vox--2019-06-26--The problem with tech people who want to solve problems

According to a witty saying usually attributed to Albert Einstein, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”  And when engineers try to solve a problem, says MIT’s Joi Ito, they often veer over that line.  “Tech people tend to want to just solve the problem,” Ito said on the latest episode of Recode Decode with Kara Swisher. “But the problem with the problem is it’s not like previous problems, where you just solve it. You actually have to keep asking the question, ‘Is this even the right question?’ And this is why it’s much more difficult.”  Ito has presided over MIT’s famous “antidisciplinary” research laboratory, the Media Lab, for the last eight years. Originally founded in an era of techno-utopianism, the MIT Media Lab now finds itself responding to the ways technology and engineering culture are accelerating and creating problems like climate change, inequality, and obesity.  “You know that little girl in The Exorcist? That’s what the internet feels like to me,” Ito said. “You have this little girl and you think she’s going to become this wonderful kid and then she gets possessed and starts becoming this demon. And we have to exorcize her and we have to kind of bring her back.”  Although some in the tech world may believe we’re living in a simulation, Ito told Swisher, that’s only because they’re looking at the world as an equation to be optimized and not the messy place that it is.  “A lot of decisions that we make about how we feel about civil rights or gay marriage, whatever it is, those aren’t decisions that are optimizations,” he said. “Those are these cultural transformations that occur in society. And I think what’s missing right now in the conversation in AI is that that’s kind of the point of life, in my own personal opinion.”  You can listen to Recode Decode wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and TuneIn.  Below, we’ve shared a lightly edited full transcript of Kara’s conversation with Joi.  Kara Swisher: Hi, I’m Kara Swisher, editor-at-large at Recode. You may know me as the author of an existential play narrated by the 20th letter of the alphabet, it’s called “Am I T?” But in my spare time I talk tech, and you’re listening to Recode Decode from the Vox Media Podcast Network.  Today in the red chair is one of my favorite people I’ve known for a long time, Joi Ito. He’s the director of the MIT Media Lab, which is separate from MIT itself, which is a university. He’s also an activist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and the editor of an upcoming essay collection called Resisting Reduction: Designing Our Complex Future With Machines.  Joichi Ito: Can I amend your introduction a little bit?  Because it is part of MIT.  Yes, it is. Yes, it is. But it operates in its own, the Media Lab...  It’s a peculiar part of MIT. And that’s what I meant to say. So why don’t you explain that? Explain what the MIT Media Lab is and how ... I want to talk about your getting to it, how you got to it, but explain what it is so people can get ...  So the Media Lab is a weird part of MIT because normally you have labs which do the research and you have academic programs that do the degrees and the tenure and things. They’re usually at tension, like church and state. And the media lab is both an academic program, the program of media, arts, and sciences as well as a lab. It was created over 30 years ago by the then-president of MIT Jerry Wiesner, Nicholas Negroponte, and a few founding faculty. Jerry Wiesner sort of finally called it the “Department of None of the Above.” Seymour Papert, who was an educator, was one of the founders, and he had this idea called constructionism, which is learning through doing. So we often say learning through construction rather than instruction.  The reason we were able to get the lab and the academic program together is instead of learning in classes we learn through doing projects. So the projects are funded by a consortium of over 80 companies.  And it’s a very tight link between businesses, and making things that can be made, essentially, that can be used and deployed.  That’s right. All of the students have to build the thing they’re talking about. And because it’s so interdisciplinary, we use the term antidisciplinary, the building of the thing is the way you sort of explain what it is you’re doing because it’s hard to explain it when you have three different disciplines trying to work together. And then also, MIT was traditionally more of a government-funded institution and the Media Lab kind of pioneered this consortium model of corporate funding. We’re corporate funded, but the other part about the Media Lab is we don’t do what they tell us to do. We’re sort of the ...  The company is the funder...  Yeah, we’re kind of a hedge against being wrong, so we often discover things that ... We do things that they wouldn’t otherwise do.  And you’re there to do ... The reason they invest in you is because they want to be on the cutting edge of whatever’s next, right? With kind of crazy wacky ideas, versus stuff they don’t want to do for tomorrow. Maybe it’s 20 years out.  And sometimes we tell them things they don’t want to hear. In the early days of high definition in Japan, the Media Lab said, “You’re doing it all wrong. It’s going to be progressive digital. It’s not going to be this analog thing.” And they were very unhappy, but we turned out to be right.  These days, I think a lot of times it’s not even about technology. We have Hollywood companies that are members, but when they did the SOPA-PIPA bill, which was this anti-copyright bill, we formally went against it. These days I think more and more ... I mean, I think the Media Lab was very techno-utopian when it first started but I think there’s a huge chunk of the Media Lab that’s critical of technology these days. So we’re often criticizing the companies that support us.  All right, so explain your journey, because I think that’s how I would explain you. You’ve been very tech forward — and at the same time you’ve always been someone very early who’s been talking about the downsides and upsides. I remember that from when we met 20 years ago. I think almost 20 years ago. Because Louie was ... You met me after I had my baby, so ... I always time things based on him. But talk a little bit about your journey of where you started and how you got to this job.  I joined a little over eight years ago. And this is when they were doing a search. Initially Nicholas Negroponte, who was the founding director, and actually Megan, reached out to me, and they were doing a service ...  Megan Smith. This is my ex-wife.  Megan Smith, yes. Yeah. And I was on a bus and she said, “Hey, would you want to be director of the Media Lab?” I said, “Yes,” but then they looked at my resume which says that I didn’t even get an undergraduate degree and they said, “Well, this probably isn’t going to work.” So they went through a whole process for months, and I guess they went through lots of candidates, but they didn’t find one that worked. So they scraped the bottom of the barrel and picked up my resume and said, “Come in for some interviews.”  Let’s talk about your bottom-of-the-barrel resume, then. Talk about your journey of where you went to as an entrepreneur.  I went to college twice. I went to Tufts and I went to University of Chicago. I was interested in computer networking.  You grew up in ...  I was born in Japan, grew up in Michigan, went back to Japan for junior high, and then came to the United States for college. This is sort of early ’80s, so this is when computer networking was just starting, when the internet just started. I was interested in communities and in music and in networks. And there just weren’t programs like that.  And the other thing that was interesting is, this is the early days of the internet, so if you went online and chatted a sysadmin and you said you were some kid from Japan, they’d give you access to everything. And if you emailed professors they would reply. So I found that I could meet just about anybody I knew to meet on the internet and I could sort of kluge together my own education.  In fact there weren’t very many classes about online communities and things like that. So I dropped out of college and I just started doing startups, internet startups. I started doing a lot of internet governance, too. So I did things like ICANN and Creative Commons. So I was really interested in the sort of nonprofit structure of how the internet and communities came together.  And why? Why was that?  I’ve always been interested in parties and communities and just subcultures. When I dropped out of University of Chicago, I became a disc jockey in a nightclub. And the reason I dropped out was I realized that there was kind of a monoculture at the university, at least in the department that I was in. And then when I was going to the nightclubs, this is early ’80s when AIDS was kind of rampant, and at the nightclub, you had skinheads and drug dealers and drag queens, and everybody was coming together around this crisis. I realized that this working-class community was much more loving and much more sophisticated in the way that, the community dynamics were resilient than what I was learning in school.  I felt like I needed to understand how communities worked in order to understand things. And then I realized that a lot of the stuff that was going on in these communities ... And also just being a DJ. You change the music and you change the way the community behaves. So I was trying to map my experiences in the nightclub onto what was going to happen online. And then I saw things ... I was still pretty optimistic at the time, but I’ve always been kind of trying to figure out that intersection.  And when it got online, you thought that was even more people that you could reach out to and communicate with.  Yeah. And in fact, when I was in high school in Tokyo and I was 16, people didn’t know I was a kid. I remember when I was I think 15, I went to — this is before the internet, but this is the source and these online services — I went to a wedding and we had people who had met for the first time showing up. And the best man had met for the first time. So I thought in the early days of online communities that this was going to change the world and if we could just connect everybody else we’d have world peace or something like that.  Utopian, the techno utopian idea. I remember when I met you, you had all kinds of ideas. You were the first person who really did talk about this idea of online communities. You introduced me, I remember when I was in Japan, to a company called ImaHima, if you remember.  Which was “I am here,” right? That’s what it means?  No, “I am free.” Or, “I have free time now.”  I remember it blowing my mind. I remember thinking there were two. There was Six Apart and ImaHima and they were, one was I am here, which was it would locate people who you could hang out with. Right?  Yeah. And it was also for jobs. So it was like the first kind of gig economy site that was around.  Yeah. It had a lot of concepts of “I am here, I want to have a beer in this part of Tokyo, do you want to meet me?” And it wasn’t just friends. It was just anybody.  It was suspending belief that you can meet anybody just anywhere. There was a lot of trust to it. And then Six Apart was that you can be linked to anybody, which was really interesting. It was in Cambridge. Amazon ended up buying it, which was interesting. I think it was Amazon. Or one of them. Or was it Mark Pincus? Or Reid Hoffman?  Six Apart — well, Reid and I invested, and Six Apart was in San Francisco, but I can’t even remember the name of the company that bought it!  But anyway, these were two massive concepts of what was about to come. It precursored Facebook, to Tinder, to everything that was going to happen. But this was the idea of community and connection and using computers to do so. And linking people by their groups and stuff like that. So that was the concept.  In your early days, you were an investor, right? You went around ... You were kind of a gadfly in a lot of ways. You wrote a lot?  In the early days, I was actually an entrepreneur so I helped set up PSI Net in Japan, and I did InfoSeek in Japan.  This was an early internet service provider.  Yeah. And when blogging came out was around when I started pivoting a little bit towards investing, so I invested in Flickr, and later Twitter. I was mostly interested in social media. I unfortunately passed on YouTube and didn’t get into Facebook.  It was interesting because when blogging started, if you remember, a lot of it was that you had all these unemployed smart engineers who had a lot to say. And they just wrote their own software. Even the founders of Six Apart had been laid off and they said, “Well, we’re going to do our own thing.” Right after the bubble, so it’s like early 2000s, I had raised a fund and I started investing in Silicon Valley. So the gadfly part of it was that there really weren’t ...  I didn’t mean that in an insulting way. You were an idea person more than most investors.  But also, it wasn’t very crowded. All the carpetbaggers were gone because they thought the party was over. And there were very few investors. Ev was there, a bunch of us were hanging out. You were there. And we just started blogging. I remember when I ... It was the early days of Google, too. So bloggers got the best search results. I remember writing a silly blog post saying, “Is Diet Coke Bad For You?” And when you searched for “Diet Coke,” it was the first result. Or when I quit drinking for a while, I wrote a blog post that said, “I quit drinking,” and when you search for “quit drinking,” it was the first result. And what was funny was that in the comments, people started sharing all their things. The comment section of my blog became a support group for people who needed to quit drinking, really.  