Art Kleiner: Every organization always operates on behalf of the perceived needs and priorities of some core group of key people. This purpose will trump every other organizational loyalty, including those to shareholders, employees, customers, and other constituents.

Stuart Hameroff:The sub-conscious mind is to consciousness what the quantum world is to the classical world.

Sara Lippincott: God is evolving. So if you're an atheist, you'd better hope that the arrow of time only goes in one direction.

Steven Levy: The truth is always more interesting that your preconception of what it might be.

Matt Ridley: Science is the discovery of ignorance. It is not a catalog of facts.

George Lakoff: Frames trump facts. All of our concepts are organized into conceptual structures called "frames" (which may include images and metaphors) and all words are defined relative to those frames. Conventional frames are pretty much fixed in the neural structures of our brains. In order for a fact to be comprehended, it must fit the relevant frames. If the facts contradict the frames, the frames, being fixed in the brain, will be kept and the facts ignored.

Ray Kurzweil: (The Law of Accelerating Returns) Evolution applies positive feedback in that the more capable methods resulting from one stage of evolutionary progress are used to create the next stage. Each epoch of evolution has progressed more rapidly by building on the products of the previous stage.

Frank Tipler: (Tipler's Law of Unilimited Progress) The laws of physics place no limits on progress, be it scientific, economic, cultural, or intellectual. In fact, the laws of physics require the knowledge and wealth possessed by intelligent beings in the universe to increase without limit, this knowledge and wealth becoming literally infinite by the the end of time. Intelligent life forms must inevitably expand out from their planets of origin, and convert the entire universe into a biosphere. If the laws of physics be for us, who can be against us?

W. Daniel Hillis: The representation becomes the reality. Or more precisely: Successful representations of reality become more important than the reality they represent. Examples: Dollars become more important than gold. The brand becomes more important than the company. The painting becomes more important than the landscape. The new medium (which begins as a representation of the old medium) eclipses the old. The prize becomes more important than the achievement. The genes become more important than the organism.

"There are two ways that spreadsheets, as we know them, distort our thinking and lead to bad decisions. The first distortion is the use of point values and simple arithmetic instead of probability distributions and statistical measures. So far as I know, there's no off-the-shelf spreadsheet product—certainly none in common use—that provides for input of numbers as uncertain quantities, even though almost all of our decisions rest on forecasts or on speculations.

There are add-on products that incorporate uncertainty into spreadsheets, and many of them are quite good. Products of this kind that I've favorably reviewed over the years include DecisionTools Pro from Palisade and Crystal Ball Professional and CB Predictor from Decisioneering. It's not too hard to appreciate the difference between products that incorporate uncertainty and those that don't: On the one hand, you've got, "We predict a $1 million profit in the first year"; on the other, "The expected Year 1 profit is $1 million, but there's a 30 percent chance of losses for the first two years." These different statements will lead to quite different discussions."

"The subjects whose tools invited them to imagine alternative scenarios believed they were doing a better job—even though statistical measures of their results showed no improvement in the actual quality of the forecasts. Those subjects did, however, take longer to perform the task. Isn't that the worst nightmare of those who must justify IT's return on investment—spending extra money on a more time-consuming product that yields absolutely no measurable improvement?"

"You're in Flemming's entrance hall. Flemming is traveling in Transylvania right now. There's a blog here, and a mailbox, an SMS terminal, and a phone booth. There's a picture on the wall. There's a WIKI path going off to the right. There are three other visitors standing around looking bewildered. What do you want to do?"

"There are five phone messages for you, 52 new mail messages, 157 new postings in your aggregator. Your family went to the movies. It is 25 degrees. There are four computers there. On the wall you see a calendar and an address book."

Stan Wagon, a mathematician at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., has a bicycle with square wheels. It's a weird contraption, but he can ride it perfectly smoothly. His secret is the shape of the road over which the wheels roll.

A square wheel can roll smoothly, keeping the axle moving in a straight line and at a constant velocity, if it travels over evenly spaced bumps of just the right shape. This special shape is called an inverted catenary.

