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In 2013, GE Capital accounted for 40% of GE's overall earnings. However by 2015, GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt says that GE Capital should account for 30% of GE's overall earnings. Why the deliberate move to redefine the revenue streams and reduce exposure in the financial segment? |
The financial segment -- GE Capital -- requires a significant amount of leverage to achieve the same return on equity when stacked against the industrial sector. So, reduced exposure to the financial segment allows GE to reduce the amount of debt it takes and in effect improve its return on equity, allowing it to compete more effectively for investors relative to its industrial peers. Furthermore, overall interest rates are facing significant upward pressure amid the Fed's taper. As such, borrowing at such a time could be expensive for GE. It is therefore wise to reduce exposure in business segments such as GE Capital that stir the need for heavy borrowing relative to its alternative industrial segment. |
The impending Synchrony Financial IPO and consequent full spin-off of the segment thereby serves to increase GE's return on equity and overall attractiveness to investors. In addition, it has its own unique set of benefits that if critically analyzed, are telling of the wider strategy at play. |
First, let's look at the structure of the spin-off. GE will initially issue an IPO for 20% of Synchrony. Then in 2015, it will spin off the remaining 80% stake that it holds, effectively relinquishing its entire position in the operation. |
Here is the catch: The Synchrony Financial IPO will be priced in such a way that there is some substantial upside to the stock post-IPO. As such, GE's 80% stake in the business will be deemed more attractive after the IPO. Ideally, GE should be able to spin off the 80% stake in 2015 at a good premium compared to the IPO price, giving it sufficient capital to push forward with its ambitious buyback program. In a recent letter to shareholders, GE asserted that it expects to return $90 billion to shareholders by 2016. The company returned $18 billion in 2013. |
GE is focusing on creating shareholder value to drive up demand for its shares and allow it to more easily raise capital through the equity market, which is safer and allows for flexibility when compared with the debt market. Unlike the case with capital sourced from debt instruments, a company doesn't necessarily have to pay back equity, and even when it does share its profit to shareholders or the providers of equity, the rate at which it pays out dividends is entirely at its discretion -- though there is often a distinction between this ideal and the actual reality; does the term activist investing or the name Carl Icahn ring a bell? |
Why does GE have an insatiable need for capital, particularly 'safer' capital from equity markets? |
All roads lead to oil and gas production infrastructure |
By reducing overall downside risks, GE will be able to attract investors in the equity market, giving it 'safer' capital needed to throw its full weight behind the industrial segment, particularly oil and gas infrastructure. |
As my colleague Isaac Pino argued in a previous article, GE is putting a lot of emphasis on innovation and efficiency, including pushing forward with efforts to reduce its new product introduction cycle by 30% over the next few years in order to present first-to-market solutions to its customers. |
This renewed interest in innovation is slowly pushing GE into the epicenter of America's shale boom narrative. GE has identified a huge problem with fracking -- the technology behind America's oil production resurgence. |
Shale output declines faster than output from unconventional plays. One estimate from the International Energy Agency says that it will take up to 2,500 new wells a year to sustain output of 1 million barrels per day in North Dakota's Bakken shale. In stark contrast, Iraq could comfortably do the same with 60 wells. |
This means that for the U.S. to increase its output at a faster pace, it will need to engage in more drilling and production when compared with other countries that pursue conventional plays. But there is a downside. Fracking is not only cripplingly expensive relative to conventional methods reduced production in the overall upstream industry is indicative -- but it also uses unsustainable volumes of water. |
General Electric is advancing a capture-use-recapture system that uses CO2 instead of water for fracking. The CO2 is recycled. This reduces overall costs and limits carbon emissions. In addition, the CO2 reduces the need for water, conserving current supplies. |
Foolish takeaway |
Overall, GE's capture-use-recapture CO2 system should be a game changer in the oil and gas production sector as producers are looking for cheaper and greener ways to produce oil and remain competitive. This new fracking solution, if properly explored, will allow GE to widen its revenue streams from the industrial sector. However, the implementation and marketing will require heavy capital spending. |
