Tom Munnecke’s Eclectica

I had a great meeting this week with Jim Fruchterman, founder and CEO of Benetech in Palo Alto, CA. Jim is a MacArthur Fellow, and a leading thinker in ways that technology can be used to address the needs of the most disadvantaged. His most recent project, Bookshare, is undergoing explosive growth: 

Bookshare.org dramatically increases access to books for the community of visually impaired and otherwise print disabled individuals. This online community enables book scans to be shared, thereby leveraging the collections of thousands of individuals who regularly scan books, eliminating significant duplication of effort. Bookshare.org takes advantage of a special exemption in the U.S. copyright law that permits the reproduction of publications into specialized formats for the disabled.

Benetech is also active applying technology to literacy, human rights, and the environment.

In my first career, I’ve seen what kind of intellectual horsepower the government or industry can throw at their projects.  Getting this kind of energy applied to those least able to afford it, however, is a challenge that Jim has tackled well.  It’s wonderful to see someone thriving and doing Good at the same time.

Here’s where folks can contribute to Benetech.

It’s always fun to see ideas evolve over time. Heather Wood Ion and I wrote a paper Towards a model of Micro Philanthropy as part of a workshop on Complexity and Philanthropy I held at the Santa Fe Institute with Murray Gell-Mann in May, 2002 (pictured at left).  Six years later, the Telegraph in UK recently quoted me on the subject in an article, Ole Gunnar Solksjaer’s charity donation: Broke? You can still be a philanthropist

Micro Philanthropy has hit Wikipedia, so I guess that makes it real.   Peter Dietz and others have picked up on the idea through Social Action Network, too.

Esther Dyson, chair of EDVentures, talks about her decision to publish her personal genome information, as well as the role of the Personal Health Record. I interviewed her at the Markle Foundation Connecting for Health Conference at Torrey Pines, San Diego, Ca. December 3, 2007. I talked about some of these topics in a paper Inverted Perspectives, Triggering Change I coauthored with Dr. Rob Kolodner in Person-Centered Health Records: Toward HealthePeople

I was fortunate to attend the wedding of Jim and Amanda Hoffmeister in San Francisco. Here is my interpretation of the event. With thanks to Robert Hotz for help with the editing.

This represents my most polished film making effort to date, trying to distill 6 hrs of video down into the essence of a wedding. I first got interested in film making in April, 2006, when I was in a bistro in Paris, listening to a fascinating conversation between Thomas Dichter and Marcia Odell about development issues in the third world. (I was holding a workshop the next day entitled, “How can 6 billion people help each other help themselves?) I put my digital camera on a wine bottle, and put it in movie record mode. When I got back to my hotel to edit the movie, I realized that I could completely shift the meaning of the conversation just by moving the edit cut point a few seconds each way. I decided I’d rather be the editor, rather than just the viewer. Here was my original movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EB6RkNVuhCE

This is a portion of the discussion at the 2008 Good Ancestors Principle workshop in Encinitas, Ca. Feb 19, 2008. It includes discussions by David Elleman, Dorion Sagan, Valdis Krebs, Frank Mosca, Frederick Turner, and Tom Munnecke, discussing some of the concepts behind resiliency in systems, including the work of Buzz Hollings.

A group of astronomers has proposed a SETI search strategy:

Richard Conn Henry, a professor at Johns Hopkins’ Zanvyl Krieger
School of Arts and Sciences, is joining forces with Seth Shostak of
the SETI Institute and Steven Kilston of the Henry Foundation Inc., a
Silver Spring, Md., think tank, to search a swath of the sky known as
the ecliptic plane. They propose to use new Allen Telescope Array,
operated as a partnership between the SETI Institute in Mountain View,
Calif., and the Radio Astronomy Laboratory at the University of
California, Berkeley.

This is an idea that I have been batting around for some time I posted a quick note on the idea in 2004, at and talked to some folks at the Hat Creek about that time when my wife and I were driving by and just stopped in as tourists.

I called the idea a “Paired Transit Protocol” - because the timing of the transits between the pairs of planets would establish a communications clock for synchronous communications (akin to computers using synchronous rather than asynchronous communications protocols. Synchronous computer communications are more efficient because they share a common clock that obviates the need for “start” and “stop” bits in the protocol.). Because each star/planet system can see the other’s transit, it creates a “leading edge” and “trailing edge” timing signal that precisely links to each other. One system transmitting an anomalous signal precisely when its planet enters or leaves the shadow of its star as cast on the other planet would confirm that that planet had seen the transit of the other planet.

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