Buckminster Fuller

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For the EP by Nerina Pallot, see Buckminster Fuller EP.
Buckminster Fuller

R. Buckminster Fuller c.1917
Born July 12, 1895(1895-07-12)
Milton, Massachusetts
Died July 1, 1983 (aged 87)
Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Occupation Visionary, designer, architect, author, inventor
Spouse(s) Anne Fuller
Children 2

Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller (July 12, 1895 – July 1, 1983)[1] was an American architect, author, designer, inventor, and futurist.

Fuller published more than thirty books, inventing and popularizing terms such as "Spaceship Earth", ephemeralization, and synergetics. He also developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, the best known of which is the geodesic dome. Carbon molecules known as fullerenes were later named by scientists for their resemblance to geodesic spheres.

Contents

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Biography

Fuller was born on July 12, 1895, in Milton, Massachusetts, the son of Richard Buckminster Fuller and Caroline Wolcott Andrews, and also the grandnephew of the American Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller. He attended Froebelian Kindergarten. Spending much of his youth on Bear Island, in Penobscot Bay off the coast of Maine, he was a boy with a natural propensity for design and construction. He often made items from materials he brought home from the woods, and sometimes made his own tools. He experimented with designing a new apparatus for human propulsion of small boats. Years later, he decided that this sort of experience had provided him with not only an interest in design, but a habit of being familiar and knowledgeable about the materials that his later projects would require. Fuller earned a machinist's certification, and knew how to use the press brake, stretch press, and other tools and equipment used in the sheet metal trade.[2]

Fuller was sent to Milton Academy, in Massachusetts, and after that, began studying at Harvard. He was expelled from Harvard twice: first for spending all his money partying with a vaudeville troupe, and then, after having been readmitted, for his "irresponsibility and lack of interest". By his own appraisal, he was a non-conforming misfit in the fraternity environment.[2] Many years later, however, he would receive a Sc.D. from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine.

Between his sessions at Harvard, Fuller worked in Canada as a mechanic in a textile mill, and later as a labourer for the meat-packing industry. He also served in the U.S. Navy in World War I, as a shipboard radio operator, as an editor of a publication, and as a crash-boat commander. After discharge, he worked again for the meat packing industry, thereby acquiring management experience. During 1917, he married Anne Hewlett. During the early 1920s, he and his father-in-law developed the Stockade Building System for producing light-weight, weatherproof, and fireproof housing – although the company would ultimately fail.[2]

By age 32, Fuller was bankrupt and jobless, living in public, low-income housing in Chicago, Illinois. In 1922[3], Fuller's young daughter Alexandra died from complications from polio and spinal meningitis. Allegedly, he felt responsible and this caused him to become drunk frequently and to contemplate suicide for a while, but he decided instead to embark on "an experiment, to find what a single individual [could] contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity".[4]

By 1928, Fuller was living in Greenwich Village and spending much of time at Romany Marie's,[5] where he had spent a fascinating evening in conversation with Marie and Eugene O'Neill several years earlier.[6] Fuller accepted a job decorating the interior of the café in exchange for meals,[5] giving informal lectures several times a week,[6][7] and models of the Dymaxion house were exhibited at the café. Isamu Noguchi arrived during 1929 –Constantin Brâncuşi, an old friend of Marie's,[8] had directed him there[5] – and Noguchi and Fuller were soon collaborating on several projects,[7][9] including the modeling of the Dymaxion car.[10] It was the beginning of their lifelong friendship.

Fuller taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina during the summers of 1948 and 1949,[11] serving as its Summer Institute director in 1949. There, with the support of a group of professors and students, he began reinventing a project that would make him famous: the geodesic dome. Although the geodesic dome had been created some 30 years earlier by Dr. Walther Bauersfeld, Fuller was awarded US patents. He is credited for popularizing this type of structure. One of his early models was first constructed in 1945 at Bennington College in Vermont, where he frequently lectured. During 1949, he erected his first geodesic dome building that could sustain its own weight with no practical limits. It was 4.3 meters (14 ft) in diameter and constructed of aluminum aircraft tubing and a vinyl-plastic skin, in the form of an icosahedron. To prove his design, and to awe non-believers, Fuller hung from the structure’s framework several students who had helped him build it. The U.S. government recognized the importance of his work, and employed him to make small domes for the army. Within a few years there were thousands of these domes around the world.

For the next half-century, Fuller developed many ideas, designs and inventions, particularly regarding practical, inexpensive shelter and transportation. He documented his life, philosophy and ideas scrupulously by a daily diary (later called the Dymaxion Chronofile), and by twenty-eight publications. Fuller financed some of his experiments with inherited funds, sometimes augmented by funds invested by his collaborators, one example being the Dymaxion Car project.

The Montreal Biosphère by Buckminster Fuller, 1967

International recognition began with the success of his huge geodesic domes during the 1950s. Fuller taught at Washington University in St. Louis in 1955, where he met James Fitzgibbon, who would become a close friend and colleague. From 1959 to 1970, Fuller taught at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Beginning as an assistant professor, he gained full professorship during 1968, in the School of Art and Design. Working as a designer, scientist, developer, and writer, he lectured for many years around the world. He collaborated at SIU with the designer John McHale. During 1965, Fuller inaugurated the World Design Science Decade (1965 to 1975) at the meeting of the International Union of Architects in Paris, which was, in his own words, devoted to "applying the principles of science to solving the problems of humanity".

Fuller believed human societies would soon rely mainly on renewable sources of energy, such as solar- and wind-derived electricity. He hoped for an age of "omni-successful education and sustenance of all humanity". For his lifetime of work, the American Humanist Association named him the 1969 Humanist of the Year.

Fuller was awarded 28 US patents[12] and many honorary doctorates. On January 16, 1970, he received the Gold Medal award from the American Institute of Architects. He also received numerous other awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom presented to him on February 23, 1983 by President Ronald Reagan.

Fuller's last filmed interview took place on April 3, 1983, in which he presented his analysis of Simon Rodia's Watts Towers as a unique embodiment of the structural principles found in nature. Portions of this interview appear in I Build the Tower, the definitive documentary film on Rodia's architectural masterpiece.

Gravestone (see trim tab)

Fuller died on July 1, 1983, aged 87, a guru of the design, architecture, and 'alternative' communities, such as Drop City, the community of experimental artists to whom he awarded the 1966 "Dymaxion Award" for "poetically economic" domed living structures. During the period leading up to his death, his wife had been lying comatose in a Los Angeles hospital, dying of cancer. It was while visiting her there that he exclaimed, at a certain point: "She is squeezing my hand!" He then stood up, suffered a heart attack and died an hour later. His wife died 36 hours after he did. He is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Philosophy and worldview

The grandson of a Unitarian minister (Arthur Buckminster Fuller),[13] R. Buckminster Fuller was also Unitarian.[14] Buckminster Fuller was an early environmental activist. He was very aware of the finite resources the planet has to offer, and promoted a principle that he termed "ephemeralization", which, in essence – according to futurist and Fuller disciple Stewart Brand – Fuller coined to mean "doing more with less".[15] Resources and waste material from cruder products could be recycled into making more valuable products, increasing the efficiency of the entire process. Fuller also introduced synergetics, a metaphoric language for communicating experiences using geometric concepts, long before the term synergy became popular.

Buckminster Fuller was one of the first to propagate a systemic worldview, and he explored principles of energy and material efficiency in the fields of architecture, engineering and design.[16][17] He cited François de Chardenedes' opinion that petroleum, from the standpoint of its replacement cost out of our current energy "budget" (essentially, the net incoming solar flux), had cost nature "over a million dollars" per U.S. gallon (US$300,000 per litre) to produce. From this point of view, its use as a transportation fuel by people commuting to work represents a huge net loss compared to their earnings.[18]

Fuller was concerned about sustainability and about human survival under the existing socio-economic system, yet remained optimistic about humanity's future. Defining wealth in terms of knowledge, as the "technological ability to protect, nurture, support, and accommodate all growth needs of life," his analysis of the condition of "Spaceship Earth" caused him to conclude that at a certain time during the 1970s, humanity had attained an unprecedented state. He was convinced that the accumulation of relevant knowledge, combined with the quantities of major recyclable resources that had already been extracted from the earth, had attained a critical level, such that competition for necessities was not necessary anymore. Cooperation had become the optimum survival strategy. "Selfishness," he declared, "is unnecessary and hence-forth unrationalizable.... War is obsolete."[19]

Fuller also claimed that the natural analytic geometry of the universe was based on arrays of tetrahedra. He developed this in several ways, from the close-packing of spheres and the number of compressive or tensile members required to stabilize an object in space. One confirming result was that the strongest possible homogeneous truss is cyclically tetrahedral.[citation needed]

In his 1970 book I Seem To Be a Verb, he wrote: "I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe."

Major design projects

Géode V 3 1.gif Géode V 3 1 duale.gif
A geodesic sphere and its dual.

Fuller was most famous for his lattice shell structures - geodesic domes, which have been used as parts of military radar stations, civic buildings, environmental protest camps and exhibition attractions. However, the original design came from Dr. Walther Bauersfeld. Chapter 3 of Fuller's Book Critical Path states:

"....I found a similar situation to be existent in World War II. As head mechanical engineer of the U.S.A. Board of Economic Warfare I had available to me copies of any so-called intercepts I wanted. Those were transcriptions of censor-listened-to intercontinental telephone conversations, along with letters and cables that were opened by the censor and often deciphered, and so forth. As a student of patents I asked for and received all the intercept information relating to strategic patents held by both our enemies and our own big corporations,..."

An examination of the geodesic design by Bauersfeld for the Zeiss Planetarium, built some 20 years prior to Fuller's work, reveals that Fuller's Geodesic Dome patent (U.S. 2,682,235) follows the same methodology as Bauersfeld's design.[20]

Their construction is based on extending some basic principles to build simple "tensegrity" structures (tetrahedron, octahedron, and the closest packing of spheres), making them lightweight and stable. The patent for geodesic domes was awarded during 1954, part of Fuller's exploration of nature's constructing principles to find design solutions. The Fuller Dome is referenced in the Hugo Award-winning novel Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner, in which a geodesic dome is said to cover the entire island of Manhattan, and it floats on air due to the hot-air balloon effect of the large air-mass under the dome (and perhaps its construction of lightweight materials).[21]

Previously, Fuller had designed and built prototypes of what he hoped would be a safer, aerodynamic Dymaxion car. ("Dymaxion" is a syllabic abbreviation of dynamic maximum tension, or possibly of dynamic maximum ion as reported the National Automobile Museum.) Fuller worked with professional colleagues for three years beginning 1932. Based on a design idea Fuller had derived from aircraft, the three prototype cars were different from anything being sold. They had three wheels (two front drive wheels and one rear steered wheel. The engine was in the rear, and the chassis and body were original designs. The aerodynamic, somewhat tear-shaped body was large enough to seat 11 people. In one of the prototypes it was about 18 feet (5.5 m) long. It resembled a melding of a light aircraft (without wings) and a Volkswagen van of 1950s vintage. All three prototypes were essentially a mini-bus, and its concept long predated the Volkswagen Type 2 mini-bus conceived in 1947 by Ben Pon.

Despite its length, and due to its three-wheel design, the Dymaxion turned on a small radius and parked in a tight space quite nicely. The prototypes were efficient in fuel consumption for their day. Fuller contributed a great deal of his own money to the project, in addition to funds from one of his professional collaborators. An industrial investor was also very interested in the concept. Fuller anticipated the cars could travel on an open highway safely at up to about 160 km/h (100 miles per hour). But due to bad design, they were unruly above 80 km/h (50 mph), and difficult to steer. Research ended after one of the prototypes was involved in a collision resulting in a fatality.

During 1943, industrialist Henry J. Kaiser asked Fuller to develop a prototype for a smaller car, and Fuller designed a five-seater which was never developed further.

Another of Fuller's ideas was the alternative-projection Dymaxion map. This was designed to show Earth's continents with minimum distortion when projected or printed on a flat surface.

A Dymaxion House at The Henry Ford.

Fuller's energy-efficient and inexpensive Dymaxion House garnered much interest, but has never been produced. Here the term "Dymaxion" is used in effect to signify a "radically strong and light tensegrity structure". One of Fuller's Dymaxion Houses is on display as a permanent exhibit at The Henry Ford in Dearborn, Michigan. Designed and developed during the mid-1940s, this prototype is a round structure (not a dome), shaped something like the flattened "bell" of certain jellyfish. It has several innovative features, including revolving dresser drawers, and a fine-mist shower that reduces water consumption. According to Fuller biographer Steve Crooks, the house was designed to be delivered in two cylindrical packages, with interior color panels available at local dealers. A circular structure at the top of the house was designed to rotate around a central mast to use natural winds for cooling and air circulation.

Conceived nearly two decades before, and developed in Wichita, Kansas, the house was designed to be lightweight and adapted to windy climates. It was to be inexpensive to produce and purchase, and assembled easily. It was to be produced using factories, workers and technologies that had produced World War II aircraft. It was ultramodern-looking at the time, built of metal, and sheathed in polished aluminum. The basic model enclosed 90 m² (1000 square feet) of floor area. Due to publicity, there were many orders during the early Post-War years, but the company that Fuller and others had formed to produce the houses failed due to management problems.

During 1969, Fuller began the Otisco Project, named after its location in Otisco, New York. The project developed and demonstrated concrete spray technology used in conjunction with mesh covered wireforms as a viable means of producing large scale, load bearing spanning structures built in situ without the use of pouring molds, other adjacent surfaces or hoisting.