And then one of my friends created a website called We Quit Drinking, which became sort of an online AA, and it was this whole community of people who were supporting each other, sort of pseudonymously sharing journals. And then the FAQ, it says, “The origin of this site was this guy who quit drinking and wrote about it. We all found each other.” And so I, still to this day, although now with this podcast I’m out again, I now occasionally drink, but I don’t blog about it because I don’t want to sort of shatter this genesis story.  You’re like the founder of bitcoin. We found you again! We’re very disappointed.  But you were investing, you were doing all kinds of things, and again, were prominently talking about the concepts of what was happening. How did you look at the internet then? Because I want to sort of talk a little bit about how it is now, and then what you’re doing, obviously, at the Media Lab.  I was concerned about certain things. Like I was very concerned about privacy. You’ll be proud of me. I won the lifetime achievement award yesterday from the Electronic Privacy Information Center.  I’m getting to that age when I’m getting lifetime achievement awards. So I was concerned about things like privacy, but I was generally optimistic. I remember in 2000 and ... I’m trying to remember the year now, 2004 or so. A bunch of us who were just talking on the blogs thought about this idea. We called it emergent democracy. So I wrote this paper together with a bunch of other people called “Emergent Democracy.”  And this was sort of before Arab Spring. We had this idea that instead of just mainstream media and polling, we could have conversations online, and that we could talk directly to government and that there would be a future public sphere and that democracy was going to change. We thought it was going to change for the better.  When Arab Spring started, we said here it comes. I remember going to Tunisia like a week after the revolution, kind of as CEO of Creative Commons at the time, just sort of celebrating the social media’s rise. So those were the good times.  Right. Right. So you were the head of Creative Commons, which ... explain to people what that is.  Yeah, so Creative Commons was created by Lawrence Lessig and a bunch of other really smart people before I joined. It was this idea that with the internet, you had the ability to share content and build on the work of others, but because of a lot of the copyright restrictions that big media companies in Hollywood were putting on, even though people wanted to share, the technology was preventing it. So the idea of creative commons was to mark your work with the permissions you wanted to grant. So you can use this as much as you want as long as you provide attribution. And to build that into the code so that people could share freely.  Creative Commons is now more widely used on Flickr and all these places you can tag your work. So this is an organization that coordinated an international effort to create the licenses.  So you’re doing that, and then doing investing, entrepreneur. How did you decide you wanted to run MIT? This was ...  What were you doing previous just before it? You were writing ...  I had a place in Dubai. I was still investing. I was running around the world investing. I was going around the world literally twice.  You had a place in Dubai?  Yeah, yeah. An apartment in Dubai. So this is a good example. I went to Bahrain and I was so confused. I didn’t understand anything. I said, “I have to understand this part of the world.” So I got a place and just started hanging out. So for me, and this is similar to the Media Lab, my sister’s an academic and until recently when I said something was “academic” it was meant as a pejorative. And so when they asked if I was interested, my answer to just about anything like that is, “Sure, I’m interested.” So I went to visit. And when I visited I realized this is really different from what I thought of as academia. It was through that first meeting that I realized that this was possibly a really interesting place for me to hang out.  Mm-hmm. So you have been there. So you’ve been there eight years. We’re going to talk a little bit about what’s going on at the Media Lab in the next section. When you joined ... What is the difference between when you joined and now? How do you look at that?  I don’t want to take responsibility for the changes, really. I think that the Media Lab had wanted to do a lot of things and I have facilitated them. I think one of them is really that it was created in an explosion of techno-utopianism, and the students and a lot of the faculty, not all of them, have wanted the Media Lab to become more reflective and to think about what did social consequences and bringing social sciences in, things like that. So that’s one.  I’ve grown in ... so a lot of it was just blocking and tackling some of the issues around accounting and dealing with members. It’s doubled in size and things like that. But we also — and this wasn’t me. I mean, the previous director had started to go into life sciences, but I’d say a pretty healthy chunk, maybe 30 or more percent — or more than that, maybe 40 percent — of the projects have something to do with life sciences. We’ve launched a space initiative. We’ve created a digital currency initiative. We’ve created a bunch of different things like that.  And we, I think, probably integrated it more into MIT than it was before. I think it’s also personality because Nicholas came from MIT so he sort of made the identity of the Media Lab “not MIT.” Whereas I came from the outside and I saw all these really wonderful people and resources inside of MIT, so I’ve been sort of pushing the Media Lab back closer to MIT, I think.  Give us a little overview of what’s going on at the Media Lab because media has always been ... you know, I’m trying to go and I went there, again, 20 years ago, the stuff they were talking about has now been commercialized. Everyone’s a billionaire from running it and everything else.  But some of the ideas didn’t happen. A lot of them ... I remember haptic touch was one that everyone thought was going to be big. Last time I was there there was a lot of self-driving cars. There was an accordion fold-up car. Like, there were robots that self-care things. It’s, sort of, an explosion of just very creative ideas and what the professors and students want to do. Explain what’s going on there now. What do you think is the most exciting stuff?  Yeah, I think first, I just ... I’ll say that the key for the Media Lab is to always try to do the stuff that other people wouldn’t do.  And, if other people start doing it, we stop it.  Stop doing it. Right.  So, we were really into wearables in the ’80s and we’re [doing] less and less of it. And so, when we do a search, we’re always looking for, often for, things that we haven’t yet thought. The really interesting stuff that I think we’re going to do is stuff that we haven’t really thought of yet.  So, it’s ... I think I’ll point that out, I think, let’s see. So, in the life sciences, for instance, Kevin Esvelt, who’s one of the inventors of CRISPR gene drive which is the technology that allows an edited gene to be inherited by all of the offspring so that you can use it for doing things like fighting Zika or trying to create mice that are resistant to ticks, or things like that. But it also has a lot of risks because you’re, you know, editing whole populations of genes. What could go wrong?  And so, a lot of his efforts have been in trying to figure out how to do community consent, building safety systems and things like that. And that’s something, for instance, that couldn’t really happen in a traditional genetics lab because a lot of it is social. So, he’s, he joined after I joined. We’re doing, you know, conformable decoders and implantables. So instead of wearables, these are things like, that power themselves by the beating of the heart or ...  Explain what that would do?  These are devices that go inside your body.  Implant? What is it? Implantable decoders?  Well, the name of her group is, Canan’s group, is conformable decoders.  Yes, so these are things like a pacemaker powered by something that goes around your heart, or something ... your brain is actually really hard to implant things in. I mean, we’ve wanted to do it for a long time, but they don’t ... yeah, it’s tricky. And then, we have people who are working on how to power these things, how to get signal out of these things. And so a lot of the work is also around the interfaces between, sort of, the human body and electronics.  Is it to make people robots, or to add things to improve the human body via machines?  I think if you go the history of the Media Lab, it’s always been somewhere around the interface between humans and machines, and then it was a lot of the early social media and internet stuff came from the Media Lab. It was networks and society, and more recently it’s data and AI in society. But there’s always something about human beings and technology. And in the life sciences, it’s often around the interface between the inside of your body and machines, or Hugh Herr’s group, biomechatronics.  Yeah. And, he has, we have a thing called the Center for Extreme Bionics. We like to take words ...  As in, like, The Bionic Man?  It is, it is, it is. We ... words are really important.  Yes, they are. I like “bionics.”  And sometimes people throw away words and then we revive them. It’s really about robotic prostheses. How do you communicate with these prostheses? It’s interesting because there are cases where if you have a bad ankle and you’re constantly having surgery, actually amputating it and replacing with a robotic prosthesis will increase your quality of life. It’s just these ... and somewhat taboo. And so, some of these things are about poking at things that are taboo that might actually make you better.  But to answer your question, I think generally, everybody’s working on trying to make the human condition better. But I think “better” is a really tricky word. It’s better for who, at what time scale?  And, I think every faculty member has a slightly different view, but I think that we’re more and more asking the question, “Are we solving the right problem?” And I think one of the problems with just straight engineering is you sort of assume that the person who gave you the problem knows what the problem is and your job is just to solve it. And I think that ...  Which is what you get when you have an engineering point of view. “Let’s just solve it.”  Not any of the repercussions or what you did to get there or anything else.  Yeah, and there is kind of science and engineering about understanding things like system dynamics and things like that, but the framing of why you’re doing this and for who ... I mean, so questioning is usually the artist and scientist, and the designers and the engineers are the ones that usually try to just kind of make it, create the utility. At the Media Lab, what we’re trying to do is bring all of those together: arts, science, engineering, and design, on a good day.  Which is sort of like Apple, or there are some companies that did that.  Yeah. All right. Talk about some more stuff you’re doing there. So, biomechanics?  Biomechatronics. That must sound good to a big company. “We’re giving money to mechatronics.”  We have Ed Boyden, who is doing synthetic neurobiology. So, he’s trying to understand all the different ways to understand the brain and perturb the brain to tackle some ... because the brain’s really complicated.  And it’s connected to a bunch of things, and I think that we have a very simplistic view of how the brain works. Medicine is really about, kind of, trial and error, and not ... there isn’t as much understanding of underlying mechanisms as you think.  I mean, a lot of the pills that you’d take, when it says mechanism of action, it says “unknown.” And so a lot of what Ed is trying to do is understand the brain, because most of the diseases that we have these days is, now we live longer and longer, are diseases that involve the brain. And so that’s a whole group, and in that group, it’s not just neuroscience; we have AI, we’ve got robotics, we’ve got nano tech and it’s a very integrated group. We have 25 groups and each one is very, very different. I won’t go through the whole list.  That’s amazing. How do you decide which ones to pick?  So, it’s really the faculty search process. I remember there was a faculty search process that the founder, Nicholas, was running, and we called it the Professor of Other; the candidate had to be proficient in at least two orthogonal fields and be antidisciplinary. But we were looking for this faculty member and we had a faculty meeting and we had this candidate everybody loved, and in typical of Nicholas form, he said, “That’s not ‘other,’ that’s ‘another.’” He’s like, “No.”  I think what really is a key thing about the Media Lab which I love is that we really do embrace the other. We are always trying to bring in things that make us uncomfortable, things that we don’t understand sometimes. And I think that’s what’s very different from a traditional academic department, where you’re sort of extending but mostly going into areas that are either adjacent to or connected somehow to the thing that you’re doing.  