A catenary is the curve describing a rope or chain hanging loosely between two supports. At first glance, it looks like a parabola. In fact, it corresponds to the graph of a function called the hyperbolic cosine. Turning the curve upside down gives you an inverted catenary -- just like each bump of Wagon's road.

One of the many cool things about the Metaweb is that it functions as a vast bottom-up collaborative filtering system. RSS feeds represent perspectives of publishers. Because feed publishers can automatically or manually include content from other feeds they can "republish," annotate and filter content. Every feed is effectively a switch, routing content to and from other feeds. You are my filter. I am your filter.

Entire communities can collaboratively filter information, in a totally bottom-up way. The community as a whole acts to filter and route content in an emergent fashion, without any central coordination. On top of this sites can then provide value-added aggregation and information-refinery services by tracking memes across any number of feeds and then repackaging and redistributing them in virtual feeds for particular topics or interests. And these new feeds are fed right back into the collective mind, becoming raw materials for still other feeds that pick them up.

What we have here is the actual collective consciousness of humanity thinking collective thoughts in real-time, and we get to watch and participate! We are the "neurons" in the collective minds of our organizations, communities, marketplaces. Our postings comprise the memes, the thoughts, in these collective thought processes. Already the Metaweb is thinking thoughts that no individual can comprehend -- they are too big, too distributed, too complex. As the interactions of millions of people, groups and memes evolve we will see increasing layers of intelligence taking place in the Metaweb.

Despite her bureaucratic title [Microsoft vice-president of corporate and industry initiatives], Stone is a creative thinker who has coined the term continuous partial attention to describe the way we cope with the barrage of communication coming at us. It's not the same as multitasking, Stone says; that's about trying to accomplish several things at once. With continuous partial attention, we're scanning incoming alerts for the one best thing to seize upon: "How can I tune in in a way that helps me sync up with the most interesting, or important, opportunity?" She says: "It's crucial for CEOs to be intentional about breaking free from continuous partial attention in order to get their bearings. Some of today's business books suggest that speed is the answer to today's business challenges. Pausing to reflect, focus, think a problem through; and then taking steady steps forward in an intentional direction is really the key.

"The trick may be to filter events so that only those that are material intrude on our reflections and heads-down work. We shouldn't jump up and run in circles every time the wind shakes the leaves, but we cannot afford to become so engrossed in what we are doing that we miss the leopard about to pounce.

There is no absolute here. Those that simply refuse to carry cell phones, or never log in to IM are dangerous to their organizations. If you are a solitary journalist, or a very senior executive, such behavior may be workable: in the former case, no one is harmed by your opting out, and in the latter case you are likely to have staffers who filter the outside world for you. But for the average person, linked in a dense, cascading social network of collaborators who depend on your timely response to critical events, it will prove increasingly difficult -- if not impossible -- to veer away from continuous partial attention. We will have to learn a new balancing act, and it will be strongly canted toward spending more cycles scanning the horizon and fewer looking down at the piecework in our laps."

* Camera phones and pocket organizers with sensors;
* Weblogs ('blogs), Moblogs, Cyborglogs ('glogs);
* Wearable camera phones and personal imaging systems;
* Electric eyeglasses and other computational seeing and memory aids;
* Recording experiences in which you are a participant;
* Portable personal imaging and multimedia;
* Wearable technologies and systems;
* Ethical, legal, and policy issues;
* Privacy and related technosocial issues;
* Democracy and emergent democracy (protesters organizing with SMS camphones);
* Safety and security;
* Technologies of lifelong video capture;
* Personal safety devices and wearable "black box" recorders;
* Research issues in "people looking at people";
* Person-to-person sharing of personal experiences;
* End of gender-specific space (e.g. blind man guided by wife: which restroom?);
* Subjectright: ownership of photograph by subject rather than photographer;
* Reverse copyright: protect information recipient, not just the transmitient;
* Interoperability and open standards;
* Algebraic Projective Geometry from a first-person perspective;
* Object Detection and Recognition from a first-person perspective;
* Computer Vision, egonomotion and way-finding technologies;
* Lifelong Image Capture: data organization; new cinematographic genres;
* New Devices and Technologies for ultra miniature portable cameras;
* Social Issues: fashion, design, acceptability and human factors;
* Electronic News-gathering and Journalism;
* Psychogeography, location-based wearable computing;
* Augmented/Mediated/Diminished Reality;
* Empowering children with inverse surveillance: Constructionist learning, creation of own family album, and prevention of both bullying by peers and abuse by teachers or other officials.

