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The Future of Ideas

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Earth

Are we a mature society?

"But likewise, and obviously, many resources should be free. The right to criticize a government official is a resource that is not, and should not be, controlled. I shouldn’t need the permission of the Einstein estate before I test his theory against newly discovered data. These resources and others gain value by being kept free rather than controlled. A mature society realizes that value by protecting such resources from both private and public control."

Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas, p. 14.

The Future of Ideas

"The argument of this book is that always and everywhere, free resources have been crucial to innovation and creativity; that without them, creativity is crippled. Thus, and especially in the digital age, the central question becomes not whether government or the market should control a resource, but whether a resource should be controlled at all. Just because control is possible, it doesn’t follow that it is justified. Instead, in a free society, the burden of justification should fall on him who would defend systems of control.

Ibid. , p. 14.

What is a commons?

This is not a new question, though we’ve been well trained to ignore it. Free resources have always been central to innovation, creativity, and democracy the businesses around them. Central Park is free in the sense I mean; it gives value to the city that it centers. A jazz musician draws freely upon the chord sequence of a popular song to create a new improvisation, which, if popular, will itself be used by others. Scientists plotting an orbit of a space-craft draw freely upon the equations developed by Kepler and Newton and modified by Einstein. Inventor Mitch Kapor drew freely upon the idea of a spreadsheet—VisiCalc—to build the first killer application for the IBM PC—Lotus 1-2-3. In all of these cases, the availability of a resource that remains outside the exclusive control of someone else—whether a government or a private individual—has been central to progress in science and the arts. It will also remain central to progress in the future.

Yet lurking in the background of our collective thought is a hunch that free resources are somehow inferior. That nothing is valuable that isn’t restricted. That we shouldn’t want, as Groucho Marx might put it, any resource that would willingly have us. As Yale professor Carol Rose writes, our view is that “the whole world is best managed when divided among private owners,”14 so we proceed as quickly as we can to divide all resources among private owners so as to better manage the world.

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The Future of Ideas, p. 13-14.

Internet Search Tools:  
By 2004, nearly three quarters of all middle and high school students used the internet as their initial source for research, according to a recent Newsweek, analysis. *

PC: the personal computer.

About searching on the internet.

Below are listed five leading Internet search engines for you to use, or book mark. In addition there are web sites you can trust and should use when writing papers.

How to cite web sources.

This PC device substantially altered how people learn and work to produce documents, images and mixed media.

Google searches over six billion web pages, discussion groups, & images.
Ask Jeeves
not as good with common names

Yahoo when searching for specific phrases or names use quotation marks: "Tamil Tigers"
MSN Search compared to what Microsoft has done, this remains a less than optimal performer
Topix.net searches 4,000 on-line news sources.

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Authors: a partial listing of with links to authorities used, quoted, and sited on this web site.

 

 

Critical links for my courses

Snow Crystals -- there are no two snow flakes that are exactly the same.

a Tahoe Snow

Vocabulary one of many pages devoted to
words you need to know for success in the class.
Metaphors are crucial to use and interpret in your writing.
Body of knowledge, such as: ecology, history, bio-history, biology, economics, science.
Methods are the means we have to test our assumptions.
A new grammar for our experiences may be necessary to develop?
Carbon as a new currency for our postindustrial world?
The United States Bureau of the Census.
Technology as politics.
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When writing: always consider | Writing Criteria: listed as a form | Free writing | Writing from texts

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Short essays on this web site as examples for your assignments.

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Rollins College Chapel; Garden in a private quad in Florida.

[ J. Siry, 1992]

* "Next Frontiers," Newsweek, March 29, 2004, p. 54.

 

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Created -- January 21, 2008.