This explains the reduced exposure in risky highly leveraged segments such as GE Capital as well as the deliberate attempt to make GE's shares more attractive in order to rope in more investors in the equity markets. |
Immigration in the Aftermath of Berlin |
The Mirror has an article up about the Berlin Christmas Market Terror attack sounding all the superficially right notes about how to react to it. I agree with the overall sentiment, but since immigration is rapidly becoming the Issue of the Year, broad outlines aren’t enough. This is an issue we need to start talking about in more detail, and so it’s worth pointing out what it gets wrong. |
It does more or less what you’d expect. (1) It does whatever it can to point out that Anis Amri was a criminal long before he was a jihadist. (2) It notes that the Polish driver of the truck – who apparently fought back and quite possibly managed to blunt the impact of the attack1 – was also an immigrant, and that any blanket bans on immigration would’ve kept him out as well. (3) It argues that the filtering system worked in the attacker’s case – because he was denied asylum and slated to be deported, and because the only reason he wasn’t deported in time to stop the attack is because Tunisia failed to issue him a passport in a timely manner. (4) It reminds us that treating all muslims as a monolithic invasion force is exactly what ISIS and similar groups want, as they are actively trying to forment war between Islam and the West. (5) It reminds us that open societies don’t preemptively jail people for what they might do, but only for what they do do – which is to say, it reminds us that there are moral limits on profiling, however effective it is in identifying likely wrongdoers. |
There is nothing to disagree with in any of that. In particular, (4) and (5) are points worth keeping in mind. To the extent "western values" have anything to say about this kind of incident, it’s that guilt-by-association isn’t a principle of law. The law can only punish you if you do something illegal – and neither being a muslim nor being a suspicious character is illegal. |
Nevertheless, articles like this are overly simplistic. Let’s take each of these arguments in turn and show how. |
1. Anis Amri was a criminal long before he was a jihadist. That is probably true of most jihadists, actually. There’s nothing magic about the Koran such that reading it hypnotizes anyone into being a psychopath. We know from research done on kill rates during WWII (primarily by S.L.A. Marshall) that most people aren’t natural killers and will just kind of half-ass it in warzones. Moreover, even after we recognized this and specifically trained soldiers to kill (rather than just hit their targets – i.e. to consciously murder enemy soldiers), kill rates improved only slightly (but apparently enough to make a difference). Most people are just really uncomfortable with killing other people. The Mirror article seems to be addressing some kind of straw man audience of people who think that jihadist ideology is infinitely transformative. That’s fine, as far as it goes – I guess a lot of the general public really does think that way – but notice how delving into Amri’s criminal background is completely ineffective if you’re thinking about this more intelligently. What if, as seems likely to me, jihad isn’t appealing because of some Rod of God magic power, but rather just is the kind of thing that attracts and enables latent psychopaths? Sort of like gangsta culture in American ghettos? I mean, listening to gangsta rap won’t make you a killer, but I wouldn’t be even a little bit surprised to learn that gangsta rap is more popular among gangland killers than it is among the general population. If you like violence, and you like exercising power over people, jihadist ideology will appeal to you. What probably happened in Amri’s case is that jihadist ideology is what inspired him to step up his game from mugging people to killing them by the dozens. And yes, that’s a problem that implicates immigration from countries where jihadist ideology is not taboo insofar as the ambient level of thugs that come in from these countries are more likely to undergo exactly this transformation. Not only that, but many of them will be motivated to abuse the immigration/asylum system to enter the West after they’ve already undergone this transformation merely because jihadist ideology specifically identifies non-muslims as free game for violence and killing. So, the Mirror argument works if you really believe in the magic power of Islam to turn people into violent killers. But arguing against irrational fantasy is not impressive. It has nothing to say about the real concern – which isn’t so much that anyone thinks muslims are uniquely horrible as that there is a uniquely horrible subculture from a particular subset of muslim countries that poses a real threat to the West. It really doesn’t matter that this subculture is not coterminous with Islam. This subculture is highly correlated with Islam, and it encourages latently psychopathic people to abandon what few restraints are left and do a lot more damage than they would left to their own devices. That’s a problem, and one that our governments are well within the confines of their mission statements to use their immigration authority to help control. |
