This article is focused on extending the knowledge economy to Low Income Countries.
As for the reference to proliferation- it will become clear along the next few pages, followed by a list of bibliographical references, should you be interested in reading more.
This article was originally planned as a more detailed (and practical) document, but, due to the lack of time, I decided to just share the core conclusions and the introduction.
This week I attended two conferences, the first on the 50th anniversary of the laser, and the second on a completely different field, a Microsoft conference on the latest crop of its web technologies.
In both cases, a funny curious similarity- the complexity of what we take for granted.
This short article (less than 500 words) is just to share some considerations.
I know that the title reminds McLuhan and others- older even than me (at least, considering my biological age).
Anyway, often I see a misalignment between the channels available- and their use.
An interesting issue- but as for the content, this post will be quite short (well, less than 1000 words).
Today I attended a seminar on the cooperation between South Africa (and, generally, Africa) and European Union on lasers.
I will publish my feed-back later this week- but, for the time being, it will be functional to something else that I had been drafting forever.
It is Sunday, so I will take a detour.
Actually- a partial detour.
A short story, resurrecting something that I created in 2007 as a joke- United Hamster Front.
This article has been sitting on my hard-disk for some time.
I should say- at least since I read on El Pais and The Guardian articles about the GCSE.
But similar complaints are routinely voiced in most developed countries: a puzzling focus on “efficiency” is seeding the educational choices adopted by everybody.
It is Friday, so this is a slightly longer article: as for the title, jump to the last section, or wait a couple of thousands of words.
The purpose? Describing through practical cases how writing could be used to improve the learning experience- and, on the flip side, how writing could actually obfuscate information, while formally releasing everything that is required.
The principle being: first, observe; then, judge- if you do the other way around, you risk a selective observation, and to focus only on what you already saw before, ignoring new possibilities.
This is a side-effect of acting based on experience (i.e. patterns): if the communication is structured around what sounds familiar to you, you can be easily mislead into ignoring information relevant to your decision.
Cum grano salis
In this seventh article and last article of this series (beside the bibliography), a reality check.
You can share ideas, dreams, or “what ifs”, but, in the end, experience is built by the interaction with reality- not by thinking about an alternative reality.
In this article I would like to share some practical experience on how to temper the fury of over-excited zealots of innovation-through-patterns.
In this sixth article: an old slogan of democracy is “no taxation without representation”- in various forms, at least since the late XVIII century; but this principle is not as widely followed as most people would expect.
In this fifth article, a look at an industry that in few decades has changed how we see the world.
Eventually, we shifted from transportation as an individual choice to transportation as a shared flow, where your individual car is part of a larger system, composed by the infrastructure that you use with your car, all the other transportation means, and, of course, all the accessory services.