The initial construction method used a circular concrete footing in which anchor posts were set. Tubes cut to length and with ends flattened were then bolted together to form a duodeca-rhombicahedron (22 sided hemisphere) geodesic structure with spans ranging to 60 feet (18 m). The form was then draped with layers of ¼-inch wire mesh attached by twist ties. Concrete was then sprayed onto the structure, building up a solid layer which, when dried, would support additional concrete to be added by a variety of tradition means. Fuller referred to these buildings as monolithic ferroconcrete geodesic domes. The tubular frame form proved too problematic when it came to setting windows and doors, and was abandoned. The second method used iron rebar set vertically in the concrete footing and then bent inward and welded in place to create the dome’s wireform structure and performed satisfactorily. Domes up to 3 stories tall built with this method proved to be remarkably strong. Other shapes such as cones, pyramids and arches proved equally adaptable.

The project was enabled by a grant underwritten by Syracuse University and sponsored by US Steel (rebar), the Johnson Wire Corp, (mesh) and Portland Cement Company (concrete). The ability to build large complex load bearing concrete spanning structures in free space would open many possibilities in architecture, and is considered as one of Fuller’s greatest contributions.

Quirks

Fuller was a frequent flier, often crossing time zones. He famously wore three watches; one for the current zone, one for the zone he had departed, and one for the zone he was going to.[22][23] Fuller also noted that a single sheet of newsprint, inserted over a shirt and under a suit jacket, provided completely effective heat insulation during long flights.

Practical achievements

Fuller introduced a number of concepts, and helped develop others. Certainly, a number of his projects were not successful in terms of commitment from industry or acceptance by most of the public. However, more than 500,000 geodesic domes have been built around the world and many are in use. According to the Buckminster Fuller Institute Web site, the largest geodesic-dome structures are:

Panoramic view of the geodesic domes at the Eden Project

Other notable domes include:

However, contrary to Fuller's hopes, domes are not an everyday sight in most places. In practice, most of the smaller owner-built geodesic structures had disadvantages (see geodesic domes), including their unconventional appearance.

An interesting spin-off of Fuller's dome-design conceptualization was the Buckminster Ball, which was the official FIFA approved design for footballs (association football), from their introduction at the 1970 World Cup until recently. The design was a truncated icosahedron -- essentially a "Geodesic Sphere", consisting of 12 pentagonal and 20 hexagonal panels. This was used continuously for 34 years until it was replaced by a 14-panel version for the 2006 World Cup.

Fuller was followed (historically) by other designers and architects, such as Sir Norman Foster and Steve Baer, willing to explore the possibilities of new geometries in the design of buildings, not based on conventional rectangles.

Facts and figures

The enormous Fuller Collection is currently housed at Stanford University.

"If somebody kept a very accurate record of a human being, going through the era from the Gay 90s, from a very different kind of world through the turn of the century — as far into the twentieth century as you might live. I decided to make myself a good case history of such a human being and it meant that I could not be judge of what was valid to put in or not. I must put everything in, so I started a very rigorous record."[31]

[32]

Use of language and neologisms

Buckminster Fuller spoke and wrote in a unique style and said it important to describe the world as accurately as possible.[34] Fuller often created long run-on sentences and used unusual compound words (omniwell-informed, intertransformative, omni-interaccommodative, omniself-regenerative) as well as terms he himself invented.[35]

Fuller used the word 'Universe' without the definite or indefinite articles (a or the) and always capitalized the word. Fuller wrote that "by Universe I mean: the aggregate of all humanity's consciously apprehended and communicated (to self or others) Experiences." [36]

The words "down" and "up", according to Fuller, are awkward in that they refer to a planar concept of direction inconsistent with human experience. The words "in" and "out" should be used instead, he argued, because they better describe an object's relation to a gravitational center, the Earth. "I suggest to audiences that they say, "I'm going 'outstairs' and 'instairs.'" At first that sounds strange to them; They all laugh about it. But if they try saying in and out for a few days in fun, they find themselves beginning to realize that they are indeed going inward and outward in respect to the center of Earth, which is our Spaceship Earth. And for the first time they begin to feel real "reality." [37]

"World-around" is a term coined by Fuller to replace "worldwide". The general belief in a flat Earth died out in Classical antiquity, so using "wide" is an anachronism when referring to the surface of the Earth — a spheroidal surface has area and encloses a volume, but has no width. Fuller held that unthinking use of obsolete scientific ideas detracts from and misleads intuition. Other neologisms collectively invented by the Fuller family, according to Allegra Fuller Snyder, are the terms sunsight and sunclipse, replacing sunrise and sunset to overturn the geocentric bias of most pre-Copernican celestial mechanics. Fuller also invented the phrase Spaceship Earth.

Fuller also invented the word "livingry," as opposed to weaponry (or "killingry"), to mean that which is in support of all human, plant, and Earth life. "The architectural profession--civil, naval, aeronautical, and astronautical — has always been the place where the most competent thinking is conducted regarding livingry, as opposed to weaponry." — [38]

Fuller invented the term (but did not invent the concept of) "tensegrity", a portmanteau of tensional integrity. "Tensegrity describes a structural-relationship principle in which structural shape is guaranteed by the finitely closed, comprehensively continuous, tensional behaviors of the system and not by the discontinuous and exclusively local compressional member behaviors. Tensegrity provides the ability to yield increasingly without ultimately breaking or coming asunder" — [39]

"Dymaxion", is a portmanteau of "Dynamic maximum tension". It was invented by an adman about 1929 at Marshall Field's department store in Chicago to describe Fuller's concept house, which was shown as part of a house of the future store display. These were three words that Fuller used repeatedly to describe his design.

"The most important fact about Spaceship Earth: an instruction manual didn't come with it."[40]

Concepts and buildings

His concepts and buildings include:

Bibliography

See also

Portal.svg World War I portal
Sustainable development.svg Sustainable development portal

Former students


References

  1. ^ Encyclopædia Britannica. (2007). "Fuller, R Buckminster". Encyclopædia Britannica Online. http://www.britannica.com/ebc/article-9365050. Retrieved 2007-04-20. 
  2. ^ a b c Pawley, Martin (1991). Buckminster Fuller. New York: Taplinger. ISBN 0-8008-1116-X. 
  3. ^ R. Buckminster Fuller, Your Private Sky, Page 27
  4. ^ Design – A Three-Wheel Dream That Died at Takeoff – Buckminster Fuller and the Dymaxion Car – NYTimes.com
  5. ^ a b c John Haber. "Before Buckyballs". Review of Noguchi Museum Best of Friends exhibit (May 19, 2006 – October 15, 2006). http://www.haberarts.com/fuller.htm. "Noguchi, then twenty-five, had already had enough influences for a lifetime – from birth in Los Angeles, to childhood in Japan and the Midwest, to premedical classes at Columbia, to academic sculpture on the Lower East Side, to Brancusi's circle in Paris. Now his exposure to Modernism and "the American century" received a decidedly New York influence.
    “Only two years before, on the brink of suicide, Fuller had decided to remake his life and the world. Why not begin on Minetta Street? In 1929, he was shopping around his first major design, plans for an inexpensive, modular home that others air-lift right where desired. Now, in exchange for meals, he took on the interior decoration and chairs for Marie's new location. He must have stood out in person, too, ever the talkative, handsome visionary in tie and starched collar."
     
    See also: "The Architect and the Sculptor: A Friendship of Ideas". Grace Glueck, The New York Times. May 19, 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/19/arts/design/19nogu.html. 
  6. ^ a b Lloyd Steven Sieden. Buckminster Fuller's Universe: His Life and Work (pp. 74, 119-142). New York: Perseus Books Group, 2000. ISBN 0-73820-379-3. p. 74: “Although O'Neill soon became well known as a major American playwright, it was Romany Marie who would significantly influence Bucky, becoming his close friend and confidante during the most difficult years of his life.”
  7. ^ a b John Haskell. "Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi". Kraine Gallery Bar Lit, Fall 2007. http://www.kgbbar.com/lit/features/buckminster_ful.html. 
  8. ^ Robert Schulman. Romany Marie: The Queen of Greenwich Village (pp. 85–86, 109–110). Louisville: Butler Books, 2006. ISBN 1-88453-274-8.
  9. ^ "Interview with Isamu Noguchi". Conducted November 7, 1973 by Paul Cummings at Noguchi's studio in Long Island City, Queens. Smithsonian Archives of American Art. http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/tranSCRIPTs/noguch73.htm. 
  10. ^ Michael John Gorman (updated March 12, 2002). "Passenger Files: Isamu Noguchi, 1904–1988". Towards a cultural history of Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Car. Stanford Humanities Lab. http://hotgates.stanford.edu/Bucky/dymaxion/noguchi.htm.  Includes several images.
  11. ^ "IDEAS + INVENTIONS: Buckminster Fuller and Black Mountain College". Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center Exhibit. July 15, 2005 – November 26, 2005. http://blackmountaincollege.org/content/view/45/60/. 
  12. ^ Partial list of Fuller US patents
  13. ^ Arthur Buckminster Fuller
  14. ^ Buckminster Fuller: Designer of a New World
  15. ^ Brand, Stewart (1999). The Clock of the Long Now. New York: Basic. ISBN 046504512X. 
  16. ^ Fuller, R. Buckminster (1969). Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN 080932461X. 
  17. ^ Fuller, R. Buckminster; Applewhite, E. J. (1975). Synergetics. New York: Macmillan. ISBN 002541870X. 
  18. ^ Fuller, R. Buckminster (1981). Critical Path. New York: St. Martin's Press. xxxiv-xxxv. ISBN 0312174888. 
  19. ^ Fuller, R. Buckminster (1981). "Introduction" (in English). Critical Path (First ed.). New York, N.Y.: St.Martin's Press. xxv. ISBN 0-312-17488-8. ""It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary and hence-forth unrationalizable as mandated by survival. War is obsolete." 
  20. ^ Geodesic Domes and Charts of the Heavens
  21. ^ The R. Buckminster Fuller FAQ: Geodesic Domes
  22. ^ Annals of Innovation: Dymaxion Man: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
  23. ^ Fuller, Buckminster (1969). Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN 080932461X. 
  24. ^ http://www.poliedrodecaracas.gob.ve/index.php
  25. ^ Poliedro de Caracas - Sightseeing with Google Satellite Maps
  26. ^ http://cityguides.salsaweb.com/belgium/reports/2001/20010120venezuelatravel/venezimages/caracas04.jpg
  27. ^ 2theadvocate.com News | Kansas City Southern razes geodesic dome — Baton Rouge, LA
  28. ^ http://www.edenproject.com/index.html - The Eden Project
  29. ^ Dymaxion Sleep - TIME
  30. ^ Chemistry 1996
  31. ^ Buckminster Fuller conversations resume January 22 : 01/03
  32. ^ http://www-sul.stanford.edu//depts/spc/fuller/about.html
  33. ^ Nerina Pallot Blog
  34. ^ "What is important in this connection is the way in which humans reflex spontaneously for that is the way in which they usually behave in critical moments, and it is often "common sense" to reflex in perversely ignorant ways that produce social disasters by denying knowledge and ignorantly yielding to common sense." Intuition, 1972 Doubleday, New York. p.103
  35. ^ He wrote a single unpunctuated sentence approximately 3000 words long titled "What I Am Trying to Do." And It Came to Pass - Not to Stay Macmillan Publishing, New York, 1976.
  36. ^ "How Little I Know" from And It Came to Pass - Not to Stay Macmillan, 1976
  37. ^ Intuition (1972).
  38. ^ Critical Path, page xxv
  39. ^ Synergetics, page 372
  40. ^ "Selected Quotes". http://www.cjfearnley.com/cgi-bin/cjf-fortunes.pl?srchstr=Fuller&name=Submit.  090810 cjfearnley.com

Further reading

External links


J. Baldwin

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James Tennant Baldwin (born 1934) (whose books and articles have been published under the names J. Baldwin, Jay Baldwin, and James T. Baldwin) is an American industrial designer and writer. Baldwin was a student of Buckminster Fuller; Baldwin's work has been inspired by Fuller's principles and (in the case of some of Baldwin's published writing) has popularized and interpreted Fuller's ideas and achievements. In his own right, Baldwin has been a figure in American designers' efforts to incorporate solar, wind, and other renewable sources of energy. In his career, being a fabricator has been as important as being a designer. Baldwin is noted as the inventor of the geodesic "Pillow Dome."

Contents

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Life and work

J. Baldwin was born the son of an engineer. Baldwin has said that, at 18, he heard Buckminster Fuller speak for 14 hours non-stop. This was in 1951 at the University of Michigan, where Baldwin had enrolled to learn automobile design because a friend of his had been killed in a car accident that Baldwin attributed to bad design. He worked with Fuller prior to graduation from U. of M. in 1955. During his student years, Baldwin worked (in a unique job sharing role) in an auto factory assembly line. He went on to do graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley.

Baldwin remained a friend of Buckminster Fuller, and reflected that "By example, he encouraged me to think for myself comprehensively, to be disciplined, to work for the good of everyone, and to have a good time doing it." [BuckyWorks, p. xi]

As a young designer in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Baldwin designed advanced camping equipment with Bill Moss Associates. Thereafter, he taught simultaneously at San Francisco State College (now called San Francisco State University), San Francisco Art Institute, and the Oakland campus of California College of Arts & Crafts for about six years.

The period 1968-69 found him both a visiting lecturer at Southern Illinois University and the design editor of the innovative Whole Earth Catalog. (The Catalog came out in many editions between 1968 and 1998, and Baldwin continued to edit and write for both the Catalog and an offshoot publication, CoEvolution Quarterly, later renamed Whole Earth Review.) In the early 1970s, Baldwin taught at Pacific High School.