So, what is that to you right now? What’s something that makes you uncomfortable that’s being developed at the lab?  Well, I think for me, the privacy — the surveillance capitalism conversation.  This is Shoshana Zuboff at Harvard.  As Shoshanna’s book ... yeah. I mean, the Media Lab, I’d say, plays a big role in her book. You know? She calls out a lot of the work at the Media Lab as the tools of the trade of surveillance capitalism. And I think that thinking about our role in the world that she describes and thinking about how ...  Explain what Shoshana’s saying. She’s saying that capitalism is built to track us and sell us and sell to us.  Yeah, yeah. I think she’s basically saying that the capitalist system that converged with the Silicon Valley big tech companies that realized that taking user information and behavior and turning that into money was the currency of the day. And all of the technology for collecting information, understanding the information, tracking that information, are the tools of the trade. And a lot of that was developed at the Media Lab.  I think it’s an interesting book. I do think there are some things that I ... for instance, when I was fighting the copyright battles, the constant thing was ... So there’s rivalrous goods and non-rivalrous goods. If somebody steals your car, you don’t have it anymore. But if somebody takes your picture from Flickr, you still have it. And so, one of, I think, the problems with her book is she treats data as if it were a rival good, like oil. It’s different. I mean, some of the key points she points out I think are okay, but some of the ...  You get to keep it even if someone takes it.  Yeah, and it’s not exactly surveillance. I mean, “surveillance” is something that is a very loaded word that has a very ...  Well, I think that’s why she used it.  Yeah. But, I guess my point is that the word surveillance is usually used by law enforcement, and it’s used to catch bad people, in the eyes of the surveillor. Whereas, I think the surveillance capitalists today, I would say, are not using the data to catch these people and put them in jail. They’re using it to do stuff to you that, that may ...  Sell you cornflakes, or whatever. Behavioral or otherwise.  Yeah. And again, I think it’s a really important conversation to have, and this is, sort of, a longer conversation, but I also think, like, Cambridge Analytica, their sales pitch sounded a lot scarier than ... When you actually look at the data, it’s not nearly as effective. And so, one of the other meta questions is so how effective are these ads in making you buy cornflakes. And, I think, again, it’s probably more effective than the average person thinks, but I don’t think it’s nearly as effective as some people sell it.  Well, I think people are especially warned by sci-fi that they see, and everything else that they’ve had over the course of their lives, it will be. You can iterate it out to the end and if it gets good, it gets really scary.  Yeah, and I think my hypothesis is that it gets scary in a different way because I think people are more complicated and I don’t think machines can solve the complexity of human beings as easily as the technology people might think. I think we’re going to have intervention pretty soon.  And again, books like that help the intervention happen, but I don’t think that ... I think that a lot of people who really believe in machines feel that the machines will get so smart that all of the messy complexity of human existence will no longer be a problem. I think that’s impossible. So I think that the worst-case scenario isn’t as scary, but I also think the best-case scenario isn’t as optimistic.  Optimistic. All right. Finishing up on MIT, what would you like to be putting in there now? You know, you’ve been there eight years. What’s an area you would really like to see work on?  So, since I got there, I got there as an administrator, but over time they made me a professor of practice and I started teaching. I’m taking students now. So, my own area of research is based on what I’ve observed being there. It’s really on understanding automated decision-making in criminal justice, or trying to understand the way that academic publishing, tenure, and funding creates silos and creates the way that science and knowledge get created, and to try and turn it on its head.  What I’m trying to do is take what we’ve learned at the Media Lab and to try to push it out, to fix some of the problems that I see. And also, bring things like social sciences and history and other things that didn’t feel applied enough to the Media Lab into the Media Lab, because I think that’s really, really important. So that’s what I’m teaching, that’s what I’m working on.  And, the idea of automated ... explain automated decision making for people that don’t know that.  Yeah. So, for example, right now we have these risk scores that we use in criminal justice for setting bail, sentencing, and probation.  If they’re going to do it again.  Yes. Basically what it does is it predicts how likely you are to recommit a crime. But, for example, they use rearrests as a proxy for your likelihood to recommit a crime, and it turns out that rearrests have a lot more to do with policing practice than the inherent criminality of the individual. What it does is it tends to reinforce social biases.  So, if you look at data ... For instance, there’s a famous study that shows that in Oakland, when you do a health study, everybody across Oakland does drugs. But when you look at the police data, only poor neighborhoods do drugs because all they’re looking at are drugs arrests, and they only arrest people where they go. But when you look at the police data and you put it into the algorithm, the algorithm thinks that only poor people do drugs.  Right? So what happens with these risk scores, it reinforces the bias, it also takes the agency ... so, it says, “No, no, no. We’re just trying to predict the criminality of the pool people, and we’ll just make policing more efficient and make jails more efficient.” Instead of saying, “Wait. Is there something we can change in the system?”  Automated decision making, the problem is the judge gets this risk score, and some of the risk scores ... like, the difference between like a five or six might be a few percentage points, but that’s, but they say, “Oh. It’s a six. We should sentence this person to a longer time in prison or not give them bail.” What happens is it’s taking ... And again, the argument is that humans are biased and these things are less biased, but the problem is that the data is biased.  It’s dirty data, and even if it’s perfectly accurate ...  So, society’s dirty. And so, what you’re doing is you’re reinforcing, sort of, backward-looking status quo. It doesn’t allow us to be progressive.  So, you’re trying to figure out how to stop that, which is really hard.  Well, it’s legally hard. There was a Reuters article about Amazon using its historical data to create an HR engine that just wanted to hire white men. Well, the engineers will say, “Oh. Well, we should just ... Okay. Got it. That’s bad. So, let’s just create a constant to give increased scores for women and minorities.” Well, it turns out Title VII, which is antidiscrimination, a part of the Civil Right Act, says that over the years now, because of all this lobbying, affirmative action is illegal. It’s illegal to put your thumb on the scale.  So today we can still push for diversity by having the HR person lean towards minorities, but the problem is, if your data says we want to hire white people, it’s illegal to put your thumb on the scale. So what we’re seeing now is the law doesn’t protect us, the code isn’t projecting us, and all of these issues are just suddenly becoming ... And, they’re just ... and the problem is you need to understand both the law and technology.  We’re here with Joi Ito, he’s the director of the MIT Media Lab. He’s someone I’ve known a long time and is always talking about interesting things, as usual. But this book, Resisting Reduction: Designing Our Complex Future With Machines, you were just talking about this idea of the ability to intersect humans with tech, with law, with other things. Talk about this book. What was your thinking of wanting to do these essays?  What was happening is, as I was starting to get involved in this conversation about the ethics and governance of artificial intelligence ... I teach a course that’s cross listed between MIT and the Harvard Law School called “The Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence.” And what I realized was that a lot of the engineers who work in AI felt that you could reduce the whole world to a function, and that life, human life, was just optimizing and that the world could be simulated in a computer. And that if we could just ... and that world ... life was just a game that you could win.  Right. There are a lot of sites like this. There were tons of them.  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, but the ... they feel, though, a lot of them feel that the world can just be reduced to a very simple formula, so therefore then if you could create an AI that was smart enough, it would figure out how to win at life, and that we would either lose or this would save the world. And to me ...  This is like that Tom Cruise movie, Minority Report. Pre-crime.  Exactly, yup. The thing is that ... and again, this is almost religious because I think that there are people who have the kind of thinking where they look at their life as a game. Where they say, “Okay. I’m optimizing for money, and this, and how many minutes do I have to do this.” So, for them ... I tweeted out the other day, “Those people who think that we live in a computer simulation are the kinds of people who are most likely to be simulations.”  Wait, explain the computer simulation ... people like Elon, I think Tony Hsieh, lots of people think we live ... this is a game.  Well, yeah. A lot of people approach life like an engineering problem. For them, I could imagine that they could see their whole life being in a computer. But there are a lot of people, and I think they sort of sort out if you go into the humanities or the east coast, there are a lot of people who don’t think like a computer. They live life through experience and only things that happen actually matter.  I think what’s interesting is that a lot of decisions that we make about how we feel about civil rights or gay marriage, whatever it is, those aren’t decisions that are optimizations. Those are these cultural transformations that occur in society. And I think what’s missing right now in the conversation in AI is that, first of all, I think that that’s kind of the point of life, in my own personal opinion. But also, you take things like the notion of fairness. There’s a conference called FATML: Fairness, Accountability, Transparency [in Machine Learning]. I think it’s just kind of FAT* now.  But a lot of the papers that you see by the engineers say, “We’ll just define fairness as accuracy,” or something like that. And this is what I call reductionist, because fairness is really complex, and it’s always contextual. So, the risk ... and so reduction is important. Reduction is Newton’s laws. Reduction is what allows the engineering that created the Industrial Revolution and brought us all this stuff.  But my concern is the stuff that we have, which is efficiency, productivity ... but that’s the stuff that makes us obese. That’s the stuff that creates climate change. That’s the stuff that ... The efficiency that creates income inequality sometimes. And this is an old thing. I’m not the first person to say this, but the problems that we have today are caused by the tools that we created, but I think there’s a lot of people who believe that more efficiency and more productivity will fix everything.  And so this is sort of an almost religious kind of difference. And I think right now there’s a lot of power in the hands of the reductionists. And I would put economists and sort of neoclassic economics sort of in this, which is just reducing everything to just measuring GDP.  So, you’re saying they think they have it figured out.  As they have now found. Your point is being proven right now. Look at YouTube shifting back and forth on these things. They can’t figure any of it out, because it’s messy. And in fact, I was talking to a pretty big tech person and they were very frustrated with what was going on with all the platforms and I said, “Oh, life is messy.” They’re not ones and zeroes, I guess.  That’s right. That’s a very Kara Swisher way of saying what I was trying to say, which is life is messy. And that if you ignore that, it’s going to get worse. And the reason that it’s a collection of essays, which I was excited, so I wrote this little manifesto-like thing ...  Called “Resisting Reduction.” And then it triggered a whole bunch of responses from Silicon Valley and all over the place. So then we decided to collect these essays and put them together into a collection. So, I have a group of indigenous people. I have somebody who does the philosophy of science. It’s a really interesting response to ...  So take the side of the reductionists. What is good about that? Because it’s been pushed at us a lot that we’ll get you cars that work, we’ll get you this that works, we’ll get you full communications. None of it has turned out the way they predicted.  And again, for me ...  