Surveillance	Sousveillance
Sur-veiller is French for "to watch from above".	Sous-veiller is French for "to watch from below".
God's eye view from above. (Authority watching from on-high.)	Human's eye view. ("Down-to-earth.")
Cameras usually mounted on high poles, up on ceiling, etc.	Cameras down-to-earth (at ground level), e.g. at human eye-level.
Architecture-centered (e.g. cameras usually mounted on or in structures).	Human-centered (e.g. cameras carried or worn by, or on, people).
Recordings of an activity made by authorities, remote security staff, etc.	Recordings of an activity made by a participant in the activity.

"Inverse surveillance is the imminent device-driven tsunami whereby we commoners take back our commons. We will be using our always-on videophones to capture the passing scene. The result will be that our blanket, overlapping and corroborating public record captured by our high-res private devices will overwhelm the spotty, lo-res record of incidents captured by so-called public surveillance devices."

Lela: "When I was 15 years old,I was on a bus to my dads,who lived 2200 miles away.I had no money and was getting pretty hungry. A lady on the bus asked me if I was hungry and I admitted I had not eaten for two days. She proceeded to feed me at every meal stop. At the end of her journey,she gave me $5 and told me.."always remember this time,if you see someone in need..help when you can". I am now pushing 60 and have never forgotten her or her words. I have never passed someone who was in need without helping them if I was able to do so. I have tried to instill this in my family as well and we are ALL ..great believers in paying it forward."

Sarah: "I noticed that there aren't any stories about kids in college doing this movement. Recently, at Southwestern College in Winfield Kansas, our Mind/Body/Universe class watched the movie Pay it Foward. The class has about 50 students in it and the teacher, Julie Conrade, decided to make Paying it Forward an assignment. We split up into about 10 groups and were instructed to find some way to Pay it Foward to our community and then present our projects to the class a month later. Some of the things the groups did included: visiting nursing homes, helping a working family renovate their house, helping a man who had a stroke clean his house because his wife was getting treatment for leukimia out of state, and recycling thousands of bottles and cans. I am in the class and noticed that all of the students took the assignment seriously and got a lot out of the experience!"

Geoff: "I was living in Buffalo, New York, last year, in a section of town that everyone called the ghetto. I was 21 years old, and every day I had to walk for half an hour through the worst streets just to get to work. I usually got stares for being one of the few white guys you'd see on the street. It made me really nervous, despite the fact that I'm 6'2 and a weightlifter. I've always been a pacifist, and haven't been in a fight since 9th grade. One day, I was heading down Bailey Avenue, and five black teenagers started following me, yelling insults and laughing at me. I was trying to ignore them, but they started circling around me while I walked. I told them to leave me alone, which only got them more riled up. Finally, one shoved me, and another one grabbed my backpack. Right as I was about to get a really bad beating, one of the guys gets clocked in the head with a soup can, and falls over. We all looked, and an old black man was standing at the back of his store about twenty feet away, holding another can. The teens started swearing at him, and he yelled for them to go away, and that he'd called the police. One of the teens started coming towards him, and gets the other can right in the face. The other three looked like they were going to rush him, but he reached behind the door and pulled out a *big* shotgun. He didn't even have to point it at them. They ran for it, practically dragging the first teen that got knocked over with them.