Baldwin was at the center of experimentation with geodesic domes (an unconventional building-design approach, explored by Fuller, that maximizes strength and covered area in relation to materials used). He also dove enthusiastically into the application of renewable energy sources in homes and in food-production facilities, working with Integrated Life Support Systems Laboratories (ILS, in New Mexico) and with Dr John Todd and the other New Alchemists involved with the "Ark" project. Baldwin's initial involvement with solar energy was during that very experimental, ad-lib phase when much was moving from principles or theory into actual development. In the 1970s, at ILS, he was the co-developer of what has been touted as the world's first building to be heated and otherwise powered by solar and wind power exclusively.

Baldwin referred to his own rural home as "a three-dimensional sketchpad."

During the Jerry Brown administration, Baldwin worked in the California Office of Appropriate Technology. Since the 1970s, Baldwin has continued to work as a designer in association with numerous organizations and projects. He organized for himself a mobile design studio and machine workshop (in a van pulling an Airstream trailer) to drive to various projects across America.

With the ears of a wider audience in the 1980s, Baldwin developed an incisive critique of the American automobile industry, which he viewed as over-focused on superficial marketing concerns and farcically under-concerned with real innovation and improvement. He was also a constructive critic of the emerging industries manufacturing "soft technology" equipment like wind turbines.

In the 1990s, Baldwin wrote a book about Buckminster Fuller, his ideas, experiments, and influence, Bucky Works: Buckminster Fuller's Ideas for Today.

In the late 1990s, he worked with the Rocky Mountain Institute (Snowmass, Colorado) in the research, design, and development of the ultralight, ultra-efficient "Hypercar" — a prototype by way of which independent designers hope to show the way for the world's auto manufacturers. With conceptual development having begun in 1991, the current version of the Hypercar uses a small generator to power an electric motor in each wheel.

Given his long-term role as a "technology" editor, something should be mentioned about the scope of Baldwin's focus on technology. His interests remained broader than that represented in the shifting media and popular focus of the mid 1980s and later, which inclined to highlight the micro chip and electronic devices based on it. Baldwin has continued to point out the value of (and need for evaluation of) technologies within a larger perimeter. Certainly shelter and transportation technologies have always interested him. So have tools, and whether a device or tool or process was freshly innovative or age-old in concept, if it enabled a person to “do the job” with wood, metal, fiberglass panels, soil, trees, or whatever, it remained worthy of Baldwin’s attention. Whereas the personal computer often (though not necessarily) inclines its operator toward imagination, almost in the sense of entertainment, Baldwin has remained equally interested in doing, in application. And while he has never ceased to be interested in the products of the factory, Baldwin has always wanted to empower individuals and small teams of people to accomplish something.

Baldwin, as one of the notable designer technologists whose cross-disciplinary approaches have opened new territory, was featured in the 1994 documentary film Ecological Design: Inventing the Future. The film viewed these designers as "outlaws" whose careers have necessarily developed "outside the box" of their time, largely unsupported by mainstream industry and often beyond the pale of mainstream academia, as well.

J. Baldwin invented (and has built) a permanent, transparent, insulated structure — of aluminum and Teflon — he calls a "Pillow Dome," said to have withstood 135-mph winds and tons of snow. The Pillow Dome weighs just one-half pound per square foot. The basic approach has since been applied in large-scale applications such as the Eden Project in Cornwall, England. Baldwin continues to practice design (as exemplified in the unique and aerodynamic 'mobile-room' Quick-Up camper he has put on the market) and to teach design at the college level. In recent years, he has taught at Sonoma State University and at California College of Arts & Crafts.

Quotes

Books

External links


List of futurologists

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Below is a list of some notable futurologists.

Name  ↓ Birth  ↓ Death  ↓ Field  ↓ Reference  ↓
Alvin Toffler 1928 living technological singularity alvin + heidi toffler {futurists}
Archibald Low 1888 1956 space
Arthur C. Clarke 1917 2008 writer The Arthur C. Clarke Foundation
Arthur Harkins
living innovation studies Arthur Harkins
Bertrand de Jouvenel 1903 1987 economist Nature 0f Future
Bill Joy 1954 living technology dangers
Buckminster Fuller 1895 1983 architect, cosmologist Who is Buckminster Fuller?
Clem Bezold
living healthcare Institute for Alternative Futures
Danila Medvedev 1980 living transhumanist Danila Medvedev
Gerald Celente
living trend forecaster Gerald Celente's Trends Research Institute
Dandridge M. Cole 1921 1965 space colonisation Dandridge M. Cole (my grand-hero-pa)
David H. Holtzman
living technology David H. Holtzman
Deane Hutton
living communicator Deane Hutton
Dennis Gabor 1900 1979 holography Dennis Gabor - Autobiography
Douglas Engelbart 1925 living hypertext, mouse Douglas Engelbart
Dirk HR Spennemann
living space heritage Cultural Heritage Management
Faith Popcorn 1948 living popcorn report Faith Popcorn's BrainReserve
FM-2030 1930 2000 transhumanist
Freeman Dyson 1923 living nuclear engineering, disarmament Freeman J. Dyson's Homepage
Fred Polak 1907 1985 social studies
Gaston Berger 1896 1960 cognitive science
George Dvorsky
living transhumanist Sentient Developments
George Gilder 1939 living society Gilder Telecosm Forum
George Orwell 1903 1950 writer George Orwell - Complete works
Gerard K. O'Neill 1927 1992 space colonization Life of Gerard K. O’Neill
Grace Hopper 1906 1992 women in computing We Build a Better World
Hans Moravec 1948 living robotics, AI Hans Moravec home page
Harlan Cleveland 1918 2008 diplomacy The Late Harlan Cleveland on Leadership
Herman Kahn 1922 1983 military strategist Hudson Institute > Herman Kahn
Hugo de Garis 1947 living AI Prof. Dr. Hugo de Garis
Jacque Fresco 1916 living architect, resource economics The Venus Project Future by Design
Jamais Cascio
living ethics Open the Future
James Hughes
living ethics Dr. J. Hughes
James Lovelock 1919 living environmentalist James LOVELOCK's web site
Jennifer M. Gidley
living psychologist, educator President, World Futures Studies Federation
Jerry Fishenden
living Microsoft future Jerry Fishenden
Jean Fourastié 1907 1990 economist Site Jean Fourastie
Jerome C. Glenn
living futures wheel
Jim Dator
living politics Papers by Jim Dator
Joanne Pransky
living robotics World's First Robotic Psychiatrist
Joël de Rosnay 1937 living molecular biology
John Naisbitt 1929 living megatrends John Naisbitt
John Smart 1960 living acceleration John Smart Bio
Kevin Warwick 1954 living robotics Kevin Warwick - Home Page
Lidewij Edelkoort 1950 living fashion Edelkoort
Magda Cordell McHale 1921 2008 painter, educator
Marsha Rhea
living boomers Institute for Alternative Futures
Mahdi ElMandjra 1933 living economist, sociologist Site mahdi elmandjra
Marshall Brain 1961 living robotics, transhumanism MarshallBrain.com
Marshall McLuhan 1911 1980 communications The Official Site of Marshall McLuhan
Matthew Simmons
living peak oil Simmons & Company International
Meredith Thring 1915 2006 inventor
M. G. Gordon 1915 1969 social studies
Michael Crichton 1942 2008 Jurassic Park MichaelCrichton.com
Michael E. Arth 1953 living urban design Michael E. Arth
Michio Kaku 1947 living string field theory Explorations in Science
Nicholas Negroponte 1943 living OLPC Nicholas Negroponte
Orrin H. Pilkey
living crique of environmentalists Nicholas School Faculty
Patricia Aburdene
living conscious capitalism Patricia Aburdene - Mega Trends
Peter Schwartz 1946 living China, Climate Change, Business, Technology Global Business Network
Renzo Provinciali
living sustainability
Patrick Dixon 1957 living business Global Change
Peter Cochrane 1946 living engineering Peter Cochrane
Peter Newman
living sustainability
Peter Russell 1946 living consciousness Spirit of Now
Ray Kurzweil 1948 living AI, transhumanism, technological singularity Kurzweil Technologies KurzweilAI.net
Raymond Spencer Rodgers 1935 2007 telesphere, food-chain
Renzo Provinciali 1895 1981 anarchist
Richard C. Duncan
living peak oil Minnesotans For Sustainability
Richard Moran 1950 living social scientist
Richard Neville 1941 living fearmonger
Richard Slaughter
living sociologist Foresight International
Robert A. Heinlein 1907 1988 writer Heinlein Society
Robert Anton Wilson 1932 2007 psychonaut Who "is" Robert Anton Wilson?
Robert Jungk 1913 1994 journalist
Sohail Inayatullah 1958 living political scientist Metafuture.org
Stanisław Lem 1921 2006 writer Official site for the author Stanislaw Lem
Stephen Euin Cobb 1955 living transhumanist Stephen Euin Cobb's
Stewart Brand 1938 living cognitive science Stewart Brand
Theodore Modis 1943 living business, physics
Vannevar Bush 1890 1974 analog computing Vannevar Bush
W. Warren Wagar 1932 2004 historian Futurist W. Warren Wagar Dies
Walter De Brouwer 1957 living OLPC Walter de Brouwer Biography
Wayne Horkan 1970 living transhumanist Wayne Horkan's weblog: eclectic
William Gilpin 1813 1894 politician William Gilpin
William Rowley
living healthcare Institute for Alternative Futures
Jason Ling 1975 living Social Networking, New Media Technologies and Mobile Technologies
Phil Salin 1949 1991 cyberspace and the Internet Salon.com

See also


Robert Anton Wilson (born Robert Edward Wilson, January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007), the American author of 35 influential books, became, at various times, a novelist, essayist, philosopher, futurist, polymath, psychonaut, libertarian[1] and self-described agnostic mystic. Recognized as an Episkopos, Pope, and Saint of Discordianism by Discordians who care to label him as such, Wilson helped publicize the group/religion/melee through his writings, interviews, and strolls.

Wilson described his work as an "attempt to break down conditioned associations, to look at the world in a new way, with many models recognized as models or maps, and no one model elevated to the truth." [2]

"My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone but agnosticism about everything."[3]


Stewart Brand

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Stewart Brand
waist-high portrait wearing black shirt, holding microphone, leaning forward and speaking
Brand speaking in 2004
Born December 14, 1938(1938-12-14)
Rockford, Illinois
Nationality American
Occupation Writer, editor
Known for The Whole Earth Catalog, The WELL, Long Now Foundation

Stewart Brand (born December 14, 1938 in Rockford, Illinois) is an American writer, best known as editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He founded a number of organizations including The WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation. He is the author of several books, most recently Whole Earth Discipline.


Contents

[hide]

Life

During Brand's childhood, his father worried that school was not stimulating Stewart to independent, creative thinking. His parents' response was to send him to Phillips Exeter Academy. After that he studied biology at Stanford University, graduating in 1960. As a soldier of the U.S. Army, he was a parachutist and taught infantry skills; he was later to express that his experience in the military fostered his competence in organizing. A civilian again, in 1962 he studied design at San Francisco Art Institute, photography at San Francisco State College, and participated in a legitimate scientific study of then-legal LSD, in Menlo Park, California.

Brand has lived in California ever since. Today, he and his wife, Ryan Phelan, live on Mirene, a 64-foot (20 m)-long working tugboat. Built in 1912, the boat is moored in a former shipyard in Sausalito, California.[1] He works in Mary Heartline, a fishing boat about 100 yards (91 m) away.[1] Otis Redding is said to have written “(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay” on a table Brand acquired from an antiques dealer in Sausalito.[1]

American Indians

Through scholarship and by visiting numerous Indian reservations, he familiarized himself with the Native Americans of the West. Native Americans have continued to be an important cultural interest, an interest which has re-emerged in Brand's work in various ways through the years. He was married to Lois Jennings, an Ottawa Native American and mathematician.[2]

Merry Pranksters

By the mid 1960s, he was associated with author Ken Kesey and the "Merry Pranksters," and in San Francisco, Brand produced the Trips Festival, an early effort involving rock music and light shows. About 10,000 hippies attended and Haight-Ashbury emerged as a community.[3] Tom Wolfe describes Brand in the beginning of his book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

NASA image of Earth

Earth from space, by William Anders, Apollo 8, 1968

In 1966, Brand campaigned to have NASA release the then-rumored satellite image of the entire Earth as seen from space. He distributed buttons—for 25 cents each[4]—asking, "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?"[5] He thought the image of our planet might be a powerful symbol. In 1968, a NASA astronaut made the photo[5] and in 1970 Earth Day began to be celebrated.[4] During a 2003 interview, Brand explained that the image "gave the sense that Earth’s an island, surrounded by a lot of inhospitable space. And it’s so graphic, this little blue, white, green and brown jewel-like icon amongst a quite featureless black vacuum." During this campaign Brand met Richard Buckminster Fuller, who offered to help him in his projects.

Douglas Engelbart

In late 1968, Brand assisted electrical engineer Douglas Engelbart with The Mother of All Demos, a famous presentation of many revolutionary computer technologies (including the mouse) to the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco.

Brand surmised that, given the necessary consciousness, information, and tools, human beings might reshape the world they had made (and were making) for themselves into something environmentally and socially sustainable. The fact that he had builders, designers, and engineers as friends surely influenced his reasoning.