Yeah. And I am and sometimes am still, and was, one of them. And I felt like if we connected everybody together ...  That’s how I feel. I was one of them.  ... we would have world peace. It just turned out to be more complicated.  And you know, it’s kind of an old movie now, but you know The Exorcist?  You know that little girl in The Exorcist? That’s what the internet feels like to me. I had this little girl and now ...  Explain that. Take that one out. Draw that one out.  Because you have this little girl and you think she’s going to become this wonderful kid and then she gets possessed and starts becoming this demon.  And we have to exorcize her and we have to kind of bring her back. I’m actually long-term optimistic.  Who gets to do that? You know what happened to the priest in that one.  I know. He had to jump out the window, right?  Several. Several priests went down.  I actually feel kind of responsible for having been involved in some of this. I don’t feel innocent. And I feel that having been part of all of this, I have to do something about it. So, I’m not like a third-party observer in this. I think, though, that ... I do think that the changes that we make have to be technically well-informed, because I think that uninformed laws, whether they’re gun control laws or privacy laws ...  Which I wrote about this week. That’s what I wrote about in the Times this week. That’s exactly what I was saying.  You’re going to whiffle on it.  It’s interesting, because everybody’s like, “Oh, you’re being pro tech.” I’m like, “No, I’m saying we’ve got to be informed or else we’re screwed even worse than we are now with no laws,” that kind of thing.  And they have to be proactively forward versus looking backwards, because it’s hard to not understand where you need to go if don’t understand where you’re going.  That’s right. I think GDPR is well-intentioned. It’s better than nothing. But it completely doesn’t hit the target yet. I think that the tech people have to get involved. I do think this public interest technologist idea, kind of like we had public interest lawyers, getting tech people more involved in coming up with how we move forward.  The problem is also, tech people tend to want to just solve the problem. But the problem with the problem is it’s not like previous problems, where you just solve it. You actually have to keep asking the question, “Is this even the right question?” And this is why it’s much more difficult. I think it’s actually, to be honest, it’s a value shift. I think it’s about the younger generation, your kids, being disgusted with us, being so disgusted that they don’t want to work for that company.  They don’t want to get on a private plane. They don’t want more stuff. And I think the problem is we’ve just started measuring our success with how much stuff we have. “How could he be smart? He’s not rich.” That kind of notion. And I think that the next generation’s at least in some part ...  It’s an interesting concept, because this idea, reduction is actually an excellent word when I think about it because they do, they always have answers. And I’m always wary of people who always have answers to things. And one of the things that has happened is, because they reinforce each other in the society they’re in, they’re in violent agreement with each other, you know what I mean? And then they feel victimized if you start to go at them.  And what’s interesting to me is there’s a lot of people like you, like me, Roger McNamee, who are in, who are like, “Wait a minute.” They know the inside and are saying, “You guys have to stop, because you don’t understand what you’re doing.” And to the outsider saying, we look like attackers when we’re not attackers.  Someone the other day was like, “Why do you hate Facebook so much?” I said, “I don’t hate it. I love it. That’s the problem.” I don’t love Facebook particularly, but you know what I mean, the concept. And so, what’s really interesting is how do you educate these people who reduce into a new way, how do you think about that?  First of all, it’s really hard ...  You’re saying resisting it, so resisting it and then what?  Because reduction is important to get anything done. You have to reduce a recipe to a recipe to give it to somebody, so reduction is important. But it’s resisting over-reduction. It’s the old “make it as simple as possible, but not simpler.” But it’s hard. I was just yesterday arguing with one of my friends in Silicon Valley about the role of advertising. In that community, since it’s so powerful, since it’s so reinforced by success, it’s almost impossible to have that conversation.  Explain that argument to me. Explain what happened. You were arguing. They said, the advertising business by its nature is going to create these mutated situations.  Yeah. And also this idea that things like fairness just can’t be reduced to a formula, and moved on. And that it’s messy. And the problem is that they’ve just been told over and over again that, “Oh, you’ll never be able to do this,” and then you can. So, when you go to Marc Andreessen’s office, it’s “Software will eat the world.” Because everybody kept saying, “Oh, you can’t do that in software. Only humans can do that.” And then they do it. So the experience of being in Silicon Valley over the last few decades is everybody kept saying you couldn’t do it and then they can do it. There’s really this interesting thing of, “There they go again, just telling us we can’t do it, but we can.”  Although being dragged in front of Congress and stuff like that, that wakes you up a little bit. But it’s difficult. I think the solution is not going to be to go into Silicon Valley and convince them through argument. I think it really is about coming up with a different narrative outside.  I do think, though, that there is definitely a movement. You see the “tech won’t build it” movement, which is the employees saying, “We don’t want our companies doing this.” You see consumers starting to say, “I like Lyft because of this.” So, I think values will change, even in Silicon Valley. And it’s interesting, when you look at the companies, the senior people are more oblivious of this than the younger people or the people who are more in the system. And so I think it’s going to change kind of bottom-up and I think it’s going to change from things like the Parkland kids who wake up and tell people what they think.  It is interesting. Defensiveness is fascinating. The defensiveness is just one of my ... I can’t believe the richest and most powerful people in the world are victims. I just won’t listen to them talk about themselves like that. But they tend to do that as a group. Not everybody. A lot of people, it’s interesting, we’re having a panel at Code this year called “Inside Out,” the people who have left, all of a sudden are becoming quite critical in a way because now they’re like, “Wait a minute.”  It’s sort of a born-again kind of thing. It’s more like, “Oh, I see the damage. I understand the damage.” And it’s a really interesting question whether it sticks or we do get these draconian rules from Congress or whoever, or abroad, the GDPR, or something happens somewhere where we get too much of a correction to it all, so that you don’t get the innovation that they desire.  Yeah. And I guess the one thing I will say, though, is that there are a bunch of people who are making a business out of fear-mongering. And I do think that, for example, I recently wrote in Wired, there are great places online for kids to learn. And overreacting to the scary stories about kids having trouble online I think could destroy these public spaces that helped me learn when I was a kid. We don’t shut down churches and schools just because kids have problems, and they probably have more problems in churches than they do online.  I don’t think we should be shutting these things down. I don’t think that we should be shutting even Facebook down. I think what we need to do is go in and make them better, just like we try to get institutions to be better. And I do worry that there’s kind of a whole generation of people who flipped out to the outside and now kind of go around sort of making money scaring people, which I think is also-  Should I be nicer, Joi? I don’t think so. I think I’m being appropriately ...  I think you should poke, but the problem is that you overshoot. One of the worst laws that was ever created, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that was created the year after WarGames, it makes it a felony to breach a terms of service. When Julia Angwin shows that you can buy ads for “Jew hater” on Facebook, she’s probably a felon for doing that. And that’s stupid. And that’s because lawmakers overreacted to some dumb movie that scared the pants off of them. So that’s what I’m worried about.  Right. I want to finish up, last thing. When you say “our complex future with machines,” right now, what is our future with machines?  We already have a complex relationship with machines.  Yeah. And Norbert Wiener, who was an MIT mathematician in 1950, wrote a book called Human Use of Human Beings. And he said that organizations are machines of flesh and blood. We already have machines, they’re called corporations. And our future is just supercharging what we already have. We can’t even control companies. To me, it’s like putting jetpacks and blindfolds on and just supercharging in whatever direction we’re headed.  So what I think we need to do is we need to get our house in order before we put these jetpacks on. And it reminds me, I was just talking to my historian friends, and ’67 was 58 race riots across America. Fifty years ago, we had Vietnam protests on MIT campus. There’s a lot of similarities. And I think one of the concerns that I have is that we have a horrible relationship with ourselves right now and then adding more power to it isn’t going to help.  So, the complex ... It really is a complex system. And regulating complex systems — our bodies are complex systems, the earth is a complex system where we’re somehow able to keep our body temperature relatively stable. And it’s not because there’s somebody in charge. It’s because we have a resilient, complex, adaptive system. And I think that’s like having a very good culture and very good norms.  I think we need to create a society that is self-regulating and isn’t so centralized, and I think that, again, I think ... I keep going back to culture. This goes all the way back to the beginning of our conversation. I think it’s a lot like how to build strong, resilient communities and it’s less like trying to engineer a program.  What do you think is key to that?  I think what we’ve done is we have subordinated the humanities. If you go to, especially the places like MIT, you’ve got ... the engineers have all the power, all the money, and everything looks like an engineering problem. And we’ve made liberal arts sort of this sideshow. I think that we need the historians, the social scientists, the anthropologists, the qualitative people involved in setting ... asking the questions. Why are we here? What are we doing?  Mark Cuban just did an interview like this, I was sort of shocked by it.  And that’s, I think, the key. And it’s not just about ... And the problem is, again, vocational education is great, but again, economists are part of that thing, which is ... the reason you’re here isn’t to work. The reason you’re here is to live and ask questions and enjoy. So I think universities shouldn’t just be to get jobs. That should be something that’s important. But that’s like just cranking out widgets for the factory.  That’s a famous saying, do you live to work or work to live?  There you go.  Those are the things that I think we really need to do. I think there’s a new version of the hippie movement that’s going to happen where people are going to say, “You know what? I don’t want to play that game anymore. I’m playing a different game. And the game that I’m playing and the thing that I’m solving for is something really different than what you want me to solve for.” And I think it’s going to be a kind of values rebellion. I think it’s already started.  Sounds fantastic. I can’t wait. I’m hoping to be part of it.  Last question, what is the most ... You always have the most interesting technology idea. What do you think is the craziest thing that you would like to see?  What are you like, “This would be so cool”? Or something you’ve seen or you’re doing at Media Lab that’s really ...  I don’t think of it as a specific technology, but one of the things that we’re working on or we see is a democratization of space. We’re seeing the cost of shooting up a satellite becoming the cost of a personal computer, thousands of dollars. Which has good things and bad things, but there are a lot of parallels.  Space trash. Billboards in space. But it’s really similar to the early days of the internet, where we had this government system that became commercialized and we had good things and bad things. So, what I want to see is I want to get space right in the way we got the internet wrong. Whether it’s institution ...  Space right in the way ... That’s nice. That would be great.  Because I think we might screw it up like we screwed up the internet.  I’m sure we will. I’m sure we will, Joi. Anyway, this is great. Thank you for coming on the show.  Recode and Vox have joined forces to uncover and explain how our digital world is changing — and changing us. Subscribe to Recode podcasts to hear Kara Swisher and Peter Kafka lead the tough conversations the technology industry needs today.