2. The Polish driver of the truck was also an immigrant. So? There really isn’t a problem with selective immigration restrictions and quotas. Virtually every country in the world already has these in place. Polish culture isn’t infected with jihadist ideology. Polish culture is highly similar to German culture. Polish citizens, as a general rule, integrate very well into German culture and legal norms. That is a good argument for allowing Polish immigrants into Germany with few (if indeed any) restrictions. Tunisian culture is infected with jihad (a point the Mirror article ironically makes on its own in a different context, presumably not realizing how severely this undercuts its general argument). Tunisian culture is not remotely similar to German culture. Tunisian immigrants have a difficult time integrating into German culture and legal norms. These are good arguments for sharply limiting the number of Tunisians accepted. |
3. The filtering system worked in Amri’s case. This is probably their worst argument, both because it is largely untrue, and also because even to the extent it is true (which isn’t very much), the very external factors the Mirror argument wants you to forget are the ones that prevented it from being effective. Those factors, obviously, are that the system is overloaded with applicants, and resources for dealing with people like Amri are stretched to the breaking point. This is nothing other than the super-familiar tradeoff between what’s ideal and what’s practical. Ideally, you can go park your Ferarri in front of the housing projects. Practically, it’s likely to get vandalized. Ideally, we can let as many people in from all over the world as want to come and do whatever it takes to help them integrate. Practically, we have problems of our own, and there are simply not enough resources available to allocate to that kind of crazy ambitious project. As long as resources are limited, there are going to be tradeoffs. Ideally speaking, you can let a million middle eastern immigrants come into a country of 80 million people in a single year. Practically, it was very, very stupid to do that. As to the Mirror‘s point, it really doesn’t matter that Amri came in before the unrealistic policy decision was made. Resources are not magically un-stretched for anyone who happened to come in before the Chancellor had a brainfart and decided to ignore economic reality. Nope, they’re stil stretched. And indeed, assessing the risks posed by bogus asylum-seekers already in the country as a result of opening the floodgates is one of the many, many things that should have been, but weren’t, taken into consideration beforehand. I mean, look, if you have a little bit of debt, and you decide to take on a large amount of debt, nobody thinks the little bit of debt is somehow irrelevant to your ability to then service the large amount of debt you’re proposing to take on, right? Just the opposite, in fact – lending agencies generally feel better about giving you large loans if you’re not already servicing small loans. A small loan that isn’t a problem in isolation may become one if you stretch your resources to cover a larger loan. This is like that. But the real howler here is the idea that the filtering system even worked in Amri’s case. Sure, it worked in the sense that it managed to correctly identify him as a problem – but arguing that the only reason it failed is because Tunisia is generally cagey about taking its shittier citizens back when you identify them as such is a really terrible argument for accepting Tunisians en masse. That’s a bit like sending your daughter to a drinking party at a frat that has a reputation for taking sexual advantage of drunk girls. If we know, already, that Tunisia can’t be trusted to take back citizens that are illegally in Germany, then Germany needs to keep the number of Tunisians admitted to a manageable level. Citizens of countries like – to put a fine point on it – Poland, where this is less of a problem, can be admitted more freely. It’s run-of-the-mill risk assessment, not rocket science. |