Whole Earth Catalog

One page of a 1969 Whole Earth Catalog

During the late 1960s to early 1970s about 10 million Americans were involved in living communally.[6] In 1968, using the most basic of typesetting and page-layout tools, Brand and cohorts created issue number one of The Whole Earth Catalog.[7] Brand and his wife Lois travelled to communes in a 1963 Dodge truck that was the Whole Earth Truck Store which moved to a storefront in Menlo Park, California.[7] That first oversize Catalog, and its successors into the 1970s and later, reckoned that many sorts of things were useful "tools": books, maps, garden tools, specialized clothing, carpenters' and masons' tools, forestry gear, tents, welding equipment, professional journals, early synthesizers and personal computers, etc. Brand invited "reviews" of the best of these items from experts in specific fields, as though they were writing a letter to a friend. The information also made known where these things could be located or bought. The Catalog's publication coincided with the great wave of experimentalism, convention-breaking, and "do it yourself" attitude associated with the "counterculture".

The influence of these Whole Earth Catalogs on the rural back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s, and the communities movement within many cities, was widespread, being experienced in the U.S. and Canada and far beyond. A 1972 edition sold 1.5 million copies and in the U.S. won a National Book Award. Many people first learned about the potential of alternative energy production (e.g., solar, wind, small-hydro, geothermal) through the Catalog. (See also renewable energy.)

CoEvolution Quarterly

To continue this work and also to publish full-length articles on specific topics in natural sciences and invention, in numerous areas of arts and social sciences, and on the contemporary scene in general, Brand founded the CoEvolution Quarterly (CQ) during 1974, aimed primarily at educated laypersons. Brand never better revealed his opinions and reason for hope than when he ran, in CoEvolution Quarterly #4, a transcription of technology historian Lewis Mumford’s talk “The Next Transformation of Man,” containing the statement: "... man has still within him sufficient resources to alter the direction of modern civilization, for we then need no longer regard man as the passive victim of his own irreversible technological development."

Content of CQ often included futurism, or risqué topics. Besides giving space to unknown writers with something valuable to say, Brand presented articles by many respected authors and thinkers, including Lewis Mumford, Howard T. Odum, Witold Rybczynski, Karl Hess, Christopher Swan, Orville Schell, Ivan Illich, Wendell Berry, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gregory Bateson, Amory Lovins, Hazel Henderson, Gary Snyder, Lynn Margulis, Eric Drexler, Gerard K. O'Neill, Peter Calthorpe, Sim Van der Ryn, Paul Hawken, John Todd, J. Baldwin, Kevin Kelly (future editor of Wired magazine), and Donella Meadows. During ensuing years, Brand authored and edited a number of books on topics as diverse as computer-based media, the life-history of buildings, and ideas about space colonies.

During 1984 The Whole Earth Software Review (a supplement to The Whole Earth Software Catalog) was founded. It merged with CQ to form the Whole Earth Review in 1985.

California government

During 1977-79, Brand served as "special advisor" in the administration of California Governor Jerry Brown.

The WELL

During 1985, Brand and Larry Brilliant founded The WELL ("Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link"), a prototypic, broad-ranging online community for intelligent, informed participants the world over.The WELL won the 1990 Best Online Publication Award from the Computer Press Association.

Global Business Network

During 1986, Brand was a visiting scientist at the Media Laboratory at MIT. Soon after, he became a private-conference organizer for such corporations as Royal Dutch/Shell, Volvo, and AT&T. During 1988, he became a co-founder of the Global Business Network, which explores global futures and business strategies informed by the sorts of values and information which Brand has always found vital. GBN has become involved with in the evolution and application of scenario thinking, planning, and complementary strategic tools. In other connections, Brand has been part of the board of the Santa Fe Institute (founded during 1984), an organization devoted to "fostering a multidisciplinary scientific research community pursuing frontier science." He has continued also to promote the preservation of tracts of wilderness.

Brand listening in Sausalito during 2009

The Whole Earth Catalog implied an ideal of human progress that depended on decentralized, personal, and liberating technological development — so called, "soft technology." However, during 2005 he criticized aspects of the international environmental ideology he helped develop. An article by him entitled Environmental Heresies, published in the May 2005 issue of the MIT Technology Review, describes what he considers necessary changes to environmentalism. In the article he suggested, among other things, that environmentalists embrace nuclear power and genetically modified organisms as technologies with more promise than risk. Relating specifically to atomic energy, Brand argued for a centralized global distributor of nuclear fuel without demonstrating any concern[neutrality disputed] for the possibility such an arrangement might become totalitarian. As these technologies are unavailable as tools to ordinary people but, rather, are wielded by a military, corporate, and academic techno-elite, some[who?] see Brand's recent statements as incompatible philosophically with his earlier work.

Aphorisms

A few of Brand's aphorisms (on which he has elaborated) are: "Civilization’s shortening attention span is mismatched with the pace of environmental problems," "Environmental health requires peace, prosperity, and continuity," "Technology can be good for the environment," and (perhaps his most famous), [8] "Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine — too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better." (Spoken at the first Hackers' Conference, and printed in the May 1985 Whole Earth Review. It later turned up in his book, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, published in 1987.) Whole Earth Catalog began with the words “We are as gods and we might as well get good at it.” and his book Whole Earth Discipline begins with "We are as gods and HAVE to get good at it." Brand wrote The WELL's sign on message, "You own your own words, unless they contain information. In which case they belong to no one."

Works

Stewart Brand is the initiator or was involved with the development of the following:

Publications

Books

As editor or as co-editor

Articles

References

  1. ^ a b c Lewine, Edward (April 19, 2009). "On the Waterfront". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/magazine/19wwln-domains-t.html. Retrieved 2009-11-02. 
  2. ^ Brand 2009, p. 236
  3. ^ Brand, Stewart. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: The Legacy of the Whole Earth Catalog. Stanford University Libraries via Google. Event occurs at 32:30. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9001613451407405270#. Retrieved 2009-11-07. 
  4. ^ a b Brand, Stewart. "Photography changes our relationship to our planet". Smithsonian Photography Initiative. http://click.si.edu/Story.aspx?story=31. Retrieved 2009-11-06. 
  5. ^ a b Brand 2009, p. 214
  6. ^ Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: The Legacy of the Whole Earth Catalog. Stanford University Libraries via Google. Event occurs at 19:00. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9001613451407405270#. Retrieved 2009-11-07. 
  7. ^ a b Kirk, Andrew G. (2007). Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism. University Press of Kansas via Amazon.com. p. 48. ISBN 0700615458. http://www.amazon.com/Counterculture-Green-American-Environmentalism-CultureAmerica/dp/0700615458/. 
  8. ^ "Information Wants to be Free ..."

Further reading

Turner, Fred From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. University of Chicago Press. 2006. ISBN 0-226-81741-5.


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Nicholas Negroponte

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Nicholas Negroponte

Nicholas Negroponte delivering the Forrestal Lecture to the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD on April 15, 2009
Born December 1, 1943 (1943-12-01) (age 66)
New York City,[unreliable source?]
Occupation Academic and Computer Scientist
Spouse(s) Elaine
Children Dimitri Negroponte

Nicholas Negroponte (born December 1, 1943) is a Greek-American architect and computer scientist best known as the founder and Chairman Emeritus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, and also known as the founder of The One Laptop per Child association (OLPC).

Contents

[hide]

Early life

Negroponte was born to Dimitri John, a Greek shipping magnate, and grew up in New York City's Upper East Side. He is the younger brother of John Negroponte, former United States Deputy Secretary of State.

He attended many schools, including Buckley (NYC), Le Rosey (Switzerland) and Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Connecticut where he graduated in 1961. Subsequently, he studied at MIT as both an undergraduate and graduate student in Architecture where his research focused on issues of computer-aided design. He earned a Master's degree in architecture from MIT in 1966.

Career

MIT

Negroponte joined the faculty of MIT in 1966. For several years thereafter he divided his teaching time between MIT and several visiting professorships at Yale, Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1967, Negroponte founded MIT's Architecture Machine Group, a combination lab and think tank which studied new approaches to human-computer interaction. In 1985, Negroponte created the MIT Media Lab with Jerome B. Wiesner. As director, he developed the lab into the pre-eminent computer science laboratory for new media and a high-tech playground for investigating the human-computer interface.

Wired

In 1992, Negroponte became involved in the creation of Wired Magazine as the first investor. From 1993 to 1998, he contributed a monthly column to the magazine in which he reiterated a basic theme: "Move bits, not atoms."

Negroponte expanded many of the ideas from his Wired columns into a bestselling book Being Digital (1995), which made famous his forecasts on how the interactive world, the entertainment world and the information world would eventually merge. Being Digital was a bestseller and was translated into some twenty languages. Negroponte is a digital optimist who believed that computers would make life better for everyone[1] However, critics[who?] have faulted his techno-utopian ideas for failing to consider the historical, political and cultural realities with which new technologies should be viewed. Negroponte's belief that wired technologies such as telephones will ultimately become unwired by using airwaves instead of wires or fiber optics, and that unwired technologies such as televisions will become wired, is commonly referred to as the Negroponte switch.

Later career

In 2000, Negroponte stepped down as director of the Media Lab as Walter Bender took over as Executive Director. However, Negroponte retained the role of laboratory Chairman. When Frank Moss was appointed director of the lab in 2006, Negroponte stepped down as lab chairman to focus more fully on his work with One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) although he retains his appointment as professor at MIT.

Mary Lou Jepsen, Alan Kay and Nicholas Negroponte unveil the $100 laptop.

In November 2005, at the World Summit on the Information Society held in Tunis, Negroponte unveiled a $100 laptop computer, The Children's Machine, designed for students in the developing world. The project is part of a broader program by One Laptop Per Child, a non-profit organisation started by Negroponte and other Media Lab faculty, to extend Internet access in developing countries.

Negroponte is an active angel investor and has invested in over 30 startup companies over the last 30 years, including Zagats, Wired, Ambient Devices, Skype and Velti. He sits on several boards, including Motorola (listed on the New York Stock Exchange) and Velti (listed on the London Stock Exchange). He is also on the advisory board of TTI/Vanguard. In August 2007, he was appointed to a five-member special committee with the objective of assuring the continued journalistic and editorial integrity and independence of the Wall Street Journal and other Dow Jones & Company publications and services. The committee was formed as part of the merger of Dow Jones with News Corporation.[2] Negroponte's fellow founding committee members are Louis Boccardi, Thomas Bray, Jack Fuller, and the late former Congresswoman Jennifer Dunn.

References

  1. ^ Hirst, Martin and Harrison , John, (2007)Communication and New Media, Oxford University Press, p. 20
  2. ^ Wall Street Journal, August 1, 2007. "Text of Dow Jones Editorial Agreement". Online edition retrieved on October 21, 2007.

Video links


Magda Cordell McHale

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Magda in the classroom at SUNY Buffalo

Magda Cordell McHale (née Lustigova) (born Hungary June 24, 1921, died Sloan (near Buffalo), New York February 21, 2008) was an artist, futurist, and educator. She was a founding member of the Independent Group which was a British movement that originated Pop Art which grew out of a fascination with American mass culture and post-WWII technologies. Later, she was a faculty member in the University at Buffalo School of Architecture & Planning. [1]

I was filled with pain and I hoped for a better world,

she recounted later. This expression of hope came to define her working practices for the rest of her life. “Society needs to know where it has been before it can know where it is going,” was her oft-cited mantra. [2]

Contents

[hide]

Early life

Born Magda Lustigova to a prominent family of grain merchants in Hungary, Magda fled to Egypt and then Palestine as a refugee during World War II to escape Nazi persecution. Here, she found work as a translator for British intelligence and met her first husband, Frank Cordell, who was also working for British intelligence. According to British architect Peter Smithson, Magda was “a force who had the capacity to turn her willpower to anything.” [2]

Post War

After the war, Lustigova and Cordell returned to London, where they established an artistic atelier at 52 Cleveland Square in Paddington London, which they shared and artistically collaborated with the British Modern artist John McHale. She and her husband rapidly became an integral part of the avant-garde artistic milieu that congregated around the Institute of Contemporary Arts. They were actively involved in the Independent Group (IG) (1952-56), a cross-cultural discussion group that included artists, writers, architects and critics who rejected the traditional dichotomies of high and low culture. The IG challenged the official Modernist assumptions of British aesthetics and pioneered a progressive, interdisciplinary, consumer-based aesthetic of inclusiveness. [2] The three artists collaborated on a variety of projects, and Magda McHale soon became indispensable to the activities of the IG for her writings as well as her archiving and organisation. She was closely involved with the exhibition This is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1956, a multi-disciplinary show retrospectively credited with launching British Pop art.

The McHale/Cordell atelier occupied three floors in a large Georgian row house in Cleveland Square. Frank used the top floor with his piano and large windows overlooking the park as his music composing studio. John McHale occupied the large sky lit studio at the back of the atelier on the ground floor. Magda used the other large painting studio downstairs, which was also used by all three artist as a film studio. McHale used the downstairs film studio to produce his photograms for his Telemath collage series. There was also a separate downstairs workshop and photographic dark room. The living room on the ground floor was used for entertaining guests such as: Reyner Banham and other members of the ICA group, musicians, writers such as Eric Newby, dramatists such as Arnold Wesker, and international guests such as Buckminster Fuller, and Picasso's son, Paulo. Cordell made numerous tape recordings of Fuller.