activistpost--2019-08-10--FCC Decides NO CHANGE to Radiation Limits For 5G Despite Research Supporting Public Outcry Over Risk

FCC Decides NO CHANGE to Radiation Limits For 5G Despite Research Supporting Public Outcry Over Risks

The role of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is to regulate the Telecom Industry even though they are not a health or environmental agency.  Current rules, safety limits and guidelines for RF radiation exposure were adopted in 1996 and don’t apply to how most people use or are exposed to RF emitting devices and infrastructure today.  They even don’t apply to how current technology and products are manufactured and marketed.  In fact, there is still no “safe” level of exposure that has been scientifically determined for children or pregnant women even though devices are marketed to everyone – including kids – to use in ways that aren’t safe.  Research has also determined that kids are more vulnerable to exposure.  It’s no big surprise that the FCC has been identified as a “Captured Agency.” For many years, their staff has included smarmy former Telecom employees who return to the industry as soon as they stop working for the government.  Thanks to everyone who has already reported this and will continue to report this very disappointing decision.  From Microwave News:  After six years of study, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has decided not to revise its current safety limits for RF radiation. The rules, which were first adopted in 1996 and are the only ones governing cell phone exposures in the U.S., will continue to be based only on thermal effects. “After a thorough review of the record and consultation with [the FDA and other health] agencies, we find it appropriate to maintain the existing radiofrequency limits, which are among the most stringent in the world for cell phones,” said Julius Knapp, the chief of the FCC’s Office of Engineering and Technology. Some had wanted the FCC to harmonize its limits with those of ICNIRP, which are considerably more permissive for cell phone exposures. The ICNIRP standard is 2 W/Kg, averaged over 10 g of tissue, while the FCC limit is 1.6 W/Kg over 1 g. The larger averaging volume alone makes the ICNIRP standard less stringent by two- to threefold (see MWN, J/A00, p.8). In the FCC announcement, issued today, Chairman Ajit Pai cites the support of Jeffrey Shuren, the director of the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health. “The available scientific evidence to date does not support adverse health effects in humans due to exposures at or under the current limits…” Shuren told the FCC, adding, “No changes to the current standards are warranted at this time.” FCC officials said at a press briefing that there’s “nothing special about 5G,” according to a report from CNET. They went on to argue that the scientific evidence to date indicates that, in terms of causing health effects, 5G is no different from any other cellular technology, including 4G or 3G. The higher-frequency signals (millimeter waves) used to deliver 5G also pose no health risk, they said, pointing out that the existing RF exposure guidelines apply to 5G. Profit outside the rigged system! Protect yourself from tyranny and economic collapse. Learn to live free and spread peace!      - Trends & Strategies for Maximum Freedom The FCC first announced its plan to review the agency’s RF rules in March 2013 in a 200-page filing. For more on the FCC and RF safety, go here.  The Telecom Industry gave congressional testimony in February that they have no scientific evidence that exposure to 5G is biologically or environmentally safe.  Many doctors and scientists say it isn’t safe (see 1, 2, 3).  The FCC continues to champion widespread 5G installation anyway – by any means necessary.  This includes allowing companies to send satellites into space to blast us from there and trying to loosen regulations so homeowners can be paid to put 5G antennas on their roofs.  Smarmy and scary indeed.