The man came over and checked to be sure I was okay. His name was George, and I waited with him until the police arrived to file a report and give descriptions. In private, George told me that his church, which was going to be closed for lack of funds, had recently received an anonymous donation for $5000 that had "pay it forward" written on the envelope. All the members had decided to do their own PIF's, and I was really glad to have been one of his."

An Elegant Gothic Lolita, EGL or Gothic Lolita for short, is a Japanese teen or young adult who dresses in amazingly elaborate Gothic looking babydoll costumes. On the weekends these women walk the streets of Tokyo and Osaka and fill Yoyogi Park and Harajuku neighborhood where they pose for tourist’s pictures and sit around looking pretty. They are beautiful, glamorous, doll-like manifestations of their favorite Visual Rock stars.
This subculture’s physical look began around the fall of 1999 as a sort of French Maid meets Alice in Wonderland style and has expanded gradually to encompass many nuances in a Victorian Gothic look.

There’s the Toothing Blog — A blog all about Toothing - finding partners for sex using bluetooth mobile phones. And then there’s the Toothing FAQ — which encourages the utilization of public places and safe sex practices. There’s even a Toothing Forum to discuss location, location, location. And now there is a story today in Wired News — Brits Going at It Tooth and Nail. Daniel Terdiman starts out with “The Brits sure are randy.” Anyone watch Coupling?

So… Is this Social Software? If one factors in the exhibitionist aspect of these Toothing encounters, the experience does have the potential to take on a ‘group’ perspective. Oh, wait a sec, the Brits have already done that with Dogging. And to think, all thanks to the wireless technology — Bluetooth.

What can we do about it? Just about everything.

The IMF is hardly more than a branch of the Treasury Department. Economist Jagdish Bhagwati, no radical, refers to the IMF- Treasury-Wall St complex that is a core part of de facto world government. The Treasury Department is part of the US government. If we had anything remotely resembling a democratic culture, actions of the government would be under the control of citizens, which would mean that citizens have to at the very least know something about them. And beyond that, we would have mechanisms to engage in political action. And in a more democratic society the third component, Wall St., would not exist in anything remotely like its present form, and what would exist would be under popular democratic control.

But any of this requires constructing the basis for democratic participation, which has been very badly eroded in the US, creating what's often called a "democratic deficit" when we refer to others -- in our own case, a huge democratic deficit.

People in the more civilized sectors of the world (what we call "the third world," or the "developing countries") often burst out laughing when they witness an election in which the choices are two men from very wealthy families with plenty of clout in the very narrow political system, who went to the same elite university and even joined the same secret society to be socialized into the manners and attitudes of the rulers, and who are able to participate in the election because they have massive funding from highly concentrated sectors of unaccountable power that cast over society the shadow called "politics," as John Dewey put it.

But it's up to us whether we want to tolerate this, and if we could begin to approach the level of democracy of, say, Brazil, we could do quite a lot about IMF conditionalities. And it doesn't happen by just showing up once every four years to participate in an "election".

Edmonds said she was hired to retranslate material that was collected prior to Sept. 11 to determine if anything was missed in the translations that related to the plot. In her review, Edmonds said the documents clearly showed that the Sept. 11 hijackers were in the country and plotting to use airplanes as missiles. The documents also included information relating to their financial activities. Edmonds said she could not comment in detail because she has been under a Justice Department gag order since October 2002. Edmonds has testified before the Sept. 11 commission, the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Select Intelligence Committee.

FBI translator, Sibel Edmonds, was offered a substantial raise and a full time job in order to not go public that she had been asked by the Department of Justice (DOJ) to retranslate and adjust the translations of [terrorist] subject intercepts that had been received before September 11, 2001 by the FBI and CIA.

"Attorney General John Ashcroft told me 'he was invoking State Secret Privilege and National Security' when I told the FBI I wanted to go public with what I had translated from the pre 9-11 intercepts." [...]

"I appeared once on CBS 60 Minutes but I have been silenced by Mr. Ashcroft, the FBI follows me, and I was threatened with jail in 2002 if I went public"