organization of information

                         

This week I am focusing my attentions on public libraries and how they effected history. Something I quickly found was that the Boston library is often considered the first real public library in America. It opened in 1854 and came out with a statement of purpose which describes many philosophies which I believe could be modified and made to be the statement of purpose for the internet. Major points of this statement are:

• There's a close linkage between knowledge and right thinking;
• The future of democracy is contingent on an educated citizenry;
• There's a strong correlation between the public library movement and public education; and
• Every citizen has the right of free access to community-owned resources.

In the 1890s Melvil Dewey took libraries to a new level as president of ALA(American Library Association). When running for this office his slogan was, "the best reading for the largest number at the least cost." His chief desire was to standardize and organize everything the library had to offer. It would be interesting to have Melvil Dewey back and to see what he would do with the internet. When I start searching for things on the internet I often feel that I am in an unorganized library. Stacks and stacks of knowledge everywhere with only a few ways to shift through and find what matters and what can be trusted. Is there any way to catalog the entire internet? I have no idea but I know there are some people out there with ideas. By the time I am old and grey maybe the internet will be well organized and straight forward and we will all wonder how we ever found anything of use before.

http://www.oclc.org/dewey/resources/biography/

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2236/how-did-public-libraries-get-started

Who would you vote for?

I understand that the political field has changed dramatically since the founding fathers ran against each other for office but this has made me curious. Who would I vote for in elections of the past with no hindsight? I think that along with a 'pick your candidate' game it would be interesting to see who else you are similar to throughout history. I admire Abraham Lincoln immensely but would I have voted for him when it really mattered? Also, do I generally believe in things which match candidates who are good presidents or bad presidents? I think it would be a great gamification exercise which would link and teach about past and present politics. Something I feel college students know much too little about.

Knowledge is Power

As a class we are still trying to figure out a project but I am just going to pretend like we are going with the idea of my last blog post. I think that this coincides extremely well with this weeks discussions on the 18th century and information.  Newspapers in this era began spreading information in vast quantities. By 1814 there were 346 newspapers in America and with the advent of the "penny press" in the 1830s, news was booming. As a testament to this, voter turnout in and before the 1836 election was below 60%. Suddenly in 1840 80% of voters got out to vote. 1870 then brought another jump in numbers voting as the 15th amendment guaranteed the right to vote to non-property owners of any race. While this still excluded women, it vastly broadened peoples need for information. The industrial revolution put this spread of knowledge on steroids and by 1880 there was a reported 11,314 papers. 

Looking at this graph you also see a large increase in recent voting percentages. I believe that we can help this along by helping the spread of information quickly and decisively. We can use digital media like news papers were used to inform people who are used to learning quickly.

http://www.historicpages.com/nprhist.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_States_presidential_elections

More thoughts on voting

Today we had a discussion about voting and ways to get college age kids to be informed and care enough to vote. Our group was the "vending machine" discussion focused around getting people informed. The main issue  is that getting informed takes time and time is the most valuable resource for people our age. That is why we decided that telling people who they would vote for based on a series of questions would be the best way. Anyone could take this poll about what their ideas are about certain topics and then the program would tell them who they are most likely to vote for. There are many problems about this which would have to be addressed.

1. The questions could be misleading. They would have to be extremely carefully worded in order to convey each parties platform. The best way may be to have a question posed to each candidate and then the voter chooses between their 1 paragraph responses. 
2. The candidates may overlap on many issues. One way to overcome this would be to output percentages of each candidate rather than just one person.
3. It could cost a lot to put together especially for our class. The best way I think that we could deal with this is to make it web-based. We could put it up on college websites making it easily accessible and editable.
4. Some people know a lot about politics and some people do not. The questions would have to vary from core values to specific topics with an option to say, "Not an issue I am concerned about."
5. More problems to come.

While there are problems we would have to hammer out I believe that this could be extremely effective. The possibilities go much further than just the the presidential elections as well. How many people know anything about their local elections in their city/county/state? I would argue that this is a much bigger problem than the presidential election and something we could begin to help fix. We could apply this to elections or any type of vote held and drastically increase our public participation. Please, as you see more problems with this post a comment with the problem and an idea for a solution. I will try to keep this updated and add in the ideas to this blog.

