normally posed by theorists not as "What answer is useful when?" but "How many ARE there?". It's almost as though they think that ideas shared by humans don't model the world, but instead constitute the world. Is that as bad as pretending that candidates are no more than their response to a journalist's ill-defined question?