Magda later recalled the significance of McHale’s return from his formative visit to America laden with imagery culled from American sources. “We all sat around on the floor for hours and looked through this unbelievable trunk of materials,” she said. [2]

In 1961, Magda divorced Cordell [3] and left for America with McHale, where they immersed themselves in academia. Encouraged by their dialogue with the American intellectual Buckminster Fuller, the McHales dedicated themselves to sociological research and published extensively on the impact of technology and culture, mass communications and the future. They moved from university to university propounding their ideas, teaching and publishing. During this time Magda published five books (three in collaboration with her husband) on future trends, and sat on numerous editorial boards. [2]

Art

McHale’s self-expression characterised both her academic and artistic endeavours. Although the latter part of her life was publicly devoted to her research into sociology and “futurist” studies, she regarded herself as a painter first and foremost. She conveyed something of her drive when talking of her art practice: “I’m a binge painter. I can go on for days until I’m limp and all wrung out. I have tremendous amounts of energy.”

McHale's artistic works were characterised by expressive figuration and heavily influenced by the Art Brut of continental painters such as Jean Dubuffet and Wols. As a rare female voice at this time, McHale’s preoccupation with the female form explored existential questions. Her textured, impasto surfaces depict distorted forms that at once reflect the resilience of the human body and describe mid-20th-century anguish. McHale’s work was acknowledged in articles and exhibitions of the day; the influential critic Reyner Banham included an illustration of her work in his 1955 article "The New Brutalism", in The Architectural Review. McHale showcased her monotypes and collages in a 1955 exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and her paintings at the Hanover Gallery in 1956, with later exhibitions at the University at Buffalo. [2]

Contemporary critics dwelt on the works’ sensuous, aggressive and primitivist qualities. “Her representation of women is not concerned with traditional notions of beauty or traditional cultural values . . . The result may be monstrous and uncompromising, but in this age of corsets, cosmetics, automation and celluloid sex, it might do us no harm to be shocked back into the realisation that there is still latent in the human being a savage instinct, fecundity and energy.” [2] Despite this new vista of art, she remained in her own work unswayed by the freedoms and allure of popular imagery and maintained her commitment to figuration. She later explained: “I am a European painter and for me that figure, that shape, is still superior to all that.” [2]

McHale's work is included in the collections of the Tate Modern in London and the Albright-Knox in Buffalo, New York.

Academic Work and Teaching

John and Magda moved from the UK to Southern Illinois University where John managed the World Resources Inventory with Buckminister Fuller, then to SUNY Binghamton where John completed his PhD and, with Magda, started the Center for Integrative Studies. Later they moved to Texas where the center was operated under the aegis of University of Houston, V.P. Andrew Rudnick.

After the death of John McHale in 1978, Magda McHale was invited to Buffalo, New York, where she established and became director of the Centre for Integrative Studies at the State University of New York. The main focus of the centre was global trends, inter-generational shifts in thought and the impact of new technologies on contemporary culture.

Magda was on faculty in the Design Studies department in the School of Architecture & Planning at the University at Buffalo (also referred to as SUNY Buffalo). The department was dissolved by Dean Mike Brooks in the late 1980s, at which point, Magda moved to the Department of Planning (later the Department of Urban and Regional Planning). Her areas of scholarship included future studies; long-range consequences of social, cultural, and technological change on global societies.

In 2000 she endowed the McHale Fellowship at the University of Buffalo School of Architecture & Planning to support design work that speculates on the impact of new technologies. [2]

She was active in the World Academy of Art & Science and the World Futures Society. [4] She worked tirelessly as vice-president of the World Futures Federation and the World Academy of Art and Science. [3]

References

  1. ^ http://www.ap.buffalo.edu/architecture/people/mchale.asp
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article3783359.ece
  3. ^ a b http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/magda-cordell-mchale-painter-and-futurist-thinker-842811.html
  4. ^ http://www.worldacademy.org/~waas/?q=node/29


External links


James Lovelock

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James Ephraim Lovelock

Born 26 July 1919 (1919-07-26) (age 90)
Letchworth, Hertfordshire, England
Residence England
Nationality British
Fields Chemistry, Earth Science
Institutions Independent researcher
Alma mater University of Manchester
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
University of London
Harvard Medical School
Known for Electron capture detector
Gaia hypothesis
Notable awards FRS, 1974
Tswett Medal, 1975
ACS, 1980
WMO Norbert Gerbier Prize, 1988
Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for the Environment, 1990
CBE, 1990
CH, 2003
Arne Naess Chair in Global Justice and the Environment [1], 2007

James Ephraim Lovelock, CH, CBE, FRS (born 26 July 1919) is an independent scientist, author, researcher, environmentalist, and futurist who lives in Devon, England. He is known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, in which he postulates that the Earth functions as a kind of superorganism.

Contents

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Biography

He was born in Letchworth Garden City in Hertfordshire, England, but moved to London where he was, by his own account, an unhappy pupil at Strand School.[1] He studied chemistry at the University of Manchester, before taking up a Medical Research Council post at the Institute for Medical Research in London.[2] His student status enabled temporary deferment of military service during the Second World War, but he registered as a conscientious objector.[3] He later abandoned this position in the light of Nazi atrocities and tried to enlist for war service, but was told that his medical research was too valuable for this to be considered.

In 1948 Lovelock received a Ph.D. degree in medicine at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Within the United States he has conducted research at Yale, Baylor College of Medicine, and Harvard University.[2]

Career

A lifelong inventor, Lovelock has created and developed many scientific instruments, some of which were designed for NASA in its programme of planetary exploration. It was while working as a consultant for NASA that Lovelock developed the Gaia Hypothesis, for which he is most widely known.

In early 1961, Lovelock was engaged by NASA to develop sensitive instruments for the analysis of extraterrestrial atmospheres and planetary surfaces. The Viking program, that visited Mars in the late 1970s, was motivated in part to determine whether Mars supported life, and many of the sensors and experiments that were ultimately deployed aimed to resolve this issue. During work on a precursor of this program, Lovelock became interested in the composition of the Martian atmosphere, reasoning that many life forms on Mars would be obliged to make use of it (and, thus, alter it). However, the atmosphere was found to be in a stable condition close to its chemical equilibrium, with very little oxygen, methane, or hydrogen, but with an overwhelming abundance of carbon dioxide. To Lovelock, the stark contrast between the Martian atmosphere and chemically-dynamic mixture of that of our Earth's biosphere was strongly indicative of the absence of life on the planet.[4] However, when they were finally launched to Mars, the Viking probes still searched (unsuccessfully) for extant life there.

Lovelock invented the electron capture detector, which ultimately assisted in discoveries about the persistence of CFCs and their role in stratospheric ozone depletion.[5][6][7] After studying the operation of the Earth's sulfur cycle,[8] Lovelock and his colleagues developed the CLAW hypothesis as a possible example of biological control of the Earth's climate.[9]

Lovelock was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974. He served as the president of the Marine Biological Association (MBA) from 1986 to 1990, and has been a Honorary Visiting Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford (formerly Green College, Oxford) since 1994. He has been awarded a number of prestigious prizes including the Tswett Medal (1975), an ACS chromatography award (1980), the WMO Norbert Gerbier Prize (1988), the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for the Environment (1990) and the RGS Discovery Lifetime award (2001). He became a CBE in 1990, and a Companion of Honour in 2003.

An independent scientist, inventor, and author, Lovelock works out of a barn-turned-laboratory in Cornwall.

CFCs

Reconstructed time-series of atmospheric concentrations of CFC-11.[10]

After the development of his electron capture detector, in the late 1960s, Lovelock was the first to detect the widespread presence of CFCs in the atmosphere.[5] He found a concentration of 60 parts per trillion of CFC-11 over Ireland and, in a partially self-funded research expedition in 1972, went on to measure the concentration of CFC-11 from the northern hemisphere to the Antarctic aboard the research vessel RRS Shackleton.[6][11] He found the gas in each of the 50 air samples that he collected but, not realising that the breakdown of CFCs in the stratosphere would release chlorine that posed a threat to the ozone layer, concluded that the level of CFCs constituted "no conceivable hazard".[11] He has since stated that he meant "no conceivable toxic hazard".

However, the experiment did provide the first useful data on the ubiquitous presence of CFCs in the atmosphere. The damage caused to the ozone layer by the photolysis of CFCs was later discovered by Frank Rowland and Mario Molina. After hearing a lecture on the subject of Lovelock's results,[12] they embarked on research that resulted in the first published paper that suggested a link between stratospheric CFCs and ozone depletion in 1974, and later shared the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work.[13]

Gaia

First formulated by Lovelock during the 1960s as a result of work for NASA concerned with detecting life on Mars,[14] the Gaia hypothesis proposes that living and non-living parts of the earth form a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism.[15][16] Named after the Greek goddess Gaia at the suggestion of novelist William Golding,[11] the hypothesis postulates that the biosphere has a regulatory effect on the Earth's environment that acts to sustain life.

While the Gaia hypothesis was readily accepted by many in the environmentalist community, it has not been widely accepted within the scientific community. Among its more famous critics are the evolutionary biologists Richard Dawkins, Ford Doolittle, and Stephen Jay Gould — notable, given the diversity of this trio's views on other scientific matters. These (and other) critics have questioned how natural selection operating on individual organisms can lead to the evolution of planetary-scale homeostasis.[17]

Lovelock has responded to these criticisms with models such as Daisyworld, that illustrate how individual-level effects can translate to planetary homeostasis.

Nuclear power

Lovelock has become concerned about the threat of global warming from the greenhouse effect. In 2004 he caused a media sensation when he broke with many fellow environmentalists by pronouncing that "only nuclear power can now halt global warming". In his view, nuclear energy is the only realistic alternative to fossil fuels that has the capacity to both fulfill the large scale energy needs of humankind while also reducing greenhouse emissions. He is an open member of Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy.

In 2005, against the backdrop of renewed UK government interest in nuclear power, Lovelock again publicly announced his support for nuclear energy, stating, "I am a Green, and I entreat my friends in the movement to drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy".[18] Although these interventions in the public debate on nuclear power are recent, his views on it are longstanding. In his 1988 book The Ages of Gaia he states:

"I have never regarded nuclear radiation or nuclear power as anything other than a normal and inevitable part of the environment. Our prokaryotic forebears evolved on a planet-sized lump of fallout from a star-sized nuclear explosion, a supernova that synthesised the elements that go to make our planet and ourselves."[11]

In The Revenge of Gaia[19] (2006), where he puts forward the concept of sustainable retreat, Lovelock writes:

"A television interviewer once asked me, 'But what about nuclear waste? Will it not poison the whole biosphere and persist for millions of years?' I knew this to be a nightmare fantasy wholly without substance in the real world... One of the striking things about places heavily contaminated by radioactive nuclides is the richness of their wildlife. This is true of the land around Chernobyl, the bomb test sites of the Pacific, and areas near the United States' Savannah River nuclear weapons plant of the Second World War. Wild plants and animals do not perceive radiation as dangerous, and any slight reduction it may cause in their lifespans is far less a hazard than is the presence of people and their pets... I find it sad, but all too human, that there are vast bureaucracies concerned about nuclear waste, huge organisations devoted to decommissioning power stations, but nothing comparable to deal with that truly malign waste, carbon dioxide."

On 30 May 2006, Lovelock told the Australian Lateline television program: "Modern nuclear power stations are useless for making bombs".[20] This view may be based on the fact that plutonium-239 from the nuclear reactor of a power plant is contaminated with a significant amount of plutonium-240, complicating its use in nuclear weapons.[21] It is easier to enrich uranium than to separate 240Pu from 239Pu to produce weapons-grade material, although even reactor-grade plutonium can in fact be used in weapons, e.g. dirty bombs.[22][23] Friends of the Earth Australia responded: "Lovelock's claim that nuclear power plants cannot be used for weapons production is false, irresponsible and dangerous. A typical nuclear power reactor produces about 300 kilograms of plutonium each year, enough for 30 nuclear weapons".[20]

Climate and mass human mortality

Writing in the British newspaper The Independent in January 2006, Lovelock argues that, as a result of global warming, "billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable" by the end of the 21st century.[24] He has been quoted in The Guardian that 80% of humans will perish by 2100 AD, and this climate change will last 100,000 years.