4. Treating muslims as a monolithic group plays into terrorists’ hands. That’s correct, as far as it goes. The problem is that this argument cuts both ways. Completely embracing muslims plays into terrorists’ hands too, by giving them an easy conduit to their pick of Western targets. This is the most sensitive part of this whole argument – because let’s be honest, a blanket ban on muslim immigration would probably work to dramatically lower the risk of these kinds of attacks. The question is down to a balancing act. Clearly muslim immigrants – at least from the Middle East and North Africa – are a risky group. Just as clearly, blanket bans on groups are antithetical to western values. There’s a conflict here, and there’s no easy way to resolve it. So, we have to keep calibrating, and this is hard work. What’s clear is that both extremes on this opposition are silly. Acting as though there isn’t a threat that’s highly correlated with Islam is willfully ignorant. As the article says "the truth NEVER goes away." That’s right, and that’s why it’s a complete waste of time for politicians to mouth bromides about Islam being a "religion of peace," or to remind us that "not all muslims are jihadist." These are, respectively, untrue and irrelevant, and everyone knows it. Islam is NOT a "religion of peace" – it’s actually quite an aggressive religion. And it hardly matters if "not all muslims are jihadists" so long as significant numbers of them are. The truth never goes away – and that goes for truths the Mirror likes as well as the ones it doesn’t. I agree that it’s unjust to treat all muslims as jihadists – they’re not. Only a minority of them are. And yet, it’s equally obvious to me that indulging in the fantasy that jihadists are somehow an insignificant minority doesn’t solve problems. There is a problem with Radical Islam, and the "Islam" part of that phrase is inalienable. So no, nothing about cautioning people that not all muslims are jihadists makes an argument for embracing Merkel’s immigration policy. Quite the contrary – any sober look at just how many muslims are jihadists and just how likely muslim immigrants are to radicalize and just how many jihadists are willing to pose as asylum-seekers in pursuit of their cause makes it clear why her immigration/asylum policy is misguided. |
5. Open societies don’t preemptively jail people for what they might do, only for what they do. Acting as though this is an issue raised by this incident is the one truly disingenuous argument in the piece. Let’s get this much out of the way: a prohibition on jailing people preemptively on mere suspicion is at the core of what I consider to be western values. It would be absolutely unacceptable to grant the government broad powers to start preemptively jailing people who merely seem likely to commit crimes. But of course, no one was actually advocating that in Amri’s case. Amri was not a German citizen and so had no inalienable right to be in Germany. The question wasn’t one of whether to arrest him and put him in jail, it was one of whether to send him back to Tunisia. Even the Mirror seems to agree that sending him back was the right course. So this whole argument is a red herring. Amri was a criminal. He’d been arrested several times for non-trivial violent crimes. And Amri didn’t have a right to be in Germany. Or Italy. The fact that he was in Europe illegally had already been determined by two separate European governments. Nothing about Amri’s case argues for preemptively arresting anyone, and I doubt that anyone serious is drawing such a conclusion from it. What Amri’s case demonstrates is that there are significant barriers to the police being able to do their job within the confines of the law. These barriers include that certain countries – Tunisia among them – are unwilling to shoulder their own burdens, and that practical, resource-based limits on the amount of immigration that can be reasonably tolerated in a given year exist. |
Merkel’s immigration policy may have been motivated by the best of intentions, but it is a failure, and failures are things that rational people learn from. The effect of this policy has been to demonstrate why there need to be country-based limits on immigration. I am not German, but if I were, I would be comfortable with an almost unlimited amount of immigration from Poland, and extremely uncomfortable with a similar lack of limits on immigration from Tunisia and similar places. Far from arguing against that, Amri’s case shows why such restrictions are needed and just. Merkel herself seems to be in a place where she has learned this lesson but does not find it politically expedient to say so in public. Politicians are, after all, almost never incentivized to admit failure. Union2 should probably not run her as their Chancellor candidate again in 2017, and assuming they make it back into government (as I guess they will) they should reverse course on asylum seekers. Looked at carefully, Amri’s case is an illustration of why. |
1. by grabbing the wheel and steering the truck away from the crowd, right before he was shot to death (there’s no way to prove this is what happened, of course, but there’s some suggestive evidence) |
2. The permanent CDU/CSU coalition is often called "Union" as a shorthand in the German political press. |