activistpost--2019-08-24--EHS ADA FCC and 5G Time for a Reboot

EHS, ADA, FCC and 5G — Time for a Reboot

“We’ve arranged a society on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology, and this combustible mixture of ignorance and power sooner or later is going to blow up in our faces. –  Carl Sagan  On August 15, Jessica Rosenworcel of the Federal Communications Commission spoke about accessibility and inclusion at a conference at Gallaudet University for the deaf and hard of hearing in Washington D.C.  As Commissioner Rosenworcal noted, “the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) was signed into law 29 years ago by former president George H.W. Bush. Upon signing, he famously said: “Let the shameful walls of exclusion finally come tumbling down.” Exactly. Those words ring true today—just as they did in 1990. Because 29 years ago this law laid the foundation for the meaningful inclusion of 60 million Americans with disabilities in all aspects of modern life.” “Title IV of the Americans with Disabilities Act became part of the Communications Act. It tasked the FCC with making sure that telecommunication relay services are widely available…. Access for all was enshrined in the law. A few years later, in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the FCC was tasked by Congress with improving access to communications equipment, ensuring it is designed, developed, and accessible for those with disabilities. Once again, access for all was in the law.”  “The way I see it is that there are three values at the heart of the Americans with Disabilities Act and its successors, like the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act.”  “Second, under the Americans with Disabilities Act, functional equivalency has been the foundation of our telecommunications relay service policies… for millions of Americans with hearing and speech impairments, it means they have the right and ability to pick up the phone, reach out and connect, and participate more fully in the world.”  “Third, inclusion. One area where the FCC has done significant work to promote inclusion involves closed captioning.”  SOURCE: FCC: COMMENTS ON ADA REMARKS OF COMMISSIONER JESSICA ROSENWORCEL TWENTY-THIRD TDI BIENNIAL CONFERENCE “WITH ACCESS EVERYONE WINS” GALLAUDET UNIVERSITY WASHINGTON, DC AUGUST 15, 2019   https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-359099A1.pdf  Regarding the ADA, The Federal Communications Commission is Negligent  There is a flip side to the FCC’s promotion of its efforts regarding inclusion and protection of human rights.  The FCC is perhaps the single most powerful force in denying growing evidence of illness and disability, by protecting corporations causing harm.  The FCC is providing justification to those industries actively discriminating against and causing avoidable harm, pain, degeneration, and suffering to a portion of the population: those Americans Becoming Disabled by the FCC.  In a November 18, 2013 joint filing to the FCC, the cities of Boston and Philadelphia accused the FCC and federal health agencies of negligence for failing to investigate whether electrosensitive persons are harmed by non-ionizing radiation.  As noted in the joint filing, in 1999-2000 the FCC had already begun a pattern of systematically ignoring evidence of the need for protections of electro-sensitive individuals.  Then, in March of 2013, the FCC’s office of Engineering and Technology opened Docket 13-84 Reassessment of Federal Communications Commission Radiofrequency Exposure Limits and Policies and ignored the preponderance of over 1,000 testimonies indicating that FCC limits are inadequate and that radio frequency exposure is linked to other adverse health effects, including cancer, infertility, DNA damage, and neurodegenerative conditions.  The pattern of neglect has accelerated with current plans for the rollout of 5G fifth generation telecommunications infrastructure, using faster millimeter wave frequencies and requiring extensive antenna densification, especially near homes, and already being mounted on lampposts and utility poles across the country.  Many of the expert submissions submitted to the FCC and ignored by the FCC indicating the need for new science-based exposure limits are indexed by Joel Moskowitz on the website Electromagnetic Radiation Safety.  SOURCE: Part I: Why We Need Stronger Cell Phone Radiation Regulations–Key Testimony Submitted to the FCC   https://www.saferemr.com/2014/08/part-i-why-we-need-stronger-cell-phone.html  In her speech at Gallaudet, Commissioner Rosenworcel noted that hearing-impaired individuals now “have the right and ability to pick up the phone, reach out and connect, and participate more fully in the world.”  Meanwhile, a marginalized population not only can’t participate in the world; these individuals do not have the right or ability to protect their health in their own homes. (And as the FCC eliminates copper landline phones individuals requiring corded landline access will not be able to pick up a phone anytime, anywhere.)  Due to lack of federal response, health-vulnerable residents are placed in the position of having to beg for consideration from utility companies, public servants, telecommunications companies, communities, and neighbors. This has resulted in an environment where the protection of human rights and health is uneven at best, with most of the affected individuals usually being systematically bullied and ignored.  For example, the forced installation of wireless gas, water, and electric meters has reportedly caused the acute onset of electromagnetic sensitivity in some individuals, while exacerbating health challenges and symptoms in others. (Lyme and MCS Multiple Chemical Sensitivity patients are among the populations that have been noted to be at risk of developing EHS and requiring protection, as well as those with compromised immunity.)  No scientific research regarding environmental impacts or human health was conducted prior to the rollout of wireless smart meters and smart grid infrastructure. Subsequently, wireless electric meters have been demonstrated to alter the human heart rate in some individuals.  In 2010, Magda Havas published peer-reviewed research demonstrating that DECT cordless phones cause heart rate alterations in some individuals.  Nonetheless, in 2019 in Massachusetts, a resident of Plymouth County with a heart condition for which she was recently hospitalized provided a letter from her physician to her town water department. Her physician stated that she needed to receive an opt out from the wireless water meter. The town was notified of her low blood pressure challenges, and informed that lack of access to water would present a serious dehydration and health risk.  In May of 2019, when she did not comply with an installation demand, the town shut off her water, causing both hygiene and dehydration risks during the peak heat summer months. The household remains without water despite reaching out to many agencies in the Commonwealth, including the disabilities board, attorney general, department of health, and elected officials.  In California, “Plumas Sierra Rural Electric Co-Operative (PSREC) disconnected electricity to the family of Stop Smart Meters! Director Josh Hart in February 2014 for refusing to pay the extortionate ‘opt out fee.’  However, on July 2nd, 2015, 16 months later, the electricity was restored to the Harts, and opt out fees dropped after an appeal hearing in Superior Court.  How and why are corporations practicing medicine without a license by overriding the health expertise of medical professionals, in favor of profit, and ignoring accommodation requests?  Thanks to the FCC.  With the federal regulator FCC firmly entrenched with the industry, where no state protection is in place, the accommodation decision is often left to the town, or the utility provider.  Many towns including Southborough, MA threatened water shut-offs if customers did not accept a transmitting water meter.  In Holyoke, Massachusetts, a yearlong effort was required by Kirstin Beatty of Last Tree Laws, who was diagnosed with electrosensitivity by three different doctors. She requested removal of wireless gas and electric utility meters. “Brian Beuregard, an employee, was kind enough to find me an alternative [non-transmitting electric and gas] meter and respond to numerous emails.” When the transmissions stopped, her health improved, white blood cells rose, and her nausea and headache decreased.  Like many, Kirstin had to pay for her non-transmitting meter.  Often a meter read fee is levied. The town of Acton, MA surcharges customers who desire an opt out meter a $25 fee per reading cycle (currently quarterly) and a fee to remove the wireless water meter.  After years of contentious opposition at Town Meeting, Wayland, MA approved wireless water meters and intends to charge $20 per quarter to read the meter. Everett, MA also accommodated a resident request for accommodation, and charges $20 per quarter.  Nearby Melrose charges $50 per quarter year for the water meter opt out reading. Given that many customers with environmental health challenges including MCS and EHS have difficulty finding work and are low income customers, the surcharge is especially punishing and discriminatory, especially if the meter’s 24/7/365 pulsed frequencies caused the environmental overload in the first place. There is no research indicating that the meters are not causing adverse symptoms.  Health vulnerable homeowners with gas, water, and electric meters are faced with the prospect of having to pay protection money times three for access to essential services. Extra fees for meter reads are unnecessary and unjustified, as many jurisdictions offer the option to self-report via postcard. Were protections in place under the ADA, the punitive surcharges would be illegal.  Most jurisdictions have relied on industry claims and FCC “protections.” Only in rare cases have towns been graciously accommodating. Concerned residents in Manchester, Massachusetts who contacted the town were immediately offered the option of disconnecting the wireless transmitter and self-reporting their water readings to the town at no fee.  Massachusetts electric utility Eversource has provided no accommodation for residents seeking a non-transmitting meter, claiming that analogs are not available, despite the fact that Maine customers can pay a surcharge to retain an analog meter. Analogs are also available for purchase on the internet.  Investor-owned utility National Grid petitioned the MA Dept. of Public Utilities in 2013 to surcharge customers seeking to opt out of gas and electric meters, securing a fee of $26 to remove each meter and $11 month for meter reads, even for months when the meter is not read. (MA DPU 13-83)  Yet the opt-out meter does not address all of the health risk factors. Electronic meters introduce both wireless radio frequency exposures and high voltage transients that can ride on the household wiring and plumbing. Electrical engineer Bill Bathgate and others have explained that the design of modern wireless meters can pollute the electrical wiring in homes with other frequencies, leading to harmonics and transients. In his book Dirty Electricity Dr. Samuel Milham discusses how a clean 60-hertz wave can be disrupted, and how these disruptions are statistically linked to poor health. Modern wireless meters and many energy efficient devices use a switch mode power, which adds “dirty electricity” and disrupts power quality. This also reduces the lifetime of electronics. If no analog is offered, customers are being forced to pay a fee and then provided with a meter that only addresses part of their concerns.  Mass Save recently provided an energy audit for the home of an EHS individual who has paid nearly $1,000 in surcharges to National Grid over the years for an opt out meter. Mass Save replaced her lights with “energy efficient” LED bulbs that polluted the power quality in the home. This caused the resident to experience a dramatic downturn in her health, until the lighting was removed. (The Building Biology Institute offers many tools for assisting individuals and buildings in healthy building design, including lighting.) Assessing Impacts of Wireless, We Need to Have Our Heads Examined When individuals have reported harm due to proximity to smart meters, smart infrastructure, solar inverters, variable speed motors, LED lighting, dimmer switches, and proximal telecommunications infrastructure including towers and antennas, the industry has responded by simply measuring the transmissions against outdated and inapplicable FCC limits. This is both inhumane and unscientific. The FCC tests cellphones by taking the temperature of a plastic head filled with the equivalent of Jell-O. Now it appears that the FDA has joined forces with the FCC to utilize manufactured tissue samples for “health research.”  This is simply mad science.  It is not only contributing to unrelenting suffering, but it is a massive waste of resources. Rather than addressing infrastructure repairs for issues like lead in the water and gas leaks, the nation was misguided into buying into a surveillance system masquerading as sustainability. It would be absurd to have a fire alarm send a message every 2,000th of a second that there is no fire, and to build massive data centers to analyze the data, and to pay technocrats to analyze and monetize the data.  There is only a need for a transmission in the case of a fire.  The wireless industry has been allowed to build a burgeoning demand for wireless infrastructure through frivolous use of technology. The massive collection of consumption and usage data is a wrong turn for humanity. We’re revisiting the point in history when all the doctors were smoking, and cigarettes were promoted for digestive issues or a sore throat. We are letting the wrong people ask the wrong questions, including the tobacco scientist shills now working for the wireless industry.  This is no longer a question of whether or not or how to accommodate the canaries in the coalmine; it is whether or not we will rethink the entire belief system held by the consumer culture about the safety of wireless devices, as cities and towns are overloaded with transmitters. And, this is a basic question about human rights. Human experimentation went awry at other times in history. It is off the rails again. “In a herd of deer, we need some super-sensitive ones. They are the ones that will hear that teeniest little crack, or smell the one or two molecules of scent from the mountain lion that’s stalking them. Their job is to use their hyper-sensitivity to alert the whole group.” ~ Peter Levine If we do not address the charade at the FCC, we will burden future generations with unfathomable injury and incalculable harm. Albert Einstein is credited with the quote, “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.” In the meantime, public servants and decision makers have the opportunity to do the right thing in their own communities, by challenging the incomplete and corrupted science, calling for independent research, dropping the surcharges, and turning the water and power back on. “Let the shameful (and idiotic) walls of exclusion finally come tumbling down.” Register Now for The 5G Crisis: Awareness & Accountability Summit. Online and FREE from August 26 – September 1, 2019. Patricia Burke works with activists across the country and internationally calling for new biologically-based microwave radio frequency exposure limits. She is based in Massachusetts and can be reached at [email protected]. Subscribe to Activist Post for truth, peace, and freedom news. Follow us on Minds, Twitter, Steemit, and SoMee. Become an Activist Post Patron for as little as $1 per month. Provide, Protect and Profit from what’s coming! Get a free issue of Counter Markets today.