He further predicts, the average temperature in temperate regions will increase by as much as 8°C and by up to 5°C in the tropics, leaving much of the world's land uninhabitable and unsuitable for farming, with northerly migrations and new cities created in the Arctic. He predicts much of Europe will become uninhabitable having turned to desert and Britain will become Europe's "life-raft" due to its stable temperature caused by being surrounded by the ocean. He suggests that "we have to keep in mind the awesome pace of change and realise how little time is left to act, and then each community and nation must find the best use of the resources they have to sustain civilisation for as long as they can".[24]

He partly retreated from this position in a September 2007 address to the World Nuclear Association's Annual Symposium, suggesting that climate change would stabilise and prove survivable, and that the Earth itself is in "no danger" because it would stabilise in a new state. Life, however, might be forced to migrate en masse to remain in habitable climes.[25] In 2008, he became a patron of the Optimum Population Trust, which campaigns for a gradual decline in the global human population to a sustainable level.[26]

Ocean Pipes proposal

In September 2007, Lovelock and Chris Rapley proposed the construction of ocean pumps comprising pipes "100 to 200 metres long, 10 metres in diameter and with a one-way flap valve at the lower end for pumping by wave movement" to pump water up from below the thermocline to "fertilize algae in the surface waters and encourage them to bloom".[27] The intention of this scheme is to accelerate the transfer of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to the ocean by increasing primary production and enhancing the export of organic carbon (as marine snow) to the deep ocean. At the time the authors noted that the idea "may fail, perhaps on engineering or economic grounds", and that "the impact on ocean acidification will need to be taken into account". However, a scheme similar to that proposed by Lovelock and Rapley is already being developed by a commercial company.[28]

The proposal attracted widespread media attention,[29][30][31][32] although also criticism.[33][34][35] Commenting on the proposal, Corinne Le Quéré, a University of East Anglia researcher, said "It doesn’t make sense. There is absolutely no evidence that geoengineering options work or even go in the right direction. I’m astonished that they published this. Before any geoengineering is put to work a massive amount of research is needed – research which will take 20 to 30 years".[29] Other researchers have claimed that "this scheme would bring water with high natural pCO2 levels (associated with the nutrients) back to the surface, potentially causing exhalation of CO2".[35]




Jacque Fresco

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Jacque Fresco

Jacque Fresco (right) with Roxanne Meadows
Born March 13, 1916 (1916-03-13) (age 93)
Residence Florida
Nationality American
Occupation Futurist
Website
http://www.thevenusproject.com/

Jacque Fresco is a self-educated industrial designer, author, lecturer, futurist, inventor, social engineer and the creator of The Venus Project.[1][2][3] Fresco has worked as both designer and inventor in a wide range of fields spanning biomedical innovations and integrated social systems. He believes his ideas would maximally benefit the greatest number of people and he states some of his influence stems from his formative years during the Great Depression.[4]

The Venus Project was started in the mid-1970s by Fresco and his partner, Roxanne Meadows. The film Future by Design was produced in 2006 describing his life and work. Fresco writes and lectures extensively on subjects ranging from the holistic design of sustainable cities, energy efficiency, natural resource management and advanced automation, focusing on the benefits it will bring to society.[2][5]

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Life, inventions and career

Earlier work

Automated construction

Born on March 13, 1916, Jacque Fresco started his professional career as design consultant for Rotor Craft Helicopter Company. He served in the Army Design and Development Unit at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, U.S. and worked for the Raymond De-Icer Corporation based in Los Angeles, California, U.S., as a research engineer.[5][4]

He worked for many companies and in many fields such as technical consultant and technical advisor to the motion picture industry, industrial design instructor at the Art Center School in Hollywood, California. In Los Angeles, he was colleague and work associate of psychologist Donald Powell Wilson.[5][4]

In 1942, Fresco started the Revell Plastics Company (now Revell-Monogram) with Lou Glaser, working variously in aerospace research and development, architecture, efficient automobile design, bare-eye 3D cinematic projection methods and medical equipment design where he developed a three dimensional X-ray unit amongst other things.[5][4]

The Venus Project

The Venus Project was started around 1975[2] by Fresco[1][6] and by former portrait artist, Roxanne Meadows[2] in Venus, Florida, USA. Its research center is a 21-acre (85,000 m2) property with various domed buildings of his design, where they work on books and films to demonstrate their concepts and ideas. Fresco has produced an extensive range of scale models based on his designs. [4] The Venus Project was incorporated in 1995.[7][8]

Venus project was founded on the idea that poverty is caused by the stifling of progress in technology, which itself is caused by the present world's profit-driven economic system.[9] The progression of technology, if it were carried on independent of its profitability, Fresco theorizes, would make more resources available to more people thereby reducing corruption and greed, and instead make people more likely to help each other.[10][6][11] Fresco advocates against a money-based economy in favor of what he refers to as a resource-based economy.[12]

In a 2008 interview with Fresco and Meadows, Fresco stated that a 'lack of credentials' has made it difficult for him to gain influence in academic circles.[2] He adds that when universities do invite him to speak, they often don't give him enough time to explain his views.[2]

The Zeitgeist Movement

The Venus Project is featured prominently in the 2008 documentary film Zeitgeist: Addendum, as a possible solution to the global problems explained in the first film and first half of the second film.[6] The film premiered at the 5th Annual Artivist Film Festival in Los Angeles, California on October 2, 2008, winning their highest award, and it was released online for free on Google video[13] on October 4, 2008.[14]. Following the movie The Zeitgeist Movement was established to aid the transition from a monetary based economy to a resource-based economy.

Resource Based Economy

[dubious ]

Circular city

A major theme of Fresco's is the concept of a resource-based economy that replaces the need for monetary economy we have now, which is "scarcity-oriented" or "scarcity-based". Fresco argues that the world is rich in natural resources and energy and that — with modern technology and judicious efficiency — the needs of the global population can be met with abundance, while at the same time removing the current limitations of what is deemed possible due to notions of economic viability.

He gives this example to help explain the idea:

"At the beginning of World War II the U.S. had a mere 600 or so first-class fighting aircraft. We rapidly overcame this short supply by turning out more than 90,000 planes a year. The question at the start of World War II was: Do we have enough funds to produce the required implements of war? The answer was No, we did not have enough money, nor did we have enough gold; but we did have more than enough resources. It was the available resources that enabled the US to achieve the high production and efficiency required to win the war. Unfortunately this is only considered in times of war." [15]

Fresco states that for this to work, all of the Earth's resources must be held as the common heritage of all people and not just a select few; and the practice of rationing resources through monetary methods is irrelevant and counter-productive to the survival of human civilization.[16]


One of the key points in Fresco’s solution is that without the conditions created in a monetary system, vast amounts of resources would not be wasted unproductively. Instead Fresco’s contention is that without the waste of resources on ends that would become irrelevant there would be no scarcity of necessary products such as food and education.

Published works (partial)

Films

See also

References

  1. ^ a b Durrani, Noni (2007-10-15). The Future: Jacque Fresco On The Future Forbes.com. Retrieved on 2008-12-02.
  2. ^ a b c d e f Living On Purpose: Interview with Fresco and Meadows (MP3). The Venus Project. Retrieved on 2008-12-02.
  3. ^ Corrias, Angela (March 19, 2009). "The Zeitgeist Movement: practical advices to build a better future". Herald de Paris. http://www.heralddeparis.com/the-zeitgeist-movement-practical-advices-to-build-a-better-future/27800. Retrieved 2009-04-08. 
  4. ^ a b c d e Future by Design at the Internet Movie Database
  5. ^ a b c d new venus (PHP). parole.aporee.org. Retrieved on 2008-12-02.
  6. ^ a b c "IMDb Profile". Imdb.com. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1332128/. Retrieved 2009-03-26. 
  7. ^ "The Venus Project, Inc." (ASPX). CorporationWiki. http://www.corporationwiki.com/Florida/Venus/the-venus-project-inc-6481878.aspx. Retrieved 2009-03-26. 
  8. ^ "Detail by Entity Name: Florida Profit Corporation: THE VENUS PROJECT, INC" (EXE). Division of Corporations. State of Florida, Department of State. http://www.sunbiz.org/scripts/cordet.exe?action=P&inq_came_from=NAMFWD&inq_doc_number=L04000033467&cor_web_names_seq_number=0000&names_name_ind=N&fei_fei_number=&fei_cor_number=&princ_cor_number=&princ_type=&princ_seq=&princ_comp_name=&names_comp_name=VENUSNAILS&names_cor_number=P03000106376&names_name_ind=N&names_name_seq=0000&names_filing_type=. Retrieved 2009-03-26. 
  9. ^ Breaking News, Artivist Film Festival website.
  10. ^ "F.A.Q.". The Zeitgeist Movement. http://thezeitgeistmovement.com/faq-home.htm. Retrieved 2009-03-26. 
  11. ^ "Zeitgeist Addendum". WorldCat. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/263093157&referer=brief_results. Retrieved 2009-03-26. 
  12. ^ "What is The Venus Project". The Venus Project. http://www.thevenusproject.com/intro_main/whatis_tvp.htm. Retrieved 2009-03-26. 
  13. ^ "Zeitgeist: Addendum". Video. Google. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7065205277695921912. Retrieved 2009-03-26. 
  14. ^ The Wall Street Journal Digital Network's Market Watch, Press release.
  15. ^ "Resource based economy". Venus Project. http://www.thevenusproject.com/resource_eco.htm. Retrieved 2009-03-26. 
  16. ^ "Resource Based Economy". Venus Project. http://www.thevenusproject.com/a-new-social-design/resource-based-economy. Retrieved 2009-11-05. 

External links



Jamais Cascio

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Jamais Cascio in 2008

Jamais Cascio is a San Francisco Bay Area-based writer and ethical futurist.

In the 1990s, Cascio worked for the futurist and scenario planning firm Global Business Network. In 2003, he co-founded the popular environmental website Worldchanging, where he was a primary contributor.

At Worldchanging, he covered a broad variety of topics, from energy and climate change to global development, open source, and bio- and nanotechnologies. In early 2006, he left Worldchanging, and now blogs at Open The Future, a title based on his WorldChanging.com essay, 'The Open Future'.

He currently serves as the Global Futures Strategist for the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, is a Fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and is a Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Future.

Cascio is also known as a speculative futurist, having written two books for the GURPS science fiction role-playing game series "Transhuman Space", Broken Dreams (2002) and Toxic Memes (2003).

Cascio's work could be classified as techno-progressive. He speaks and writes frequently on the use of future studies as a tool for anticipating and managing environmental and technological crises. In 2006, he spoke at the TED conference. In 2009, Cascio was named by Foreign Policy Magazine as #72 among their "Top 100 Global Thinkers".

See also

References

External links


Gaston Berger

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Gaston Berger (1 October 1896 – 13 November 1960) was a French futurist but also an industrialist, a philosopher and a state manager. He is mainly known for his remarkably lucid analysis of Edmund Husserl's Phenomenology and for his studies on the character structure.

Berger was born in Saint-Louis, Senegal. After managing a fertilizer plant during the 1930s, he created in Paris the Centre Universitaire International et des Centres de Prospective and directed the philosophical studies (Études philosophiques). The term prospective, invented by Gaston Berger, is the study of the possible futures.

From 1953 to 1960 he was in charge of the tertiary education at the Minister of National Education and modernised the French universities system. He was elected at the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques in 1955.

In 1957 he founded the journal Prospective and the homonym centre with André Gros. This same year he created the Institut national des sciences appliquées (INSA) of Lyon with the rector Capelle.

He was the father of the French choreographer Maurice Béjart (1927-2007). The university of Saint-Louis, Senegal, where he was born is named after him.


Douglas Engelbart

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Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart

Douglas Engelbart in 1984, showing two mice
Born January 30, 1925 (1925-01-30) (age 84)
Portland, Oregon, USA
Citizenship US
Nationality US
Ethnicity German (father's side), Norwegian and Swedish (mother's side)
Fields Inventor
Institutions SRI, Xerox PARC, Doug Engelbart Institute
Alma mater Oregon State College (BS); UC Berkeley (PhD)
Doctoral advisor John R. Woodyard
Known for Computer mouse, Hypertext, Groupware, Interactive Computing
Notable awards National Medal of Technology, Lemelson-MIT Prize, Turing Award, Lovelace Medal, Norbert Wiener Award for Social and Professional Responsibility, Fellow Award, Computer History Museum

Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart (born January 30, 1925) is an American inventor and early computer pioneer. He is best known for inventing the computer mouse,[1] as a pioneer of human-computer interaction whose team developed hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to GUIs; and as a committed and vocal proponent of the development and use of computers and networks to help cope with the world’s increasingly urgent and complex problems.[2]

His lab at SRI was responsible for more breakthrough innovation than possibly any other lab before or since. Engelbart had embedded in his lab a set of organizing principles, which he termed his "bootstrapping strategy", which he specifically designed to bootstrap and accelerate the rate of innovation achievable.[3]

Contents

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Early life and education

Engelbart was born in the U.S. state of Oregon on January 30, 1925 to Carl Louis Engelbart and Gladys Charlotte Amelia Munson Engelbart. He is of German, Swedish and Norwegian descent.[4]

He was the middle of three children, with a sister Dorianne (3 years older), and a brother David (14 months younger). They lived in Portland in his early years, and moved to the countryside to a place called Johnson Creek when he was 9 or 10, after the death of his father. He graduated from Portland's Franklin High School in 1942.

Midway through his college studies at Oregon State University (then called Oregon State College), just at the end of World War II, he was drafted into the Navy, serving two years as a radar technician in the Philippines. It was there on a small island in a tiny hut up on stilts that he first read Vannevar Bush's article "As We May Think", which greatly inspired him. He returned to Oregon State and completed his Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering in 1948, a B.Eng. from UC Berkeley in 1952,[5] and a Ph.D. in EECS from UC Berkeley in 1955. While at Oregon State, he was a member of Sigma Phi Epsilon social fraternity.

As a graduate student at Berkeley he assisted in the construction of the California Digital Computer project CALDIC. His graduate work led to several patents[6]. After completing his PhD he stayed on at Berkeley to teach for a year, and left when it was clear he could not pursue his vision there. He then formed a startup, Digital Techniques, to commercialize some of his doctorate research on storage devices, but after a year decided instead to find a venue where he could pursue the research he had been dreaming of since 1951 (see Epiphany).

Career and accomplishments

The first computer mouse held by Engelbart showing the wheels that directly contact the working surface.

Epiphany

Doug Engelbart's career was inspired in 1951 when he got engaged and suddenly realized he had no career goals beyond getting a good education and a decent job. Over several months he reasoned that: (1) he would focus his career on making the world a better place; (2) any serious effort to make the world better requires some kind of organized effort; (3) harnessing the collective human intellect of all the people contributing to the solution was the key; (4) if you could dramatically improve how we do that you'd be boosting every effort on the planet to solve important problems - the sooner the better; and (5) computers could be the vehicle for doing all this.