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Add a Separator |
This plugin adds a separator between the intro text and the extended (more…) text of the content of a post. It simply replaces the span id more tag with the separator that is set in the plugins php file. |
Some separator samples are given there. |
Upload into the /plugins directory and activate it in the Plugins Menu. |
Fixed a bug that forced WordPress Adminmenu to show a white blank page. |
Initial Release |
• See a short part of the code |
1. Upload add-a-separator.php to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory |
3. Edit the $separator variable in the add-a-separator.php to change your separator |
Can i change the separator? |
Yes, simply change it in the plugin php file to your needs! |
Contributors & Developers |
“Add a Separator” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin. |
Translate “Add a Separator” into your language. |
Interested in development? |
Monday, June 30, 2014 |
A profound difference in Canadians and Americans |
Last Thursday, in a unanimous 8-0 decision, the Supreme Court of Canada granted declaration of aboriginal title to more than 1,700 square kilometres of land in British Columbia to the Tsilhqot'in First Nation, the first time the court has made such a ruling regarding aboriginal land. |
Last week's decision by Canada's Supreme Court certainly surprised me; but nothing surprised me more than the public support for it among Canadians. Just read a few of the comments to the CBC report cited above. They are overwhelmingly in favor of the natives; many thanking the natives for standing up to the government in defense of their rights. |
Canada's First Nations, our aboriginal citizens, enjoy two bodies of rights that are recognized in Canada's Constitution. The first is called their "inherent rights", rights they have as the original inhabitants of this land; the most important inherent right (under law) is that of self-governance. The other set of rights are "treaty rights", those result from treaties between the natives and the Crown of England. I believe that the inherent right to self-governance grants the First Nations their right to make treaties and thus underlies the legal rights in the treaties. Those native treaties are part of Canada's Constitution; in every way, a part of that body of law that is considered the "highest law of the land." |
And that is a major difference in Canada and the US. In the US, even though the Constitution of the United States says, explicitly, that "all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land," treaties made with the American native peoples have all been abrogated, a gross violation of honour. |
Not only do Canada and the US differ in their application of law to their respective aboriginal populations, but look at the difference in the attitudes of the people in the two countries. Americans, by and large, are learning to accept a "tyranny of the majority" (to borrow John Adams' famous phrase). Where Canada has its vaunted "mosaic" of cultures; the US has a level of collectivism and forced conformity that is far more threatening to individual liberty than universal health-care. The American view is "Let every man live as he chooses. As long, of course, as he chooses to live like me." The best example is probably the freedom of religious expression, which very many Americans feels applies only the the "one true religion." |
What most Canadians recognize, still, is the concept of individual rights that supersede the will of the majority. And, ironically, it just doesn't get more "American" than that. Canadians realize that they protect the rights of every individual by defending the rights of the minority; not by enforcing the dictates of the majority. |
You want to protect your own right to free speech? Then stand for the right of another to express a view with which you strongly disagree. Some of you can start with me. |
You want to protect your right to be free from indefinite imprisonment without trial? Defend the rights of those who have been held in prison for 12 years without a single shred of evidence of any wrong-doing ever presented to a judge. |
You want to protect your right to practice religious expression? I think you know what to do. |
As Ron Paul said in his 1987 book Freedom Under Siege, "Government by majority rule has replaced strict protection of the individual from government abuse." |
Not necessarily so in Canada. Not yet, anyway. |
Thank you, Tsilhqot'in Nation! |
Fears of tech addiction in kids living 'digital childhood' |
Internet is now more popular than TV and 25% of toddlers have their own media device, new research finds |
Posted by Hannah Vickers | September 13, 2017 | E-safety |
ofcom, internet, technology-addiction, survey, tech-and-play, onbuy, digital-childhood |