activistpost--2019-12-16--Day 5: The Fitting Of Technocracy And Transhumanism

If society must be transformed into Technocracy, then the humans who live there must be transformed into Transhumans. In other words, a perfectly efficient, utopian society envisioned by Technocrats would be quickly soiled if it were inhabited by weak-minded and imperfect humans in their present form. This is exactly why we see many Technocrats who also identify as Transhumans as well. Some well-known names that come to mind include Elon Musk (Tesla), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Ray Kurzweil (Google) and Peter Thiel (PayPal).  To grasp this larger picture, it is necessary to address three questions: • How is Scientism the glue that binds them together?  It eschewed capitalism, free enterprise and any form of elected politician, and sought to create a resource-based economic system where they (scientists, engineers and technicians) would be the sole planners and controllers of society.  Many Technocrats today have no idea of the deeper goals of Technocracy but nevertheless use their expertise to run portions of society without any regard for America’s traditional political processes. ‘Rule by experts’ is a rule, but it is only one subservient part of the overarching goal of replacing our current economic system with Sustainable Development, aka Technocracy, Green Economy, Green New Deal, etc.  One modern champion of Transhumanism, Dr. Max More, wrote,  Transhumans seek to apply advanced technology to the condition of man in order to take over the evolutionary process and literally create Humans 2.0. The holy grail of Transhumanism is to achieve immortality, but in the process they intend to weed out the more negative characteristics of Humans 1.0: warlike nature, argumentative, inconsistent, unreliable, etc. This is genetic cleansing on the largest possible scale.  Scientism is the glue that binds them together  Scientism is religious proposition that was first presented by the French philosopher Henri De Saint-Simon (1760-1825). He wrote,  While true science explores the natural world using the time-tested scientific method of repeated experimentation and validation, Saint-Simon’s Scientism is a speculative, metaphysical worldview about the nature and reality of the universe and man’s relation to it.  Saint-Simon proposed that the religious leadership of his day should literally be replaced by a priesthood of scientists and engineers, who would interpret the oracle of science in order to make declarations to society on necessary human action to lead mankind to Utopia. Thus, science would be elevated to a state of immutable godhood, worshiped by its followers who are led by its priests.  Technocracy and Transhumanism are both based on Scientism. Both believe that advanced science, engineering and technology are the exclusive instruments of progress. Both are adept at promising benefits that are always just around the corner, but that never materialize. Both are expert at manipulating governments to supply taxpayer resources to fund their respective projects. Both believe they are hijacking evolutionary processes to create a future engineered by technologists.  No Future Here, Go to Mars…  Even more substantive is that the both see no future for the world as it exists today. Radical environmentalists like Greta Thunberg believe the world has only 12 years left before climate-apocalypse destroys us all. Elon Musk uses his billions to escape Earth by funding his SpaceX rocket company with the ultimate intent of colonizing Mars. Jeff Bezos privately funds his Blue Origin for the same purpose – to colonize Mars. They both have stated that the only future for mankind is in outer space, populating the cosmos because Earth is going to hit a dead end when the resources run out.  In short, Technocracy and Transhumanism are both anti-human. Technocracy, channeled by the United Nations as Sustainable Development, believes that the earth can only support one billion or so humans. Further, all humans are considered as mere resources on a par with herd animals such as cattle. Transhumanism believes Humanity 1.0 is as good as dead and the only hope for the future of man is for Transhuman scientists to invent Humanity 2.0 and leave Earth altogether.  In one sense, Technocracy’s strict allocation of resources and energy only mark a containment pattern while they build and test space travel technology.  This is not new thinking. Winwood Reade wrote The Martyrdom of Man in 1872 and stated as clearly as any modern Transhumanist or Technocrat could:  Disease will be extirpated; the causes of decay will be removed; immortality will be invented. And then, the earth being small, mankind will migrate into space, and will cross the airless Saharas which separate planet from planet, and sun from sun. The earth will become a Holy Land which will be visited by pilgrims from all the quarters of the universe. Finally, men will master the forces of Nature; they will become themselves architects of systems, manufacturers of worlds. These bodies which now we wear belong to the lower animals; our minds have already outgrown them; already we look upon them with contempt. A time will come when Science will transform them by means which we cannot conjecture, and which, even if explained to us, we could not now understand, just as the savage cannot understand electricity, magnetism, steam. (p. 179)  The word ‘radical’ doesn’t even scratch the surface  In light of the above, I hope you realize that you simply cannot look at Technocrats and Transhumanists and pin labels on them like Marxist, Socialist, Communist or Fascist. Transhumanists and Technocrats represent a new type of radicalness that the world has never seen before.  It means nothing when people gather to discuss philosophical issues and new ways of doing things, unless they have the means to do what they claim. Jeff Bezos isn’t waiting for NASA to colonize Mars; he is building his own spaceship with his own money. Likewise, Elon Musk is self-funding his own space fleet. The late global financier, David Rockefeller, didn’t wait for governments to flesh out a new economic order, but rather used his own funds to create the Trilateral Commission with its own economic transformations.  Thanks to the United Nations’ adoption of Technocracy as Sustainable Development, its Agenda 21 policies have been spread to every corner of the planet, including every town and county in America. In total ignorance of the trap being laid for them, people are now demanding more, not less. Global warming is being used as the battering ram to break down the current economic system, paving the way for the only alternative being offered: Sustainable Development, aka Technocracy.  Lest you think that the scientific elite are benevolent purists simply working for the betterment of mankind, I would caution you to remember the late Jeffrey Epstein, who plumbed the depths of depravity, debauchery, sex trafficking and blackmail and who was also a member of the elitist Trilateral Commission for several years. Epstein was a Technocrat and a Transhumanist, hoping to achieve eternal life within his lifetime – alas, he failed.  To use the word ‘radical’ to describe Technocracy and Transhumanism would be a gross understatement. They are both outside the bounds of objective reality and worse, they are dragging the rest of us along with them.  You can read more from Patrick Wood at his site Technocracy News & Trends, where this article first appeared.  Subscribe to Activist Post for truth, peace, and freedom news. Become an Activist Post Patron for as little as $1 per month at Patreon. Follow us on SoMee, Flote, Minds, Twitter, and Steemit.  Provide, Protect and Profit from what’s coming! Get a free issue of Counter Markets today.


aljazeera--2019-10-07--Bangladesh student killing: Thousands protest demanding justice

Dhaka, Bangladesh - Thousands of university students on Monday staged protests in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka and Rajshahi city after an undergraduate student was allegedly killed by activists of Chhatra League - the student wing of the ruling Awami League party.  Abrar Fahad, 21 - a student at the prestigious Bangladesh University of Engineering Technology (BUET) - was allegedly killed over his Facebook post critical of Bangladesh's recent water-sharing agreement with India.  On Saturday, Dhaka and New Delhi signed several agreements, including allowing India to withdraw 1.82 cusec (185,532 litres per hour) of water from Feni river during Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's visit to India.  Dhaka and New Delhi have for decades struggled to ink a deal on sharing river waters. A controversial agreement on sharing water of Ganga river has long been seen in Bangladesh as a treaty which favours India.  "He was killed because of some of his Facebook posts. That is insane," one of Abrar's classmates, who preferred to be unnamed, told Al Jazeera.  "The goons of Chhatra League killed him. We want justice," he said.  Barkat Ullah, 57, Fahad's father said: "My son was just an innocent student. He had his own strong opinions and he was killed for that."  Fahad's cousin Abu Talha Rasel, 31, said it "was pretty evident who had killed Fahad".  Several classmates of Fahad and the residential students of Sher-e-Bangla hall, who spoke to Al Jazeera, have pointed fingers of blame at Chhatra League activists for Fahad's killing.  According to an autopsy report by doctors at Dhaka Medical College Hospital, Fahad died of "internal bleeding and excessive pain" as he was badly beaten up by blunt objects such as cricket stumps or bamboo sticks.  Protests were also organised in Rajshahi city where students blocked major roads. Teachers are also believed to have joined some of the protests.  At least nine BUET students have been detained, some of them belonging to the ruling party, in connection with the murder.  Earlier, Additional Deputy Commissioner of Dhaka Metropolitan Police Abdul Baten told reporters that they had taken students into custody after they were identified based on security camera footage.  Police has not yet revealed the motive behind the murder that has caused public outrage.  The Chhatra League activists interrogated Fahad over his alleged involvement with Chhatra Shibir - the student wing of Jamaat-e-Islami, the country's largest Islamist party - which has political ties with the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).  Ashikul Islam Bitu, assistant secretary of the BUET unit of Chhatra League admitted that Fahad was picked up from his room by the ruling party activists on suspicion that he was a Shibir activist.  BUET's residential physician Dr Mashuk Elahi told reporters that students of the Sher-e-Bangla hall called him at about 3am. "I went to the hall and saw the body near the stairs. By then he was dead. There were injury marks all over his body."  Awami League party General Secretary Obaidul Quader said "the law would take its own course" in a damage control exercise.  "Investigation is on. Legal action will be taken against those who will be found responsible in the investigation," he said replying to a query from reporters over the incident.  The main opposition BNP condemned the murder and said the ruling party members have "stained their hands with blood".  "It seems to me that we are living in a death valley," BNP Secretary-General Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir said in a statement.  In recent months, Prime Minister Hasina, who is also the president of the Awami League, had cracked down on Chhatra League activities over allegations of corruption, violence and extortion.  Last month, Rezwanul Haque Chowdhury Shovon and Golam Rabbani were sacked from their posts of Chhatra League president and general secretary respectively after allegations of extortion.  Asif Nazrul, professor of law at Dhaka University said: "Who gave the right to Chhatra League to interrogate another fellow student for his involvement with Shibir or posting anti-government Facebook statuses?"  "Chhatra League has gone out of control of the government. Their questionable activities have to be stopped," he told Al Jazeera.