Tron & Advertising

This weekend my wife and I watched Tron for the first time on Netflicks. While a little cheesy for my taste, it did have some interesting points on openness. Should programs be free to users? Are we headed to a more open or closed world? Can companies put their main product out for free and still make enough money to keep a job? I would say yes and we have to prime examples in facebook and Google. Most people would consider these companies expert in many different areas but their real expertise? Advertising. In many ways these two companies are pioneers in internet advertising. In fact, it is nearly the only way they make money! So is advertising the answer? With a progress to a more open society should we expect a bogging down in advertisements thrown at us? I am tempted to say yes and I am not really against it. I payed less for my Kindle full knowing that they were going to stick advertisements on it. It is a price that I, the consumer, am willing to take which may show in what direction we are headed.
I have heard many people speak negativity about internet advertising but I don't think they realize that advertising is why we get so much stuff for free. Facebook and Google would have to charge us for using their products. One of the main concerns I have heard is that they are collecting too much personal data. While I do understand that privacy is an issue, this is why people will pay them a lot of money. They know that their advertising is going to specific people who have already shown an interest in something like their own product. I am personally all for this. Although I am not an advertiser, I am a consumer and if I am going to have adds around me why not have stuff I am actually interested in? They know I'm a Mormon. They know how old I am. They know my gender, my age, what I like, and what I don't like. Scary? Honestly, I don't mind. As long as I am still getting stuff for free bring on the advertising. 

When I was going to Snow College I feel like I finally realized the importance of learning rather than getting a degree. Suddenly grades didn't matter as much as learning the subject and being able to have an intelligent conversation on the topic. It was like night and day. Suddenly I was getting As in classes where everyone said was next to impossible. This change in my desire to learn also lead me to a class called Entrepreneurial Finance. I really had the desire to go to this class but already had too many credits and not enough time. I then went to the teacher and told him my situation. That is when I first learned about auditing, or going to class to learn rather than to get a grade. I learned a lot about finance and it ended up being one of the reasons I decided to major in finance. I feel like this was my first experience with open learning. Back in the 16th and 17th centuries learning was revolutionized. The percentage of educated people went up considerable during this time because of new inventions and new thoughts. I feel that we are going through a similar process. With the development of the internet we have thrown education online. Some of these include: 

• http://www.extension.harvard.edu/open-learning-initiative
• http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/#writing-and-humanistic-studies
• http://www.khanacademy.org/
• http://open.byu.edu/

These sites and many others are dedicated to bringing a new ability to learn to everyone around the world for free. Just as knowledge progressed from those who knew Latin and were extremely wealthy before the Renaissance era,  knowledge no longer has to be for those who go to college. It is incredible what has been done but it must be done with caution. The sites I have listed are open to users but not at all open to publishers. This is important because while everyone can and should be a consumer of knowledge, producers should have limitations. For example, just because I wrote a paper 4 years ago about how global warming is false doesn't mean I should be able to post it to a scientific journal. The same this goes with All Gore. Just because he has money and power doesn't mean he is right. There is a balance which must be found. This is a topic which has been and will be debated. Overall, however, I do believe that having an open society will make us better off. We just have to be careful what we consume and create.

Humanism as the germinal period of modernism

The title of this blog came from a recent article I found. http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/humanism.html. I would highly suggest the read.

I have often been confused by the term "humanism." Any definition I come across seems very vague and usually takes pages to explain. I have attempted asking people the definition of humanism and have yet to get a single sentence response. Perhaps by the end of this post I will be able to create that one sentence definition, perhaps not. This article portrays humanism as a break from current tradition back to the old tradition. In 16th century context, it took the medieval attitude of supernaturalism, brought it back to the classics where it got loosely tied to a mixture of art and critical thinking, and threw it into the 18th century which is where modernism was born. This few hundred years of societal conflict has be dubbed the Renaissance. To me, it is one of the most fascinating times of history to consider. There was so much going on in the realm religion and science together, the conflict nearly tore them both apart inside and out. The basics of religion were being attacked by people inside the church like Martin Luther as well as scientists such as Galileo. In this strange battle between science and religion in the Renaissance era who one? Neither. The aesthetic nature came out on top. The world idea was changing into beauty and emotion. I'm not sure why we have called it humanism. To me, the name is more confusing than insightful. A better word could simply be pre-western as this was truly the time where an individualistic idea was brought to the forefront. Where Europe began thinking like we think today. And thus the west was born.
So, what is humanism? I still cant give a solid definition but I feel like I have cut off some edges and am slowly coming to an understanding. If you have any other insights or if you have found that one sentence definition, please share.