Over the years, children’s entertainment has transformed significantly, with children today being more likely to use the internet frequently than adults. OFCOM (Office of Communications) reports that internet usage has overtaken TV for the first-time as the top media pastime for children around the UK. Researchers studying the behaviour of children have indicated that youngsters are living in a “digital childhood”, and therefore increasingly likely to become addicted to technology. |
According to a survey by Tech and Play (2015), 25% of under threes have their own media device, such as a tablet or games console, and 37% of three to five year olds. The remainder of children share use with friends and other family members, as a large number of household’s own tablets. Older children, between five and 15 years old, are most likely to have the most access to electronic devices. In 2014, a survey by OFCOM, 7 in 10 children aged between five and 15 use a tablet, which is likely to have soared even further today. |
Research conducted by OFCOM has shown that the use of technology amongst children has increased considerably, particularly amongst young children. In 2015, toddlers aged around three to four years old spent on average 6 hours and 48 minutes per week on electronic devices, which soared to 8 hours and 18 minutes last year – an increase of 26%. For children aged between five and 15 years old, the average time also substantially increased, from 14 hours and 42 minutes in 2015 to 15 hours in 2016. Children today are becoming increasingly addicted to electronics and technology, emphasising the claim that youngsters are living in a “digital childhood”. |
It is unsurprising that children today are becoming addicted to technology when the number of apps available for children to play on the Apple ‘App Store’ and Android’s ‘Google Play’ are on the rise. According to statistics released by Statista, in the space of two years (January 2015 to 2017), apps on the App Store grew by almost one million alone. It is no wonder children favour electronic devices over television when there are so many apps readily available at the click of a button. |
OFCOM research has suggested that, due to the increase in technology use among young children, only one in 10 toddlers of the so-called “iPad generation” are labelled as being ‘healthy’ by paediatricians. The Nightingale Hospital, located in central London, has treated children as young as 12 years old for ‘technology addiction’. PAARS, a charity from North London has seen a marked rise in the number of children becoming ‘addicted’ to electronic devices, such as tablets, games consoles and phones. As a result, they have seen a sudden increase in the number of children verbally abusing, or even physically hitting them, when they take devices away from them, or turn the internet off to prevent usage. |
Children who spend the majority of their childhood online tend to have less of an ability to focus than youngsters who use technology minimally |
Furthermore, starting at a screen, such as an electronic device, can arguably have adverse effects on the brain and concentration. Technology has a profound impact on the way young children think and feel, and since technology is full of stimuli and often requires paying attention to a number of things at the same time. Children who spend the majority of their childhood online tend to have less of an ability to focus than youngsters who use technology minimally. Moreover, children as young as seven years old are developing hunchbacks and curved spines due to long hours spent bending over devices such as phones and tablets. |
In a survey by Onbuy.com, a sample of parents with children aged from zero to 15 years old were asked series of questions regarding technology. 64% of the parents questioned said that they would prefer money to be spent on children’s television rather than on electronic apps, to avoid children from becoming addicted to tablets and games consoles, and 77% of parents surveyed would favour their children to watch TV shows instead of playing on electronic devices for hours on end. |
When Onbuy.com asked parents why they allowed their children to play on tablets and game consoles for long periods of time, parents had four main responses: |
· They didn’t allow children to play on electronic devices for long periods of time (14%) |
· They only allowed use for educational purposes (29%) |
· For entertainment, socialising and winding down (22%) |
· Convenience; for parents to keep their child entertained and quiet whilst they complete chores, cook or work (33%). |
Due to the rise in technology, there has been a noticeable decline in children’s programming times on popular television channels, such as ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5. In 1998, repeats of children’s TV shows made up just 38% of children’s television, whereas in 2011, the figure rose sharply to 91%, according to OFCOM research. As well as this, programming schedules among major channels have decreased significantly – with ITV having the sharpest decline. In 1998, ITV had an astonishing 424 hours’ worth of children’s shows in a year, which fell drastically to 42 hours in 2015. Furthermore, Channel 5 saw the second largest drop, with 353 hours in 1998 being reduced to 30 in 2015. Additionally, Channel 4 cut their hours drastically in 2015, reducing 49 hours to a mere zero. |