Several years prior, Engelbart had read with interest Vannevar Bush's article "As We May Think", a call to arms for making knowledge widely available as a national peacetime grand challenge. Doug had also read something about computers (a relatively recent phenomenon), and from his experience as a radar technician he knew that information could be analyzed and displayed on a screen. He suddenly envisioned intellectual workers sitting at display 'working stations', flying through information space, harnessing their collective intellectual capacity to solve important problems together in much more powerful ways. Harnessing collective intellect, facilitated by interactive computers, became his life's mission at a time when computers were viewed as number crunching tools. He went to UC Berkeley to learn everything he could about computers, got his PhD, and was told to be very careful about who he talked to about his "wild" ideas. After a year of teaching at Berkeley as Acting Assistant Professor, he took a position at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, hoping one day to pursue his vision there. He initially worked for Hewitt Crane on devices. He and Hew became lifelong friends.

SRI and ARC

At SRI, Engelbart gradually proved himself with over a dozen patents to his name (some resulting from his graduate work), and within a few years was funded to produce a report about his vision and proposed research agenda titled Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. This led to funding from ARPA to launch his work. Engelbart recruited a research team in his new Augmentation Research Center (ARC, the lab he founded at SRI), and became the driving force behind the design and development of the On-Line System, or NLS. He and his team developed computer-interface elements such as bit-mapped screens, the mouse, hypertext, collaborative tools, and precursors to the graphical user interface. He conceived and developed many of his user interface ideas back in the mid-1960s, long before the personal computer revolution, at a time when most individuals were kept away from computers, and could only use computers through intermediaries (see batch processing), and when software tended to be written for vertical applications in proprietary systems.

Two Apple Macintosh Plus mice, 1986

Engelbart applied for a patent in 1967 and received it in 1970, for the wooden shell with two metal wheels (computer mouse - U.S. Patent 3,541,541), which he had developed with Bill English, his lead engineer, a few years earlier. In the patent application it is described as an "X-Y position indicator for a display system". Engelbart later revealed that it was nicknamed the "mouse" because the tail came out the end. His group also called the on-screen cursor a "bug", but this term was not widely adopted.

He never received any royalties for his mouse invention. During an interview, he says "SRI patented the mouse, but they really had no idea of its value. Some years later it was learned that they had licensed it to Apple for something like $40,000."

Engelbart showcased many of his and ARC's inventions in 1968 at the so-called mother of all demos.[7]

ARPANET

Because Engelbart's research and tool-development for online collaboration and interactive human-computer interfaces was partially funded by ARPA, SRI's ARC became involved with the ARPANET (the precursor of the Internet).

On October 29, 1969, the world's first electronic computer network, the ARPANET, was established between nodes at Leonard Kleinrock's lab at UCLA and Engelbart's lab at SRI. Interface Message Processors at both sites served as the backbone of the first Internet [1].

In addition to SRI and UCLA, UCSB, and the University of Utah were part of the original four network nodes. By December 5, 1969, the entire 4-node network was connected.

ARC soon became the first Network Information Center and thus managed the directory for connections among all ARPANET nodes. ARC also published a large percentage of the early Request For Comments, an ongoing series of publications that document the evolution of ARPANET/Internet.

Anecdotal Notes

Historian of science Thierry Bardini has argued that Engelbart's complex personal philosophy (which drove all his research endeavors) foreshadowed the modern application of the concept of coevolution to the philosophy and use of technology.

Bardini points out that Engelbart was strongly influenced by the principle of linguistic relativity developed by Benjamin Lee Whorf.[8] Where Whorf reasoned that the sophistication of a language controls the sophistication of the thoughts that can be expressed by a speaker of that language, Engelbart reasoned that the state of our current technology controls our ability to manipulate information, and that fact in turn will control our ability to develop new, improved technologies. He thus set himself to the revolutionary task of developing computer-based technologies for manipulating information directly, and also to improve individual and group processes for knowledge-work.

Engelbart's philosophy and research agenda is most clearly and directly expressed in the 1962 research report which Engelbart refers to as his 'bible': Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. The concept of network-augmented intelligence is attributed to Engelbart based on this pioneering work.

End of research career and subsequent developments

Engelbart slipped into relative obscurity after 1976 due to various misfortunes and misunderstandings. Several of Engelbart's best researchers became alienated from him and left his organization for Xerox PARC, in part due to frustration, and in part due to differing views of the future of computing. Engelbart saw the future in collaborative, networked, timeshare (client-server) computers, which younger programmers rejected in favor of the personal computer. The conflict was both technical and social: the younger programmers came from an era where centralized power was highly suspect, and personal computing was just barely on the horizon.

In his book about Engelbart, Bardini points out that in the early 1970s, several key ARC personnel were briefly involved in Erhard Seminars Training. Although EST seemed like a good idea at first, the controversial nature of EST reduced the morale and social cohesion of the ARC community.

The Mansfield Amendment, the end of the Vietnam War, and the end of the Apollo program reduced ARC's funding from ARPA and NASA. SRI's management, which disapproved of Engelbart's approach to running the center, placed the remains of ARC under the control of artificial intelligence researcher Bertram Raphael, who negotiated the transfer of the laboratory to a company called Tymshare. Engelbart's house in Atherton burned down during this period, causing him and his family even further problems. Tymshare took over NLS and the lab that Engelbart had founded, hired most of the lab's staff including its creator as a Senior Scientist, renamed the software Augment, and offered it as a commercial service via its new Office Automation Division. Tymshare was already somewhat familiar with NLS; back when ARC was still operational, it had experimented with its own local copy of the NLS software on a minicomputer called OFFICE-1, as part of a joint project with ARC.

At Tymshare, Engelbart soon found himself marginalized and relegated to obscurity—operational concerns at Tymshare overrode Engelbart's desire to do further research. Various executives, first at Tymshare and later at McDonnell Douglas (which took over Tymshare in 1984[9]), expressed interest in his ideas, but never committed the funds or the people to further develop them. His interest inside of McDonnell Douglas was focused on the enormous knowledge management and IT requirements involved in the lifecycle of an aerospace program, which served to strengthen Doug's resolve to motivate the IT arena toward global interoperability and an open hyperdocument system[10]. Engelbart retired from McDonnell Douglas in 1986, determined to raise a flag on neutral ground where he could pursue his work in earnest.

Teaming with his daughter, Christina Engelbart, in 1988 he founded the Bootstrap Institute with modest funding to coalesce his ideas into a series of three-day and half-day management seminars offered at Stanford University 1989–2000, which served to refine his ideas while inspiring candidate participants. By the early 1990s there was sufficient interest among his seminar graduates to launch a collaborative implementation of his work, and the Bootstrap Alliance was formed as a non-profit home base for this effort. Although the invasion of Iraq and subsequent recession spawned a rash of belt-tightening reorgs which drastically redirected the efforts of their alliance partners, they continued with the management seminars, consulting, and small-scale collaborations. In the mid-1990s they were awarded some DARPA funding to develop a modern user interface to Augment, called Visual AugTerm (VAT), while participating in a larger program addressing the IT requirements of the Joint Task Force.

Honors

Since the late 1980s, prominent individuals and organizations have recognized the seminal importance of Engelbart's contributions[11]:

In December 1995, at the Fourth WWW Conference in Boston, he was the first recipient of what would later become the Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award. In 1997 he was awarded the Lemelson-MIT Prize of $500,000, the world's largest single prize for invention and innovation, and the ACM Turing Award. To mark the 30th anniversary of Engelbart's 1968 demo, in 1998 the Stanford Silicon Valley Archives and the Institute for the Future hosted Engelbart's Unfinished Revolution, a large symposium at Stanford University's Memorial Auditorium, to honor Engelbart and his ideas. Also that year, ACM SIGCHI awarded him the CHI Lifetime Achievement Award (and inducted him into the CHI Academy in 2002).

In early 2000 Engelbart produced, with a dedicated team of volunteers and sponsors, what was called the The Unfinished Revolution — II, also known as the Engelbart Colloquium at Stanford University, to document and publicize his work and ideas to a larger audience (live, and online). The video archives of both the 2000 UnRev-II: Engelbart's Colloquium at Stanford, and the 1998 "Engelbart's Unfinished Revolution" Symposium, are still available online as of this writing (December 2008). In December 2000, US President Bill Clinton awarded Engelbart the National Medal of Technology, the United States' highest technology award. In 2001 Engelbart was awarded a British Computer Society's Lovelace Medal, and in 2005 he was made a Fellow of the Computer History Museum and honored with the Norbert Wiener Award, which is given annually by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.

Robert X. Cringely did an hour long interview with Dr. Engelbart on 9 Dec 2005 in his NerdTV video podcast series. On December 9, 2008, Engelbart was honored at the 40th Anniversary celebration of the 1968 "Mother of All Demos".[12] This event, produced by SRI International, was held at Memorial Auditorium at Stanford University. Speakers included several members of Engelbart's original Augmentation Research Center (ARC) team including Don Andrews, Bill Paxton, Bill English, and Jeff Rulifson, Engelbart's chief government sponsor Bob Taylor, and other pioneers of interactive computing, including Andy van Dam and Alan Kay. In addition, Christina Engelbart spoke about her father's early influences and the ongoing work of the Doug Engelbart Institute. In June 2009, the New Media Consortium recognized Engelbart as an NMC Fellow [13] for his lifetime of achievements.

At present

The most complete coverage of Engelbart's bootstrapping ideas can be found in Boosting Our Collective IQ[14], by Douglas C. Engelbart, 1995. This is a special keepsake including three of Engelbart's key papers, artfully edited and produced into book form by Yuri Rubinsky and Christina Engelbart to commemorate the presentation of the 1995 SoftQuad Web Award to Doug Engelbart at the World Wide Web conference in Boston that December, honoring his early and seminal contribution to the hypertext systems. Only 2,000 softcover copies were printed, and 100 hardcover, numbered and signed by Doug Engelbart and Tim Berners-Lee. 30 pages, 5.5″×9″ includes Epilogue and details of the Award. Engelbart's book is now being republished by the Doug Engelbart Institute.

Two comprehensive histories of Engelbart's laboratory and work are in What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff and A Heritage of Innovation: SRI's First Half Century by Donald Neilson. Other books on Engelbart and his laboratory include Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing by Thierry Bardini and The Engelbart Hypothesis: Dialogs with Douglas Engelbart, by Valerie Landau and Eileen Clegg in conversation with Douglas Engelbart. All four of these books are based on interviews with Engelbart as well as other contributors in his laboratory.

He is now Founder Emeritus of the Doug Engelbart Institute, which he founded in 1988 with his daughter Christina Engelbart, who is now Executive Director. The Institute promotes Engelbart's philosophy for boosting Collective IQ—the concept of dramatically improving how we can solve important problems together—using a strategic bootstrapping approach for accelerating our progress toward that goal.[15]

In 2005 Engelbart received a National Science Foundation grant to fund the open source HyperScope project. The Hyperscope team built a browser component using Ajax and DHTML designed to replicate Augment's multiple viewing and jumping capabilities (linking within and across various documents). HyperScope is perceived as the first step of a process designed to engage a wider community in a dialogue, on development of collaborative software and services, based on Engelbart's goals and research. The Doug Engelbart Institute is now based at SRI International.

Engelbart has served on the Advisory Board of the University of Santa Clara Center for Science, Technology, and Society, and The Hyperwords Company Ltd (producer of the free Firefox Add-On called 'Hyperwords'[16].

Family

Dr. Engelbart has four children, Gerda, Diana, Christina and Norman with his late wife of 47 years, Ballard who died in 1997. He has nine grandchildren.

References

  1. ^ BBC News Online: The Man behind the Mouse
  2. ^ The Unfinished Revolution II: Strategy and Means for Coping with Complex Problems, Colloquium at Stanford University, Jan–Mar 2000.
  3. ^ About a Bootstrapping Strategy — an introduction with links to source materials.
  4. ^ Lowood, Henry (Dec. 19, 1986): Douglas Engelbart Interview 1, Stanford and the Silicon Valley. Oral History Interviews.
  5. ^ http://dougengelbart.org/about/cv.html
  6. ^ Engelbart Patents
  7. ^ Engelbart, Douglas C., et al. (1968), "SRI-ARC. A technical session presentation at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, Dec. 9, 1968" (NLS demo ’68: The computer mouse debut), 11 film reels and 6 video tapes (100 min.), Engelbart Collection, Stanford University Library, Menlo Park (CA).
  8. ^ Thierry Bardini & Michael Friedewald, Chronicle of the Death of a Laboratory: Douglas Engelbart and the Failure of the Knowledge Workshop, History of Technology 23, 2002, p193.
  9. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tymshare#Tymshare_Sold_to_McDonnell_Douglas Tymshare sold to McDonnell Douglas
  10. ^ About an Open Hyperdocument System an introduction with links to Doug's key writings on the subject
  11. ^ Honors Awarded to Doug Engelbart
  12. ^ Engelbart and the Dawn of Interactive Computing
  13. ^ NMC Fellow award
  14. ^ Engelbart Books
  15. ^ Doug's Vision Highlights: Augmenting Society's Collective IQ
  16. ^ http://www.hyperwords.net/about_us_adv.html

Further reading

External links


David H. Holtzman

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David H. Holtzman image.jpg

David H. Holtzman is a former security analyst and military code-breaker, a futurist, activist, security expert, technologist, technology executive, and writer. Initiatives he spearheaded have radically changed the way people interact with technology.

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Dot Com Boom

During the Dot Com Boom of the late 1990s, Holtzman ran one of the most critical networks in the world —- the domain name system. As Chief Technology Officer of Network Solutions and the manager of the Internet's master root server, Holtzman oversaw the growth of the commercial Internet from five hundred thousand to over twenty million domain names.