bbc--2019-03-14--Emma Haruka Iwao smashes pi world record with Google help

The value of the number pi has been calculated to a new world record length of 31 trillion digits, far past the previous record of 22 trillion.  Emma Haruka Iwao, a Google employee from Japan, found the new digits with the help of the company's cloud computing service.  Pi is the number you get when you divide a circle's circumference by its diameter.  The first digits, 3.14, are well known but the number is infinitely long.  Extending the known sequence of digits in pi is very difficult because the number follows no set pattern.  Pi is used in engineering, physics, supercomputing and space exploration - because its value can be used in calculations for waves, circles and cylinders.  The pursuit of longer versions of pi is a long-standing pastime among mathematicians. And Ms Iwao said she had been fascinated by the number since she had been a child.  The calculation required 170TB of data (for comparison, 200,000 music tracks take up 1TB) and took 25 virtual machines 121 days to complete.  "I feel very surprised," Ms Iwao, who has worked at Google for the past three years, said of her achievement.  "I am still trying to adjust to the reality. The world record has been really hard."  But she still hopes to expand on her work.  "There is no end with pi, I would love to try with more digits," she told BBC News.  It would take 332,064 years to say the 31.4 trillion digit number.  Google announced the news in a blog on Pi Day (14 March - "3.14" in American date notation).  Nasa has previously published a list of some of the ways in which it uses pi. These include:  "Pi is useful not only for measuring circles but it also appears in calculations for everything from the period of a pendulum to the buckling force of a beam," said mathematician Matt Parker.  "Modern maths, physics, engineering and technology could not function without pi."  In 2010, Nicholas Sze used Yahoo cloud computing to calculate that the two quadrillionth digit of Pi was zero - a calculation that would have taken 500 years on a standard computer at that time.  However, he did not calculate all the digits in between.


bbcuk--2019-04-10--New 150m Caledonian Sleeper trains are hotels on wheels

New £150m Caledonian Sleeper trains 'are hotels on wheels'

The new £150m fleet of Caledonian Sleeper trains has been unveiled - with travellers being promised an overnight stay in "a hotel on wheels".  The 75 new carriages will offer en-suite double rooms for the first time.  There will be 484 rooms available, initially on the Lowlander route between London and Glasgow/Edinburgh.  They will be followed by a Highlander route between London and Aberdeen, Inverness and Fort William.  The fleet, which will be on the rails from the beginning of June, features:  The Caledonian sleeper, which has been running in various forms since 1873, is now operated by Serco on behalf of Transport Scotland.  Its new carriages are bespoke and designed for Caledonian Sleeper from scratch.  Serco's Ryan Flaherty said the fleet would provide "a truly magical experience that will transform travel between London and Scotland".  He added: "Safety is absolutely paramount for us. But, beyond that, this is a hospitality experience.  "People now are very much looking for a decent experience - whether it is in a restaurant, a shop or indeed travelling on a train - and we have gone after that market.  "So it's no longer a transactional, overnight thing where you're not going to get a great sleep or a great breakfast. We want to be the best at every single step of the journey."  Another first for the Sleeper is the introduction of new engineering technology to stop things going "bump" in night.  In the past, passengers have complained of being woken by a shunt when two sections of the train coupled together at Carstairs.  But the operators say the addition of 150 Dellner couplers will be a "dream" development for snoozing guests.  Serco's Ryan Flaherty said: "On the current train the coaches have to 'kick' together to make the contact, but going forward it's 'kissing'.  "It's much more gentle and will be imperceptible to the guests who are asleep."


conservativehome--2019-01-15--James Palmer We need a Minister for East West Rail

James Palmer: We need a Minister for East West Rail

James Palmer is the directly elected Mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough.  When it comes to Government investment in infrastructure, there is much talk of the need to redress the north-south divide. There are many myths around this debate, but while much focus gets placed on Greater London versus the north, there is less attention on the central heart of this country, and transport connections east and west.  So of course I welcome the development of East West Rail, which will connect Oxford, Milton Keynes and Cambridge, as well as the emerging plans for an expressway linking the two University cities. The economy of this central belt is flourishing, supporting pioneering enterprises which are at the world’s forefront. It is rightly labelled as the UK’s answer to Silicon Valley. This growth corridor hosts clusters of businesses in life sciences, digital and advanced engineering and technology, and competes internationally for research and development funding and other inward investment.  The Cambridge to Oxford ‘Arc’ alone supports 1.8 million jobs and generates £90 billion in “gross value added” (GVA) for our economy. The National Infrastructure Commission estimates that with the right Government investment, that GVA could increase by a further £163 billion, with an additional 700,000 jobs created, by 2050 – double the economic growth that could be achieved if the Government does nothing.  In short, this rail scheme will be vital for UK plc. So vital, in fact, that I think the Government needs to appoint a Minister for East West Rail.  The good news is I understand it is the Government’s intention to do just this. To have a Minister pounding the corridors of Whitehall to drive this project forward will be hugely significant, and will improve on the already good levels of inter-governmental working there has been.  Let’s have a Minister with a vision for a true East West Rail too. Why does it have to stop at Cambridge? The economy of the East will be hugely boosted if the route also connects centres like Bury St Edmunds, Stowmarket, Ipswich and the major port at Felixstowe. I know from the western side too, there is real appetite to extend the line to Bristol. What we would then get is a real East-West link that will deliver growth across a key central southern belt of this country.  But we also need to be clearer on what the benefits are for local people. It’s about how this will grow the economy, create new jobs, and ease the pressure on housing through the delivery of a million much-needed new homes. It is also as much about better transport connections along the route, as it is connecting Cambridge and Oxford. People in Bedford and Sandy, for example, will suddenly have a fast route into Cambridge. East West Rail is a transformational project, but this isn’t yet cutting through to communities. Key to this will be improved local engagement. The last meeting I went to on East West Rail saw Government officials talking to a room about what they intended to do, with little dialogue. The approach needs to change.  We now have the Cross Corridor Leaders Group, which encompasses the leaders and chief executives of the 28 relevant local authorities, and which is still in its early phases.  We also have the strategic alliance England’s Economic Heartland which I believe should expand to include more authorities in the East.  There is great potential for a Minister to work with these groups representing people and businesses, to ensure a clear strategy can be developed that satisfies as far as possible both the local and national priorities.  The Government clearly needs support from local leaders too. Kit Malthouse wrote to me last year asking where we can accommodate our share of the million homes along the corridor. My response was: “first tell me where East West Rail is going”. We can’t plan for housing without certainty of the route of the rail line and the expressway, including how this will impact on local plans in some of the 28 local authorities. I know in the West there is uncertainty over where the expressway will go and here in the East we don’t know, for example, if the rail route will go through Sandy and southern Cambridgeshire, or follow the existing A428 corridor.  Let me also sound a note of warning. East West Rail should not be seen as simply a boost to an already prosperous area. The 2018 Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Independent Economic Review report, led by economist Dame Kate Barker, stressed that to secure the continued growth of our unique economy, a range of challenges need to be overcome, with transport infrastructure and housing key among these. We have ageing transport networks and house prices which in Cambridge are 13 times average household earnings. It is not sustainable and we need solutions urgently.  We need East West Rail to integrate with existing transport and housing plans, such as the emerging Cambridgeshire Metro, which will deliver a world-class mass transit system that can complement the new rail link. We also need to ensure East West Rail dovetails with our plans to build more homes, including through garden villages, which will be unlocked by the delivery of the Metro system and other infrastructure schemes we are developing.  I know as Mayor, delivering even simple infrastructure upgrades is not easy and requires unrelenting focus. East West Rail is essential, but it will stagnate without drive from central Government and partnership working with local representatives.  East West Rail is too important to the future of the UK economy to fail. We need a Minister in charge who will ensure that is not an option.


dailyheraldchicago--2019-09-10--Lisles Molex opens new lab at North Central College in Naperville

Lisle's Molex opens new lab at North Central College in Naperville

A new feature of North Central College's 2-year-old science facility opened Tuesday through a partnership with the Lisle-based electronic connectors company Molex.  The Molex Advanced Electronics Lab is a space for electrical and engineering-related courses for undergraduates inside the Dr. Myron Wentz Science Center on North Central's Naperville campus.  Officials celebrated the lab during a ribbon-cutting ceremony Tuesday afternoon, with North Central President Troy Hammond in a news release calling it part of the college's "promise to provide dynamic and integrated educational experiences for our students."  As the newest feature of a $60 million building that opened in 2017, the Molex Lab offers 28 workspaces and electronic test equipment that will allow students to learn about high-speed signaling, power management, high-performance automation systems and robotics.  Molex CEO Joe Nelligan said in a news release he expects the company's support of the new lab will "give students opportunities for hands-on learning and exploration and help them pursue their passion in engineering and technology."  The Wentz Science Center also is home to the Omron Design and Automation Lab, supported by an automation technology company based in Japan, as well as nearly 30 other labs for teaching and research, 15 seminar classrooms, a lecture hall and 53 faculty offices.  Classes began in the new Molex Lab this semester, with students taking courses such as introduction to electrical engineering, digital logic, circuit analysis, microcontrollers and electronic controls.