According to the BBC, over the last six years, children’s viewing of TV programmes has dropped by more than a quarter. In an attempt to revive the children’s sector, last month, the BBC unveiled it will invest more money into children’s television as part of the BBC's first Annual Plan. The new investment will see the budget for children's programming reach £124.4m by 2019-20, up from the current figure of £110m. The BBC claim in three years, £31.4m of their budget will be spent online, to appeal to younger generations that are becoming more “tech savvy”, in order to combat competition from American broadcasters such as Netflix and Amazon Prime. |
Connective Knowledge |
From P2P Foundation |
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Connective Knowledge = A property of one entity must lead to or become a property of another entity in order for them to be considered connected; the knowledge that results from such connections is connective knowledge. |
From Stephen Downes, at |
Connective knowledge "is more than just the existence of a relation between one entity and another; it implies interaction. A relation - such as 'taller than' or 'next to' - is a type of quality. It describes a property of the object in question, with reference to a second object. But the fact that I am, say, 'taller than' Fred tells us nothing about how Fred and I interact. That is something different. |
This is why it is incorrect to represent distributed knowledge merely as a type of probabilistic knowledge. The logic of probability implies no connection between correlated events; it merely observes a distribution. A connected system will exhibit probabilistic characteristics, but it is not itself probabilistic. |
Probabilistic knowledge is a type of quantitative knowledge. It is based on the counting of things (or events, or whatever) and of comparisons between one count and another (one needs only to read Carnap to see this clearly). A poll, for example, gives us probabilistic information; it tells us how many people would vote today, and by inference, would vote tomorrow. But the fact that Janet would vote one way, and I would vote one way, tells us nothing about how Janet and I interact. |
Connective knowledge requires an interaction. More to the point, connective knowledge is knowledge of the connection. If Janet votes a certain way because I told her to, an interaction has taken place and a connection has been established. The knowledge thus observed consists not in how Janet and I will vote, nor in how many of us will vote, but rather, in the observation that there is this type of connection between myself and Janet." ( |
Connective "Emergence" |
From Stephen Dowes, at |
"First, we may perceive an actual set of connections linking a group of entities as a distinct whole. For example, when one domino topples another, and so on, in turn, and we observe this from a distance, we may observe what appears to be a wave moving through the dominos. The wave that we observe can be said to be an 'emergent phenomenon' - it is not a property of the dominos themselves, or even of the falling of the dominos, but of the connectedness of the falling - because one domino causes the next to fall, we see a wave. |
Second, we may perceive something as a distinct whole and interpret this as a set of connections. For example, when we look at the image of Richard Nixon on the television, we do not perceive the individual pixels, but rather, the image of a person. But our inference goes beyond merely the observation of the person; if asked, we would say that the appearances of the pixels are connected to each other, through the mechanism of having a common origin (Richard Nixon himself) and the mechanism of video broadcasting. |
Emergence is fundamentally the result of interpretation. " ( |
Characteristics of Connective Knowledge |
Is the widest possible spectrum of points of view revealed? |
Were the individual knowers contributing to the interaction of their own accord, according to their own knowledge, values and decisions, or were they acting at the behest of some external agency seeking to magnify a certain point of view through quantity rather than reason and reflection? |
Is the knowledge being produced the product of an interaction between the members, or is it a (mere) aggregation of the members' perspectives? |
Is there a mechanism that allows a given perspective to be entered into the system, to be heard and interacted with by others? (George Siemens) |
Zizo: using a pattern database |
Philip Howard |
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