Early career

Early in his technology career Holtzman was a cryptographic analyst, Russian linguist, and submariner with the U.S. Naval Security Group. He worked at the Defense Special Missile and Astronautics Center as an intelligence analyst, focusing chiefly on the Soviet Manned Space program. As chief scientist at IBM's Internet Information Technology group, Holtzman managed the development of IBM's information product and service offering to encrypt and sell digitized content across the Internet, which was called cryptolopes. He served as a senior analyst for Booz Allen Hamilton for several years, where he ran technology-driven restructuring initiatives for Wall Street firms and large financial institutions. He also designed and built a networked, heterogeneous database and text retrieval system called Minerva, which was used by NATO and several trade associations before being sold to IBM in 1994.

Holtzman has designed and built numerous information-based software systems and is the author of several patents dealing in areas as diverse as identity management, digital rights management and domain name registration. Mr. Holtzman was CEO, co-founder with Nick Arnett and chairman of Opion, a venture-backed company Arnett started in 1999. The company developed several patented and innovative marketing intelligence technologies involving pseudonymity, reputation-ranking and "buzz" tracking, which were acquired by A.C. Nielsen/Buzzmetrics. He has consulted on marketing strategy for several large corporations, including Amazon.com. He has been a security consultant for several organizations, private and public, including Wesley Clark’s 2004 presidential campaign. He was also CTO for All-America PAC, Senator Evan Bayh's leadership PAC leading up to the 2008 Presidential election. He has been an adviser to over a dozen high-tech companies throughout North America. He has taught business courses as an adjunct associate MBA professor at American University in Washington, D.C., and entrepreneurship via a cutting edge “Lecture On Demand” technique for the University of Pittsburgh using distance learning software and podcasts.

In addition to being the author of the recently released “Privacy Lost: How Technology is Endangering Your Privacy" (Jossey-Bass, 2006) and consulting, Holtzman is currently the president of GlobalPOV, a firm he founded to explore significant technology issues and their effects on society. He has been interviewed by major news media including the New York Times, CNN, and USA Today. Holtzman wrote a monthly ethics and privacy column called "Flashpoint" for CSO [Chief Security Officer] Magazine, and his essays have been frequently published in BusinessWeek as well as Wired Magazine, CNET, and ZDNet. Holtzman publishes occasionally on topics such as privacy, intellectual property, business, and pop culture on his blog, www.globalpov.com. His new book, Surviving Identity Theft, will be published in Fall 2009 from Adams Media.

Mr. Holtzman was recently featured in a New York Times article about estate planning, in which he is quoted as saying, "Unlike paper, this is a very amorphous, rapidly changing set of circumstances. It puts a huge burden on the person doing the estate planning to maintain a cache of passwords."[1]

Education

Holtzman has a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland and a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh. He is the father of five children, whom he raised as a single parent. He likes to sail, watch Shakespearean plays, and cook.

Some Articles Written by Holtzman

See also

References

  1. ^ Jacobs, Deborah L. (May 20, 2009). When Others Need the Keys to Your Online Kingdom. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/your-money/estate-planning/21ONLINE.html. 

External links


Gerald Celente

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Gerald Celente (born November 29, 1946) is an American trend forecaster,[1][2] publisher of the Trends Journal, business consultant[3] and author who makes predictions about the global financial markets and other events of historical importance. Celente has described himself as a "political atheist" and "citizen of the world."[4] He has appeared as a guest on television news shows such as The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Today Show, Good Morning America, CBS Morning News and NBC Nightly News.[5]

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Background

Celente was born in The Bronx, New York City, New York. He had early political experience running a mayoral campaign in Yonkers, New York and served as executive assistant to the secretary of the New York State Senate, which Celente called the worst job he ever had.[6] From 1973 to 1979 Celente traveled between Chicago and Washington D.C. as a government affairs specialist.[6] In 1980 Celente founded The Trends Research Institute (at first called the Socio-Economic Research Institute of America), now located in Kingston, New York, publisher of the Trends Journal which forecasts and analyzes business, socioeconomic, political and other trends.[7][8]

Forecasting

An article in the Washington Times has claimed "Celente's accurate forecasts include the 1987 stock market crash, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the 1997 Asian currency crash" and "the 2007 subprime mortgage scandal."[9][10][11] His forecasts since 1993 have included predictions about terrorism, economic collapses and war. More recent forecasts involve fascism in the United States, food riots and tax revolts.[3][12][13][14][15][16][17] Celente has long predicted global anti-Americanism, a failing economy and immigration woes in the U.S.[12] In December 2007 Celente wrote, "Failing banks, busted brokerages, toppled corporate giants, bankrupt cities, states in default, foreign creditors cashing out of US securities ... whatever the spark, the stage is set for panic in the streets" and "Just as the Twin Towers collapsed from the top down, so too will the U.S. economy ... when the giant firms fall, they’ll crush the man on the street." He has also predicted tax revolts.[18][19] In November 2008 Celente appeared on Fox Business Network and predicted economic depression, tax rebellions and food riots in the United States by 2012.[20] Celente also predicted an "economic 9/11" and a "panic of 2008."[9]

In 2009 Celente predicted turmoil which he described as "Obamageddon" and he was a popular guest on conservative cable-TV shows such as Fox News Sunday and Glenn Beck's television program.[21] In April 2009 Celente wrote, "Wall Street controls our financial lives; the media manipulates our minds. These systems cannot be changed from within. There is no alternative. Without a revolution, these institutions will bankrupt the country, keep fighting failed wars, start new ones, and hold us in perpetual intellectual subjugation."[22] He appeared on the Glenn Beck show and criticized the U.S. stimulus plan of 2009, calling government controlled capitalism "fascism" and saying shopping malls in the U.S. would become "ghost malls."[23] Celente has said, "smaller communities, the smaller groups, the smaller states, the more self-sustaining communities, will 'weather the crisis in style' as big cities and hypertrophic suburbias descend into misery and conflict," and forecasts "a downsizing of America."[16]

Publications

References

  1. ^ Alderman, Leslie, Seven great businesses for you to start in 1998, money.cnn.com, 15 December 1997, retrieved 3 August 2009
  2. ^ Hopkins, Steve, Doctor doom - For 2008, Gerald Celente predicts the total collapse of an already damaged economy, WeeklyBeat.net, 23 February 2009, retrieved 3 August 2009
  3. ^ a b Naughton, Keith, Can Toyota Get Its Mojo Back?, newsweek.com, 17 January 2000, retrieved 3 August 2009
  4. ^ trendsresearch.com, Gerald Celente, retrieved 16 August 2009
  5. ^ trendsresearch.com, TV news, retrieved 16 August 2009
  6. ^ a b Jones, Alex, Alex Jones show, KLBJ (AM), 17 November 2008, retrieved 12 December 2008
  7. ^ Lawlor, Julia, On my... desk: Gerald Celente, nytimes.com, 14 February 1999, retrieved 16 August 2009
  8. ^ Thompson, Carolyn, Profiting from seeing into future... Trends translate into predictions of the demands to come, Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, p. 3D, 19 September 1990
  9. ^ a b De Borchgrave, Nostradamus redux, washingtontimes.com, 24 November 2008, retrieved 5 August 2009
  10. ^ Cooms, Leslie, 1987: Year it all collapses (scanned print article carried on Celente's wesbsite), Daily Freeman, 23 January 1987, retrieved 16 August 2009
  11. ^ Metz, Tim, Reporter's Notebook: Buyback frenzy captures our man's eye and appetite (scanned print article carried on Celente's wesbsite), Wall Street Journal, 11 November 1987, retrieved 16 August 2009
  12. ^ a b Dunn, Brad, Happy new year, or '01 to forget?, Daily News Express, 14 December 2000, retrieved 3 August 2009
  13. ^ Lawlor, Julia, On my... desk: Gerald Celente, nytimes.com, 14 February 1999, retrieved 3 August 2009
  14. ^ Kane, Michael, Gerald Celente trend forecaster knows which way the wind blows, nypost.com, 11 August 2008, retrieved 3 August 2009
  15. ^ Bader, Jenny Lyn, Ideas & trends - Forget the millennium. Try to predict one week, nytimes.com, 26 December 1999, retrieved 3 August 2009
  16. ^ a b Ketcham, Christopher, Trends for downsizing the US: The Bright side of the panic of ‘08, atlanticfreepress.com, 27 January 2008, retrieved 3 August 2009
  17. ^ McGrath, Ben, American chronicles - The dystopians (p. 41, mentions Celente), newyorker.com, 26 January 2009, retrieved 3 August 2009
  18. ^ Celente, Gerald, Trends journal (scanned print article carried on Celente's website), trendsresearch.com, Winter 2008, retrieved 16 August 2009
  19. ^ Celente, Gerald, Top Trends 2008: Panic and fear – Solutions and hope, December 2007, retrieved 5 August 2009
  20. ^ Fox Business Network, Gerald Celente Predicts Revolution (video carried at peoplestar.co.uk), 14 November 2008, retrieved 3 August 2008
  21. ^ foxnews.com, Glenn Beck's War Room, 23 February 2009, retrieved 3 August 2009
  22. ^ Celente, Gerald, Celente calls for "revolution" as the only solution, 14 April 2009, retrieved 16 August 2009
  23. ^ Fox TV, Gerald Celente: $2000 gold and the break up of the US (video clip carried on YouTube), 2 April 2009, retrieved 16 August 2009

Bill Joy

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Bill Joy

William Nelson Joy
Born November 8, 1954 (1954-11-08) (age 55)
Alma mater University of Michigan
University of California, Berkeley
Known for Co-founder of Sun Microsystems
vi
NFS
csh
"Why the future doesn't need us"

William Nelson Joy (born November 8, 1954), commonly known as Bill Joy, is an American computer scientist. Joy co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, Andy Bechtolsheim and Vaughan Pratt, and served as chief scientist at the company until 2003. He is widely known for having written the essay "Why the future doesn't need us", where he expresses deep concerns over the development of modern technologies. He has two children, Hayden and Maddie.


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Early career

After growing up in suburban Detroit, Michigan, Joy received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan and his M.S. in EECS from UC Berkeley in 1979.[1] Joy's PhD advisor was Bob Fabry.

As a UC Berkeley graduate student, Joy worked for Fabry's Computer Systems Research Group CSRG in managing the BSD support and rollout where many claim he was largely responsible for managing the authorship of BSD UNIX, from which sprang many modern forms of UNIX, including FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Apple Inc. has based much of the Mac OS X kernel and OS Services on the BSD technology.

Some of his most notable contributions were the vi editor, NFS, and csh. Joy's prowess as a computer programmer is legendary, with an oft-told anecdote that he wrote the vi editor in a weekend. Joy denies this assertion.[2]

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Novell at the time, continued the mythopoesis during an interview in PBS's documentary Nerds 2.0.1, inflating Bill Joy's accomplishments as having personally rewritten the BSD kernel in a weekend.

Sun

In 1982, Joy co-founded Sun Microsystems.

According to a Salon.com article, during the early 1980s DARPA had contracted the company Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) to add TCP/IP to Berkeley UNIX. Joy had been instructed to plug BBN's stack into Berkeley Unix, but he refused to do so, as he had a low opinion of BBN's TCP/IP. So, Joy wrote his own high-performance TCP/IP stack. According to John Gage,

"BBN had a big contract to implement TCP/IP, but their stuff didn't work, and Joy's grad student stuff worked. So they had this big meeting and this grad student in a T-shirt shows up, and they said, 'How did you do this?' And Bill said, 'It's very simple — you read the protocol and write the code.'"

Rob Gurwitz, who was working at BBN at the time, disputes this version of events.[3]

In 1986, Joy was awarded a Grace Murray Hopper Award by the ACM for his work on the Berkeley UNIX Operating System.

Joy was also a primary figure in the development of the SPARC microprocessors, the Java programming language, Jini / JavaSpaces and JXTA.

On September 9, 2003 Sun announced that Bill Joy was leaving the company and that he "is taking time to consider his next move and has no definite plans".

Post-Sun activities

In 1999 Joy co-founded a venture capital firm, HighBAR Ventures, with two Sun colleagues: Andreas Bechtolsheim and Roy Thiele-Sardiña. In January 2005 he was named a partner in venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. He has once said, "My method is to look at something that seems like a good idea and assume it's true".[4]

Technology concerns

In 2000 Joy gained notoriety with the publication of his article in Wired Magazine, "Why the future doesn't need us", in which he declared, in what some have described as a "neo-Luddite" position, that he was convinced that growing advances in genetic engineering and nanotechnology would bring risks to humanity. He argued that intelligent robots would replace humanity, at the very least in intellectual and social dominance, in the relatively near future. He advocates a position of relinquishment of GNR (Genetics, Nanotechnology, and Robotics) technologies, rather than going into an arms race between negative uses of the technology and defense against those negative uses (good nano-machines patrolling and defending against Grey Goo "bad" nano-machines). A bar-room discussion of these technologies with inventor and technological-singularity thinker Ray Kurzweil started to set his thinking along this path. He states in his essay that during the conversation, he became surprised that other serious scientists were considering such possibilities likely, and even more astounded at what he felt was a lack of considerations of the contingencies. After bringing the subject up with a few more acquaintances, he states that he was further alarmed by what he felt was the fact that although many people considered these futures possible or probable, that very few of them shared as serious a concern for the dangers as he seemed to. This concern led to his in-depth examination of the issue and the positions of others in the scientific community on it, and eventually, to his current activities regarding it.

Despite this he is a venture capitalist, investing in GNR technology companies. He has also raised a specialty venture fund to address the dangers of Pandemic diseases, such as H5N1 Avian influenza and biological weapons. In 2006, he was awarded the Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award for developing this biosafety venture fund and other actions.[5]

References

External links